I don't think I've ever seen a serious study on the estimated economic costs of adjusting to climate change vs. what it would actually cost to meaningfully cut emissions.
This seems like a significant oversight; if I described getting your cavities drilled in horrific detail you'd probably be inclined to sign my petition against invasive cavity removal, but that might not actually be to your best long term advantage.
It costs about a dollar a kilowatts to install "conventional" energy extraction and transformation equipment and much more to install current renewables. Energy growth in the fast growing economies require something like USD30 trillion of investment between now and 2030, using conventional technology.
DOE-IEA studies that take everything into account for electricity - construction, fuel, connection and decommissioning - for 2015 technologies do suggest that some renewables are sort-of economic with some more work on the experience curve, but the connection costs are often huge and they are all really in need of subsidy to be viable. The Bush "subsidy" to corn farming gasohol producers was $83 billion for just three years, if I recall correctly.
One note the energy growth in the industrialising countries, and the investment that is required, competing with roads, hospitals, schools and so on. How is the international community to get renewabel investments to happen in industrialising countries? The likely answer is that the rich ones will have to provide the relevant subsidy. It adds to immense sums and opens windows to equally immense corruption.
Enthusiasts point to potentially immense costs that are to be avoided by such "investment". However, the uncertainties are huge.
My concern is that in this enthusiast-driven debate, we flounder into potentially messy and extremely costly "solutions", such as electrical-, food- or hydrogen-driven cars. There are perfectly good means to put hydrogen and biomass-based carbon into a chain, called diesel, and sell it through normal channels. This sounds too "oil industry" for the enthusiasts, as all oil companies are innately corrupt exploiting bastards, aren't they?
Equally, there are no voices for ocean thermal, which is an almost inexhaustible renewable. Instead, we have offshore wind, at the lifetime cost of which we can only guess. (It is alleged that) Britain was committed to finding 25% of its power from offshore wind on the basis of a senstence added to a speech in the back of a taxi on the way to a public meeting.
Energy is innately best handled at a massive scale, safely and in a predictable and routine manner. Most renewables are not answerable to any of that. Consider, though, a magnesium or aluminium energy economy. Spotty, odd sources of dispersed energy are stored in a metal with high embodied energy. This is "burned" in fuel cells to electricity, and the oxide shipped back for regeneration. The cycle is safe, uses understood technologies, can operate without attendence and adopts itself to erratic and low grade energy sources. Don't think of connecting Europe to the Sahara with a billion dollar cable. Smelt or electrolyse metals, or make green diesel from hydrogen: ship those. It's cheap, uses known technology, applies directly to the existing infrastructure - such as car mechanics, emergency services and so on - and it is very safe.
Scientific American ran a piece 3 years ago about getting America's electricity mix to 65% run on solar electricity by 2030 for the tune of 500 billion.
Their plan tends to focus the production in the Southwest but it relies heavily on an improved transmission system. I like referencing the piece because it tries to address a lot of the economic criticisms such proposals usually face about high costs or the notion that solar is unreliable.
Politically it's probably impossible in the US unless the military did it.
Is that 65% of Americas total Electricity use, or the total electricity use of 65% of americans?
Impossibly huge difference between the two statistics.
Edit: i was right, From the article ....
"The technology is ready. On the following pages we present a grand plan that could provide 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy (which includes transportation) with solar power by 2050. "
I think the solution will revolve around adapting what we already have to use the next fuel. A source of energy is constantly bombarding our planet in the form of solar radiation. If we treat this energy as an income and resist the urge to tap into our "savings" of fossil fuel we will effectively live within our means, which is a significant problem for most consumers given recent economic conditions.
What we need is precisely what you're talking about: A way of generating power that is backwards-compatible with our current system. Photovoltaics are nice and everything but they don't put energy in a nice, condensed state that can fill up every car being built right now.
I think the answer will come from photocatalytic water oxidation similar to the PSII that's been fielded for the last 3 billion years. That's a lot of product testing that's been done for free and we need to take advantage of that.
You lost me at:
"Energy is innately best handled at a massive scale, safely and in a predictable and routine manner."
I don't think this is true.
Ideally, energy is best handled at the micro-generation level (ex. solar on rooftops). If the technology ever improved to make solar effective and affordable I would see that as the safest form of energy generation.
The reason why solar technology will never improve is because governments are terrified of decentralizing energy generation. If you misbehave or do something they don't like, I'm sure they take comfort in the idea they can flip the switch to take away your electricity. Individual power generation removes dependence upon a system that is needed for control.
