Climate change won’t wait for future innovation – we need action now
nature.com
nature.com
Griffith is also careful to note that climate solutions are "yes ands", so we should increase efficiencies as much as we can in addition to electrifying as much as we can (and also pursuing ambitious strategies like fusion and CCS). Definitely make a great case of rolling out existing solutions like solar and wind in a big way to bring down carbon emissions really quickly.
[0] - the book focuses only on the US, but results could be similar in countries with similar economies.
Oh, and they also have a 9 month lead time, if you're lucky!
And this is after I've spent five figures opening every wall, heavily insulating the place, and buttoning it back up.
I'm not complaining personally; I can afford this okay, but it's impractical to expect even moderately well-off Americans to be able to. This isn't just about the bottom line of developers, 'cause most housing stock is already owned. We're probably looking at massive subsidies to make it happen, and significant resistance because doing it is a huge imposition (one I did willingly, but I knew I was getting into it) reliant on limited labor and materials.
Ideal indoor air quality is equal to outdoor air quality. This can only be achieved through air exchange. The ventilation process may be 100% efficient but the consequences of pumping outside air in and inside air out are the same. The air must be heated and costs some unit of energy to accomplish.
Ideal indoor air quality is (can be) better than outdoor air quality. This is because when the outside air is brought in it passes through filters to get rid of things like dust and pollen.
> The air must be heated and costs some unit of energy to accomplish.
Unless you use passive solar thermal, i.e., let the sun heat the home:
* https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/passive-solar-home-design
Look up HRV/ERVs.
You'll have better air quality by building a tight envelope and using mechanical ventilation because all the air from the outside will flow through filters. It then gets tempered by the exhausted stale air before being circulated.
A leaky house and ventilation through windows was fine in the 1920s, but we've better ways now.
(And operable windows won't go away: they're mandated for fire egress. So you can crack one open if you wish.)
There's no real way to fix that without completely stripping the house down to the frame and rebuilding with modern techniques and materials.
I don't think it does. In principle, you could stay relatively inefficient with low cost to the climate as long as you were drawing power from overprovisioned wind and solar. Of course, that energy may be better spent elsewhere so efficiency is critical, but we can't get carbon emissions down to zero by only increasing efficiency of systems that ultimately draw power from coal and natural gas power plants.
"Fighting Climate Change" is all sunshine and rainbows and photovoltaics until you realise that the messaging has been thoroughly usurped by an anti-civilisation regressive agenda. They don't want people using cleaner energy; they primarily want people using less energy; they sell that goal with promotion of "eco" and "green" etc.
I want us to use more AND cleaner energy; one without the other is a civilisation-level failure.
For those who have all the that, the de-growth camp asks that people give up meat, down-size their houses and give up one of their cars. Maybe they should, but that will never win any popular support. The answer is always both though, we need to make things more efficient and produce more energy than ever using renewables.
Products advertised as "energy saving" are almost invariably worse.
E.g. modern dishwashers use much less energy, but also take much longer (4 hours instead of 1 hour).
If there are products that are equivalent in functionality but use less energy (housing insulation? heat pumps?), I'm all for it.
More expensive systems to consume less are logical in cities or for things that can't be scheduled, when p.v. and other renewable with similar output characteristics can't be used.
Much of the rest is just not for efficiency but for sell cheaper crap for the OEM at a bigger price for the customers.
I don't think a willingness to accept less energy for a decade or two, constitutes an anti-civilization agenda. I don't even think the small fraction of extremists who want everyone living on an organic commune are anti-civilization.
Sounds like "two weeks to flatten the curve". Very slippery slope. Expect a lot of people to oppose it (me included). Especially since there will invariable be different rules for the elites (same as with the pandemic).
Another necessary short term sacrifice to lessen the risk to society?
> Very slippery slope
I don't know where you're scared "increase effeciency" or "waste less" will go. It's perfectly fine to have gripes with how that gets accomplished. "Fuel taxes are bad because X", "cap and trade would be terrible" or "Windmills suck", I get, "using less energy is bad", I do not get.
> Especially since there will invariable be different rules for the elites
I mean, the most common proposal is taxes on consumption to fund clean energy and/or cleanup. Not really a "different rules" situation in my mind.
