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Mediocrity Is The Enemy Of The Solution
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Do leaders
have a clear understanding of what the problems are and the
technologies we need to eliminate emissions? We think the answer to
both questions is no.
By Claudia Kemfert and Mark Z.
Jacobson
On
Friday, December 11, 2020, European Union leaders agreed to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions 55% below 1990 levels by 2030. On Saturday,
December 12, President-Elect Joe Biden promised that the US would
rejoin the Paris Accord on Wednesday, January 20, the first day of his
new administration. The agreement calls for the United States to
reduce its carbon emissions 25% below 2005 levels by 2025. Also on
December 12, President Xi Jinping of China told a virtual climate
summit that China would reduce its carbon emissions 65% below 2005
levels by 2030, with renewables accounting for 25% of energy
consumption by then.
Are any
of these promises enough? Do these and other leaders have a clear
understanding of what the problems are and the technologies we need to
eliminate emissions? We think the answer to both questions is no.
First,
what are the main problems caused by energy? In addition to global
warming, they are air pollution mortality and morbidity and energy
insecurity. According to the World Health Organization, seven million
people die and hundreds of millions more become ill each year from
worldwide air pollution. In addition, our current energy
infrastructure gives rise to at least four types of energy insecurity:
that due to diminishing availability of fossil fuels and uranium; that
due to the reliance on centralized power plants and refineries; that
due to reliance on energy from outside a country’s borders; and that
due to fuels that have mining, pollution, waste, meltdown, and weapons
proliferation risk.
Since all
these problems are caused primarily by our current energy
infrastructure, we believe changing our energy to rely entirely on
clean, renewable energy and storage will solve all three problems.
Clean, renewable energy includes onshore and offshore wind, solar
photovoltaics on rooftops and in power plants, concentrated solar
power, solar thermal for heat, geothermal electricity and heat,
existing hydroelectric power, tidal power, and wave power. These types
of electricity and heat are all provided by wind, water, and solar (WWS)
sources. Storage includes electricity, heat, cold, and
environmentally-friendly, sustainable hydrogen storage. We and other
groups have developed plans for almost all countries of the world to
transition to 100% WWS and storage at low cost.
How is
this solution at odds with those of world leaders? In two main ways.
First, most scientists believe that if we want to avoid 1.5 oC global
warming since the early 1900s and its catastrophic consequences, the
only practical way is to eliminate 80% of energy and non-energy
emissions by no later than 2030 and 100% by or before 2050. Neither
the Paris Accord nor the other proposals listed at the beginning are
nearly so aggressive enough to accomplish this goal. Second, a careful
look at the policies of world leaders indicate that, while they
include WWS and storage, they also include either natural gas, carbon
capture, direct air capture, biofuels, and/or nuclear power. Thus,
these leaders propose an “all-of-the-above” policy, where they will
try everything that special interests claim help solve the climate
problem but really can’t. This
policy is often disguised under the term,”climate neutrality.” The
term sounds good and creates political majorities, but it also extends
technological path dependencies on fossil and nuclear business models.
Even worse, the “all-of-the-above-climate neutrality” policy does not
address air pollution or energy insecurity at all; instead, it worsens
these problems.
As
famously stated once,
mediocrity is the enemy of greatness.
In this case, mediocrity is
the enemy of the solution.
So, why
does “all-of-the-above” not work?
First,
natural gas results in enormous carbon dioxide, methane, and air
pollution emissions, both during its mining and use. In addition, it
is a limited resource, is used significantly in centralized power
plants, is often mined then shipped across country boundaries, and has
mining and water pollution risks. As a result, natural gas damages
climate, human health via air pollution, and energy security, so it
fails to solve any problem. A current example from Europe illustrates
the absurdity of current policy related to natural gas. Europe and
Germany are currently constructing the Northstream II natural gas
pipeline from Russia to Germany. This contradicts all agreed
objectives and is economically and ecologically nonsensical. However,
it was agreed upon as a concession to special interest groups within
the framework of “climate neutrality.”
Second,
carbon capture (removing carbon dioxide from smoke stacks) and direct
air capture (removing carbon dioxide from the air) fail on their face
on multiple levels. First, they reduce absolutely no air pollution.
Instead, because they require energy to run, they require more mining
and burning of natural gas or coal to provide that energy, thus they
increase both mining and air pollution. Since they increase rather
than decrease the use of fossil fuels, they hasten all the energy
security risks of fossil fuels. Because they are inefficient and
costly at reducing carbon from smokestacks or the air, the money they
use to do that could more easily be used to build a wind turbine or
solar plant to replace a coal or gas plant, thus reduce more carbon
from the air while simultaneously reducing air pollution and mining.
Finally, what happens to the carbon that is captured? Well, today,
most is piped to an oil field to make the oil less dense to get it out
of the ground more easily. Half the captured carbon is lost back to
the air through this process. There is no proof that the rest of the
carbon stays in the ground.
Recently, EU politicians have been raving about “blue hydrogen”, in
which the CO2 produced during the production of hydrogen using natural
gas will be captured and stored. Such technologies are often promised
by companies in the oil and gas industry as “the miracle weapon for
achieving climate neutrality,” for which they request generous state
subsidies.
Third,
biofuels and biomass are billed as climate saviors. Biofuels are
burned as a replacement for gasoline or diesel in vehicles. Biomass is
burned as a replacement for coal or natural gas to produce
electricity. Because biofuels and biomass are both burned, they create
similar levels of air pollution as the fossil fuels that they replace.
