The Madrid climate talks

The Madrid climate talks ended in disarray. That is not particularly surprising. As long as all that was required was voluntary promises with no teeth and no accounting (as in the Kyoto and Paris agreements) everyone was happy to participate, and the delegates got to feel important and got free trips abroad and good food on an expense account – what’s not to like about that?  Once the debate got down to real details and real money and real sacrifices it all fell apart. The developing countries are not about to give up their drive to modernize and lift their citizens out of poverty. The developed countries are not about to give up their central heating and cell phones and cars.

Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement was certainly bad optics, but in practical terms it made no difference. Those that argue that America should “lead the way” are, I think, hopelessly naïve. First, I don’t think any politician can make Americans give up what would be required to meet the Paris agreement goals. Second, I don’t think America has enough influence to convince India and China, among others, to abandon their drive to modernize and just let their billions of people continue to live in poverty.

The shadowy activist groups that have created the Greta Thunberg media phenomena are certainly clever (The main one seems to be the Swedish” We Don’t Have Time” NGO). Notice that they keep well in the background, but write good speeches for her and quietly arrange her transportation around the world (including flying two crew to America to sail back the low-carbon-footprint sailboat that brought her here). But in fact, while she gets media attention, it doesn’t really change any of the facts on the ground.

The core facts that the climate activists don’t seem to understand or are deliberately ignoring  are (a) modern civilization worldwide is built on heavy energy use, and (b) neither wind nor solar energy are “dense” enough or reliable enough to provide more than a fraction of the energy modern civilization requires. Nuclear energy and (if we can ever get it to work) fusion energy might help solve the problem, but the (largely irrational) public fear of nuclear power plants is a powerful disincentive.

Let’s look at US energy use, just to get real about this issue.37% of our energy use is for transportation. 35% is for industrial processes. About 16% is residential use and the remaining 12% is commercial use. So if we are going to make major cuts that matter, most of it will have to come from transportation and industry. Just putting LED bulbs in our houses isn’t going to make that much difference (though it is still worth doing).

Here is some of what we would really have to do to make significant cuts in US energy use:

1. Clean out most of the local grocery store shelves, since almost all of that fresh food and canned goods and boxed cereal and fresh meat is shipped in from all over the world these days. Imagine a grocery store stocked only with what is grown or made locally. For that matter, you would have to clean out the shelves of most of your local retail stores – hardware stores, clothing stores, auto supply stores, appliance stores, etc. etc. They all depend heavily on transportation, not only to bring in their stock from around the country and around the world, but to support the complex supply chains involved in making those products in the first place. Oh, and forget about buying from Amazon.

2. Give up our cars and give up ever flying. Those in the core of big cites with good bus or subway service can probably manage this. The rest of the country is built around cars – if you live in the suburbs or the country do you think you can walk to the nearest mall or grocery store or doctor’s office? For that matter, can you even walk or bicycle to your place of work?

3. Give up our cell phone and home computers and streaming services on our TV and all the apps we love to use. It’s great that we can use Siri on our cell phone to get the weather forecast or look up the definition of a word, or that we can stream a movie when we want to, but did you know that the massive server farms that drive those services worldwide currently use about 416 terawatts of electricity annually, or about 40% more than the entire United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland)?

4. Many of us would lose our jobs, especially if we work in transportation or industry. Suppose, just as a rough estimate, that we cut both U.S. industry and transportation by half, which is the order of magnitude that would be required to meet the Paris agreement. There are, for example, about 3.5 million truck drivers in the US today, so there might be about 1.75 million newly unemployed truck drivers.  There are about 13 million workers in US manufacturing today, so there might be about 6.5 million newly unemployed. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Making such drastic changes would ripple through the rest of the economy as well, producing massive unemployment in other sectors as well. What are the odds that any U.S. politician, or any political party, could survive implementing such deep cuts?

Dealing with climate change is a very complex technical, economic, political, geopolitical and psychological/sociological issue. Simplistic answers – like naïve and uninvolved bureaucrats setting unenforceable national goals - aren’t going to work, however passionate climate activists may be.