How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
Page 5
Over time, we would naturally start using more renewables, but left to its own devices, this growth won’t happen nearly fast enough, and as we’ll see in chapter 4, without innovation it won’t be enough to get us all the way to zero. We have to force an unnaturally speedy transition. That introduces a level of complexity—in public policy and technology—that we’ve never had to deal with before.
Why do energy transitions take so long, anyway? Because…
Coal plants are not like computer chips. You have probably heard of Moore’s Law, the prediction made by Gordon Moore in 1965 that microprocessors would double in power every two years. Gordon turned out to be right, of course, and Moore’s Law is one of the main reasons the computing and software industries took off the way they did. As processors got more powerful, we could write better software, which drove up demand for computers, which gave hardware companies the incentive to keep improving their machines, for which we kept writing better software, and on and on in a positive feedback loop.
Moore’s Law works because the companies keep finding new ways to make transistors—the tiny switches that power a computer—smaller and smaller. This allows them to pack more transistors onto each chip. A computer chip made today has roughly one million times more transistors on it than one made in 1970, making it a million times more powerful.
You’ll sometimes hear Moore’s Law invoked as a reason to think we can make the same kind of exponential progress on energy. If computer chips can improve so much so quickly, can’t cars and solar panels?
Unfortunately, no. Computer chips are an outlier. They get better because we figure out how to cram more transistors on each one, but there’s no equivalent breakthrough to make cars use a million times less gas. Consider that the first Model T that rolled off Henry Ford’s production line in 1908 got no better than 21 miles to the gallon. As I write this, the top hybrid on the market gets 58 miles to the gallon. In more than a century, fuel economy has improved by less than a factor of three.
Nor have solar panels become a million times better. When crystalline silicon solar cells were introduced in the 1970s, they converted about 15 percent of the sunlight that hit them into electricity. Today they convert around 25 percent. That’s good progress, but it’s hardly in line with Moore’s Law.
Technology is only one reason that the energy industry can’t change as quickly as the computer industry. There’s also size. The energy industry is simply enormous—at around $5 trillion a year, one of the biggest businesses on the planet. Anything that big and complex will resist change. And consciously or not, we have built a lot of inertia into the energy industry.
For context, think about how the software business operates. There’s no regulatory agency that has to approve your products. Even if you release a piece of software that’s imperfect, your customers can still get enthusiastic and give you feedback about how to make it better, as long as the net benefit you’re offering is high enough. And virtually all your costs are up front. After you’ve developed a product, the marginal cost of making more of it is close to zero.
Compare that with the drug and vaccine industry. Getting a new medicine to market is much harder than releasing a new piece of software. Which is as it should be, considering that a drug that makes people sick is much worse than an app that has some flaws. Between basic research, drug development, regulatory approval to test the drug, and every other step required, it takes years for a new medicine to reach patients. But once you have a pill that works, it’s very cheap to make more of it.
Now compare both with the energy industry. First, you have huge capital costs that never go away. If you spend $1 billion building a coal plant, the next plant you build will not be any cheaper. And your investors put up that money with the expectation that the plant will run for 30 years or more. If someone comes along with a better technology 10 years down the road, you’re not going to just shut down your old plant and go build a new one. At least not without a very good reason—like a big financial payoff, or government regulations that force you to.
Society also tolerates very little risk in the energy business, understandably so. We demand reliable electricity; the lights had better come on every time a customer flips a switch. We also worry about disasters. In fact, safety concerns have nearly killed off new construction of nuclear plants in the United States. Since the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, America has broken ground on just two nuclear plants, even though more people die from coal pollution in a single year than have died in all nuclear accidents combined.
We have a large and understandable incentive to stick with what we know, even if what we know is killing us. What we need to do is change the incentives so that we can build an energy system that is all the things we like (reliable, safe) and none of the things we don’t like (dependent on fossil fuels). But that will not be easy, because…
Our laws and regulations are so outdated. The phrase “government policy” doesn’t exactly set people’s hair on fire. But policies—everything from tax rules to environmental regulations—have a huge impact on how people and companies behave. We won’t get to zero unless we get this right, and we’re a long way from doing that. (I’m talking here about the United States, but this applies to many other countries too.)
One problem is that many of the environmental laws and regulations in place today weren’t designed with climate change in mind. They were adopted to solve other problems, and now we’re trying to use them to reduce emissions. We might as well try to create artificial intelligence using a 1960s mainframe computer.
For example, America’s best-known law related to air quality, the Clean Air Act, barely mentions greenhouse gases at all. That’s hardly surprising, because it was originally passed in 1970 to reduce the health risks from local air pollution, not to deal with rising temperatures.
