[ RadSafe ] Article: What It Would Take to Put the Brakes on Global Warming -- 700 new, 1, 000-MW nuclear plants

[John Jacobus]

>From today's Washington Post at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/14/AR2007071401243.html

--------------
What It Would Take to Put the Brakes on Global Warming

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 15, 2007; A09

If the majority of climate scientists are right, the
sheer immensity of the global warming problem can make
mortal measures look hopelessly tiny.

That's what one Bush administration official seemed to
be saying in a speech to a 2004 conference. Energy
Secretary Spencer Abraham said it would take a
technological breakthrough on par with the discovery
of electricity to slow climate change.

That galled a member of the audience, Princeton
University professor Robert Socolow, who thought there
were things people were capable of doing -- and must
be doing -- now.

So Socolow and fellow Princeton professor Stephen
Pacala came up with a game, with multicolor wedges, to
make the global warming problem look solvable, albeit
still difficult. (See
http://www.princeton.edu/~cmi/resources/stabwedge.htm.)

First, they set a goal of keeping global greenhouse
gas emissions constant. That would hold atmospheric
concentrations of carbon dioxide to about 550 parts
per million, roughly twice the level in the
preindustrial era. That would not stop global warming,
but it would probably limit temperature change to 3
degrees or so. Hitting Socolow and Pacala's target
would still be no small feat, given that greenhouse
gas emissions have been rising steadily with economic
growth.

After setting their goal, Socolow and Pacala divided
up the amount of savings needed into seven wedges,
like pie pieces. Each wedge represented a billion tons
of reductions in annual carbon emissions by 2050.
(Socolow uses carbon to measure greenhouse gases and
gets nice round numbers; when measured in carbon
dioxide, the figures are 3.67 times greater.)

In a class exercise, the professors give students 15
wedges with different colors, each representing a way
to achieve a billion tons of carbon savings, and had
the students mix and match them to come up with a
plausible strategy for keeping the 2050 emissions
level equal to today's. Coming up with seven
politically feasible wedges is no simple matter. Here
are some of the choices:

Triple nuclear electricity production by building 700
new, 1,000-megawatt nuclear plants. Boost wind
production 30-fold by building nearly 2 million
1-megawatt wind turbines. Halt deforestation and plant
300 million hectares of unforested land. Cover an area
the size of New Jersey with photovoltaic cells. Double
the fuel efficiency of cars and light trucks. Replace
every incandescent light bulb in the world with a
compact fluorescent bulb and change building codes,
including in the developing world, where the most
commercial building is occurring.

The impact of the wedges has been huge. Since the
Princeton pair wrote their article in late 2004, each
has given about 100 talks, prodding scientists,
policymakers and companies to attack global warming in
concrete ways.

There are endless scenarios because every country is
different. Fast-developing countries like China and
India, where greenhouse gas emissions per person are a
tiny fraction of those of the average American,
currently account for about half of the world's
greenhouse gas emissions. Socolow and Pacala assumed
that these countries, even if they restricted
emissions, would generate 60 percent more greenhouse
gases by 2050 than they do now. So they assumed that
industrialized nations like the United States would
have to cut emissions by 60 percent.

Looking at Socolow and Pacala's options can be
daunting. But Socolow says, "We've gone from a problem
people scarcely recognized, to one that seemed
impossible to address, to a serious determination to
address it."

+++++++++++++++++++
““Few of their children in the country learn English... The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages ... Unless the stream of their importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious.”
-- Benjamin Franklin, circa 1750, on German immigration to Pennsylvania

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com


       
____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a better Globetrotter. Get better travel answers from someone who knows. Yahoo! Answers - Check it out.
http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545469