(Editors note: Read part one and two and four) I must admit, my friends, that at this point I do not have a handle on a compelling moral argument for what must be done to ameliorate our environment and how to do it justly. I know what I’d like to see done, and I know that at present very few would agree with me and willingly pick up the banner to march forward. Here is the problem in a nutshell, and it is the 2000 pound elephant standing in the room that few will acknowledge. Any effective and just solution to global warming necessitates an indefinite period of severe austerity within developed nations, and a substantial transfer of wealth to developing nations to put them on the path toward sustainable economies. We do not hear any call for austerity in the US, even among the most ardent supporters of global warming intitiatives, and the call is faint in Europe. All we hear from Gore et. al. is the word “opportunity”. Is there any argument that can convince the rich of this world to give up a large measure of the comforts they derive from their disproportionate consumption that they will do so willingly?

What I hear and read in the media is the acknowledgment of the elephant by indirection. It is in the constantly reiterated foolish insistence that technology will come to the rescue. This inanity reached new lows recently when Sir Richard Branson, with Al Gore standing beside him, announced a $25 million prize for a process that will remove carbon from the atmosphere “in an economically viable way”. Anyone with a smattering of thermodynamics would know that this is nonsense. The entropy of mixing CO2 emissions with the other atmospheric constituents (it can be calculated from Gibbs equation of mixing) is so large that it would take, at the minimum just to reverse the entropy increase, the energy equivalent of 1/4 of the annual output of electricity in the US to remove one billion tons of CO2. There are currently 2.92 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere of which it would be desirable to remove about 1 trillion tons.

Continue reading American Exceptionalism And Global Warming (Part 3) →