I can never tell whether journalists, activist, and politicians are just ignorant, or whether they understand perfectly well that they are lying and just don’t care.
This comes to mind as I read yet another glowing article by some journalist about how president Xi of China is promising that China will be carbon-neutral by 2060 (with the implied question of why can’t the U.S. do the same?). Of course, talk is cheap. Xi can promise anything he likes. In fact China is currently the world’s largest producer of CO2 (28% of global CO2 emissions), and despite Xi’s pledge is currently massively expanding the number of coal-fired power plants. In 2020 alone China brought on-line 38.4 gigawatts of new coal-fired power plants, more than three times as much new coal-fired power as the rest of the world put together, and has another 247 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants (184 new plants) currently in construction or planning. Why? Because China doesn’t have much oil, but it does have a lot of coal, and it is hell-bent on becoming a first-world nation as fast as it can. It is clear that global warming fears simply aren’t going to deter China from industrializing as fast as it can, whatever Xi pledges to an incredulous media.
Nor is China alone. India, another massive nation trying to grow into the first world, gets about three-quarters of its power from coal-fired plants, and is planning to build more, because for India coal is cheaper than any other energy source, and India too is not going to stop industrializing just to please those of us in the wealthy first world.
These two examples are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to discussing what would really be needed to reduce global greenhouse gas production. But let’s just look at our own country, since we are in fact the second highest producer of greenhouse gases (15% of global CO2 emissions). Transportation accounts for 29% of that, electric power generation for 28%, and industry for 22%, with smaller amounts for other sectors. So let’s start with transportation.
Electric vehicles are the current fad among the well-off (the rest can’t afford them). Of course there is a dirty little secret about electric vehicles that is usually ignored, and that is that the power to charge their batteries comes from a power plant somewhere, likely burning coal, oil or gas (currently about 65% of US power), in which case the electric car is a worse polluter than a gasoline-powered vehicle, especially if one factors in the ~10% power loss in transmission, and the ~10-15% loss in the battery charge/discharge process. And it has incurred the enormous environmental impacts engendered by mining the lithium and cobalt needed in its batteries – but that all happens in other nations, so we can pretend it doesn’t matter. And we are conveniently ignoring for the moment the enormous problem we will have when all those batteries reach end-of-life and need to be disposed of safely or recycled, with no infrastructure in place to do either.
In fact, all electric vehicles do is shift energy use out of the transportation column and into the electricity-producing column. They do nothing to reduce total energy use, and reducing total energy use is the only thing that will really reduce CO2 production.
No, if we really want to make a dent in the CO2 produced by transportation we simply need to stop traveling so much. That means the well-off (that’s us!) need to stop flying off to Florida to board a cruise ship, or flying to Europe to sightsee, or driving off on a whim to visit distant relatives. That means CEOs and the really wealthy need to stop using their private jets (a person in a private jet emits up to 20 times as much CO2 on their trip as taking a commercial flight), and give up their yachts. The irony of John Kerry, climate change advocate, flying alone in a private jet to Iceland in 2020 to receive an award for his climate change efforts, is obvious.
Lots of luck getting Americans to stop traveling and give up their love affair with cars. For that matter, most of the country outside of city centers is built around car travel – if your supermarket or job is 5-10 or more miles away, as it is for most people, how are you going to survive without a car? What are the odds we can get everyone to use bicycles? What would be the cost of completely redesigning all of America to put most people within walking distance of their stores and jobs, or even of building and maintaining enough public transportation to reach almost everyone, including in the suburbs and rural areas? Get real!!!!
Then there is all that wonderful stuff in the local supermarket and delivered to our doorstep from Amazon. Ever thought about how it gets to you? Or about all the shipping involved in the supply chain that grew or made it? It’s lovely to get out-of-season fruit from our local store, or wonderful butter from Ireland or lamb from New Zealand or steaks from Idaho or cheese from Wisconsin or almonds from California. It’s wonderful that Amazon can get my latest computer accessory (likely made and shipped from China) to my door in two days. But all of that required shipping. Think we can get Americans to accept supermarkets that only contain locally-grown foods and stores that contain only locally-produced items? Not likely!
Again, that’s just the tip of the iceberg for transportation. The implications are much more far-reaching and complex. For example, we haven’t even touched on the disruptions in the job markets or the economy that such changes would product, nor the political backlash that those disruptions would drive.
