At age 22, Solomon Goldstein-Rose served a term as the State Representative for a district that borders mine. He left the legislature to work full time on climate change, and he and I have had many climate discussions over the years. When I found out he’d released a book, I asked for a review copy.
The title would be more accurate if it said “Solutions”, not “Solution”; Goldstein-Rose’s whole point is that if we break up the causes of climate chaos into separate industries and sectors, multiple solutions can be woven together to create a carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative world: a meta-solution with many components woven together into a coherent approach, where no single approach could come anywhere near eliminating 100% of atmospheric carbon. He even gives percentage ranges that each can theoretically accomplish.
The well-researched book offers four questions to evaluate carbon remediation strategies (pp. 21-22):
- Is it cost-competitive?
- Can it scale up fast enough?
- Does it rely on mandates to industry or on individual choices? Mandated behavior change will be a lot faster—but in MY opinion, encounter more hostility.
- How much lifestyle change will it require? The more change, the lower the rate of adoption.
Also five pillars for addressing carbon globally (p. 4, explored in detail with a chapter for each, pp. 83-195):
- (Clean) electricity generation
- Electrification of processes now powered by carbon-intensive fossil fuels
- Synthesized fuels
- Non-energy shifts
- Carbon sequestration
Pillars 1 and 2 are all about getting our electricity generation as clean as possible, and then switching many energy-hogging activities to that clean electricity. Pillar 3 is about switching to carbon-free artificial substitutes for systems that really need concentrated, consistent energy (jet airplanes, for instance, p. 125). Pillar 4 covers the impact of industries like agriculture, logging, and cement. And Pillar 5 extracts carbon from the air and puts it, quite literally, “where the sun don’t shine”—usually deep underground.
In general, while I have concerns about the environmental and social impacts of several of his recommendations, I basically approve of his approach and am grateful for his meticulous number-crunching and numerous references (which would have been even better if the book had an index).
But there’s one “solution” he gives a lot of weight to that I am convinced is a serious mistake: He’s strongly in favor of nuclear power (pp. 96-105).
I’ve already made the arguments against nuclear power, many times. You can find a condensed version in the brief update I wrote for a new Japanese edition of my first book, Nuclear Lessons, following the Fukushima meltdown in 2011: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Nuclear-Lessons-Intro-2011-2017-tweak.pdf
There’s also one potential 6th pillar he dismisses that could make up for not using horrific, unsafe, toxic nuclear technology: He almost completely ignores conservation/efficiency, other than calling them a distraction (pp. 41-46) and only hinting at the significant positive contribution they make on pp. 200-201. There’s also a passing reference (p. 147) to eating less meat as a way of reducing carbon impact (which, as a vegetarian since 1973, I certainly endorse—but as just one conservation step among many).
The research on conservation and efficiency is clear. We’ve already cut our energy use drastically by switching from incandescent to LED lighting, insulating our buildings, etc. But that’s only the beginning. The US still uses well more than twice as much energy per capita as, say, Denmark or Britain—places that offer comparable or better quality of life by most metrics.
And by designing systemically and holistically, there are far more opportunities to conserve. For example, when the Empire State Building underwent a “deep-energy retrofit” several years ago, it achieved energy savings of over $4 million per year, with just a three-year payback. Multiply by billions of buildings, and we begin to see what’s possible. As Amory Lovins, founder of Rocky Mountain Institute (a major player in the Empire State Building project), notes (in this admittedly dense article), when we have different energy efficiency systems working together, we can gain exponential energy savings. And that translates to vastly lower carbon footprint. I discuss Lovins’ amazing work in much more accessible language in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, along with several other equally amazing “practical visionaries.”
