It's called the "precautionary principle". Unfortunately, it is pretty much a moot point now, since we have already reached the point of no return.
How did we do it? By putting a price on everyone's head through capitalistic Blind Faith. We always end up with the accountants making the decisions about who lives (has a job) and who dies (the family farmer, the African bushman) simply through scratching some numbers on a piece of paper.
Religions assisted them with the Manifest Destiny lie: that humans are separate from Nature and that some humans are more important than other humans, determined by how much power or money they have.
Nature doesn't negotiate.
I'm sorry, but there just isn't a solution that anyone is going to like, so you're on your own now. Nature will force us into Descent through starvation, disease, competition, and exposure. Billions of people will be soon looking for a place to live that isn't under water. Billions more will be trying to protect their places and their food.
I hope everyone is enjoying their cars and roads and cushy chairs. M. King Hubbert told you so 50 years ago, so don't blame me for spelling it out.
There are only individual solutions now. There is no possible way (known to current peer-reviewed science) of providing resources to continue the lifestyles we have enjoyed. Not just because the resources are running out, but because any mitigating actions involve descent and recession, while the entire psychological future of TWAWKI is based upon investment, which is based upon perceived growth in production of crap that nobody needs (try explaining 'insurance' to a woodchuck). There is no more growth possible without a miracle from Area 51 that will allow us to go to another planet. Since that is improbable at best, you should just get used to the fact that "Calling All Pets" on NPR is going to become "Cooking All Pets".

There is only one 'solution' and that is to redistribute global wealth to ensure the poor have access to security: clean water, medicine, healthy food, education, and a safe and loving future. Then perhaps we and they will see each other for the first time as friends and neighbors instead of 'The Enemy.' When this happens folks will embrace each other and the world community of humans, and stop forever the dream of a personal family empire. Population will drop and all will be peace.

fat chance hey?

http://science.reddit.com/info/5z8sk/comments/

thank you for your support...

I almost changed the subtitle to this to say "(or, Hasn't Anyone Seen Highlander 2?)"

But I didn't.

I attended an Energy Symposium at Georgia Tech last week. It sounded to me as though another consequence of the emission requirements on power plants is to render some of the older coal plants obsolete. Sometimes it is difficult to retrofit the old plants with the required new equipment; sometimes the new equipment causes the cost of production to become too high. (Most likely the latter is because more coal needs to be burned, sending CO2 up, as you point out.)

At any rate, more and more of these older plants end up being closed. In some ways this is good, but we are lacking good alternatives to replace the energy that is lost. Getting new coal plants permitted is a problem because of CO2. Nuclear is expensive to build and requires a long time frame, if regulatory authorities will approve new plants. Wind is not an option here in the Southeast, because there is very little wind on land, and hurricane insurance is not available at reasonable cost for offshore wind. There is clearly not enough gas to install new gas powered plants. I am wondering whether total installed electrical capacity will start to decline, in not too many years.

Sunstein evokes the controversial case of the ban on DDT, the harmful neurotoxin contained in some pesticides that Rachel Carson railed against in her seminal book "Silent Spring." While the health effects of the ban in wealthy countries have almost certainly been positive, it may be a different picture in poor countries, where the chemical was one of the most widely-used treatments for malaria.

In making this assertion, Sunstein either hasn't done his homework, or he is lying.

DDT fell out of fashion because of rising immunity by insect populations. Rachel Carson never said ban DDT, she warned about the consequences of indiscriminate spraying. The WHO permits the use of DDT in domestic situations.

The problem with DDT is its high persistence in the environment. It still kills birds in the Arctic today.

And that very persistence means an R-strategy species, like a mosquito, with a short life span and high reproductive rate, can evolve immunity very quickly. Meanwhile a K-strategy species, like a raptor (Bald Eagle), cannot.

Sunstein's misuse of this example, in knowing or unknowing concert with a group of right wing thinktanks determined to smear Rachel Carson, calls into question the whole validity of his thesis.

And by the by, the worst impacted by DDT concentrations, amongst human peoples, are the aboriginal peoples of the Arctic. This stuff is still around after 30 years, and it concentrates in the bodies of the animals they eat. Mother's milk in the Arctic is over the EPA-accepted level for DDT concentrations.

So hardly rich white people, but amongst the poorest people in the northern hemisphere.

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/ddt/

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/09/fair_on_the_ddt_myth.php

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2007/06/more_links_on_rachel_carson_an.php

Note we find our old friend and global warming (and peak oil) denier the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writing screeds against Rachel Carson.

I think solutions short of falling back into preindustrial society are not all that hard to find. Many areas of energy usage are amenable to nearly exponential increase of efficiency. As an example look at lighting:

First we had candles, and oil lamps. I'm not sure what percentage of chemical energy to visable light these devices achieve, but it has got to be quite low.

Then we went to Edison's incandescent bulb whose century long reign is nearly overd. Because of the relatively low temperature its efficiency is only a percent or two.

We are now trying to replace these with compact florescents, with a severalfold increase in lumens/watt.

Within a few years we will be replacing CFLs, with more efficient LEDs, or possibly semiconductor lasers, for a further significant leap in efficiency.

