Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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158 farther horizons
other organizations will make great changes in the way they do
business, the forces of blessed unrest will become still more restless,
and governments and international agencies will fi nally bestir
themselves to do belatedly what they should have done decades
before. But these trends, as important and urgent as they are, will
not quickly reverse the effects of climate destabilization to which
we are now committed. Lacking foresight, we did too much damage
to the fabric of life and waited too long to reverse the trends.
For a while at least, our plight will be rather like that of the passenger
walking north on a southbound train.
At the end of the era of cheap fossil fuels and climate stability,
however, the forces of denial embedded in our politics, media,
education, and economy will try to divert our attention as long as
possible. Others will promise increasingly heroic ways to keep climate
destabilization at bay by proposing one silver-bullet solution
or another. For some, nuclear power is our only option, but they
do not say whether it could be deployed on the scale necessary in
the short time available and at a price we could afford. Nor do they
explain how to manage terrorist threats or the radioactive waste
that will have to be isolated for 250,000 years, or why this is preferable
to improved effi ciency and renewable energy technologies
that can be deployed more quickly at a fraction of the cost and
with virtually none of the risks and problems of nuclear energy.
Others aim to develop and deploy devices that suck carbon out
of the atmosphere (Broecker and Kunzig, 2008; Homer-Dixon
and Keith, 2008) or cool the Earth temporarily by injecting sulfur
dioxide into the stratosphere. If such geoengineering schemes are
successful and if they do not cause other problems, they could
buy us a bit of time, but little is said about how we might best use
that short reprieve (Mooney, 2008). There will be other proposals,
no doubt, and they will be increasingly grandiose and desperate;
sometime soon one or more may be tried, and if so, they
will likely fail grandiosely at an exorbitant cost (Robock, 2008,
pp. 14–18). Despite their differences, these schemes all share the