Or consider the fuel-economy standards known as CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy). They were adopted in the 1970s because oil prices were skyrocketing and Americans wanted more fuel-efficient cars. Fuel efficiency is great, but now we need to put more electric vehicles on the road, and CAFE standards haven’t helped much at all with that, because they weren’t designed to.
Outdated policies are not the only problem. Our approach to climate and energy keeps changing with the election cycle. Every four to eight years, a new administration arrives in Washington with its own energy priorities. There’s nothing inherently wrong with changing priorities—it happens throughout the government with every new administration—but it takes a toll on researchers who depend on the government for grant money and entrepreneurs who rely on tax incentives. It’s hard to make real progress if every few years you have to stop work on one project and start from scratch on something else.
The election cycle also creates uncertainty in the private market. The government offers various tax breaks designed to get more companies to work on clean energy breakthroughs. But they’re of limited use, because energy innovation is so hard and can take decades to come to fruition. You could work on an idea for years, only to see a new administration come in and eliminate the incentive you’ve been counting on.
The bottom line is that our current energy policies will have only a negligible impact on future emissions. You can measure their effect by adding up the extent to which emissions will go down by the year 2030 as a result of all the federal and state policies now on the books. All told, it comes to about 300 million tons, or about 5 percent of projected U.S. emissions in 2030. That’s nothing to scoff at, but it’s not going to be enough to get us near zero.
Which is not to say that we can’t come up with policies that make a big difference on emissions. CAFE standards and the Clean Air Act did what they were designed to do: Cars got more efficient, and the air got cleaner. And there are some effective emissions-related policies in place now, although they’re disconnected from each other and don’t add up to enough to make a real difference for the climate problem.
I believe
that we can do this, but it will be hard. For one thing, it’s much easier to tinker with an existing law than to introduce a major new one. It takes a long time to develop a new policy, get public input, go through the court system if there’s a legal challenge, and finally implement it. Not to mention the fact that…
There isn’t as much of a climate consensus as you might think. I’m not talking about the 97 percent of scientists who agree that the climate is changing because of human activities. It’s true that there are still small but vocal—and, in some cases, politically powerful—groups of people who are not persuaded by the science. But even if you accept the fact of climate change, you don’t necessarily buy the idea that we should be investing large amounts of money in breakthroughs designed to deal with it.
For example, some people argue, Yes, climate change is happening, but it’s not worth spending much to try to stop it or adapt to it. Instead, we should prioritize other things that have a bigger impact on human welfare, like health and education.
Here’s my reply to that argument: Unless we move fast toward zero, bad things (and probably many of them) will happen well within most people’s lifetime, and very bad things will happen within a generation. Even if climate change doesn’t rank as an existential threat to humanity, it will make most people worse off, and it will make the poorest even poorer. It will keep getting worse until we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and it deserves to be as much of a priority as health and education.
Another argument you often hear goes like this: Yes, climate change is real, and its effects will be bad, and we have everything we need to stop it. Between solar power, wind power, hydropower, and a few other tools, we’re good. It’s simply a matter of having the will to deploy them.
Chapters 4 through 8 explain why I don’t buy that notion. We have some of what we need, but far from all of it.
There’s another challenge to building a climate consensus: Global cooperation is notoriously difficult. It’s hard to get every country in the world to agree on anything—especially when you’re asking them to incur some new cost, like the expense of curbing carbon emissions. No single country wants to pay to mitigate its emissions unless everyone else will too. That’s why the Paris Agreement, in which more than 190 countries signed up to eventually limit their emissions, was such an achievement. Not because the current commitments will make a huge dent in emissions—if everyone meets them, they’ll reduce annual emissions by 3 billion to 6 billion tons in 2030, less than 12 percent of total emissions today—but because it was a starting point that proved global cooperation is possible. The U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement—a step that President-elect Joe Biden promised to reverse—only illustrates that it’s as hard to maintain global compacts as it is to create them in the first place.
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To sum up: We need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar. To do it, we need lots of breakthroughs in science and engineering. We need to build a consensus that doesn’t exist and create public policies to push a transition that would not happen otherwise. We need the energy system to stop doing all the things we don’t like and keep doing all the things we do like—in other words, to change completely and also stay the same.
But don’t despair. We can do this. There are lots of ideas out there for how to do it, some of them more promising than others. In the next chapter, I’ll explain how I try to tell them apart.
Skip Notes
* You can read the whole speech, “This Is Water,” at bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu. It’s wonderful.
CHAPTER 3
FIVE QUESTIONS TO ASK IN EVERY CLIMATE CONVERSATION
When I started learning about climate change, I kept encountering facts that were hard to get my head around. For one thing, the numbers were so large that they were hard to picture. Who knows what 51 billion tons of gas looks like?
