Time to get beyond incremental thinking

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The invention of the steam engine in the mid-1700s was one of those moments that utterly transforms the world around it. The significance was surely hard to discern at the time; even today history books note the occasion but do not greatly celebrate it.

But the event marked a divide between an economy and society that depended on muscle power — of humans and their draft animals — and one in which engines used wood or coal to multiply those muscles by hundreds, if not thousands.

It’s hard to think of another comparably transformative invention or socially tectonic shift. Electricity, telecommunications, the computer, all hugely consequential.

But transformative to that degree? Perhaps only the emergence of cultivated agriculture compares.

What is not any longer arguable is the equally transformative challenge we face now: to transition off those same fossil fuels that created and energized the modern world.

The McKinsey consulting firm estimates that to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to manageable — if still damaging — global levels by 2050, industrialized nations will need to increase carbon productivity by about the same gain in average labor productivity enabled by our machines in the last 200 years. And we will need to do this within the next four decades or so.

Oregon’s greenhouse gas emissions would need to drop from about 70 million tons in 2005 to less than 14 million tons in 2050.

Any number of studies concludes that this leap is daunting but doable, mostly with technologies and efficiency practices we already have access to. But we have to apply our technologies and our ingenuity in truly transformative ways.

Example: Portland General Electric is proposing to shut its Boardman coal plant in 2020, some two decades earlier than planned. PGE would largely replace the coal with gas to generate electricity to fill the hole and meet still-growing loads.

Gas has fewer greenhouse gas emissions than coal, so that seems a step in the right direction. The utility would continue to pursue energy efficiencies and would meet its renewable energy obligations to the state.

But this is incremental thinking in the face of transformational challenge. To be on track to Oregon’s 2050 goal, carbon emissions from generating Oregon’s electricity would need to be some 40 percent lower in 2030 than today.

By mostly substituting gas for coal, the utility’s greenhouse gas emissions likely will be about where they are today, or higher.

Portland General Electric is thinking harder about this question than are most electric utilities. The company is finding ways to cost-effectively shutter its coal plant early, providing recharging stations for electric cars, supporting home and business energy efficiency retrofits.

But "harder" isn’t enough, not anymore. Utilities have to show the creativity today that they showed when electricity was new, when we built the Columbia River hydropower system and the western transmission grid.

We have to figure out how to cost-effectively bring wind and solar into the grid, storing what’s not needed for when it will be, using gas to augment renewables and conservation, not substitute for them.

If utilities are still thinking incrementally, so are the rest of us. The best current designs for the new Columbia River bridge still assume most people will cross in their automobiles, alone; and that there will be some 25 percent more of these crossings daily in 2030. Putting in a MAX line and bus lanes would only keep auto traffic from rising still higher.

Unless most of those cars and buses are electric by then, and more people are on MAX than driving, and utility-supplied recharging power comes principally from renewables, our emissions won’t be going steeply down by then; at best they’ll be stabilized or inching up.

Congress is equally hostage to incremental action when it is moved to act at all. We continue to shovel large subsidies to producers of coal, oil and gas. We should be holding them responsible — and through them, ourselves — for the emissions from their products, by imposing strict and declining carbon caps.

That single action alone would signal, to inventors and innovators and business women and men who are inclined to look for the next transformative energy application, that betting on low-carbon technologies is that next big winner.

For the climate, business-as-usual is the short-term safe bet and the long-term big loser. It is also, lamentably, the prevailing wisdom in commerce and government today.

Angus Duncan is the founder and president of the Bonneville Environmental Foundation and chairman of the Oregon Global Warming Commission.