The Homunculus in the Room

 

A Drawing of the Homunculus.

There have been times, in human history, where we’ve gotten a few things wrong.  The theory about the sun revolving around the Earth, for instance.  Or how about the one where dinosaurs lived among early humans (ok some people still believe that… check out your nearest creationist museum for evidence).  In the 1900’s, Phrenologists were convinced that you could learn someone’s personality traits by “reading” the bumps on their head.  And in medieval times people thought frogs were born from mud.  We may look back and conclude that these stabs at scientific truth reflect somewhat poorly on our collective intelligence, but back in the day, that stuff was as true as it could get!

My favorite example of ‘theories of yore’ gone sour is that of The Homunculus. Aside from being delightful to pronounce, the Homunculus Theory has an interesting take on human reproduction, circa the 17th century.  It arose after scientists began using microscopes to look at, well, lots of things, and they discovered little “animals” (which they named Animalcules) swimming around in semen.

“[Homunculists] held the belief that the sperm was in fact a “little man” (homunculus) that was placed inside a woman for growth into a child. This seemed to them to neatly explain many of the mysteries of conception. It was later pointed out that if the sperm was a homunculus, identical in all but size to an adult, then the homunculus may have sperm of its own.  This led to the belief that all beings on earth contained all the future progeny of the planet within them, just getting tinier and tinier, much like Russian dolls.” -Wikipedia

While the Homunculus had a good run, it just couldn’t last in the scientific discourse because better and more appropriate theories surfaced that more accurately explained conception.

I think carbon capping is our modern-day homunculus.

The theory is just plain wrong.  It operates in a false paradigm: one where the cost of emissions reductions doesn’t matter politically or economically.  That would certainly be nice, and cap and trade might succeed if it were true, but unfortunately, that assumption is not based on reality.  Carbon Capping is a false theory two reasons:

1. Political Reality.  U.S. Congress won’t pass a climate plan that even moderately increases energy prices, as we saw most recently with Lieberman-Warner (and repeatedly over the past 20 years of failed climate legislation).  Any carbon-capping plan that hopes to make an ecologically relevent dent in emissions would have to increase current energy prices significantly - that’s the whole point, making dirty energy expensive.  Yet the entire nation screams “no” when energy prices could be impacted, thus, no legislation enacted.  

To give you some real numbers to chew on, Lieberman-Warner would have had us trading at $35 per ton of carbon and it failed; experts are arguing that we need carbon to trade at between $70-$500 per ton to start with in order to get us on track for 80% by 2050.  For reference, the price increase in gas we’ve seen over the last year is equivalent to the effect that a $500 per ton carbon tax would have.  Given the massive national unrest due to skyrocketing energy costs, and the fact that gas is never going to go back down in price, do you think America is going to voluntarily vote for another price increase that shoots gas over $6 per gallon?  

2. Economic Reality. Even if we got a carbon capping piece of legislation passed, the ‘cost containment’ and ‘price ceilings’ and ’safety valves’ and ‘offramps’ would never let the carbon price get high enough to actually reduce CO2 to ecologically necessary levels.  We’d be stuck with an functionally ineffective policy that would serve as a ruse for legitimate action.  It’s a catch-22, because we’re in an entirely wrong paradigm of thinking!

So our modern day homunculus is the idea that in order to solve climate change, we need to make dirty energy expensive.  As the evidence of reality points out, it’s impossible given our political and economic climate to make dirty energy expensive enough to reduce emissions.

So how about a paradigm shift: let’s make clean energy cheap.

It’s an entirely different way of thinking about the problem.  Instead of fighting over how much we can slow CO2 (and be association, the economy), we’ll be fighting over how fast we can proliferate the technologies that will price dirty energy out of the picture.  It’ll be an breakneck space race to entirely transform society, rather than a self-imposed economic clusterfuck to avoid ecological apocalypse.  And no, my friends, you can’t make clean energy cheap by just setting international targets and then “letting the market do the magic”, as much as we loved that old strain of thinking that had us bickering over ppm.  

We’ve got to invest.

Call it Kennedy, call it Apollo, call it good old U.S. innovation.  We’ve got to shift our paradigm, embrace a new way of thinking, and get working on the solutions that will make dirty energy a thing of the past faster than any carbon market could ever dream of.  

If you’re one to study science history, you’ll know that scientific revolutions ignite as punctuations that massively disrupt the status quo and send researchers down an entirely new path.  Cheap clean energy is the revolution we must embark on, and carbon capping is the homunculus that’s better fit for the annals of the Smithsonian.

So I guess the point of my post today is just to say it: THERE’S A HOMUNCULUS IN THE ROOM!!!

Time to get it out.