Getting to net zero--and even net negative--is surprisingly feasible, and affordable

[Jim__]

The full paper in AGU Advances is available here. The following excerpt is from TechXplore:

Regardless of the pathway we take to become carbon neutral by 2050, the actions needed in the next 10 years are the same. Credit: Jenny Nuss/Berkeley Lab)

________________________________________________________________________________________________

Reaching zero net emissions of carbon dioxide from energy and industry by 2050 can be accomplished by rebuilding U.S. energy infrastructure to run primarily on renewable energy, at a net cost of about $1 per person per day, according to new research published by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the University of San Francisco (USF), and the consulting firm Evolved Energy Research.

The researchers created a detailed model of the entire U.S. energy and industrial system to produce the first detailed, peer-reviewed study of how to achieve carbon-neutrality by 2050. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world must reach zero net CO2 emissions by mid-century in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change.

The researchers developed multiple feasible technology pathways that differ widely in remaining fossil fuel use, land use, consumer adoption, nuclear energy, and bio-based fuels use but share a key set of strategies. "By methodically increasing energy efficiency, switching to electric technologies, utilizing clean electricity (especially wind and solar power), and deploying a small amount of carbon capture technology, the United States can reach zero emissions," the authors write in "Carbon Neutral Pathways for the United States," published recently in the scientific journal AGU Advances.

more ...

[mr_lebowski]

1. Cool, I got my dollar/day right here ... take it! nt

[Laelth]

2. I am not buying this.

120 billion a year? I suspect that carbon neutrality will be vastly more expensive than that. If it ONLY cost 120 billion/year, we should have done it yesterday.

-Laelth

[Jim__]

4. That's 120 billion / year for 30 years.

There will be intense political opposition to the implementation of any such project; and 30 years ago, far fewer people were convinced that climate change was for real - the project would have been even less politically feasible back then. Also, from the article: the cost of the transformation is lower now than in similar studies we did five years ago.

I've never been convinced that the biggest barrier to addressing climate change is cost. I believe that the biggest problem is that we're fighting against powerful vested interests. For instance, in the schematic for actions needed by 2030, I would expect strong political opposition to at least steps 1, 2, 4, 6, and 7.

I also believe we would be far better off today if we had begun seriously addressing climate change yesterday.

[Laelth]

5. I hear you and agree re. vested interests.

To move them we will need to heavil subsidize cleaner energy and give those interests a slice of the pie—make it in their economic internet to support and participate in the transition.

My greater worries are China, India, and Brazil. What to do about them, I have no clue. The US could, at significant expense, go carbon neutral. China, India, and Brazil (representing 40% of the world’s population) can not.



-Laelth

[NNadir]

6. In this century, already, we have spent over 2.7 trillion dollars on solar and wind energy.

The amount of money "invested" in so called "renewable energy" in the period between 2004 and 2018 is over 3.036 trillion dollars; dominated by solar and wind which soaked up 2.774 trillion dollars.
Source: UNEP/Bloomberg Global Investment in Renewable Energy, 2019

The result has been that yearly increases in carbon dioxide concentrations on this planet measured at Mauna Load has reached 2.4 ppm year, having increased since the last week of 2004 when it was 377.9 ppm to yesterday, when it was 415.46 ppm. (Accessed 01/28/21)

Perhaps you have heard that cliché about doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting a different result being defined as insanity.

I have.

[Jim__]

7. To state the glaringly obvious, the "we" the Bloomberg article is talking about ...

... is different from the implied "we" in the report cited in the OP. The "we" in the OP report is less than 5% of the size of the "we" in the Bloomberg article. And the OP report is specifically tailored to the US energy and industrial system: The researchers created a detailed model of the entire U.S. energy and industrial system to produce the first detailed, peer-reviewed study of how to achieve carbon-neutrality by 2050. Your citation is off the mark.

