by Al Gore
In 2011, the United States filed a formal complaint against China for allegedly providing unfair subsidies to its wind and solar manufacturers. As of 2012, the U.S. imposed tariffs of approximately 30 percent on Chinese-imported solar panels, and the European Union began its consideration of a similar complaint. Nevertheless, in spite of these problems, the low prices that resulted from China’s commitment and subsidies helped drive the scale of production to higher levels than anyone predicted, thus producing sharper cost reductions than anticipated.
China’s impressive commitment to move forward aggressively with the deployment of wind and solar has inspired many other nations around the world, but its continuing enormous investment in new coal-fired generating plants has caused it to overtake the United States as the largest global warming polluter on the planet. Everyone realizes the importance to China of continuing its development of business and industry in order to continue reducing the levels of abject poverty in its country, but protests inside China against dirty energy projects are growing in several regions.
In the last ten years, China’s energy consumption has gone up more than 150 percent, surpassing that of the U.S. And, unlike the United States, China still gets approximately 70 percent of its energy from coal. Its coal consumption has increased 200 percent over the same decade, to a level three times that of U.S. coal consumption. China is both the largest importer of coal in the world (followed by Japan, South Korea, and India) and the largest producer of coal, by far—producing half of the world’s coal, two and a half times more than the U.S. (which is the second-largest producer of coal). Indeed, the amount by which China’s coal consumption increased from 2007 to 2012 amounts to additional demand that is equivalent to all of the U.S. annual consumption. Beijing has proposed a cap on coal production and use to be implemented in 2015, though many experts are skeptical about their ability to stay within the cap.
Even though its appetite for oil pales in comparison to its consumption of coal, the amount of oil China used doubled during the 1990s, doubled again in the first decade of this century, and is now second only to that of the United States. For the first time, in 2010, Saudi Arabia’s oil exports to China exceeded those to the U.S. In 2012, China’s domestic oil reserves appeared to have peaked. And even though they are aggressively developing offshore oilfields, the Chinese already import half the oil they use, and the U.S. Energy Information Agency predicts that China will import three quarters of its oil within the next two decades.
Security experts have noted that this trend has implications for Chinese foreign policy in areas like the disputed reserves in the South China Sea and its forward-leaning engagement with oil-rich countries in the Middle East and Africa. Many observers found it ironic that after the United States invaded Iraq—at least in part to ensure the security of Persian Gulf oil supplies—the Chinese became the largest investor in Iraq’s oilfields.
On a per capita basis, energy consumption in China is only a fraction of that in the U.S. and other more developed countries, though its per capita CO2 emissions are approaching those of Europe. Since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping were implemented more than thirty years ago, China has converted much of its economy from agriculture to industry and the transition has been even more energy-intensive because of subsidies to fossil fuels—which reduce energy efficiency in every country that uses them. In fact, electricity rates, petroleum product prices, and natural gas prices are all fixed by the government at below market levels, though there is active debate in Beijing about letting all energy prices float further upward to global market levels. Overall, China is lagging behind other leading global economies in crucial areas of energy efficiency.
In spite of its energy challenges and its massive CO2 emissions, China has implemented an extremely impressive set of policies to stimulate the production and use of renewable energy technologies. In its latest Five Year Plan, China announced that it will invest almost $500 billion in clean energy. The Chinese make use of “feed-in tariffs,” a complex subsidy plan that worked extremely well in Germany. China also uses a full range of other policies, including tax subsidies and the imposition of renewable energy percentage targets on utilities.
In addition to capping the use of coal, it has also established a number of hard targets for the reduction of CO2 emissions per unit of economic growth. A former vice minister of environmental protection, Pan Yue, said in 2005 that China’s economic “miracle will end soon, because the environment can no longer keep pace.”
In the last decade, there has been tension between goals set by the national government and implementation strategies pursued by regional governments, which are typically intertwined with industrial energy users. As a measure of the national government’s seriousness in enforcing the CO2 reduction and energy intensity reduction targets, Beijing sent officials to these regions in 2011 to impose forced closings of factories and even blackouts in order to ensure that the goals were met. More recently, the central government has linked promotions of local and regional officials to their success in achieving these goals.
In the renewable energy sector, China has dominated global production of windmills and solar panels, as noted above, but has made less progress in the installation of solar panels than it has in installing windmills—partly because it exports 95 percent of the solar panels it produces, many of them to the United States. In some recent years, 50 percent of all the windmills installed globally were in China, though almost a third of its windmills either are not connected to the electricity grid or are connected to lines that cannot handle the electricity flow.
