Innovation, in many cases, is the easy part. This is what the novelist William Gibson meant when he said, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” Gadgets like the iPhone, talismanic for technologists, give a false picture of the pace of adaptation. To a wealthy American or Swede or Japanese, the market penetration may seem total, but more than a decade after its introduction, the device is used by less than 10 percent of the world; for all smartphones, even the “cheap” ones, the number is somewhere between a quarter and a third. Define the technology in even more basic terms, as “cell phones” or “the internet,” and you get a timeline to global saturation of at least decades—of which we have two or three, in which to completely eliminate carbon emissions, planetwide. According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started.
The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator.
To remake each of these systems so that they don’t is less like distributing smartphones or floating wifi balloons over Kenya or Puerto Rico, as Google intends to, than like building an interstate highway system or constructing a subway network or a new kind of power grid connected to a new array of energy producers and new kind of energy consumer. In fact, it is not like that; it is that. All of that and much, much more: intensive infrastructure projects at every level and in every corner of human activity, from new plane fleets to new land use and right down to a new way of making concrete, production of which ranks today as the second most carbon-intensive industry in the world—an industry that is booming, by the way, thanks to China, which recently poured more concrete in three years than the United States used in the entire twentieth century. If the cement industry were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter.
In other words, these are infrastructure projects of a scale so far from our experience, in the U.S. at least, that we hardly expect their existing corollaries to ever even be repaired anymore, instead learning to live with potholes and service delays. On top of which, unlike the internet or smartphones, the requisite technologies are not additive but substitutive, or should be, if we have the good sense to actually retire the dirty old varieties. Which means that all of the new alternatives have to face off with the resistance of entrenched corporate interests and the status-quo bias of consumers who are relatively happy with the lives they have today.
Thankfully, the green energy revolution is already, as they say, “under way.” In fact, of all the necessary components of this broader, zero-carbon revolution, clean energy is probably farthest along. How far along? In 2003, Ken Caldeira, now of the Carnegie Institution for Science, found that the world would need to add clean power sources equivalent to the full capacity of a nuclear plant every single day between 2000 and 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. In 2018, MIT Technology Review surveyed our progress; with three decades left to go, the world was on track to complete the necessary energy revolution in four hundred years.
That gap yawns so wide it could swallow whole civilizations, and indeed threatens to. Into it has crawled that dream of carbon capture: if we can’t rebuild the entire infrastructure of the modern world in time to save it from self-destruction, perhaps we can at least buy ourselves some time by sucking some of its toxic fumes out of the air. Given the indomitable scale of the conventional approach, and given just how little time left we have to complete it, negative emissions may be, at present, a form of magical thinking for climate. They also seem like a last, best hope. And if they work, carbon capture plants will deliver industrial absolution for industrial sin—and initiate, as a result, a whole new theological romance with the power of machine.
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Threaded through the reverie for carbon capture is a fantasy of industrial absolution—that a technology could be almost dreamed into being that could purify the ecological legacy of modernity, even perhaps eliminate its footprint entirely.
The semi-subliminal sales pitch for wind and solar is not dissimilar—clean energy, natural energy, renewable and therefore sustainable energy, inexhaustible, even undiminishable energy, harnessed rather than harvested energy, abundant energy, free energy. Which all sounds quite a lot like nuclear power, at least as it was originally presented and received. Of course, that was back in the 1950s, and it has been decades now since nuclear was seen as a path to energy salvation rather than, as it invariably is today, through the specter of metaphysical contagion.
It was not always this way. In his 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech before the United Nations, Dwight Eisenhower outlined the terms of a standing-offer arms trade that was also a moral bargain: as a reward to any nation disavowing the pursuit of nuclear weapons, and as a kind of penance for having developed the horrible technology in the first place, the United States would offer aid in the form of nuclear energy, which it would also be cultivating at home.
For a speech delivered by a president who was also a military man, it is a remarkably lyrical lament that is also a peacetime call-to-arms—in fact, it evokes in a modern reader quite beautifully the threat from climate change. After briefly describing the dramatic expansion of the capacity of the American nuclear fleet, which had in the eight years since the war grown twenty-five times more powerful and plainly terrified him, and then what it meant for the United States to have gained Soviet Russia as a nuclear rival, Eisenhower continues:
To stop there would be to accept helplessly the probability of civilization destroyed, the annihilation of the irreplaceable heritage of mankind handed down to us from generation to generation, and the condemnation of mankind to begin all over again the age-old struggle upward from savagery towards decency, and right, and justice. Surely no sane member of the human race could discover victory in such desolation. Could anyone wish his name to be coupled by history with such human degradation and destruction? Occasional pages of history do record the faces of the “great destroyers,” but the whole book of history reveals mankind’s never-ending quest for peace and mankind’s God-given capacity to build.
It has been at least a generation since Americans might have casually read “mankind’s God-given capacity to build” as a reference to nuclear power—a generation since the world stopped believing nuclear power was, in an environmental sense, “free,” and started thinking of it in terms of nuclear war, meltdown, mutation, and cancer. That we remember the names of power-plant disasters is a sign of just how scarred we feel by them: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima.