cc >> Bassam Shakashiri: I'm the
director of the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy
and, of course, professor of chemistry here.
I'm very proud to tell you this is my 42nd year as a faculty
member here a long with my colleague Hans Reich over here,
and Tom is the third person who's been here for 42 years.
Tom, are you here? We welcome you this afternoon to
a very special presentation and a conversation by the
editor-in-chief of Chemical & Engineering News, Rudy Baum.
Rudy told me when I picked him up at the airport this is the
first time he's been in Madison. That surprised me.
So we're not letting you go for a while, Rudy.
We're going to keep you here so that you get to share, so we get
to share with you the huge benefits that UW Madison offers,
not only in chemistry and all the chemical sciences but to the
culture of Wisconsin and to the culture of the nation, the
culture of the world. Rudy's talk, as you know and see
on the screen there, is entitled Sustainable Growth is an
Oxymoron. I want to say a few things about
Rudy briefly because you're in for a very special treat.
Rudy's been editor of Chemical & Engineering News and has been at
C&E News for a long time, almost 30 years.
He got his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Duke University,
then enrolled at Georgetown University, and one day in his
first year at Georgetown University he answered an ad in
the classified section of the local newspaper.
The ad turned out to be from ACS and joined ACS in the education
division. And the next thing he shared
with me as we were driving from the airport is that when he was
at ACS in the education division, one day he saw an ad
on a bulletin board, a 3x5 card in which they were looking for
somebody to work in Chemical & Engineering News, and he applied
for that too and got the job. Rudy is a very thoughtful and
provocative individual. He takes full advantage of the
platform that he has helped shape as editor-in-chief of
Chemical & Engineering News in addressing very important
societal issues. Issues that are very much
related to the role of science, in our case the chemical
sciences, in society. He is a person who I am very
proud to be associated with him. As president-elect of the
American Chemical Society and as a long-time member, a 50-year
member of ACS, I have thoroughly enjoyed his editorials and the
other parts of C&E News that he has contributed to.
I haven't always agreed with him, but that is part of the
significant role that Rudy provides to all of us.
And Rudy is a very, very thoughtful person, as I have
said already. We all know, here's last week's
issue of C&E News. Most of us now look at it
electronically because I still like this one because I can
carry it around and show it. Here's last week's issue.
I can't show you this week's issue because it's only on the
web so far. So I want to show you very
briefly a couple of slides that relate to why Rudy is in town
here. He is, of course, to share with
us what his title deals with, but I want to show you very
briefly the theme that I have selected for the ACS during my
presidential year 2012. Advancing chemistry,
communicating chemistry. Advancing chemistry, we do that
through research, through education, through innovation.
And communicating chemistry we do in a variety of ways.
In the scientific literature, we do it so well as we speak to
each other and relate to each other.
When it comes to communicating with nonspecialists, we have a
long way to go. And it is essential for us to
consider the awesome responsibility that we have as
members of a learned society, as members of a scientific society,
as members of an educational society to communicate our
science to everyone in society. Well, everyone means there are
different audiences that we have to deal with.
And I'm very proud to tell you or very happy to tell you that
at UW Madison this semester, along with Ron Seely, the
well-known science and environmental reporter for
Chemical & Engineering, it was for the Wisconsin State Journal,
sorry, Ron, we're offering a course to graduate students and
postdocs that deal with the communication of science to the
general public. So you've had a chance to look
at this slide and I'm going to change it very quickly, but
before I do, I'd like to point out to you the all important
mission statement of ACS. To advance the broader chemistry
enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and its
people. A very powerful statement.
And its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and its people.
I'd like everyone to think about this.
In fact, my goal is that if I call you up at 3:00 in the
morning or somebody calls you at 3:00 in the morning and says to
you what is the mission of the ACS, you'd be able to say this
without having to look it up. We should feel it in our bones.
As we continue our journey in advancing our knowledge and
helping society appreciate what chemical sciences are all about.
