People often present two timeframes that we should have as goals for CO2 reduction - 30% (off of some baseline) by 2025 and 80% by 2050.
I believe the key one to achieve is 80% by 2050.
But we tend to focus on the first one since it is much more concrete.
We don't distinguish properly between things that put you on a path to making the 80% goal by 2050 and things that don't really help.
To make the 80% goal by 2050 we are going to have to reduce emissions from transportation and electrical production in participating countries down to zero.
You will still have emissions from other activities including domestic animals, making fertilizer, and decay processes.
There will still be countries that are too poor to participate.
If the goal is to get the transportation and electrical sectors down to zero emissions you clearly need innovation that leads to entirely new approaches to generating power.
Should society spend a lot of time trying to insulate houses and telling people to turn off lights or should it spend time on accelerating innovation?
If addressing climate change only requires us to get to the 2025 goal, then efficiency would be the key thing.
But you can never insulate your way to anything close to zero no matter what advocates of resource efficiency say. You can never reduce consumerism to anything close to zero.
Because 2025 is too soon for innovation to be completed and widely deployed, behavior change still matters.
Still, the amount of CO2 avoided by these kinds of modest reduction efforts will not be the key to what happens with climate change in the long run.
In fact it is doubtful that any such efforts in the rich countries will even offset the increase coming from richer lifestyles in places like China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, etc.
Innovation in transportation and electricity will be the key factor.
One of the reasons I bring this up is that I hear a lot of climate change experts focus totally on 2025 or talk about how great it is that there is so much low hanging fruit that will make a difference.
This mostly focuses on saving a little bit of energy, which by itself is simply not enough. The need to get to zero emissions in key sectors almost never gets mentioned. The danger is people will think they just need to do a little bit and things will be fine.
If CO2 reduction is important, we need to make it clear to people what really matters - getting to zero.
With that kind of clarity, people will understand the need to get to zero and begin to grasp the scope and scale of innovation that is needed.
However all the talk about renewable portfolios, efficiency, and cap and trade tends to obscure the specific things that need to be done.
To achieve the kinds of innovations that will be required I think a distributed system of R&D with economic rewards for innovators and strong government encouragement is the key. There just isn't enough work going on today to get us to where we need to go.
My point is not to denigrate efficiency. Slowing the growth of CO2 ppm is of course a good thing. And there are of course lots of cheap, and in many cases self-funding efficiency gains to be made.
We should at the least fix market barriers and dysfunctions that prevent these gains from being realized. That's just being smart.
But it's not enough to slow the growth of CO2 given the strength of demand driven by the poor who need to get access energy. And, we have to actually stop it at some point.
No amount of insulation will get us there, only innovating our way to essentially 0-carbon energy technology will do it. If we focus on just efficiency to the exclusion of innovation, or imagine that we can worry about efficiency first and worry about energy innovation later, we won't get there.
The world is distracted from what counts on this issue in a big way.
Originally published on The Gates Notes
Nuclear power is insane, developed for weapons, with need to know, secrecy, lies, proliferation, million year waste and dirty bombs bred in.
25 cents per KWH for new Nuclear.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/01/05/study-cost-risks-new-nuclear-power-plants/
10$ per W nuclear minimum.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/07/15/nuclear-power-plant-cost-bombshell-ontario/
7 cent per KWH solar
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/04/solar-power-breakthroughs-sunrgi-7.html
Wind 7 cents per KWH
Solar PV 11 cents
http://www.nrel.gov/director/pdfs/milken_sandia_102307_final.pdf
panels for 1$ Wp new.
25 cent per kwh nukes 9$ per W average. http://energyeconomyonline.com/uploads/Is_New_Nuclear_Competitive_July_10_2009_FNS_Event.pdf
Remember that YOU the end user can purchase and install solar, so one less middle person.
http://eetd.lbl.gov/EA/EMP/reports/lbnl-2674e.pdf
Page 16, list the installed cost from 2$ to 20$.
Notice that
35% of the system cost 7-8$
15% cost 6-7$
5% cost 5-6$
2% cost 4-5$
about 1% cost 3-4%
about .5% cost 2-3%
and 62 system were not included because they cost less than 2$
as an investment 2$/Wp works out to about 3 cent per KWH over 30 years in sunny Az.
...and yes, mrpurple805 NEW nuclear technology will have to be part of the solution.
BTW, I have three product innovations within my industry (home technology contracting) that meet the green/green model... if I could just get someone to listen... hint hint... ;)
Insulation goes without saying, but innovation in transportation and electricity will probably fall short of the goal, since R&D typically end up with implementation of one or several technologies without taking into account some of the factors contingent to accelerated changes in the environment.
The suggestion to fix market barriers and dysfunctions is a good start, but a global solution might not surface from an intrinsic evaluation of the information at hand, due in part to the estimation of the targeted deadline as well as the strong pull for tangible return on investments.
My guess is that one of the reason Mr. Gates wrote this column is because as a trailblazer in his field, he has proven his ability to use innovative strategies. Similarly, what we need today is not only to take into account "brilliant minds who care" but also to evaluate solutions based on changeable and sometimes unpredictable chain reactions in the ecosystem due to a number of cumulative resonances in the biosphere.