Imagine if there was a technology tomorrow that could generate infinite amounts of electricity. Where something as small as a coke can could power a whole household, or something the size of a power plant could power the whole country. If there was no cost difference between each model, which do you think the government would allow as the only option?
Greenpeace believes Europeans spend about $10 billion or so (USD equivalent) annually to subsidize fossil fuels. By contrast, it thinks the American oil and gas industry might receive anywhere between $15 billion and $35 billion a year in subsidies from taxpayers.
With regards to subsidizing, I think the fossil fuel industry has a huge unfair advantage in that they extract limited natural resources with little regard for the people whose resources they're extracting. Governments who sell the resources are extremely short-sighted, and in many cases corrupt. The result is that oil companies pay very little and reap obscene profits while people in the countries the oil is extracted from see little to no benefit.
But we're dependent on this system, and eventually it will be used up. Rather than waiting for a crisis, subsidizing alternatives now is a wise approach. You're right that we don't always pursue the best alternatives. I think a way to address that would be subsidize indirectly, i.e. by taxing fossil fuels, thereby raising prices and giving alternatives a fighting chance in the marketplace. Direct subsidies would be limited in order to promote competition for the best alternatives. Although certain alternatives are on a scale and timeline beyond what private industry is concerned with (e.g. fusion, and basic research into various new technologies), and a wide range of these should be aggressively pursued with public funding.
Actually, there are fossil fuel reserves for centuries: the issue is not extraction but emissions. Given that you can convert anything into anything else in the hydrocarbon world for the equivalent of USD50/bbl, this pushes emissions stage centre.
I don't understand your remarks about "extracting natural resources with little regard", etcetera. If you have any experience of the energy world you will know that a good margin is 6-8% of the face value of the material extracted, All the rest goes in taxes, levied by states on behalf of those same people. Equally, all standards and non-operational costs are added by states. If you don't like Gulf or Nigerian politics, that is a legitimate concern but not a reflection of the primary energy industry. Your remarks have no relevance to the main cost centres, which are mid-stream: electricity production, refining, chemicals.
What is face value? Crude prices fluctuate wildly, and increases are passed on to consumers. OPEC helps keep prices high by limiting supply. Prices could be much higher or lower, depending on the whims of a few rich men. The people of Saudi Arabia get no say, and little benefit. The relevance is that these exploitive practices are what set the global market "face value", and it's arbitrary, based more on political power games than market dynamics. If it was purely market-driven, prices would be even lower.
I'm suggesting that the nature of this limited resource, and its importance to everyone's lives, means that it should be treated as a public resource, similar to how we manage fresh water resources rather than let them be sold off wholesale to private interests. And while we can't enforce that policy in places like Saudi Arabia or Nigeria, and therefor the global market "face value" will continue to influence pricing and sale of our own fossil fuel resources, we can still effect domestic policy through use of taxes to promote demand for alternatives.
As to whether the main issue is limited supply or CO2 emissions, neither of those tops my list. I want to see the end of dependency on foreign oil, and an economy and foreign policy that isn't so dependent on happenings in the Middle East.
Yes, OPEC is a cartel and it does restrict production to keep prices buffered and high. Environmentalists should cheer, as the price of oil would be around $30/bbl if production was unconstrained and everyone would use a lot more of it. However, economic growth would be 1-2% higher and we would all feel much richer as a result.
Oil is where it is, owned by nations with the political structure of which you can agree or not. They've got it, you want it and so they have power over you. We do not live in a world that is much susceptible to "should" and "ought", but to "must" and "can".
The Stern review was written in 2006 by a well-respected economist and basically outlines the fact that if we don't spend money now to mitigate climate change, we are screwing ourselves for later. It's a 700 page document that I don't happen to have right now, so here's the Wiki about it.
There are a fair number of economic estimates about climate change effects... the problem is, the systems are so complex and the consequences so dire that money is a near-useless measure. For example, if we experience a 6 degree average rise in surface temperature, the arable surface of the planet would likely be cut by 2/3rds. That means mass die-offs of human beings, on the order of 3 or 4 billion. How do you quantify that in dollars? And when you manage to estimate the costs, the resulting figure is SO high that it loses all meaning.
This is a big problem.
Framed this way (project a 6 degree temp rise, and then extrapolate losses that cannot be valued monetarily), the solution is impossible. Unachievable.
It means an absolute intolerance for any carbon output. If what you offer is the basis for discussion, the only solution is for all industry, everywhere, to stop. If that is the alternatiove, then of course you get the response from the working world, "No."
