March 1, 2022
Dear Friends and Family,
The excerpts in this epilogue posit several things:
The Questions of Today: Situation: Last Friday the Russians attacked Ukraine; some pundits are speculating this might be the start of World War III.
Pertinent facts underlying this first European invasion in over 75 years.
We have known both Russia and China have expansion desires.
The Consequences: Russia’s energy income rose significantly because of the price increases and Europe became more dependent on Russia for its energy supply as U.S. imports decreased (particularly liquefied natural gas – LNG). As a result, politically Russia gained more leverage on Europe (Germany and Eastern Europe in particular) which the U.S. cannot counter unless the U.S. energy policy is changed.
The Questions:
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
The excerpts in this epilogue posit several things:
- Achieving the targets set in the Paris Climate Agreement is highly unlikely to slow any growth of human influences on the climate, let alone reduce them.
- If the U.S. were to generate all of the energy it uses with renewables, 25% to 50% of all the land in the U.S. would be required for wind and solar farms and battery storage centers.
- Batteries and wind turbines have a relatively short life – 10 to 20 years and they have to be landfilled which requires extensive land.
- Eliminating the burning of wood in Africa and Asia would have a huge impact on world-wide pollution as well as CO2 emissions. Yet, little effort is being expended to do so.
- Two technical solutions exist to counter warming of the planet – solar radiative and Carbon Dioxide removal from the atmosphere which are described in the attachments.
- Environmental adaption to the changing climate on a local basis is the most probable outcome for dealing with any warming.
The Questions of Today: Situation: Last Friday the Russians attacked Ukraine; some pundits are speculating this might be the start of World War III.
Pertinent facts underlying this first European invasion in over 75 years.
We have known both Russia and China have expansion desires.
- We have known both Russia and China have expansion desires.
- We know the world economic and for the most part the political balance is highly influenced by energy – particularly in Europe.
- The United States decreased its production of oil and natural gas by halting oil and gas leasing on federal lands and regulations regarding fracking thus disrupting our energy independence. This had an impact on the rise in world-wide oil and gas prices and overall supply. The reasoning for these policy changes was the reduction of CO2 emissions via less use of fossil fuels, e.g., “The New Green Deal.”
The Consequences: Russia’s energy income rose significantly because of the price increases and Europe became more dependent on Russia for its energy supply as U.S. imports decreased (particularly liquefied natural gas – LNG). As a result, politically Russia gained more leverage on Europe (Germany and Eastern Europe in particular) which the U.S. cannot counter unless the U.S. energy policy is changed.
The Questions:
- How much of Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine was because of this added leverage on Europe?
- Will this embolden Russia to attack Eastern Europe or influence China’s potential invasion of Taiwan (since the U.S. and NATO would have difficulty defending both eastern Europe and Taiwan simultaneously)?
- Might this lead to World War III and if so, how much would be because of the U.S. Climate Change philosophy?
Happy Learning,
Harley
CLIMATE CHANGE EPILOGUES – EPILOGUE 5
POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS – EXCERPTS
THE REALISM OF TODAY’S EFFORTS:
The Science: In December 2015 the politicians and activists from 194 countries came together in Paris and agreed to limit human influences on the climate sufficiently to keep the global temperature from rising 2 degrees C. Take a moment to read that again, carefully. When you do, you’ll probably realize that there are few unstated assumptions. One is that there’s an agreed-upon temperature baseline from which to measure warming. If the baseline were the temperature in 1910, the world has already warmed by about 1.3 degrees C, whereas if the baseline were the average from 1951 to 1980 the warming today would be 0.9 or 0.4 degrees C smaller. In fact, the temperature from which we’re supposed to judge future warming is ambiguous. Without clarity on this point, future politicians and policymakers could declare either victory of failure, as might be convenient at the time.
