The following excerpts are from an article about a recent paper on gas as a bridge fuel that was widely discussed, and that showed that relying on gas would have an insignificant effect on carbon emissions, partly because it would block the deployment of renewable sources:

“Natural gas will not be a bridge fuel to a post-carbon future in the absence of an overarching climate change policy, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Nature.
That’s because the fuel is likely to displace low-carbon renewable energy sources as well as coal from the energy mix…
‘The study by McJeon and colleagues adds to the growing body of research that the increased use of gas does not lower greenhouse gas emissions, primarily because it delays the use of lower-carbon sources like renewable technologies, and discourages efficiency and conservation,’ said Christine Shearer, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, who was not affiliated with the study.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/natural-gas-offers-little-benefit-in-fight-against-global-warming/

Investments (and resources) that are used to build up a gas infrastructure cannot at the same time support the implementation of renewables.
Moreover, resources are finite and the quality of many ores mined today is not equal to the quality of those mined some years ago. We can no longer afford to waste as much as we did in the past, and this means that we have to use the resources we have more intelligently. This means better informed policy choices, also regarding renewable energy. Wrong infrastructure choices have consequences many years into the future.
Below are links to some Jeremy Grantham quarterly letters that are relevant in this context.

Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7853

On the Road to Zero Growth
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2012/11/Grantham%20letter%20Nov%2020.pdf

The Longest Quarterly Letter Ever
Your Grandchildren Have No Value (And Other Deficiencies of Capitalism)
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2012/02/GMO.pdf

(Or: “Jeremy’s Quarterly Letters are available at the GMO website. Registration is required, but free. Choose the “Library” tab on the top menu bar and choose “Jeremy Grantham’s Letters and Articles” on the left menu to see all letters dating back to 1999.)

Very true indeed! And it would behoove those of us who are still more-or-less middle-class Americans to recall that by global standards, we are among the elite.

A well-reasoned piece, Greg. It certainly is going to take a variety of measures to reduce the magnitude of the problem.

We often hear contrarians claim that any action taken to mitigate the effects of climate change will wreck the economy. (Indeed, there are many possible ways to wreck the economy. One very effective way was demonstrated convincingly in 2007-2008.)

But at bottom, this contrarian argument rests on one assumption: that we will keep on doing the thing that’s wrecking the economy even as we see the economy collapsing around us. I submit that this assumption is untenable.

That said, there is an even better reason to doubt the contrarians’ economic alarmism. Every major effort at fixing an environmental problem has turned out to be less costly than the nay-sayers predicted.

At the same time, we know in a general way what happens when such efforts at prevention are cut back or ignored. Example: the failure to build up the dikes and pumping stations around New Orleans, pre-Katrina. Example: the failure to regulate the fertilizer plant in West, Texas — or to inform the local firefighters about the danger the plant contained. Example: the oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, April 2010.

That’s what I think too, if anyone cares. I also think John J. above makes some great points – the one about “going dark” is where I’m headed.

The other thing I keep wondering is Why don’t we ever talk about planting trees? We’re still relying on governments and Powerful People to make decisions for us, but if we had no other choice, and had only low-tech options to address this problem, what could we do? Mobilizing a social tree-planting movement could have a significant impact. Here’s why:

o Growing Zones are moving northward, and frost dates are getting farther apart
o Part of the problem is the last 1000 years of forest removal across the planet
(this is a major effect of “development”)
o It does require some planning, but doesn’t necessarily need huge investment to get started
o CO2 fertilization is a thing, and it’s going to affect biological productivity, at least in the tropics. This amplifies the power of tree-planting to make a dent in this problem
o It has huge educational value, both for helping people understand climate change, and for helping people relate to Earth
o Give people something constructive to do. Someone recently said that “we can’t do anything” is more dangerous than “it’s not happening”, because it leads to despair. Yes, I’m just one green person, but if half of the world planted a tree, that’s 3 billion+ trees.

My next proposal will be enhancing ocean productivity by cutting chemical pollution, but that might take more work.

We all (people, businesses, etc) use energy. There are multiple, alternative, perfectly viable ways to get energy, and fossil carbon is only one. But, the people who own the reserves have a stranglehold on the market due to a number of reasons (commitment to infrastructure, ownership of leaders, manipulating laws and regulations, marketing).

A small number of very powerful people Owning All The Things and having that taken away from them is messy business but over the scale of history routine for our species.

Sometimes it happens because of what we now call disruptive technology (even if Ma Bell was not cut up modern technology might have done her in, the TV advertising based industry … remember that? … is eviscerated by the internet. These things happen). Sometimes it happens because of violent revolution. Sometimes because of a crash and burn then we see what comes out of the ashes.

Status quo is tenacious and there is rarely evidence it will change. Then it changes. Usually, the only way to understand the change is to look a back at it.

There is only a certain amount that we can do today to make that goal achievable. We don’t have the technologies available to lower energy intensity to levels that could sustain 9 billion people at first world standards. But what we can do is put the world on a path where that can happen.

What we do have power over, today, is avoiding certain collapse (and massive human suffering) by reducing and ending our emissions of CO2 over the next ~30 years. That is an achievable goal and one that – while it’s not going to fix all the problems – will allow later generations to chart their own course to a sustainable future.

The model tells us: pursue infinite Growth based on limited resources, and you overshoot and crash. Jack up the assumed quantity of resources high enough, and instead of a resource crisis you get a “pollution crisis” in which the quantity of pollution starts to affect health, agricultural productivity, etc. too severely to be covered up. Call the first scenario “peak oil” and the second “climate change”. Twiddling parameters so that productivity is increased faster or pollution is limited more cheaply postpones the crisis but does not prevent it; as the authors said of one of their model scenarios, the world doesn’t run out of any one thing; what it runs out of is the ability to cope.

The only way the Limits to Growth authors could get their model NOT to show a hard crash this century was to impose conditions in which the entire world collectively strove to attain zero population growth and a steady-state economy (which implies a more equitable distribution of resources). Is that going to happen in the coming decades? Ha, fat chance. Therefore, the crash – whatever its ultimate causes – is already headed down the tracks toward us and picking up speed, and the few people who see that and want to stop it are simply not going to be able to.

Does that mean we should stick with “edamus bibamus gaudeamus” as long as possible and screw conservation? Quite the opposite. Unless you are fairly old, you can count on ending your life unable to afford most of the luxuries you now enjoy (including some you think of as necessities). If you have kids, you can be certain that they will. If you don’t want to break, emotionally if not physically, when decline hits you, you’d better start learning to do without that stuff and maintain the physical ability to do so. When I walk home from work, it’s not primarily for the sake of the planet, whose fate is out of my hands; I’m lookin’ out for number one. Those who fail to do so will be sorry if someday they’re 80 years old and have to get out of their gasless SUVs and walk to the store for the first time.

I had a brief discussion with Dr. Mann regarding his optimism regarding the future. I agree with “Joe D” and disagree with Dr. Mann regarding the most likely human behavior, and the future climate— the “worse case” scenario seems optimistic to me, judging by the amount of warming we have already committed to and the lack of mitigation efforts over the previous 50+ years.

cosmicomics, nice links.

I agree that we should ask “does it make sense do to X” but the main point I’m making here is that it does not make sense to ad the “or” (or “instead of”) to the end of that because a) we simply don’t have the information (though we do think we have the hubris to understand what is needed at that level of details) and b) we will probably need to do multiple things anyway.

Existing infrastructure hardly limits future possibilities and it is not a zero sum game. To some small extent that may be a little true here and there but it is way less true than the urgency to act. And, in the end, if we have to disassemble a bit of infrastructure here and there in 2114 that’s fine.