In late January, Usama Bin Laden made an extended statement expounding on the reality of climate change and its effects on the world:

“The effects of global warming have touched every continent. Drought and deserts are spreading, while from the other floods and hurricanes unseen before the previous decades have now become frequent.” (Haveeru Online)

This statement is surprisingly lacking in rancor. Although something may be is lost in the transition from tape to text, this does not really all that inflammatory a statement. No conspiracy theories? No mocking our decadence? Perhaps, some of the tone was lost in the transcription. Regardless of the quality of Usama’s rhetoric, his mention of climate change raises an interesting question: could anthropogenic climate change incite terrorism against the industrial west?

Likely not. For instance, should Pakistan’s water supply reduce to a few precarious trickles due to thinning glaciers, bombing Manchester, Düsseldorf, or Los Angeles for their backlog of carbon dioxide emissions would not do much to solve that. Instead, Pakistani terrorists (or armies, for that matter) would turn their attention to dams up the Indus River, in Kashmir—a measure that quenches thirsts for both water and revenge. In a worst-case scenario, climate change-induced violence would not be primarily be turned outwards at India but would erupt between provinces within Pakistan—already tension exists between Sindh and the Punjab over the latter’s sizable diversions from the Indus River.

The security threat from climate change comes from the exacerbation of current environmental tensions, not any sort of east vs. west—or north vs. south—struggle. In a recent video put online by the Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate highlights climate change will increase the need for American military expenditures; clashes of civilization go unmentioned.

They also go almost unmentioned in Usama’s recent video. Instead, he criticizes the major global corporations for their role not only in CO₂ emissions as well as the economic downtown. While this may seem a moderation of views, we need to remember that these statements are part of the same rhetorical universe as Ayman al-Zawahiri’s 2008 statement“How brutal and greedy the Western Crusader world is, with America at its top.”

Al-Qa‘ida’s rhetoric conforms to what Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit termed occidentalism, the reduction of Western civilization as a means of dehumanization. Typical tropes depict the Western society as passionlessly and mechanistically organized, yet at the same time embroiled in sin. Buruma and Margalit trace its intellectual roots to German Romantics resisting the French incursion under Napoleon, who was still seen as the of French revolutionary rationalism. To counter the perceived dryness of this outlook and rouse the nation for war, they espoused a philosophy of moralistic heroism in defense of the nation.

A corporate, industrialized society licentiously changing atmospheric chemistry at the expense of global welfare seems a ready-made occidentalist message, and indeed climate change-based rhetoric was often at the fore of the Copenhagen conference last December. As Sudan’s Lumumba Stanislas Dia-Ping said, the conference’s proposed remedies were “a solution based on values, the very same values in our opinion that funnelled six million people in Europe into furnaces [and] asked Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries.” (Guardian). Dia-Ping also has an answer for those who say that it’s hypocritical for the Sudanese ambassador to argue in such a manner:

Dia-Ping struggles, in contrast to those faceless right-wing newspapers! Although I’m hardly familiar enough with Sudanese political history to comment on Dia-Ping’s personal history, I am familiar enough with its economics. Sudan, Venezuela, and Bolivia consistently positioned themselves as the voice for “the millions of common masses.” However, in light of the UK Climate Secretary Ed Miliband’s comments after the Copenhagen conference, these nations, along with China, did the most to undermine the proceedings. How has it gone unmentioned that these countries’ economies rely on exporting fossil fuels? And that China—Miliband’s main target of critique—buys sixty percent of Sudan’s oil output?

As much as Dia-Ping and company like to excoriate the developed world for the carbon dioxide it’s amassed in our atmosphere, such occidentalist rhetoric merely masks the profit motives that ultimately lie behind countries like Sudan’s opposition to current actions on climate change.

What’s Naomi Klein doing in the video above, though? How do climate-based critiques of the West impact the West? Next week’s installment will find out.

Although in recent months the term “nuclear option” has mainly applied to legislative tactics, during Wednesday’s State of the Union address Obama discussed the original nuclear options. One—nuclear proliferation—he emphatically rejected. The other—nuclear power—he strongly endorsed, eliciting some of the most enthusiastic cheers of the night. I was cheering too, because nuclear power might prove the one of most effective ways to reduce our civilization’s carbon footprint.