The Demand: How realistic is it to believe that net global emission can be eliminated within thirty to fifty years? The world will need much more energy in the coming decades, in part because of demographics. The economic betterment of most of humanity in the coming decades will drive energy demand even more than population growth. Combined, the drivers of population and development are expected to grow energy demand by about 50% through 2050. Fossil fuels provide about 80% of the world’s energy today. A strong growth in renewable sources like wind and solar will decrease the share of the world’s energy provided by fossil fuels to about 70%.
The challenge is to flatten this steeply rising curve in the face of growing energy demand. Under current trends, every 10% reduction that the developed world makes in its emissions will offset less than four years of growth in the developing world. It will hardly do anything directly to reduce human influences on the climate given the 100% reduction needed to stabilize the carbon dioxide concentration. This was clear even in 2015, when the agreement was signed. The Paris Agreement is unlikely to slow the grown of human influences on the climate, let alone reduce them. A realistic view of the longer term is that the world is very unlikely to zero out its net emissions by 2075, let alone by 2050, and so society will largely respond by adapting.
Source: Unsettled by Steven E. Koonin (2021)
Renewable Energy Capacity: The U.S. government estimates renewables will be a larger source of electricity than natural gas in the U.S. by 2050. Globally, it estimates renewables will rise from being 28% if the world’s electricity in 2018 to nearly 50% by 2050. But those numbers are misleading. While renewables in 2018 globally generated 11% of total primary energy, 64% of it (7% of total energy) came from hydroelectric dams. And dams are largely maxed out in developed nations, while their construction is opposed by environmentalists in poor and developing ones. The shares of global primary energy from solar and wind in 2018 was just 3%.
But won’t solar and wind take off now that the costs of batteries are rapidly declining? The costs of batteries are declining, but the progress has been gradual, not radical. It has not allowed the cheap storage of the grid’s electricity. Consider Tesla’s most famous battery project, a 129 megawatt-hour lithium battery storage center in Australia. It provides enough backup power for 7,500 homes for four hours. One of the largest lithium battery storage centers in the world is in Escondido, California. But it can only store enough power for about 24,000 American homes for four hours. There are about 124 million households in the United States. To back up all the homes, businesses, and factories in the U.S. electrical grid for four hours, we would need 15,900 storage centers the size of the one in Escondido.
The big oil and gas companies know perfectly well that batteries can’t back up the grid. The places integrating large amounts of solar and wind onto electricity grids are relying more and more on natural gas plants, which can be ramped up and down quickly to cope with the vagaries of the weather. France is a perfect example. After investing $33 billion during the last decade to add more solar and wind to the grid, France now uses less nuclear and more natural gas than before, leading to higher electricity prices and more carbon-intensive electricity.
Renewable Energy Land Requirements: A wind farm requires roughly 450 times more land than a natural gas power plant.
In the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, a solar farm only generates two-fifths of its annual electricity needs in the autumn and winter months, but the U.S. consumes almost 50% of its total annual electricity during the colder portion of the year. That means that roughly 10% of yearly demand would need to be stored from one half of the year for use in the other half by batteries (which would only charge and discharge once/year). But we can solve that issue by overbuilding solar farms by 30%, unfortunately that takes up an area of eighteen thousand square miles – equivalent to the area of Maryland and Connecticut combined.
These calculations only consider electricity. If we move beyond electricity to include all energy, space requirements quickly get out of hand. If the United States were to try to generate all of the energy it uses with renewables, 25% to 50% of all land in the U.S. would be required. By contrast, today’s energy system requires just 0.5% of land in the United States.
Source: Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger (2020).
Batteries: What is a battery? I think Tesla said it best when they called them Energy Storage Systems. That’s important. Batteries do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants. So, to say and Electric Vehicle (EV) is a zero-emission vehicle it not at all valid. Since 40% of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that 40% of the EVs on the road are coal-powered. It takes the same amount of energy to move a 5,000-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.
Car batteries weight one thousand pounds and are about the size of a travel trunk. They contain 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig us 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one car battery. All batteries eventually rupture, and they all end up in the landfill.
Windmills each weigh 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, and 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades.
Source: Article by Bruce Haedrich, who has penned numerous books, including The Fifth Generation War and The Outlands.
