Emission Impossible

Emission Impossible?

“At a mere 1°C or so above the average temperature of 120 years ago, the world is experiencing increases in the frequency and intensity of deadly heat waves in many regions; increases in torrential downpours and flooding in many others; large expansions in the annual area burned in regions prone to wildfires (and expansion of wildfires into regions not previously prone to them); an increase in the power of the strongest tropical storms; expanded impacts of pests and pathogens across large parts of the globe; disruptive changes in monsoons; other alterations in atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns that, together with other impacts, are affecting agriculture and ocean fisheries; an accelerating pace of global sea-level rise; and ocean acidification arising from absorption of some of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”                                              

Net-Zero America: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure, and Impacts, a December 15th Report from Princeton University and the Andlinger Center

Doesn’t everybody already know all that?! Former Vice President Al Gore produced a climate-change documentary a few years ago entitled “An Inconvenient Truth,” and simply because so many people do not want to take the steps necessary to reduce and reverse the horrific consequences of burning carbon to generate energy – the “greenhouse effect” – they reach for caverns of excuses and explanations, denial on steroids, to do little or nothing about it. The current economic costs are literally trillions of dollars per year in natural disasters, new outbreaks of migrating disease, loss of arable land and coastal erosion. And more than a few deaths. Still we deny. Fighting climate change is inconvenient. From poor farmers clearing and fertilizing vast tracts of land by burning, to high consuming modern nations lapping up energy-driven lifestyles as if there were no tomorrow. Most of that energy is still generated by burning fossil fuels.

Religious extremists, from fringe evangelicals to Hindu fundamentalists, believe that God either will not let mass environmental calamity ravage humanity or that this is God’s punishment for one form of “unacceptable” human behavior or another. The correction, then, is prayer and the adherence to stricter religious mandates. With the raging pandemic, the increasing availability of vaccines notwithstanding, humanity is likewise distracted and appropriately focused on surviving COVID-19. Climate change will just have to wait. But even with less travel from the pandemic, climate change is still having its way with humanity and will ultimately kill more people than the novel coronavirus. By far. The US can and must take a more aggressive posture against this toxic environmental arrogance.

President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to return the United States to the Paris climate accord and prioritize new policies to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, reduce excess consumption and generate massive new forms of environmentally friendly alternative energy capacity. The GOP has pledged to fight anything that smacks of containing existing fossil fuel industries or that might add extra operating costs to existing manufacturing or transportation. We have become a “reactive” government – cutting spending to avert expected catastrophes and then spending two or three times the preventative budget to deal with the resulting natural disasters. 

By blaming the disasters on “routine cycles of nature” over which we purportedly have no control, GOP climate change minimizers and deniers relieve themselves of preventative regulations and preparatory expenditures. From climate change to medical disasters like the pandemic. Others say we should take some steps as long as they do not impose any significant burdens on business. Seriously? It is little wonder that the greatest pressures come from the youngest voters, since it is they who will live through escalating climate disasters if not contained.

Meanwhile, we are running out of time. Even though we need to do a lot more a lot more quickly – 2025/30 – are more necessary goals, it seems that the global goal is to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. But are there genuine achievable paths to get there? Yes! But it won’t be easy or cheap (but not remotely as expensive as nay-sayers project). Mostly replacing power plants, the power grid (which has pretty much reached the end of its useful life anyway) and other basic infrastructural necessities. It’s just that is will be so much more expensive in dollars and lives if we do not. The above-noted report set down how we can get from here to there.

Adele Peters, writing for the December 23rd FastCompany.com, explains: “The report looks at five scenarios, each differing in how aggressively they rely on renewable energy or how quickly vehicles and buildings electrify. But in each case, the annual cost of energy for consumers is similar to what it is today. All the scenarios rely on boosting the rate of growth of wind and solar, so there’s four times as much renewable capacity by 2030. To manage all the new renewable energy, the electric grid will also need to expand roughly as much in the next 15 years as it did in the first 150 years of its existence (and then expand again by roughly that much in the following 15 years).

“We’ll need to start building new infrastructure to transport captured CO2 to geological basins where it can be stored underground—typically in places where oil or gas was previously extracted. ‘In effect, it’s putting the carbon back down where it came from,’ [says Eric Larson, a senior research engineer at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University]. Roughly 50 million electric cars will need to be brought into service. And as buildings become more efficient, they’ll also start to electrify, with equipment like electric heat pumps replacing heat from fossil fuels. Forests and farms will need to capture 200 million more metric tons of CO2 each year than they do now.

“This decade, the work to reach the goal could create between 500,000 and 1 million new energy jobs. (In almost all states, jobs that are lost in the fossil fuel industry will be replaced by new jobs in construction and clean energy manufacturing.) As coal is no longer used for power, the pollution cuts will also help avoid 100,000 premature deaths [in the US alone].

“The hope is that companies can use the report to plan their own net-zero pathways, and the incoming administration can use it to help prioritize the first steps it can take to tackle climate change as it studies the scenarios. ‘We don’t know what the ultimate pathway is going to be,’ Larson says. ‘But we want to show a range of options for getting there. . . . We aren’t taking a view as to what the right way is. We don’t really care which way gets it done, as long as it gets done.’” Eventually, we won’t even have carbon effluents that we need to bury underground. But we need to accelerate our efforts… starting yesterday. Nature truly does not care what we do. She started with nothing, and if we insist on continuing obviously destructive practices, she will reward us with the dire consequences of which we are totally aware!

I’m Peter Dekom, and so much of our industrial and electrical power generating capacity is embedded in facilities that have long-since passed their optimal useful life that replacing them will spur an overall increase in productivity, a true economic return on investment.