Gladys lives in a small community called Ziossa, at the end of a long dirt road in the Dodoma region of Tanzania. Like many in her community, she is a subsistence farmer who grows maize and peanuts to support her family. Life in sub-Saharan Africa is already challenging. There are nearly 600 million people there with no access to electricity, and women often bear the greatest part of the burden this puts on their household: gathering fuel and water, and doing all their domestic and agricultural work without the labor-saving devices we in rich countries take for granted. Gladys is a widow with six children; after she lost her husband, life got even harder.
Solar Sister is a nonprofit whose goal is to support rural women in creating their own clean energy businesses. When they visited Gladys’s community in 2016, she signed up immediately. She’d never heard of solar before, she said, but now she sells solar lights across the region: mostly to women, but some men, too. Solar lanterns quickly pay for themselves as they don’t need to be powered by batteries. And they replace kerosene lamps, which can spark fires and generate indoor air pollution that can cause respiratory disease. This business helps Gladys support her growing family, which now includes seven grandchildren, and Gladys is only one of ninety-four entrepreneurs in her region. Together they have reached 1.2 million people across Tanzania with clean energy, based on a business model that empowers women.
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In her TED talk How Empowering Women and Girls Can Help Stop Global Warming, Katharine Wilkinson explains that “women are the primary farmers of the world. They produce 60 to 80 percent of food in lower-income countries, often operating on fewer than five acres.… Compared with men, women smallholders have less access to resources, including land rights, credit and capital, training, tools and technology. Close those gaps, and farm yields rise by 20 to 30 percent.” As Gladys found, clean energy opens even more new opportunities.
On the opposite side of the world, northern Canada’s plentiful mining resources often lie near or on the traditional lands of First Nations peoples. In such remote areas, diesel is the primary fuel for both towns and mines. But it’s expensive and runs the risk of dangerous spills that can contaminate land and even water supply. Wiigwaasaatig Energy is a partnership between mining corporation AurCrest and three local Ojibway Nations in northern Ontario. They’re currently purchasing off-grid mobile wind- and solar-generation units and are ultimately hoping to provide forty megawatts of electricity, enough to power over six thousand homes. The Nations own 51 percent of the project and the company owns 49 percent, giving locals the opportunity to benefit from the mine and generate local power at the same time.
WHY ENERGY—NOT FOSSIL FUEL—IS A MORAL NECESSITY
Electricity from fossil fuels has played a key role in relieving poverty and spurring economic growth in many places. But thanks to clean energy advances, we can now achieve the same goals without ruining the environment and our health. So while electricity is a moral necessity—fossil fuels aren’t.
One reason fossil fuels are no longer the future is the simple fact that it’s the 2020s, not the 1820s. Most countries in Western Europe, North America, and Australasia developed at a time when coal was the main source of fuel. But given how far we’ve now progressed toward clean energy, it’s not only patronizing but frankly colonialist to presume that everyone else has to use coal, too. It implicitly says to other countries, “You aren’t ready for modern cars and cellphones yet. At your stage of development, you get party line telephones and Model T Fords. Check back with us in fifty years.”
Further, while many rich countries have enough fossil fuels to supply their needs for decades to come, most developing countries don’t have abundant reserves. Africa, where many of those without access to plentiful energy live, has only 7.5 percent of the world’s known oil reserves, 7.1 percent of its gas reserves, and 1.3 percent of its coal reserves. Latin America has just 19.5 percent of the world’s known oil reserves—and most of it is located in Venezuela and Brazil, where corruption related to the fossil fuel industry runs rampant and little of the proceeds go to those most in need. It’s the developed and wealthy nations of North America, Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East that have the lion’s share, 70 percent of known oil reserves, 79 percent of gas, and 56 percent of coal. So expecting poor countries to develop in exactly the same way as rich nations isn’t what I would consider to be moral. Quite the opposite: instead of enabling them to stand on their own feet and supply their own energy, it’s inviting them to a lifetime of indebtedness to the rich countries who want to sell them fuel.
Of course, no country needs anyone else’s permission to make their energy choices. Today, many developing countries can leapfrog over obsolete technologies to newer, cleaner forms of energy, just like they’ve already done with cellphone technology. In the past few years, developing countries installed more clean energy than fossil fuel–powered electricity generation due both to increasing demand for electricity in general and the plummeting costs of solar and wind. By 2025, renewables such as solar and wind will generate more electricity globally than coal. According to Bloomberg, the top five emerging markets for low-carbon energy sources are India, Chile, Brazil, China, and Kenya. “It’s been quite a turnaround,” said Dario Traum, a senior associate at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “Just a few years ago, some argued that less-developed nations could not, or even should not, expand power generation with zero-carbon sources because these were too expensive. Today, these countries are leading the charge when it comes to deployment, investment, policy innovation, and cost reductions.”
In 2019 over 70 percent of new electricity installed around the world was clean energy. That number soared to over 90 percent in 2020 during the pandemic, and it’s changing people’s lives. Children can study for school in the evening. Women can walk around more safely. Cottage industries offering to charge people’s cellphones or pump water are springing up.
