Guest Opinion | Energy transition, the bigger picture, Part 1 of 3

We will have a closer look at: urgency, energy descent, population and steps 1-7.

Urgency

 Let’s take a look at where we are in the current effort at decarbonization. A good way to find out is to look at the Keeling curve(.https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/)The Keeling Curve is a daily record of the global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration maintained by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, and is measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The reading on September 3, 2024 was 422.48 ppm (parts per million).

At the top of the graph you can click on a number of different time periods: full record, 1700-present, 2k years,10k years, 800k years, 70m(million) years. When you click on “full record” it shows that the curve is still going steadily upwards. It is NOT slowing down, it is not even flattening out. The number is still going up at about 4-5 ppm per year.

I also encourage everybody to look at the 2k, 10k and 800k graphs. The last time it was 422 ppm, was sometime in the Pliocene, 3 million years ago, when temperatures were 3-5 degrees F warmer than pre-industrial times and sea levels were 40-50 feet higher.

What does this mean? Well, it means that despite 50 Earth Day celebrations, millions and millions of solar panels, windmills and electric cars, many L.E.D lightbulbs, lots of talk and climate action plans later, we have not made a dent!

The CO2 curve is still steadily going up. And the smartest kid in the class will say, sure, but without all our efforts it would have been worse. And that is probably true. But the immense reduction in ground transportation, airplane flights and other energy use during the first phase of COVID 19 (remember “lock down”) barely made a dent in the curve. Which is an indication of the enormous effort it will take to actually flatten that curve.

Remember the “350” movement by Bill McKibben? Well, we have passed that station long time ago. We are all still sitting in a train going in the wrong direction. It also means that the journey in the direction of decarbonization is getting longer and longer (and a lot harder because of feedback loops, e.g. melting permafrost). At this point we will be bailing with a hole in the boat for a long time to come, while the water level in the boat is still rising!

This is quite sobering also because the speed with which this is happening, is unprecedented in paleo climatology. There have been many changes in the Earth’s climate in the past, but never this fast. What that means is that all living species will have a hard time to adapt. In the past trees (and other life forms) used to follow the growing or melting of the glaciers in the ice ages, which happened over thousands of years. Not now. They will either simply die, get diseased and be fuel for forest fires.

Will Homo Sapiens be smart enough to reduce atmospheric carbon? Or face the same fate of extinction as our faintly related cousins the Neanderthals, who split off from the hominid tree some 500.000 years ago. They died out about 40,000 years ago because they failed to adapt to a relative fast change in the climate (several hundreds of years), when grassland steppes, full of easy to hunt herbivores made way for impenetrable dense thickets and then forests with little grass and elusive wildlife.

This is not a storm on the horizon, no this a monumental disaster unfolding; the massive 6th great extinction of species is underway. Extinction is forever. The threads of the web of life are unraveling now. Even if we were able to stop all emissions tomorrow, scientists agree that the predicted temperature rise and sea level rise connected to these Keeling Curve numbers will happen. They are already in the pipeline. Unless of course humans cause a nuclear winter or some massive volcanic eruption occurs, which nonetheless will hasten the crumbling of civilization. Or unless we find a way to get all that carbon dioxide (950 giga tonnes) out of the atmosphere pronto!

We have co-evolved with all living things around us, in a delicate, interdependent balance. To think that we can just obliterate a big part of the living world around us is complete folly. And as Richard Heinberg points out, to get to “carbon neutral” in 2050, enormous amounts of fossil fuel will have to be used to mine ore and minerals, transport, melt, construct, transport again, all the solar panels, wind mills, electric appliances necessary to get there. In other words it will get worse before it gets better. Or rather, we are going to ruin the planet a lot more before we are going to “save” it. Does that make any sense? Is that prudent?

We all want to save the planet, no doubt about it, but not quite yet! We somehow don’t feel the urgency, even though there are massive fires all over Brazil, 40 inches of rain just fell in Southern Japan, elephants are killed in Namibia to feed the starving people because of exceptional drought, Bangladesh had floods the elders had never seen in their lives, and so on. There are disasters happening everyday all over the planet consequence of our communal attitude towards our ‘home” (oikos in Greek, eco-logy), planet earth.

One reason there is no urgency, is the fact that there is this perception, that it will all happen in the future and not here. That we have time to adapt somehow sometime in the future. “Technology will solve everything.” And indeed this is a disaster that will unfold over several generations. We all care about the future of our children and grandchildren, but thereafter, about people that are not even born yet and that we will never know, not so much. The concept of care for the seventh generation, adopted by many native peoples, is foreign to the current western philosophy.

Energy descent and degrowth

As Richard Heinberg mentioned, if we try to replace all the energy we are using now with alternative energy sources (solar, wind, hydro, hydrogen and others) it will most likely create a serious spike in current carbon emissions, as we need to fabricate all the solar panels, electric cars, windmills etc. using fossil fuels. In that case we are just further from our goal of bringing down the Keeling curve.

At this point in time China is producing an enormous amount of cheap, “green” electric vehicles and solar panels that are dumped all over the planet, to gain market share. But most industrial energy in China used to make these panels and cars is still created by coal fired power plants, so these so called “green” vehicles are part of the spike Richard speaks of.

And besides, as he points out, there are simply not enough materials to be found on the planet to fabricate that many solar panels again and again over the years, and all the other needed devices. There are about 1.5 billion cars on the planet at the moment, of which 20 % in the USA.  A lot of energy will be needed to just lug around those 1.5 billion very heavy batteries all day.

Average lifespan of solar panels 30-50 years. Average life span of metal roofing about 40-70 years, maybe a bit more. ( It is labor intensive and costly to remove solar panels to renew a roof).

All electricity transport depends on copper. The mountains of copper for this kind of energy production and transportation are huge, we will need 50 million tons in 2050 alone. To produce one ton of copper ore, over 125 tons of rock and soil must be displaced. Not to mention the lithium, cobalt, nickel and many other components needed for all the devices that run on electricity. Fossil fuel is so hard to replace because pound for pound fossil fuel carries 60 to a 100 times more energy than a battery of the same weight depending on type of fuel and battery. And the smart kid in the class will ask: why then do we waste so much fossil fuel. Very good question.

And there is something way more important that is seldom mentioned in all the climate discussions.