Seven Elements That Have Changed the World

by John Browne

  In California, the state governor Arnold Schwarzenegger led one of the most ambitious climate-change agendas in the world. In 2006, I found myself sitting in Schwarzenegger’s famous cigar tent in the Sacramento Capitol’s Quadrangle. He wanted my opinion on a forthcoming bill to reduce greenhouse gases in the state by 25 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050. While the exact targets were ambitious, Schwarzenegger demonstrated that climate change warranted government action rather than just discussion that might be had on a talk show.

  In the UK, Tony Blair chose climate change as a focus for the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles, Scotland. This, I believe, was the high-water mark for political interest in climate change at the international level. Blair convinced the leaders of the world’s eight major economies of the serious risks that climate change posed to our common future, but no agreement was reached on practical actions to take. Despite public concern and real determination among the world’s leaders, no global action was taken. The rhetoric had got ahead of reality.

  International failure

  Since then, the prospects for a meaningful international agreement on climate changed have diminished with each passing year, and with each summit of the UN Climate Change Conference. The 17th Climate Change Conference was held in December 2011 in Durban, South Africa. Although promises were made to work towards a binding agreement in the coming years, nothing substantial was achieved.112 Heads of state were more concerned with the intensifying crisis in the eurozone. Once again, the issue of climate change was kicked into the long grass.

  So why has humanity, faced with the greatest potential challenge to its existence, failed to agree on a solution?

  I believe that the problem is one of human behaviour when facing a danger that is uncertain and far off. Anthony Giddens, a distinguished British social scientist, writes that we do not take action against climate change because the dangers posed are not apparent in everyday life.113 Electorates do not cope well with probabilities, forecasts and sacrifices; they choose to believe those who tell them that everything will be all right, whatever the reality.

  As governments push on with austerity programmes, and as slow growth and inflation erode the standard of living in much of the world, many voters see action on climate change as an unaffordable luxury.114 The effects of climate change are uncertain, far off and dispersed, unlike the bills they have to pay today. Democratic politicians, elected for short periods of office, naturally reflect those sentiments. Climate change is something to deal with once the economy is sorted out, or once they are re-elected.

  But the problem is deeper than mere short-termism. Even if we could overcome our irrationality and act to protect our long-term interests, a global agreement on climate change would not be straightforward.

  The problem is one of collective action: the ‘tragedy of the global commons’.115 Carbon dioxide does not respect national boundaries and so the damage caused by pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is shared by everyone. If one nation reduces emissions but others do not, it still faces the same risk of climate change. While it is in our global interest to reduce emissions, no individual nation will bear the cost without a guarantee that others will follow suit. It is simply cheaper and easier to be a free rider.116

  Change therefore requires common agreement on how emissions reductions should be shared. But the costs and benefits for each nation are different. Small island nations fear the consequences of rising sea levels and so demand the toughest emission targets. Expansive nations in the far north, such as Canada and Russia, may actually benefit from a warming climate as their land becomes more fertile and their mineral resources more accessible.

  The greatest divergence exists between rich and poor nations. Developing nations, most importantly China and India, argue that climate change is not a problem of their making. China emits more carbon dioxide than any other nation, but its per capita emissions are only a third of those in the US. Access to cheap carbon-based energy was the basis of development for all the world’s prosperous economies. Why, China reasonably asks, should they be denied the development that the West had enjoyed? One Chinese delegate at the Kyoto Summit described the difference in viewpoint as: ‘What [developed nations] are doing is luxury emissions. What we are doing is survival emissions.’117 Developed nations, and most importantly, the US, argue that an agreement which lets the developing nations off the hook might place them at an economic disadvantage to their increasingly powerful global competitors.

  Faced with divergent national interests and a problem that is uncertain and far off, we should have known better than to pin our hopes on an internationally binding agreement.

  We have been here before in our attempt to control the spread of nuclear weapons; it is only in a nation’s interest to give up nuclear weapons if they are sure that all others will too. Even faced with risk of nuclear Armageddon, we have failed to reach an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons or even to prevent their spread.

  Climate change presents a collective action problem of the very greatest scale. It requires every country and almost every individual on earth to change the way they live, on the promise that others will do the same, in order to protect the interests of humanity decades from now. That is a vast challenge, well beyond the capacity of democratic institutions at the international level.

  Surprisingly, even in the absence of a global agreement, change is already happening, driven by technological innovation in the energy system, and a chaotic patchwork of political progress, emerging from local, regional, and national interests.

  The technology of carbon

  At the beginning of the Carboniferous period, 360 million years ago, the first primitive forests absorbed carbon dioxide from the earth’s atmosphere. Over time, through death, decay, heat and pressure, these forests were transformed into five trillion tonnes of carbon fossil fuels. Since the industrial era, humanity has released around 5 per cent of that back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

  Humanity, driven by its desire for energy, has changed the distribution of carbon far more rapidly than ever before. And this distribution will continue to change unless we change how we use energy; by 2050, there are likely to be two billion more people on earth and global energy consumption will almost double.

