Climate is extremely complex, so that global warming won’t proceed in a straight line, something that helps the skeptics (most of whom are motivated by secret payments from large corporations or are under influence of same).
Right now, the Atlantic is in a warm cycle of 10 to 15 years. During the warm cycle, hurricanes are more frequent and more powerful. The warm cycle this time is slightly warmer, because the average surface temperature of the earth and its oceans has increased over the past century. Thus it is true global warming contributed to Irene’s wrath. But climate change activists should be careful to acknowledge the contribution of the warming cycle.
After the warming cycle, the Atlantic will turn cooler. Global warming may mean it won’t turn as cool as it otherwise would, but the cooling will nevertheless make for less dramatic hurricane seasons for a while in the 2020s. Climate change can only be measured over decades, not by individual events or even short patterns.
In other global warming news, a new study shows that weather cycles appear to correlate with increased violence in tropical countries. If the El Nino/ La Nina correlation holds up, it is a horrifying harbinger for what is likely to happen in those countries during the coming century of higher temperatures produced, not just cyclically, but by long-term warming produced by dumping masses of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The mixture of futurism, utopianism, environmentalism, American pop culture, and Middle Eastern politics in this news item is too powerful for an old Trekkie like yours truly to pass up.
American television serials have been an important part of t.v. history in the Middle East, as they have been in much of the world. In the Arab world typically they have been broadcast with subtitles (back in the 1970s I learned some Arabic in my leisure time that way, in Cairo, Beirut and Amman). In contrast, in Iran they were dubbed into Persian, and I watched a Star Trek episode in that language in Tehran in 1976, before the ayatollahs banned Americana as a tool of the devil.
Back in the days when there were few channels in the Arab world, before satellite t.v., sometimes a whole season of American soap operas like Falcon Crest (I know) were broadcast as a bloc, one every weekday night until the season was finished, and you could hear a pin drop in Cairo during that hour. Now, there are satellite channels that specialize in delivering American serials.
I can’t say that I am aware that Star Trek has been particularly popular in the Arab world. The Star Trek wikipedia entry is a stub. Among the few Arabic web page entries I could find for the serial was a 2009 announcement that MBC-2, a Saudi-owned entertainment satellite channel, was offering a free Star Trek t-shirt or mousepad if you could answer the trivia questions at its Star Trek web page. Leonard Nimoy (who played Spock) recently endorsed a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution, which caused a flurry of reporting on Star Trek in Arabic. Of course, reception studies for American television serials among Arab publics are virtually non-existent, so it is hard to gauge the impact of or interest in the series.
As an afficionado of science fiction, I read fanzines like Locus, and have noted that the reports on fandom throughout the world are extremely uneven. That is, science fiction seems to be popular in Romania, but not in Zambia. Now, you might think that it depends on how urbanized a society is, or how many engineers and other technically trained people it has. But I don’t think that is the explanation.
I have a different hypothesis about the relative popularity in various regions of the world of science fiction. It is influenced a bit by Frederic Jameson’s thesis that literature in the developing world is often a national allegory. I think science fiction is popular where scientific and technological innovation is explicitly part of the national project. Thus, it was produced everywhere in the old Soviet Union, even in largely rural areas like Tajikistan, because scientific modernity and invention was key to what it was to be a Soviet citizen. It is popular in Communist China for the same reason, even though that country still has a lot of rural villages. Also in Brazil. Of course, it is big in Germany, France and the UK, and Western Europe generally.
Given that “Arab researchers and scientists account for only 1.1 percent of global scientific publishing, and spending on scientific research lies below 0.3% of GDP in the majority of Arab countries,” it is no surprise that science fiction just is not a big genre in contemporary Arabic literature. That is, it is not a genre on which the national allegory can easily be inscribed.
