By Shawn Dell Joyce
    The Times Herald-Record

    Sunday 18 March 2007

    What if I told you that we already have everything we need to resolve the crisis of global warming, except action? Would you believe me? How about believing two Princeton University economists?

    Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow announced in August 2004 that "humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problems for the next half-century."

    Pacala and Socolow have devised "The Princeton Wedge."

    Imagine a graph going up at a sharp angle. This is the graph of projected U.S. carbon emissions during the next half-century.

    We are now at 1.8 gigatons of carbon emissions per year, and headed toward 2.6 GtC in the next 45 years, if we keep the same energy-use patterns.

    Pacala and Socolow point out that we need to "drive a wedge" into that graph by stabilizing emissions, then reducing them by half (0.9 GtC) in less than 50 years. This will help us avoid some of the worst effects of climate change, like the increasing acidification of the world's oceans, the rising sea levels, and a 5-degree-or-higher rise in average global temperature.

    They pointed out that we need to stabilize our emissions first, and then reduce them over the next 50 years.

    Think of that reduction as seven small wedges on the graph representing 1 GtC each. The first wedge represents energy efficiency in our homes. As physicist Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, which is dedicated to the efficient and restorative use of resources, once said, "Saving energy is cheaper than buying it."

    This means making our homes more efficient by employing methods like using EnergyStar-certified products that use less energy, save money and help protect the environment. We can also use better insulation and compact, fluorescent light bulbs.

    The second wedge represents carbon saved by making our buildings greener.

    Our buildings produce 100 million metric tons of carbon more than our cars do, according to architect Edward Mazra, who founded www.architecture2030.com to lay out a plan to the building/designing community for building and renovating our buildings to be carbon neutral by 2030.

    Buildings consume 40 percent of the world's resources and produce 48 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions, according to Mazra.

    The third wedge is saving carbon by increasing vehicle fuel efficiency.

    We already have the technology to achieve 100 miles per gallon fuel efficiency, and eight manufacturers have prototypes tested that get better than 67 mpg.

    What's the holdup? "Policy" according to Lovins. "Oil wasted by rolling back car efficiency standards set in 1975 exactly equals the amount of oil the administration now hopes to be able to extract annually from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."

    The fourth wedge is improving our coal-burning efficiency.

    More than half of our electricity is derived from coal. Coal plants operate on average at about 32 percent efficiency - wasting, in one way or another, 68 percent of the energy they produce. They produce about 25 percent of all U.S. carbon emissions, according to Pacala and Socolow. If your furnace were operating as inefficiently as most coal-burning plants, you would replace it. It just makes sense to increase the fuel efficiency of coal-burning plants at least to the suggested 60 percent needed to stabilize emissions by 2050.

    The fifth wedge represents renewable energy sources like wind turbines, solar panels, hydropower, geothermal and biomass.

    Orange County will be hearing a lot about biomass in the near future as some of our farmers are looking at biofuels as a cash crop. Plans call for the county to be home to Taylor Biomass, which will convert bagged household waste into electricity, and Masada Oxynol, which will convert bagged garbage into cellulosic ethanol.

    The sixth and seventh wedges go together in what is called "carbon capture and sequestration."

    What this means is the carbon produced by burning coal would be trapped and piped underground to be stored in depleted oil reserves. That's the "capture."

    Trees naturally store carbon in their woody parts. This is "sequestration." The world's rain forests are responsible for sequestering an entire wedge (or 1 GtC). If we stopped clear-cutting the world's forests, we could save half a wedge. If we reforested some of the areas that have already been cleared, we could save another half-wedge.

    While this plan can reduce our emissions by 50 percent, writer Bill McKibben, whose 1989 book, "The End of Nature," sounded one of the earliest alarms about global warming, points out that it won't be enough to keep pace with the crisis.

    His "Step It Up" organization is calling on Congress to cap greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent over the next 50 years. That is only 2 percent per year.

    The United Kingdom announced plans last week to set a "legally binding" target to cut carbon emissions by 60 percent by 2050.

    Every one of you reading this right now has enough potential energy in your body to light up your hometown for a week!

    Let's put that energy in motion on April 14th, a national day of actions asking Congress to "Step It Up!"