Here's My Solution to Climate Change: Part III

The part where we talk about cool new things

The wind turbines at night, are big and bright, *clap clapclapclap* "Wind turbines at night" by lukewestall is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Before we begin, a big thank you to everyone for reading. I appreciate you bearing with me as we saw a surge of interest right around the holidays. It means a lot to have people read (and comment) on these and going forward I plan to publish every Thursday and (now that I have notifications turned on) respond to your comments much more quickly. Thanks again!

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As discussed last time, if you’re looking for solutions, you should pick something else to care about. There are none (at least realistic ones) for climate change, which helps drive the doomerism around this discussion. But what I’m interested in are the dizzying array of options – some of which, due to my self-imposed word limits, only getting a passing mention – that give us reason to believe we can, in the words of an underrated Matt Damon role, science the shit out of this.

Now, let’s be very clear about a few things. One, I am not a climate scientist. Two, I am not an engineer. But what I can do is understand the basics of problem solving. So, let’s start with a simple question: what’s causing all this?

Ignoring that this is hotly contested in some corners,¹ briefly it comes down to the idea that we pumped too many greenhouse gasses into our atmosphere. Okay, how did that happen? Well, as I understand it, we cleared a bunch of land for agriculture and industry and living (and, with them, the trees that provided a handbrake on this) and we started burning – and I believe the technical term here is “a metric shit ton” – of fossil fuels which increased the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide, aka, CO₂. Why? Because it allowed us to do awesome stuff.

So, if that’s how we got into this, how do we get out of it? Well, as we discussed last time, part of it is removing what we’ve put there, and part of it is putting less bad stuff in there. Since, as we’ll discuss next week, “let’s all live in pods and eat insects and outlaw pickup trucks” is an impossible solution, let’s start more simply by googling “top sources of greenhouse gasses.” Why? Well, I assume that if we’re dealing with a problem that has multiple causes we should focus on the most important ones and the lowest hanging fruit. What we shouldn’t do is try and solve the problems that are hardest to solve but also will have the least impact. Which is also why I should add “professional environmental activist” to the list of things I’m not. But, yeah, we’re just another hectoring ad campaign away from getting people to recycle plastic bottles.

The EPA provides a handy list of sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Number one, creating 29 percent of U.S. 2019 greenhouse gas emissions², is transportation. This may also be the lowest hanging fruit out of all the problems we face, even if it looks daunting. A whopping 82% of these emissions come from light duty vehicles and medium and heavy trucks. That means if we get people to stop driving the vehicles they’re driving we’re going to make a massive improvement to our situation. This sounds daunting until you realize that people change their vehicular use patterns constantly. That great bogeyman, the SUV, is brand new. Other than O.J. Simpson, no one was driving these when I was growing up. Remember that period when everyone was into Humvees? People’s preferences for what they drive change all the time. And as much as right now SUVs are headed up, they’re not the only thing.

This chart from Goldman Sachs on the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) in the US is instructive. Now, the incredibly optimistic projections aren’t incredibly persuasive to me, perhaps unfairly, because I wouldn’t believe Goldman Sachs if they told me water is wet. I may still be sore over the collapse of the global economy when I was in law school. But even just the massive increase in the last few years is astounding. EVs went from not being a real thing to 3% of the market in just a few years.³ And they’ve done so by getting relentlessly better. The average price has declined almost a third in that time and the average range has almost doubled – addressing the two biggest flaws that EVs have.

But the most interesting part of the EV story is this bad boy, the Ford Lightning. If EVs stay in their niche of “cars: from luxury to itty bitty” then they’re never going anywhere, not when majority of U.S. auto sales are SUVs and pickup trucks. But the development of an electric pickup truck, and one by Ford – the leader in pickup sales – of all people? The popularity of the Lightning – Ford had to stop taking pre-orders – is potentially massive, particularly because it allows EVs to break out of their cultural position as “vehicles for tech bros or people still rocking ‘I’m With Her’ bumper stickers.” Ford is even approaching this correctly by giving the Lightning the cool feature of being able to turn into a generator. Not a lot of brownstones in Brooklyn need a generator. This is a truck built for people who drive trucks, with the promise/potential of being better than their current trucks.⁴ EV models of SUVs are on their way too. There’s no guarantee this progress will continue, but we’re at least on the path towards driving better vehicles.

