Deep Decarbonization: A Realistic Way Forward on Climate Change
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
This article even mention it, obviously on the last place in a strange way "and to advanced nuclear plants with zero emissions". As if there were some non-advanced nuclear plants that have non-zero emission.
Solar and wind require energy storage that we don't have now and it does not seem we will without major technological leap. In addition, in large parts of the World they just does not make sense as there is not enough sunny/windy days.
For nuclear energy we have everything - knowledge, infrastructure, experience.
What makes people so blind to the simple solution of the problem we have now? Eco people fought vigorously nuclear energy for years and now we are where we are. Time to say that they've made a costly mistake and move on.
In my uneducated opinion, the only way I see nuclear working is if there are small modular reactors that are produced quickly in a factory assembly line.
For anyone interested, citation is here: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/read...
The idea that there is some tipping point in 2030 that must be avoided at all cost is just an internet rumor.
It's more complicated & nuanced than most blogs or stories have time for, but it's not an Internet rumor.
I don't think she says anything I much disagree with. I think this even restates my point, in less inflammatory language:
> and here, my friends, is where the mythical "we have 12 years to fix this or the world ends" narrative comes from. (I'm not pointing my finger at anyone in particular here; I'm just saying I've heard this. A lot.)
> Concl'n: Science does not identify a specific goal, target, or timeline. What it says is simply this: the more carbon we produce, the worse the impacts. The best thing to do is wean ourselves off it, as soon as is humanly possible. As a human I'd add: while minimizing suffering.
Most nuclear plants have been working 20-40 years. We need new designs for safer, cheaper plants, and a viable storage for nuclear waste.
We need both fast actions and we also need actions that take ten years or even thirty. Everything helps.
I've been participating in climate discussions for multiple decades.
The less we do and the later we do, it's going to be worse. But it's still better than not doing anything.
Ie there's no point in time, after which it's not worth doing anything.
France's nuclearization program took 20 years [2], but that's a hare's pace compared to building the energy storage required for intermittent sources.
1. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/14/global-lithium-ion-batt...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Messme...
And storage for renewables is a last resort. Instead of storage:
1. build in areas with reliable winds (offshore trade winds)
2. better interconnection ("the wind is always blowing somehwere")
3. over-provisioning. If you build 3 times as much wind power as you need, it's still a lot cheaper than nuclear and you need a lot less storage.
4. storage. It's expensive, but if you did 1-3 correctly, you don't need much of it.
Nuclear is safe, but it's also crazy expensive and takes decades to build.
Are we anywhere near the limits of what can be done with time-of-use pricing? If we flatten the "duck curve" then nuclear is a good match.
Variation in renewable energy generation can be reduced by averaging over larger geographic areas. Wind speeds and cloud cover vary much more on local scales than on continent-wide scales.
A combination of demand adjustment and linking of power generation over large geographic areas can reduce the need for energy storage.
In France, 70% of the electricity is nuclear, 15% is hydro, pumped by the excess nuclear power generated at during the night.
Now for your arguments:
1. Wind goes from 0 to 50mph at sea. No reliable wind corridor exists. Even if Market Street in San Francisco makes me think otherwise frequently :)
2. The concept of wind proliferation has been debunked, at least on the European level. We built a network between Denmark, Germany, Portugal and Italy. It doesn't work.
3. If you don't have wind, putting 3 wind turbines won't help you more. Germany learned it the hard way where their CO2 emission flat lined since 2009 instead of going down despite their all in on the wind and solar energy. If you install 3 times more than what you need, you also have the side effect of making your renewable energy 3 times more carbone intensive. It kills solar as a viable, scalable option for instance.
4. Yes that would be the required breakthough to change the game. Right now batteries production pollute way too much and cost too much to be climate efficient.
Do you have either a non-paywall version of that article or an alternative article with a similar view? I'm curious what it says, but I can't read it with the paywall in place.
We would need to develop a wavesomethingreactor which doesn't exist yet.
Nuclear will not solve our problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
If Fukushima was in New Yersey the USA would have lost New York City.
If global warming is as certain and as dangerous as what's being claimed, the risk of contaminating a few thousand acres (or even miles) with radioactivity is certainly worth it to save the world.
Plus Fukushima basically disproved the China syndrome scare we've been fed for 40+ years.
That's 10sqkm that's been lost basically forever, or as long as it humans require solar power for only 648MW during the day when the sun is shining.
Fukushima Daiichi was 5,306 MW and generated that 24hrs a day.
