Advanced BioFuels USA

by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (The Washington Post)  Naomi Oreskes is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University. Erik Conway is a historian of science and technology at the California Institute of Technology. They are the co-authors of “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future” (Columbia University Press), from which this article is excerpted.
It’s 2393. A historian is recounting the collapse of Western civilization due to catastrophic climate change. In her anniversary lecture, she explains how the carbon-combustion complex and blind faith in free markets during the late 20th and early 21st centuries conspired to prevent action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, until it was too late to prevent the Mass Migration of 2093 and the inundation of the world’s great coastal cities. But first, she has to introduce a few old concepts and terms that may no longer be familiar to her audience:
Bridge to renewables
The logical fallacy, popular in the first decades of the 21st century, that the problem of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil-fuel combustion could be solved by burning more fossil fuels, particularly natural gas. The fallacy rested on an incomplete analysis, which considered only the physical byproducts of combustion, particularly in electricity generation, and not the other factors that controlled overall energy use and net release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Cryosphere
The portions of the Earth’s surface, including glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice and permafrost on land, that used to be frozen.
Environment
The archaic concept which, separating humans from the rest of the world, identified the nonhuman component as something that carried particular aesthetic, recreational or biological value (see environmental protection). Sometimes the “natural” environment was distinguished from the “built” environment, contributing to the difficulty that 20th-century humans had in recognizing and admitting the pervasive and global extent of their impact. Radical thinkers, such as Paul Ehrlich as well as Dennis and Donella Meadows (a 20th-century husband-and-wife team), recognized that humans are part of their environment and dependent upon it, and that its value was more than aesthetic and recreational; that the natural world was essential for human employment, growth, prosperity and health. These arguments were commonly disparaged, but the idea of environmental protection contained at least partial recognition of this point.
Environmental protection
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External costs
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Fugitive emissions
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Human adaptive optimism
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Invisible hand
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Market failure
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Physical scientists
The practitioners in a network of scientific disciplines derived from the 18th-century natural philosophy movement. Overwhelmingly male, they emphasized study of the world’s physical constituents and processes — the elements and compounds; atomic, magnetic and gravitational forces; chemical reactions; flows of air and water — to the neglect of biological and social realms, and focused on reductionist methodologies that impeded understanding of the crucial interactions between the physical, biological and social realms.
Sink
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Statistical significance
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Type I error
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Type II error
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