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Building a Sustainable Future Is Not a Luxury

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

With the advent of a global financial crisis that may soon rival the Great Depression, I read a disturbing volley of reports asserting (with an ironic play on words) that global warming is now on the 'back burner.' Can we 'afford' such a 'luxury,' the reports ask -- as if planning for a survivable future is a frill.

Building a sustainable future is not a luxury. The bad news is that we have no real choice but to build it. The really good news, however, is that creating a new energy infrastructure, done correctly, can function as an economic motor that will power our communities -- and our world -- out of a morass created by unchecked, shortsighted greed.

Just as our financial system needs to be reconstructed from its dangerous dependence on a surplus of borrowed money, so, as well, our energy system must be re-cast from a fossil-fuel base that is living on borrowed environmental time.

In one hundred years, students of history may remark at the nature of the fears that stalled responses to climate change early in the twenty-first century. Skeptics of global warming kept change at bay, it may be noted, by appealing to most people's fear that change might erode their comfort and employment security -- all of which were wedded psychologically to the massive burning of fossil fuels. A necessary change in our energy base, they may conclude, may have been stalled beyond the point where climate change required attention, comprehension and action.

Technological change always generates unemployment fears. Paradoxically, such changes also always generate economic activity. A change in our basic energy paradigm during the twenty-first century will not cause the ruination of our economic base (as some 'skeptics' of climate change believe) any more than the coming of the railroads in the nineteenth century ruined an economy in which the horse was the major land-based vehicle of transportation. The advent of mass automobile ownership early in the twentieth century propelled economic growth, as did the transformation of informationgathering with computers in the recent past. The same developments also put out of work blacksmiths, keepers of hand-drawn accounting ledgers and anyone who repaired manual typesetters.

An Energy Revolution Is Overdue

We are overdue for an energy system paradigm shift. Limited supplies of oil and their location in the volatile Middle East argue for new sources, along with accelerating climate change from greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. Over four years ago, Business Week argued in an August 16, 2004 editorial: "A national policy that cuts fossil-fuel consumption converges with a geopolitical policy of reducing energy dependence on Middle East oil. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions is no longer just a 'green' thing. It makes business and foreign policy sense, as well... In the end, the only real solution may be new energy technologies. There has been little innovation in energy since the internal combustion engine was invented in the 1860s and Thomas Edison built his first commercial electric generating plant in 1882."

Before the end of this century, the urgency of global warming will become manifest to everyone. Solutions to our fossil fuel-dilemma -- solar, wind, hydrogen and others -- will evolve during this century. Within our century, necessity will compel invention. Other technologies may develop that have not, as yet, even broached the realm of present-day science fiction, any more than digitized computers had in the days of the Wright Brothers a hundred years ago. We will take this journey because the changing climate, along with our own innate curiosity and creativity, will compel a changing energy paradigm.

Such change will not take place at once. A paradigm change in basic energy technology may require the better part of a century, or longer. Several technologies will evolve together. Oil-based fuels will continue to be used for purposes that require it. (Air transport comes to mind, although engineers already are working on ways to make jet engines more efficient.)

A Wide Variety of Solutions

A wide variety of solutions are being pursued around the world, of which the following are only a few examples. Some changes involve localities. Already, several U.S. states are taking actions to limit carbon-dioxide emissions despite a lack of support from the federal government. Building code changes have been enacted. Windpower incentives have been enacted even in Bush's home state of Texas, where some oil fields now host wind turbines.

Wind turbines and photovoltaic solar cells are becoming more efficient and competitive. Improvements in farming technology are reducing emissions. Deep-sea sequestration of CO2 is proceeding in experimental form, but with concerns about this technology's effects on ocean biota. Tokyo, where an intense urban heat island has intensified the effects of general warming, has proposed a gigantic ocean-water cooling grid. Britain and other countries are considering carbon taxes.

The coming energy revolution will engender economic growth and become an engine of wealth creation for those who realize the opportunities that it offers. Denmark, for example, is making every family a share-owner in a burgeoning wind-power industry. Solutions will combine scientific achievement and political change. We will end this century with a new energy system, one that acknowledges nature and works with its needs and cycles. Economic development will become congruent with the requirements of sustaining nature. Coming generations will be able to mitigate the effects of greenhouse gases without the increase in poverty so feared by 'skeptics.' Within decades, a new energy paradigm will be enriching us, and securing a future that works with the requirements of nature, not against them.

Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Johansen is the author of the three-volume “Global Warming in the Twenty-First Century” (Praeger, 2006).