In the movie portrayal of the Titanic's journey across the Atlantic Ocean, the passengers aboard the ship don鈥檛 realize that something has gone horribly wrong until it鈥檚 too late.
George Rhee, a professor of physics and astronomy at 性视界传媒, equates that fateful event to the present day and the potential consequences of failing to act on climate change in light of mounting evidence.
And he does so with numbers.
鈥淚 view renewable energy as a lifeboat,鈥 Rhee said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 way of saving lives. I think worldwide, climate change is a WWII type of problem, and it requires a WWII type of effort to solve it.鈥
Rhee is helping Nevada address the problem of climate change through an he created that determines the state鈥檚 total fossil fuel demand by 2050, based on a range of renewable energy options chosen by the user.
Rhee breaks down the significance of the calculator, how it works, who should use it and why.
Where did the idea come from? The idea was inspired by a similar calculator developed for the U.K. by David MacKay, a British physicist and mathematician. The driving force for me in creating the calculator is that I think climate change is real and that it鈥檚 man made. We all need to do our part to fix this problem. Nevada runs mostly on fossil fuels and this needs to change.
And the effects of climate change are becoming more visible. Anyone who doubts that can take a walk by Lake Mead and can see that year by year, or even, month by month, the water level in the lake going down. You can see the effects. We鈥檙e breaking temperature records in Nevada and Nevada is warming faster than the rest of the world.
What is the calculator? The calculator looks at a range of four options for each supply and demand choice, with the options going from business as usual, to the maximum that we could do. For example, in the nuclear energy category on the supply choice side, the first option I provide is that we never create a nuclear power plant in Nevada, because I don鈥檛 see us building one unless public opinion changes.
What鈥檚 the next step up from that? Going from not having a nuclear power plant, to having one.
The idea is to look at what resources we have to address climate change and switch to renewables in Nevada.
How do you use the calculator? The first step is to decide what your demand is going to be so that you can determine how much supply you鈥檙e going to need. What you want to do is reduce the demand in order to minimize the problem of switching to renewables.
Having one car with one person driving is one of the most inefficient ways of moving people around. Public transport is one way to reduce emissions. Another is to electrify transport. One option in the Nevada transport category is to electrify transportation completely by 2050. But if you have to electrify everything that鈥檚 not electric, we have to build even bigger solar plants.
If we work hard enough, we can solve this problem. It鈥檚 perfectly doable.
The calculator can become a conversation starter, especially with key Nevada stakeholders, Rhee says. We can鈥檛 just say no to everything and expect climate change to solve itself.
That鈥檚 the conversation that I鈥檓 trying to get started. People are very vocal at saying no. You want a wind farm? People say no. A solar plant? People say no. That鈥檚 not the way we鈥檙e going to solve this problem. We鈥檝e got to get people to say yes.
The idea of the calculator was to give us a tool to look at our options so we can decide politically what we can do. We have the technology to do this, but do we have the political will to do this?
How do we solve climate change? It鈥檚 a quantitative problem. You pay a utility bill in your home, and you鈥檙e charged per kilowatt-hour of energy. The only way to solve this problem, is to be quantitative.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends that we reduce fossil consumption to essentially zero by 2050 to avoid two degrees of warming and associated climate disruption.
Achieving the target is not do or die. Four degrees of warming is much worse than two degrees of warming, so we shouldn鈥檛 quit if we don鈥檛 quite make it.
性视界传媒 Rhee: Rhee works in several fields of study including cosmology, extragalactic astronomy, and sustainable energy. He teaches a class 鈥 Physics for a Better Environment 鈥攚here issues surrounding climate change and renewable energy are examined. The course is offered this spring.