On the other hand, if anyone wants to use more energy the onus is on them to explain how we can do that within our carbon budget, when we're not even living within our budget currently.
Deep ecologists have decided once and for all that technology and science won't provide the solution, hence what you call their " anti-civilization agenda".
Let's take a step back and look at things calmly. You want not to be restrained in your way of life. But a better efficiency enable to do the same with less energy. So you'd be not restrained in any way. Therefore there is no reason to want to use "more energy" as a goal by itself.
Better efficiency implies batter technologies and better Science. This is where too many ecologists get it wrong.
However, we can also say that technologies don't mechanically provide a better world.
Biotechnology has resulted in a massive use of pesticides that kills biodiversity while the agro-tech business make people fat through over-processed food and ingredients bad for health.
Technology also enable us to do industrial wonders but they also pollute (rare metal extraction for example).
Eating food bad for your health and living within high level of pollution don't look to me as great civilizational achievements, do they?
Last point: we need "clean energy", not "cleaner". Science has demonstrated how fast climate changes and biodiversity plummets. In the short term, the cleaner, the better - but that can last only during a rather short transition time to really clean energy.
Many countries have at last got out of endemic poverty. Many African countries before the Covid were growing their GDP by 3 to 5% per year. It's great but that means their use of energy is rising fast.
So to stop the climate change, we really need to transition much faster. Many ecologists don't see that transition even starting ; neither do they see science and technology provide the solution on the coming years. Hence their agenda of rationing.
I can't see that agenda being politically feasible. I personally conclude that we will hit a wall collectively. When climate will be so bad and the collapse of biodiversity will directly hit our way or life, then we will take the hard decisions.
I don't believe in a civilization collapse. Books by true historians have debunked every claim of a civilization collapse due to overuse of the natural resources. And even so, we are super resilient animals, super efficient as organizing and adapting when necessary.
But, as you rightly pointed out, we are not equal in this world. The huge costs when hitting the wall will not be fairly splitted. The wealthier you are in a wealthier country you are, the less you are likely to suffer from it.
Since you don't want any change in your way of life, you should aim to belong to the 1%. Because 99% of us will have to change.
And even so, being part of the 1% doesn't protect you totally, far from it. Driving a Bugatti won't matter much if a tree fall onto you because of a big storm. And you won't escape a pandemic either.
Some people prefer to be super rich and live in fear all the time of being attacked. I prefer a system where every job provides a decent way of life so streets are safe.
That is the same for climate. Some will prefer living in huge mansions with underground self-sufficient bunkers. I prefer that everyone gets to live in a super energy efficient place so that we don't need bunkers against tornadoes. Because when the tornado arrives, you'll making an errand 30 miles away and your children will be 10 miles from that bunker as well.
The solution is collective. Hence my pessimism: we will change our way of life only when it will have become unbearable. Nature will be deep into the already current 6th extinction, meaning that it will restart despite us. But that takes thousands of years. So we will have to change our way of life starting from a low point rather than starting now.
So the ecologists' agenda is not irrational. That may hurt your wanting to keep your way of life. Maybe you will be able to. But your children and your grandchildren will have quite different conditions.
Except if Science and technology provides a way out. Many bet on it. That's not irrational either but the time is the issue. We need to capture huge amounts of CO2 and methane in the next 20 years to maintain our way of life. Is this a reasonable bet?
Well, if we collectively invested trillions of dollars to reach that goal, I may take the bet. For now, we prefer bail-out the wealthier of us ; and some lunatics leaders around the world will force us to spend that money on the military.
"Good night and good luck".
You lost me at "simply"
[Edit] Sorry if this comes across as snarky, but c'mon, this is an existentially hard problem and there are few if any significant quick wins that are doable in the face of public inertia, obstruction from the petro-rich, technical complexity, etc. Giving the opponents an easily shot-down 'simply' isn't going to cut it.
[0] - would have liked a better source but https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-15/electric-...
It looks like current geo-politics will undo years of disinvestment in the fossil fuel production while never having met the emission cut-off goals.