POTENTIAL NON-TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS: Geoengineering: It is defined as the deliberate large-scale manipulation of environmental processes that affects the earth’s climate, e.g., cool the planet by replacing the amount of incoming solar energy.
Source: Unsettled by Steven E. Koonin
Eliminate Burning Wood: When you interview women who are small farmers about what it’s like to cook with wood you might assume they would complain about the toxic smoke they must breathe. After all, such indoor air pollution shortens the lives four million people per year, according to the World Health Organization. But around the world, what they complain about more often is how much time it takes to chop wood, haul wood, start fires, and maintain them.
Burning coal is “good” on most human and environmental measures versus burning wood. Natural gas is similarly better than coal on most measures. People burn wood not coal, and coal not natural gas, when those fuels are all they can afford, not because they are the fuels they prefer. Humans today use more wood for fuel than at any other time in history, even as it constitutes a lower share of total energy. Ending the use of wood for fuel should thus be one of the highest priorities for people and institution seeking both universal prosperity and environmental progress.
Economic Development: Two out of every hundred Americans are involved in farming, whereas two out of every three Ugandans are farmers. “How do you grow enough food,” the Ugandan farmer asks. “With very large machines,” I replied.
For more than 250 years, the combination of manufacturing and the rising productivity of farming have been the engine of economic growth for nations around the world. Today, hundreds of millions of horses, cattle, oxen, and other animals are still being used as draft animals for farming in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Not having to grow food to feed them could free up significant amounts of land for planting of trees, a significant potential for emission reduction. The key is producing more food on less land. While the amount of land used for agriculture has increased by 8% since 1961, the amount of food produced has grown by an astonishing 300%.
As technology becomes more available, crop yields will continue to rise, even under higher temperatures. Experts say sub-Saharan African farms can increase yields by nearly 100% by 2050 simply through access to fertilizer, irrigation, and farm machinery. (And methane emissions would be reduced because of the reduction of draft animals). Additionally, the use of water per unit of agricultural production has been declining as farmers have become more precise in irrigation methods.
From 1981 to 2015, the population of humans living in extreme poverty plummeted from 44% to 10%. Our prosperity is made possible by using energy and machines so fewer and fewer of us have to produce food, energy and consumer products.
Source: Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger (2020)
POTENTIAL TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS: There are at least two technical ways to counter warming of the planet. One is to make the earth a bit more reflective (increase its albedo), so that it absorbs a bit less energy from the sun. Alternatively, we could pursue Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), which is just what is sounds like: sucking some of the CO2 back out of the atmosphere to directly offset human emissions. These two strategies are very different in terms of their practical challenges and potential impacts (positive and negative), but both merit discussion.
Solar Radiative Removal: There are many ways we might further enhance the albedo, including brightening the land surface with “white roofs” on buildings, engineering crops to be more reflective, brightening the ocean with microbubbles on the surface, and putting up giant reflectors in space, to name a few. However, creating aerosols in the stratosphere might be the most plausible way to make a significant global impact. The haze in the stratosphere that occurs naturally after major volcanic eruptions demonstrably cools the planet for a few years as the haze particles settle out. Such cooling events are evident in the global temperature record.
It is well within the capabilities of current technology to create a stratospheric haze via any of a number of methods including additives to jet fuel or artillery shells that disperse the gas hydrogen sulfide at high altitude. This would not be a onetime exercise: the haze would have to be refreshed constantly, as the particles settle out over a year or two. Solar Radiation Management merits serious research, in fact the US Congress has recently provided funds for exploratory work.