The lack of scientific and technological productivity in the region is owing to the same forces that created economic and infrastructural stagnation (the Oil Gulf is excepted)– major resources were simply stolen by the ruling elites and dedicated to their villas and foreign investments rather than being invested in the universities and research institutions. This major failure to boost research is one of the reasons that they lost militarily and geostrategically to their rival, Israel. The bad governance also has an impact on public attitudes. For most Arabs, science and technology is something that is constantly coming from the outside, almost never something invented locally. It is not participatory, not part of their national project. Rapid technological change, especially if it affects employment or the relative power of groups and states, may even fuel resentment against the outside world. The turn to religion, a putting of faith in forces outside ordinary reality, makes sense in a context in which there is little human scientific and technological agency. (Arabs know very well how to use technology once they acquire it, they are just not the heroes of its story.)
So King Abdallah’s love of Star Trek is a little idiosyncratic. And the theme park is after all intended for foreign tourists.
But the use of alternative energy for the park is the one bit of it that has a local context. Research and development in green energy is expensive, and deploying the solar panels and wind turbines is a substantial investment that will pay off only over time. That is why investors in this sector are typically well-heeled venture capitalist with deep pockets, or are governments. One of the ironies of the current energy scene is the United Arab Emirates’ project called, Masdar, a green-energy town of 30,000. There was at one point a plan to build a bigger version of Masdar in Jordan itself. Alternative energy faces obstacles in the region because behind the scenes, the Saudis, who give out a lot of foreign aid, lobby against wind and solar (they are afraid their oil will fall in value). But this attitude of theirs may be changing, and the Revolutions of 2011 have anyway reduced their clout in this regard. I don’t know how anyone would have known about it in the English-speaking world, but the first Egyptian solar power plant, funded in part by the European Union, opened this month in Bani Suef.
So renewable energy, for the non-oil Middle East states, is one potential area of innovation where at least a few local leaders and environmental groups are taking some initiative. It is no accident that it is this technology that is being associated in Jordan with the Star Trek theme park. That is, the Arab world may be groping toward a new national allegory, in which solar energy will be central.
In the meantime, King Abdallah needs to move his country more rapidly toward being a parliamentary democracy with full legal rights and liberties for all citizens, of the sort characteristic of the United Federation of Planets in the Star Trek universe. The age of the Klingons and Romulans in the region is passing.
OPEC and the International Energy Agency are both expecting that demand for crude oil will start rising again next year. OPEC’s market report in July forecasts a rise in crude oil demand of 1.32 million barrels per day in 2012. And the IEA offers a similar prediction, foreseeing an increase of 1.5 million barrels per day. That demand growth will almost certainly outpace the supply growth, adding volatility to the world’s energy market – and reducing the stability of the global economy. This trend does not bode well for the already hurting American economy as consumers and businesses start facing rising petroleum prices caused by increased international competition for the world’s limited crude supply.
The impact of increasing global oil demand won’t just be another blow to our economy. It could also have a severe effect on American relations with the Middle East and China. As we experience increasing international competition for oil – especially when the world’s conventional oil production hits its peak – we’ll see a rise in tension between China and the U.S. as both growing populations demand an increasingly luxurious lifestyle be fueled by petroleum. The competition for oil between the world’s two largest economic superpowers will in turn help drive up political tensions in the Middle East, causing more instability in petroleum prices that will hurt any chance of America’s economic growth.
Reducing the tensions in international petroleum politics during the course of the 21st century by weaning the American economy off oil is a common sense foreign policy we must follow to insure the stability of our relations with China, the Middle East, and other nations. The United States has the technology to upgrade itself into a clean energy nation during the course of the next four decades. But despite our technology and the many benefits that we will gain from building industries on the foundation of clean-tech innovations, some U.S. politicians and media pundits are still promoting the “Drill, baby, drill” theory of energy independence. Their claim is that pumping domestic crude from our offshore and Alaska reserves is our best option to free ourselves from foreign oil sources. It’s a false claim.