A part of your "criticism":

The result has been that yearly increases in carbon dioxide concentrations on this planet measured at Mauna Load has reached 2.4 ppm year, having increased since the last week of 2004 when it was 377.9 ppm to yesterday, when it was 415.46 ppm. (Accessed 01/28/21)

As noted by an NOAA report on climate change, burning fossil fuels for energy is the main cause of the increase in global atmospheric carbon dioxide. The more energy created through alternative sources, the less the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

As a chart in wikipedia clearly shows, we are disproportionately increasing the burning of fossil fuels to meet the increased demand for energy:



The report cited in the OP is a plan for decreasing, in absolute terms, the generation of electricity in the US through the burning of fossil fuels.

From your "criticism":

Perhaps you have heard that cliché about doing the same thing over and over and over and expecting a different result being defined as insanity.

Sigh. Sure. John Larroquette used to cite that to say he'd go to the bar every night and get drunk. Of course, when going to the bar, he never expected to get drunk. It's a very simple scenario. But even that scenario is too complicated for the cliché. It's simple to predict he'll get drunk at the bar. But his denialism and alcoholism are much too complicated to be explained away by it.

Let's look at another example of your cliché demonstrating insanity. Late last summer, fires blazed across California. Fire fighters fought them with water, chemical retardants, airplane drops of water and retardant, building control lines, etc. Yet, as they fought these fire, the fires only got worse. Clearly, according to the cliché the fire fighters, or at least the people who were sending them to fight the fires, must have been insane. They were performing the same acts over and over and over, and yet the result was the same, the fires continued to get worse.

Eventually, they did put the fires out. And, while the fires burned they managed to drive them away from some populated areas. In other words, what they were doing was not insane. The cliché doesn't actually apply. It doesn't actually apply to the generation of energy either. Clichés rarely apply to complex real-world situations.

[NNadir]

8. Um, thank you for the Wikipedia chart and the cute tales about John Larroquette whoever he is.

I read the primary scientific literature, and I don't get my information from Wikipedia.

As I said, there are thousands of similar reports to those cited in the OP in the scientific literature, the most famous being the Socolow and Pacala line of horseshit that was published in 2004 with exactly the same arguments as this wonderful paper cited in the OP here makes almost 17 years later.

Again, in 2004 - this is a measurement and not interpretation of a measurement including wishful thinking and daydreaming - for the week beginning when Socolow and Pacala published the famous "wedge" paper, the week beginning August 10, 2004, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere was 375.68 ppm. One can see this on the um, [idata page of the NOAA carbon dioxide observatory at Mauna Loa]. The most recent week reported on the website, that beginning on January 17, 2021, it was 415.18 ppm.

Now, Pacala and Socolow are professors at Princeton University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world. I've had the amusing experience of seeing them at various lectures around here. It should be clear that the so called "wedgies" didn't work. The use of dangerous natural gas, which is no way sustainable, the use of which is a crime against all future generations, which is repeated in the pabulum paper described in the OP here, almost verbatim, nearly to the point of plagarism, 17 years later, has grown by leaps and bounds, and is the second fastest growing source of energy this century after coal. Still despite the world wide embrace of this particular Socolow and Pacala wedgie, the planet is dying.

I sometimes hear from people who seem to believe that I understand very little about fossil fuels, although I have been writing here for about 20 years on these topics, usually citing the, um, primary scientific literature, which litters my journal in this space.

If one was to read, say, the annual International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook reports, which I do every year (except this one since access is more limited to me, you would recognize that it is delusional, totally delusional to argue that we are using less fossil fuels than previously.

The fastest growing source of energy in the 21st century has been coal.

To wit:

In this century, world energy demand grew by 179.15 exajoules to 599.34 exajoules.

In this century, world gas demand grew by 50.33 exajoules to 137.03 exajoules.

In this century, the use of petroleum grew by 34.79 exajoules to 188.45 exajoules.

In this century, the use of coal grew by 63.22 exajoules to 159.98 exajoules.

In this century, the solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energy on which people so cheerfully have bet the entire planetary atmosphere, stealing the future from all future generations, grew by 9.76 exajoules to 12.27 exajoules.

