Climate change, limits to growth, and the imperative for socialism

Monthly Review

Volumn 60, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 51-67

  Li, Minqi ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF UTAH   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 48849102263     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-03-2008-07_4     Document Type: Review

References (19)

1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "Summary for Policymakers of the Synthesis Report of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report," November 2007, http://www.ipcc.ch.
2. David Spratt, "The Big Melt: Lessons from the Arctic Summer of 2007," October 2007, http://www.carbonequity.info/docs/arctic.html.
3. David Spratt and Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red (Friends of the Earth, 2008), http://www.climatecodred.net.
4. David Spratt and Philip Sutton, Climate Code Red;
5. Jonathan Leake, "Fiddling with Figures while the Earth Burns," Times Online, May 6 2007, http://www.ecolo.org/lovelock;
6. James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 15-38.
7. 2: Where Should Humanity Aim?" (abstract), April 2008, http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/ abstracts/submitted/Hansen_etal.html (accessed May 2008).
8. Also see John Bellamy Foster, "The Ecology of Destruction," Monthly Review 58, no. 8 (2007): 1-14.
9. This is known as the Jevons Paradox, named after the nineteenth-century British economist William Stanley Jevons who first took note of this perverse effect. See Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster, "William Stanley Jevons and The Coal Question," Organization & Environment 14, no. 1 (2001): 93-98;
10. John Bellamy Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2002), 94-95.
11. Ted Trainer, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain A Consumer Society (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2007), 110-11.
12. Energy Watch Group, "Uranium Resources and Nuclear Energy," EWG-Series No.1/2006 (December), http://www.energywatchgroup.org.
13. Michael H. Heusemann, "The Limits of Technological Solutions to Sustainable Development," Clean Technology and Environmental Policy 5 (2003): 21-34.
14. A recent experiment sponsored by the Germany government intends to show that a network with 61 percent of electricity from wind, 14 percent from solar photovoltaics, and 25 percent from biomass, can meet up to 100 percent of electricity demand ("Renewed Energy," The Guardian, February 26, 2008, http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jeremy_leggett/2008/02/ renewed_energy.html). But as discussed below, biomass is very problematic and could emit more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels. Thus, the experiment suggests a 75 percent limit to de-carbonization of electricity generation.
15. The energy statistics discussed here and in the following paragraph are from: International Energy Agency, Key World Energy Statistics 2007, http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/2007/key_stats_2007.pdf.
16. Although there has been much talk of developing a "hydrogen economy," hydrogen itself is not a primary energy source (i.e., there are no natural stores of hydrogen to be exploited). Hydrogen fuel is produced from water, a process which requires energy input. Thus, hydrogen is simply an energy storage mechanism (much like a battery), and its environmental consequences depend on the source of energy that is used to produce it.
17. Joseph Fargione, et al., "Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt," Science 319, no. 5867 (2008): 1235-38;
18. Timothy Searchinger, et al., "Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land-Use Change," Science 319, no. 5867 (2008): 1238-40.
19. According to Key World Energy Statistics (see footnote 9), in 2005, measured by 2000 U.S. dollars, the energy intensity of OECD countries was 37 percent below the world average, France 41 percent below world average, Germany 44 percent below world average, and UK 56 percent below world average.