[1] https://www.originenergy.com.au/blog/5-largest-solar-farms-i...
Michael Shellenberger is one of my favorite writers on this topic. The radiation around Fukushima is less than the naturally occurring radiation in Colorado.
2. huge political hurdles
3. no ROI and no clean energy without billions of up-front investment and 20 years
I think we should have started spending hundreds of billions on nuclear power plants yesterday, but now we have to walk and chew gum at the same time. If it really does take 20 years to build enough nuclear power plants (construction that will be fueled by carbon) we have to make some other clean energy investments RIGHT NOW that will soften the blow until we finish building those reactors.
If it can solve global warming in 20 years, that's an easy win to take. There is no emergency forcing anything faster, and I doubt that it's even possible to find a cure (that isn't worse than the disease) that works faster anyway.
You say nuclear isn't dangerous because of all the safety measures, yet here you're qualifying those safety measures as mere overreaction.
Not to be pedantic, but nothing is going to solve it. We're talking about efforts to mitigate it.
When people start to truly panic and fear death you can be sure the nukes will start getting built quickly. It’s just too bad people on all sides can’t get there before reality sets in further, including those who claim to be legitimately fearful (if they aren’t pushing for nuclear now, and fast, they’re not truly fearful.)
> When people start to truly panic and fear death you can be sure the nukes will start getting built quickly.
By this point it is far too late for any action to have meaningful consequence. People are raising hands now, when the effects are practically nonexistent on a human timescale, because if we wait until the effects affect us, then we are well and truly fucked. Society won’t collapse this century, but it might in a few hundred years.
In retrospect, the advocacy of regressive policies like "everyone should fly less" will be just another chapter of the long serious of luddites thinking the only solution to problems is to reverse technological progress in the face of new, unexpected problems raised through the continual growth of the global economy.
What will never happen is addressing climate change through social engineering.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/20/climate-change-to-slow-globa...
A carbon tax (at least without going 100% to sequestration) is only an behavior penalty. It's not even a net gain, it's just slowing a net loss. There's nothing innovative about that.
The sequestration part of the equation is where there's potential for technological breakthroughs. If we go carbon negative, it won't be because it requires a change in lifestyle, but because we find a cheap way to offset our carbon generation. And I mean literally pulling carbon from thin air (or water). Not using accounting trickery to buy some emission "offset" that a developing population surely would have hypothetically used, had you not paid them cash money (along with a sizable percentage to some broker who has friends in DC).
I think you would find much less opposition, no matter the government's cost, once 1) a plan is laid out that doesn't require a regression in anyone's lifestyle, and 2) doesn't involve a punitive cost to sustain that lifestyle, and 3) doesn't involve any component resembling wealth re-distribution, or buying credit that amounts to paying someone else to not do something.
If you're going for utilitarianism, pick a more politically agreeable utility, like actual sequestration, if you want to be successful.
It prevents addition of co2, but does not subtract. Focus on encouraging and incentives for subtraction, not preventing addition. If you want people to get on board. (I get that reducing emissions means less to sequester. That's thinking short term, and beyond minor cutbacks, a political loser. A successful solution won't require that to be effective.)
I'm saying anything punitive and negatively coercive is the wrong approach. It might technically work, but won't ever be successful politically. Unless we go full authoritarian regime. As soon as a large enough portion of the population is hit with having to change lifestyle, it's done for. Focus on solutions that don't require that.
How do you foresee the other environmental pressures (water, soil etc) being resolved? Are we merely maturing through a series of dirty technologies and are on the cusp of a clean tech revolution that will allow us to arbitrarily increase the Earth's carrying capacity? At what point does absolute decoupling of growth and resource consumption occur?
I do hope you're right, as it seems like the only viable path, but I am still doubtful.
Chernobyl and more recently Fukushima.
You might say those were caused by outdated tech or bad management. I'm someone who doesn't think my local or national government would be immune to those failings.
The country is already destroying itself with fracking and coal mining. Nuclear power is orders of magnitude more devastating. So while nuclear is plenty safe when handled correctly, it's completely understandable to feel like America is not a country which can be trusted to handle things correctly.
All of this is completely wrong. Fracking has enabled us to simultaneously reduce CO2 emissions (by reducing coal mining) while reducing our reliance on foreign oil. Nuclear would be a huge leap forward, again maintaining energy independence (no reliance on Chinese solar panels) while cutting CO2 output.
