The 2023 UN Climate Change Conference (“COP28”) finished last month with many promises that obscure a key fact: We could easily stop climate change right now if we wanted.
Interesting read. A UN-approved report last year said that geoengineering by injecting sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere may be necessary, but would come with major uncertainties. Releasing S02 is not without risks which we don't fully understand, and some regions might 'lose' in terms of greater climate impacts as a result. 'The primary challenges of geoengineering are conducting field experiments to accurately assess potential consequences and developing international agreements to safely deploy and monitor geoengineering technologies.'
Also, as mentioned by others, climate change is only one of the many planetary boundaries we are exceeding; others include novel entities, biosphere integrity, land-system and freshwater change, and biochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen). The debts are mounting up as our environment (water, land, air, oceans) degrade and can support less. Surely we need a more fundamental systems change from our current economic growth model at all cost to something more sustainable.
I'm amazed that conservation is rarely mentioned in much of what I read. It must be more efficient in many cases, at least up to a point. Do we ignore it because it is just 'too hard' in our current economic system?
Hypothesis: Our planetary boundaries are much higher than is normally accepted, mainly because those who calculate planetary boundaries in the first place tend to have a conclusion before their work is done (why would I look for planetary boundaries if I thought there aren't any yet that we have met?). I aim to write about this in the future, after I independently look at planetary boundaries.
As for SO2, many environmentalists are scientists. They are not realistic. They want more and more science, which takes decades. They don't do anything in the meantime. That's not how you solve a problem. You solve it by iterating on solutions.
1. Study.
2. Looks good? Do a small test
3. Looks good? Do a bigger test
4. Looks good? Release at scale
5. Looks good? Keep going
Instead of
1. Study
2. We learned a bit but there's so much we don't know! Study more.
3. We learned a bit but there's so much we don't know! Study more.
4. We learned a bit but there's so much we don't know! Study more.
5. We learned a bit but there's so much we don't know! Study more.
I think we need to take such concerns very seriously, but I don't think we should abandon economic growth as a goal to do that. In fact, especially for developed economies, growth is getting more decoupled from increasing resource usage (dematerialization). And over the long term, growth is driven by technology and ideas, which are also what we need more of to solve our environmental challenges. Wrote about this more here if you're interested: https://open.substack.com/pub/philipskogsberg/p/the-engine-of-progress-why-growth
"Dematerialization" is massively overclaiming for some tiny improvements in material use efficiency from what are extremely poor, easily optimized starting points.
I will believe in dematerialization when the per capita mass of steel in advanced countries falls to 1 tonne from its current 15 tonne average. Until that happens it's just propaganda for the status quo.
Edit: I should add that I don't think dematerialization is a good thing. There are at least a billion households that need more material mass to improve their wellbeing, not less.
I don't disagree! What I'm referring to is not that we should use less resources generally than we do now. By dematerialization I mean growth as a result of value being created from services and intangibles not just by extracting more resources, eg IT.
I am skeptical about the "value" created from intangibles such as brands, lengthy copyright periods, and repeated patents for minor variations of an invention. These seem zero-sum, benefiting some households at the expense of others.
Some services (street cleaning, yoga instruction) are definitely valuable to households while others (taxation "management", casinos) are less obviously socially useful.
You will have noticed that I am focused on the word "economic" in the phrase "economic growth": growth that materially benefits households. Other stuff that businesses may do is ... activity, but it isn't economic (e.g. crypto, AI for ad targeting). This is too easily overlooked in the cheerleading for progress.
I'm sympathetic to this argument, but don't think we should be too fast to judge some parts of the economy (eg gambling). Not that I particularly like it, but you gotta take some bad with the good. If we go to an extreme where the only economic growth (in terms of GDP) we have left is based on gambling and prostitution, that wouldn't feel like progress. But that doesn't seem true. And in any case, you can make a similar argument about the parts of the "hard" economy that uses physical resources for "bad" things like weapons manufacturing - to what extent that benefit households? Alas, it's part of the overall growth of the economy, which itself is better than no growth, I think.
Thanks a million for writing this. I am retired, but up to late in 2021, I worked over 20 years in patent portfolio management for a Fortune 500 company, after having been trained as a research scientist and practiced as one (for that same company) for 15 years. One of my internal client groups, as a patent portfolio manager, was the huge, sprawling Engineering team - the folks who did the very serious work of designing, building, maintaining, troubleshooting, and improving all the "must work" hardware that goes into factories that are actually making stuff for the company to sell to people and other companies. The folks I had regular contact with were SERIOUS engineers. No "pie in the sky" for these folks. They worked on things that needed to be worked on in order for the company to make money in the short, medium, and long terms, and the things they toiled on had to work. Not just theoretically. When someone threw a switch, stuff had to work.
I was always taken, when "chewing the fat" with these folks, by how many of them dismissed as "solutions" most every thing in your "Part 1" that is commonly put forward as being responsive to the threat of climate change - ESPECIALLY the things put forward most avidly by experts in environmental sciences. The common complaint was that they were good ideas, but "drops in the bucket". The most common explanation for why they were always the things that "experts" (with educations equal to their own) were putting forward, was that the experts are "too close to the problem" and "dependent for employment on companies and agencies tied to those approaches". Almost to a person, these engineers believed that - eventually - the world will do your "Part 3", but likely, not until the pain of climate change is very, very great. Because... politics...