The progressive case for nuclear power is fairly simple—it’s better than coal. Coal doesn’t just up the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air, but also rains down a more conventionally lethal cocktail of ash, uranium, thorium, arsenic, mercury and more. A 2004 EPA report estimated that coal-burning power plants kill 24,000 a year. Although nuclear waste disposal is by no means perfect, at least the industry acknowledges it is a problem to be secured. Furthermore, even when things do fail, they fail much less spectacularly: the worst American nuclear incident, at Three-Mile Island in 1979, led to no statistically significant (pdf) increase in cancer rates. As environmentalist Bill McKibben cleverly summarized it:

“We know that nuclear power represents some risk; even [nuclear energy proponent Rip] Anderson says so. But we also know by now that a new conventional coal plant offers a flat-out guarantee of environmental destruction—even if nothing goes wrong.”

What about renewables, though? Although renewables are becoming more and more capable of providing a greater share of our energy mix, it is still hard for them to provide baseload power—the constant minimum amount of electricity needed for the grid. Although some environmentalists claim that a good network of renewables can provide such power, the most advanced “supergrid” being planned—connecting the countries bordering the North Sea—will connect with such intermittent sources as wind and solar with the constantly-running Norwegian hydroelectric dams. Even as renewables provide a greater and greater share of our electricity, we’ll still need a greenhouse emission-free and reliable baseload, and (lacking Norway’s geography) that means nuclear.

Despite nuclear power’s green potential, though, the way Obama framed his energy policy was worrying. It included almost every potential energy option under the sun—or rather, under the ground. By specifically pushing for “clean coal technologies,” Obama threatens to undermine the great unsung grassroots accomplishment of the noughts: the United States’s de facto moratorium on new coal power plants. Obama’s plan, as outlined in the State of the Union, consisted mostly of carrots: more incentives, more subsidies, more power stations. Nuclear can’t simply add onto coal as the baseload electricity source—it must replace it, and that means introducing a stick. And the most effective stick would be some sort of carbon pricing.

Obama only backhandedly this, pushing for congress to “[pass] a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America.” This seems like good politics on the short run, defusing concerns that energy prices will rise in a bad economy. However, by making cleaner energy investments—be they in nuclear power, renewable electricity, or energy efficiency—dependent on the whims of congressional budget committees, such a “positive” approach makes change in the long run more difficult.

Increased subsidies are no substitute for a price on carbon which would level the playing field in favor of more efficient and less-greenhouse gas intensive methods of electricity production and consumption. And more importantly, it would make it easier for actors independent of the government—individuals and businesses—to make green investments. And it would make the sort of subsidies that make fossil fuel backers and fiscal conservatives chafe at nuclear and renewable subsidies less necessary.

One would think this sort of libertarian paternalism would appeal to the self-described conservatives in Congress. On Friday Obama confronted House Republicans over their health care proposals—a similar confrontation over the logic of energy funding needs to happen. The nuclear option may be greener than commonly assumed, but extra funding won’t make America more sustainable unless it happens in a sounder policy context. To address that, we may need to confront the legislative nuclear options.

(Revised on 26 January)

Even though I was born in Boston, I spent my early years in the town of North Andover, in northeastern Massachusett’s Essex County. Full of greenery, winding roads, old cottages and a Congregationalist church, it is also home to not a few ostentatious houses and parking spaces. A quasi-rural part of Greater Boston, North Andover is classic New England exurbia. Pickup trucks were a regular part of the landscape. Although my family might have struck outsiders as classic Bay Staters during the Dukakis years—Greek-American liberals with a Volvo (and Dad’s a professor to boot)—pickup trucks were a regular part of my landscape. Thinking back to North Andover today, I’m not at all surprised that 64% of its voters supported Scott Brown. My big question isn’t why they voted for Brown, but why North Andover doesn’t follow the rest of America’s exurbs and vote red more often.

If the Brown election was exceptional, it was only because Martha Coakley fashioned a uniquely unlikeable self-image. As Cheneyesque Brown’s views on torture may be, Coakley’s rudeness was much more alienating to the Massachusetts electorate. Brown’s better-fashioned image made it easy to overlook the venality of his platform, and American voters have often favored persona over policy. Brown’s anti-tax message was interpreted by Bay Staters as representing “fiscal responsibility”—what better way to reduce the deficit than by not spending the money to reduce it and blocking efforts to reduce the cost of Medicare? This inability to do subtraction is a well-entrenched aspect of American political economy. People in Massachusetts, it turns out, are Real Americans^TM after all.

Thus we have the panic amongst the Democrats about losing “Middle America.” As noted above, North Andover certainly looks Middle American enough. Did I forget to mention that North Andover’s almost 95% white? As Reagan sppechwriter Peggy Noonan opined observed of Brown, “He’s a regular guy, looks like an American.”