You’ve got it backwards. America, and the rest of the world, has a problem with environmentalists who can’t do cost-benefit analysis. Thanks to nuclear, France hit CO2 emissions per capita of 6.5 tons back in 1990. Now it’s at 4.6. Germany is still around 9. By the time Germany gets to similar levels using wind and solar, France will have been sitting at those lower levels for 50 years. Everyone in Germany becoming vegans tomorrow won’t make up for half a century of unnecessary CO2 emissions because environmentalists were afraid of nuclear.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-can-cont...
We still can't get companies to tell the public what's in these fluids because they are protected trade secrets.
Prior to Fukushima nuclear power was fairly economical in Japan. Post-Fukushima and in retrospect it would have been cheaper to cover every roof in Japan with solar panels, build loads of offshore wind, and build massive energy storage facilities and pumped storage reservoirs.
I would imagine the expense is difficult to determine and quite controversial. Especially when you consider the costs of the effects to the ocean/environment and whatnot that aren't being borne by the japanese people.
Any nuclear accident is unacceptable, but what do you think the rate of crashes were in the first 1000 Airplanes?
When we don't build nuclear, we don't really get better at nuclear. If the U.S. decided to build 50 Nuclear reactors in relatively remote parts of Nevada to power California. Even if we had another accident, by the time we had finished that project our safety standards would be in a very different place.
People aren't always rational, people will strongly resist changing their current viewpoints and people will very strongly resist making lifestyle changes. Politicians know this also when looking to get elected.
Reducing meat consumption and reducing the number of flights we take are other areas people need to look at but you'll be met with the same problems at a personal and political level.
And what are the equivalent numbers on solar and wind?
We don't know that since to this day we do not know what cost a nuclear power plant actually imposes on society. The geological issue of ultimate storage for example is absurdly complex and remains unresolved. Here in Germany there's only very few potential locations[1]. None of them without potentially hazardous downsides.
[1]: https://www.bgr.bund.de/DE/Themen/Endlagerung/Bilder/BGR_Ber...
We do have energy storage now, and it is already pretty damn good. Lower costs of production offset the cost of any inefficiencies of storage.
From a policy perspective, Victory Gardens [2] were a successful strategy during WWII. It would be great to mobilize a similar effort to get people growing food in their own backyards again, and reduce the amount of monocrop farming and all the global transportation and chemical fertilizer production that goes along with it.
1: “The Carbon Farming Solution”
2: Victory Gardens: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden
My wife and I have been mostly vegan for a year for health reasons and it’s surprisingly easy. Throw on the eco benefit and it’s a very good feeling. Very worth it.
Surprisingly little about vegan promotional stuff gives practical advice. It's mostly talking about how wasteful meat is and how foolish meat-eaters are.
Where is practical material about daily eating habits? Like, what should an athletic teenager eat, how much, and how often? Preferably with pictures of actual normal daily food, not "here's an arcane recipe requiring twelve ingredients and ten steps that you will eat once and forget about". And preferably with approximate nutritional value.
For adults it's probably pretty easy simply because adults don't need a lot of food to be healthy, and can skip meals without much downside. Adults are also in many ways less busy. A teenager needs food in the morning rushing to school, and probably needs to pack lunch also because there probably isn't a real vegan meal available at school to buy.
If you do a cursory search of vegan material, or only pay attention to stuff that pops up on your Facebook/Reddit/HackerNews/Twitter feed, you'll definitely get a lot of "meat = bad"-type material. However, if you put in a little more effort there's a lot of good material available - from recipes, to nutrition advice, to guides on what products are vegan/are not.
Hint: I've found appending the term "vegan" to my Google searches for recipes tends to work quite well and yield healthy, reasonable, scalable meals. By putting in the work, I've gotten a bunch of YouTube channels, saved recipes I like, and nutrition advice.
More importantly, a recipe doesn't tell you how much or how often you should eat it in your diet.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2018.1...
> The present paper argues that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics ignores or gives short shrift to direct and indirect evidence that vegetarianism may be associated with serious risks for brain and body development in fetuses and children. Regular supplementation with iron, zinc, and B12 will not mitigate all of these risks. Consequently, we cannot say decisively that vegetarianism or veganism is safe for children.
I seriously recommend you read the entire review. I do not think it's something that can be trivially solved with supplementation. Eg:
> The AND says that “[v]egans must regularly consume…B-12-fortified foods or B-12-containing supplements,” and “[m]ost vegetarians should” do the same (Melina, Craig, and Levin 2016). The results of Herrmann et al. (2003) suggest that even with supplementation vegans may still tend to cluster in the deficient-to-borderline-deficient range. Vegetarians can achieve adequate B12 levels with supplementation, but some are still in the deficient and borderline-deficient range. Whether it is realistic for vegetarians/vegans to maintain adequate B12 levels throughout their entire childhood via supplementation is an open question.
