Rachel's Democracy & Health News #930  [Printer-friendly version]
October 25, 2007

INDUSTRY'S PLAN FOR US

[Rachel's introduction: The fossil fuel corporations have a plan for
us, and it does not include any substantial investment in renewable
solar energy. Their plan is focused on "geo-engineering" -- which
means re-engineering the oceans, the atmosphere and the earth itself
to make it possible to continue burning fossil fuels. U.S. EPA is on
board with the plan.]

By Peter Montague

It now seems clear that the coal and oil industries are not going to
allow the United States to curb global warming by making major
investments in renewable sources of energy. These fossil fuel
corporations simply have too much at stake to allow it.

Simple physics tells us that the way to minimize the human
contribution to global warming is to leave the remaining fossil fuels
in the ground -- stop mining them as soon as humanly possible. This
obvious solution would require us to turn the nation's industrial
prowess to developing solar power in its many forms as quickly as we
can -- we would need a "'Manhattan Project' for Energy," as the
strategy journal of the top U.S. military planners said recently.

Look at the relative size of our current government investments in
solar vs. fossil fuels. In 2007 the federal Department of Energy spent
$168 million on solar research. On the other hand each year since
1991 the U.S. government has spent 1000 times that amount -- $169
billion -- subsidizing the flow of oil from the Middle East, according
to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, our top military planners. And that
figure doesn't include what consumers paid for the oil itself. If our
solar investment remains one-tenth of one percent of our investment in
oil, there will be no solar power to speak of in our future.

A rapid shift to renewables based on solar would not be easy and I
don't want to minimize the effort required. It's stupendously large.
But we've undertaken heroic industrial projects before -- and with
notable success. We mobilized quickly and massively to defeat the
combined industrial might of Germany, Japan, and Italy in less than
five years after Pearl Harbor. The original Manhattan Project turned
a physicist's theory into a working A-bomb in less than 6 years; just
building the gaseous diffusion plant near Oak Ridge, Tennessee was a
scientific, engineering and industrial feat of astonishing magnitude
and complexity. The Marshall Plan successfully rebuilt Europe after
WW II. Our Man-on-the-Moon program succeeded just 11 years after the
Russians tweaked our national ego by launching Sputnik into orbit in
1957.

Yes, a shift to solar-powered renewables would be difficult, but it's
doable. Unfortunately, any plan to shift from fossil fuels to solar
has three fatal flaws, from the viewpoint of Big Oil and Big Coal:

1. The fossil fuel corporations have an enormous investment in fossil
infrastructure and they own vast quantities of fossil fuels that they
plan to exploit with little real effort over the next 50 years. They
have been making excellent profits for a century and, as fossil fuels
get scarcer, prices will only rise. In 2006, ExxonMobil reaped profits
larger than any other corporation in history ($39.5 billion). If the
U.S. does not invest seriously in renewable alternatives, we'll have
no choice but to pay whatever price the fossil corporations demand.
Just a few days ago oil hit $90 a barrel; eight years ago it was
selling for $10 a barrel. No wonder ExxonMobil now has a book value
larger than the national budget of France. Naturally, they intend to
maintain their market share, even if it means doing everything in
their power to thwart progress.

2. The fossil fuel business is 100 years old and fully understood. No
surprises lie ahead. But renewables? Who knows which renewables will
win out in the marketplace of ideas? If Uncle Sam were to invest as
much money in solar power as it has so far invested in the Iraq war
(roughly $800 billion), who knows what new technologies would emerge?
(Incidentally, if we maintain our current solar research budget at
$168 million per year, it will be 4761 years before we have spent
as much on solar research as we have, so far, spent in Iraq.) New
technical innovations could be very unsettling for complacent
industries like coal and oil. For them, innovation spells trouble.
Innovation could render them irrelevant in a decade or two and they
could disappear just like the makers of whale-oil lamps and buggy
whips 100 years ago.

3. Coal and oil are highly centralized. It's their nature. Whoever
owns the fossil fuels, the big central power plants, and the
distribution systems can call the shots. But solar? The sun shines
everywhere and it's free. Suppose some woman at MIT develops a solar
panel that you paint onto your roof (from a can you buy at Home
Depot), attach some wires, and start generating your own electricity?
Central control disappears. This would be like tossing a hand grenade
into the current corporate/political structure. Of course even right-
wing politicians love lefty-sounding slogans like "power to the
people," but they don't mean real power like electricity or hot water
or home-made hydrogen for transportation fuel. (Check out the Nova TV
program, "Saved by the Sun," which briefly mentions paint-on solar
panels.)