The land use required for biofuels is enormous. Photosynthesis is only
1% efficient. Solar panels are 20% efficient. Thus, a solar panel
needs 1/20th the land as a biofuel to produce the same energy. On top
of that, an electric car uses 1/4th the energy as an
internal-combustion engine car to go the same distance. Thus, a
battery-electric car running on solar energy uses 1/80th the land as
an ethanol-fueled car. Further, biofuels require huge amounts of
energy, fertilizers, and water to process and transport. Some studies
find that the carbon consumed in producing a biofuel is similar to
that of the gasoline or diesel it replaces. Similarly, whereas several
forms of biomass (e.g., forestry residues) produce less carbon than
coal or natural gas for electricity generation, others (e.g.,
municipal solid waste) produce much more. Even the forms of biomass
that produce the least carbon still emit many times more carbon than
wind energy. In fact, wind and solar reduce orders of magnitude more
air pollution while using less land and reducing much more carbon than
biofuels or biomass.
Fourth,
new nuclear power has zero chance of helping to solve the urgent
climate, pollution, and energy security problems described. New
nuclear plants take 10 to 19 years between planning and operation.
This includes the times to obtain a construction site, a construction
permit, an operating permit, financing, and insurance; the time
between construction permit approval and issue; and the construction
time. This compares with planning-to-operation times of new wind or
utility PV of 1 to 3 years. Thus, with an average new nuclear time of
15 years, not a single new reactor planned today could be built by
2030, when we need 80 percent of all emissions stopped. This applies
to proposed Small Modular Reactors, the first of which is estimated to
be commercially available only by 2030, and this will likely be
delayed as well.
On top of
that, new nuclear plants (including Small Modular Reactors) cost
around 5 times that of a new onshore wind or utility PV farm. Thus, we
for the same money, we would obtain one-fifth the energy with nuclear
and 7 to 18 years later.
Moreover,
nuclear has multiple energy security problems. 1.5% of all nuclear
reactors built to date have melted down; multiple countries have
developed nuclear weapons secretly under the guise of civilian nuclear
energy programs; nuclear radioactive waste must by stored over 250,000
years and has exposure risks; and nuclear has underground uranium
mining risks for lung cancer. WWS technologies do not have any of
these risks. Finally, nuclear is not carbon free. It results in
significant carbon emissions during the 10 to 19 years between
planning and operation; it requires significant energy for refining
uranium and building the plant over many years, and it emits direct
heat and water vapor, a greenhouse gas, to the air during its
operation. Overall, it emits 9 to 37 times the carbon-equivalent
emissions per unit energy produced as a new wind turbine.
In sum,
an all-of-the-above policy is a mediocre policy that will not help
solve the global warming, air pollution, or energy security problems
we face because it will siphon scarce resources needed for the real
solution to these problems. It will also siphon precious time, which
we have very little of.
What we
need is a rapid transition to 100% clean, renewable WWS energy and
storage for everything while also addressing non-energy emissions.
This transition involves electrification of most everything –
vehicles; building heating and cooking; industrial processes – and
providing the electricity entirely with WWS. We estimate that, due to
the efficiency of electricity over combustion and other factors, such
electrification will reduce worldwide energy needs about 57%. Although
overall energy requirements will decline, electricity requirements
will be about 90% greater than today. Thus, more energy will be
electricity. Electricity is the
new oil.
Because
we will use much less overall energy and because the cost per unit
energy is lower with WWS, annual worldwide costs of powering the world
for all purposes will be about 61% lower – $6.8 trillion per year
rather than $17.7 trillion per year – with WWS in 2050. Because WWS
eliminates almost 7 million deaths annually and emissions associated
with global warming, it also reduces social costs (energy plus health
plus climate costs) worldwide by an even larger 91 percent (from $76.1
to $6.8 trillion per year).
The
upfront capital needed for this transition worldwide (which is spread
over 30 years), is about $73 trillion. However, this cost pays for
itself in about seven years due to the $11 trillion in annual energy
cost savings due to WWS over fossil fuels. In the United States, the
capital cost of this Green
New Deal is $7.8 trillion.
In Europe, it is $6.2 trillion. In China, it is above $16 trillion.
WWS
creates 28.6 million more long-term, full-time jobs than lost
worldwide, including 3.1 million in the United States, 2.9 million in
Europe, and over 8.5 million in China. It needs only 0.65% of the
world’s land, of which two-thirds is space between wind turbines that
can be used for multiple purposes.
Thus, we
urge world leaders to seek a real solution, not mediocrity, and to
stop letting fossil-nuclear business models continue under the guise
of “climate neutrality” or a different name. We are at a turning
point. The decade of avoiding climate change and irreversible climate
protection is beginning. But only without alternative facts and smoke
screens, only with scientific facts.
There are only advantages to a rapid
transition to real clean, renewable energy and storage.
Claudia
Kemfert
Prof. Dr. of Energy, Transportation, and Environment
German Institute of Economic Research (DIW, Berlin)
ckemfert@diw.de
Mark Z.
Jacobson
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Stanford University
jacobson@stanford.edu
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EU leaders agree on 55% emissions reduction target, but activist
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Make the European Green Deal Real– Combining Climate Neutrality and
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Lessons from Modeling
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Flexible electricity generation, grid
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rejoin the Paris Agreement on day one and lead the world in the
fight against climate change. https://t.co/dHSsXRk35h” / Twitter
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China, India stress climate commitments at global summit
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Cost-Effective than the Existing System
Green Play Ammonia™, Yielder® NFuel Energy.
Spokane, Washington. 99212
www.exactrix.com
509 995 1879 cell, Pacific.
Nathan1@greenplayammonia.com
exactrix@exactrix.com
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