I also want to mention to you that Rudy is a very important
member of the third initiative. I've appointed a working group
that aims to help the public understand the science of
climate change, and Rudy, along with seven other people, is a
member of that working group. Actually, he's a consultant to
the working group. Because he's an ACS employee, he
cannot be a full member of the working, but he is as good as
being a full member. So share this with you and then
the last thing I'd like to say before Rudy is to remind the
graduate students in the audience and the mentors of the
graduate students in the audience of the activity that
the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy has launched.
And it is to invite all PhD chemistry candidates to include
a chapter in your PhD thesis explaining the hard work and the
discoveries that you made, explaining them to your mother,
to your grandfather, to a member of the family, to our elected
officials, to the program officers who supported the
research that we do. So I call that to your
attention. I also call to your attention
that if you do that, you get a $500 cash award.
It's not only to the first 10, we're beyond 10.
So those of you in the audience who would like to take advantage
of that, please do so. And those of you in the audience
who would like to see what the chapters look like, just go to
our website, scifun.org, and you'll see the full
listing of these chapters already there.
So what I'd like to do now is present to you Rudy.
So Rudy would you come up here please because I have a couple
of mementos for you from your visit to Madison.
Here's a Science is Fun button that I would like you to have.
And because of the thoughtfulness and the great
service that you do to us, I would like to present you with
this replica of the famous University of Wisconsin sifting
and winnowing plaque, and I'll read it to you.
It's a quotation. It goes like this,
"Whatever may be the limitations which trammel
inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University
of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and
fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth
can be found." This is posted on the side wall
of our Bascom Hall, and it really, those words exemplify to
me, Rudy, what you do with Chemical & Engineering News and
what you do as a responsible member of the American Chemical
Society. So this is for you, Rudy.
Thank you very much. >> And ladies and gentlemen,
Rudy Baum. [APPLAUSE]
At the conclusion of the talk, you're all invited
to a reception in the atrium to visit with Rudy and further have
more conversation. So, Rudy Baum.
Rudy Baum: Thank you for that really lovely introduction.
Before I actually start my formal talk/comments, Bassam
mentioned that he doesn't always agree with what I write and
that's fine. It doesn't ever bother me that
people don't agree with something that I've written in
an editorial in C&EN. One of the things that confounds
me, though, is when people write letters saying that there
shouldn't be anything in the magazine about policy issues or
public policy or we shouldn't be taking a position on a question
of a controversial law or something.
I find that just very astounding that in this day and age when so
many of the crucial issues facing us involve science and
technology and have a huge component of science and
technology. It's part of the reason why we
do not do as well as we should. And addressing them is the fact
that not enough scientists are really communicating with the
public about, I think, scientific issues and the public
is not really very good at understanding them.
So it is kind of interesting to me.
But one of those issues is the topic of my talk tonight:
Sustainable Growth is an Oxymoron.
I want to discuss today sustainability from a number of
perspectives, especially in the context of the topic of climate
change that I think is going to affect our lives significantly
and dramatically in the coming years.
I don't have a lot of slides but as Bill McKibben observes in
this book "Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet,"
many politicians and other policymakers talk about climate
change as something that's going to happen in the future.
They discuss global warming as something that's going to affect
future generations unless we do something about it now.
That's not really the case. Climate change is occurring
right now. It's not a problem for our
children and our grandchildren. It's a problem for us.
I suspect that there are some people in this room that do not
think that climate change is the greatest challenge facing
humanity in the 21st century. And I suspect there are also
some people here who don't think that human activity is
responsible for the climate change that, in fact, is
occurring. I hope there isn't anyone who
doesn't think that climate change is happening.
Numerous studies indicate that Earth's temperature has, in
fact, increased by about 1 degree C since 1950.
Climate change skeptics have challenged those studies on a
whole variety of grounds. It's interesting, Richard
Muller, a physics professor at UC Berkeley and something of a
climate change skeptic himself, founded the Berkeley Earth
Surface Temperature project to assess those questions.
And interestingly, when I was in O'Hare today waiting for my
connection to Madison, I got an email from one of my assistant
managing editors and Muller is actually presenting, he's not
testifying before a hearing in Congress because he's actually
presenting it at a briefing because the democrats don't
control the house, of course, so he can only be at a briefing,
not a hearing, but he's actually presenting the results of the
BEST, it's the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project,
acronym is BEST, presenting it today at Congress.