No, a serious plan to focus the nation's industrial prowess onto a
solar-powered rebirth will not be allowed by the fossil corporations.
Instead we'll be offered a rolling circus of technical fixes aimed at
keeping coal and oil streaming out of the ground. The circus is
already well under way.

A Sulfur Parasol to Blot Out the Sun

Just this week the New York Times published a proposal to attach a
fire hose to some lighter-than-air balloons for the purpose of
injecting at least a million tons of sulfur particles into the upper
atmosphere, to create a giant parasol to cool the planet. Such a
scheme might further deplete the Earth's ozone shield, which remains
frayed from DuPont's earlier botched experiment with CFCs. And it
could create large-scale acid rain. But contemplating these clownish
Rube Goldberg solutions may at least relieve the stress of facing what
really needs to be done.

A new word enters our vocabulary: Geo-engineering

Instead of allowing the U.S. to make the transition to solar power,
the fossil corporations have evidently decided it's better to
re-engineer the oceans and the atmosphere -- and perhaps even the
planetary orbit of the Earth itself -- to make it possible to continue
burning fossil fuels for another 50 years.

Grand schemes for re-engineering the planet now have their own special
name -- geo-engineering. The word means, "global-scale interventions
to alter the oceans and the atmosphere so fossil corporations can
continue business as usual."

The fire-hose-and-balloon project is only one of many "geo-
engineering" schemes in the works.

Fertilizing the Oceans with Iron

There are serious plans afoot to dump huge quantities of soluble iron
into the oceans as fertilizer, intending to stimulate the growth of
plankton, which will then eat carbon dioxide from the air. As the
plankton die, their carcasses will sink to the bottom of the ocean,
carrying all that carbon dioxide with them, where it will remain
for... for... well, actually, nobody knows for how long. How long
might it be before that dormant carbon dioxide comes back to bite us?
Nobody knows. Would such a plan disrupt life in the oceans? Nobody
knows. But private firms are pressing ahead with large-scale ocean-
fertilization experiments as we speak. (They are hoping to get rich
selling "carbon credits" to polluters so the fossil corporations can
continue contaminating the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. We might
well ask the ethical question, who gave these cowboys permission to
run geo-engineering experiments in the world's oceans?)

This is all very reminiscent of earlier plans to bury nuclear waste
in the floor of the Pacific Ocean, on the theory that the seabed has
lain dormant for many millions of years. But that plan never caught on
because few people could develop sufficient confidence that the future
would unfold exactly like the past. There was that nagging doubt...
what if we've missed something important and we turn out to be wrong?
What if our understanding is flawed? There was too much at stake, and
the plan was shelved. (With carbon dioxide, of course, there's far
more at stake.)

Mirrors in Orbit

Now there's a new plan to rocket mirrors into orbit around the
earth. Another parasol to block sunlight. The mirrors would consist of
a mesh of aluminum threads a millionth of an inch in diameter, "like a
window screen made of exceedingly fine metal wire," says Lowell Wood
at Lawrence Livermore Lab, who dreamed up the idea. The only drawback
to this plan mentioned so far is its enormous dollar cost: to reduce
incoming sunlight by 1% would require -- get this -- 600,000 square
miles of mirror, which is larger than the combined areas of Arkansas,
Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia,
Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Maine, South Carolina, West Virginia,
Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Jersey,
Delaware and Rhode Island.

Of course the U.S. has a long history of large-scale interventions
above the clouds. In 1962 we conducted an experiment called "Starfish
Prime" in which we exploded a small nuclear weapon (equivalent to 1.4
million tons of TNT) 400 miles up in the atmosphere, just to see what
would happen. What happened came as a complete surprise to the
geniuses who set off the blast. The explosion left so much residual
radiation trapped in space that the world's first communication
satellite -- Telstar, which was launched after Starfish -- failed
because it encountered crippling levels of radiation. Ultimately, one-
third of all the low-orbit satellites in space at the time were
disabled by the residual radiation from Starfish Prime. Another
unanticipated cost of Starfish was the temporary shutdown of
communications and electrical supply in Hawaii, 1300 kilometers from
the blast. Who knew?

