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Wedges - the solution to Climate Change?
A roadmap to tackling climate change?
One of the things I've found most frustrating in the climate change debate is the lack of concrete proposals. Most of us realise that we need to be taking urgent action. But very rarely do you hear someone proposing a full set of solutions to the problem that is both effective and practical. Everyone knows we need to cut carbon emissions: it's much more difficult to agree on how.
That's why I was so pleased to hear of the "wedges" idea developed by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala.
There's a handy online presentation. In short, they think that it's possible to cap global emissions at their current rate, and hence avoid total disaster. This means saving 7 billion tons of carbon emissions a year in 2050. And they have many ideas for individual steps which, if taken now, would result in savings of 1 billion tons each. Replacing enough coal plants with renewables, nuclear or even gas; actively applying carbon capture technology and pumping carbon emissions back into the ground. In a recent issue of Scientific American, Socolow and Pacala identified 15 possible 'wedges', all based on technology currently available.
It doesn't answer the questions of how to make these things happen - though the authors support the idea of a $100-a-ton price on carbon, much similar to the value placed on carbon in the existing European trading scheme.
But it's the first time I've seen a serious, global, proposal presented in such an accessible manner. Are wedges the future of the climate change debate?
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Yes, a price on carbon will help make all these thing happen, even if none of the revenue goes towards them.
The presentation is refreshing because it is saying we can do this, there really isn't a big problem, it is "just" an expense. If we wanted to do it badly enough, we would spend the money.
This contrasts totally with the hardline Green position that global warming is essentially insoluble by technology.
It is often our take on things which prevents us from seeing things as achieveable. Two answers to the question 'how far away is it?' could be 'a 30-minute walk or 'about 1800 steps' for exactly the same destination. Luckily, time often appears to be 'there for the taking' in front of us and we start doing all sorts of things with it without really thinking. Thus, time goes by, and before we realise it, we have actually taken those 1800 steps.
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an alternative frame of measurement when something might take 1800 days to complete, for example. 'That's about 5 years', I can feel some readers chirping, but when 'I' think about years, it always seems to get multiplied up into what a long number of days that must be, which then overwhelms me and prevents me from starting. It's a good job that doesn't seem to happen with 'footstep' steps, otherwise we'd be in trouble!
The steps which don't seem to work though are the chunky ones towards solving big problems. Here, we again seem to revert to the 'that sounds like an impossible number of mini-steps' pattern of thought, without actually calculating it.
Thus, and sort of counter-intuitively, the 'wedges' approach may help us to learn that 'walking through a problem' is an achievable way of solving it.
My short answer to your question on whether wedges are the way forward in the climate change debate is thus a cautious 'yes'.
I must admit, positive initiatives to tackle climate change enthuse me a lot more than pious denunciations of modern life, capitalism or industrial production.
It does now seem that, as the science becomes more widely accepted, that such initiatives are going to form a major part of both political and economic life over the coming decades.
"I must admit, positive initiatives to tackle climate change enthuse me a lot more than pious denunciations of modern life, capitalism or industrial production."
Me too, Rob!
Peter