> The consequences of B12 deficiency in childhood for brain and body development are extensive, severe, and can be irreversible. Potential consequences include (among many others) impaired cognitive development/school performance, depression, weakness, fatigue, nerve damage, and failure to thrive (Graham, Arvela, and Wise 1992; Rasmussen, Fernhoff, and Scanlon 2001). Breastfeeding infants whose mothers are vegetarian/vegan are also known to be at risk for B12 deficiency (Graham, Arvela, and Wise 1992; Kühne, Bubl, and Baumgartner 1991; Roschitz et al. 2005; von Schenck, Bender-Götze, and Koletzko 1997).
Not only that, he is against vegetarianism on the base of it being a thing liberals do.
Using regenerative farming, cows can even be net carbon negative, meanwhile a lot of human feed uses artificial fertilizer which is a big contributor to carbon emissions.
See White Oak Pastures for an example (verified by third parties): https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019...
The fact is, our current system not only ignores the negative externalities of (animal intensive) agriculture — we subsidize it. That’s why I think a carbon tax is a good idea. It would mean meat would become more expensive. This angers a lot of people. But if we get serious about measuring the actual environmental effects of agriculture, it needs to be reflected in the cost. To me, if we solve this problem the world would eat a lot more plants, and the meat that is consumed would be produced by carbon negative, regenerative practices.
Land that is capable of storing carbon is generally great farmland since the process in carbon sinks is what leads to humus.
I suspect there's zero chance that this type of sentiment could be harnessed for "Hey, let's offset carbon emissions [of whom the #1 emitter is our chief political rival, China]"
In fact that's the biggest problem with broadening support for decarbonization in general. The largest share of global carbon is emitted by countries like India and China, which billionaires exported thousands of American jobs to, profiting from looser environmental regulations in the process. Of course the average American outside of the SF ivory tower is skeptical about changing his or her own habits to clean up that mess!
>While Victory Gardens were portrayed as a patriotic duty, 54% of Americans polled said they grew gardens for economic reasons while only 20% mentioned patriotism. (which cites the book Eating for victory : food rationing and the politics of domesticity)
Combined with the produce shows and competitions mentioned, I'd put indirect social pressure and saturation advertisement above the patriotism angle with this in mind. I'd wager that if there was a push to have people grow their own veg again, citing economic reasons, and calling them "freedom gardens" or some such, we could see a similar level of success.
India emits about 7% of global emissions. The United States emits about 16% [1].
Per capita India emits about 1/9th what the US does.
[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
I still think the basic thesis I am driving at holds, instead of cleaning up their act 20 years ago, multinational corporations shipped all of these polluting jobs to nations where it was OK to pollute, acting as a sort of escape valve which allowed them to continue belching carbon into the air and keep their profits high.
US and EU industry are among the cleanest in the world and asking the working class in these places to make more sacrifices is a slap in the face which has been going on for years. The Kyoto Protocol established no carbon targets for developing countries. The Paris Agreement established targets but they were laxer than the targets for developed countries.
This is a decarbonization strategy designed to optimize the profits of multinational corporations. If the working and middle classes don't push back it will continue, but corporate-owned media is ready to put Greta Thunberg on stage at every opportunity and shame you for questioning any part of the party line on climate change.
Whether or not that felt like a luxury at the time is kind of irrelevant from an accounting perspective but important from a political perspective.
That said, for someone in the U.S. to try and pass off responsibility to a country emitting three times less per capita [1] seems borderline absurd to me. And that's not even accounting for the fact that -- as you point out -- much of China's emissions are exported from the U.S and EU. If the U.S. had the cleanest industry and its people had already made significant sacrifices in the name of climate protection we should see that the U.S. has comparatively low per-capita emissions. It clearly doesn't.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emis...
US is 16.1 metric tons per capita in 2018. The only countries or territories higher than the US are Kazakhstan (16.8), Australia (16.8), Luxembourg (16.9), Oman (17.6), Saudi Arabia (18.6), Estonia (18.6), Gibraltar (21.8), Bahrain (21.8), United Arab Emirates (22.4), Kuwait (23.9), Trinidad and Tobago (26.2), New Caledonia (26.2), Qatar (38.2), Curaçao (52.1), and Palau (58.0).