Air conditioning/ refrigeration/ heating is also becoming considerably more efficient as time passes -not to the degree that is possible with the revolution in lighting technology, but by significant factors as well.

Similar curves apply to alternative energy generation. We are still pretty early on the learning curves for wind and solar. Both of these areas benefit greatly from advances in materials science, and even such mundane areas as structural mechanics, and fluid dynamics. You can bet that straight bladed 3 blade wind turbines are not an optimal design. Every improvement to these technologies brings their price down, as well as improving their EROEI. These latter two have been increasing in price performance by about 5% per year. Exponential improvements if sustained over significant periods of time can have overwhelming effects.

The real challenge is not so much to get us to give up our standard of living, but to redirect our progress, towards doing more(or similar) with less. The old approach was to exploit cheap fossil energy to do more by application of brute force. The new paradigm is going to be to do the same job with decreasing resource usage. The real battlefront is getting our corporate product development system to make this major directional change, as well as to convince consumers to takeup the new ecologically less damaging products in a big way. We don't need 360HP autos to impress the neighbors, we need hybrids, evolving into plugin hybrids etc.

Lately we've been growing our economy 2-3% per year, and improving our carbon efficiency by perhaps half that. The key is to bump up those efficiency gains by 3-5% per year. We haven't even tried. It hasn't been a priority. Let us make it one, then we can see if our system is up to the challenge.

The Law of Unintentional Consequences, a form of Murphy's Law, reigns supreme. The more chaotic a system the more the system is unknown, the greater the consequences of this Law. It also manifeststs itself in the Butterfly Effect where one person's action can have ride reaching consequences for millions (both good and bad). Bascially i just means that any solution will create its own problems, often worse than the problem in the first place.

Does this mean we just hunker down and do nothing? Obviously not. What it does mean is that we must do what we can to understand as much as we can before we react or act. Reacting is the worse because you are often pressed for time and have to rush, which means solutions are not well thought out.

Bottom line is there is never a silver bullet to solve our problems. One of the things that bothers me the most is when solutions are suggested and it's presented such that it can be applied universally, and everything will be just as it was. The move to biofuels is showing to be just not the case, for example, as it has now driven the price for grains through the roof. Though many predicted that would happen, they were ignored.

And that's another threat to our society. Ignoring the warnings of those who can see some of the Unexpected Consequences for any suggestion.

Richard Wakefield
London, Ont.

No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on.

I agree that we must examine all courses of action that reduce GHG and mitigate effects of peak oil because of possible unintended consequences. But, at some point the governments and citizens will have to choose between the lessor of two evils, partially because of economic reasons.

I believe Peak Oil production will be percieved as a greater threat to people in the US, mostly because we are the greatest consumers of oil/liquid fuels (25% of world total oil use with only 4% of world's population). The effects of climate change causing droughts, severe storms, and higher ocean levels can be dealt with because these changes generally come slowly over a period of years. If oil goes over $200 in the next year or two and the economy crashes, producing unemployment of 25% and hyper inflation, the populace will demand swift action to bring alternative oil sources along with new technology to improve energy efficency. Demands to reduce GHG will become less important.

If in five years 30 million US families do not have jobs and 75 to 100 million are classified as poor, the conservative PTB will push for ignoring the climate change issue. We must resist this on all fronts and make the case that solutions to the energy problem can produce less GHG and use fewer natural resources and have less harmful environmental effects. The "green" energy industries will have to become very politically active, beside working to offer employment to the huddled masses.

Mark in St Louis, USA

Much of this reduction has come because of requirements in the act that oil coal-fired powerplants feature new emissions reduction technology when they are renovated. The downside of this, though, is that it decreases the plants' overall efficiency, requiring it to burn more coal than they previously would have, and thus emit more carbon dioxide.

2-3% of conversion efficiency, I believe. Even with tops SO2 scrubbing.

The reality is, even the conservatives have voters who hunt and fish, and taking the pain on Acid Rain just got too great.

Been to China? The US is *not* going back to Chinese levels of particulates and SO2.

Sunstein also brings up opposition to genetically modified foods. He claims that that banning them based on concerns about human health could have the perverse effect of eliminating their potential to improve global food security.

No one seems to say clearly what GM food means.

It means the farmer can only grow the crop with the permission of the seed company. The natural reproductive cycle of the plant is cut off.

It means huge risks to the core genetic material of our plant life, and the risk of serious cross-contamination. It also means seed firms suing farmers whose fields happen to be next to those using GM crops.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3736591.stm

Canada's Supreme Court on Friday ruled that Percy Schmeiser, who was found to be growing the GM rapeseed in 1998, had breached Monsanto's patent.

He had denied planting Monsanto seeds, saying they took root on his land through natural cross-pollination.

Given that our planet has finite resources, would exchanging all our 'dirty' energy for 'clean' energy be any solution?

Would we still have more energy than the planet can handle (especially considering the ways we use that energy)?

Ozymandias, are we too powerful for our own good?

