Attached is a letter written to Brendan I. Koerner, Wired editor and Slate's environmental answer man known as the Green Lantern. If you haven't read any of these columns they're a great source of information about the true environmental impacts of various choices, and are written without the hysterical or overly self-impressed manner of which some environmental writing is guilty. You can find them all by this link or searching for lantern in the Slate main page.
Bear in mind that this is in fact an email which was written in one sitting with very little editing, and so may have major errors or omissions or places where I make no sense at all. Which you may or may not find different from regular articles. In any case, it was too long to just sit in my sent items folder so, lucky readers, here it is. Interesting also to note that I have been ranting to anyone who would listen about plug-in hybrids since at least 2004 and promised an article on plug-in hybrids in January of 2007 but this is the first time any thing substantive has appeared about them in this space. I still plan to put together a slightly more indepth article.
Dear Lantern,
First, I wanted to thank you for writing an excellent column. I consider myself a moderate environmentalist, in that I try to make informed and intelligent choices about my own consumption and purchases, without resorting to Ed Begley Jr-type excesses that require complete rearrangements of lifestyle. But making these choices certainly are becoming more complex, and having someone taking the time to do a thorough and intelligent investigation of the actual cradle to grave impacts of energy usage and emissions is an invaluable service.
One topic I've heard you mention wanting to tackle in the future is that of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. When I first started hearing about this my gut instinct was that this was being used primarily as a distraction by the auto companies to avoid having to actually make progress on hybrids which were just being produced. It seemed like a pattern in which automakers always chose a technology 5-10 years on the horizon as the "next big thing" so they could avoid improving fuel economy today. Further research has not changed my (admittedly somewhat biased) opinion.
Part of the problem I've found in research is finding researchers without fairly obvious agendas. Here are three interesting papers I've found discussing the issues, all of which make important basic scientific points, but the first is written by someone who claims that there IS NO energy solution and the world population will experience a Malthusian collapse to 1 billion no matter what we do. A second I read was quite old and came from an advocacy group against nuclear power (and didn't make many points that the first didn't). A third is quite technical but seems balanced and well-researched, though at this point I wouldn't be *too* surprised to find out that the author advocates murder of puppies somewhere in there.
Many of the articles on the other side seem to be highly dependent on the false argument that there was no gasoline infrastructure until we built it, which self-evidently ignores not only the specialized challenges that face hydrogen as a fuel source, but the fact that the gasoline economy had the good fortune of decades to be built. Much of the arguments on the pro-hydrogen side seem to come from an offshoot of "We're Americans, dammit, and we can figure anything out!"
While I personally find some truth in the libertarian argument that there are no resources but human resources (that is, that any resource shortage can be solved through ingenuity and creating new solutions), this doesn't imply that we can create any solution that we want. Which is to say, we could spend billions of dollars investing in a salmon economy, using wild Alaskan king salmon to fuel our automobiles, and no amount of human ingenuity would make it a good idea. Part of the ingenuity required is in finding the *right* solution and not wasting resources on the wrong one.
In any case, my personal bias is this: Hydrogen would have to be a pretty spectacular fuel source to supplant that which already exists: Electric and Hybrid-Electric Cars. This technology is not only already mature enough to be useful today, the infrastructure is already in place (in the form of nationwide transmission lines). Its true that electricity today is highly dependent upon coal, but tying cars to the grid allows us to double our money on improving emissions. As we improve our power grid emissions, cars come with it. The only investment in new production for the infrastructure is metered individual charging stations tying into power lines and/or replacement battery systems (for pure electrics), and the existing fuel network for hybrids which can be increasingly supplemented with biofuels or other fuels capable of electricity generation in a small package. (Yes, I know how dirty a name biofuels have gotten, as detailed in your slate colleague Christopher Flavelle's article: . However, the use of plug-in hybrids would undeniably reduce total consumption of fuels for transportation, and a responsible (no food-based) program of biomass and oil derivative recycling might be able to have a major impact on this new lower-volume of demand.) All of this technology exists and is ready to go today, and with electricity being as ubiquitous as it is, is available to a wide range of people.
(Speaking of which, I noticed in your recent chat you mentioned home solar generation for powering electric cars. Tesla Motors is teamed with Solar City for something like this. Doesn't really look especially cost effective at this point, but definitely seems feasible at least. Here's an article: )
Anyway, I look forward to your article on hydrogen, even if your findings don't confirm my biases. I've really enjoyed your work so far, and will continue to await the latest articles.
KT
Note: I think I'll crosspost this letter to my blog (http://ktismael.com/mt/ ) as it was just supposed to be a quick email and has since turned into a full-length article (albeit poorly written, not properly researched, and with poor explanations, but hey, its a blog, so that's OK). Fair warning, I may prepare another one of these before long on another pet environmental obsession of mine "On the grid Solar". But that won't be today, as I do actually have a day job, despite the ridiculous length of this email, which I suspect you're < 50% likely to have read this far into.