Project RBR

Despite lessons supposedly learned from Starfish, just last year the
Pentagon proposed a project called RBR ("Radiation Belt
Remediation"). The RBR project would generate "very low frequency
radio waves to flush particles from the [Van Allen] radiation belts
and dump them into the upper atmosphere over one or several days."
(There are two Van Allen radiation belts; the one closest to earth
lies 400 to 4000 miles in the sky.) The stated purpose of the RBR
project is to "protect hundreds of low earth-orbiting satellites from
having their onboard electronics ruined by charged particles in
unusually intense Van Allen radiation belts 'pumped up' by high-
altitude nuclear explosions or powerful solar storms." It seems the
Pentagon is making plans for conducting nuclear warfare above the
clouds. But I digress.

Luckily a small group of scientists from Britain, New Zealand and
Finland (organized as the "British Antarctic Survey") caught wind of
the RBR plan and actually gave it some thought. They concluded that
RBR would "significantly alter the upper atmosphere, seriously
disrupting high frequency (HF) radio wave transmissions and GPS
navigation around the world." The world's commercial (and military)
transport systems are now almost completely dependent upon GPS
navigation, so disrupting the global GPS system would create economic
chaos, not to mention loss of life. Who knew?

A Plan to Change the Earth's Orbit

As pressure builds on the fossil corporations to quit contaminating
the atmosphere with CO2, plans for geo-engineering the planet grow
ever-more grandiose and desperate. There is now talk of moving the
Earth 1.5 million miles out of its orbit around the sun, to compensate
for doubling carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Ken Caldeira of
Stanford University has calculated that moving the Earth in this
fashion would require the energy of five thousand million million
hydrogen bombs (that's 5,000,000,000,000,000 hydrogen bombs). No doubt
the Pentagon is studying it with considerable interest.

The Biggest Geo-engineering Project: Carbon Sequestration

Now, the biggest earth-based geo-engineering project of all is in the
late stages of development by the coal and oil industries, and is
about to be "regulated" by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA). This is the plan that convinces me that the fossil
corporations have no intention of allowing the U.S. to make a rapid
transition to solar power. This Big Fossil plan is called CCS,
short for "carbon capture and sequestration" and it, too, closely
resembles dozens of previous unsuccessful attempts to figure out what
to do with radioactive waste.

Carbon sequestration is a fancy name for what used to be called the
"kitty litter solution" to radioactive waste: bury it in the ground
and hope it stays there. Carbon sequestration is a plan to capture
gaseous carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants (and perhaps from
other industrial operations as well), turn it into a liquid, and pump
it into the deep earth or perhaps into the ocean, where it will
remain for an unknown period of time. Professional optimists employed
by the fossil industries claim the unknown period of time is
"forever." But how can they be sure?

Saving the Coal Industry

The future of the coal industry, in particular, is at stake. Without
carbon sequestration, the coal industry will not survive. Just this
month the state of Kansas refused to license the construction of a new
coal-fired power plant simply because of its carbon dioxide
emissions. This is the first time a coal plant has been turned down
merely because of its contribution to global warming. The hand writing
is on the wall: Big Coal is doomed unless they can find some way to
demonstrate that "clean coal" is more than an advertising slogan. This
is what carbon sequestration geo-engineers are being paid to do.

Saving the Oil Industry (and the Automobile Industry)

But there's more at stake than just the coal industry. The oil
industry, too, is depending on "carbon sequestration" to convince the
public that continuing to burn fossil fuels is safe. Even the car
companies have recognized that their future depends upon convincing us
all that carbon sequestration will work -- and work forever.

We know this is really, really important to the fossil corporations
because some of the biggest names in global industry are underwriting
"geo-engineering" solutions for the carbon dioxide problem at some of
the most prestigious U.S. universities. The Center for Energy &
Environmental Studies at Princeton University is conducting geo-
engineering studies (1.4 Mbyte PDF) funded by BP (the felonious
oil corporation formerly known as British Petroleum) and by Ford
Motor, the troubled manufacturer of SUVs. Geo-engineering work at
Stanford University is being supported by ExxonMobil, by General
Electric, by Schlumberger (the oil-drilling services giant), and by
Toyota.

To convince the U.S. environmental community that geo-engineering
carbon dioxide is the only way to go, the Stanford geo-engineering
group has linked up with NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council).
Together, they are publishing clever propaganda masquerading as
science. For example, in a recent letter to California legislators
they say, "We only wish to address the science of CCS [carbon capture
and sequestration] here." So we are expecting a scientific argument.
Instead, the letter tries to persuade legislators to support carbon
sequestration using arguments that have nothing to do with science.

