Once-in-a-century drought followed by once-in-a-century flooding — Hell and High Water — that’s something larger and larger swaths of this country will need to get used to, especially if their Congressional reps keep opposing action on climate change.

Douglas county Georgia was “hit by 21 inches of rain in a 24-hour period from Sunday to Monday, knocking out the drinking water supply to most residents, and forcing others to boil their water,” the NYT reports. “As much as 15 to 20 inches of rain pounded counties around Atlanta for more than 72 hours.”

* Concentrated solar thermal electric: 1,600 gigawatts peak power
* Nuclear: 700 new gigawatt-sized plants (plus 300 replacement plants)
* Coal: 800 gigawatt-sized plants with all the carbon captured and permanently sequestered
* Solar photovoltaics: 3,000 gigawatts peak power
* Efficient buildings: savings totalling 5 million gigawatt-hours
* Efficient industry: savings totalling 5 million gigawatt-hours, including co-generation and heat recovery
* Wind power: 1 million large wind turbines (2 megawatts peak power)
* Vehicle efficiency: all cars 60 miles per US gallon
* Wind for vehicles: 2,000 gigawatts wind, with most cars plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles or pure electric vehicles
* Cellulosic biofuels: using up to one-sixth of the world’s cropland
* Forestry: end all tropical deforestation

Each of those so-called “stabilisation wedges” requires an astonishing level of effort. For instance, the 800 GW of coal with carbon capture and storage represents a flow of CO2 into the ground equal to the current flow of oil out of the ground. It would require, by itself, re-creating the equivalent of the planet’s entire oil delivery infrastructure.

I will have to give it a look. It has been added to my non-fiction list.

Welcome NYT readers to the debate of the decade: Technology development vs. deployment
We’ve run out of time to wait for an unknown techno-fix to save us
Posted by Joseph Romm (Guest Contributor) at 1:37 PM on 08 Apr 2008

Measured in millions of tons of carbon per pixel per year.

From this site

You mentioned that book here, but I have not read it yet.

Without a doubt, air travel emissions are a tough nut to crack. Romm may ignore them precisely because he knows that his natural audience will be most hostile to curtailing travel.