He has four papers that are now out for peer review, but the
conclusion of their work, and they analyzed data from 39,000
unique stations around the world, and their conclusion is
that all the previous studies that do show that 1 degree C
increase in Earth's surface temperature are, in fact,
accurate and that the variety of criticisms like the heat island
effect and the poor placement of the temperature stations, in
fact, are not valid criticism, that temperature change is real.
In fact, the terms climate change and global warming may be
somewhat misleading. At a forum on international
collaboration in science and technology, John Holdren, who is
President Obama's science advisor, said global warming is
a dangerous misnomer. It suggests that the changes are
uniform, primarily about temperature, global, excuse me,
gradual and likely benign. None of these are true.
What we should be calling the phenomenon, he told that forum,
is global climate disruption.
The fact is most people know that we're disrupting the
climate. As is so often the case, Garry
Trudeau is incomparable at capturing what's really going
on. And this, by the way, you read,
it's a little screwy, it's down the left side and then down the
right side. In this cartoon from a few weeks
ago, NPR's All Things Being Equal host Mark Slackmeyer
is introducing an honest businessman.
Here, he's saying--
Well, you can see what he's saying.
The scientific case for global warming is overwhelming and it
grows daily. Only a moron would deny it.
He opposes good policies because I care much more about my
short-term economic interests than the future of the damn
planet. Hello.
The Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago ran an op-ed piece by
a person named Robert Bryce entitled "Five Truths About
Climate Change." Bryce is a senior fellow at the
Manhattan Institute which describes itself, and I'm
quoting here from its website, "As working to develop new ideas
that foster greater economic choice and individual
responsibility." I think it's fair to translate
that into right-wing think tank. I've listed Bryce's five truths
here. He concludes his essay: It's
time to move the debate past the dogmatic view that carbon
dioxide is evil and twirl it toward a world view that accepts
the need for energy that is cheap, abundant and reliable.
As I wrote in an editorial in C&EN recently, this isn't
climate denial, it's climate change indifference.
This is the illustration that accompanied Bryce's op-ed piece.
There is something deeply and disturbingly revealing about the
attitude of Bryce, the Manhattan Institute and the Wall Street
Journal's editorial page toward the Earth in this illustration.
The Earth is depicted here not as the planet that sustains us,
it is instead a wailing baby crying out for its bottle of oil
and coal to feed the smokestacks that sprout from its head while
hapless parents try to placate its hunger with windmills.
The arrogance behind this illustration is almost
incomprehensible to me. I'm sure many of you are
familiar with this plot of the concentration of atmospheric CO2
at 3,000 meters on Mauna Loa. It's called the Keeling Curve
after Charles David Keeling, the man who made most of the
measurements on here. He received his PhD in
geochemistry in the early 1950s from Northwestern University.
He began measuring CO2 in the mid-50s as a postdoc at Cal Tech
in places like Big Sur and Pasadena.
He took a job at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in
1956 and started measuring CO2 on Mauna Loa as well as a number
of other places including Antarctica in 1958.
He ran out of funding, actually, in the '60s for the places other
than Mauna Loa, but he was actually able to keep the
funding throughout his lifetime. He died a couple of years ago.
This is a truly remarkable data set.
To me it is the antidote to the arrogance of the illustration I
just showed you from the Wall Street Journal.
The Keeling Curve shows that the concentration of atmospheric CO2
is rising. This isn't, and it really
shouldn't have been at the time, surprising.
No one had measured it before. But given the amount of fossil
fuel that was being burned, a simple mass balance analysis
guarantees the observed increase over time.
The only thing in doubt, actually, is the slope of the
line because they didn't understand then, and we still
don't have a perfect understanding of the role of the
oceans in absorbing the carbon dioxide that we're putting into
the atmosphere. What's truly remarkable about
this plot, to me, is it shows that the Earth breathes
one breath per year. Each decrease in CO2 is an
inhalation. Each increase, an exhalation.
Keeling understood what he was seeing immediately.
