Part One:
HOW CAN WE STORE RENEWABLE ENERGY, SO WE CAN USE IT EVEN WHEN THE SUN ISN’T SHINING?
Our first guest is Philip Warburg, environmental lawyer and former president of the Conservation Law Foundation. Okay, let’s say we produce our energy from renewable sources (non-fossil-fuels), such us solar, wind and water. These sources are intermittent, not uniformly available year-round. Where do we store this energy, so it’s available for us to use on days (or weeks) when the sun isn’t shining, when the wind isn’t blowing?
A few non-battery storage sources are available, but technology has not yet reduced their cost to a level that we can use broadly. On the other hand, lithium-ion batteries are already part of our lives: they power our smartphones, tablets, and even some electric cars. Lithium-ion batteries are compact, scalable, and responsive (you can access the stored energy quickly when you want it).
But they also have a down-side. They’re not efficient at higher temperatures (so we would have to use some energy just to cool the batteries). They can only be recharged a limited number of times before they have to be replaced. And there is a risk of fire/explosions! Think about the recent problems with Samsung smartphones and Tesla automobiles. Obviously, these problems will have to be resolved before we can rely on Lithium-ion batteries to store the energy we get from renewable sources.
An alternative would be to use batteries made from different types of metals, or with solid-state technology, or gels. For any option, our society would have to invest a lot of money in order to reach the goal of storing energy efficiently and affordably. Some private R&D is already taking place, and the federal and some state governments have allocated small amounts to the research. But to achieve the vision, we’ll all have to think more expansively, like Pres. Kennedy did when he made a national commitment to putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
Part Two:
FARMERS WORKING TO STOP CLIMATE CHANGE? YES, IT’S POSSIBLE, AND BETO HAS BEGUN THE CONVERSATION.
We speak with Matt Russell, an Iowa farmer and the executive director of Iowa Interfaith Power & Light, an organization that invites farmers to join — and even to lead — the efforts to find solutions to climate change. Like all of us, farmers sometimes prefer to ignore the elephant in the room, to avoid even mentioning the climate issue.
Enter Beto O’Rourke, newly announced presidential candidate. Beto saw an article about Iowa farmers in the New York Times. He was impressed, and he called Matt and other Iowa farmers. Beto and the farmers sat down and discussed their ideas and concerns. They talked about farmers’ lives and livelihoods, and how they are affected by climate issues ranging from droughts to floods to the high cost that farmers would incur if they changed their choice of crops, pest-control, pricing and marketing in an era of huge global supply-chain corporations.
After listening to the farmers, Beto quickly changed his stated policy recommendations. His enlightenment was soon picked up by most of the other democratic candidates for president.
At the same time, the farmers could see that their viewpoint was being addressed. They weren’t being treated as the villain, just one part of the problem like everyone else. They welcomed the opportunity to help lead the country and the world in finding solutions to the climate change crisis.
Through their life’s work, farmers have gained crucial knowledge and experience. They’ve thought about ideas for potential changes that can help the environment while at the same time adding value to their farming productivity. So one thing that Beto and others have recognized is that we should pay farmers for their agricultural expertise and efforts. We must apply human ingenuity to create change, but society should pay farmers for their ideas.
Another part of the climate solution should include incentivizing farmers to *capture carbon*. What does this mean? Environmentalists, scientists and world leaders are now talking about reducing our carbon emissions. That is, of course, necessary; but it is not sufficient. We won’t be able to reach our climate change goals in time, if we do nothing more than reduce our carbon emissions. We also have to *remove* some of the carbon that has *already* been emitted into the atmosphere over centuries.
Thus, in order for the world to reach its necessary net-zero emission status on time, food production and land management will have to be drasticly reformed. When farmers hear this, they sometimes get nervous, because they see how much it could end up costing their families, in order to save the entire planet. Society as a whole should share some of that cost, including investing in research to find more environmentally-friendly methods of farming. Fortunately, agriculture is unique: it’s the one human-managed realm which has the ability to transform from a net emitter of carbon to a net carbon-catcher.
