We’re Winning on Climate Change
By Nayyer Ali MD
Judging by the headlines, 2018 appears to have been a bad year on the climate front.
For decades, scientists have warned that the industrial emissions of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil, and natural gas, the fuels that power our modern civilization, are changing the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide has already risen from 280 ppm to over 400 ppm in the last 60 years, leading to a perceptible warming of the climate. Global average temperatures are up about 1 degree centigrade over the last century, although not all of that is due to carbon dioxide, as half of that occurred before 1950. However, there is a grave concern about this century, and what would happen if the rest of the world used fossil fuels as the US and Europe did in the last.
In the last 12 months three events have triggered increased concern. The first was President Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Accords, an agreement that involved pretty much every other nation on Earth. The rest of the world has continued to commit to the Paris goals of reducing carbon emissions, but with the US out, it weakens the framework markedly. Second, the body of climate scientists that give guidance to the world on this issue, known as the IPCC, issued a report that our upper limit of safe climate change is lower than we thought. Up to now, it was the opinion of the IPCC that keeping total warming to less than 2 degrees centigrade would avoid major negative impacts to civilization and to the environment. But this year the IPCC moved the goalposts, and stated that 1.5 degrees should be the target. Given that 1 degree has already happened, this doesn’t leave much room for further warming, which is inevitable as we have no prospect of completely stopping our use of fossil fuels in the next 20 years. Third, for the last three years, total carbon emissions by the global economy had been flat, making some optimists think that perhaps we have at least peaked carbon emissions, but data for 2018 show that emissions are set to rise by over 2% this year.
These negative factors have led some to panic, or declare that human civilization and even life on Earth are at risk of being wiped out. These fears are grossly overblown, and ignore a number of critical trends that have become clear in the last five years.
First, while carbon emissions have not literally peaked, they are getting very close to an absolute peak that should occur in the next 5-10 years. What has held back emissions in the last few years has been the sudden collapse in coal use in the US and Europe, and the switchover to either cheaper natural gas or to solar or wind power. Coal use in China and India is not actually declining, but it has clearly stopped rising rapidly, as it was doing, with many coal plants that were to be built having been canceled. Global consumption of coal peaked in 2013 (“peak coal”) and is on steady trend downward. Because coal emits more carbon than any other fuel, this is a huge positive change. The IPCC worst case scenario was based on the idea that the world would burn more and more coal for the next 80 years, with coal still being the primary source of electric power in 2100, that clearly is not happening.
Peak carbon emissions will occur when we reach the tipping point and oil consumption actually hits a high water mark and starts its decline. That is likely to happen in the next 5-10 years, depending on how rapidly electric cars become the majority of new car sales. China, India, and several European countries already have laws banning the sales of gasoline cars after about 2030, but EV’s should take off in the next few years as the cost comes down. When electric cars are cheaper than gasoline cars to own and drive, gas cars will be rapidly driven out of the market. The speed of collapse of the gasoline car will surprise many.
Second, renewables and storage are progressing in efficiency and dropping in price much faster than expected. At this point solar panels cost less than 1,000 dollars per kilowatt, and storage of power can be bought for about 200 dollars per kilowatt hour. Wind is even cheaper than solar. For perspective, to fully power the US with renewables would need about 1,000 gigawatts of solar or wind capacity, and the ability to store about 5,000 gigawatt hours of power. The total price of that would be about 2 trillion dollars, which seems like a lot, but if spent over 10 years, represents a renewable energy investment of 200 billion dollars per year, or roughly 1% of GDP. Add to that the price of solar, wind, and storage continue to decline every year.
Third, despite President Trump’s hostility to energy issues, the rest of the world is rapidly taking the political action needed to solve this problem. Most importantly, California, the world’s 5 th largest economy, passed a law requiring a totally carbon-free electric grid by 2045. Given that the vehicle fleet will also be all-electric by then, California will have created a modern carbon-free economy. While California has done this first, expect other liberal states like New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and New Jersey to join. In fact, it looks like states with 31% of the US population will enact similar laws in the next 1-2 years. As important, other major industrial economies like France, Britain, and Germany will also follow along in the next few years. California and other trailblazers will be extremely important, because they will master the technologies and skills needed to create modern carbon-free economies, making it easy for other nations to then adopt similar systems in the years after. By 2070, it is highly likely that the world as a whole will be powered by carbon-free energy, perhaps except for air travel.
Fifth, while carbon emissions did rise somewhat in 2018, the trend in the last decade has been towards a major slowing in the rate of growth. The IPCC had four general scenarios for this century, from most optimistic to most pessimistic. It is now clear that the most optimistic scenario, where carbon emissions peak in the 2020’s and drop back to zero by 2070, is the path we are on. That path would have kept temperature rise to less than 2 degrees. But now the IPCC is saying that we should be even more ambitious and attempt to keep the total temperature increase to 1.5 degrees, which means only another 0.5 degrees from where we currently are.
That small a rise is going to be a hard target to hit. But as temperatures have been rising less than 0.15 degrees per decade, it suggests that we still have a few decades to work on the problem. The IPCC now asserts that letting temperatures rise 2 degrees will lead to increased risk of extreme weather, more sea level rise, shrinking north polar icecap, and major damage to coral reefs (which are highly temperature sensitive life), and we should not consider that acceptable.
But there is plenty of good news on global warming. The really bad scenarios that the IPCC had for the future have been averted. Technology is rapidly giving us a good chance to get off fossil fuels in a less than a generation. Should we still panic at the thought that we will go beyond the 1.5 degree limit of the IPCC?
That limit should be treated with concern but not panic. There is no existential threat to either humans or animals or plants in general due to that amount of climate change. In fact, in Earth’s history, the climate has usually been much warmer than it is now. For most of the last few hundred million years, the Earth was so warm that there were no polar ice caps at all, even in winter. Even in the history of humans, the Earth was significantly warmer than present in the last two interglacials (warm periods between the ice ages), roughly 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. This tells us that the Earth’s environment can certainly survive some warming, though there is concern that the current speed of warming may not give some plants and animals enough time to adapt.
Is there some sort of emergency response that can be taken if it does turn out that warming is greater or more detrimental than expected? There is, it is called “direct air capture” or DAC. DAC refers to technology that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then buries it underground. This technology is already available, the problem is the cost. It is a very expensive way to deal with the problem and currently would not make sense. But in 50 years, when the technology has developed way beyond what we can predict, it would give the world of 2070 a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and lower carbon dioxide to a safe level. Not only will the technology develop greatly in 50 years, but the globe will become much wealthier, and so what is now too expensive will become affordable. Just as providing heart surgery to every American who needed it was impractical in 1955, but is now routine and affordable with a 20 trillion dollar economy, the global economy will be at least four times its present size in 2070.
A 500 trillion dollar global economy can then spend 5 trillion dollars a year on DAC without it being a massive burden. DAC between 2070 and 2100 will bring carbon dioxide levels back down if way go too far even with all these positive trends. Climate change is a technological and economic problem, and it has reasonable solutions at hand. There is no need to panic.