Yes, we need energy. Energy is one of the primary ways that we can address and tackle poverty, lack of access to clean water, and sufficient food, among other development goals. But today, for the first time in hundreds of years, fossil fuels don’t have to be the source of it. Instead, as Norwegian psychologist and economist Per Espen Stoknes says, “climate change is an opportunity for economic development—an entire energy system has to be redesigned from the wastefulness of the previous century to a much smarter mode of doing things. It’s a great opportunity to improve global collaboration and knowledge sharing and to create a more just society.”
CLEANING UP OUR ELECTRICITY
Decarbonizing the electricity sector is a low-hanging fruit. That’s where about 25 percent of our carbon emissions come from globally, and it’s also where change is happening fastest—not just in developing countries. Almost 23 percent of the electricity on the Texas grid in 2020 was generated by wind, eclipsing coal for the first time. Each time I drive out of the city, new wind farms are springing up—with longer and longer blades—on the flat, windy landscape of the High Plains. Knowing that Glasgow would host the 2021 global climate conference inspired Scotland to hit 54 percent clean energy in 2016, 76 percent in 2017, and 97 percent in 2020. Other countries at or near 100 percent clean energy include Iceland, Norway, Paraguay, Costa Rica, and Uruguay.
The reason we’re seeing wind farms spread across America’s heartland and new solar installations being built across the Southwest—and Mexico, India, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere—isn’t because of government subsidies. It’s because prices for renewable energy have dropped so low that subsidies are no longer needed to support them. They can even compete with highly subsidized fossil fuels. From 2010 to 2020, the price of building new wind power dropped 50 percent, and solar costs fell below those of fossil fuels in many places—as little as 3 cents per kilowatt hour in countries like Mexico, Peru, India, and Dubai. In 2010 solar and wind accounted for 4 percent of total global electricity capacity; by 2019 they made up 18 percent, representing a $2.6 t
rillion investment.
Hang on, you might be thinking. Did you just refer to fossil fuels as “highly subsidized”? Yes, I did. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), fossil fuel use is subsidized to the tune of 6.5 percent of global GDP, or nearly $165,000 USD per second. Nearly half of that goes to coal, then petroleum; only 10 percent to natural gas. In the U.S., the IMF estimates that fossil fuel subsidies top $600 billion per year. That is slightly more than the Pentagon’s budget, ten times what the U.S. spends on education every year, and more than twenty times the clean energy subsidies. What form do these subsidies take? Some are the result of tax breaks, direct production subsidies, and leases on public land at far below market rates. Other subsidies come in the form of costs on people and land, called negative externalities by economists: air pollution, asthma, cancer, land degradation, water contamination, and more, caused by fossil fuel extraction and combustion but paid for by us.
Once you understand just how uneven the energy playing field is, statements about the economic viability of clean energy sound even more transformative. One study finds, for example, that the entire U.S. power grid could be transitioned to 90 percent renewable energy by 2035 at no net cost, and with a reduction in average electricity costs of 13 percent. It would also avert $1.2 trillion in health and environmental damages and 85,000 premature deaths. Globally, the International Renewable Energy Agency’s 2019 report on global energy transformation finds that “for every $1 spent for the energy transition, there would be a payoff of between $3 and $7.” The report also points out that as renewable energy would require fewer subsidies than fossil fuels, this amounts to a $10 trillion global savings through 2050. For perspective, it’s estimated that the U.S. military has spent more than $5 trillion since 2001 fighting the “Global War on Terror.”
Manufacturers are increasingly generating their own power on-site from renewable sources, too: popular brand Method Soap’s factory outside Chicago features an on-site wind turbine, a green roof, and solar “trees.” Big tech firms including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft bought more renewable energy than anyone else in 2019, and all have either achieved or committed to achieving 100 percent clean energy.
GOING THE EXTRA ELECTRIC MILE
When we think about cutting carbon emissions, our minds often jump immediately to solar farms and wind turbines. To reach its full potential, though, a clean electricity sector needs to be paired with two other strategies: good old-fashioned efficiency, because the cheapest form of energy is the energy that you don’t use, and cutting-edge technology that electrifies cars and trucks, home heating, and industrial processes currently powered by other types of fossil fuels.
Efficiency isn’t only about energy-saving lightbulbs, or efficient appliances, or turning off your computer. These do matter, and options are much more attractive than they were twenty years ago. That’s when my dad first got the efficiency bug and swapped out all our regular lightbulbs with old-school compact fluorescents. They took two minutes to light up and gave everyone in the room a gray complexion, as if we’d just been rolled out of a drawer at the morgue.
LEDs today come in all shapes and colors, and their costs have dropped so low that it’s cheaper now to buy an LED than to pay for the electricity a free incandescent bulb would use. But when we talk about large-scale efficiency, there’s a lot more to it: more efficient cars and vehicles, retrofitting buildings, smart home technology, industrial efficiency, computerized optimization of freight transport and airlines, and the efficiency of the entire electrical grid.
Globally, Germany and Italy are in top place on the annual International Energy Efficiency Scorecard. Canada and the U.S. are tied at number ten on the list. The good news, though, is that energy efficiency improvements—across the industrial, transportation, and building sectors—could actually cut U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2050. And energy wasted is money lost, so efficiency improvements usually have a short turnaround time before the initial investment starts saving money.
