Clarifying Some Issues for Climate Change
It bothers me how much confusion there still is about what it takes to fight climate change. A recent article in Bloomberg was a case in point. They rank new EV’s by “greenness”. I’m not going to talk about the details of what they call green, but the problem is that the whole idea is wrong. All EV’s are green in the only way that matters, and a ranking by “greenness” just confuses the issue.
I’ll try to be organized about this. First of all, the primary change that has to take place is the replacement of fossil fuels by sustainable sources of power. In practice that comes down to moving everything to the electric grid, with a beefing up of that grid to handle the greatly increased demand and with sustainable sources.
The timescale for this transformation is dictated by a carbon budget-there is only so much more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere before the consequences become catastrophic. All that carbon dioxide just adds up, and the results continue to get (exponentially) worse. To succeed we have to stop burning fossil fuels before we hit the carbon budget limit. That process has three parts:
- Make the electric grid what it has to be: sustainably generated with much more capacity and much better connectivity.
- Move all applications to the electrical network. (Note that hydrogen apps fit here since most of the hydrogen will be electrically-generated.)
- Cut down on usage for all of the remaining fossil fuel applications.
The first thing to note is that most conservation efforts fit under item #3, so it’s worth stating unequivocally that conservation by itself is not the solution to climate change. It’s only a piece of what has to happen, and the rest is most of the problem. And conservation for EV’s doesn’t fit here at all. Item #1 has to happen for all energy uses, so “greenness” of particular car models is an insignificant blip on a much bigger issue. Finally, it should be obvious that despite what the oil companies tell you, climate change is not primarily a matter of everyone’s personal responsibility: governments have to take large-scale action.
It’s worth saying a little more about items 1 and 2. There is quite a lot of #1 that can start now: improving and expanding the capabilities of the network as well as deployments of solar and wind power. There are of course limitations to what we can currently get done. The biggest current issue is in-network energy storage, to handle periods where there isn’t sun or wind. However, this is an area of such active work that one can expect big improvements in the next few years. For that reason it’s fair to regard item #1 as mostly a matter of money and commitment. (That’s not to say there can’t be big contributions from new technologies — such as fusion — as they become available.)
Item #2 is harder. This involves not just familiar issues such as heat pumps but also industrial processes, such as for steel, cement, and plastics. For these there is still research to be done before we can talk about worldwide deployments. Overall this is an area with many different application-specific issues and deployment scenarios, so lots of work has to be organized and done in parallel. Again this goes way beyond individual responsibilities. Note that EV’s fit under item #2-changing to an EV is a contribution regardless of whether your electric utility has done its work yet or not.
Finally there is the international aspect to the whole problem. It’s amazing how much of the discussion of climate change is about us doing our part-as if our atmosphere were somehow detached from everyone else’s. This really needs to sink in: there is only one atmosphere, and we will only succeed if everyone else succeeds too. Helping poorer countries to cope is not a matter of charity; it’s a matter of our own survival. Obviously there are going to be negotiations over whose money gets spent on what, but rich countries are going to have to do what it takes for poor countries to redo their infrastructures. Like it or not we are going to have to help with technology development and deployments worldwide.
Originally published at http://ontheoutside.blog on November 3, 2023.