The EU average is 8.6. China is 8.0. India is 1.9.
I don't see how the US qualifies as among the cleanest.
If you imported 200 million people into the US in poverty conditions and did nothing to improve their situation, then all of a sudden US per capita emissions would look great too.
In the worst case scenario if you attach policy to this metric you might see states gaming it by deciding to make sure their poor people stay that way (probably already on the minds of policy makers in some authoritarian states).
Admittedly I don't have numbers handy, but I think it would be better to look at emissions generated per dollar of economic output, particularly in industries that generate the most emissions. Then you can start inferring judgements about whether it's better for humanity to open a new factory in China or in the USA, and those two states have to compete on cleanliness if they want to grow their economic output. I bet this sort of measurement would paint the US in a much more favorable light than per capita (and the EU even better). If adding the next $100B to the world economy in the US or EU is cleaner than adding it in China, why shouldn't we push for that?
1: https://www.agric.wa.gov.au/grains/control-green-bridge-pest...
Everybody going back to farming is a way to use the unemployed I guess. Maybe it'll have a comeback once we've automated everything (we're well down that path now).
It's a fine hobby if you enjoy gardening and find satisfaction in the honest simplicity and hard work of digging over soil, weeding, and spreading manure.
But the truth is: supermarket food is incredibly cheap, and you'll be putting in 50 hours of labour to grow $20 worth of vegetables.
If you enjoy the process and don't mind not getting much output, by all means enjoy it as a hobby. But as a way to feed the nation? I'm skeptical.
Therefore, I’m not saying we should copy the Victory Garden from WWII verbatim, but use it as a model for how every person can use their backyard to combat climate change.
The point is not to replace all of agriculture, but find ways that, collectively, individuals can make a dent in the problem. Even if it’s as simple as planting more oak trees and fruit trees.
But, some of the comments here lack imagination (to speak kindly of the some of the negativity and snark in some of the other replies) in how we could take a 20th century idea and update it for today. We have more technology available, and more knowledge.
Nordhaus won a Nobel Memorial Prize proposing a solution: https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/
To oversimplify: carbon tariffs on any country not doing their part.
I actually find it terrifying that people think this way. It's the same intentional blindness that climate change deniers show, only with more steps and information.
The author even goes as far as parroting George W Bush's (now decade old and stupid even when it was fresh) vague hope that technology will just magically fix the problem. Of course, he is allowed to be bat shit insane because he is on "our side".
This problem is (geo-)political. It's not about technology or ideas or campaigning. It cannot be fixed by any local action (except maybe building flood defenses and watching everyone else drown?). Until people accept that they won't be able to fix this by composting more and hoping others take the bus, we will be doomed. Given that, a great article about how much Madrid could cut it's emissions is pointless and distracting.
None of those things are actually likely to work. But they're infinitely more likely to work that talking about local action and cutting back your meat intake.
Sorry if I wasn't clear, this problem is really hard. Likely unsolvably hard. But that doesn't make an impractical solution practical.
No, there are no effective things my community can take. None.
Even my whole nation has zero actual power. That's the whole point here. I don't know why people keep saying that.
Im a limey brit. We have a huge economy, lots of cars and houses, all pouring out co2. But we only produce 1% of world emissions. So even if we cut our emissions to zero today, that would be only 1/8th of the global cut needed just for 2020. Given world co2 emissions are growing at 2.7%, the problem would still be getting worse.
Nothing the UK does matters in the face of this issue. And we're one of the bigger, more powerful, more polluting nations.
Before we can find an actual solution, we need to stop wasting time and effort pretending this can be solved by communities. It really really can't.
One of the main reasons why we can't replace fossil fuels is because they are arguably the most efficient way of storing and transporting a huge potential of energy.
Think about it like this. It's easier to store a ton of coal for 50 years then it is to store the same amount of potential energy as electricity in a battery. It's more efficient to transport a ship filled with coal then it is to transport the same amount of energy as electricity through power lines.
Fossil fuels have a high energy yield per unit and they are abundant.
So, fossil fuels are far easier to scale towards diverse and large energy needs compared to clean energy sources.
The author hears the bells chime, but can't find them: he alludes to the higher price of "green steel" and how subsidies are a necessary to support these innovations. But he ultimately draws the wrong conclusion.
For one, he compares Denmark to China. Which represents 18% of the World's population. Sure, if China would switch to wind energy, the effects would be massive. But that's discounting vast economic differences between those countries.