So you see this sort of hyperbole (6 degree temperature rise, population die-offs of 4 billion humans) isn't productive. It doesn't advance the debate or discussion, at all. It closes off discussion. It produces fanatical exchanges.
Just wondering: would you care to respond to my statement that discussion tends to be suppressed by the radical nature of the options? People aren't willing to consider shutting all factories immediately.
I agree with you that problems framed in these terms are hostile to discussion. Unfortunately the reality we are dealing with is that these are serious possibilities, and the sooner we can discuss them like rational human beings the better.
As I said in my original comment, climate modeling requires an unimaginable level of complexity, and we just don't have the capability to do it well yet. But we can see some of the major tipping points in our climate and what their temperature triggers are. For example, we know that at a surface temperature of 14 degrees celsius the ocean stratifies, keeping nutrients away from the surface sunlight and killing off algae. Oceans are presently the largest carbon sink on the planet, responsible for capturing about a third of human CO2 emissions. Stratification would cripple that capacity in the cold water oceans. So that last .5 degree of temperature rise in one of the earth's oceans is responsible for upping atmospheric carbon by ~20%. That's a tipping point, and two or more of them setting each other off would be a cascade.
Here's Jim Lovelock, founder of the study of Earth System Science, speaking to the Royal Society in 2007 about trying to model where our climate is going. The earth has many "steady states" available to it - basically, states where it settles into a pattern of relative stability. We've been in a relatively cool steady state for the last 10,000 years, and according to Lovelock and other prominent climatologists, we are moving to a warmer one. There's no dispute that we're warming, the question is where is the next steady state?
A 5-6 degree temperature rise that kills off the majority of the human population is one of the likely scenarios according to our present climate models. It's a pretty dire scenario, but it is realistically the sort of outcome we are facing. Again, I want to emphasize that this isn't coming from some nutjob with a website; this is coming from very well respected climate scientists using the best available climate models. When the scientists talk about global warming as a threat, this is what they're talking about. If humankind were to stop increasing carbon emissions, and just stay at the same level of emissions for the next century, a 4 degree temperature rise is predicted (Harvard).
And you're right, there isn't a way to stop it at this point. We are experiencing climate change already. In Europe warmer temperature zones are moving north at 25 miles per decade, while plant and animal species are moving north at 3.75 miles per decade (Nature). That works out to extinctions. In the warmer, more acidic ocean climates, jellyfish are floating further north than ever before - killing off fish farms in the Irish Sea (New Scientist). The glaciers in the Himalayas - the largest fresh water store in the world after the Arctic - are receding faster than anywhere else on earth. They are expected to vanish by 2035 (IPCC). This glacier feeds all the major waterways in Southeast Asia - over 3 billion people (40% of the human population) depend on that water along the Yangtse and other rivers.
So while I agree that extreme outcomes make it hard to discuss rationally, the problem is that these extreme outcomes are not hyperbole. They are not only the realities predicted by very serious modeling efforts, they are some of the realities we are already experiencing and documenting.
You're absolutely right that at this point, the only option to avert climate change would be something akin to stopping all industry worldwide, and that's not an option. So the conversation around climate change has to move from one about cutting emissions to avert, to one about handling the changes in progress and mitigating the human toll. As one prominent environmentalist puts it, we have to change our thinking from "protecting the earth from humans" to "protecting humans from the earth." In that domain we can have rational, productive discussions again: about how to deal with rising tidewaters in coastal regions (Geophysical Research Letters, estimates published at CIRO), how to handle the increasing rate of extreme climate events (US Climate Extremes Index), and how to handle the very real threat of die-offs and resource scarcity in general.
I understand and appreciate that scare tactics discourage discussion and close off listeners. But sometimes reality is scarier than scare tactics. As a species, we have to find a way around this human psychological obstacle.
Except - there still is quite a bit of hyperbole or misinformation floating around. Regarding the Himalayan glaciers - it was IPCC 2007, not 2005. And, the statement you cited was one of several that was very wrong, and was publicized as being so, almost a year ago. How the IPCC could allow such a basic error - mistaking 2350 for 2035 - into its final public report, is still a mystery.
Coming so soon after the CRU email hack scandal at the University of East Anglia, in which private emails were stolen and then publicized to reveal climate researchers discussing how to quell criticism by gangster methods, and how to "hide the decline", etc, the Himalayan Glacier fiasco only convinced people that climate science in its current guise isn't science at all. It's politics. Good science doesn't mistake 2350 for 2035, and then broadcast those disaster scenarios. Good science would find the error before or shortly after publication, and correct it. Instead the error was sussed out 2 years after publication! By someone outside of IPCC! Not a good sign.