Carbon Dioxide Removal: CDR is a twin of mitigation – taking it out of the atmosphere instead of (or in addition to) putting less of it up there in the first place. There are seeming advantages to CDR. It would make the issue of “whose CO2 is it” less relevant and thus less contentious; assigning responsibility for emissions is one of the largest impediments to current international efforts to reduce them. It would also allow the continued use of fossil fuels as demand, economics, and technology might require. It’s not difficult to design a chemical plant that would capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere. So, the real questions are about scale and costs. The scale of carbon dioxide removal required to materially reduce human influences is daunting. The annual global consumption of energy materials is measured in gigatons. Every year the world as a whole uses about 4.5 Gt of oil and 8 Gt of coal, so removing even 10 Gt of CO2 per year (about one-third of current emissions) would require a comparable infrastructure just to capture and handle the material. Needless to say, this wouldn’t be cheap. Recent estimates are that it would cost upward of $100 to capture and compress one ton of CO2, meaning a cost of at least one trillion dollars to remove 10 Gt of CO2 per year.
And then there is the issue of what to do with the CO2, once it’s removed from the atmosphere. The best thing to do with CO2 removed from the atmosphere is to sequester it, either underground or in the ocean. Needless to say, this would be an enormous undertaking at the scale required. Instead of using chemical plants to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, another option might be to remove it using natural plants – that is vegetation. Hence the calls for planting some trillion trees (reforestation) to save the planet.
ADAPTATION: It seems all but certain that our efforts to reduce emission will be complemented, if not overshadowed, by adaptation to a changing climate.
CLOSING THOUGHTS: We need to better understand the tremendously complex climate models we’ve built. An awful lot of effort is being devoted to not very informative model simulations under varying emission scenarios. It would be much better spent trying to understand why the climate models fail in describing the recent past and are so uncertain in their projections of the future. In short, there should be more thinking and less unproductive computing. I’d think that kind of scrutiny of the assessment would be essential, particularly since the Biden administration is advocating some $2 trillion of spending on climate and energy.
At the same time, we need to reduce the hysteria in climate journalism. Journalists themselves need help to better understand the material they are presented with, and the public needs the tools to become more critical consumers of media coverage of climate.
So, the best strategy is to promote economic development and strong institutions in developing countries in order to improve their ability to adapt. A research program into geo-engineering options like those discussed is prudent and, as I’ve noted, the intense monitoring of the earth’s system that would be a first step in that research program would, in any event, also improve our understanding of the climate system.
What I think we should do, in short, is to begin by restoring integrity to the way science informs society’s decisions on climate and energy – we need to move from The Science back to science. And then take the steps most likely to result in positive outcomes for society.
Source: Unsettled by Steven E. Koonin (2021).
Environmental humanism will eventually triumph over apocalyptic environmentalism, I believe, because the vast majority of people in the world want both prosperity and nature, not nature without prosperity. They are just confused about how to achieve both. The evidence shows that an organic, low-energy, and renewable-powered world would be worse, not better, for most people and the natural environment.
While environmental alarmism may be a permanent feature of public life, it need not be so loud. The global system is changing. While this brings new risks, it also brings new opportunities. Confronting new challenges requires the opposite of panic. With care, persistence, and, I dare say, love, I believe we can moderate the extremes and deepen understanding and respect in the process. In so trying, I believe we will bring ourselves closer to the transcendent moral purpose most people, perhaps even some currently apocalyptic environmentalists, share: nature and prosperity for all.
Source: Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger (2020)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS – EXCERPTS
THE REALISM OF TODAY’S EFFORTS:
The Science: In December 2015 the politicians and activists from 194 countries came together in Paris and agreed to limit human influences on the climate sufficiently to keep the global temperature from rising 2 degrees C. Take a moment to read that again, carefully. When you do, you’ll probably realize that there are few unstated assumptions. One is that there’s an agreed-upon temperature baseline from which to measure warming. If the baseline were the temperature in 1910, the world has already warmed by about 1.3 degrees C, whereas if the baseline were the average from 1951 to 1980 the warming today would be 0.9 or 0.4 degrees C smaller. In fact, the temperature from which we’re supposed to judge future warming is ambiguous. Without clarity on this point, future politicians and policymakers could declare either victory of failure, as might be convenient at the time.
