Doing a lot with very little
‘Nonsense!’ was my first and resounding response to this hypothetical question. Given the scale of the climate change challenge, $10 million is nothing. What could one do with such a ridiculous amount?
But a seed of interest was planted in my mind and step by step, walking on the streets and parks behind a stroller with my two and a half-year-old son, thoughts emerged in my mind and moved, one by one, to an imaginary waste bin.
First I scanned in my mind through the ‘wedges’ proposed by Socolow: energy efficiency and conservation. $10 million can pay for thermal insulation of what – 1,000 houses? Renewable energy: enough money for two, maybe three, medium windmills? Fuel switch: how many buses could be converted from dirty diesel to compressed gas? A thousand? Planting trees: how would trees just planted compare in their CO2 effect to millions of grown trees being cut down at the same time? Like a drop in the ocean. One village, two windmills, a thousand converted buses and a few million trees are not going to have any measurable influence on the climate. We can always justify these kinds of projects by attributing them ‘a model value’. But let us be honest – model value of applying something already thousand times tested and proved is very limited.
What is it next on Socolow´s shopping list? Oh yes – carbon storage. Untested and extremely expensive. And there’s nuclear energy, of course. But, other considerations aside, $10 million does not move construction of a single nuclear power plant more than just a few steps. Gaia theory father James Lovelock argues relentlessly in favour of nuclear energy to slow down global warming and to buy us time for adjustments. Unfortunately, while Lovelock sees nuclear energy as the only tool that may save us from the worst, the deeply rooted suspicion of nuclear energy is not going to fade away anytime soon.
So is there really nothing I could do even with $10 million to leave behind a livable earth for my little son and his generation? Will he and billions of other people struggle through the ‘perfect storm’ envisioned by John Beddington, science adviser to the British government?
Many people believe that our technology is all we need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and stop global warming. I do not see that. With a fast-growing population and consumers’ appetite, we are on track to exhaust limited resources and to devastate this planet regardless of our clever technologies.
If this is true, then maybe I should spend my millions to give people a wake-up call and ask them to consume less. But already so many prophets, old and modern, have called for modesty or at least for ‘reasonable’ restrain in consuming. Decades ago, Erich Fromm asked the question ‘To have or to be?’. For too many people, to be means to have. Could my millions make any difference in talking to the masses mesmerized by omnipresent advertising for more, more and more products you need to buy to be happy, to be someone? I doubt it. Even the most masterly crafted and shocking messages delivered by superstars and aired in the primetime of the main global media would soon be drowned out by thundering waves of ads for cars, phones, cosmetics, drinks, foods, drugs, lifestyles...Drowned out and forgotten.
And then it struck me. Intuitively we tend to focus on what can be done to reduce emissions in the biggest polluters, such as the United States or China. But maybe the right way is to focus on the main victims of the climate change instead. Those are the places where the money can go much further and where the most human suffering from climate extremes is happening.
There it was, my answer to the $10 million question. Pictures of African women with loads of fuel wood emerged in my mind – and with them the feeling of hammering heat on my head under the tropical sun. I recalled my visits to African schools without mirrors to teach students about concentration of sun energy. Without that, young Africans can hardly believe that their mothers could actually cook their family meals without precious wood or expensive charcoal; without breathing smoke that damages their health; without destroying trees and bushes as far as one can walk around the towns and villages; without producing soot by millions cooking fires burning every day in a year, all over the continent. The same soot is now recognized as an important contributor to global warming.
There are several reasons why solar cooking – a simple and cheap technology – is not used enough in tropical countries. Lack of knowledge is very important. Lack of solid, good-looking and very low cost models is another. With my $10 million I would hit at these barriers: in a competitively selected African country and working closely with local groups, I would build a small factory to produce simple, but pretty and very cheap solar cookers made of lasting plastics – for instance from PET, used for the production of cheap plastic bottles. Time is precious and this could be done within few months. Within one year we would start to see large social and environmental benefits – albeit not a cooling planet. I would also make sure that as many African schools as possible get a set of the cookers for their physics labs, so they can teach their students about a practical way of using the abundant solar energy that tropical countries have and must start to use. With tens of millions of African families using solar cookers, some of the students, technicians, entrepreneurs and politicians would inevitably start to think about how to use solar energy for other purposes; for instance, for clean electrification of the continent. That is ‘conditio sine qua non’ if we are serious about pulling Africa out of poverty while fighting climate change at the same time.
Juraj Mesik works as a volunteer for Society for Sustainable Living. Email mesik@changenet.sk