The central government is also directing an ambitious plan to build the most sophisticated and extensive “super grid” in the world in order to remedy this problem. Beijing has announced that it will spend $269 billion over the next few years on construction of 200,000 kilometers of high-voltage transmission lines, which one industry trade publication noted is “almost the equivalent of rebuilding the United States’ 257,500-kilometer transmission network from scratch.”
As many countries have realized, high-capacity, high-efficiency electricity grids are essential in order to use intermittent sources of electricity like those produced by windmills and solar panels, and to transmit renewable electricity from the areas of highest potential production to the cities where it is used. As the percentage of electricity from the sources increases, the importance of smart grids and super grids will increase.
Plans are proceeding to link the high-sun areas of North Africa and the Middle East to large electricity consumers in Europe. Similar plans are on the drawing boards in North America, where high-sun areas of the Southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico can easily provide all of the electricity needed in both countries. And in both India and Australia, plans are under way to link high-sun and -wind regions with high-electricity-consuming regions.
There is, in any case, a powerful need to upgrade the reliability, carrying capacity, and advanced features of the electricity distribution grid in rich and poor countries alike. In the U.S., for example, interruptions in electrical service and unplanned blackouts, combined with inefficiencies in distribution and transmission, impose an estimated annual cost of more than $200 billion per year. In India, the largest blackout in history—by far—occurred in 2012 when more than 600 million people lost power due to problems in managing electricity flows through the antiquated grid system.
In addition to the development of super grids and smart grids—which can empower end-users of electricity with tools to become far more efficient in their ability to reduce energy consumption and save money—there is a pressing need for more efficient ways to store energy. A great deal of investment has gone into the research and development of new batteries that can be distributed throughout the electrical grid and in homes and businesses in order to reduce the need for wasteful overcapacity in electrical generation that is needed during the peak hours of use. These batteries can also provide valuable electricity storage when used in electric car
s that, like most cars, spend the vast majority of their time in garages or parking spaces.
Toward that end, automakers around the world are launching fleets of electric vehicles in anticipation of a shift toward renewable electricity and away from expensive and risky petroleum supplies. At least some manufacturers in almost every industry are also converting to strategies that emphasize lower energy and material consumption. Energy efficiency expert Amory Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, has thoroughly documented the impressive movement by many companies to take advantage of these opportunities.
In addition to solar and wind, wave and tidal energy are both being explored—in Portugal, Scotland, and the United States, for example—and although the contribution from these sources is still minuscule, many believe that they may have great potential in the future. Nevertheless, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in a special report on renewable energy sources in 2011, said that wave and tidal power are “unlikely to significantly contribute to global energy supply before 2020.”
Geothermal energy has made a significant contribution in nations like Iceland, New Zealand, and the Philippines, where there is an abundance of easily exploitable geothermal energy. The vast potential for geothermal energy derived from much deeper geological regions has been unexpectedly difficult to develop, but here again, entrepreneurs in many countries are working hard to perfect this technology.
Although the potential for hydroelectric energy has been almost fully exploited in major areas of the world, there are undeveloped resources in Russia, Central Asia, and Africa that have great potential, though critics also warn about serious ecological risks in particular locations.
The use of biomass is expanding, and in some countries is beginning to play a significant role. In addition to traditional uses of manure and other forms of biomass for cooking, modern biomass techniques are being used to burn wood from renewable forests in far more efficient processes to produce heat and electricity. As with biofuels, the net impact of biomass use, when analyzed on a lifecycle basis, depends a great deal on the careful calculation of all of the energy inputs, the impact on land use and biodiversity, and the time periods required to recycle the carbon through the regrowth of the plants and trees.
There is also a global movement to produce methane and syngas from landfills containing large amounts of organic waste, and to produce biogas from large concentrations of animal waste gathered in animal feedlot operations. China, for example, has a major focus on biogas—requiring the installation of biogas digesters at all large cattle, pig, and chicken farms to derive the gas from animal waste, though enforcement of this mandate has been lagging. The U.S., which has a voluntary program, and other countries should follow their lead.
FALSE SOLUTIONS
There are two strategies for responding to global warming that are unlikely to work, even though each one has enthusiastic supporters. The first is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). I have long supported research and development of CCS technologies, but have been skeptical that they will play more than a minor role. It is always possible that there will be an unexpected technological breakthrough that greatly reduces the cost of capturing CO2 emissions and either storing them safely underground or transforming them in some manner into building materials or other forms that make them useful and safe. My friend Richard Branson has established a generous prize for the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere, and invited NASA scientist and global warming expert Jim Hansen and me to be judges in the competition.