I've been meaning to tell you this for years, but now I have an opportunity. I live in southern Mexico which is very poor and also full of incredibly energetic, savvy, computer literate young people, many of whom may eventually find themselves on a bus to Tijuana headed for the border because there is no work here. If somebody (like you) came to Oaxaca and opened up an information technology industry here to employ these young people, I don't think you'd be disappointed. Oaxaca is NOT plagued with drug violence. It is full of culture, innovation, and willingness to work. Venga!
I agree we need clarity, but we also need near and long term goals.
We have many technologies today, why not use them?
If we were to say our national goal is to be carbon neutral by 2017 and carbon negative by 2020, do we have the technologies? Probably!
We can increase the process of carbon sequestering by reforesting, even areas with salt water, and modify farming techniques. We can employ on large scale technologies that capture and recycle carbon into carbonate and bio-fuels, using excess carbonate for ocean acidity. We can use CO2 sequestering cement for building façades.
We can start manufacturing nano-carbon-laser zapped cable, improve efficiency over time, but begin now the grid for distributed power.
Maximize energy efficiency important now and in the future.
The fastest route to emission reduction is sequestering, attitude change and the grid, which will increase assimilation of renewable technologies in commercial and residential properties.
People will always like selling off spare energy.
We can employ more wind, solar, fuel cell, broad board-hydrogen capture, waste technologies.
Zero emissions should be the goal for electrical generation, but reducing carbon in other sectors is sufficient if we were to go carbon negative.
There are many other technologies and policies, but if we could do this; we’d be sitting back in 2025, proud of our low hanging fruits, well on a path to 80%, and with an economy humming away.
But believe me that all of the above will be like a joke as if China and India go through an “industrial revolution” Western standard: the World will not survive it, NO SACKING WAY, unless we don’t change the system of Economics: Social Policies, Banking, Industrialization and etc., and see and evaluate these.
Sincerely, Joshua Konov
For one thing, we are destroying the biosphere. We'll regret loss of the jungles not only for the resources lost as we make more grazing land for superfluous meat animals, but because the jungles are a carbon sink that release oxygen into the atmosphere. Clear cutting the temperate forests has the same objection.
The melting of mountain top glaciers implies "brown air" more than global warming alone. Of course, the particulate matter undermines our health but worse, water will be released more quickly as possibly destructive floods while the rivers run drier through the summer. Generous reliable sources of water will be something bitterly missed as this century goes on.
Environmentalists rush from symposium to conference by plane, spewing carbon and smoke into the atmosphere as they moralize in a dour and unfriendly fashion. Being right doesn't make them more attractive. Odd to relate, the solar system is moving into a region of star forming matter. This could create a risk of global cooling!
Just imagine: we could choak and thirst on a frigid world!
My point is that planets work similarly. The hydrosphere and atmosphere are made and squeezed from the core. This is where the petroleum comes for Tom Gold's theory of the deep source. During the time of life on the earth, gases and oils (and water and air) have been leaking out and either burning or just vaporizing. What we have now is a little speed up of limited duration.
This ejecta has been captured or converted by the biosphere. That is why we have clear skies and don't have a heavy carbon dioxide atmosphere like Venus and its surface temperature of 900 degrees Fahrenheit. The essential reason for global warming is the dimunition of the biosphere.
What makes it merely demented ravings of a mad man, is that a whole body of theory hangs upon the conventional insight. If it were true, nothing in astrophysics is true except for observable fact. Frankly, I hold this as one of my theory's most attractive qualities.
My theory of the Bose Einstein Condensate as a transforming nuclear process is meant to explain why meteors have so much iron, but it also dismisses background black body radiation as a local phenomenon whereas it is conventionally taken as a proof of the big bang theory. You can be worse than flunked and burned at the stake.
I could go on, but breakfast and the Queen are waiting; so, I will reserve the rest for another day.
We should at the least fix market barriers and dysfunctions that prevent these gains from being realized. That's just being smart.
But it's not enough to slow the growth of CO2 given the strength of demand driven by the poor who need to get access energy. And, we have to actually stop it at some point.
No amount of insulation will get us there, only innovating our way to essentially 0-carbon energy technology will do it. If we focus on just efficiency to the exclusion of innovation, or imagine that we can worry about efficiency first and worry about energy innovation later, we won't get there."
It is essential to consider what it takes to change human behavior and leverage research that currently exists.
Written unfortunatelly on broken English, this book provide solutions for all problems which could be solved very easely till 2015
We need to maximize the efficiency of everything that uses energy. We need to wring out every last MPG from every gallon of gasoline, every last BTU from every tank of heating oil, every last KWH from every ton of coal. Contrary to what Gates thinks, every little bit helps!
Besides, he does say that efficiency is good. Simply not enough.
There's is no logical reason why these two approaches should not be taken together.
Unless the author has some business reason for encouraging the continued use of fossil fuels, until the entire world is turned over to totally sustainable power production, which he will have invested in too, there's no reason to just sit back and do nothing to conserve energy.
The people who are going to be innovating, are, by and large, not the same people who will be insulating, and if there are any science doctorates who are torn between their promising energy research and their other job insulating buildings, then I'm sure they're clever enough to figure out the priority.
If we all keep consuming energy as we are, and merely wait for science to deliver the solutions, we are likely to be living in an irretrievably warming world before those solutions are found.
Don't let's put all our eggs in one basket. That seldom ends well.