LIFE AFTER CLIMATE CHANGE
Humans pour 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere annually.
What would life be like if we solved climate change? Better than today or worse? Mud huts and gruel, or flying cars and the Jetsons? Comfy homes, good food, whip-smart appliances and robots hopping around on farms all seem pretty likely, experts queried by USA TODAY said. All in all, our living standard would be the same, only a lot greener and more efficient. Their view is in stark contrast to a common complaint by those who object to making global-warming-based changes to the economy, suggesting such changes would destroy America’s standard of living and force everyone to “live in yurts and eat tofu,” as one commenter put it.
“Every single proposed solution will simultaneously improve life and decrease carbon emissions,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of climate science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who has provided testimony and scientific expertise to the White House, the governor of California and U.S. congressional offices.
These predictions presume that the shift to carbon-neutral energy, industrial and transportation systems will happen in time to slow and eventually reverse the effects of global warming the planet is already beginning to experience: rising oceans, more flooding, worse storms and increased heat waves and droughts.
Whatever happens next, experts said, depends entirely on how quickly we act. Many of these technological and policy changes have begun but need to be sped up, they said. Humans pour 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere annually. People must shift away from those carbon emissions within the next 20 years to avoid “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
A day in a new world
For Earth Day, let’s presume we’ve made that shift to a carbon-neutral world and you, your children or your grandchildren are waking up on a crisp fall morning sometime between 2050 and 2100. What’s the day like?
Houses won’t look all that different, though homes will almost certainly have solar power if it’s appropriate for the area. That will be especially important in hot and sunny parts of the country, to decrease the pressure on power production for cooling during the day. California has a law requiring that all homes built after 2020 include solar panels.
Homes will still have heat and cooling, electric lights, lots of electronics and big windows, but the systems and appliances will be much more efficient.
This shift is already happening – refrigerators are about 20% larger but use one-quarter the electricity compared with those sold 20 years ago. The LED lightbulbs you buy at the grocery store use 20% of the energy the incandescent bulbs of a decade ago did, said Jay Apt, a physicist and professor who directs the Electricity Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
When people get out of bed, the house will be a comfortable temperature. Properties will probably still have a furnace or an electric heat pump, but they won’t be used as much because homes will be much better insulated.
The systems used to heat buildings probably will look different from the ones we know. One example already used in some buildings involves preheating or chilling water when power is cheap, then using it during the day when power is more expensive.
After getting out of bed, the next step might be to check the dishwasher to get out a cup for coffee. The dishwasher, along with most appliances, will probably be tied to a smart system in your house that knows the power cost at different times of the day. If the power company gets significant power from wind turbines, the cheapest power may be at night. If it’s from solar, it might be cheapest during the day.
“Your dishwasher may very well communicate with the electric power grid and say, ‘OK, Mr. Smith has decided that he only wants to run his dishwasher only when the price of power is less than 12 cents per kilowatt-hour,’ so your dishwasher may decide to run at 2 in the morning,” Apt says.
Or you might set an override to tell the appliance that whatever the price, the dishes have to be done by 6 p.m., in time for dinner.
Here a turbine, there a turbine
Coal, oil and many natural-gas-fired power plants will have long ago closed. The nation will probably be powered by a mix of nuclear, wind, solar and hydroelectric energy and some natural gas.
The power grid will have been rebuilt to accommodate more periodic power inputs, which will afford better protection against physical and cyberattacks.
When people drive across America, the sight of large solar arrays or wind turbines will be common, much like oil rigs are an everyday sight now. You might run across tall arrays that pull carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into fuel and the raw material for industrial uses.
Fun cars, fast charging
The car of the future will be electric because electricity is easy to generate from carbon-neutral sources such as wind, solar and nuclear. It’s a shift that has begun. In Norway, 58% of all cars sold in March were electric, according to Norway’s Road Traffic Information Council.
That’s a far cry from the less than 1% of cars in the USA that are electric. The experts presume the shift will happen relatively quickly. It won’t be wrenching, said Chris Field, director of Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment.
