Can we shift to renewable energy? Yes. As to how …

[one...two...tree 2,762]

We will need fossil fuels like oil and gas for the foreseeable future. So there's really little choice (sigh). We have to press ahead with fracking for natural gas. We must approve the Keystone XL pipeline to get Canadian oil.

This mantra, repeated on TV ads and in political debates, is punctuated with a tinge of inevitability and regret. But, increasingly, scientific research and the experience of other countries should prompt us to ask: To what extent will we really "need" fossil fuel in the years to come? To what extent is it a choice?

I don't know Elisabeth Rosenthal, but I could kiss her for this. Herpiece in the Sunday New York Times is one of the few I've ever seen in the mainstream media to take the aspirations of climate hawks seriously, at least seriously enough to consider the possibility of a clean energy system an open question. Just by doing that, she bucks the defeatist conventional wisdom being peddled by her colleague Joe Nocera and dozens of other journalists and pundits. So yay for her!

It might seem like a small thing, but it's not. The most potent weapon in the hands of status-quo defenders is an aura of inevitability: We're stuck with fossil fuels for the rest of the century whether we like it or not; it's impossible to change any faster. That aura is an enormous advantage, but it's fairly brittle. Once rapid, positive change becomes (or becomes seen as) a live possibility, the question shifts from "can we do it?" to "should we do it?" "We can't do it" — always delivered in a tone of world-weary realism — becomes "we shouldn't do it," which is much more difficult to defend. When people get the sense that a better future for their children is possible, is real, is there for the taking, they are willing to fight and sacrifice for it, in a way that few will for a lost cause.

So Rosenthal is cracking the door. It almost doesn't matter what's in the rest of her piece (though you should read it). It's enough that she throws the conventional wisdom open to challenge.

The two sides arguing in Rosenthal's piece will be familiar to anyone who follows this area. On the "we can do it" side are folks like Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford University and Mark A. Delucchi of the University of California, who most recently put out a study [PDF] showing that New York could power itself entirely with renewables by 2050. On the other side is a consultant who points out that "the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow" (seriously — kill me) and an economist who warns that a rapid transition to renewables will be "complicated and costly" (as if maintaining thecurrent power system is not complicated and costly!).

I want to put aside the specific disputes and make a larger point. It strikes me — not for the first time — that those who disagree over whether we can transition to renewables quickly are not really having a disagreement over technology, though the argument is often phrased in those terms.

Think about it this way. If you want to change the U.S. energy system, there are several levers you can pull on. You can improve clean-energy technology and make it cheaper. You can change people's behaviors and expectations. You can change laws and regulations. Or you can change the way value is assessed. So, using shorthand, these are technological, behavioral, political, and economic change.

To achieve a fully renewable energy system will require some of all these. Most disputes in this area amount to disagreements over how much of these various kinds of change are possible.

What reports like Jacobson and Delucchi's show is that it would be possible to achieve a fully renewable system without substantial technological change, as long as there is substantial social, economic, and political change. In other words, they show how you can hold one lever steady and still achieve your goals by pulling harder on the other ones.

That's what Jacobson means when he tells Rosenthal, "You could power America with renewables from a technical and economic standpoint. The biggest obstacles are social and political — what you need is the will to do it." (More on the "and economic" part of that in my nerdy addendum at the bottom.)

This kind of talk drives some people crazy. They think it downplays the mind-boggling scale of the challenge. They think it lures people into a false sense of security and in particular makes them sanguine about the (abysmal) state of clean energy innovation. "Wake up! We really do need better technology!" they cry.

Which is fine. But let's be clear: The fulcrum of the dispute here is not technology itself. The U.S. could switch to 100 percent renewables, relatively quickly, if we were willing to undertake the enormous upheaval and expense. Imagine WWII levels of mobilization, or larger, sustained over a decade or two.

http://grist.org/cli...aign=socialflow

[^_^ 5,021]

The US can be the next Saudi Arabia, awash in oil money. Our children and their children can grow up in a nation as opulent as Norway or Bahrain are today.

But to do that, we first have to get the greenies out of the way.