We need more folks like you making The Big Picture clear - or at least clearer. Just because something is good to do, does not make it a solution to a problem. We need to approach this from a standpoint of "If the plan NEEDS to WORK (and it does...), what does the plan NEED to include?" My experience is that many, many well-educated engineers already "get" what you're saying here - and we need to get it better communicated to the rest of the culture.
When did you stop chewing the fat with them? Because the earliest people who called the viable future of solar did so about 10y ago, but they were solitary voices. I only realized step 1 was viable a couple of years ago. Before that, I would have agreed with your friends.
Aside from that, I agree with you, but I didn’t know this was already common knowledge in such circles. I’m glad to hear!
First, chronology: The discussions I referred to with my engineer clients/colleagues/friends occurred (I'm going by memory, here) between about 2017 and early 2020 (when Covid intervened and sent us all into work-from-home, and one didn't really HAVE meetings that lent themselves to off-the-topic conversations over a cup of coffee before and/or after the actual business meeting).
Second, I should probably have made more clear that I regard myself as their peer. Even though I was educated as, and practiced as, a research scientist, my education came in Chemical Engineering departments. I just never, in my career, practiced the kind of hands-on, practical, "must-work engineering" that they did. Before doing patent portfolio work, I tried to invent new engineering materials for a living. You're allowed to - even expected to - have well-intentioned failures in that kind of work.
Third, perhaps obviously, they were not commenting on exactly what you are proposing, but, rather, more generally about what one having a keen but general interest in scientific matters, and the politics of getting things done, reads and hears about. So when I say they were critical of Step 1, I meant that while they were SUPPORTIVE of many of the ITEMS of Step 1, as both helpful and practical to varying degrees, they were skeptical that even all the items of Step 1, taken in the aggregate (but Step 1 ALONE without something more), could be a "full solution" to the problem of climate change.
There is an understanding, often unspoken, among engineers who had a healthy dose of "systems science" in their education and development, that one very rarely gets out of a systems problem by ONLY stopping doing what caused the problem. One needs to "work the problem forward", not just try to go back to how things were, pre-problem.
There is another understanding, often unspoken, among engineers, that we humans tend to treat very large things as though they are infinite, right up until they prove not to be. For example, with respect to lakes and rivers, I recall my chemical engineering professors in the 70's relating that when THEY had been in college, decades earlier, they had been taught that "the answer to pollution is dilution". They were actively trying to get us NOT to think that way, and, of course, no sane person would even utter that phrase today, not to espouse it, nor even to debunk it. It's been relegated to history.
It's wise to keep both these things in mind when thinking about climate change. Humankind until very recently treated the atmosphere and global climate systems generally as though they were infinite, and, now, like lakes and rivers before them, we know they are not. We are capable of dumping enough of some thing into them to make a very real difference. So we DO know that we have to stop some things (Step 1), but we SHOULD also recognize that we need to do more than just that.
So, finally, what my engineering friends were advocating for, even back in 2017-2020, is what some call geoengineering or climate engineering or atmospheric engineering. It also goes by other names, and unfortunately almost all of them have pejorative "vibes" in the broader culture. I consider both your Step 2 and Step 3 to be in that ill-defined realm.
While all were aware of what you call Step 2, the consensus seemed to be that it, coupled with Step 1, would still be insufficient. There were also concerns with the economics (and thus, practicality) of it, but like most things in the engineering realm, time and new research change those considerations. For what it's worth, my take and that of my old friends, was that the Step 2 activities are at least likely to be less culturally unpopular, and thus, easier to develop consensus around, than Step 3 activities.
What most felt, even back then, was that something like your Step 3 would ALSO be needed. Many of these folks were still connected with their old engineering schools and concerned that what they were hearing was how difficult it was to even get funding to do research into actions that I would call "Step 3 - like", or for that matter, even "Step 2 - like".
Well, much more than you asked for! Hope it was helpful.
Tomas, interesting as always. I understand that nuclear fission seems attractive now because it doesn't release CO2, but the problem of how to safely transport and dispose of highly radioactive waste has still not been solved. Also, once countries adopt nuclear fission at scale, it seems unlikely that it will be used only as a transition to renewable sources after large expenditures on infrastructure. There is the potential that the nuclear "patch" will become permanent, returning us to same problems that led to abandonment of fission in the first place. Fusion is the pipe dream, but still far from being practical. There is much room for exploitation of solar, wind, and geothermal, along with new battery technology, before going to fission.
I hope it mentions how the Nuclear Waste issue is completely self-inflicted - When I learned we could keep reprocessing spent fuel, but choose not to due to the risk of weapons being made with the process, I was beside myself.
My whole life, everyone is complaining about nuclear waste like it's some disqualifying factor (as if we couldn't just shove it deep underground in a geologically inactive area w/o aquifers or other nearby water resources), and yet this whole time we 100% could just sidestep the issue. It's the one argument anti-Nuclear people have, and yet it somehow keeps winning
I'm convinced all the Green party / Anti-Nuclear groups worldwide are/were being paid by Big Oil. Take away their lobbying, and we'd have nuclear power in most major countries and a fraction of the pollution, CO2 PPM in our air, etc.
We just need to agree on a single reactor design that fits the majority of use cases, and then spam build it across the nation, rather than making them all bespoke, with the accompanying red tape from working through a new design with Governments every time one is built. Start breeding the spent fuel, and we could have (and could have had, for 50 years...) a 100% Carbon-free electrical grid that has fuel sourced from reliable places, with enough to last far far into the future
Nuclear is not CO2-neutral. It is not even close. Nuclear is 120g/kwh, wind is 7-9g/kwh. Nuclear is also the most expensive form of electricity production.
