The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

covered in black grime, hands and clothing stained orange from an acidic creek full of chemical leachate.¹⁷⁶ Coal mining also releases trapped methane, a powerful greenhouse gas and even more powerful explosive inside subterranean mines. Several thousand coal miners are killed each year in China.

Coal is worse than oil and much worse than natural gas when it comes to emissions of greenhouse gas, because its carbon content is the highest of all fossil fuels. To produce an equivalent amount of useful energy, burned coal unleashes roughly twice as much carbon dioxide as burned natural gas. It also releases a host of irritating or toxic air pollutants, including sulfur dioxide (SO₂), nitrogen oxides (NO and NO₂), particulates, and mercury. It makes acid rain. If converted to a liquid, it releases 150% more carbon dioxide than oil fuels. To people hoping to bring our escalating release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere under control, coal is Public Enemy Number One.

As my University of California colleague Catherine Gautier writes, “Were it not for its environmental impact, coal would be the obvious choice to replacing oil.”¹⁷⁷ From a geological perspective, there will be no scarcity of the stuff anytime before 2100.¹⁷⁸ And therein is the problem: From nearly all model projections, coal is slated to replace oil. By the year 2030 its consumption in the United States is projected to rise nearly 40% over 2010 levels. In China, which already burns twice as much coal as the United States, consumption is projected to nearly double.

Other than banning the stuff, the only thin hope lying between this future and a giant upward lurch in the atmosphere’s greenhouse gas concentrations is something called Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), often called “clean coal” technology. There’s no such thing as clean coal, but CCS does appear technically possible and, at first blush, alluringly simple: Rather than send carbon dioxide up the smokestacks of coal-burning power plants, use chemical scrubbers to capture it, compress it to a high-pressure liquid, then pipe the liquid someplace else to pump deep underground. Oil companies already use a similar process to force more petroleum out of declining oil fields. Successful pilot demonstrations of CCS technology are under way in Norway, Sweden, and Wyoming, the longest running for more than a decade without mishap.

The main problem with CCS is one of scale, and therefore cost. First, the “capture” process consumes energy itself, requiring significantly bigger plants burning even more coal to generate the same quantity of electricity. Second, a vast network of pipelines is needed to transport staggering volumes of liquid CO₂ away from the power plants to suitable burial sites (abandoned oil fields or deep, salty aquifers). The United States alone produces about 1.5 billion tons of CO₂ per year from coal-fired power plants. Capturing and storing just 60% of that means burying twenty million barrels of liquid per day—about the same as the country’s entire consumption of oil.¹⁷⁹ Small pilot demonstrations are one thing, but a demonstration of CCS at the scale of even one full-sized power plant has yet to be attempted. FutureGen, the only proposed prototype, was scrapped in 2008 when its estimated cost swelled to $1.8 billion (the project has since been revived). Finally, there are no guarantees that the stuff won’t leak back out to the atmosphere. A leakage rate of just 1% per year would lead to 63% of the stored carbon dioxide being released within a century, undoing much of the supposed environmental benefit.¹⁸⁰

Carbon Capture and Storage has become a commonly accepted bullet point among proponents of coal, as if all of the above problems have somehow been worked out. Politicians and many scientists have dutifully lined up behind it. It figures prominently in all of our biggest blueprints for reducing greenhouse gases, including model scenarios of the Stern Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the International Energy Agency projections outlined above. CCS is embraced by Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown, and other leaders of the G8. It is the single strand of hope upon which a thunderous increase in carbon emissions from our coming coal boom might possibly be restrained.

I’m not holding my breath.

CHAPTER 4 California Browning, Shanghai Drowning

“Behold, he withholdeth the waters, and they dry up: also he sendeth them out, and they overturn the earth.”

—Job 12:15

In January 2008, the U.S. state of Iowa was on the front pages of newspapers all around the world. Ninety-four thousand voters of the Iowa Democratic Party had just propelled Barack Obama—a freshman Illinois senator who was virtually unknown just two years earlier—over the longtime national front-runner, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. The Iowa caucuses are the first major electoral event in the U.S. presidential race and are widely believed to influence its outcome. Iowa’s voters had delivered a stunning upset and the opening salvo of one of the most exciting and protracted primary battles in U.S. electoral history. Little did they know that only five months later, their state would be on the front pages of newspapers around the world once again.

Within weeks after the political campaigns had left for other battles in other states, the snow started to fall. Two big storms dumped more than three feet of it around the little town of Oskaloosa. By March, Iowa had tied its third-highest monthly snowfall total in 121 years of record keeping. Then came the rain. April’s statewide average was the second-highest in 136 years. Twelve inches deluged the town of Fayette, obliterating its previous record of eight inches set back in 1909.¹⁸¹ Snowmelt and water ran everywhere, flooding cornfields and swelling streams and rivers. On May 25, a category F5 tornado—the strongest category of tornado and Iowa’s first F5 in forty years—leveled a forty-mile swath through tiny Parkersburg, killing eight people, destroying hundreds of homes, and narrowly missing populous Cedar Falls. President George W. Bush declared four counties federal disaster areas and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) dispatched thirty-nine relief workers to the state.¹⁸² Forty-eight other tornados followed in the month of June, killing four Boy Scouts and raising the state’s tornado fatalities to its highest since 1968.

Then things got nasty. The wettest fifteen days in Iowa history began on May 29. Global food prices soared as farm fields in America’s top state producer of corn and soybeans melted away in the rain. In Cedar Rapids, thirteen hundred city blocks were inundated when the Cedar River leapt its banks and climbed eleven feet higher than had ever happened in the city’s 159-year existence. In Iowa City, parts of the University of Iowa campus were underwater. When I arrived in mid-July the university’s magnificent arts buildings and museum were trashed. Cedar Rapids was piled high with gutted wood, dead cars, and molding drywall. A train dangled crazily from a crushed bridge into the river. The little farming town of Oakville was simply wiped off the map—its former green fields cratered or buried in sand by the flood. There was nothing left but wrecked homes and fields, with plumes of black smoke rising from piles of burning wreckage.

By August, eighty-five of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties had been declared federal disasters. FEMA’s response team had grown from thirty-nine to fifteen hundred. Two million acres of the world’s finest farmland had lost twenty tons or more of topsoil per acre; six hundred thousand acres of bottomland were simply scoured away. ¹⁸³ The statewide damage estimates had swelled to $10 billion—roughly $3,500 for every man, woman, and child in Iowa—and would later go even higher. By 2009 damage estimates to the University of Iowa alone were approaching one billion dollars.¹⁸⁴ Forty thousand Iowans—almost half the number of voters who in January helped send Barack Obama to the White House—had been displaced from their homes.

Meanwhile, six states and eighteen hundred miles to the west, a very different water-related disaster was unfolding. On June 4, 2008—right in the middle of those wettest fifteen days of Iowa history—Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger strode to a podium in Sacramento to declare an official state of drought in California, the largest total producer of agricultural products in the United States.

Conditions in the Golden State had deteriorated rapidly in an already dry decade. The year before, rainfall in Southern California had been 80% below average. Statewide snowpack and rainfall levels were so low that farmers had begun abandoning their crops. By October, the extreme dryness had fueled a series of vicious wildfires, killing