And that's essentially the same for the point: build new houses. It's surely positive and needed in the long run, but to do so you need many resources, wood itself is renewable at a certain level of demand, not renewable above that level. Long story short: not counting some mass-genocidal ideas, at a level even the original nazi probably never though of IMVHO the quicker changes possible is start to re-localize anything that can be re-localized, starting from a massive agricultural plan with very strong incentives to try to maximize local, even inefficient, food production to cut transportation as much as possible.
For many area of the planet that's still not possible tough, too many people in such areas respect of the nature local production capacity... Local and inefficient agriculture might run at a slow peace, for instance instead of powerful diesel tractors fields can be handled by less powerful on-rails electrical agrivoltaic tools, something unsustainable without government incentives, but ultimately probably doable with. That's can reduce general pollution to more manageable levels and still provide enough food in most cases. Pushing rails with similar criteria (only goods trains, running when there is enough energy, slow, inefficient, but enough for non-perishable goods).
Quicker than that I know only mass genocide and unpleasant things like that.
- Positive feedback loops of melting ice -> lower albedo -> more energy absorbed from the sun -> more ice melts
- Unstoppable acidification of oceans and death of vasts amounts of sea life
- Disruption of thermohaline ocean currents, disrupting weather everywhere with little time for nature to adapt, leading to mass extinctions
- Areas where we currently grow most food will quickly become impossible to farm
Basically the point is that the "budget" is how much we can pump and still go back and fix.
It is not possible to just push the brakes and expect an immediate result, the extra carbon that is in the atmosphere will continue warming the planet and the actual warming will fuel positive feedback loops that will make things even worse (and they are not limited to just melting ice).
And, of course, things will keep getting far worse as much as we delay doing something significant in this area.
Sure, no one wants to loft sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, but it won’t cost much [2] and we have plenty of natural experiments demonstrating safety (volcanoes). The critical thing is that it would buy time to transition. It’s not like there isn’t a massive interest in transitioning from fossil fuels. But, will we transition fast enough to prevent irreversible runaway positive feedback loops?
[1] interestingly, the rationale for banning solar geoengineering is not the potential danger of the technology, but the (claimed) inability to govern the process. https://www.solargeoeng.org/
Alternatively, here is a view from the Editor of Science, calling for “Symmetric Precaution.” https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm8462
[2] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae98d/...
- It'll reduce the motivation to transition. You can imagine the current politicians and lobbies against climate change trotting out an argument along the lines of we don't need to transition because we have geoengineering. - The second argument which holds more weight I think is that it creates a time bomb. You need to continue increasing the amount of geoengineering that's happening. I believe the name for this is "termination shock": all the pent up warming happens in a much smaller time scale which could have massive unintended consequences.
"The Risk of Termination Shock From Solar Geoengineering" https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
It's a gradient. The more CO2, the warmer earth gets.
Of course there are positive feedback components, but there are negative ones too. And stuff like clathrate gun, etc., can't be found in the IPCC reports.
The 2 degree goal is more or less arbitrary. edit: by that I mean 1.9 isn't much better than 2.1--not that 2.1 is no big deal
Take the indian subcontinent as a great example. That is a region of a billion people dependent entirely on the monsoon for water. The region is surrounded by deserts to the west and north. If the monsoon is disrupted due to climate change, what will happen to those billion people? It's worse still if you consider that glacial meltwater from the himalayas also feeds China's largest rivers.
On the flip side, too much rain and there is also a disaster.
This is the point - we don't know what will happen but can be certain it will be bad.
We can go from "Livable with adaptation" to "millions displaced from unlivable catastrophes and conditions" by hitting some of those milestones.
On the same line though decommissioning nuclear plants in Europe was always a bad move. Italy abandoned nuclear with a referendum 1987 just after Chernobyll and again voted against nuclear in 2011. Italy then buys nuclear energy from France and gas from Russia. This is just putting the head in sand and moving the problems out of sight. Germany is/was about to make the same mistake. Nuclear is a far from perfect solution available now which is beeing replaced for the hope of a much better solution much later on. We are not sure we'll get the much better solutions down the line. We should make all the green(ish) bets we can.