"We can stop global warming with $700M." Where are the sane voices advocating for this, and how can it become more prominent in the media?
That would be a worthwhile group on the planned social graph (or how it was called)!
As the intermediate solution (3) is simple and cheap, it looks like it's kept in the dark so businesses can better run EV /PV etc. campaigns while the climate doomsday is lurking around the corner. But as that cooling off the planet solution is kept at bay, biodiversity is suffering every day and this cannot be reverted. Pondering over it, the great article sparked some sad thoughts I wish my brain did not produce.
By the way, the chemistry interlude does make very much sense, I would not want to miss it.
Well what he is saying is that if you got a rock the size of earth and put it in orbit around our sun, then given the amount of energy being absorbed and the energy radiated, the steady state temperature would be about 400k. That's because the amount of energy absorbed/radiated is not a straight line relationship with temperature.
But the problem with his theory is "remove Earth’s atmosphere". That's the Thermos flask. Yes, if you break the flask then the contents will return to ambient temperature very quickly.
I'm impressed by Making Sunsets: I just offset (the forcing of) my projected emissions for the year (based on a WWF calculator that didn't seem great but gave a plausible answer (8 tonnes) that I think is usable for this purpose) for just £72 (I was a little disappointed it converted at £1/$ but it's still mad cheap). I read their FAQ and they seemed on top enough of things for me to be happy to do that, as the worst plausible case scenario I see is they're being a few times optimistic, so maybe I offset ~1/3rd of my year's emissions but that's still both good and a good price, so fair dinkum. And maybe the lower forcing estimates for carbon dioxide are right and I actually just over-offset (even better and even better value).
It doesn’t offset anything. It’s completely meaningless. Long before companies like Making Sunsets would have a measurable impact, governments will have intervened. And there are countless issues with solar radiation management that are not mentioned in this post, but are extremely complex and could have disastrous consequences. (It will create a completely different climate even if average temps have dropped to pre-industrial levels for once.) I have read about every paper on this since it sounded like a viable option, but the issues around this are so insanely big that I don’t see it going forward in any meaningful way. The only viable option for now is decreasing consumption alongside re-wilding and maybe industrialized drawdown (Olivine-based probably).
Tomas, I always enjoy your essays but I *strongly* disagree with your arguments here.
1. I agree we need to electrify the world and that will go a long way in resolving our problems. The only thing I would add as a nuance is that we need to scale those solutions, and do it fast. We have not solved energy storage and renewable intermitency, and we need that cheeply at scale. Building nuclear plants take decades, we need lots of materials for the transition and it is not certain supply will match demand... these factors need to be accounted for when thinking about the pace of the transition. I believe it can be done, but looking at current trajectory I do not think we are nearly going fast enough *if we want to stay below 2 degrees*. Same thing on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) current usage is < 0.1% of total fuel and we need to scale production from 5 million litters today to 449 billion litters in 2030 - not saying it can't be done, but that's going to be very challenging, especially when considering limited supply of feedstock -- https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2022-releases/2022-06-21-02/
2. These theoretical calculations are nice and beautiful, but I'm worried they're quite quite far from the reality. Take Lithos, who "accelerates the natural ability of rocks to absorb CO₂ by spreading superfine crushed basalt on farmlands and measuring the removal empirically": Frontier - a group of some of the world leading companies - made a commitment to purchase their carbon credits at $370/ton, and they're saying that the company is on a path to achieve $100/ton by 2030. These are EXPERTS working on the topic, saying that the price is 10-35x more expensive than your calculation AND they're saying that there will be challenges at scale "At very large scales, there are limits to all carbon removal methods, Lithos’s approach included. Even though waste basalt is currently abundant, the method’s dependence on its availability as a feedstock could become a limiting factor when scaling up to gigaton levels." -- https://frontierclimate.com/portfolio/lithos. So again, reality is more complex than some napking math.
3. We have absolutely NO idea how geoingeneering works and what would be the impacts of it. The earth's climate is one whole sytem, and modifications in the US could have consequences in Asia "for example, that the monsoon season in south and south-east Asia would be disrupted, and solar geoengineering could cause agricultural losses, food crises and water insecurity in many parts of the world". That is from a letter signed by 430 experts to halt all research in that space, which I encourage you to read here: https://www.solargeoeng.org/. Because of this we'd need global alignement, which will never happen. And if some countries start messing with other countries' climate, I guarantee you this will lead to war.
More than strongly disagreeing with you, I think those kind of post are not intellectually rigorous and are very dangerous. Don't get me wrong, we need optimism and there are solutions that we need to continue scaling, but arguing we can solve climate change with a $700m check and some rocks is just plainly wrong and creates a false sense of non-urgency (which the comment section very well shows). When you start looking at every solutions in details, there are huge challenges that come with them, and we have not solved those and are often far from solving them.
I understand you desire to take a position and be contrarian, and I generally enjoy that, but on that topic I think you should be careful when claiming that you know better than thousands of scientists and entrepreneurs working day and night on this. Not saying they're necessarily right and don't have biases that should be pointed out, but when every top researcher in its field is ringing the alarm, I find it foolish to AT LEAST not mention in your essay why you could be wrong.
Thank you for your substantive and thoughtful comment! Pt by pt:
1. Read the nuclear post tomorrow!
Yes we will not make it in time. Hence step 3.
2. I’m no expert but:
- water is much better at forcing CO2 exchange with elements. The fact this is on ground and not in water might be part of the problem?
