KICKING THE CARBON HABIT
by William Sweet
isbn: 0-231-13710-9
price: $27.95 / £17.95
publication date: June 2006
The Wall St. Journal ran the Sweet review today.
"Mr. Sweet knows what he is talking about...Kicking the Carbon Habit is a great place to kick-start the debate and cool down the rhetoric."
Full text below.....
Bookshelf:
LEISURE & ARTS
Bookshelf: How to Make the Rhetoric Less Heated, and the Planet Too
By William Tucker
920 words
8 June 2006
<javascript:void(0)>The Wall Street Journal
D8
English
(Copyright (c) 2006, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
KICKING THE CARBON HABIT
By William Sweet
(Columbia University Press, 256 pages, $27.95)
The global-warming debate itself is generating a worrisome degree of heat. There is Al Gore especially, posing with movie stars on the cover of Vanity Fair's "environmental" issue and himself now a movie star, thanks to his power-point, slide-show film "An Inconvenient Truth."
Mr. Gore fulminates about the Bush administration's failure to act. "We have all the technologies we need to start the fight against global warming," declares the former vice president. "We can harness the sun and wind. We can stop wasting energy. We can use the Earth's plentiful coal resources without heating the planet." Such comments, as one might expect, have been warmly received in the mainstream media, but a little skepticism is in order.
It is true that the Bush White House has been reluctant to acknowledge, until very recently, that anything unusual is going on with global temperatures. Yet Mr. Bush is four-square behind the only practical solution to global warming -- and no, it is not solar panels on the roofs of suburban homes or windmills in Nebraska or more coal mining out West. It is nuclear power.
In "Kicking the Carbon Habit," William Sweet concedes that global warming is happening. He believes the evidence to be compelling, however uncertain certain variables may yet be. But it is mere fantasy to think that wind and sunshine can do much to help. Rather, he contends, a revival of nuclear power is key. As a senior news editor at the flagship publication of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Mr. Sweet knows what he is talking about.
He begins by making an obvious concession -- that you're never going to get the American people out of their cars. Trying to mandate another big leap in gas mileage is basically useless. People just consume the "energy savings" by driving more. It's questionable even whether gas-mileage standards, so far, have reduced gasoline consumption, since so many people have migrated to SUVs.
The obvious place for the U.S. to start reducing its greenhouse gases is with the coal that produces half our electricity. We now burn coal twice as much as we did when Jimmy Carter set out to solve our energy problems in the late 1970s. (In fact, Mr. Carter promoted coal.) Our coal consumption now produces 10% of the world's carbon dioxide. Replacing a good portion of our coal plants over the next 25 years would be the surest way of addressing the problem. Wind and solar can play a role at the margin. Hydrogen or some new hybrid technology may eventually reduce our oil consumption. But coal is the place to start.
Much of Mr. Sweet's effort is directed at people who still find the science of global warming unconvincing. He gives a long dissertation on each aspect -- the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the emerging science of climate studies, the attempts to build computer models -- each told through the biography of a pioneering scientist. These are not household names, but they are good stories.
Particularly dramatic is the tale of Danish geologist Willi Dansgaard, who moved to Greenland in the 1950s to study the Earth's magnetic field and ended up far more interested in the Greenland Ice Cap, which, he believed, held an undisturbed history of the Earth's climate. But how, so to speak, to unearth it? Fortuitously, in 1964, the U.S. Army established nearby Camp Century, an early warning base for Soviet missile attacks. Mr. Dansgaard had been pecking away at the Ice Cap a few hundred feet at a time, but the Army had a drill that could go down thousands of feet. Collaboration began and before long the team had drilled several miles down to bedrock, bringing up an unparalleled trove of scientific information. Mr. Dansgaard's original paper on the Ice Cap -- including the melting threats to it -- was published in 1968, long before our current overheated political debate.
So what to do? Mr. Sweet lays down his first principle in chapter one: "There is no such thing as clean coal." Environmental fantasies about sequestering three billion tons of carbon exhaust in the earth every year border on delusional. Instead, Mr. Sweet writes, it is time to take "a second look at nuclear energy."
His effort may be an opening gong. For far too long, America's political culture has treated nuclear power with timidity, still traumatized by the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979 and the dire predictions, ever since, of environmental extremists for whom nuclear power spells catastrophe. Nuclear-reactor construction has ground to a halt.
But all the while, existing nuclear reactors keep doing a splendid job of creating clean energy -- and they are making huge amounts of money. (Connecticut has just proposed a windfall profits tax on them!) With more than a dozen energy companies now lined up to apply for new licenses before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, we may be a lot closer to a nuclear revival than anyone thinks. The last piece of the puzzle will be an enhanced public understanding of what the true options are. "Kicking the Carbon Habit" is a great place to kick-start the debate and cool down the rhetoric.
Mr. Tucker is a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.
