The point of no return
The Revenge of Gaia
By James Lovelock
Allen Lane, 2006, �16.99
Reviewed by Pete Mason
THE PUBLICATION of James Lovelock�s The Revenge of
Gaia made front-page news. The Independent�s banner headline, above a
darkened earth, read: "Green guru says: �We are past the point of no
return�." (16 January) Few scientists can speak with more authority than
Lovelock, founder of �Gaia theory�, on the environmental calamity facing
the earth�s population. His latest book is controversial, passionate,
brisk and alarming.
Lovelock�s approach is holistic: only a whole earth
approach to global warming, or "heating" as he prefers to call it,
should guide attempts to solve this problem, otherwise the cure may be
worse than the disease. Lovelock�s approach led him to the Gaia theory
in the late 1960s, which treats the earth as a single living organism.
(Gaia was the ancient Greeks� goddess of the earth.) Scientists now
agree: "The earth system behaves as a single, self-regulating system
comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components".
(Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2001)
Over the last three billion years or so, whilst our
neighbouring planet Venus fried (at up to 480�C) and Mars froze (-63�C),
the earth remained temperate. Yet, Lovelock explains: "Only for a brief
period in the earth�s history was the sun�s warmth ideal for life, and
that was about two billion years ago� In about one billion years, and
long before the sun�s life ends, the heat received by the earth will be
more than two kilowatts per square metre, which is more than the Gaia we
know can stand". Currently, we receive 1.35 kilowatts per square metre
of energy from the sun.
The sun was roughly 25% less luminous when life
began on earth. Various natural cycles developed which ensured that the
earth remained sufficiently temperate for life to survive and flourish.
Lovelock argues that, "what evolves is the whole earth system with its
living and non-living parts existing as a tight coupled entity".
But Lovelock appears to go too far: he complains
that scientists will not accept "the goal of the self-regulating earth,
which is, according to my theory, to sustain habitability". He
attributes to Gaia a mystical, goal-seeking ability, and scientists are
surely right to resist this teleological concept of the pursuit of an
ultimate purpose. This is how Lovelock gained his �New Age� following in
the 1970s.
His first opponent was Richard Dawkins, author of
The Selfish Gene. Lovelock says the argument is now settled: "classical
reductionist terms" simply cannot explain the emergence of the complex
web of self-regulation of Gaia, he says. Lovelock refuses to reduce
things to simple known quantities.
The sun is 25% hotter now � equivalent, Lovelock
says, to raising the temperature of the earth�s surface by 20�C � yet
Gaia has maintained a habitable climate. This effort is already
stressing the earth�s systems. Now human activity has forced the earth�s
temperature up by nearly one degree in an instant of geological time. If
one degree doesn�t seem much, Lovelock gives a difference of only 3�C in
average temperature between the long glacial periods and the current
temperate but unstable �interglacial� period.
The IPCC projects a possible 5�C rise this century.
A 5�C rise reduces most of the earth�s surface to desert and scrub. The
seas rise 80 metres, and since most cities lie on the coast or waterways
they will be lost, most likely in sudden catastrophic events such as the
hurricane which struck New Orleans in 2005. In Lovelock�s tentative yet
compelling Armageddon, humans survive in the polar regions without any
semblance of civilisation.
"I think that we reject the evidence that our world
is changing because we are still� tribal carnivores", Lovelock argues.
Here is the basic flaw of the book. In effect, Lovelock attributes
global warming to our �original sin�. Compare this to the article, It�s
Capitalism or a Habitable Planet, in the Guardian (2 February). The
article explains that "private ownership of trade and industry"
comprises the decisive political force in the world. It concludes: "Only
by breaking up corporate power and bringing it under social control will
we be able to overcome the global environmental crisis". Beyond this the
article betrays the anarchistic leanings of the author, anti-capitalist
writer and broadcaster Robert Newman but, in publishing it, the Guardian
reflects an anti-capitalist consciousness essentially lacking in The
Revenge of Gaia.
Lovelock presents a desolate plea to governments and
big business to build nuclear power stations as a temporary measure
because they are "clean" and he sees no immediate alternative. They can
bury the radioactive waste from one power station in his back garden: "I
would use the heat from its decaying radioactive elements to heat my
home".
The Revenge of Gaia is a sustained argument for
nuclear power � just as the UK government is moving in the same
direction. But many people correctly distrust the ability of �corporate
power� and pro-capitalist governments to operate safe nuclear power.
This is not even addressed by Lovelock.
Yet twice Lovelock asks: "Why on earth, you may ask,
can�t we use solar energy directly? It must amount to far more than even
our present needs". He replies, "mostly because� [solar cells] are quite
expensive to make". This is a common plea yet, as Mike Hamer in the New
Scientist explains, production runs for solar panels are still small "so
individual units are expensive". (21 January)
Compare the cost of solar panels to computers.
Computers are produced in vast quantities and can sell at a tenth of the
price, yet are hugely more complex, arise from enormous research budgets
and, in addition, bear the costs of duplication of R&D by competing
firms, and the continual redundancy and retooling typical of rapacious
capitalist wastefulness. With a socialist plan of production, solar
panels could be produced for every roof, utilising vast economies of
scale, reducing the cost to a vanishing fraction of their current cost.
Lovelock wonders whether roofing materials could be
developed to convert sunlight to electricity, yet they already can. A
socialist society could tile every roof with robust solar tiles (which
even today are designed to connect to the national grid) and could
absorb the entire cost, offset against long-term savings and the prize
of saving the planet. Occupants could benefit with vastly reduced fuel
bills. This approach alone � and it could be one of many � could solve
our energy needs and more. (See note)
But energy corporations are directly threatened by
decentralised, localised solar energy production. A socialist,
democratically planned society could use some of the billions of profit
from the oil companies for solar energy programmes.
Lovelock mentions that coal and oil burning power
stations are rarely more than 40% efficient � "the other 60% escapes as
waste heat". Another 10% of electricity is lost down power lines.
Greenpeace points out that producing energy where it is needed would
halt this enormous waste. Lovelock raises common concerns such as
storage, which arise only if power generation is centralised in vast
energy plants.
He complains that anti-nuclear campaigners link
nuclear power with nuclear weapons, but the referral of Iran to the UN
Security Council because of its nuclear power programme shows they are
linked. Lovelock�s approach is na�ve at the very least. The UK
government has in the past favoured nuclear power plant designs which
require highly enriched, or even weapons-grade, fuel.
We face an "imminent shift in our climate to one
that could easily be described as hell", Lovelock says. Carbon dioxide,
the greenhouse gas which is the main cause of global warming, can easily
be extracted from the air, Lovelock demonstrates, mixed with an igneous
rock called serpentine and made into bricks. �Clean� energy, such as
solar power, is plentiful only if collected and used in a socially
distributed fashion � a literal �power to the people� shared through the
national grid � as part of a national and international, democratically
agreed energy plan. The problem lies not with technology but with the
unplanned and extraordinarily wasteful system we live in.
Note: Research shows that two or three well
designed solar panel installations per house in the UK (covering roughly
one third of the average sized roof) would provide enough energy for
almost all domestic requirements in the UK through most of the year
(three times the requirement in the summer months). Domestic energy
consumption is roughly one third of the total of domestic, industry and
transport energy consumption in the UK. (Department of Trade and
Industry, 2004)
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