“Drill, baby, drill” is a slogan, not a solution. What America needs its leaders to create is a solid and viable energy policy that focuses not on “energy independence” but on “energy freedom.” Energy freedom is a concept Congressman Jerry McNerney (representing California’s District 11) came up while co-writing with me the book Clean Energy Nation: Freeing America from the Tyranny of Fossil Fuels. Energy freedom takes the common sense approach that the United States must position itself as the world’s leading nation in building a global clean-energy economy. If we can achieve this ambitious endeavor, we can promote economic and social freedom for all humanity by transforming the global market from one built on the shifting sands of fossil fuels to one built on a foundation of renewable energy production and energy-efficient consumption.
The concept of energy independence is folded into energy freedom. As we upgrade the U.S. toward a clean energy economy, we will reap the economic, political, and social benefits that will come from our no longer being highly dependent on other nations to provide us with our fuel resources. But energy freedom also provides other benefits. Our national security will grow stronger in a world where America has reduced its fossil fuel consumption and thus decreased the international competition for the planet’s limited supply of oil. With reduced international tensions from a clean energy-based global economy, America will have less chance of finding itself drawn into violent conflicts in the Middle East – or a potential oil war with China, a nation now building up its military might.
America’s public health will increase as we start reducing the toxins from fossil fuels now polluting our air, water, and land from the production and consumption of oil, natural gas, and coal. Increased public well-being reduces the cost of public health care. Healthier people are happier and more productive, adding to the quality of life for American citizens and a more vigorous economy.
America’s deciding to commit to achieving its energy freedom will promote the growth of clean-tech innovations in our university and government laboratories as well as in private research done by major corporations and by garage-based inventors. The wide-spread economic impact in producing clean energy from wind, solar, water, and biofuels – an impact multiplied by gains in energy efficiency in consuming that energy – will mean more prosperity and jobs for Americans as our people start to create the “green industries” for the world’s burgeoning clean-energy market. If America can get in early as the leader of this about-to-boom market, our nation can generate trillions of dollars over the next twenty or more years that will empower us to reduce our current financial debt to foreign creditors, thus reinvigorating the American dollar.
We can achieve energy freedom. But it will require the American people to change the way they look at energy production and consumption. It will require leaders on the state and federal levels to provide a vibrant vision for moving our economy from the Fossil Fuel Age to the Clean Energy Age. But unfortunately, as the cliché goes, “freedom isn’t free.” Transforming America into a clean energy economy will require massive capitol to rebuild our energy infrastructure and create the industries needed to support renewable resources and energy efficiency.
Two years ago, Congress failed to pass a “cap and trade” bill to reduce our hydrocarbon emissions. That cap and trade effort passed through the House as the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 after much political deal-making among the Republicans and Democrat lawmakers. But the bill essentially came dead on arrival to the U.S. Senate where the partisan environment was too acidic to promote an open and honest discussion of its merits and liabilities.
Arising out of the ashes of cap and trade efforts is a new idea called “fee and dividend.” The plan places a carefully-monitored fee on hydrocarbons when they enter the American market – whether from a coal mine, an oil well, or an ocean-going petroleum tanker. Instead of this money going to the U.S. government’s coffers, one hundred percent of this fee will be divided among American citizens on a monthly basis to their checking accounts, thus reducing the financial impact on individuals from the rising energy costs induced by the fee. The fee and dividend approach will promote energy innovations and clean-tech industries that will wean us away from fossil fuels and build us into an economically-stable clean energy nation.
Fee and dividend is an idea that is steadily gaining support from both Democrats and Republicans. If managed smartly, it can also empower the United States to lead the world toward a cleaner and more efficient global energy economy that will mean more peace and prosperity for the people of all nations. Americans must lead the world to achieve energy freedom. With fee and dividend, we can reach that worthy goal.
Author Bios
Martin Cheek, co-author of Clean Energy Nation: Freeing America from the Tyranny of Fossil Fuels, has been a journalist for more than two decades specializing articles on the latest developments in science and the high-tech industry. He lives in Morgan Hill, California.