It's possible that we may soon see a shift in the national "discussion" regarding environmental policy. In the past, it has been nothing more than two armed camps of secular religious extremists talking past each other in our usual Kabuki show that poses as debate in this country (camp 1: people who have abdicated reality for the belief that nature = good and humans = evil/stupid, camp 2: people who have abdicated reality for the belief that we live in a free market society and any result the "free market" produces must be optimal).
Not too long ago, I finished Jared Diamond's outstanding book, "Collapse" that detailed how human societies are dependent on their environments to sustain themselves. The first half of the book gave well researched historical examples of societal collapse (usually ending in cannibalism), and listed compelling theories as to the seemingly rational and irrational choices the people of those societies made to bring about their collapse. The second half of the book detailed how these lessons apply today.
Anyone who's read Diamond's most famous work, "Guns, Germs, and Steel," knows that his writings are transformative. That is, you cannot read a Diamond book and not have you view of the world, history, and the way that people interact with their environment altered, or at least firmly cemented. F**king brilliant would not be an exaggeration.
I would like to see us move to a place where we see environmentalism less as a jobs versus spotted owls proposition, but as the struggle for the survival of our society. If we do not reach a sustainable lifestyle (or at least a radically less unsustainable lifestyle), our species will, in all likelihood survive, but our global society will collapse and our successors will suffer horribly (hell, perhaps our selves will suffer depending on our rate of environmental consumption). "Collapse" punctures the notion that human development has been one long chain of improving life in increasing population through technological advances by pointing out that no, there have been failures too. It is not guaranteed that the next advance will be adequate enough and come in time to support our lifestyles. It's going to take something more than faith in markets and innovation to save us, starting with some actual dialog.
Posted by: S.W. at July 30, 2008 10:33 AMI agree pretty much entirely with your comments here. I do believe that human ingenuity is capable of solving most any problem, but as stated, that requires actually engaging in solving it, rather than sitting around waiting for the problem to be solved.
One of the first times I recall really thinking about sustainability was in a class I had with John Flynn the great English professor at MTU. The quick takeaway from his talk: part of the life we consider normal in modern society involves everyone having breakfast with juice squeezed from a tropical fruit, no matter where they live or how much fuel is consumed transporting it. Though I am in the transportation business, this kind of lifestyle truly doesn't seem sustainable, but its the sort of thing that we as a society think about very rarely. And we'd better be prepared to start as oil prices climb higher and higher.
Diamond has been on my list for years, but I haven't made it there yet. However, since I love books that completely rearrange my outlook, I'll have to add him in soon. It actually makes me think somewhat also of the other book you're having me read, "Red Mars" and the discussion of how major advances in life-extension affect not only ecology, but also people's thinking about it. It does make you wonder if our medicine continues advancing if it will cause people to think more responsibly about their role in the planet.
An ancillary idea that's been bouncing around my head, of which your comment reminds me: The environmental movement is splintering and its fascinating and amusing to watch. For a long time it was this monolithic block, but as our understanding has improved and new technologies have appeared, battle lines are increasingly being drawn in interesting places.
For instance, Green has long meant being against GMO, which I would contend is horribly backward philosophical place to pin yourself, since few things have done more to relieve human suffering in the most powerful and obvious ways than GMO crops, as they (through Norman Borlaug) have likely saved over 1 billion (with a b) people from starvation. However, now Peta has introduced the lab-grown meat challenge, piling onboard the ship hoping that science can provide a reasonable answer to their problems. In similar ways, those concerned about global warming should be dead-set against organic farming as it takes far more resources to produce than more typical methods.
All this is surely a good thing, as it indicates a bit of a "growing up" of the movement past the bumper stickers and back to actual positions and dialogue. It also brings to mind a talk I heard recently by Thomas Lovejoy (conservation biologist who may be the first to work with the concept of biological diversity). In dismissing the use of non-native trees with high growth rates as a carbon sink strategy he said, "Valuing Trees only for their carbon is like valuing computer chips only for their silicon." This, to me, gets it exactly backwards. For one, silicon isn't supposed to be bringing about the end of life on the planet. A better example might be "is like valuing Guinness for its water." You *know* how much I value Guinness, but if my kitchen is on fire and I've a pint in my hand, then sorry, Arth but its getting dumped. I agree with him about premise however, I don't think we shoud just randomly plant high growth trees anywhere we can fit them for carbon sequestration, but this is precisely the problem with the "Chicken Little" position that the environmental movement has taken in the past 20 years. When you tell me that life is ending and we're all going to die if we don't do something drastic *right now*, you don't get to complain that my solution isn't elegant enough. And so we have all these half-baked bullshit solutions like hydrogen cars, and carbon sinks, and pouring lime into the ocean, instead of having an intelligent discussion to create a coherent energy policy like we should have 10 years ago.
Posted by: ish at July 30, 2008 12:22 PM