Because the majority of the Earth's land mass is in the
northern hemisphere, there are more plants in the northern
hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere.
In the spring and summer, these plants are absorbing CO2 as they
grow and produce leaves and get bigger.
In the fall and winter, the leaves fall and decompose.
So we have inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.
One of the most unnerving aspects of global climate change
for the human psyche to absorb is that it drives home with
absolute finality that the Earth is finite.
I know that sounds obvious, but people have never behaved as if
the Earth was finite. They have behaved as if Earth
and its resources, the environment itself, were
infinite and that human activity could have no discernible impact
on it. The Keeling Curve doesn't
demonstrate that climate is changing.
It simply provides the evidence that supports the most obvious
mechanism to account for the global warming that has
occurred. It does show, in two very
concrete ways, that Earth's atmosphere is finite and can be
impacted by the biosphere. Humans account for the increase,
plants account for this periodicity.
And by the way, there is no question that the increase is
due to burning fossil fuels. The isotopic signature of the
CO2 proves that definitively. If Earth is finite, then by
definition so is our capacity to produce and consume.
Yet we live within a socioeconomic system that is
predicated on endless growth. The rate of growth, in
population and economic activity, went exponential about
200 years ago with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.
We call it the Industrial Revolution but it was really a
revolution based on the extraction of fossil fuels from
Earth and their use to power machines and eventually generate
electricity. Civilization as we know it
depends entirely on burning fossilized sunshine cheaply.
Because that's what fossil fuels are.
They're the fossils of dead plants and dinosaurs but those
flora and fauna were just the machines that converted hundreds
of millions of years of sunshine into compounds buried in the
Earth waiting for us to extract them.
We burned the fossil fuels on the cheap because we treated the
atmosphere as a free dumping ground for the waste products of
combustion, primarily CO2. We treated the atmosphere, in
fact, as an open sewer, the same way for a very long time we
treated our waterways. The insidious thing about CO2 is
that it doesn't stink or make us sick the way water pollution and
other forms of air pollution do. Eventually, humanity was going
to hit a wall, a wall that told us that a system based on
endless growth was not sustainable on a finite planet.
What seemed obvious was that at some point we were going to use
up the Earth's reserves of fossil fuels.
In the case of petroleum, some experts believe that we've
already reached what's called peak oil, the point at which
we've extracted half of all the petroleum on Earth and that
supplies are inevitably going to decline.
Whether or not we've actually reached peak oil or not, we've
certainly reach the peak oil that's reasonably easy to
extract from the Earth. If that weren't the case, why
are we drilling in 5,000 feet of water through 13,000 more feet
of rock as we were in the Gulf of Mexico in the Macondo Field
that resulted in the BP oil well disaster?
If we haven't, why are we contemplating drilling in the
Arctic Ocean with all the incredible risks that go along
with that? Or contemplating drilling in two
miles of water through 15,000 feet of rock off the cost of
Brazil. Why are we contemplating
building a pipeline from Alberta to the Gulf Coast of the United
States to bring heavy, sour, crude to be refined in the Gulf
Coast refineries. It turns out that it doesn't
look the availability of fossil fuels is going to be the wall
that puts a limit to growth on a finite planet.
Climate change, global warming, global climate disruption, call
it what you will, is going to be the wall that's going to be that
wall. There are enough fossil fuel
resources left on Earth for us to keep the economic engines
that have powered 200 years of exponential growth going for
another 100 to 200 years, but the climate isn't going to let
us do that. But an aside.
There's enough fossil fuels for us to continue in business as
usual mode for some time. But at what cost?
Even leaving climate change aside.
We have no idea what the long-term environmental impact
of the BP oil spill is. We're blasting the tops off of
mountains in West Virginia to get at the coal that's buried
under them, and in the process destroying hundreds of miles
pristine streams and despoiling hundreds of square miles of
landscape essentially forever. How much of our environment are
we willing to degrade to satisfy our addiction to fossil fuels?
The fact is that eventually we're going to have to learn how
to live off the sun in real time.