Congressman Jerry McNerney (D-CA) is Cheek’s co-author.
1. Environmentalists and peace advocates are hoping that cooperation on solar energy projects can help foster peace between Israelis and Palestinians. What this article doesn’t say is that such cooperation might also allow the two sides to avoid future conflicts over resources. The gas fields off the coast of Israel and Gaza could become an object of competition. And there is a looming water crisis that could drive conflict, which might be averted by solar-powered water purification plants. Green energy can also possibly avert the worst impact on the Middle East of global climate change, which will hit Israelis and Palestinians disproprotionately.
2. Saudi Arabia plans to become, well, the Saudi Arabia of solar energy production. Plans are being made to stretch power cables to Egypt, where the population of 82 million is hungry for energy. While Egypt has great solar potential of its own, it is oil-rich Saudi Arabia that has the spare cash to invest at the moment in solar installations. And few places on earth have more sunlight and less flora and fauna than the Kingdom’s Empty Quarter. (Saudi and other plans for nuclear plants may have been muted by the Fukushima disaster).
3. The photovoltaic plant at Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates not only powers a major research facility in the city but exports extra power to the UAE grid. AME Info writes, “Masdar Power is currently constructing the 100MW Shams One, one of the largest concentrated solar power plants of its kind in the world and the largest in the Middle East. Located at Madinat Zayed, 120km southwest of Abu Dhabi city, the project, is on schedule for completion towards the end of 2012.”
9. Global solar capacity grew 73% in 2010. Solar is still only about .5% of global electricity production, but that is an enormous increase over only half a decade ago, and the prospects are for big leaps forward over the next decade.
10. The largest wind farm in Europe has just begun production in Scotland. It will power 250,000 homes. Scotland has made it of the highest priority to get 100% of its energy from renewable sources by 2025, among the most ambitious such plans in the world.
The reason these stories are so important, despite the so-far small contribution of wind and solar to world energy production, is that they point to a near future in which they generate a substantial proportion of the world’s electricity. We are in a race with disaster because of the ever-increasing amounts of carbon dioxide and soot we a spewing into the atmosphere. We are at 393 parts per million of carbon now, up from 380 only a couple of years ago. 450 ppm of atmospheric carbon has been identified by scientists such as James Hansen as the point at which life on earth as we know it begins to look unsustainable. We’ll be there in short order if current trends continue.
These charts from the NOAA Mauna Loa Observatory may tell the striking story of a human species marching to a doom at its own hands, not only blithely unaware of the approaching calamity but actively denying it out of a tragic mixture of greed, shortsightedness and stupidity.
I’ve often thought that one of the problems environmentalists face is that most automobile emissions are not visible and smelly enough. Maybe just a law that exhaust has to be dyed sooty would be enough to get us off petroleum. The commercial does this work well.
Quite apart from contributing to global climate change, which threatens our food supplies, automobile exhaust is not good for children and other living things. Scientists increasingly suspect it is implicated in our epidemic of autism.
Of course, driving an electric car only reduces carbon emissions to the extent that the electric plant that recharges its battery is powered by non-fossil fuels, such as hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, wave or solar. But in Portugal, where 45 percent of electricity is from renewable sources, driving a Leaf would be very environmentally friendly. Or in Iowa, where 17 percent of electricity is now from wind. And my friends in California with solar panels on their homes, who actually provide electricity to the grid, would be able to charge their Leafs with virtually no air pollution.
And, the batteries and range for electric vehicles will likely improve quickly.
A lot of the sources of emission are fixed coal and other hydrocarbon plants that will likely go on operating through 2020, suggesting that there will be annual increases in emissions into the next decade.
In turn, this steady production of atmospheric poison, which causes the atmosphere to retain the heat of sunlight and interferes with it being radiated back out into outer space, is likely to increase the average global surface temperature by more than 2 degrees. Climate scientists had hoped that international protocols and government efforts would hold the increase to that amount. An average increase of 3 degrees would suggest that in some times and places it would be hellish, with a deleterious impact on crops and human health.