How ground is it?
Would love to see the math to see where the approaches differ.
3. I hear your concern that what I say is dangerous. Funny enough, I think what YOU say is dangerous!
The argument that we shouldn’t say something because it’s dangerous doesn’t resonate at all. There are very few things that are better untold. People can judge better than we think. Truth shines stronger than lies in the long run.
More importantly, your core argument there is the precautionary principle, which, used the way many environmentalists use it today, is very badnfor the environment.
There is NO path in front of us where we keep the earth below 2°C without solar geoengineering. None. Zero.
So the question should be: do we prefer to fry, or explore solar geoengineering?
And since here the alternative is global warming, not doing anything means choosing global warming.
Once you realize that’s the question, the answer becomes: OK SGE should be assessed in a cost-benefit analysis vs global warming.
It turns out we know enough to try, and that what we know is actually pretty safe.
So the next step should be “test and monitor”, not “uuuhhh we don’t know enough let’s choose global warming while we test this SGE thing for the next 3 decades”.
2. My understanding is that olivine/basalt cannot be spread directly in oceans - rather it needs to find its way to oceans AFTER having captured carbon from the athmosphere thanks to CO2-rich rain. I looked at the article you are basing your argument of (https://worksinprogress.co/issue/olivine-weathering/), and I think the author is making an error when he writes "how olivine sequester carbon from the sea, and the form the air". Olvine captures carbon from the air, and then sequesters it in the sea - that's why people spread it on land (or beaches) and not directly into the sea. Actually I don't think the author is saying that it should directly be spread into the sea "Silicates usually find their way down to the ocean via rivers, so we’ll have to build our own." [...] The slurry is pumped into a large concrete pipe (since it’s flowing downhill, energy costs are minimal), and our particle of magnesium silicate comes to rest on the ocean floor of the Java Sea". I'm no expert as well but I know carbon markets well enough to know a lot of people are looking at those solutions and that's it's not simply overlooked by the world.
3. I get your point but I don't agree with two things :
(A) - "There is NO path in front of us where we keep the earth below 2°C without solar geoengineering". -> The IPCC is giving us one, the world is just chosing to not follow it (continued fossil fuel exploration, not enough climatetech investments, etc.).
(B) - If that plan is not realistic, you're implicitely assuming we cannot reduce CO2 emissions materially. That means we keep adding CO2 in the athmosphere, and pray Geoengineering works (without actually causing more harm). Let's say it does - what do you think will happen with transition efforts and CO2 emissions ? I would bet they will keep increasing because we can just spread sulfure and cool off the earth. But if they keep increasing, we'll have to keep increasing our geoingeneering efforts. I would argue this spiral is one we really don't want to end up in.
Sure, you could say that we will be reasonable and just use geoingeneering to buy us time to reduce CO2 emissions - that it's just going to be for a few years until we've transitioned aways from fossil fuel - but do you really believe that ? Do you believe humanity will be reasonable ? I unfortunately don't.
2. I'm 75% confident that the idea is to just dump it in the ocean. It's just rock. It captures the CO2 diluted in the water. This is exactly how I read your quote.
3.A. What path did the IPCC suggest that is viable? As in, that humans can do?
Because stopping all fossil fuels overnight ain't gonna happen.
If it's something that is actually doable, I'm curious.
3.B. Not correct. We can. Here's the thing: The key insight from capitalism is that people are selfish. If you align what's good for the individual and what's good for all, then you get human flourishing. Stopping fossil fuels overnight ain't gonna happen because it's good for society but bad for individuals. However, building up solar and nuclear is good for both individuals and society, and hence will happen.
In fact I foreseee CO2 in the air being a *resource* in the future, as I explain here
2. If by "my quote" you mean the quotes in my post, they are from the article you're using and I'm saying the quotes are wrong. Anyway both seem to exist (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fclim.2019.00007/full) but I still have very large doubts on our capacity to get to $7/ton (mostly because it only represents theoretical energy costs - and everyone seems to argue the process is much more complex and costly).
B. I never mentioned we needed to stop fossil fuels overnight, what we need is to stop new explorations. And we're not doing it because it's simply cheeper than alternatives in most cases - to solve this, we'd need higher carbon taxes, but we're not doing it because it's painful and would cause massive inflation and recession. So what we're doing is essentially massively discounting future risk so that the cost of inaction is vitually lower than the cost of action (again, inflation and recession). My argument is that we are currently discounting future costs way too much, which I think we'll continue doing because states are run for 4-5 year periods, not 50 (in the western world, at least). So as you introduce geoingeenering and to buy some time (and again, we have no idea if it'll work), what you'll do is add massive costs into a massively discouted future. My opinion is that when we'll get to that future, it will be bad.
Also I very much like capitalism - I think we're just bad at pricing long-term risk.
I'd have to go read my thesis again (that's from 43 years ago when we used to write by hand) but I am absolutely 100% sure that I never used the word "badder".
This platform is for people who want to communicate. In communication theory we have the concepts of the "sender", the "medium" and the "receiver". One of the most important parts of this process is that the sender and the receiver are able to understand the same protocol. (The protocol is the method of encoding and decoding the information so that the medium can carry it without error. )
Unfortunately, this particular receiver is unable to decode the sender's data after receiving it.
Practically, the use of a cable-tube to send SO2 to the stratosphere is probably very difficult and possible dangerous. Surely it would be easier and simpler to just keep sending up balloons with a pack of SO2 for dispersal, then burn the balloons?