The even better news, though, comes when you add in the second half: electrification. There, physicist Saul Griffith has a plan. It’s called “Rewiring America” and in it, he calls for tripling electricity production and electrifying everything we can, as soon as possible. This includes heating, industry, and most of all, transportation.
The biggest chunk of global transportation emissions, almost 40 percent, comes from passenger cars and SUVs. These are changing as the cost of electric cars drops and more and more companies get on board. Volvo announced recently that as a company it is aiming to become carbon neutral by 2040 and is planning a fleet of electric and hybrid vehicles. In a 2020 Super Bowl ad with basketball star LeBron James, General Motors proclaimed that its infamous gas guzzler, the Hummer, would be reborn as an electric 1,000-horsepower pickup truck in 2021. And in 2021, GM announced it would sell only zero-emission vehicles by 2035.
As of 2020, twenty countries—ranging from rich ones such as Norway and Sweden to low income ones such as India and Sri Lanka—have announced they’ll be banning sales of new gas or diesel cars at some point in the future, with estimated dates ranging from 2025 for Norway to 2050 for Costa Rica. China has announced it will be doing this, too, although with no date set as yet. California, the fifth largest economy in the world, plans to ban the sale of new fossil fuel cars by 2035. This might sound far away, but I saw our first electric city bus here in Lubbock in 2020. If we’ve got them in the second most conservative city in America, the world really must be changing.
What will electrification accomplish? According to Saul, it’s a big part of ensuring the U.S. meets its Paris goals, and it will also create 25 million new jobs. “Will our lives change?” he asks rhetorically. “The surprising answer is, not a lot. Those things that will change, though, will be for the better: cleaner air, cleaner water, better health, cheaper energy, and a more robust grid.”
REACHING FOR THE HIGHER ENERGY FRUIT
Electricity generation is a no-brainer, but what about other sources of carbon? Industry is responsible for 21 percent of emissions worldwide. These come from construction, manufacturing, mining, and from chemical reactions when creating materials, particularly cement. Certain heavy manufacturing industries, including those that make glass, steel, and concrete, require extremely high temperatures that, so far, renewable sources have not been able to achieve. But in 2019 a new start-up called Heliogen claimed it had created a way to generate heat between 1,000 and 1,500°C using concentrated solar power—effectively a solar “oven.” A Canadian company called CarbonCure is commercializing a method that injects CO2 into cement as it’s hardening into concrete, turning the process into a net sink rather than an emissions source. Technologies like these aren’t operational yet, but they show the potential for new development in many areas, including heavy industry.
A big part of a grid transition to clean energy is ensuring a stable supply of power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Low-carbon-baseload power can come from geothermal, or from nuclear, or from using batteries or other methods to store energy generated by wind and solar. None of these solutions are perfect. Geothermal energy does release some carbon dioxide, although significantly less than fossil fuel–powered electricity generation. For example, Iceland produces about 0.16 million tons of CO2 from its geothermal energy every year, while the U.S. produces almost 2,000 million tons of CO2 each year generating electricity from fossil fuels. The mining, extraction, and processing of the materials and rare earth metals needed for wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and nuclear also have a carbon footprint that, while significantly lower than fossil fuels, isn’t zero. Nuclear power has other challenges, from the astronomical cost of building a conventional plantI to the ethics and logistics of extracting its fuel and disposing of its toxic waste. Lingering memories of nuclear disasters and concerns about the proliferation of nuclear weapons add to its complexity. But heartening progress is being made in unexpected places.
First, the price of lithium-ion batteries fell 86 percent from 2010 to 2019 and is expected to continue this slide. In September 2019, the city of Los Angeles approved a record-breaking deal involving solar plus battery storage that would supply electricity at 3.3 cents per kilowatt-hour, and battery costs continue to drop. In terms of mining rare earth metals, the DeGrussa copper and gold mine in the Australian bush, formerly run on diesel generators, is now powered by one of the largest off-grid solar farms on the planet, saving 12 million tons of carbon emissions each year. Efforts to recycle batteries, as Tesla does, and solar panels and wind turbine blades as well, as they come to the end of their lives, are essential to minimizing the costs and emissions of resource extraction. And then there’s technology: distributed and smart grids can help move the electricity around in ways that increase efficiency and minimize the need for storage. And when electricity is plentiful, the excess can be used to pump water up to a higher hydropower reservoir; when energy is needed, the water can run downhill to power the turbines.
In terms of alternative energy sources, Iceland is already entirely powered by geothermal energy, and others are getting on board. When I visited Ball State University in Indiana a few years ago, everyone wanted to tell me about their new geothermal energy system. It’s the largest ground-source closed system in the country, with over thirty-six hundred boreholes that together replaced four old coal-fired boilers. Most of the emissions in Juneau, Alaska, are generated by the millions of cruise ship visitors that power their economy, so residents have designed and set up their own carbon offset program. Visitors pay to offset the carbon emissions of their trip by replacing local heating oil use with zero-emission heat pumps.
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