The Demand: How realistic is it to believe that net global emission can be eliminated within thirty to fifty years? The world will need much more energy in the coming decades, in part because of demographics. The economic betterment of most of humanity in the coming decades will drive energy demand even more than population growth. Combined, the drivers of population and development are expected to grow energy demand by about 50% through 2050. Fossil fuels provide about 80% of the world’s energy today. A strong growth in renewable sources like wind and solar will decrease the share of the world’s energy provided by fossil fuels to about 70%.
The challenge is to flatten this steeply rising curve in the face of growing energy demand. Under current trends, every 10% reduction that the developed world makes in its emissions will offset less than four years of growth in the developing world. It will hardly do anything directly to reduce human influences on the climate given the 100% reduction needed to stabilize the carbon dioxide concentration. This was clear even in 2015, when the agreement was signed. The Paris Agreement is unlikely to slow the grown of human influences on the climate, let alone reduce them. A realistic view of the longer term is that the world is very unlikely to zero out its net emissions by 2075, let alone by 2050, and so society will largely respond by adapting.
Source: Unsettled by Steven E. Koonin (2021)
Renewable Energy Capacity: The U.S. government estimates renewables will be a larger source of electricity than natural gas in the U.S. by 2050. Globally, it estimates renewables will rise from being 28% if the world’s electricity in 2018 to nearly 50% by 2050. But those numbers are misleading. While renewables in 2018 globally generated 11% of total primary energy, 64% of it (7% of total energy) came from hydroelectric dams. And dams are largely maxed out in developed nations, while their construction is opposed by environmentalists in poor and developing ones. The shares of global primary energy from solar and wind in 2018 was just 3%.
But won’t solar and wind take off now that the costs of batteries are rapidly declining? The costs of batteries are declining, but the progress has been gradual, not radical. It has not allowed the cheap storage of the grid’s electricity. Consider Tesla’s most famous battery project, a 129 megawatt-hour lithium battery storage center in Australia. It provides enough backup power for 7,500 homes for four hours. One of the largest lithium battery storage centers in the world is in Escondido, California. But it can only store enough power for about 24,000 American homes for four hours. There are about 124 million households in the United States. To back up all the homes, businesses, and factories in the U.S. electrical grid for four hours, we would need 15,900 storage centers the size of the one in Escondido.
The big oil and gas companies know perfectly well that batteries can’t back up the grid. The places integrating large amounts of solar and wind onto electricity grids are relying more and more on natural gas plants, which can be ramped up and down quickly to cope with the vagaries of the weather. France is a perfect example. After investing $33 billion during the last decade to add more solar and wind to the grid, France now uses less nuclear and more natural gas than before, leading to higher electricity prices and more carbon-intensive electricity.
Renewable Energy Land Requirements: A wind farm requires roughly 450 times more land than a natural gas power plant.
In the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, a solar farm only generates two-fifths of its annual electricity needs in the autumn and winter months, but the U.S. consumes almost 50% of its total annual electricity during the colder portion of the year. That means that roughly 10% of yearly demand would need to be stored from one half of the year for use in the other half by batteries (which would only charge and discharge once/year). But we can solve that issue by overbuilding solar farms by 30%, unfortunately that takes up an area of eighteen thousand square miles – equivalent to the area of Maryland and Connecticut combined.
These calculations only consider electricity. If we move beyond electricity to include all energy, space requirements quickly get out of hand. If the United States were to try to generate all of the energy it uses with renewables, 25% to 50% of all land in the U.S. would be required. By contrast, today’s energy system requires just 0.5% of land in the United States.
Source: Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger (2020).
Batteries: What is a battery? I think Tesla said it best when they called them Energy Storage Systems. That’s important. Batteries do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants. So, to say and Electric Vehicle (EV) is a zero-emission vehicle it not at all valid. Since 40% of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that 40% of the EVs on the road are coal-powered. It takes the same amount of energy to move a 5,000-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.
Car batteries weight one thousand pounds and are about the size of a travel trunk. They contain 25 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of nickel, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig us 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one car battery. All batteries eventually rupture, and they all end up in the landfill.
Windmills each weigh 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, and 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades.