Another problem was that the data I was seeing often appeared devoid of any context. One article said that an emissions-trading program in Europe had reduced the carbon footprint of the aviation sector there by 17 million tons per year. Seventeen million tons certainly sounds like a lot, but is it? What percentage of the total does it represent? The article didn’t say, and that kind of omission was surprisingly common.
Eventually, I built a mental framework for the things I was learning. It gave me a sense of how much was a lot and how much was a little, and how expensive something might be. It helped me sort out the most promising ideas. I’ve found that this approach helps with almost any new topic I’m digging into: I try to get the big picture first, because that gives me the context to understand new information. I’m also more likely to remember it.
The framework of five questions that I came up with still comes in handy today, whether I’m hearing an investment pitch from an energy company or talking with a friend over barbecue in the backyard. Sometime soon you may read an editorial proposing some climate fix; you’ll certainly hear politicians touting their plans for climate change. These are complex subjects that can be confusing. This framework will help you cut through the clutter.
1. How Much of the 51 Billion Tons Are We Talking About?
Whenever I read something that mentions some amount of greenhouse gases, I do some quick math, converting it into a percentage of the annual total of 51 billion tons. To me, this makes more sense than the other comparisons you often see, like “this many tons is equivalent to taking one car off the road.” Who knows how many cars are on the road to begin with? Or how many cars we would have to take off the road to deal with climate change?
I prefer to connect everything back to the main goal of eliminating 51 billion tons a year. Consider the aviation example I mentioned at the start of this chapter, the program that’s getting rid of 17 million tons a year. Divide it by 51 billion and turn it into a percentage. That’s a reduction of about 0.03 percent of annual global emissions.
Is that a meaningful contribution? That depends on the answer to this question: Is the number likely to go up, or is it going to stay the same? If this program is starting at 17 million tons but has the potential to reduce emissions by much more, that’s one thing. If it’s going to stay forever at 17 million tons, that’s another. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t always obvious. (It wasn’t obvious to me when I read about the aviation program.) But it’s an important question to ask.
At Breakthrough Energy, we fund only technologies that could remove at least 500 million tons a year if they’re successful and fully implemented. That’s roughly 1 percent of global emissions. Technologies that will never exceed 1 percent shouldn’t compete for the limited resources we have for getting to zero. There may be other good reasons to pursue them, but significantly reducing emissions won’t be one of them.
Incidentally, you might have seen references to gigatons of greenhouse gases. A gigaton is a billion tons (or 109 tons if you prefer scientific notation). I don’t think most people intuitively get what a gigaton of gas is, and besides, eliminating 51 gigatons sounds easier than 51 billion tons, even though they’re the same thing. I’ll stick with billions of tons.
Tip: Whenever you see some number of tons of greenhouse gases, convert it to a percentage of 51 billion, which is the world’s current yearly total emissions (in carbon dioxide equivalents).
2. What’s Your Plan for Cement?
If you’re talking about a comprehensive plan for tackling climate change, you need to consider everything that humans do to cause greenhouse gas emissions. Some things, like electricity and cars, get lots of attention, but they’re only the beginning. Passenger cars represent less than half of all the emissions from transportation, which in turn is 16 percent of all emissions worldwide.
Meanwhile, making steel and cement alone accounts for around 10 percent of all emissions. So the question “What’s your plan for cement?” is just a shorthand reminder that if you’re trying to come up with a comp
rehensive plan for climate change, you have to account for much more than electricity and cars.
Here’s a breakdown of all the human activities that produce greenhouse gases. Not everyone uses these exact categories, but this is the breakdown I’ve found most helpful, and it’s also the one that the team at Breakthrough Energy uses.*1
Getting to zero means zeroing out every one of these categories:
How much greenhouse gas is emitted by the things we do?
Making things (cement, steel, plastic)
31%
Plugging in (electricity)
27%
Growing things (plants, animals)
19%
Getting around (planes, trucks, cargo ships)
16%
Keeping warm and cool (heating, cooling, refrigeration)
7%
You might be surprised to see that making electricity accounts for just over a quarter of all emissions. I know I was taken aback when I learned this: Because most of the articles I read about climate change focused on electricity generation, I assumed it must be the main culprit.
The good news is that even though electricity is only 27 percent of the problem, it could represent much more than 27 percent of the solution. With clean electricity, we could shift away from burning hydrocarbons (which emits carbon dioxide) for fuel. Think electric cars and buses; electric heating and cooling systems in our homes and businesses; and energy-intensive factories using electricity instead of natural gas to make their products. On its own, clean electricity won’t get us to zero, but it will be a key step.