Of course, transportation doesn’t just involve vehicles. Aircraft are responsible for 10% of this sector’s emissions. Aircrafts are a hard problem. It’s difficult to imagine a jet plane running on solar. But there’s two reasons for optimism. The first is that, yes, we are working on better versions of planes. There’s Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) which, well, most Google hits on this are from energy producers so that should give you an idea about it. But it does have promise and, again, the important point here is not whether we can prove it works. It does work, it’s just too expensive, for now. There’s also the promise of electric powered planes, which range from theoretical to actual functioning aircraft capable of short distances. The main problem with these are, of course, battery storage capacity, which in many ways is the most important fight in the world. There’s also the concept of hydrogen powered airplanes which are probably quite a distance off, but perhaps not as fanciful as they seem at first blush. None of these are likely to replace our current air fleets. But a diversified air fleet running off SAF, clean hydrogen, battery power, and sure, maybe someday even solar power, is possible.

Secondly, there’s a lot of airmiles that are pointless. Part of why people use airplanes is because trains are terrible. Outside the Acela corridor they’re mostly useless except for throwback recreation. At least in this country. And although we’re unlikely to ever have a fast and reliable New York City to London train, if we could move New York City to Dallas miles, or even just Dallas to Houston miles away from airplanes, we would have another alleviation. Maglev trains require zero fossil fuels, are exceptionally fast, and are also real. They are, of course, exceedingly rare because they are exceedingly expensive.⁵ Particularly in a country like ours – which went from having the greatest building public sector since Rome to being very bad at it – there’s little hope we’re going to be laying down maglev tracks across the country. But if you’re looking for causes of optimism for China’s emissions, here you go. And although our public sector may not be able to accomplish this, the crazy billionaire set, led by Elon Musk and Richard Branson are both in on the Hyperloop concept, which would bring us the equivalent of high-speed rail. Again, feasible solutions, just expensive ones.

Of course, you’ll notice a lot of this relies on electricity, which if it’s coming from coal is suboptimal. That’s a perfect segue into our next major sector of greenhouse gas emissions – responsible for a full quarter of them – which is electricity production. If you break electricity production down more, it’s clearer where the problem is:

Coal combustion is more carbon intensive than burning natural gas or petroleum for electricity. Although coal use accounted for about 61 percent of CO2 emissions from the sector, it represented only 24 percent of the electricity generated in the United States in 2019. Natural gas use accounted for 37 percent of electricity generation in 2019, and petroleum use accounted for less than one percent. The remaining generation in 2019 came from non-fossil fuel sources, including nuclear (20 percent) and renewable energy sources (18 percent), which include hydroelectricity, biomass, wind, and solar. Most of these non-fossil sources, such as nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and solar, are non-emitting.

Coal is to climate change as smoking is to public health. We just need to make it go away. But we’re going to need to replace it with things that are better. So how are we looking with new energy sources? Pretty good.

If you have the time (once you’re done reading this, smashing that like button, and sharing on social media, of course) I’d recommend checking out this article by Google engineers. In addition to a more technical explanation of my arguments last week about carbon capture, it also notes how things have proceeded since their previous manifesto. This is worth quoting in full:

[R]enewable energy systems have come down in price faster than we expected, and adoption has surged beyond the predictions we cited in 2014.

Our earlier article referred to “breakthrough" price targets (modeled in collaboration with the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.) that could lead to a 55 percent reduction in U.S. emissions by 2050. Since then, wind and solar power prices have met the targets set for 2020, while battery prices did even better, plummeting to the range predicted for 2050. These better-than-expected price trends, combined with cheap natural gas, caused U.S. coal usage to drop by half. The result: By 2019, U.S. emissions had fallen to the level that the McKinsey scenario forecast for 2030—a decade sooner than our model predicted.

This is not what you typically hear but, yes, the move towards green energy is going well. Things are getting cheaper and more plentiful, which is always the goal. And we’ve barely scratched the surface on possible energy sources. We have ideas ranging from the emergent to the fanciful to that thing we knew was a solution in the 1980s but we’ve been weird about.⁶ 

The argument against green energy is usually that this stuff is too expensive, none of them are individually capable of replacing fossil fuels, and we can’t transition off fossil fuels today. To which I say, they’re getting cheaper, we’ve been using diversified energy sources my entire life, and name me one societal transformation that happened over night. Meanwhile, I’ll ask you to drive through the endless wind turbines of West Texas and ponder that 80% of all new electricity capacity is renewable (90% of that being solar and wind) and the record for renewable energy being produced keeps getting smashed, all while we’re in the relative infancy of this technology.