Source: Article by Bruce Haedrich, who has penned numerous books, including The Fifth Generation War and The Outlands.
POTENTIAL NON-TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS: Geoengineering: It is defined as the deliberate large-scale manipulation of environmental processes that affects the earth’s climate, e.g., cool the planet by replacing the amount of incoming solar energy.
Source: Unsettled by Steven E. Koonin
Eliminate Burning Wood: When you interview women who are small farmers about what it’s like to cook with wood you might assume they would complain about the toxic smoke they must breathe. After all, such indoor air pollution shortens the lives four million people per year, according to the World Health Organization. But around the world, what they complain about more often is how much time it takes to chop wood, haul wood, start fires, and maintain them.
Burning coal is “good” on most human and environmental measures versus burning wood. Natural gas is similarly better than coal on most measures. People burn wood not coal, and coal not natural gas, when those fuels are all they can afford, not because they are the fuels they prefer. Humans today use more wood for fuel than at any other time in history, even as it constitutes a lower share of total energy. Ending the use of wood for fuel should thus be one of the highest priorities for people and institution seeking both universal prosperity and environmental progress.
Economic Development: Two out of every hundred Americans are involved in farming, whereas two out of every three Ugandans are farmers. “How do you grow enough food,” the Ugandan farmer asks. “With very large machines,” I replied.
For more than 250 years, the combination of manufacturing and the rising productivity of farming have been the engine of economic growth for nations around the world. Today, hundreds of millions of horses, cattle, oxen, and other animals are still being used as draft animals for farming in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Not having to grow food to feed them could free up significant amounts of land for planting of trees, a significant potential for emission reduction. The key is producing more food on less land. While the amount of land used for agriculture has increased by 8% since 1961, the amount of food produced has grown by an astonishing 300%.
As technology becomes more available, crop yields will continue to rise, even under higher temperatures. Experts say sub-Saharan African farms can increase yields by nearly 100% by 2050 simply through access to fertilizer, irrigation, and farm machinery. (And methane emissions would be reduced because of the reduction of draft animals). Additionally, the use of water per unit of agricultural production has been declining as farmers have become more precise in irrigation methods.
From 1981 to 2015, the population of humans living in extreme poverty plummeted from 44% to 10%. Our prosperity is made possible by using energy and machines so fewer and fewer of us have to produce food, energy and consumer products.
Source: Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger (2020)
POTENTIAL TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS: There are at least two technical ways to counter warming of the planet. One is to make the earth a bit more reflective (increase its albedo), so that it absorbs a bit less energy from the sun. Alternatively, we could pursue Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR), which is just what is sounds like: sucking some of the CO2 back out of the atmosphere to directly offset human emissions. These two strategies are very different in terms of their practical challenges and potential impacts (positive and negative), but both merit discussion.
Solar Radiative Removal: There are many ways we might further enhance the albedo, including brightening the land surface with “white roofs” on buildings, engineering crops to be more reflective, brightening the ocean with microbubbles on the surface, and putting up giant reflectors in space, to name a few. However, creating aerosols in the stratosphere might be the most plausible way to make a significant global impact. The haze in the stratosphere that occurs naturally after major volcanic eruptions demonstrably cools the planet for a few years as the haze particles settle out. Such cooling events are evident in the global temperature record.
It is well within the capabilities of current technology to create a stratospheric haze via any of a number of methods including additives to jet fuel or artillery shells that disperse the gas hydrogen sulfide at high altitude. This would not be a onetime exercise: the haze would have to be refreshed constantly, as the particles settle out over a year or two. Solar Radiation Management merits serious research, in fact the US Congress has recently provided funds for exploratory work.
