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In the interview, Lovelock, originator of the “Gaia Hypothesis”, which suggests that the Earth can be treated as a self-regulating system like a living organism, and whose work on chlorofluorocarbons led to the ban on CFCs, insists that there is no time to reduce carbon emissions through an international agreement as was the case with the CFC ban. “Most of the ‘green’ stuff is verging on a gigantic scam,” he believes. “Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It’s not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it’ll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning,” he says. He also regards CO2 sequestering as “crazy” and “dangerous”.

Having caused consternation in some circles for advocating nuclear power as a more practical low-carbon generation process than renewables as far as Britain was concerned, he now says that while nuclear “is a way for the UK to solve its energy problems… it is not a global cure for climate change. It is too late for emissions reduction measures.”

The only way, Lovelock claims, that the human race can be saved is by the large-scale burying of charcoal made from agricultural vegetable waste. This usually rots down and releases most of the CO2 fixed by the plants when they are growing, but if it were burned with low oxygen levels it would produce charcoal which could be ploughed back into the ground and would not be able to be broken down in the same way. The process would produce a biofuel which farmers could sell, and as a result a subsidy would not be necessary. “This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference,” Lovelock says, “but I bet they won’t do it.”

Lovelock is deeply pessimistic about the future of the human race. He believes there are already too many people on Earth to survive two degrees of warming, while with four degrees of warming, the planet would not be able to sustain more than a tenth of its current human population, because it would be impossible to grow enough food. “The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less,” he says. “I don’t think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what’s coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing’s been done except endless talk and meetings.”

You can read the entire interview with James Lovelock by Gaia Vince in New Scientist, January 23 issue.

Photo of James Lovelock from Wikimedia by Bruno Comby.

In a wide-ranging session on Tuesday dealing with global biofuel, food security and poverty issues, there was plenty for the presenters to disagree about — but the one thing they could all concur on was that the biofuel genie is out of the bottle and he’s here to stay.

Several times during the session the presenters highlighted the fact that biofuels have finally brought an inherent value to agriculture that was previously missing. This, more than anything else, is why biofuels are not going to go away. Up to now, the lack of agricultural value has caused a deep deficiency in the level of funding and investment that governments worldwide have provided for their agricultural security and infrastructure.

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