Hi Tomas, great article. I recently joined your subscription, thanks for your work.
One comment on the EV transition. You refer to two sources that bring very differrent results. The first link predicts that 100% of car sales will be EV by 2030.
I think all predictions are more or less bogus, you have to figure out which ones are best and then take them in and make your informed opinion.
Electric cars are structurally cheaper than ICE cars. They consume less fuel. They are better for the environment. They just haven't benefited from over 100y of improvements. Therefore, EVs will win, it's a matter of time. The question is how fast.
Now that we have Tesla and Chinese companies flooding the market, we're at the beginning of the exponential curve. It's unstoppable. So it's a matter of years or decades, not much more than that.
Of course, the installed base of ICEs is big, and the infra sturdy, so it will take time to replace their network effects and economies of scale. But it will happen.
Based on all of this, when will a majority of cars be EVs? Can't be less than 10y (installed base) and I'd be surprised if it was 30y (over a generation).
You can do all those things and the climate will still change. The climate changed before humans and will continue to do so.
The pandemic has shown us that if you mess with complex systems (i.e reflect sunlight), you will get a whole load of unintended consequences that often will be much worse.
There’s a fun book by Neal Stephenson called “Termination Shock” that explores the unintended consequences of using atmospheric particulates for the reflective based geo engineering.
Despite the inevitability of unintended consequences, we have high confidence that doing nothing in the face of climate change is going to be pretty catastrophic for billions of people. Hard to imagine that second order effects of expanded non-fossil fuels and carbon sequestration will be dramatically negative. The nice thing about putting SO2 into the atmosphere is that it has a short decay time (according to this post). So we could turn that experiment off if we don’t like what we’re seeing.
Poor scientific assumption: increased CO2 increases temperatures. The temperature record supports the reverse. Predictions from climate models that cannot even account for clouds are useless as evidenced by their inability to predict anything. There should be a debate about climate change - pit the scientists whose livelihood depends on govt/corp funding and pit them against independent scientific voices:
You would do better by listening to actual climate scientists, which that link did not do. 100% of actual climate scientists agree on AGW, indeed, the natural cycle would have our planet nominally cooling at present rather than warming. Ergo, man is overwhelming nature.
Man killed almost all the Buffalo, man's CFC pollution wrecked havoc on the Ozone layer, man's actions in response saved the Ozone layer. Man is capable of immense triumphs and horrible tragedies, particular on the scales of global industry and decades of work.
That said, I don't get the urgency to phase out fossil fuels (which is not a zero cost endeavor for human wellbeing) nor the necessity to deploy vast amounts of land and resource for renewables, when you already have the option of an highly concentrated energy in the form of nuclear generated electricity
Thanks for the great write-up on S02 geo-engineering and CCS. I wish more smart, climate oriented people would focus on them.
Because #1 is not going to happen anytime soon. It just baffles me that it's presented as a choice. It's not a choice. We cannot do it. We are not even remotely close to being able to do it. Over 75% of world wide energy comes from fossil fuels. The rest is mostly nuclear and hydro. Nuclear is effectively illegal to build in most of the Western world, and we've already built most of the hydro we can.
We can go all out developing all the technologies listed here and it will still be a decade before we even begin to make a large dent. This isn't just a matter of political will, or investments. It's a matter of dealing with the physical world. You can't just snap your fingers and choose to update 75% of the world's energy infrastructure.
We still have no real solution to deal with the seasonality of solar and wind. This will take decades to build out. We still have no real solution to make concrete, steel, fertilizers and plastics. This will also take decades to build out.
Interesting read. A UN-approved report last year said that geoengineering by injecting sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere may be necessary, but would come with major uncertainties. Releasing S02 is not without risks which we don't fully understand, and some regions might 'lose' in terms of greater climate impacts as a result. 'The primary challenges of geoengineering are conducting field experiments to accurately assess potential consequences and developing international agreements to safely deploy and monitor geoengineering technologies.'
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0398-8
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/11/solar-geoengineering-climate-change-new-study
https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2022/reversing-climate-change-with-geoengineering/
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/mar/right-dose-geoengineering-could-reduce-climate-change-risks
Also, as mentioned by others, climate change is only one of the many planetary boundaries we are exceeding; others include novel entities, biosphere integrity, land-system and freshwater change, and biochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen). The debts are mounting up as our environment (water, land, air, oceans) degrade and can support less. Surely we need a more fundamental systems change from our current economic growth model at all cost to something more sustainable.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-09-18/the-earth-system-has-passed-six-of-nine-planetary-boundaries/
I'm amazed that conservation is rarely mentioned in much of what I read. It must be more efficient in many cases, at least up to a point. Do we ignore it because it is just 'too hard' in our current economic system?
Hypothesis: Our planetary boundaries are much higher than is normally accepted, mainly because those who calculate planetary boundaries in the first place tend to have a conclusion before their work is done (why would I look for planetary boundaries if I thought there aren't any yet that we have met?). I aim to write about this in the future, after I independently look at planetary boundaries.
As for SO2, many environmentalists are scientists. They are not realistic. They want more and more science, which takes decades. They don't do anything in the meantime. That's not how you solve a problem. You solve it by iterating on solutions.