This ties in nicely with the next sector on our chart, which is industry and commercial. Most of this is the same problem, but it gives me a chance to link to this piece – regrettably from Vox – on the challenges of greening heavy industry. It’s an excellent (and long) look at the challenges specific to industrial needs – namely that they need immense amounts of heat. The main takeaway is that, and stop me if this sounds familiar, some of these energy sources are viable but are currently too expensive and we need more dollars on research and to make them cheaper vis a vis fossil fuels. You may notice a theme developing.

The last part I want to talk about is the agricultural sector, which makes up 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions but almost a quarter globally. This one relies on a lot of things, including having better energy sources and reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from livestock, which is a mixture of a technical problem and a political problem because some of these things run contrary to the interests of factory farms. But we have most of the tools we need, or we’re close. Although beef is a serious problem, the impact of you going vegan to stop climate change is overrated. But the proliferation of high-quality plant-based foods is not. This is an issue that often falls prey to the Solution Fallacy. The flat rate of veganism is touted as proof that this is a dead end, which would be true if the goal was a religious like conversion of the masses to veganism. But if the goal is lowering the impact of this sector on emissions, the rapid growth of these products is a very good sign. And the progress being made in this area is incredibly fast and, most importantly, a virtuous circle. The better these products become the more people buy them the more economies of scale kick in and prices come down the more people buy them the more innovation is spurred and on and on and on.

The virtuous circle applies to all these issues. The more people buy EVs the more innovation and production will occur and the cheaper they’ll get, which will further spur demand for infrastructure like charging stations. Almost exactly like it did with the horseless carriage. The same goes for renewable energies and the demand for needed grid improvements. And these things even interact. The better our energy sources become the cheaper fueling EVs will become, or powering factories or home, or even ideas like vertical farming that are currently too expensive and too energy intensive to be useful in this fight could become quite helpful.

Nothing I’ve discussed in this part is a solution, and nothing is mere moments from overtaking current, carbon intensive sources. But if you were to try and write this even a decade ago, almost everything discussed here was either completely fanciful, middling at best (like plant-based products), or – pun most definitely intended – politically radioactive (you can guess what I’m referring to with that). Now, they’re not. All of them are getting better, all of them are getting closer to either commercial viability or widespread adoption. The list of problems is dominated by cost – which is coming down everywhere.

It’s possible to go through and nitpick all of these, to point out all the problems. I would write that myself if this Substack was called Technopessimism. There are still problems to overcome, including the political and cultural problems. But the goal of this series is to flip the script. Discussions of climate change are dominated by prophecies of impending doom, relentless pessimism, and cynical hand-waving of solutions. But that’s a choice. We can instead choose to make this a discussion of possibilities and progress. Which one is more likely to spur the actions we need?

1. I received some good feedback about this. As I’ve stated before, I’m taking a Pascalian Wager viewpoint. I can’t prove – the way I would want to as a lawyer – that all this is happening, and I don’t think it’s a moral failing to have questions. I also think that the burden of proof is on those who believe that mass burning fossil fuels – which is unnatural – is clean and safe. If I was arguing for the kind of draconian measures I’ll mock next week, I’d want to present more evidence. But I’m arguing we shift profits from coal producers to Elon Musk, that doesn’t require a high bar of belief.

2. Of course, America is not the only source of greenhouse gas emissions. But, although the global numbers are different – for example, industrial production being much worse than transportation - the underlying causes are similar. Plus, other than China, we are by far the biggest source. We also happen to be the technological and cultural leaders of the planet (this isn’t jingoism, it’s just true). If we were to develop the technologies we need to fix the problem here, they’re likely to proliferate.

3. This is where focusing on America is counterproductive to my thesis. Statistics released yesterday show German EV sales went from 3.1% of total vehicle sales in 2019 to a quarter of all sales last year.

4. I’ll sometimes read claims on the internet that people who drive pickups will never drive electric ones. Which, yes, I’m sure there’s a few. It’s hard to roll coal in an EV. But I also remember when guys who drove Tacomas were teased, yet they’re now the fifth most popular pickup in America. A lot of the “oh, [these people] will never do [this thing]” discourse is driven by people who are either speaking about one specific person or, more likely, have never met any of whatever group they’re talking about.

5. Unless we crack the riddle of room temperature superconductivity at ambient pressure. Why am I talking about this? Because not long ago, the idea of cracking the riddle of room temperature superconductivity was considered far off in the future, but we did it in 2020. This could have huge effects on high-speed rail. A reminder that today’s “that’ll never happened” is often tomorrow’s “that happened.”

6. Writing a multipart series when you haven’t written anything other than legal briefs for a decade is hard. Do not recommend. I appreciate with your patience on only addressing nuclear in passing when it’s key to the last part of this series.