Bad news & good for Renewable Energy....

Today’s post: Wednesday, 3-4-2009

I. First the bad news.:

A. We may be running out of time to deal with C02 and other causes of man-made global warming.:

1. California, where I live, though we’ve had recent rains, has now experienced 3 unusually dry years in a row. And Governor Schwarzenegger just proclaimed we may need to begin to ration water here. That may just be where we are in a normal set of dry years which will reverse later as it has done in the past. But it may not be normal and may be our new climate due to the definite warming California has experienced over the last 15 or 20 years.

If it is our new climate as driven by global warming, this trend will worsen as the C02 to warm our state further is already in the world’s atmosphere.
If so, we need large infrastructure investments in all these areas NOW:

a) desalination stations up and down the California coast –at least 20 and maybe 100 of them – AND new pipelines to get that usable water to the people, businesses, and farms that need it;
b) severe restrictions on lawn watering and large subsidies for installing and then requiring drip irrigation and soil water content monitoring and control systems both for urban areas and for farms;
c)large subsidies to install flush free urinals or very low flow ones in all dual use bathrooms and men’s rooms and leak repairing plumbing checks and repair;
AND,
d) even more rapid build-up of solar and wind electricity generation to replace the hydro power we will no longer get due to less rainfall and snowfall.

We may be already out of time and need all that NOW or within 6 months at least. Oops!! With what money? The State of California is already cutting services and adding taxes due to the current recession to keep from running out of money.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Virtually every other part of the world will have some similar problems supporting agriculture and providing water supplies soon if climate change begins to become this far along already.

2. The increase in sea level and shrinkage of the ice in Antarctica is beginning to occur faster than was originally predicted and the C02 to warm the world further and speed this up more is already in the world’s atmosphere.

But this one is potentially scarier. At some point huge chunks of ice will simply break off and drop into the sea. For very large chunks, that may produce tidal wave like effects. And this would speed the rise of sea levels around the world MUCH faster than now predicted. Such ice chunks will melt faster once that occurs as they will have more surface area exposed to the warmer temperatures.

For many islands and coastal areas that means that serious trouble may happen within 15 or 20 years; and there might be less warning than the people there now expect.

B. Some parts of our ability to add renewable energy are shrinking just as we need to increase it by over ten times instead.

Many alternative energy projects have been delayed or dropped due to:
the shrinkage in available credit; or from government support drying up due to the recession deleting the money the governments had allocated to support renewable energy; or from the sharp drop in oil prices making it harder to compete with oil now with the temporarily more expensive renewable energy sources.

I. Here’s some of the good news.:

A. The current severe recession is global and has resulted in dramatically reduced consumption of fossil fuels and has temporarily reduced our production of C02 by doing so.

Timewise that is actually a bit of a reprieve. We may have 5 to 10 years longer than we otherwise would have before we have to deal with more severe impacts from global warming. And, we might have that much more time to switch out of fossil fuels before global warming becomes impossible to reverse.

B. In the United States, Barack Obama won our election and became our President; & he and his administration have already made progress in moving our economy to use more renewable energy and become more energy efficient. (He may be premature in trying to increase the cost of using fossil fuels and removing their tax breaks while we are in a severe recession and do not yet have the renewable energy to replace them. But he will succeed in doing both to some degree I think. And, anything he does in those two areas, however small initially, will speed the development & use of energy sources other than fossil fuels.)

C. Businesses, entrepreneurs, and governments all over the world are developing innovations that will make renewable energy more available and cost less or help make our economy more energy efficient and able to do without fossil fuels.

Even better, they are beginning to put the best of what they already have to large scale use!! We are in a kind of a war where time is our enemy. And the successful generals in United States history, notably Patton & Grant, proved that attacking NOW with the best of what you have gets more results than trying to wait until conditions are perfect.

D. Germany has now proved that feed-in tariffs dramatically increase bringing renewable energy online without excessive government subsidy or economic disruption. And there is a good chance feed-in tariffs will soon be in use everywhere in the world. (See our post last week, on Wednesday, 2-25-2009.)

In summary, the global warming bad news is almost scarier than the news of the current recession. But the good news gives us ample reason to hope and ways to help speed up solutions.