The letter is peppered with distinctly unscientific language like
"perfectly safe" to describe the fossil corporations' favorite geo-
engineering solution. "Perfectly safe" is not a scientific concept. It
is a political concept.

To be fair, deep in their letter NRDC and friends add a few caveats to
their "perfectly safe" claim. For example, they say, "Leakage is
conceivable but it is unlikely in well-selected sites, is generally
avoidable, predictable, can be detected and remedied promptly, and in
any case is extremely unlikely to be of a magnitude to endanger human
health and the environment if performed under adequate regulatory
oversight and according to best practices." [Emphasis in the
original.]

So carbon sequestration will be "perfectly safe" if it occurs
at "well-selected sites" and if performed under adequate
regulatory oversight and according to best practices."

Let's examine these caveats. Are these scientific concepts? Do they
even refer to anything in the real world?

Human History: Selecting Sites for Dangerous Projects

What experience do humans have siting dangerous facilities at only
"well-selected sites"? I am thinking of the atomic reactor in Japan
sited near an earthquake fault and recently shut down by serious
earthquake damage. I am thinking of the U.S. radioactive waste site
proposed for Yucca Mountain in Nevada where government and private
engineers felt the need to falsify data to make the site appear
acceptable. How do NRDC and Stanford propose to avoid a repeat of
these fiascos when it comes time to select dozens or hundreds (perhaps
thousands) of sites for pumping carbon dioxide into the ground?

Human history: Best practices with Dangerous Technologies

And that about "best practices"? Does this phrase take into account
actual human experience with power plant operators photographed
asleep in the control room of nuclear reactors? Or young men deep in
missile silos relieving their boredom by getting drunk or taking
drugs while standing ready to launch intercontinental ballistic
missiles armed with hydrogen warheads?

Will Every Nation Abide by the NRDC/Stanford Prescription?

After the U.S. begins injecting billions of tons of liquid carbon
dioxide into the earth, won't China, India and other countries do the
same? If they do, can they be counted on to choose only "well-selected
sites" and to follow only "best practices" for the next hundred years?
Who will oversee carbon sequestration in Nigeria or Uzbekistan?

How do NRDC and Stanford imagine that standards for site selection and
"best practices" will be enforced around the globe? Have NRDC and
Stanford published solutions to these problems? Or are they just
putting empty words on paper hoping to fool clueless legislators into
adopting untestable technical solutions that the fossil corporations
are paying them to promote?

But the most dubious part of the NRDC plan to geo-engineer carbon
sequestration is their claim that is will be "perfectly safe" if
performed with "adequate regulatory oversight." Can NRDC and their
friends at Stanford point to any instances of large-scale industrial
enterprises that currently have "adequate regulatory oversight?"

Everyone knows that regulators quickly get captured by the industries
they are supposed to regulate. There is a substantial body of social
science literature on this point. Regulators are poorly paid, but if
they look the other way at regulatory violations, they may find a
lucrative job awaiting them when they retire from government. Less
sinister but more pervasive is the simple fact that regulated
corporations spend a lot of time befriending regulators, dropping by
to say hello, asking about the kids, gaining their trust and
ultimately their allegiance. Are NRDC and Stanford prepared to deny
this indisputable history of regulatory collapse? Have they examined
the dismal record of the Food and Drug Administration, the Consumer
Product Safety Commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the
Securities and Exchange Commission, and the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency? Are they prepared to design and describe regulatory
institutions that do not suffer from these same fundamental human
flaws? Or are they just blowing smoke?

So let's examine these caveats just a bit more.

1. What actual experience to do humans have designing anything to be
kept out of the environment forever? Answer: None. Absolutely
none. In this context, then, what can "perfectly safe" possibly mean?

2. What human regulatory institutions can NRDC and friends point to
that have proven adequate? Let's see. The regulatory system for
preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons? Today, 40 years after
the inception of the non-proliferation treaty, Israel, India, North
Korea, Pakistan -- all have The Bomb despite heroic efforts to prevent
its spread. The only reason Iraq and Syria don't have a nuclear weapon
is because Israel bombed their nascent nuclear power plants to
smithereens.

