Transition Observations: Good, Bad and Irritating
* Good: Solar power generation and electric vehicles (EVs) are taking off at rocket speed worldwide, with wind and battery backup also in high gear. These technologies have gone mainstream, leaving old modes of generation and transportation on the downside of the slope.
* Bad: Even if global emissions fall at a pace associated with a 1.5–2 degree C temperature rise, climate chaos may not be avoided. Evidence suggests that warming could be greater at given concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG) than Ů̊̊̊N and other mainstream projections indicate.
* Irritating: Western governments are pouring billions into corporate welfare aimed at saving the oil business and other relics of the oil age rather than saving the Earth. This threatens to leave another tough new layer of energy infrastructure blocking the sunny, windy path off fossil fuel and compulsive consumption.
Driving on Sunshine
Not only do solar and wind generate the cheapest electricity virtually everywhere, but as of 2022, virtually everybody everywhere had figured that out. Everybody who reasonably can is now acting on that knowledge. Not always effectively, but they’re acting. Solar and wind reversed course and got costlier rather than cheaper last year. But coal- and gas-fired power costs are up much, much more. That’s true most of all in Europe, but also the US, India, Indonesia, South Africa. Pretty much everywhere.
On cost and convenience terms, solar seems increasingly likely to lead the transition, with wind becoming more a night time adjunct to solar, alongside batteries. In addition, more complex grids, fancier storage, bidirectional charging that allows EV batteries to feed power back into buildings or the grid, all sorts of things once viewed as esoteric look increasingly normal.
EV sales are also soaring. Two of my favorite stats are that 10% of all new passenger vehicle sales in the world are now fully electric and 25% of the cars sold in China in late 2022 were either battery electric or plug-in hybrid. New models of all shapes and sizes are showing up in the US, where EV sales jumped 65% last year to account for about 6% of new cars.
The question preoccupying Big Policymakers now is who will build all the solar panels and batteries. Both the US and Europe are rapidly gearing up their own solar, EV and battery manufacturing, as the realization belatedly dawns that China has developed a dominating lead in all these areas. That lead should register to China’s credit, not blame, given how desperately the world needs to replace coal and gas-fired electricity. What’s more, Western governments should be able to build — or provide adequate incentives for private industry to build — their own solar manufacturing without shutting China’s panels out of their countries in the interim, thereby slowing the transition and risking retaliation from Beijing. But the important thing is that governments are finally moving.
Since electricity generation currently accounts for about 25% of all global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and road transport roughly 15% of GHG emissions and half of oil demand, decarbonizing these two sectors alone could slash emissions over the next decade. Insulation and heat pumps in homes and other buildings should have a big impact over that period, as well.
All that is likely to happen faster than forecasts show, given “tipping point” dynamics and the difficulty conventional economic modeling has in keeping up with system-disruptive change. Modeling assumes the future will follow the patterns of the past. Disruption assures it will not.
Will We Bake Anyway?
Droughts, floods, wildfires, jet-stream whiplash. You name it, we’ve had it in unprecedented amounts so far this decade. It spurs people to action on the climate crisis, which is good. But what does it imply about the future, if such intense weather shifts are already perceptible, decades before they were expected? Nothing good, if you believe such climate analysts as Medium’s Richard Crim. He calculates that the next three to five years will be much hotter even than the heat-record-breaking last three to five.
“A perfect storm of warming” is what Crim expects, based on three factors: * The likely approach of a multi-year El Nino, after three years in which La Nina ocean patterns moderated what otherwise would have been even higher temperatures; * Rapidly falling sulfur dioxide (SOx) emissions as a result of 2020 changes in international shipping fuel specifications that make the air cleaner but also removed a sunlight-blocking agent that lowers temperatures; * A phenomenon where the Earth has been gradually absorbing more sunlight over the last two decades and reflecting less back into space. The cause is debatable and may be a combination of things. But it’s happening.
Crim isn’t alone in his negative expectations. Back in 2018, three climate scientists from the universities of California at San Diego and Texas A&M published a paper in the journal Nature suggesting that climate change was accelerating beyond standard expectations for reasons that overlap significantly with Crim’s. James Hansen, who as a Nasa official famously warned Congress of climate change in the 1980s and is now at Columbia University, recently emphasized the reduction in SOx in shipping fuel as particularly important in otherwise similar analysis. Those are more or less random examples. I could have listed many others.