And that's not going to be easy. Fossil fuels aren't just
fossilized sunshine, they're concentrated fossilized
sunshine. McKibben claims in "Eaarth."
that one barrel of oil, and I think this is right,
yields as much energy as 25,000 hours of human manual labor.
More than a decade of human labor per barrel.
The average American uses 25 barrels per year which, he
writes, is like finding 300 years of free labor annually.
To live off the sun in real time we're going to have to make some
changes. We're going to have to slow
down, and we're going to have to get a lot smarter.
Slowing down will involve making the wrenching transition to an
economic system that is not predicated on growth.
I don't know what that system looks like.
In my mind, it's something that I call a high tech subsistence
economy in which consumption is no longer the sine qua non of
success. And we're going to have to make
the transition to living off the sun in real time, we're not
going to make that transition a year or two or even a decade or
two. In the mean time, we're going to
have to go through a transition where we still burn fossil fuels
but hopefully burn them more cleanly during a time where we
probably build more nuclear power plants and learn how to
deal with the waste that's leftover afterward and during
which time we adapt to a changed and disrupted climate.
As Holdren pointed out at that policy forum, humanity has three
options in the face of climate change: mitigation, adaptation
and suffering. We're already doing some of
each, he said, what's up for grabs is the ultimate mix of the
three. Mitigation can't work alone
because the climate is already changing and is going to
continue to change regardless of what we do starting tomorrow.
We will have to adapt to an altered climate.
We are already adapting whether we acknowledge it or not.
The new flood walls surrounding New Orleans are, in fact, an
adaptation to climate change. And unless humans are able to
limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees C on average,
which at this point is very much in question, the suffering that
humanity faces is going to be severe.
What roll does chemistry and the chemistry enterprise play in
this? We don't call it the central
science without good reason. And in the world of a changing
disrupted climate and an evolving economic system,
chemistry will take on an even more important role than it has
in today's society and economy. Green chemistry and green
engineering will obviously play an important role in creating
more sustainable manufacturing practices.
It's already having an impact. Last year I interviewed Paul
Anastas who is the deputy administrator at EPA for the
Office of R&D, and he is also one of the fathers of green
chemistry and engineering. And he said to me, my vision for
the future of the Office of R&D includes a recognition that the
goal of sustainability is our true north, that scientific and
technological innovation is essential to the success of our
mission, that we need to couple our excellence and problem
assessment with an equal excellence in solving problems,
and that we must act with a sense of urgency.
In our interview, however, Paul also referred to a speech that
administrator Lisa Jackson had given in which she said it's
time to put to rest the notion that economic growth and
environmental protection are incompatible.
It's time to finally dismiss this false choice.
That's a comforting notion. But it's really not one that's
any longer true. Sustainable economic growth, as
in the title of my talk, is an oxymoron.
We live on a finite planet. We have to learn how to have a
healthy economy that doesn't depend on endless growth.
And it should go without saying that a critical component of
such a society is one with a stable global population.
Of course, green chemistry and engineering don't address the
energy challenge that is at the heart of climate change.
Learning to live off the sun in real time is a challenge that
must be addressed by chemistry and the chemistry enterprise.
We're doing it now but not nearly enough is being done and
it's not being done with the sense of urgency that is
required. We need to develop, over the
next few decades, mechanisms for the large scale conversion of
sunlight into electricity and liquid fuels needed to power our
society. We need batteries and other new
technologies to store massive amounts of electrical energy
generated by variable sources such as solar and wind power.
These are all challenges that fall under the category of
mitigation of climate change. They are mechanisms to head off
the worst aspects of the worst case scenarios of climate
change. Chemistry and related
disciplines will also be called on to contribute to the
inevitable adaptation that humans will have to adopt in the
face of a changing climate. We will need crops that tolerate
higher temperatures and survive on less water.
We will need new herbicides and insecticides to deal with pests
that are migrating in a changing climate.
We will need new pharmaceuticals.
Chemistry, in fact, is the science that will be called on
to preserve really any semblance of the quality of life that
we've come to depend on and accept as our due.