The #1 problem with renewable energy is that the transition to a mostly low-carbon grid is supposed to happen at an indeterminate point in the future. That future currently exists only on paper. Even Ireland and the UK - two countries frequently brought up in this context - still supply only around a third of electrical energy via renewables.
Electrifying everything sounds nice until you realise that nowhere on earth has load growth been supplied by renewable energy.
It is truly a crying shame that nuclear has been abandoned in pursuit of unclear future benefits all the while accelerating the climate emergency.
A nuclear plant will provide decades of energy without emitting carbon into the atmosphere. In all that time, build towards a future where the nuclear plant isn't needed. The promise of a wind and solar future is still several decades in the future. Why wait for that when we have a problem right now?
And there it is: the big boys are addicted to oil profits and "the spice must flow". Last time I looked (a few years ago) the ten most profitable companies in the world were nine oil companies and Apple.
(As I type this there's a guy outside driving a gas-powered noisy golf-cart thing with a tank and a gas-powered pump spraying plant poison on the lawn. It's a microcosm of what's wrong with us. Poisoning the air, land, and water, polluting sound itself, to maintain a wasteland of useless grass! What's more, you could make a lawn that maintained itself and fed some livestock, and not waste this guy on this stupid destructive job.)
Anyhow... Here's a link to an old "brain dump" comment of mine in re: systems of agriculture. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24827329
There's also a great case to be made for integrated alcohol fuel production on a local ecologically harmonious scale to power ICE vehicles (or hybrids) In many cases it makes way more sense that going directly for full electrification of cars, trucks, and busses, etc. (I know of http://alcoholcanbeagas.com/node/277 but there are others.)
As pointed out in TFA we have all the solutions and technology we really need already. What seems to be missing is the knowledge and will to employ them.
Something should change in what work is, how production is organized and profit is produced or I do not see how else this contradiction can be resolved.
The work can be organized by reducing work time (workday) to produce all there is necessary for biological living. Say 4 h workday (see productivity growth on why this is possible), no wage cut, at production factors, construction, food, etc. This 4 hour workday will be enough for some good level of living. And everything else can be produced somehow else, not as work. Then it will not be necessary to keep production of some object only for the sake of paying for a house, thus consumption will slightly lower but work day will lower, too.
This system works great if you want to optimize for price. Even if a nation want to sell cheap in order to fund an invasion force, the buyer can continue as before and just buy based on the price. Similar for carbon emissions, as the buyer doesn't feel responsible for the subsidies. If there is an offer on the connected market then the buyer can buy it.
There is no way we can make enough changes in 10 years, so things must go the other way. Jean Marc Jancovici says emissions must be shrink 5% per day. You can't have a thriving economy anymore.
Of course nobody wants to make any effort, because it means selling your car, turning off heating/AC, forgetting that vacation, forgetting that steak, even quitting your job, etc etc.
On one hand, we think people who live in the forest, far from everything, are crazy people. But the reality is that a life of sobriety, economic degrowth, austerity, those are the things that are needed to *save the world*.
We need to accept to eat pasta, rice and vitamins for a long time unless civilization moves away entirely from fossil fuels so that it can properly adapt.
If you refuse to accept that you must reduce your living standard, you are part of the problem, plain and simple. Politicians and companies will do exactly NOTHING if it angers consumers or if consumers keep giving those companies money.
I'm often quite pessimistic about the ability of politicians to change course about co2 emissions. Consumers have too much powers.
But the main problem I think is: there is no option to work less. Lets say you want to consume less, what will you do with your money, throw away? So I think that the workday should be reduced.
That's all well and good if you want to make money, the market operates on hype, but it's less good if you need to make some particular change quickly.
Article -- This is how we defeat Putin and other petrostate autocrats https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/25/this-i...
Video Interview -- https://youtu.be/rJ9XfdbCddk Bill McKibben: How To Defeat Putin and Climate Change | Amanpour and Company
Oh, and also I'd like to see green movements taking less Russian money...
"People think Europe depends on Russia for energy because it lacks its own, but 15 years ago Europe exported more natural gas than Russia does today. Now, Russia exports 3x more gas than Europe produces. Why? Because climate activists, partly funded by Russia, blocked fracking." https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/14993866370667274...