  Technology offers us three ways to rebalance this: energy conservation; low-carbon energy; and the creation of carbon sinks.

  First, we can use less energy. If we are unwilling to reduce our standard of living, a reduction in energy consumption requires increased efficiency. In many circumstances that is relatively straightforward and economically attractive, as efficiency gains often deliver significant savings. Innovations in digital communication, such as video calling and collaborative distance working, may be particularly significant.

  However, energy efficiency is not the silver bullet that it may appear to be. When something becomes more efficient people use more of it.118 And when people save money through energy efficiency, they spend the money on other products that use energy. Energy efficiency is not the same thing as energy conservation. Getting people to conserve needs more than the application of technology; it needs education, incentives and potentially regulation.

  The second technological tool to restore carbon balance is to reduce the carbon intensity of energy production. Most exciting is the development of zero carbon sources of energy, including renewables such as wind and solar power.

  Only a decade ago, these were developmental niche technologies, prohibitively expensive and deployed only on a tiny scale. But in 2010, renewables accounted for almost half of the new electricity capacity installed across the globe. Over the past seven years, there has been a fourfold increase in wind power capacity, while solar power capacity has increased almost thirteen times over. That rapid growth has delivered vast increases in the scale of production and prodigious learning that has improved efficiency and driven down costs. In 2008, for example, solar photovoltaic cells cost $4 per watt
of capacity. Today the same capacity can be manufactured for less than $1. Away from the international conferences in Copenhagen and Durban, there has been a quiet revolution that is just starting to transform our energy system.

  Nevertheless, renewables are still a small proportion of the energy mix and carbon fuels will be with us for some decades yet. Reducing carbon intensity therefore demands changing the mix of fossil fuels, away from coal and oil towards natural gas. It produces, for an equivalent amount of electricity generated, half the carbon dioxide of coal. Coal has met almost half of new energy demand over the last decade, but the recent boom in cheap natural gas production could soon cause gas-fired electricity generation to replace coal-fired power stations. Gas power stations also have the advantage of being able to ramp up their output quickly, to meet falls in renewable supply when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing.

  Replacing oil is more difficult, as its energy density makes it uniquely useful in cars and aeroplanes. Natural gas vehicles have come a long way since the ‘da qi bao’ (‘big bag of gas’) bus used in China in the 1960s. Giant gas-filled grey bladders would sit precariously on the roof, needing constant refilling as they quickly deflated and sagged over the side of the bus. Natural gas will continue to be used for transportation and if a unit of energy from gas sells for a fraction of that of oil, as is now the case in the US, it will become more ubiquitously used. Electric- and hydrogen-powered vehicles are also possible solutions, but a costly investment in infrastructure is required before their use can become widespread.

  A more immediate alternative to replace diesel and petrol is biofuel. Instead of relying on processes which take many millions of years to convert plant and animal remains into crude oil which we then refine into diesel and petrol, we can use a different and faster method: growing crops and refining them into fuel. Carbon dioxide is absorbed in their growth and emitted in combustion. In the US, laws passed in a drive to reduce carbon dioxide emissions mean that most petrol at the forecourt contains 10 per cent ethanol made from maize. There are dangers here: crops for biofuels must not reduce the global supply of much-needed food.

  The third and final way to reduce levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is to trap it in carbon stores. Most obviously that means preserving, restoring or expanding existing carbon stores in forests and particular soils. But there is a chance that we may also be able, in time, to create artificial stores of carbon, by intervening in the combustion of fossil fuels, capturing carbon dioxide before it escapes and burying it underground.

  In November 2010, I visited the Huaneng Gaobeidian Power Plant near Beijing to see China’s pioneering carbon capture technology in action. The project is the first plant in China to demonstrate the carbon capture process.

  A complex array of steel pipes takes up a space about half the size of a football pitch. Inside the pipes, a fluid freezes carbon dioxide escaping from the coal furnace below. As I watched, two workers clad in boiler suits stepped forward and, opening a hatch on the side of the apparatus, pulled out a container of frozen carbon dioxide. Holding some in my gloved hands, I watched it quickly melt and disappear into the atmosphere.

  However, the Huaneng project is still just a demonstration, capturing only 3,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, less than a millionth of China’s total emissions. It will be a long time before carbon can be captured on a significant scale.