Now let’s consider electrical generation (28% of US CO2 production). The current fads in this field are for wind farms and solar panels, and there are companies with good lobbyists and political connections that are making a lot of money from these fads. President Biden seems especially enamored of them, as was President Obama. (Trump ignored the whole issue, perhaps because he didn’t own any companies in the field). But the reality, as is so often the case with initiatives driven more by ideology than by economics, are proving not to be as rosy as promised by the hype. The current generation of wind farms are proving to have more downtime and more maintenance costs than expected. For example, the blades, made of fiberglass because of their immense size, turn out to be more fragile than expected.
Globally, Germany has made the largest investment ($100+ billion thus far) in these innovations, and to date their CO2 production has changed little because of the low-grade and heavily-polluting lignite coal they are needing to burn to fill in for the failure of their renewable energy systems to provide 7/24 grid stability (though the COVID shutdown helped their statistics a bit temporarily), but their electricity prices (~30 cents/kWh) are about 50% higher than the EU average.
A recent study in England revealed that for UK offshore wind farms, the operating costs exceeded the revenue (without subsidies) by the end of the first year, and got progressively worse as time went on. One might think newer generators would be more reliable than older ones, but in the UK at least, the newer, larger wind turbines have a higher failure rate than the older ones.
In the US we have already exploited almost all the good hydroelectric sites. If we really wanted to reduce our CO2 from electric generation we would build more nuclear power plants. The current generation are much cheaper to build and much safer. But the American public has an irrational fear of nuclear power, even though the deaths worldwide from nuclear power accidents (including even Chernobyl) are many orders of magnitude less than from polluting hydrocarbon-burning power plants. Even the hyper-vigilant Sierra Club recognizes that.
But again, if we really want to make a difference we simply need to use less electricity. But we have built a whole national infrastructure based on the profligate use of electricity. Indeed, it is one of our major vulnerabilities. Think about what happens when the electricity goes off. We can’t heat or cool or light our homes and offices. We can’t run our computers, which closes down most businesses. Our phones don’t work. Most industrial processes shut down. In a supermarket we can’t even buy stuff “manually”, because only the computer knows the price of each item (and most clerks these days couldn’t add up the bill and tax without a computer anyway). We can’t even charge up our lovely new electric car! But then we couldn’t gas up our old gas-guzzler either, because the pumps at the gas station that pump the gas from the underground tank are electric!
So now think about the implications of drastically reducing our electricity use. This is more than just swapping out our old incandescent light bulbs for LEDs (though that is worth doing). Forget about bitcoins (bitcoin mining uses more energy than all of Argentina). Forget about streaming movies or social media or roaming the internet or using your cell phone or ordering from Amazon (the server farms that support those services use more energy than all of Great Britain, including Scotland, Wales and Ireland). Set your air conditioning to 78º and your electric furnace to 55º. And figure that most things that you buy will cost a lot more, because the industries that make those things will have to cut way back to save power, so the supplies will be limited. Oh, and food will also cost a lot more, because producing the fertilizer and pumping the water that makes our farmers so efficient takes a lot of electric energy.
If anything, the implications of significantly reducing our use of electric power are even more far reaching than in the transportation field. What are the odds that Americans, spoiled as they are by their first-world amenities, can be persuaded to make these changes?
I could go on. In agriculture, for example, we really ought to all give up eating meat, whose production uses an enormous amount of energy as well as increasingly-scarce water. And we ought to stop making things out of plastic, which by the way is poisoning the earth as well. And we ought to repurpose old buildings instead of building new ones, because concrete and steel and aluminum production use prodigious amounts of energy. But you get the point – significantly reducing CO2 production will take a lot more than the few current fads being pushed by politicians and activists, and will face massive cultural resistance.
That isn’t to say that we ought not to do these things, just that it will be a lot harder and far more disruptive than the naïve politicians and activists seem to realize. And I seriously doubt (a) that countries like China and India can be persuaded to give up their dreams of reaching first-world status, and (b) that Americans, especially the very well-off elites who are the loudest activists for climate change (and the heaviest users of energy), can actually be persuaded to give up their toys and their amenities. Al Gore won a Nobel Prize for his climate change work, but his main house in Nashville (he has three) uses as much electricity as 34 normal homes. Just heating his swimming pool uses as much electricity as 6 normal homes!
Bill Gates, in his recent excellent new book on climate change, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, pins his hopes on technology. Technology can certainly help, but I doubt it will be enough. To make a real difference will require fundamentally changing the culture worldwide, and that is a lot harder, especially when the climate activists and politicians seem to be so naïve about what is really required.
In the end the fact to most nations (including the US) are depopulating themselves right now may make the biggest difference. Less people is, at least potentially, less energy use.
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