BTW from the way things seem to be heading, I think we will use the dirty , pop the clean on top and keep on singing party time till mr hangover overhauls us. tra la

I think this article starts with a faulty misconception, stemming from the idea that we must continue with life as we now know it. If forced to, people can live on much less than they do now. (In the case of America a lot less.)

If you don't create new problems with new technology, but instead return to proven low tech solutions, and add the scientific insights provided by the receding golden age, we have the option of a managed change. Cuba managed to survive. Although no one could honestly call it the land of milk and honey, low tech solutions have allowed them to get by.

Being a pessimist, I don't think we will do this, but it is possible.

An example of a proven technology is the bicycle, root cellar, or hand operated water pump.
An example of golden age science is the solar oven, or passive solar heating.

From http://www.carbonequity.info/

• Climate change impacts are happening at lower temperature increases and more quickly than
projected.
• The Arctic's floating sea ice is headed towards rapid summer disintegration as early as 2013, a
century ahead of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections.
• The rapid loss of Arctic sea ice will speed up the disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet, and a rise
in sea levels by even as much as 5 metres by the turn of this century is possible.
• The Antarctic ice shelf reacts far more sensitively to warming temperatures than previously
believed.
• Long-term climate sensitivity (including "slow" feedbacks such as carbon cycle feedbacks which are
starting to operate) may be double the IPCC standard.
• A doubling of climate sensitivity would mean we passed the widely accepted 2°C threshold of
"dangerous anthropogenic interference" with the climate four decades ago, and would require us to
find the means to engineer a rapid drawdown of current atmospheric greenhouse gas.
• Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are now growing more rapidly than "business-as-usual", the most
pessimistic of the IPCC scenarios.
• Temperatures are now within ≈1°C of the maximum temperature of the past million years.
• We must choose targets and take actions that can actually solve the problem in a timely manner.
• The object of policy-relevant advice must be to avoid unacceptable outcomes and seemingly
extreme or alarming possibilities, not to determine just the apparently most likely outcome.
• The 2°C warming cap is a political compromise; with the speed of change now in the climate system
and the positive feedbacks that 2°C will trigger, it looms for perhaps billions of people and millions of
species as a death sentence.
• To allow the reestablishment and long-term security of the Arctic summer sea ice it is likely to be
necessary to bring global warming back to a level at or below 0.5°C (a long-term precautionary
warming cap) and for the level of atmospheric greenhouse gases at equilibrium to be brought down
to or below a long-term precautionary cap of 320 ppm CO2e.
• The IPCC suffers from a scientific reticence and in many key areas the IPCC process has been so
deficient as to be an unreliable and dangerously misleading basis for policy-making.

www.carbonequity.info/PDFs/Arctic.pdf

In "Avoiding Harmful Solutions" you wrote:

Arguments for rapid action on global warming are often framed in terms of the precautionary principle: given the potentially catastrophic consequences of the problem, we're better off taking action to prevent them, even if some uncertainty remains about just how bad they'll be.

If I understand the precautionary principle, the quote above has it just backwards; the precautionary principle urges us to slow down, not act. From wikipedia:

The precautionary principle is a moral and political principle which states that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action.

You switch to the appropriate understanding of the precautionary principle in your next sentence:

But in thinking about the legislation and technologies intended to combat global warming, it's important to remember that even the most attractive solutions will likely have problems of their own.

This may all seem picky, but TOD is a great place to learn. I would hate for someone (unfamiliar with the precautionary principle) to walk away confused from your interesting article.

Thanks.

Steve Lee
"It is up to the most conscious member of the relationship to create the space for the relationship to grow." Ram Dass

Solutions from Houston ??

http://www.getreallist.com/resources/ASPO_Houston_10-07_cnelder.pdf

There are two 'Catch-22's here.

1. 'Excitement about the solution that blinds us' is the result of some kind of Homo S. brain damage after living in XX century. We think that we understand most of everything and that we have control over most of everything. We went through 100 years of permanent growth and that conditioned our minds making it inept to deal with other versions of reality.

2. How do we minimize exposure to unintended consequences? Method is very simple - do absolutely nothing. Be aware that whatever we do, we affect the environment and that chain of events from that point is beyond our intellectual capability. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that whatever we do using energy increases overall entropy of the system. The consequences will always be something we do not want or we did not think about before we 'started'.

This thread presupposes that there are solutions; I have serious doubts about that to begin with.

I think it is reasonable to say that energy is scarce and will become much more scarce once we roll over the peak "fill in the blank" (oil, gas, coal, etc.). This creates the problem of even trying to build alternatives since somewhere someone will need to do without energy if it is diverted to these grand schemes to save the world.

Already we have seen the misdirection (waste) of resources by central planners bringing us the faulty ethanol solution. My own view is that central planning is a disaster in the making and that if there are to be solutions they will come out of free people making individual choices and risking their own resources. The role of government is to protect the rest of us should some individuals or corporations attempt to dump off some of their own costs on the rest of us by polluting the environment, but for government to make the economic decision as to where resources should be invested into whatever, has a proven record of failure in localities like the USSR and Eastern Europe.

Of course the path of freedom will not be followed because it is popular to be taken care of, so there will be a clamor for government to do something, and the politicians will happily oblige.