12.27 exajoules is slightly over 2% of the world energy demand.

2019 Edition of the World Energy Outlook Table 1.1 Page 38] (I have converted MTOE in the original table to the SI unit exajoules in this text.)

A lot was made about the Dunning Krueger effect and Trump, but I recently saw a lecture by Dunning, on line, in which he pointed out that many people, most people, are subject to this effect on more than one topic, that it's not "just" Trump, although Trump extends his inflated view of himself into far more subjects than healthy people.

The topic of energy tends to bring out the largest number of people who unwittingly assert authority on a topic about which they clearly know nothing or little. After 30 decades of reading thousands upon thousands upon thousands of papers on Energy and the Environment, again, in the primary scientific literature and not all that much on Wikipedia, I have come to recognize that most people deigning to discuss energy, particularly with self declared authority are avatars of Dunning and Kruger with respect to energy and the environment.

I'm not a little kid. I'm an old man who has invested decades in the study, serious study of this topic. I've been listening to this line of wishful thinking bull my whole adult life.

Guess what? Despite 50 years of wild cheering for it, and the expenditure, again, of trillions of dollars - this on a planet where more than 3 billion people lack access to improved sanitation - so called "renewable energy" didn't save the world. It isn't saving the world. It won't save the world. The reason is physics, extremely low energy to mass ratios.

There is also a reason that humanity abandoned so called "renewable energy" in the 19th century and early 20th century, and all of the reactionary rhetoric in the world cannot change that fact. The reason is that most people, even more so than today, lived short miserable lives of dire poverty.

The sooner we stop lying to ourselves about energy and the environment, particularly in a setting that is clearly in the territory of Dunning & Kruger, the sooner we will be able to save what is left to be saved. And let's be clear, OK? There is less to save in 2021 than there was in 2004, since far more has been destroyed, like say, the great barrier reef, to name one thing among thousands of such things, as well as great coastal forests on multiple continents.

Oh and by the way, steel wind turbine posts, and steel pipes for transporting the thermodynamic nightmare of hydrogen, depend on access to coke, which is made by heating anthracite coal in a blast furnace heated by coal.

As for the remark on linguistics, clichés generally become clichés by being true, but it is not always the case. It is, for anyone who has engaged in a serious study of energy and the environment, clearly not the case that the Pacala/Socolow/blah...blah...blah clichés, repeated endlessly, year after year, decade after decade, and day after day have any relevance to truth. They are clearly delusional.

They do not generate results. They generate complacency.

It will never be "easy" or "simple" to address climate change, despite decades of declarations to the contrary, going all the way back to that asshole Amory Lovins in the 1970's. It is very, very, very, very hard, an engineering challenge of supreme difficulty. It needs to be addressed seriously, and not just for bourgeois brats bragging boisterously about their electric cars and the solar cells on the roofs of their McMansions, but also with respect to the basic human rights that are the subject of human development goals for those who live on less than $2/day, numbering in the hundreds of millions of people.

It is obscene to state otherwise, in my view, a crime against all future generations.

Have a wonderful Friday.

[NNadir]

3. This one is certainly even more delusional than most of the thousands of these.

My personal favorite among the many thousands is that of Mark Z Jacobson, wherein he sued PNAS for publishing a commentary on his similarly delusional claim.

A good read along these lines would be the 2004 Pacala and Sokolow paper stating that we had everything we needed back then to do it. Here we are in 2021 far worse off. We obviously did not have everything we needed.

Here's a clue for looking at these increasingly bizarre hand waving publications: if they involve a bourgeois affectation involving "all new stuff" they are ignoring the issue of embodied energy.

If they are claiming it is "deceptively simple" they are ignoring the historical reality that can simply look at similar evocations from 30, 40, and even 50 years ago.

The engineering challenge is on an unimaginable scale, a glib evocation of this type do not produce results so much as they generate complacency and wishful thinking.