Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions
science.org
science.org
The rapid development of battery technology must be a close second. I remember as a kid in the 1990s it was difficult to get good rechargeable batteries to power a RC toy car. They were often huge battery packs that would over heat, last a few minutes per charge and takes ages to power up. Now we have people carrying cars driving hundreds of kilometres on quick charging batteries.
10% is nothing.
Subject to the realities of global politics, it's the habitability of the equator and the low incidence of tropical diseases in the Southern US that would have been phased out.
- Land use (over-grazing, deforestation for pastures and feed crops, most of crops grown are for farmed animals, etc.)
- Water use
- Inefficient feed -> food conversion
- Nutrient runoff leading to eutrophication
- Increasing risk of zoonotic diseases and antibiotic resistance
- Bioaccumulation (of PFAS, pesticides, heavy metals, microplastics, etc.)
1. Pandemic evolution
2. Antibiotic resistance
A distant third is GHGs / climate change, and then the other issues that matter only if we stay alive.
In many cases animals graze on marginal land that can’t be used to grow human food directly. In these cases the alternative ways to get the same protein production could imply cutting down land in other countries to grow protein rich crops for humans.
Water use doesn’t have to be high. In the US it’s a product of industrialised animal agriculture, bad subsidies and free water rights that farmers are forced to use unless they want to use those rights.
Animals can convert food that humans can’t eat into food that we can eat. In some cases they eat the part of the plant that we don’t.
EU has prohibited all routine use of antibiotics in farming. Other countries should follow.
And there are upsides of animal agriculture as well. They are often a critical to do regenerative agriculture. In the best case they eat grass from land that we can’t grow stuff on, eat parts of the plants that we can’t eat ourselves, and give us high quality fertiliser that greatly improves soil quality. There’s a reason farm animals have been with us for millennia.
That said we should absolutely eliminate all heavily industrialised animal agriculture, which means we have to reduce meat consumption. It would be interesting to know how much meat we could eat if all meat production was sustainable.
As you implied, continuing current levels of meat consumption for 8 billion humans, even with regenerative techniques, will still result in substantial increases in land/water use and other negative impacts. We should be sceptical of regenerative grazing claims as well, as they are often pushed by the industry, without sufficient evidence.
I'm hesitant to say just because we've been farming animals for thousands of years is good justification for continuing it (at least at this scale on non-marginal lands). After all, it did lead directly to the problems we face today, as people clung on to traditional methods without thinking even as they migrated and new technologies/knowledge became available. For example, European colonists brought hard-hoofed cows, sheep, goats, horses, and deer to Australia, despite the country's native fauna all being soft-footed, leading to soil compaction and many resultant ecological issues. Now almost 50% of Australia's land surface area is used for red meat farming, and it is the leading cause of deforestation in many parts of the country.
On plant parts that humans can't eat, perhaps it's fine to let wild animals eat them, further improving biodiversity (after all we need a healthy biosphere of many species providing ecosystem services for long-term human survival), or we can compost or process into other products. I'd be looking into stock-free organic farming and precision fermentation as new promising approaches as well.
Just to make the implicit explicit: the current reality of meat production is feeding livestock with protein rich crops grown on cut down land in other countries. An alternative’s model scalability and economic viability has not been shown yet.
So the hope of such a thing existing in the future should probably not influence how you choose to nourished yourself today
> Before these were invented we were looking at a situation where meat consumption (or at least beef) may have to be phased out.
They haven't really changed the game, at least not yet. But assuming optimistically they can reduce cow methane emissions and downsides can be avoided [1], the magnitude of the reduction [2] probably will not make or break the continuation of the cattle industry.
[1] https://www.murdoch.edu.au/news/articles/seaweed-might-not-b... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/13/seaweed-...
And I am talking about fossil carbon, something deeply buried for millions of years, and added to the cycle, not circulating differently the carbon that already was in it. Most of that new carbon was extracted in less than a century and burned, staying for a couple of centuries more.
And speaking of recycling carbon, it is not even in the order of carbon emitted by positive feedback loops, what is emitted by permafrost thawing, what was emitted just last year in Canada fires is all orders over the effort of decades.
There is a big elephant in the room. While it is there, all effort will be mostly meaningless.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/france
Somehow, from 1973 they went from 10t C02 per capita to 4.8 t per capita in 2022.
Their GDP at the same went from 264 Bn to ~2779 Bn
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/FRA/fra...
Whatever mysterious method of C02 reduction they used should be investigated.
My guess is nuclear energy, more efficient cars, better insulated houses, and less heavy industry.
As electricity prices are lowered (e.g. by state investment in nuclear) various things that use fossil fuels will shift over to electric.
1. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/heating-40-millio...
2. https://heatpumpingtechnologies.org/annex46/wp-content/uploa...