Now we’ve hit something. Although this doesn’t explain why North Andover usually votes blue, demography might be part of the reason for the Republican turn in less urbanized areas in Massachusetts—and for the exurbs’ conservatism nationwide. The New Republic’s Thomas B. Edsall quotes Robert Powell, a sociologist (appropriately enough) at Harvard: “New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’” This is a familiar story to any urban geographer and historian—Chicago is the classic example. Edsall argues that white “hunkering down” is responsible for the emergence of the Tea Party movement as a national force. “The demographic transformation of the country and the birth of multicultural America have made this group extremely status anxious—an anxiety that the recession obviously heightens.” Even if we don’t accept Edsall’s argument that the anti-health care backlash is rooted in the fear of a transfer of wealth and benefits from white to non-white communities, the geographical implications of the Massachusetts vote are obvious: Massachusetts already pays for its own health care—why should it pay for other states’?

Even when people “hunker down” in a city, though, urban density makes juxtapositions inevitable. Obviously there’s tension (which sometimes erupts), but proximity also has a way of breaking down barriers between groups. In a city, a conversation between a Greek-American, a Uyghur-American, and a Cambodian-American is completely possible (as a matter of fact, it happened in Cambridge last summer). Cosmopolitanism is more likely in the polis.

When we deal with statewide and nationwide politics, however, different patterns emerge. It’s hard to breach ethnic barriers when communities are separated by the interstates and where random encounters are limited to the mall and supermarket. As the de facto segregation of the northern urban areas demonstrates, this has been an issue for over a half-century. The internet doesn’t make things any better—as Cass Sunstein argues in Republic.com 2.0, hunkering down is worse on the internet than anywhere else.

Older, white voters were among Brown’s strongest supporters (pdf). The country is changing into something unfamiliar, and they are discomforted by it. This is not necessarily active racism, , but rather a vague sense that things should continue to be as they are. Of course Massachusetts has a strong history of active racism: the last person who held “the people’s seat” was pelted with tomatoes by his constituents over school busing, in very urban Boston no less. Such racial conflicts led to the spatial segregation we have today. So it takes more than an urban zip code to be a cosmopolitan—it requires stepping out of one’s perceptual shell in order to view to world in a broader way.

Brown’s victory does nothing to change the broad demographic trends that are reshaping the country. Whites will no longer be an ethnic majority, and almost a fifth of our citizens will be foreign-born. It is our generation’s task to redefine Middle America as the meeting place between peoples, not the provenance of one race and history. Not only does our nation have great potential for cosmopolitanism, it has great need for it. If Americans decide to hunker down, whatever challenges facing the nation as a whole will go unrecognized, and whatever satisfaction that comes from crouching with our own kind will be false comfort at best.

A community center in Würrich, Germany with solar panels on its roof (wikimedia commons)

We live on a spherical world, tilted slightly askew. And we have weather. Although we do not think of them now, preconditions such as these will have a profound impact on the way solar energy is implemented in this century, with corresponding impacts on the shape of our future economy. It’s currently imagined that a solar economy would leave the world as is, just with solar panels on the roof. But a meaningful shift from fossil fuels to solar power will require economies of scale—economies likely not offered by the small installations promoted by many current solar boosters. A solar-powered society may involve alterations to the Earth’s surface as dramatic as those caused by the industrial revolution.

The world’s most aggressive solar advocate is also one of the least likely: cloudy, high-latitude Germany. The German government subsidizes renewable power through the use of a feed-in tariff, which requires electric companies to buy power from solar panels at an above market rate for twenty years. This assures the installer of the system that they will make a profit, leading to a rush for the most expensive of the renewables: photovoltaics (solar panels). The result has been a solar power boom, with Germany generating over half of the world’s solar electricity.

There are two main modes for generating solar electricity. The centralized model operates much like a conventional power plant, setting aside a space for a solar panel farm (or mirrors to focus heat on a working fluid to run the generator) and distributing the power from there. A good example of this is a mammoth eighty-megawatt one planned for a former German Democratic Republic army base.

The other method, distributed generation, consists of small-scale solar installations, mostly on rooftops, all linked together by the grid. Germany’s feed-in tariffs have been incredibly successful in distributed generation, and similar incentives for solar power have already been implemented in Ontario and the city of Gainesville, Florida.

Since public utilities have to pay more for renewable energy under feed-in tariff systems, they pass on these costs to consumers. In Germany, this adds about an extra euro to each month’s bill—not a large amount, but the projected growth of renewables in Germany could lead to a monthly increase of two to eight euros, with figures in the higher part of that interval now being favored due to the trendiness of costly photovoltaics.

Also, there are also political-economic reasons for German investments in photovoltaic technology, though. By driving up demand for solar panels, the feed-in tariffs form something of a subsidy for the German solar panel industry. Photovoltaics are seen as a next-generation export, and the ability of manufacturers to generate high-paying industrial jobs is at least as to the German government as using solar power to generate electricity.

