Europe/Plan B – For a Carbon-Free Economy Independent of Arabic Oil, Russian Gas or Chinese Coal

One month after the attack on Pearl Harbor US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his annual address to the nation. In this historic speech Roosevelt outlined US industrial plans for 1942: to produce 60,000 planes (and an additional 125,000 in 1943) and 45,000 tanks (75,000 in 1943), and to increase production rate of merchant ships to 6,000,000 tons (with an additional 10,000,000 tons of shipping in 1943)...

How to produce such gigantic amount of weapons in such a short time was a huge challenge. The story goes that when Roosevelt asked the leaders of the automobile industry – the main industrial complex in the wartime U.S. – whether these goals were doable, their answer was: “Sir, we will do our best, but our capacity to add this production will be too stretched...” Roosevelt reportedly responded: “Gentlemen, you do not understand me. You will stop producing cars and will produce what our country needs from you.” And so it was: there were no private cars produced in the United States from the spring of 1942 until the end of 1944.

Lester R. Brown, founder and long-time president of the WorldWatch Institute, recounted this story at a presentation at the World Bank in Washington in April 2007. Brown was speaking in the context of the accelerating climate crisis. The United States is home to less than five percent of humanity, yet it produces one quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause warming of the Earth‘s surface. The European per capita contribution, by comparison, is half of the US contribution, but still three times higher than the per capita contribution of China.

The consequences of climate change are already drastic, but according to recent computer models, the future impacts will be much worse. Climate models predict a 3 to 4 degree centigrade increase in average temperature of the earth‘s atmosphere – a jump that will make our generation witness to the worst extinction of species since the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Even God – equal homo sapiens will not be immune to the changes. Droughts, floods, heat waves, violent storms, wild fires, hurricanes and other climatic extremes will lead toward the death of tens if not hundreds of millions of people. Mass migration of humans uprooted by floods, famines and lack of drinking water may lead to wars and the destabilization of whole regions of Africa and Asia – but not even the rich countries of Europe and North America will be spared.

The task faced by humanity is without precedents, and the time to respond is very limited. Or perhaps there is one precedent – 1941, when the world faced the most terrible war in history. The principle message of Roosevelt’s 1941 speech rings just as true today: “Our task is hard – our task is unprecedented – and the time is short. We must strain every existing armament-producing facility to the utmost. We must convert every available plant and tool to war production. That goes all the way from the greatest plants to the smallest - from the huge automobile industry to the village machine shop... Only this all-out scale of production will hasten the ultimate all-out victory. Speed will count. Lost ground can always be regained- lost time, never. Speed will save lives; speed will save this Nation which is in peril; speed will save our freedom and our civilization.” Today, the challenge is not Nazism, but the complete retooling of our economy to herald in a carbon-free era of prosperity.

Imagine for a while that a man of Roosevelt’s stature would sit in the White House today. Would it be possible to significantly reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses in a short time and thus slow down global warming? Most likely the answer is yes: Humankind has available the necessary technology and resources, and the USA, EU, China, Russia and other big economies could apply them on a mass scale in a very short period of time. A 70% reduction in global emissions from today’s levels is technically not out of reach. What is missing, however, is political leadership – intelligence and courage. Intelligence to understand what the best science tells us about the causes and consequences of greenhouse emissions, not what is repeated by religious lunatics who believe that the world was created in 4007 BC. And courage not to bomb foreign countries, but instead to stand up to political sponsors from the oil and automobile industries and tell both them and all citizens what they must do and stop doing.

Already in 1991, the US Department of Energy published a study of wind energy potential in the US. The study made it clear that just three states – Texas, Kansas and North Dakota – have sufficient combined wind energy potential to provide electricity for the whole country. This was true with technologies available in 1991. Since then, wind energy technology has made major progress. Today, the potential of both weak and very strong winds can be used for energy generation - winds that in 1991 were impossible to use. Wind energy thus could cover the entire energy needs of the United States, not only electricity needs. Farmers on American prairies are now starting to compete in offering their land for building wind power plants – the old NIMBY syndrome (not in my backyard) is being replaced by PIMBY syndrome - put it in my backyard. On one tenth of a hectare of land, an American farmer can in one year produce corn that will be sufficient to make ethanol worth $200 dollars. A modern wind turbine on the same piece of land can produce in the same year electricity worth $100,000 dollars. The mathematics is very simple.

Obviously, wind does not blow only in the US. The wind energy potential of China’s coasts and inland plains is sufficient to cover the electricity needs of China. The same is true about the vast lands of Russia. EU, the largest economy of the world and a global leader in using wind energy, had 35,000 MW installed capacity of wind turbines in 2004. The plan for 2010 is to have installed capacity of 75,000 MW. Wind by far is not the only widely available source of renewable energy – the first contracts for concentrating solar power plants with output of 850 MW and 900 MW were recently signed to supply California with the clean energy. And the potential for energy conservation is tremendous even in Europe, which is already much more energy efficient than the United States.

Technologies for the implementation of “Plan B” – a carbon free economy independent on Arabic oil, Russian gas or Chinese coal – are not missing. What is missing to mobilize their mass production is both an adequate perception of the threat to western civilization and political leadership of Roosevelt’s quality. How deep this leadership deficit is was just shown at the G8 summit in Germany.