Common sense reinforces the thought that reality may be worse than the forecasts from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggest. Frightening as those reports are, they are the consensus view, what top climate scientists worldwide will all sign off on. That means they’re watered down, probably quite a lot.
But what about views from the likes of born-again climate optimist David Wallace-Wells, author of the 2019 best-seller The Uninhabitable Earth, as pessimistic a work as it sounds? Wallace-Wells bases his new-found hope on emission-reducing developments like those I describe in the first section of this article. The question in this section is different. It’s basically whether the IPCC has underestimated the climate impact of any given level of GHG emissions, including the rise we’ve already experienced.
I don’t know the answer. I just know there’s enough credible data and analysis to counter any inclination to rest on our laurels in light of positive indications about the emissions outlook. Those indications are good, but if Hansen, Crim and others are right, they aren’t good enough, and we’d better work harder both at reducing GHG emissions (mitigation) and preparing for the impact of heat, drought, floods and rising oceans (adaptation).
Corporate Welfare
One thing we should not be doing, in my view, is using public resources to carve out a “clean” future for the oil industry. If oil companies want to try and convert themselves into something different with a longer lifespan, fine, as long as they pay for it themselves. Yet lifelines to these and other massive GHG emitters extend from all sides of the huge and misnamed US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
What am I talking about? Examples abound, but I’ll focus on just one: carbon capture and storage. CCS is removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from the emissions stream when fossil fuels are burned and injecting that CO2 deep into the ground. Bits of the CO2 may be usable, so the process is sometimes called carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS).
The idea is that, if you apply CCS, oil and gas can still be burned — even in zero-emission times — in the “hard-to-decarbonize” 15%-25% of the economy where renewable electricity may not work well, mostly concrete, steel, aviation and shipping. Most efforts by modelers and scenario planners to identify “pathways” to zero carbon emissions by 2050 posit heavy reliance on CCS to do these things. But these are just scenarios, and it’s possible to imagine endless alternative paths to the zero-emissions goal.
Take the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero by 2050 report, famed for saying no investment is needed in oil projects that are not already operating or planned. This scenario relies heavily on CCS. But it also concedes it would probably be possible to eliminate emissions without this technology by adding another 30% to solar, wind and battery investments. That extra 30% would cost $15 trillion, the IEA says. But elsewhere, it gives the net cost of avoiding both CCS and new nuclear reactors as just $2 trillion if you subtract the savings from not building CCS and nuclear. To the public, the incremental cost is even less: “Taking account of avoided fuel costs, the estimated total additional cost of electricity to consumers between 2021 and 2050 [from using renewable electricity without CCS or nuclear] is $260 billion,” the IEA calculates.
That $260 billion may sound like a lot, but it’s hardly more than a rounding error in the global energy business. And it includes no charge for the environmental threats CCS and nuclear entail. Or the fact that both CCS and nuclear power are notorious for huge cost and timing overruns, while solar, wind and batteries are renowned for falling costs and fast installation. The oil industry has been trying for years to make CCS pay, but the process still isn’t economic. The IEA cost figures are guesstimates. A decade from now, the renewable electrification-only approach might easily turn out to be cheaper.
One thing the IEA does evidently assume with good cause is that new technologies can be developed for electrification of concrete and steel manufacturing and use of batteries and/or hydrogen in large trucks.
Yet the IRA provides big tax credits for the CCS path — credits that just happen to equal the level of subsidies Exxon says are needed to make CCS economic. Why? The IEA may have inadvertently provided the answer in a discussion of the “challenges” its Net-Zero scenario presents for the oil industry: “The oil and gas industry could play a key role in helping to develop at scale a number of clean energy technologies such as CCUS, low carbon hydrogen, biofuels and offshore wind. Scaling up these technologies and bringing down their costs will rely on large-scale engineering and project management capabilities, qualities that are a good match to those of large oil and gas companies.”
Get it? These technologies provide new jobs tailored to suit the skill set of the same companies and countries that are now producing oil and gas. That’s the point. Finding the quickest or cheapest, much less the cleanest or most socially desirable, way to end carbon emissions is not the point. It’s the system trying desperately to save a valued part of itself. It is, at best, a sad waste of time and effort that humanity can ill afford.
