Articles by Gar Lipow

There’s more room than you think

(Part of the No Sweat Solutions series.)

As almost everyone who studies the subject concludes, one key to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions is efficiency. Renewable sources generally provide energy at a slightly higher market price than fossil fuels. Oh, there are exceptions: passive solar heating, wind electricity, biofuel from waste. But overall, if we get all our energy from low-emitting sources, we will spend more overall per BTU. If we can use those BTUs efficiently, our overall energy bill can be the same or lower.

A reintroduction

I'm restarting my series on solutions to global warming, both on how to phase out fossil fuels and the best means to sequester carbon, because I consider the topic a critical one.

The carbon lobby has mostly (not entirely) given up disputing that global warming is occurring. They know that they won't be able to confuse the public on its human-caused nature much longer.

But a final stalling tactic is open to deniers -- to pretend that nothing can be done, or at least nothing that most people are willing to live with. There is an old engineering saying: "no solution, no problem."

Converging with this, there is a small but unfortunately influential primitivist movement. In their belief that technology itself is totalitarian, they also contribute to the idea that the only solution to global warming is a drastic reduction in the technical level of civilization -- perhaps down to the hunter-gatherer level. Many well-meaning, intelligent people promote a less extreme version of this trope -- the conviction that we need to impoverish working people in rich nations to solve our environmental crisis and deal justly with the poorer countries.

The primary purpose of this series is to ensure that energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies become known as inexpensive fossil fuel substitutes available today, rather than a high-priced vision of tomorrow. The U.S. needs to understand that continued use of fossil fuel is a political decision rather than a technical one.

The Talmud and global warming

As global warming deniers move from "it's not happening" to "it's not human-caused" to "but it's good for you" to "it's too expensive to fix," I'm reminded of a tale from the Talmud.

It seems a family was accused of returning a clay pot they had borrowed cracked beyond repair.

The accused family had three defenses:

1. They never borrowed the pot.
2. The pot already had a crack in it when received.
3. They returned the pot completely unharmed.

Perhaps it is unfair to assume this story is about global-warming deniers just because it centers on a cracked pot.

Because shopping shouldn’t require matrix algebra

A lot of people ask why carbon permits or taxes should be levied as far upstream as possible. Why tax or auction permits for pumping or importing oil, rather than burning it?

One obvious answer is: red tape. Regardless of where a tax is levied, you will pay. But if it is collected at the wellhead, you don't have to have a separate line on every gas receipt under the sales tax. Your local supermarket does not have to buy a major upgrade to it's software, slowing the line you are in as their system crashes, and the checkers switch to hand calculators.