  Moreover, capturing carbon is only half the story: somewhere has to be found to store it.119 The possibilities are varied and imaginative, ranging from storage in rock formations to the creation of large carbon dioxide lakes three kilometres under the sea, the point at which carbon dioxide sinks in seawater. Many people feel uneasy about the idea of storing vast quantities of carbon dioxide inside the earth, fearing what could happen if a carbon store were accidentally released. The same worries over waste storage that have slowed the growth of nuclear power are now coming to bear on fossil fuels.

  Carbon capture and storage technology will only have an impact on carbon dioxide emissions if it can be made economically competitive. Energy that would otherwise be used by consumers and industry has to be used to capture carbon. Huaneng sell some frozen carbon dioxide for use in fizzy drinks and the dry ice used at rock concerts, yet the market for those products is very small compared to total carbon dioxide emissions. A more plausible alternative is to inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to recover the last remaining amount of oil.120

  Bottom-up politics

  So human ingenuity presents a wide range of technical solutions: products that reduce our need for energy, new sources of energy that emit less carbon, and methods for trapping carbon that would otherwise be released. We have the tools at our disposal to control carbon’s destruction of the planet.

  But more than that, we have the social structures to make it happen. The low-carbon revolution is already taking place, not through grand multilateral agreements, centralised decisions and vast new financial mechanisms, but, rather, through a messy, chaotic, stuttering, bottom-up collection of small changes.

  At every level – country, region, company and household – changes are being made where they align with the interests of those involved. Few are dramatic, but in aggregate they are significant. Patchworks of nations with common interests can work together to set emissions targets, introduce a price for carbon and support low-carbon technologies, without giving any member a competitive advantage. Europe is perhaps the best example of where this is happening, with common agreement on targets for the amount of renewable energy generation and a scheme for trading emissions.121

  Individual nations, often driven by concerns about energy security and local pollution of air and water, are also taking unilateral action. More than a hundred countries around the world, both developed and developing, now have support for renewable energy. China, already the world’s largest consumer of clean energy, aims to deliver 15 per cent of its energy from renewables by 2020.

  Wherever governments are able to explain the benefits that renewable energy can bring, and to convince the people that, as costs fall, subsidies can be phased out, renewables will continue to grow. Where governments can offer financial support that is clear and credible, investment will follow. Over the last seven years, investment in clean energy has grown every single year, at an average rate of 30 per cent.

  At the level of the household, Western consumers are changing their habits: consuming less energy, both to save money and protect the environment. Concern about climate change feeds through to spending decisions, and puts pressure on businesses to improve their environmental performance.

  Across the world, small coalitions are forming in which change is possible. It will not be as comprehensive, as efficient or as effective as a global agreement, but crucially it is politically feasible. Change is happening, and that should give us hope.

  That, however, is not enough. We must find a group of leaders who have a common view of purpose, namely to limit, as much as possible, the risk that climate change will have dire consequences for humankind. They need to encourage all the activity that is happening at country and grassroots levels so as to take us to the point where the possible temperature rise is at least moderated. Since the effectiveness of leadership is context-dependent, they need to pick the right economic and political conditions to go further towards their shared purpose. And, failing that, they need to prepare us to adapt to a different set of climatic conditions. Carbon has served humankind very well; we must ensure it does not exact an impossible price for that.

  GOLD

  El Dorado

  THE HIGHLIGHT OF MY first visit to the Museo del Oro in Bogotá, Colombia, in the late 1980s was the magnificent gold raft of El Dorado, the Gilded King.1 Sitting in the centre of the raft, the King wears an elaborate headdress and is surrounded by twelve smaller figures. Some of the simple human forms sit on the edge as if to row the raft, while others, decked in ornate jewellery and wearing masks that resemble jaguar heads, attend
to the King. The raft represents the ritual thought to be performed at Lake Guatavita, to the north-east of Bogotá, in which the new leader of the Muisca tribe was received.

  As the dawn sun rose, the King would be stripped naked and his entire body painted in fine gold dust. Reflecting the morning light, the King boarded the raft while on the banks of the lake people of his tribe danced, sang and played drums. At his feet the principal chiefs placed more gold, jewels and emeralds before rowing the raft towards the centre of the lake. As they reached the middle, and the shouts from the edge of the lake reached fever pitch, the raft stopped and a flag was raised for silence. The Gilded King, who had been sitting perfectly still and quietly throughout, then made his offering to the lake, casting his riches into the water. As the last gold piece disappeared, the flag fell and the festivities continued in celebration of the new ruler. The naked gold man continued to gleam in the sun and so connected to the source of all life.2

  El Dorado simply means ‘the gilded man’, yet since the name of the Gilded King was first described by the Spanish historian Fernández de Oviedo in 1541, it has been embellished, exaggerated and has taken hold of imaginations on every corner of this Earth. El Dorado grew from a gilded man into a mythical city and eventually an entire empire made of gold; it became a dream and a wild aspiration that was always to be found over the next mountain ridge or across the next ravine.