This does raise the prospect, however, that if Germany wants to run its economy from the sun it will likely have to pay much more for its energy. This is not entirely surprising—Germany’s abundant coal deposits fueled its rise to an industrial power. Germany might have the will to switch to solar power, but overcast skies at high latitudes mean they have to install more photovoltaics to extract the same amount of energy as another array in a sunnier climate. Switching to renewable power and remaining an economic power may well be contradictory aims.

There is a strong ideological component to distributed energy’s appeal. As Governor Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan put it, with distributed solar “every homeowner, every business, becomes a renewable energy entrepreneur.” Granholm uses the rhetoric of opportunity to sell distributed solar power, making small rooftop installations seem distinctly American. Distributed power also has sort of a Web 2.0 vibe. Rather than having to buy electricity from a big corporation, you can make it yourself.

Even if distributed generation fits well with the contemporary zeitgeist, economies of scale still present an issue. It is simpler to construct one big solar farm than a large number of installations on existing rooftops. In all likelihood, it is also a more financially viable option. Furthermore, at high latitudes like Michigan’s, today’s technology does not allow most consumers to generate electricity to make a profit, so Granholm’s statement is worse than rhetorical—it is disingenuous.

Nonetheless, solar cells have retained high levels of popularity, resulting in massive production, which in turn has caused retail costs to fall. Now China intends to cut prices even more — according to Reuters, US solar entities as well as German solar firms Conergy and Solarworld are becoming more concerned about China’s efforts to grab a larger share of the renewable market by cutting costs in order to compete. The US faces the task of trying to encourage consumers not to purchase the cheaper solar energy products made in China. Needless to say, there has been much speculation about trade barriers.

But is this truly the best way to establish a solar-powered economy? Solar projects have boomed because installers are guaranteed returns on investments, but such guarantees have forced Spain and Gainseville to restrict the number of new installations each year, while Ontario has had to temporarily shut down the program altogether. Just as fostering a photovoltaic industry has been instrumental in protecting Germany’s feed-in tariffs, in the United States job growth is a major argument for the promotion of distributed solar. Even in more favorable environments, these programs may not be financially sustainable.

A solar farm at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada

This is well illustrated by the centralized-distributed debate going on in Nevada. Distributed power is seen as more conducive to job growth. Danny Thompson—the treasurer for the Nevada chapter of the US’s largest union federation, the AFL-CIO—told the Las Vegas Sun that a centralized solar power plant would be a mere “flash in the pan” in terms of job growth. The incremental installation of photovoltaic panels on rooftops would provide more jobs over a longer period of time. This also means it will cost more. The great danger in sacrificing efficiency for current job growth is that it leaves our solar policy more exposed to changes in energy policy. Should feed-in tariffs drive up electricity costs too much, they will become an easier political target here than in Germany.

Even considering the ideal solar farm located in a sunny environment with its photovoltaics (or mirrors) positioned to maximize insolation, we would need to cover large swaths of desert with solar panels in order to really start replacing fossil fuels. “[The] Sahara could supply all of Europe, the Gobi could power China, and the Chihauhuan, Sonoran, Atacama and Great Victoria Deserts could electrify entire continents,” the Guardian’s George Monbiot dreams in his book Heat. Nicolas Sarkozy tossed the same idea around while proposing a Mediterranean Union. A solar economy would rework the Earth’s surface to save the atmosphere.

The scale of this inspires a certain awe: pyramids and Great Wall, look at how much bigger our civilization’s solar farms are! It also inspires fright—some conservationists are beginning to line up against schemes to cover the Mojave Desert with mirrors and photovoltaics, as is California Senator Diane Feinstein. If the damming of western rivers serves as any guide, though, the possible profits from paneling the deserts will likely prevail eventually.

As convenient as the sun has proven for four billion years of life on this planet, harnessing it to power our more recent inventions is a challenge. Our current technology has achieved neither the ease of nature nor the economy of fossil fuels, but our reckless use of the latter is forcing us to alternatives. The prevailing policy in Europe and the United States is not so much a solar policy as a jobs policy that involves photovoltaics. Despite enthusiasm over green jobs, we have to face the prospect that the path an environmentally sustainable economy may not be the one that creates the most jobs. Furthermore, a real plan for shifting our civilization to solar power would probably employ economics of scale to an unprecedented degree, opening up paradoxes about what a saved planet would look. Sunlight may be free, but we should not trick ourselves into thinking it can be harnessed effortlessly.

A version of this article first appeared in the Spring 2009 print edition of Diskord, and has been updated.