1. Study.
2. Looks good? Do a small test
3. Looks good? Do a bigger test
4. Looks good? Release at scale
5. Looks good? Keep going
Instead of
1. Study
2. We learned a bit but there's so much we don't know! Study more.
3. We learned a bit but there's so much we don't know! Study more.
4. We learned a bit but there's so much we don't know! Study more.
5. We learned a bit but there's so much we don't know! Study more.
I think we need to take such concerns very seriously, but I don't think we should abandon economic growth as a goal to do that. In fact, especially for developed economies, growth is getting more decoupled from increasing resource usage (dematerialization). And over the long term, growth is driven by technology and ideas, which are also what we need more of to solve our environmental challenges. Wrote about this more here if you're interested: https://open.substack.com/pub/philipskogsberg/p/the-engine-of-progress-why-growth
"Dematerialization" is massively overclaiming for some tiny improvements in material use efficiency from what are extremely poor, easily optimized starting points.
I will believe in dematerialization when the per capita mass of steel in advanced countries falls to 1 tonne from its current 15 tonne average. Until that happens it's just propaganda for the status quo.
Edit: I should add that I don't think dematerialization is a good thing. There are at least a billion households that need more material mass to improve their wellbeing, not less.
I don't disagree! What I'm referring to is not that we should use less resources generally than we do now. By dematerialization I mean growth as a result of value being created from services and intangibles not just by extracting more resources, eg IT.
I am skeptical about the "value" created from intangibles such as brands, lengthy copyright periods, and repeated patents for minor variations of an invention. These seem zero-sum, benefiting some households at the expense of others.
Some services (street cleaning, yoga instruction) are definitely valuable to households while others (taxation "management", casinos) are less obviously socially useful.
You will have noticed that I am focused on the word "economic" in the phrase "economic growth": growth that materially benefits households. Other stuff that businesses may do is ... activity, but it isn't economic (e.g. crypto, AI for ad targeting). This is too easily overlooked in the cheerleading for progress.
I'm sympathetic to this argument, but don't think we should be too fast to judge some parts of the economy (eg gambling). Not that I particularly like it, but you gotta take some bad with the good. If we go to an extreme where the only economic growth (in terms of GDP) we have left is based on gambling and prostitution, that wouldn't feel like progress. But that doesn't seem true. And in any case, you can make a similar argument about the parts of the "hard" economy that uses physical resources for "bad" things like weapons manufacturing - to what extent that benefit households? Alas, it's part of the overall growth of the economy, which itself is better than no growth, I think.
Thanks a million for writing this. I am retired, but up to late in 2021, I worked over 20 years in patent portfolio management for a Fortune 500 company, after having been trained as a research scientist and practiced as one (for that same company) for 15 years. One of my internal client groups, as a patent portfolio manager, was the huge, sprawling Engineering team - the folks who did the very serious work of designing, building, maintaining, troubleshooting, and improving all the "must work" hardware that goes into factories that are actually making stuff for the company to sell to people and other companies. The folks I had regular contact with were SERIOUS engineers. No "pie in the sky" for these folks. They worked on things that needed to be worked on in order for the company to make money in the short, medium, and long terms, and the things they toiled on had to work. Not just theoretically. When someone threw a switch, stuff had to work.
I was always taken, when "chewing the fat" with these folks, by how many of them dismissed as "solutions" most every thing in your "Part 1" that is commonly put forward as being responsive to the threat of climate change - ESPECIALLY the things put forward most avidly by experts in environmental sciences. The common complaint was that they were good ideas, but "drops in the bucket". The most common explanation for why they were always the things that "experts" (with educations equal to their own) were putting forward, was that the experts are "too close to the problem" and "dependent for employment on companies and agencies tied to those approaches". Almost to a person, these engineers believed that - eventually - the world will do your "Part 3", but likely, not until the pain of climate change is very, very great. Because... politics...
We need more folks like you making The Big Picture clear - or at least clearer. Just because something is good to do, does not make it a solution to a problem. We need to approach this from a standpoint of "If the plan NEEDS to WORK (and it does...), what does the plan NEED to include?" My experience is that many, many well-educated engineers already "get" what you're saying here - and we need to get it better communicated to the rest of the culture.
Thank you!
When did you stop chewing the fat with them? Because the earliest people who called the viable future of solar did so about 10y ago, but they were solitary voices. I only realized step 1 was viable a couple of years ago. Before that, I would have agreed with your friends.
Aside from that, I agree with you, but I didn’t know this was already common knowledge in such circles. I’m glad to hear!
Tomas, a few things in reply...
First, chronology: The discussions I referred to with my engineer clients/colleagues/friends occurred (I'm going by memory, here) between about 2017 and early 2020 (when Covid intervened and sent us all into work-from-home, and one didn't really HAVE meetings that lent themselves to off-the-topic conversations over a cup of coffee before and/or after the actual business meeting).
Second, I should probably have made more clear that I regard myself as their peer. Even though I was educated as, and practiced as, a research scientist, my education came in Chemical Engineering departments. I just never, in my career, practiced the kind of hands-on, practical, "must-work engineering" that they did. Before doing patent portfolio work, I tried to invent new engineering materials for a living. You're allowed to - even expected to - have well-intentioned failures in that kind of work.
Third, perhaps obviously, they were not commenting on exactly what you are proposing, but, rather, more generally about what one having a keen but general interest in scientific matters, and the politics of getting things done, reads and hears about. So when I say they were critical of Step 1, I meant that while they were SUPPORTIVE of many of the ITEMS of Step 1, as both helpful and practical to varying degrees, they were skeptical that even all the items of Step 1, taken in the aggregate (but Step 1 ALONE without something more), could be a "full solution" to the problem of climate change.