Unfortunately, that does not exist in nuclear power. As in, not a single one of those requirements is fulfilled by any commercial design.
moving manufacturing overseas
I'm tired of: "The EU doesn't emit as much as China does". Let's account for all the garbage we let China produce and then look at the numbers again.
Which sadly is usually absolutely no controls
At least per the available data from 1990, France has lowered its consumption-based CO₂ emissions in absolute terms:
* https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-emissions...
And given the population has also risen since 1990:
* https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?time=1990..lat...
even if total emissions had stayed the same, per capita numbers would have gone down.
The same if often said of the US, and it is not true either:
* https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/no-the-us-didnt-outsource-our-...
Ironically enough, I assume that if they hadn't managed to publish a higher-level article in Science, the actual paper (hypothetically published elsewhere) would have been the 116 (+/- epsilon) pages of detailed measures and methods, result displays, and sensitivity analyses/robustness checks.
If I read the article correctly, they systematically detect when emissions policies are adopted by looking at sudden increases/"breaks" in "stringency indices" of a country's emissions policies (within a particular industrial sector.) The machine learning comes in their automated procedure for identifying these breaks (which is well out of my expertise – my longitudinal analysis training is in good old fashioned multilevel modelling and structural equation modelling.) They then do the standard trick of using a binary before/after "treament" indicator variable. Once that is done, though, it looks like you can choose your method of choice for detecting significant changes in emissions pre-post intervention.
https://gml.noaa.gov/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.png
Things you might intuitively expect to be visible but aren't:
• COVID lockdowns (i.e. aviation shutdown).
• Germany's phaseout of nuclear power and return to lignite.
• The collapse of the USSR.
• Any kind of global climate agreement.
• The explosion of cheap air travel.
• The enormous drop in solar/wind costs in the 2010s.
• Chinese adoption of capitalism and consequent industrialization in the 1990s.
If even global lockdowns had no impact on CO2 levels it's fair to say there are no actual or conceivable government policies that will be successful at reducing emissions any time soon. The authors of this paper aren't going to mention that though, otherwise examining 1500 different government policies might seem a bit pointless and the discussion would have to move to adaptation, which they don't like conceptually.
1. Developed and developing countries reacted differently to different incentives. This to me is just another point where “the invisible hand” only works in certain limited cases. Markets are identifiable measurable systems. Not magic
2. It’s a mix, it needs careful monitoring and good across the board policy and industrial involvement - yeah. We need good government and good private sector involvement. So there goes the paddle just as we enter the brown looking creek …
3. Loving the graphics - Inwish Incoukd do that with matplotlib
There's a certain amount of irony and despair when referring to the invisible hand of a free market in the context of government and ngo interference therein...
2) subsidies
3) financing
All three which I would argue we are woefully behind on in the US for EVs and solar.
There should be a ten year subsidy on new cars in the range of 10000$ that decreases 10% per year if they are EVs or PHEVs with 40 mile all electric ranges.
There should be a tax on new ice cars that increases by 4% of the retail car cost every year.
Of course we should have a similar increasing tax on gasoline, but that is more regressive.
power generation ? use nuclear & solar.
ships ? use manufacturing that's close to usage centers. not everything needs to be made in china.
wars - too profitable / jobs program. maybe reduce size of gvt
“By contrast, taxation is a notable exception in effectively causing large emission breaks alone. It stands out as the only policy instrument that achieves near equal or larger effect size as a stand-alone policy across all sectors.“
## Developed Countries
• Transport Sector:
• Pricing: Most successful individually (20%)
Subsidies: Highly effective when combined with pricing (33%).
• Electricity Sector:
• Regulation: Most effective as a stand-alone policy (33%).
• Pricing: A key component in successful policy mixes (50%).
• Subsidies: Not effective as a stand-alone policy.
• Pricing: Most effective when used alone (43%).
• Subsidies: Can be a valuable complement to other policies.
• Buildings Sector:
• Subsidies: Slightly dominant, effective both individually and in combinations.
• Variety of Instruments: Broad set of policies can be similarly effective.
## Developing Countries
• Transport Sector:
• Regulation: Most powerful as a stand-alone policy (33%) and in combination with subsidies, pricing, and information (33% each).
• Electricity Sector:
• Subsidies: Most powerful as a stand-alone policy (67%).
• Complementarities: No effective policy combinations detected.
• Industry Sector:
• Pricing: Shows the most synergy with other policies (50%).
• Subsidies: Effective complement in policy mixes.
• Buildings Sector:
• Regulation: Most effective as a stand-alone policy.
• Variety of Instruments: Broad set of policies can be effective, with a slight emphasis on regulation.
Are there any studies that prove these policy interventions will have any practical benefit going forward?