Inflexibility on Global Warming at MIT? Of Course!

My alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sent me an email this week along with all the rest of its far-more-distinguished alumni.  M.I.T., it would seem, apparently has a "Climate Change Plan", and they want our input.  Or, as the email stated ...

"Alumni are invited to share ideas and proposals in the MIT Climate CoLab contest, which is gathering concrete ways to advance the new MIT Plan for Action on Climate Change.  The winners will present their proposals at a campus conference.  Dozens of ideas have been submitted so far, such as launching a green careers hub and transforming existing [MIT campus] buildings to 'net zero' energy use."

Naturally, I am going to bite my tongue and refrain from forwarding along to the "Climate CoLab contest" any of my previous writings on the topic of global warming.  I just get the sense that they might not be taken in the spirit in which they were written, particularly this one in which I happily suggest we simply give up the fight and live with, say, palm trees in Connecticut.  And there's this one, where I call BS on the political motivation behind the movement.

But yes, I have to say that I was really taken aback by the "steamroller" nature of the email -- it is happening; it is man-made; we can do something about it; and we should do something about it, whatever the consequences.  Fait accompli.  Don't brook a moment of discussion about any of those, thank you for not being allowed to offer opposing thoughts.

Now ... let us again be candid.  I think it is a wonderful idea if M.I.T. decides to transform existing buildings on campus to being net zero consumers of energy, producing without fuel the energy that the building and its users require.  Of course it's a good idea, if for no other reason than any reasonable, cost-free step which reduces demand for oil anywhere drives down the price of oil to those miserable despots, tyrants and other fine folk who rule the oil-producing countries of the Middle East.  ISIS is getting a million dollars a day selling oil.  If it were, say, cat pee they were selling, they would have more trouble buying arms to murder innocents.

So yes, in that sense I'm a little "green."  But my greenitude has nothing to do with influence on the climate; rather, eventually we're going to run out of fossil fuels and the sooner we develop cost-effective options to produce energy, the better -- to a point.

For example, energy is not a "completely fungible resource", in the sense that all sources of power are not alike.  You're not going to power a car directly with coal or a nuclear reactor -- yet.  But if you are able to turn as many possible consuming areas of energy use that can be converted away from fossil fuels, we get to where we're only using fossil fuels where we need to -- like cars -- and we're generating electricity from sources like nuclear power, which are not only cleaner, but don't prop up Middle Eastern petromaniacal dictators and thugs.  And -- we can get down to where the USA demand for fossil fuels is reduced -- and production increased -- to where we're a net exporter of them.

If that makes me a little green, OK, fine.  I suspect in that sense we all are.  Of course, my motives, as opposed to the anti-nuke types, are at least honest.

I just wish that my esteemed alma mater, forever on the leading edge of technological thought, would have considered that its contest might also include ways to deal with temperatures eking up a degree here and there for the next century -- dealing with it, not just fixing it.  Accepting the fact that India and China, each with at least three times our population and not a shred of interest in cutting their fossil use, will eventually swamp our own impact on the atmosphere.

That would have taken a modicum of courage on the part of the nation's leading technological institution of higher learning.  I think we'll wait a while to see that.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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