Are we up to this task? Certainly chemists around the
world are making important contributions on all of these
fronts. As the editor of C&EN, I've
visited chemistry departments and I'm continually impressed,
sometimes amazed, with the vigor and enthusiasm that people like
you are bringing to their work. I have talked for many years
about chemistry both as a core discipline and as an enabling
science. And it is as an enabling science
that chemistry is going to be called on to contribute to the
mitigation and adaptation of climate change that's going to
be happening in the coming years.
I see chemists working increasingly in
multidisciplinary teams with biologists, physicists, material
scientists, physicians, engineers and others in focused
research that is leading to new drugs, new materials, new
catalysts and new processes to meet the ultimate goal of a
truly sustainable economy. On the other hand, climate
scientists like Jim Hansen and Stephen Schneider have been
warning about the growing threat of global warming for at least
25 years. And to tell you the truth, we've
done almost nothing to change the disastrous course we're on
in terms of the use of fossil fuels.
Chemical scientists are optimistic about what they can
invent and create to help with the mitigation of and adaptation
to climate change, but not nearly enough is being done.
There is no political will to solve this problem, in this
country especially because solving it requires sacrifice
and almost no one, especially here in the United States, is
willing to ask humans to sacrifice.
This is the cover of a book, a novel, by James Howard Kunstler
that I learned of by reading Bill McKibben's "Eaarth."
It's a dystopian fable of a world some number of years from
now, a world that has drastically changed climate and
a complete breakdown in the social order.
It is a world in which the machine age has ended and major
forms of energy are once again human and animal muscle power.
It is, literally, "A World Made By Hand."
Is this a likely scenario for our future?
Probably not. But it's not out of the
question. James Lovelock, the originator
of the Gaia hypothesis, has a much more dire view of where
Earth is headed in the face of climate change than the one that
Kunstler has. Lovelock predicted some two or
three years ago that by 2100 there would be 500 million
people on Earth. As you know, there are about
7 billion, we just crossed that threshold a couple of weeks ago,
and that would be a cataclysm of just unimaginable proportions,
and yet Lovelock has been right about a number of things.
And if you've read Jared Diamond's book "Collapse," he
shows very clearly how complex societies can implode almost
overnight, especially in the face of rapid environmental
changes.
I'm not as pessimistic about humanity's future as Kunstler.
Humans are amazingly adaptable and amazingly creative.
But cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels burned without any
concern for their impact on climate has allowed humans, and
let's be frank about this, allowed humans to be stupid
about the way we've developed our civilization.
We have no choice but to get smarter.
And we have to do it very quickly.
I think it's up to scientists to lead this charge and to lead it
in two ways. One, by doing the science that
they do by making the kinds of advances that the world needs to
address this incredibly important question.
But at least as importantly as vocal advocates for changing the
path that we're on. Not enough people with the
creditability for scientists have taken up this cause with
the passion it deserves. We're talking about the future
of the Earth, and because scientists know that this
problem is real and serious and can explain that the arguments
of those who deny that it is real and serious are specious.
We haven't always been known as scientists.
I learned one day driving home listening to NPR's Real Science
Friday that scientist is a word with a definite origin.
It was coined in 1834 by Cambridge University historian
and philosopher William Yule. The older term for people
pursuing scientific activities was natural philosopher, and in
Yule's view that term was too wide and too lofty.
Perhaps natural philosopher is too wide and too lofty a term to
describe people who do science. However, I think we may have
given up something when we abandon natural philosopher for
scientist. It isolated us to some extent,
allowed us to retreat into pursuing scientific inquiry for
its own sake and in doing so, cuts science off from humanities
and scientists off, to some extent, from their
responsibilities as citizens. I don't know whether anything we
do can change the course that we're on, but I think we have to
try. If scientists are the ones who
know that global climate change will be a human tragedy of yet
undefined proportions and we do nothing about it, what does that
say about us? And why should society continue
to support us? What, in fact, is the role of
the scientist citizen? And I'm not going to try and
answer that, but it's something that I hope all of you will give
some thought to. I'm not saying that we should go
back to calling ourselves natural philosophers.
I am saying that scientists, especially chemists, who are
among the most practical of scientists, must become much
more involved in this most important challenge and issue
facing us today. Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]