"In 2014, NATO's secretary general revealed Russia was funding climate activists, saying, “Russia... engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations working against shale gas to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas" https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/14993872777215508...
A better solution would be to interconnect larger grids and to build new transmission infrastructure. Africa is a good example of this going wrong. Instead of interconnecting the continent, the west is focused on off-grid solutions, things that don't scale well.
Considering it will still take decades for renewables to be rolled out and cheap enough to replace wood and coal, it makes sense to use gas transitionally.
The fact that this isn't discussed in green movements is insane. It literally would reduce carbon emissions faster. It shows how the green movement is more ideological than pragmatic.
Bottom line: the amount of CO₂ emitted by "third world" countries is miniscule and it is only a distraction to point to it.
In 2020 the US alone emitted about as much CO₂ as all of Africa, India, and South America together:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...
(India: 2.44 billion tonnes, Africa: 1.33 billion tonnes, South America: 994.16 million tonnes, total: 4.76 billion tonnes; US: 4.71 billion tonnes).
That's just the US, not counting the rest of North America, Europe, the rest of Asia and China, some of which may count more as "third world" than others, it's up to debate.
Many developing countries are near the equator and can take advantage of solar. The distributed nature of solar is also a benefit for countries that lack infrastructure. Why not start with a cleaner solution? Countries in Africa and South America can increase their use of hydroelectric power as well.
I'll stop you right there because the major producers of greenhouse gasses aren't third world countries. Historically, the majority of greenhouse gasses emitted comes from industrialized nations.
> can be switched to gas cheaply and easily
I highly doubt that. Gas distribution requires a fine grained pipeline infrastructure which needs constant maintenance. That's a massive upfront cost in developing countries and new economies like India where the domestic market lacks such infrastructure in many places. Not to mention challenges regarding security and geography.
Given the respective individual income level in those countries, it's far cheaper to source energy locally from wood, manure and - above all - coal.
Moreover, the big issue isn't what new economies like India aren't emitting today. But what they are very much willing to emit in the near future in order to raise overall living standards to a level comparable with the West.
At this point, wagging fingers what they should or shouldn't do is a non-sequitur since Western nations carry a historical responsibility for their own industrial pasts.
In the documentary "Before the Flood", this dillemma is being made abundantly clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia5fMomBXbE
That doesn't mean we shouldn't tackle emissions in third world countries.
There's a stark difference between having the facts right, and having enough credibility to be believed by everyone else that you're right.
I live in Arizona, and the electric companies here make it hell for solar owners. I don't understand it.
But I am tired of the insipid, agitated state, screaming and pushing fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD).
When I was a young man, I was told the world will freeze, and within five years we will all die. (Good times for fur trade!)
Then, the ozone layer will be gone, and within five years we will all die. (SPF 5000 anyone?)
Suddenly in the early '80s it flipped to the world is warming, and within five years we will all die.
More recently, it just 'climate change' because the FUD has been so rapidly changed, and within five years we will all die.
No one is denying that the climate changes. What people are tired of and denying is the FUD.
Every single generation thinks all previous generations where idiots; but we, WE know it much better and are smarter then all!
Wait till next generation, and see what they tell about us.
(Edit: Reference to an article with news clippings of the above https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca... ) edit2: let the down voting begin!
You should have listened to Tiny Tim then:
Because he thought The Ice Caps are Melting
(Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho)
Honestly, if I prove you wrong, will you apologize and retract your libel?
https://news.yahoo.com/ocasio-cortez-world-going-end-1505170...
The point is, beware making quantified predictions. Climate change is real, but when one makes hyperbolic predictions with a quantified timeframe, and then it doesn't happen, the argument is weakened, and skeptics are reinforced.
Al Gore learned the same lesson.
Do you have sources for these 2 claims? Not that I doubt you, necessarily, but I'd love to check the data.
Their source http://www.fao.org/home/en/
https://polarbearscience.com/2021/10/31/global-population-si...
The underlying agenda is a push towards centralised control and ownership of everything. You can't control the world's emissions if you can't control everything everyone does.