You read a lot about sustainable growth and green energy these days, and you're going to read a lot more about it in the near future. The problem with this idea is that it's very much a case of too little, too late. We have only a few years in which to act and we should have started a generation ago.
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| "Be realistic - demand the impossible" |
With this in mind, here are some of what I feel are more realistic ideas for eco-policies. Not remotely economically or politically realistic of course, just realistic in terms of, you know, physical and biological reality.
Bear in mind that this is just to start with and that these are quite vague ideas designed to give a sense of scale and scope. This is not a detailed policy position paper, it doesn't give the colour of the stamps in ration books or the type of in-passport microchip used to track carbon use. All I can say for sure is that the measures would probably have to get a lot tougher as time went on - for instance, in the medium to long term it might just be better to ban flying
entirely as you can travel just as effectively by ship or train if you really want to be there, and most everyday business / diplomatic matters can always be resolved by teleconference.
* Cars would be allowed in theory, but minimum fuel price should be around UK£13 / US$20 litre. Fuel taxes generally should be on the order of 2,000%. (current UK fuel taxes, which are considered very high, are somewhere roughly in the region of 100%)
* To replace cars, two and four-seater pedal/electric velomobiles could be built. To encourage adoption I'd give generous tax breaks to builders, maybe start a state-owned company or two myself, and the speed limit would be dropped to 40MPH on multiple lane motorways, 30MPH on single lane rural roads, and 20mph on urban roads. Limit enforced by speed governors built into all vehicles and enforced by yearly MOT. Tampering with governor / speeding would be severely criminalized.
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| If I got my way, you'd all be pedalling around in these! |
* Air travel ration: You are allotted something like 22,000 air miles (or equivalent to a there-and-back antipodean flight - "once around the Earth"). You can sell all or some of them on the open market or you can use them. If you sell them you have no money problems for a long time - which would solve a lot of poverty-related problems.
This would allow you to fly at most from the UK to Australia and back once, OR London to New York and back twice, OR UK to the Balearic Islands (a popular holiday destination) and back 13 times. For an American that would translate into 4 flights between New York and Los Angeles. Ever. Unless you paid something like half a million dollars for someone else's air miles.
* Internal flights in physically small countries (smaller than, say, Germany) or flights shorter than 500 miles are BANNED (ie, London-Edinburgh). They'd be substituted by rail travel with sleeper carriages where needed - fuel duty could be possibly waived in the case of public transport to encourage adoption, though electrification should be the long term goal.
* The most environmentally efficient forms of power are wind and CSP (Concentrated Solar Power). Existing PV (photovoltaic) should still be subsidized, but a questionmark put on further adoption as PV cells are quite polluting in the long run. To keep the lights on, transcontinental-scale power grids need to be installed alongside massive CSP plants in desert regions and wind farms at sea - though storms may make wind farms a bad idea in the long run, desert CSP plants should work out... as long as we can keep terrorists from blowing them up.
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| Let's get all our energy from deserts, he said. What could possibly go wrong? |
* Even with all this work, there's a very good chance we might not make it. Civilisations do sort of collapse from time to time, and environmental disasters are top contributors. As a civilisation at risk, we have to make sure that the crap we've already manufactured is kept somewhere safe while we're out pillaging and doing the whole Mad Max Dark Ages thing, or we'll be screwed no matter what we do. Additionally, there are still clowns out there who think that nuclear power is the only way to deal with climate change.
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| Seems legit. |
Now while it may or may not be carbon-neutral - and remember, uranium doesn't come out of the ground in nice clean pellets - there is no long term storage for the waste.
The closest thing we have to a solution to this is throwing used fuel rods into boreholes a few miles deep - and if you go a bit deeper, the earth is already quite radioactive and so hot that it turns into taffy which swallows up just about anything you care to put into it. Upshot is - put your nuclear crap and PCBs and whatnot several miles underground or so and you ain't gonna see it again. The only problem is, imagine all the cost of drilling for oil, only even deeper - and not even getting any oil at the end of it!
So there you have it - the actual cost of really building a green economy and retaining anything like our current lifestyles - a WWII sized effort that would turn everything upside down and change our lives forever. Velomobiles, restrictions on air travel, a new wave of energy colonialism (That ended well last time!), and billion-dollar holes in the ground - and that's just for starters!
I haven't even mentioned making people use the same phones and computers for 10-20 years at a time, or power rationing, or that we'd need to nationalise whole swathes of industry just to make the required amount of economic planning possible, or the teeth that already unpopular supranational bodies would need to enforce such measures... oh and did I mention that I agree that certain current and former oil executives should be arrested and charged with crimes against humanity?
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| At last! (I jest- seeing Dick Cheney behind bars might be funny, but he's relatively small fry. Most people have never even heard of the worst ones) |
Of course, if you asked an economist, a politician, or the average voter about any of these ideas, they'd laugh in your face - nobody would vote for it and nobody would pay for it. (Not even the Dick Cheney bit? C'mon... -Ed)
This is why none of these are remotely politically or economically feasible, even less so in the current climate of nationalism and extreme capitalism. Ask a climate scientist however, and they'd probably tell you that these very modest ideas don't go remotely far enough. Still, you gotta start somewhere, and putting a few solar panels on the roof and treating yourself to a new Prius just isn't going to cut it.
As a wise man once said, if you refuse to make your way of life negotiable, you get a new negotiating partner - reality. At some point we will be forced to do all of the above and more - AND some really grim stuff like a one-child policy, a ban on all but minimal animal farming, etc, etc, etc.
The real question however, is even more simple. Do we want to survive or not? Because if pollution's got so bad it can kill something as big as a whale, what do you think it's gonna do to you?
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| The Inuit are doubly screwed. |
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