Barring breakthroughs, however, the cost of the CCS technology presently available—both in money and energy—is so high that utilities and others are unlikely to use it. A utility operating a coal-fired generating plant and selling electricity to its customers would have to divert approximately 35 percent of all the electricity it produces just to provide power for the capture, compression, and storage of the CO2 that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. While that might be interpreted as a bargain if it saved civilization’s future, the utility could not afford to do it and still stay in business. And the volumes of CO2 emissions involved are so enormous that taxpayers do not have much appetite for shouldering the expense.
While safe and secure underground storage areas do exist, the process of locating them and then painstakingly investigating their characteristics in order to ensure that the CO2 will not leak to the surface and into the air is quite significant. There has been notable public opposition to the siting of such underground storage facilities near populated areas. The consensus among those scientists and engineers who are experts in this subject is that the longer the CO2 is stored, the safer it becomes—because it begins to be absorbed into the geological formation itself. Nevertheless, the overall expense of CCS has prevented its adoption by large carbon polluters.
Both the United States and China announced large government-financed demonstration projects for CCS, though the Chinese project—known as GreenGen—is behind schedule, and the U.S. project—called FutureGen—is mired in the endemic political paralysis that characterizes the present state of democracy in the United States. Norway, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia are among the other countries pursuing CCS. However, one of the world’s leading experts on CCS, Howard Herzog of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has said for years that the real key to making this technology profitable and viable is to put a price on carbon.
The second technology that is sometimes described as a silver bullet that could eliminate most CO2 emissions, at least from the electricity-generating sector, is one with a long and fraught history—nuclear power. The present generation of 800 to 1,200 megawatt pressurized light water reactors is, unfortunately, probably a technological dead end. For a variety of reasons, the cost of reactors has been increasing significantly and steadily for decades. In the aftermath of the triple tragedy in Fukushima, Japan, the prospects for nuclear energy have further declined.
The safety record, while much improved, is still one that has been producing public opposition. France, which used to have a global reputation as the most advanced and efficient nation in nuclear power, has had difficulties with its new generation of reactors. South Korea, on the other hand, has been moving forward with a design that many experts believe is promising. Several new reactors are under construction around the world, but as our low-carbon energy options are evaluated, nuclear energy is severely hampered by both cost and perceived safety issues. There is still a distinct possibility that the research and development of a new generation of smaller and hopefully safer reactors may yet play a significant role in the world’s energy future. We should know by 2030.
In spite of their problems, both CCS and nuclear power have had enduring appeal, partly because they are technological solutions that offer the possibility that a single strategy might lead to a relatively quick fix. Indeed, psychologists tell us that one of the other glitches in our common way of thinking about big problems is what they call “single-action bias,” a deeply ingrained preference for single solutions to problems, however complex the problems may be.
This same common flaw in our way of thinking helps to explain the otherwise inexplicable support for a number of completely bizarre proposals that are collectively known as geoengineering. Some engineers and scientists argued several years ago that we should float billions of tiny strips of tinfoil in orbit around the Earth to reflect more incoming sunlight and thereby cool down the global temperature. The public record does not indicate whether they were wearing tinfoil hats when they launched their idea. An earlier proposal in the same vein featured a giant space parasol, also intended to block incoming sunlight. It would have had to be 1,000 miles in diameter and would have required a moon base for its construction and launch. Others have suggested that we attempt to accomplish the same result by injecting massive quantities of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere in order to block sunlight.
The fact that any reputable scientist would lend his or her name to such proposal
s is certainly a measure of the desperation that those who understand the climate crisis feel about the abject failure of the world’s political leadership to begin reducing the rate of emissions of global warming pollution. But given the unanticipated consequences of the planetary experiment we already have under way—pumping 90 million tons of heat-trapping pollution into the atmosphere every twenty-four hours—it would, in my opinion, be utterly insane to launch a second planetary experiment in the faint hope that it might temporarily cancel out some of the consequences of the first experiment without doing even more harm in the process.
Among the other consequences of the SO2 proposal that was pointed out in a 2012 scientific study is this startling change: the sky we have gazed at since the beginning of humankind’s existence on Earth would no longer be blue—or at least no longer be as blue. Does that matter? Perhaps we could explain to our grandchildren why there were so many references to “blue skies” in the history of the cultures on Earth. Maybe they would understand that it was necessary to sacrifice the blueness of the sky in order to accommodate the political agenda of oil, coal, and gas companies. The levels of pollution above cities have already changed the color of the night sky from black to reddish black.
No one has any idea what such proposals would mean for the photosynthesis of food crops and other plants; light needed for life would be partially blocked in order to create more “thermal space” to be occupied by steadily increasing emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. The effectiveness of photovoltaic conversion of sunlight into electricity—one of the most promising renewable energy technologies—might also be damaged. And none of these exotic proposals would do anything whatsoever to halt the acidification of the oceans.