What about the regulatory system for controlling the discard of
radioactive waste? Radioactive waste is loose at thousands of
locations around the planet. In hundreds (perhaps thousands) of
instances we do not even know where the stuff has been dumped. This
technology was developed by the smartest people in the world with
unlimited budgets -- yet at places like the gold-plated Los Alamos
Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico (now renamed the Los Alamos
National Laboratory), plutonium, americium-241, strontium-90 and other
supremely dangerous radioactive elements were buried in shallow pits,
or simply dumped into mountain canyons without any records kept of
their whereabouts. The kitty litter solution. And this was a federal
scientific laboratory under strict military surveillance and control
at the time. Can we expect the fossil corporations under the watchful
eye of EPA (wink, wink) to do better?

How about the regulatory system for curtailing the widespread
destruction of wildlife and human health from hormone-disrupting,
cancer-causing chlorinated chemicals? The arctic, which has no
industrial enterprises to speak of, is among the most heavily
contaminated places on earth because the chemical regulatory system
failed to consider how chemicals migrate once they are released into
the environment.

So where can we find real-world examples of this "adequate regulatory
oversight" that NRDC and Stanford say will be necessary to make carbon
sequestration "perfectly safe"?

Maintaining vigilance for hundreds or thousands of years?

Elsewhere in their letter, NRDC and the engineers from Stanford say
they believe carbon sequestration can be maintained for millions of
years, but they say, if something goes wrong, rapid response will be
possible.

Is this really true?

Again, let's return to the debates over radioactive waste from the
late 1970s. Back then scientists were a bit more candid: they admitted
they knew of no way to pass information reliably to future generations
describing the location of radioactive waste dumps. Given human
history and the evanescence of human institutions, they could not
imagine a way to reliably warn future generations about dangers buried
in the earth. At one point they considered writing a huge warning
across the face of the moon using graphic symbols because they had no
idea which human languages would survive thousands of years into the
future. Have NRDC and Stanford published their solution for this
problem?

Why should we assume that humans a hundred years from now -- let alone
500 or 5000 years from now -- will be able to monitor for carbon
dioxide leaks, locate them, and take rapid action to control them? The
prudent assumption would be that humans will NOT have those
capabilities. It seems to me it would be unethical to design our
technologies based on untested and untestable (and wildly optimistic)
assumptions about future humans and their social organizations. Who
gave us the right to make decisions now based on assumptions, which,
if they are wrong, could destroy the planet as a place suitable for
human habitation -- which is precisely what the carbon sequestration
researchers are intending to do.

With the future of the human species at stake, isn't a little humility
in order? Will these geniuses find themselves staring into the mirror
one day toward the end of their shameful careers muttering, "Who
knew?"

But ordinary people who aren't subsidized by energy or automobile
corporations are asking the same sorts of common-sense questions they
asked 20 years ago when the same sorts of brainy university types were
telling us it was "perfectly safe" to bury radioactive waste in the
ground:

** What if these scientists and engineers turn out to be wrong?

** What if there's something important they haven't thought of?

** Are these people infallible or are they human? They can't be both.

** Isn't it unethical to claim that something will be "perfectly safe"
when as a scientist you know you can't be perfectly sure?

** When the fossil corporations impose their plan on us and begin
large-scale carbon sequestration, won't that become a powerful
incentive to reduce federal funding for conservation, renewables, and
solar power? Then won't we have all our eggs in one basket? And didn't
our grandmothers tell us that was a bad idea?

** After the fossil corporations impose carbon sequestration on us,
won't we be saddled with even more killer fly ash choking the air, and
even more toxic bottom ash threatening groundwater supplies? Won't we
have even more destruction from mountain-top-removal coal mining, plus
the enormous waste of water and land in the mid-western and western
coal states? "Clean" coal will still be one of the dirtiest and most
destructive forms of energy. And oil will still keep dragging us into
endless bloody resource wars because we will still need to funnel more
and more of the world's remaining petroleum into our astonishingly
wasteful and inefficient enterprises. Is this really the direction we
want to be going? Is this a plan we can explain to our children with
pride? Is this a plan that will give our children hope?

** Would carbon sequestration truly be reversible if we discovered far
in the future that it was a mistake? If not, who can claim that it is
ethical to proceed?

** If radioactive waste and carbon dioxide are so dangerous and so
hard to manage, how does it make sense to steer the nation and the
world onto a course that will guarantee continued production of these
lethal substances far into the future?

** With the survival of humans at stake, isn't this a classic and
urgent case for applying the precautionary principle?