There is an understanding, often unspoken, among engineers who had a healthy dose of "systems science" in their education and development, that one very rarely gets out of a systems problem by ONLY stopping doing what caused the problem. One needs to "work the problem forward", not just try to go back to how things were, pre-problem.
There is another understanding, often unspoken, among engineers, that we humans tend to treat very large things as though they are infinite, right up until they prove not to be. For example, with respect to lakes and rivers, I recall my chemical engineering professors in the 70's relating that when THEY had been in college, decades earlier, they had been taught that "the answer to pollution is dilution". They were actively trying to get us NOT to think that way, and, of course, no sane person would even utter that phrase today, not to espouse it, nor even to debunk it. It's been relegated to history.
It's wise to keep both these things in mind when thinking about climate change. Humankind until very recently treated the atmosphere and global climate systems generally as though they were infinite, and, now, like lakes and rivers before them, we know they are not. We are capable of dumping enough of some thing into them to make a very real difference. So we DO know that we have to stop some things (Step 1), but we SHOULD also recognize that we need to do more than just that.
So, finally, what my engineering friends were advocating for, even back in 2017-2020, is what some call geoengineering or climate engineering or atmospheric engineering. It also goes by other names, and unfortunately almost all of them have pejorative "vibes" in the broader culture. I consider both your Step 2 and Step 3 to be in that ill-defined realm.
While all were aware of what you call Step 2, the consensus seemed to be that it, coupled with Step 1, would still be insufficient. There were also concerns with the economics (and thus, practicality) of it, but like most things in the engineering realm, time and new research change those considerations. For what it's worth, my take and that of my old friends, was that the Step 2 activities are at least likely to be less culturally unpopular, and thus, easier to develop consensus around, than Step 3 activities.
What most felt, even back then, was that something like your Step 3 would ALSO be needed. Many of these folks were still connected with their old engineering schools and concerned that what they were hearing was how difficult it was to even get funding to do research into actions that I would call "Step 3 - like", or for that matter, even "Step 2 - like".
Well, much more than you asked for! Hope it was helpful.
Ah that makes a lot of sense. It seems you, they, and I think alike.
Then I think the great things I learned since I was there was that
1. Step 1 is in the right direction and can get us close to what we need.
2. Step 2 is very easy conceptually. Just quite expensive
3. Step 3 has options that are both suuuuuupercheap and have few drawbacks
I’d be curious what they think!
Tomas, interesting as always. I understand that nuclear fission seems attractive now because it doesn't release CO2, but the problem of how to safely transport and dispose of highly radioactive waste has still not been solved. Also, once countries adopt nuclear fission at scale, it seems unlikely that it will be used only as a transition to renewable sources after large expenditures on infrastructure. There is the potential that the nuclear "patch" will become permanent, returning us to same problems that led to abandonment of fission in the first place. Fusion is the pipe dream, but still far from being practical. There is much room for exploitation of solar, wind, and geothermal, along with new battery technology, before going to fission.
You will LOVE my article next week!
I hope it mentions how the Nuclear Waste issue is completely self-inflicted - When I learned we could keep reprocessing spent fuel, but choose not to due to the risk of weapons being made with the process, I was beside myself.
My whole life, everyone is complaining about nuclear waste like it's some disqualifying factor (as if we couldn't just shove it deep underground in a geologically inactive area w/o aquifers or other nearby water resources), and yet this whole time we 100% could just sidestep the issue. It's the one argument anti-Nuclear people have, and yet it somehow keeps winning
I'm convinced all the Green party / Anti-Nuclear groups worldwide are/were being paid by Big Oil. Take away their lobbying, and we'd have nuclear power in most major countries and a fraction of the pollution, CO2 PPM in our air, etc.
We just need to agree on a single reactor design that fits the majority of use cases, and then spam build it across the nation, rather than making them all bespoke, with the accompanying red tape from working through a new design with Governments every time one is built. Start breeding the spent fuel, and we could have (and could have had, for 50 years...) a 100% Carbon-free electrical grid that has fuel sourced from reliable places, with enough to last far far into the future
Nuclear is not CO2-neutral. It is not even close. Nuclear is 120g/kwh, wind is 7-9g/kwh. Nuclear is also the most expensive form of electricity production.
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-nuclear-is-the-best-energy?r=36xnz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
"We can stop global warming with $700M." Where are the sane voices advocating for this, and how can it become more prominent in the media?
That would be a worthwhile group on the planned social graph (or how it was called)!
As the intermediate solution (3) is simple and cheap, it looks like it's kept in the dark so businesses can better run EV /PV etc. campaigns while the climate doomsday is lurking around the corner. But as that cooling off the planet solution is kept at bay, biodiversity is suffering every day and this cannot be reverted. Pondering over it, the great article sparked some sad thoughts I wish my brain did not produce.
By the way, the chemistry interlude does make very much sense, I would not want to miss it.
You’re right, it’s still pretty niche. How would you recommend to make it more prominent?
1. Seek access to Al Gore / establish connect to a nearby Climate Reality Chapter
2. Educate/ share in personal network & local community
3. Follow makesunsets on social media. On Instagram I became the 14th follower. Way too small group of followers
...and yes check through the social graph who of your UT readers have the same intention and check possibilities 🤞😀
That argument is like saying you can't make the interior of a thermos flask colder because the air outside the flask is hotter. It's not valid.
Thank you for translating for me. Between the anagrams and the rhetoric, I was a bit lost
Well what he is saying is that if you got a rock the size of earth and put it in orbit around our sun, then given the amount of energy being absorbed and the energy radiated, the steady state temperature would be about 400k. That's because the amount of energy absorbed/radiated is not a straight line relationship with temperature.