Carbon Dioxide Removal: CDR is a twin of mitigation – taking it out of the atmosphere instead of (or in addition to) putting less of it up there in the first place. There are seeming advantages to CDR. It would make the issue of “whose CO2 is it” less relevant and thus less contentious; assigning responsibility for emissions is one of the largest impediments to current international efforts to reduce them. It would also allow the continued use of fossil fuels as demand, economics, and technology might require. It’s not difficult to design a chemical plant that would capture CO2 directly from the atmosphere. So, the real questions are about scale and costs. The scale of carbon dioxide removal required to materially reduce human influences is daunting. The annual global consumption of energy materials is measured in gigatons. Every year the world as a whole uses about 4.5 Gt of oil and 8 Gt of coal, so removing even 10 Gt of CO2 per year (about one-third of current emissions) would require a comparable infrastructure just to capture and handle the material. Needless to say, this wouldn’t be cheap. Recent estimates are that it would cost upward of $100 to capture and compress one ton of CO2, meaning a cost of at least one trillion dollars to remove 10 Gt of CO2 per year.
And then there is the issue of what to do with the CO2, once it’s removed from the atmosphere. The best thing to do with CO2 removed from the atmosphere is to sequester it, either underground or in the ocean. Needless to say, this would be an enormous undertaking at the scale required. Instead of using chemical plants to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, another option might be to remove it using natural plants – that is vegetation. Hence the calls for planting some trillion trees (reforestation) to save the planet.
ADAPTATION: It seems all but certain that our efforts to reduce emission will be complemented, if not overshadowed, by adaptation to a changing climate.
- Adaptation is Agnostic: Society can adapt to climate changes whether they are natural phenomena or the result of human influences.
- Adaptation is local: Adaptation is naturally tailored to the different needs and priorities of different populations and locations. This also makes it more politically feasible. Spending for the “here and now” is far more palatable than spending to counter a vague and uncertain threat thousands of miles and two generations away. Further, local adaptation does not require the global consensus, commitment and coordination that have proved so far elusive in mitigation efforts.
- Adaptation is Autonomous: It will happen on its own, whether we plan for it or not.
- Adaptation is Effective: Societies have thrived in environments ranging from the Arctic to the Tropics. Adapting to a changing climate always acts to reduce net impacts from what they would be otherwise – after all, we wouldn’t change society to make things worse!
CLOSING THOUGHTS: We need to better understand the tremendously complex climate models we’ve built. An awful lot of effort is being devoted to not very informative model simulations under varying emission scenarios. It would be much better spent trying to understand why the climate models fail in describing the recent past and are so uncertain in their projections of the future. In short, there should be more thinking and less unproductive computing. I’d think that kind of scrutiny of the assessment would be essential, particularly since the Biden administration is advocating some $2 trillion of spending on climate and energy.
At the same time, we need to reduce the hysteria in climate journalism. Journalists themselves need help to better understand the material they are presented with, and the public needs the tools to become more critical consumers of media coverage of climate.
So, the best strategy is to promote economic development and strong institutions in developing countries in order to improve their ability to adapt. A research program into geo-engineering options like those discussed is prudent and, as I’ve noted, the intense monitoring of the earth’s system that would be a first step in that research program would, in any event, also improve our understanding of the climate system.
What I think we should do, in short, is to begin by restoring integrity to the way science informs society’s decisions on climate and energy – we need to move from The Science back to science. And then take the steps most likely to result in positive outcomes for society.
Source: Unsettled by Steven E. Koonin (2021).
Environmental humanism will eventually triumph over apocalyptic environmentalism, I believe, because the vast majority of people in the world want both prosperity and nature, not nature without prosperity. They are just confused about how to achieve both. The evidence shows that an organic, low-energy, and renewable-powered world would be worse, not better, for most people and the natural environment.
While environmental alarmism may be a permanent feature of public life, it need not be so loud. The global system is changing. While this brings new risks, it also brings new opportunities. Confronting new challenges requires the opposite of panic. With care, persistence, and, I dare say, love, I believe we can moderate the extremes and deepen understanding and respect in the process. In so trying, I believe we will bring ourselves closer to the transcendent moral purpose most people, perhaps even some currently apocalyptic environmentalists, share: nature and prosperity for all.
Source: Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger (2020)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| cc_e5l_solutions_--_epilogue_5.pdf |