Is Green Even Possible?

Is it even possible to stem the tide of global warming? What hardware would accomplish a roll back in global carbon dioxide emissions, say to cut them in half by 2050?

According to Copenhagen based green author Bjorn Lomborg, the good news is that a 50% emissions reduction is doable. We simply need to build a mere:

• 30 new nuclear plans
• 17,000 windmills
• 400 biomass power plants
• two massive-sized hydrocarbon facilities
• 42 coal and gas power plans with a better carbon-capture technology

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the list above is not what we need to build by 2050. It’s what we’d have to build each year until 2050. The global price tag to do that is $5 trillion a year, says Bjorn Lomborg. An amount that’s as likely to get spent as the US congress is to join hands and sing Kumbaya.

So we’re supposed to throw up our hands and wait for the tidal waves? Nope, says Lomborg. The solution is a huge, federally subsidized R&D investment in solid-state physics and electrics engineering. Its aim is to make solar power cost-beneficial for the common electricity user. Said in other words, presently solar, wind and other green energies represent a paltry 0.6 percent of global energy consumption. Lomborg argues that R&D investment could lower the cost of solar panels, boost their efficiency and make solar affordable for the millions, dramatically raising that percentage.

Lomborg cites the example of mainframe computers, unaffordable for the common man in the nineteen-seventies, now ubiquitous because R&D dramatically reduced P.C. costs and they became are as common as toasters. Make solar electricity similarly cheaper, less expensive than fossil fuel electricity, and the market forces will accomplish our clean energy goals. Makes cents to me.

Bjorn Lomborg is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool it and is one of both Esquire and Time Magazines’ most influential people of the twenty-first century.

Bjorn Lomborg