“The electric car I have right now is the best car I’ve ever had. It’s a Chevy Bolt. It’s very practical, well thought out and fun to drive. It’s a really great car,” he said.
Those future cars will probably have a range between charges far greater than today’s 225 miles. Estimates put it at 400 miles by 2028. There will probably be fast-charging outlets nationwide, just as there are gas stations today.
Already, homes in Atlanta must be built to accommodate electric vehicles.
Accessible cities
More people will live in cities, which produce far fewer greenhouse gasses per person than suburbs. The cities will be designed with the kind of humanfriendly density being incorporated into plans across the globe.
Cities, which will have mostly apartment buildings and townhouses, will be walkable and have bike paths. Excellent mass transit will be available via electric buses and vans. Businesses and office buildings will be interspersed rather than plunked down miles out of town in office parks and malls.
People will choose space to spread out or cheaper land and housing, preferences made more sustainable because of the increasing ability to work from home or commute by electric vehicles.
Telecommuting for fun and profit
Work will be more integrated with living areas. Offices will be built to high standards to reduce waste, save water and conserve energy.
More than 33,000 buildings in the USA have gotten LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification, marking them as highly efficient.
Not that everyone will go to an office every day. Telecommuting all or part of the time will become more common as the tools for doing so – fast Internet and good video connections – become cheaper, better and easier to use. More people will work from communal workspaces near their homes.
Big U.S. companies are beginning to do this. Amazon, Apple and Google have dozens of offices across the nation where people can work, so employees don’t all need to move to Silicon Valley in California or to Seattle.
Many people are used to working from shared office spaces such as WeWork and ImpactHub.
Rethinking food
What’s old will be new again in many ways when it comes to food and farming, experts said. The nation’s food supply is likely to be fresher and more wholesome as growers and sellers become better at managing logistics to minimize travel time and loss.
“We’ve gotten into this mode that we expect to see blueberries and oranges every week of the year. As energy costs go higher and water becomes even in more short supply in the future, not every type of food will be available at every moment,” said Robert Myers, a professor of agriculture at the University of Missouri in Columbia and an expert on climate change and sustainable agriculture.
Amanda Little, author of the forthcoming book “The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World,” said mankind will probably eat the same kinds of food we eat today, but it will be produced differently and much more efficiently.
That’s especially true of meat, which Little predicted will be either plantbased faux meat or vat-grown tissue that is identical to meat on a cellular level. “It’s very inefficient to raise an entire animal just to eat the edible parts of it,” she said.
Meat from animals, what we’ll call “craft” or “specialty meat,” will still be available.
Little said cell-based meat is closer than we realize. She had some vatgrown duck last week.
“It was chewy and greasy, but it tasted very meaty,” she said. “For a very early stage lab meat product, it was very convincing.”
Farms will look the same as we drive by, but a closer look will show differences. Older practices, such as planting clover and other cover crops during the winter, will be more common to improve soil health, making the ground more able to withstand floods or drought and decrease the amount of fertilizer needed. Complex crop rotations, aided by computers, will make farming more efficient and cheaper because less fertilizer and pesticides will be required.
Fields might have drones buzzing over them or small robots running down the rows, testing the soil for moisture and nutrients and imaging the crops for weed or insect infestations. That information will be automatically fed to the farmer, who can use it to precisely water and care for each small land unit, rather than wasting expensive water and chemicals.
Those fields will probably incorporate wind turbines or solar panels to give growers additional income. Many farms in the Midwest get rents of $3,000 to $5,000 per year to put turbines on their land, Apt said.
Energy for everyone
The world’s air and water will be cleaner once we stop using polluting energy sources. The planet’s resources will become more equitable as carbon-neutral energy sources become cheaper and more efficient, which will make them available to people in parts of the world where energy is expensive and difficult to obtain.
It’s all doable – no breakthroughs required, Stanford’s Diffenbaugh said: “The knowledge necessary for getting on that path is available.”