5°C in decades?
Kevin Drum says the world has given up on climate change. He starts with a table from the Financial Times:
Europe is pulling back from clean energy research. India and Brazil barely have any to begin with. The United state is flat at about $50 billion—maybe a tenth of what we should spending. And China, after a decade of research, has decided to double down on coal and slash its clean energy R&D. Only Southeast Asia is still increasing its green energy research, perhaps because they have a more visceral fear of climate change then the rest of us. When you announce that you’re moving your capital from Jakarta to an entirely new island because Jakarta is sinking…
…it drives it home rather.
This is a disaster. Given (1) the consistent global refusal to cut back on energy usage and (2) the fact that building out current technology (mostly wind and solar) will only get us halfway to zero carbon, our only hope lies in better technology. Without that, 2°C is already in the rear-view mirror and even 3°C is all but impossible to achieve. We’re looking instead at a world that will warm by 4°C or even 5°C during the second half of the century. This is not a world you want your grandchildren to live in.
This is exactly what I’ve been predicting, and I had read about the pull back; I was just talking about it yesterday in class. My students often seem to shrug it off; we’ll terraform the moon, Mars, or relocate to Titan (a new favorite, of course). We have human ingenuity, and don’t need to be bound to nature anymore.
Why, oh why are people so ignorant of consequences?
I suppose that is marginally better than “God’s got it”, which I have seen on more than one occasion.
That is not a particularly realistic take on what is happening with renewable energy – for a start, that graph is not research spending, but rather mostly capital investment. The reality is rather more complicated, and while challenging it is not nearly as pessimistic as that comment sets out.
First, wind and PV have both seen astonishing reductions in unit costs, on the order of a 75% reduction in 7 years. In energy terms, the 2018 number that is equal to the 2010 number is in fact four times the capacity. So, while the capital flows in have been slowing, the pace of projects has continued to increase – and those two are in fact quite linked. Wind is now the cheapest way to generate electricity in the world, and PV is not far off – and the cheapest in many places with poor wind resources. That cost continues to move downward for both.
Second, there are now real barriers to continue to increase the pace of deployment in much of the world. Intermittent generation places demands on the electrical grid, which is a major constraint for wind projects. The pace of wind energy deployment is now dictated in large measure by available grid capacity, and much of the low-hanging fruit is gone. China cannot right now add new wind capacity, and a significant percentage of its existing installed turbines cannot always run because of the lack of transmission capacity. The problem is less acute for PV, where the decline in storage costs allows some alternative, but for PV as well, the pace of mass deployment is partially dictated by grid capacity. For much of the world, we have caught up with and taken up all the available capacity, and capital flows now have to go to the grid, not renewable generation.
Third, there is indeed a drying up of subsidies – the Chinese wind program is on hiatus, due to the aforementioned grid bottleneck, and many other programs have scaled back or face huge uncertainty (the US’ PTC, for instance).
So, to say there is a pulling back is not really correct. Renewable energy is still being deployed faster than ever, at least for wind and PV. It just isn’t accelerating any more, in part because it cannot. Not enough qualified and experienced people to go around, limited grid capacity, end of subsidies, all mean that capital is not flowing in at the same staggering pace – in other contexts, that might even be a good thing. However, the time is now desperately short, and at least on the energy generation side, most of the tools are already there.
I imagine it’d be easier to make Earth livable again than to terraform other planets. The technologies required to do that would facilitate that terraforming.
I wonder if there’ll be enough civilization left to make it happen…
Naif
Some really good points. I recently attended a petroleum industry conference. While many of the participants didn’t think much about the protesters outside a huge focus of the conference was about climate change and how the industry must respond to it. Without doubt there were some climate sceptics in the room, but with one exception people I spoke to were personally concerned about climate change, what their kids would think of them in the future and how they could reduce the impact of their companies operations and transition to other forms of energy.
One thing that was front and centre in a number of the expert presentations was world energy use, population growth and the current and projected source of energy.
