Copenhagen Cassandras don't have an answer

The hundreds of limousines and private jets that ferried environmentalists to the climate conference in Copenhagen make an apt metaphor for the world's approach to climate change itself: The amount of posturing and preening vastly outweighs sincere efforts to reduce carbon emissions. And there are good reasons for that.

We have been through this exercise before. Most of the world's nations have ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Very few of them have actually met its targets, and the increase in emissions by behemoths such as China (150 percent increase in greenhouse-gas emissions since 1990) and India (103 percent increase) has overwhelmed the insignificant reductions achieved by the few countries that have made any, such as Denmark (22 percent decrease).

Nor is it hard to understand why. Consider Germany, which has undertaken one of the most stringent emission-reduction regimes in Europe. "A kilowatt of electricity costs three times as much here as it does in the United States, supercharged with high taxes to discourage use and to help fund renewable energy development," reports The Washington Post. "Meanwhile, a 50 percent 'eco-tax' has sent the price of gasoline soaring to $8 a gallon. To manage costs, the [Pokropp] family of three unplugs all their appliances but the refrigerator at night [and] avoids driving. ... 'We have no choice,' said Andreas Pokropp, a former coal refinery worker. 'We have to be green, even if we can't afford it.'"

Through such Draconian measures, Germany has managed to reduce emissions all of 22 percent from 1990 levels. By contrast, President Barack Obama has promised to lower greenhouse-gas emissions in the U.S. to 83 percent below 2005 levels by mid-century. That would bring per-capita emissions to the level at which they stood in the 1870s - when Thomas Edison was still trying to figure out what kind of filament would make a good light bulb.

A new analysis by the International Energy Agency says achieving Copenhagen's goals would cost at least $10 trillion. It doesn't explain how advanced nations would come up with that money while they are shrinking their economies to pre-Industrial Revolution size.

Meanwhile, a decade-long plateau in global temperatures and the recent Climategate scandal have cast renewed doubt on the premise underlying the political posturing. It remains unclear how much global warming is occurring, how much of it is caused by human activity, and how much it could be reversed by a radical change in energy use.

How radical a change? According to Reason magazine's science editor Ronald Bailey, relying on the work of MIT's Daniel Nocera, in 2002 the world consumed 13.5 terawatts of power, which is 13.5 trillion watts - 80 percent of which were supplied by fossil fuels. Assuming the world has 9 billion people in 2050, conservative estimates suggest the world will need an additional 15 to 22 terawatts by mid-century. We'd need 88 terawatts more if everybody on the globe adopted an American lifestyle. If everybody in the world adopted the lifestyle of India's poor, then the world could get by on only 4 terawatts.

How do we get that additional juice? If windmills were placed on every point of the globe with winds of 11 mph or more, Nocera estimates wind energy could produce about 2.1 terawatts. If every river on Earth were dammed, hydroelectric power could produce maybe 2 terawatts. Even nuclear power falls short, producing another 8 terawatts by 2050 - if we built one new reactor every two days, for the next 40 years.

The only known sources of energy sufficient to meet the demands of modern civilization are fossil fuels and solar power - "more energy from sunlight strikes the Earth in one hour than humanity uses in a year," Bailey writes. Al Gore says a 10,000-square-mile solar plant could meet America's entire electric demand. But solar power presents several daunting technological obstacles.

And environmental ones. Back in March, the AP reported that 19 energy companies had sought to build solar and wind facilities on a half-million acres in the Mojave Desert. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein objected on conservationist grounds, as did David Myers of The Wildlands Conservancy: "It would destroy the entire Mojave Desert ecosystem," Myers said. And even assuming one could place a gigantic array of mirrors and photovoltaic cells in the desert, there's still the problem of keeping them clean, says environmental writer William Tucker: "Where, in the middle of the desert, do you find enough water to wash down 10,000 square miles of solar collectors at least once a month?"

Many well-meaning people agree with Mike Tidwell of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, who calls global warming a great moral crisis. Maybe it is. But the answer, if we're to find one, will come from physicists and engineers - not the high-flying Cassandras of Copenhagen.