What the climate scientists are advocating, and what we should do to ensure the security of the global energy supply, is creating new forms of energy that replace not 1/4,000 of the total, but more like 10 percent or 50 percent or 100 percent. Those are numbers worth talking about. Everyone doing a little isn’t going to help. We need to make big changes.
S+B: But these green marketing initiatives work in attracting customers, right?
MacKay: They work because people don’t use numbers to examine what is being proposed. My mission is to help people be more numerate, so that when, say, a new wind farm is announced, people understand how much land needs to be used and how much energy it adds up to. I really want us to end up with a plan that adds up. It is a good idea to get off fossil fuels. And if we can become more numerate, then maybe we can have more constructive conversations, instead of all these emotional arguments that we have at the moment, with the anti-wind people against the pro-wind people, the anti-nuclear people against the pro-nuclear people.
S+B: What should business leaders do to better facilitate this discussion?
MacKay: The ones who are participating in the “greenwashing” and emitting the hot air, it would be nice if they stopped doing that. We need to engage the public in constructive consensus building. At the moment all the conversations are polarized and mistrustful. What I advocate is that each country produce a road map, based on the consensus of, say, a group of 60 business leaders, engineers, and political leaders, for what actually adds up, what actually can be accomplished, respecting the laws of physics, the laws of economics, and the financial and political reality.
Targets for cutting greenhouse gases by 17 percent by 2020 [the Obama plan] or 100 percent by 2050 are too vague. We need to visualize in more detail the scale that is required to meet these challenges. If the goal of these road maps is to emit zero carbon by 2050, how do we get there? It is technically possible by then to stop using fossil fuels. Among the technologies that could make the biggest contributions, the most significant are energy-saving technologies, wind power, solar power, so-called clean coal (as yet an unproven technology, by the way), and nuclear power. The scale of building required is far bigger than most people realize. For the U.S., to get half of today’s total energy consumption from wind, solar, and nuclear, we need wind farms with an area equal to the size of California, solar panels covering an area greater than all existing buildings, and a fivefold increase in nuclear power. Once people understand the scale of the energy challenge they’ll realize they can’t say no to anything; indeed, they have to say yes to pretty much every form of alternative energy.
We’ve got 40 years left; we have time to create a world free of fossil fuels by 2050 if we start now. There’s time to build lots of green stuff, such as nuclear power stations and electric cars, and to insulate a lot of buildings — all in a way that adds up to real reductions in fossil fuel use.
S+B: How much hot air is coming from the Obama administration and the new Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu?
MacKay: I think Steve Chu is wonderful, but I’m a bit distressed by how he is being forced to tread softly. It sounds like the Obama administration is being very cautious, by pushing very modest reductions in greenhouse gases. Maybe Obama’s right. Maybe being tentative is the only way for the administration to achieve its ultimate goal of greenhouse gas reduction, given its slender majority.