The consensus was that:
– By 2050 world population would be at least 9 Billion.
– Population growth is strongest in the developing world.
– Energy demand growth is strongest in the developing world.
– The most optimistic estimates of zero carbon energy source growth was that it would not keep pace with demand for energy.
– Coal was projected to drop away as percentage of energy source (good as a high CO2 equivalent energy source).
– Gas (CNG/LPG) is rapidly climbing and will be the dominant source of carbon energy (not good, but better than coal).
– CO2 equivalent overshoot will result in 4-5 C increase in temperature, which the presenters describe as catastrophic.
It was very sobering. As one person put it to me:
You have a billion people who have nothing and use almost no energy. You can’t ask them to stop burning twigs and dung used to cook food. You have 5 billion people who are just beginning to experience and appreciate a modern lifestyle and all that entails, are we going to try and deprive those people of what we have? Are we prepared to fight wars as a result of that? Then we have 1 billion or so people leading an energy rich life. Obviously we should bear the brunt of reducing energy use to reduce carbon emissions. Do you see any political movement willing to take the steps needed to actually drive that?
Here is one example of a transformation accomplished in a decade.
Eric Reguly (The Globe and Mail, Oct. 12, 2019, B4) says that “Radical transformations by oil giants to green-up their acts are not just possible but can be profitable too”, citing Orsted in Denmark. This is one example of transformation “because executives decided they could no longer tolerate warming the planet and blackening lungs”.
Orsted continues their activism (https://youtu.be/1i8qGM-Wf9g) by producing (https://youtu.be/sHQlXM1xv2s) a virtual reality experience of the “overview effect” (https://youtu.be/-Qh_o6ZButQ), the unique perspective astronauts get of Earth and its fragility. “When you look down on the Earth, you can’t see the political boundaries. Politics means absolutely nothing because you’re seeing the natural world.” (Helen Sharman interviewed by Adam Vaughan, New Scientist Sept. 28, 2019, p. 42)
“Green” energy alternatives need critical analysis. For example wind (Naif #2): land use, bird kills, impact of large scale ‘extraction’ of energy from wind on continental and global currents, actual cost taking into account state regulation, subsidies … Solar: land use, extractive impact of metals required … Some of this analysis makes the nuclear option look good: cost, thorium cycle, small modular reactors.
In 1980 Jeremy Rifkin published Entropy (co-author Ted Howard, afterword by an economist Nicholas Geogrescu-Roegen). Some the analysis is out of date (e.g. comments on China) but the point of mentioning it is that it starts with the understanding that the Earth is a closed (thermodynamic) system with respect to materials (hence the extractive industries with their collateral effects on the Earth and, often, indigenous populations) with the Sun as an open source of energy. Rifkin continues to be active (The Globe and Mail, Nov. 16, 2019, O8; https://www.foet.org/about/tir-consulting-group/). This macro approach continues with a group from the Max Planck institute and others (e.g. https://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/esd-2019-6/ in circulation in 2019 but more technical than Rifkin’s Entropy which is accessible). This approach of analyzing the Earth as a system can be criticized as being too simple to be useful in prescribing solutions. Nonetheless, at a gross level it may be more reliable and give better understanding than detailed climate models (which are based on deductive physical models but have tuning parameters). V. I. Arn’old : “Complex models are rarely useful (unless for those writing their dissertations).” This fundamental approach is the ying to the yang of the comprehensive systems approach of the Green New Deal and others (e.g. On Fire) which includes the social and economic dimensions (57 min https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNzLkdr7UIU).
I, for one, look forward to spending my final years under the swaying palms of Lake St. Clair.
OK sure, it will be a fetid pool of E. Coli, invasive milfoil, and cyanobacteria.
Orsted was an example given in one of the presentations. That’s a niche solution made possible by a combination of geography and culture. Not a global solution. Also worth noting that the carbon Orsted had been extracting isn’t going to stay locked in the ground. They sold their rights to other petroleum companies to fund their green conversion.