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
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Nuclear power is insane, developed for weapons, with need to know, secrecy, lies, proliferat
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10$ per W nuclear minimum.
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7 cent per KWH solar
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Wind 7 cents per KWH
Solar PV 11 cents
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panels for 1$ Wp new.
25 cent per kwh nukes 9$ per W average. http://ene
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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%
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...and yes, mrpurple80
BTW, I have three product innovation
Insulation goes without saying, but innovation in transporta
The suggestion to fix market barriers and dysfunctio
My guess is that one of the reason Mr. Gates wrote this column is because as a trailblaze
I've been meaning to tell you this for years, but now I have an opportunit
I agree we need clarity, but we also need near and long term goals.
We have many technologi
If we were to say our national goal is to be carbon neutral by 2017 and carbon negative by 2020, do we have the technologi
We can increase the process of carbon sequesteri
We can start manufactur
Maximize energy efficiency important now and in the future.
The fastest route to emission reduction is sequesteri
People will always like selling off spare energy.
We can employ more wind, solar, fuel cell, broad board-hydr
Zero emissions should be the goal for electrical generation
There are many other technologi
But believe me that all of the above will be like a joke as if China and India go through an “industria
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 superfluou
The melting of mountain top glaciers implies "brown air" more than global warming alone. Of course, the particulat
Environmen
Just imagine: we could choak and thirst on a frigid world!
My point is that planets work similarly. The hydrospher
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 temperatur
What makes it merely demented ravings of a mad man, is that a whole body of theory hangs upon the convention
My theory of the Bose Einstein Condensate as a transformi
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 dysfunctio
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 essentiall
It is essential to consider what it takes to change human behavior and leverage research that currently exists.
Written unfortunat
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 encouragin
The people who are going to be innovating
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 irretrieva
Don't let's put all our eggs in one basket. That seldom ends well.