The Case for Eco-Optimism
By Nayyer Ali MD
In the last 75 years or so, our species has overcome the problem of poverty for the vast majority of us. Most people, even in lands that were once extremely poor like Mexico and China, have enough to eat and live to 70 years or more. Extreme poverty and hunger will mostly be gone entirely in the next few decades.
But this material progress has come at an immense environmental cost. In the 1960’s these costs were seen in severe local air and water pollution in the industrialized world. While this sort of environmental problems have been greatly mitigated through a variety of pollution control technologies, two other problems are still creating a sense of impending doom for the planet. These problems are climate change (global warming) due to emissions of carbon dioxide and other wastes gases of our energy systems, and possible mass extinction of complex species (mammals, birds, fishes, reptiles, and flowering plants). The two problems are linked as they both are the results of human activity that have resulted in our prosperity. While these are serious issues, there is a strong case for optimism that we can solve both these problems in the course of this century. This column will look at climate change, and the next will look at extinction.
The problem of global warming will require us to change our energy systems (how we create electric power and how we run our cars and heat our homes) to one in which we do not burn fossil fuels. Greenhouse gas (mostly carbon dioxide, but also methane and nitric oxide) emissions have been rising for decades. But in the last ten years the growth in emissions slowed dramatically as the world started to switch away from coal to better natural gas for power plants, and as the cost of solar and wind power plummeted so much that over 1,000 gigawatts of renewable energy was deployed worldwide.
The global power capacity totals about 7,000 gigawatts. This deployment is only accelerating, in 2020 there was 260 gigawatts of new renewable power installed around the world, and that accounted for 80% of the total new power capacity added. Meanwhile, China just announced that they would no longer provide financing for new coal plants to be built in other countries, signifying the end of new coal construction for most nations, as Western nations and lenders like the World Bank no longer fund coal plants either.
At the same time, the other big user of fossil fuel, the auto industry, is rapidly switching to electric vehicles, much faster than many thought possible even two years ago. In July, 5% of vehicle sales in the US were electric, while 20% of vehicles produced in Germany were electric. Ford just announced an 11 billion dollar investment in brand new electric vehicle production and battery production. For auto makers, they are quickly realizing you cannot be in both product lines for very long. The immense amount of investment, engineering talent, and design work needed to maintain a new product fleet with two entirely different power systems is just not going to be viable. A few years ago, the conventional wisdom was that electric vehicles would slowly grab market share, reaching 30% of worldwide sales by 2030. But that is turning out to be way too conservative. Auto makers will be entirely abandoning gasoline engine vehicles and offering only electric by end of the decade if not sooner. Consumers will also see that the future resale value of a gasoline-powered car will start to collapse in a few years, at which point the number of buyers for brand new gasoline cars will plummet.
The major oil producers are grappling with this calculation in real time. While oil prices have rebounded sharply this year to 80 dollars a barrel, there is great reluctance to start investing in new production. Major Western oil companies are keeping their capital expenditures on a tight leash, and even the usually aggressive American oil frackers who respond rapidly to high oil prices are being very cautious. No one has confidence about the long-term future of oil. While the rest of the stock market has soared, Exxon Mobil stock still remains valued lower than before the pandemic, and much lower than five years ago.
Another interesting development in renewable power is Singapore’s project to obtain solar power from Australia. Singapore is developing a massive solar farm in the Australian desert, and will lay giant cables to transmit that power over a thousand kilometers to Singapore, which lacks the space for a giant solar field. This is proof of concept of a potential solution to the issue of using solar power at night. Obviously, the panels can’t work when the sun is down, but we can move power across time zones. Could solar farms in North Africa power China, and solar in Australia power the US, while panels in the Mexican desert supply power to Europe? Not today, but in 20 years certainly yes.
The other way to overcome the issue of renewable power and 24/7 reliability is with batteries. Tremendous research and development in battery technology is ongoing, and the cost of batteries has been dropping rapidly for the last decade. It is almost certain that the battery issue will be solved in the next 10 or 20 years.
The IPCC recently released their latest assessment report and it reflects a lot of these changes. The global energy future looks much different than it did ten years ago. The great fear that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions would just keep rising every year for this century is now clearly not the case. That scenario led to catastrophic warming of 4.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. Using projections based on the current policies already in place, GHG emissions will remain basically static for the next 80 years, and warming will be limited to about 2.7-3.1 degree range. If we take into account policies that governments have stated they are committed to follow in the future (for example, the banning of all gasoline vehicles in China and Europe in the next decade), annual GHG emissions will slowly fall by about 50% by end of the century, and warming will be limited to about 2.4 degrees. That’s not a catastrophic number, but we can do better. The goal is to limit it to well below 2 degrees, maybe as low as 1.5 degrees.
To achieve 1.5 degrees, we would have to get to zero worldwide GHG emissions by about 2040. But keeping it below 2 degrees stretches out the time available to 2070. Given the trends we are already seeing, 2040 is probably unrealistic, but 2070 will be easily beat. Which means warming will be somewhere between 1.5 and 2 degrees. But that’s not the end of the story. There is also another technology that could alter those numbers. It’s called “carbon capture and sequestration” (CCS), in which carbon dioxide is sucked out of the air and then safely deposited deep underground. This can be done today, in fact a large CCS facility is being built in Iceland, but the cost is very high, about 800 dollars per ton of carbon dioxide. To sequester 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide (what we emit each year), would cost over 20 trillion dollars. But this technique will get better over time, and if we can bring the cost down to 100 dollars per ton, then after 2050, the world could start taking carbon dioxide out of the air on a massive scale and actually start to reduce the total in the atmosphere, putting global warming in reverse. As such, even if we miss the 2040 deadline for reaching net zero, CCS could give the world in the decades after 2050 the option to make up the difference, and keep temperatures in a range desired. An added factor is that the world in 2050 will be much richer than today. Current global GDP is about 90 trillion dollars, but will likely be 300 trillion dollars by 2050. To spend 1% of that on CCS will not be a terrible burden on the future.
It would be foolish to say that the problem of climate change has been solved. Much work needs to be done, and trillions of dollars need to be invested in the coming decades. But the path to a successful outcome to this challenge is quite evident. It is reasonable to be an eco-optimist.
The key is to understand this is a global challenge, not simply an American or European or Chinese one. The aim is to develop the energy technology that allows for zero carbon emissions and is cheaper than fossil fuels. We are getting there, and faster than anyone thought possible ten years ago.
