… so gobsmackingly big …

Quote of the Day — 13 February 2011

It turns out, to get on a trajectory to hit 450 ppm, we’re going to need to turn off most of our fossil fuel energy, end deforestation, and build about 11.5 new terawatts of clean energy capacity by 2033 (30 years out from the 2003 baseline). Woo!

That’s a lot of sh*t to build! As I said, it’s “the equivalent of America’s massive industrial build-up for WWII, only across the entire globe, for 40 years straight (at least), against a faceless enemy.”

Of course we have no idea what the actual mix will end up being. There’s no predicting innovation, much less politics. But the one thing we do know is that the task ahead is enormous, so gobsmackingly big that the smart money is almost certainly on failure. If we want a chance at success we’re going to have to rethink a lot of our assumptions about consumption, economic analysis, policy design, and political strategy.

In a situation where doing too little is so likely and doing too much is virtually impossible, we’re going to have to be climate hawks. That means leaning forward, biased ever toward action, choosing opportunism over optimization and the resilient over the efficient. Every second we dither, the climb gets steeper.

— David Roberts
— “The gobsmackingly gargantuan challenge of shifting to clean energy “
— Grist

www.grist.org/article/2011-02-11-gobsmackingly-gargantuan-challenge-of-shifting-to-clean-energy
www.grist.org