Oxfam has just issued a warning that food staples will likely double in price by 2030, in part because of climate change. A billion people in the world go hungry already, and spend 80% of their income on food. If the world envisaged by Oxfam materializes, obviously there is the potential of widespread starvation.
The Big Oil and Big Coal executives attempting to stop efforts to reduce emissions are thus in effect mass murderers of a future generation.
America’s corporate police state has decided that ecological activism is a danger that it needs to spend millions combating. (In fact, genuine ‘eco-terrorism,’ as opposed to FBI entrapment of aging hippies, is rare.)
Given what is being done to the planet, the FBI should instead be having agents sit outside Big Oil and Big Coal corporate offices tracing how the money goes out from them to buy our political representatives (that is illegal, guys) and have them work against green energy and engage in climate change denial.
1. German Chancellor Angela Merkel became a green energy hawk after Fukushima. She wants to phase out Nuclear energy and coal, and move quickly to renewables.
2. A team headed by Patrick Pinhero, associate professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Missouri-Columbia, has invented a flexible solar sheet that dramatically improves the efficiency of light collection. Most photovoltaic solar panels capture only 30% of available light, but Pinhero’s sheets collect 90%. He says, “Our overall goal is to collect and utilize as much solar energy as is theoretically possible and bring it to the commercial market in an inexpensive package that is accessible to everyone… If successful, this product will put us orders of magnitudes ahead of the current solar energy technologies we have available to us today.”
7. Germany is streamlining regulatory permissions for wind energy installations. Bureaucratic red tape is often the biggest impediment new renewable facilities (even though governments fall over backwards to give tax and other breaks to Big Oil and Gas).
8. That the wind doesn’t blow all the time (“intermittency”) is not actually that important, contrary to what the Big Oil propagandists argue. Iowa gets 17% of its electricity from wind, and it does not cause blackouts.
“Message: According to page 8 of the report, the missing number is 80 GW for small hydro.
“In 2010, for the first time, worldwide cumulated installed capacity of wind turbines (193 gigawattsa), small hydro (80 GW, excluding large hydro) biomass and waste-to-energy plants (65 GW), and solar power (43 GW) reached 381 GW, outpacing the installed nuclear capacity of 375 GW prior to the Fukushima disaster.”
My column is out at Truthdig , on the growing Green Gap between China and the United States with regard to clean energy technologies: “The New Sputnik.”.
Excerpt:
‘ In 1957, a United States shocked by the Soviet launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite bounced into action to compete on the world stage. More than 50 years later, in May of 2011, the U.S. is facing a new challenge. The Chinese Communist Party has decided to launch a crash program to produce green energy, a field where it already has a commanding lead over the U.S. The difference between 1957 and 2011 is that American politics in the meantime have been captured by parasitic or corrupt industries such as high finance and big oil and gas. The Green Gap produced by China’s increasing lead in the technologies of the future is not even headlined in America’s corporate mass media, much less galvanizing a nation of gas guzzlers and coal junkies…
In contrast to the strenuous efforts of 1958 to expand Americans’ horizons, the House of Representatives in 2011 is full of politicians who actively despise science and higher education, hate environmentalism, deny global climate change and are in the back pocket of Big Oil. They have delivered themselves of a budget that increases funding for the Department of War, implies long-term and deeper cuts in taxes for the super-wealthy, and devours the seed corn of America’s K-12 and higher education programs… Instead of increasing funding for Title VI and the [foreign and] area studies centers (the descendants of 1958’s NDEA [National Defense Education Act), governmental agents of the proudly monolingual tea party in their wisdom have cut that program by half.
The U.S. won the space race that was kicked off in earnest by Sputnik. Now, this Congress, full of climate change contrarians, hasn’t even gotten up off the couch or laced up its sneakers in reaction to China’s solar challenge… ‘
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