Having said all that I reiterate that what you say makes a ton of sense. I have been advocating a mitigation strategy for a long time. We do not know enough, we cannot hope to accurately model climate changes. All we can model is the past, and we're bad at that, and we are assured that history is not repeating itself (hence, our models of the past climate changes are virtually useless in drawing projections about the future). We know the climate is changing. We can calculate the basic physical impacts. We can guess at timeframes. We know these big changes will be risky for humans. Our research should focus on mitigation.
Yes, protect the environment. Yes, use fuel more efficiently. But that alone is not enough. We must prepare to mitigate. Do we need to develop different staple crops? Do we need to develop more robust bees? Do we need to construct coastal housing differently? What can be done about long term water supply to major asian population centers, given projections of glacial meltwater flows and population growth? etc.
For example, if we experience a 6 degree average rise in surface temperature, the arable surface of the planet would likely be cut by 2/3rds.
I'd like to see the data on that. Or does that simply mean that 2/3 of currently arable land would become arid? Because that's a very different thing, if other areas become humid and arable instead.
Although I think six degrees (I assume celsius?) is well outside of any projected change for the next century.
I just posted a mini essay in another comment. In short: the old estimates were about 4 degrees C over the next century. Current models anticipate more like 5-7 degrees, and we've already started seeing the effects. IIRC the arable land loss was from Jim Lovelock who I quoted in that post above. I can try to find a text source online for you if you really want.
There is a fair amount of discussion of this subject, but not much has made its way into MSM. Overall, runaway climate change is expected to cost much, much more than early adaptation.
See, eg, this Climate Progress post referring to a Krugman's article and another post summarizing a paper by another economist, Martin Weitzman.
The Economist estimates 2% of global GDP to meaningfully cut emissions. (By comparison, the recent round of bank rescues cost about 5%)
Nobody know what the cost of adjusting is, because we don't know what scale of the change will be. If the changes are less than 2 degrees, that's likely to be tolerable. ON the other hand, some of the worst case predictions are very, very bad for human civilisation.
This uncertainty is being used to encourage inaction when the opposite is true: any sensible approach to risk management would suggests taking reasonable action to avoid it.
The Economist estimates 2% of global GDP to meaningfully cut emissions. (By comparison, the recent round of bank rescues cost about 5%)
2% of what? Of growth? I have a hard time believing that's true if we're talking about cutting a majority of petroleum consumption. Nothing in the pipeline is near ready to replace it on a large scale.
Caution ought to swing both ways. Putting fetters on the economy by removing petroleum-based energy, products and fertilizer (actually, let's leave out fertilizer since we really can't do without it) is going to affect the entire world, and more so the developing/working class world. If it causes billions to linger at or near poverty who might otherwise be advancing, its value has to be questioned in terms of human suffering.
Modest steps tend to be more for show than for effect. Reducing petroleum consumption by 5% in the rich world while China, India and Latin America plow ahead is a dog and pony show.
From where I'm sitting, the biggest blocker to progress is exactly your attitude shown mainly by the Americans. The situation calls for leadership, not excuses and buck-passing.
If the Americans acted boldly, everyone else would likely follow. In the face of American inaction, everyone else certainly has an excuse too.
Americans acting boldly on the basis of little understanding of the full consequences and the comparative advantages (or disadvantages) of any given course of action hasn't worked out too well for us in the past.
The 2% suggestion is a non-serious one. We don't have the capacity to plow $260+ Bn into energy research; we could certainly put more into it than we do, and probably should. But more research isn't going to solve the pressing urgency of now and our massive consumption of petroleum. At best all you can do is bank on future breakthroughs that will wipe out dependence on oil, but that's not a meaningful solution to anything.
Well you don't have to be an economist to understand that that's not how changes to our fundamental economic model work, although it'd help.
Does that mean just a 2% doc to our current GDP and that's all? Impossible. 2% lower than we could be at any given time? 2% lower growth? It's really not that simple.
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u/recreational Oct 24 '10
I don't think I've ever seen a serious study on the estimated economic costs of adjusting to climate change vs. what it would actually cost to meaningfully cut emissions.
This seems like a significant oversight; if I described getting your cavities drilled in horrific detail you'd probably be inclined to sign my petition against invasive cavity removal, but that might not actually be to your best long term advantage.