But the problem with his theory is "remove Earth’s atmosphere". That's the Thermos flask. Yes, if you break the flask then the contents will return to ambient temperature very quickly.
Got it.
AFAIK the moon is not 400k though
I'm impressed by Making Sunsets: I just offset (the forcing of) my projected emissions for the year (based on a WWF calculator that didn't seem great but gave a plausible answer (8 tonnes) that I think is usable for this purpose) for just £72 (I was a little disappointed it converted at £1/$ but it's still mad cheap). I read their FAQ and they seemed on top enough of things for me to be happy to do that, as the worst plausible case scenario I see is they're being a few times optimistic, so maybe I offset ~1/3rd of my year's emissions but that's still both good and a good price, so fair dinkum. And maybe the lower forcing estimates for carbon dioxide are right and I actually just over-offset (even better and even better value).
Thanks for the tip!
Your contribution is double. One is the money. The other is the social validation of this approach!
Brilliant! The question then becomes what are these so-called experts working on rather than doing this, and why?
Some are working on this!
There’s just more of the others screaming louder
I am tempted to buy some carbon credits from your link just for the conversational value going forward.
"I offset my 15 tons, how about you?"
It’s so much better than not traveling or curtailing yourself! Plus you can nag people all year long! How valuable is that?!
It doesn’t offset anything. It’s completely meaningless. Long before companies like Making Sunsets would have a measurable impact, governments will have intervened. And there are countless issues with solar radiation management that are not mentioned in this post, but are extremely complex and could have disastrous consequences. (It will create a completely different climate even if average temps have dropped to pre-industrial levels for once.) I have read about every paper on this since it sounded like a viable option, but the issues around this are so insanely big that I don’t see it going forward in any meaningful way. The only viable option for now is decreasing consumption alongside re-wilding and maybe industrialized drawdown (Olivine-based probably).
You’ll be excited about my article in a few weeks!
Seems like #3 solves the problem without the expense or dislocations of #1 and #2.
Yes
Step 3 is enough
Step 1 will happen no matter what because thank you capitalism
Step 2 is the hard one, but I guess it’s preferable to figuring out what happens with centuries worth of SO2…
Tomas, I always enjoy your essays but I *strongly* disagree with your arguments here.
1. I agree we need to electrify the world and that will go a long way in resolving our problems. The only thing I would add as a nuance is that we need to scale those solutions, and do it fast. We have not solved energy storage and renewable intermitency, and we need that cheeply at scale. Building nuclear plants take decades, we need lots of materials for the transition and it is not certain supply will match demand... these factors need to be accounted for when thinking about the pace of the transition. I believe it can be done, but looking at current trajectory I do not think we are nearly going fast enough *if we want to stay below 2 degrees*. Same thing on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) current usage is < 0.1% of total fuel and we need to scale production from 5 million litters today to 449 billion litters in 2030 - not saying it can't be done, but that's going to be very challenging, especially when considering limited supply of feedstock -- https://www.iata.org/en/pressroom/2022-releases/2022-06-21-02/
2. These theoretical calculations are nice and beautiful, but I'm worried they're quite quite far from the reality. Take Lithos, who "accelerates the natural ability of rocks to absorb CO₂ by spreading superfine crushed basalt on farmlands and measuring the removal empirically": Frontier - a group of some of the world leading companies - made a commitment to purchase their carbon credits at $370/ton, and they're saying that the company is on a path to achieve $100/ton by 2030. These are EXPERTS working on the topic, saying that the price is 10-35x more expensive than your calculation AND they're saying that there will be challenges at scale "At very large scales, there are limits to all carbon removal methods, Lithos’s approach included. Even though waste basalt is currently abundant, the method’s dependence on its availability as a feedstock could become a limiting factor when scaling up to gigaton levels." -- https://frontierclimate.com/portfolio/lithos. So again, reality is more complex than some napking math.
3. We have absolutely NO idea how geoingeneering works and what would be the impacts of it. The earth's climate is one whole sytem, and modifications in the US could have consequences in Asia "for example, that the monsoon season in south and south-east Asia would be disrupted, and solar geoengineering could cause agricultural losses, food crises and water insecurity in many parts of the world". That is from a letter signed by 430 experts to halt all research in that space, which I encourage you to read here: https://www.solargeoeng.org/. Because of this we'd need global alignement, which will never happen. And if some countries start messing with other countries' climate, I guarantee you this will lead to war.
More than strongly disagreeing with you, I think those kind of post are not intellectually rigorous and are very dangerous. Don't get me wrong, we need optimism and there are solutions that we need to continue scaling, but arguing we can solve climate change with a $700m check and some rocks is just plainly wrong and creates a false sense of non-urgency (which the comment section very well shows). When you start looking at every solutions in details, there are huge challenges that come with them, and we have not solved those and are often far from solving them.
I understand you desire to take a position and be contrarian, and I generally enjoy that, but on that topic I think you should be careful when claiming that you know better than thousands of scientists and entrepreneurs working day and night on this. Not saying they're necessarily right and don't have biases that should be pointed out, but when every top researcher in its field is ringing the alarm, I find it foolish to AT LEAST not mention in your essay why you could be wrong.
EDITED for a typo in your name, apologies :D
Thank you for your substantive and thoughtful comment! Pt by pt:
1. Read the nuclear post tomorrow!
Yes we will not make it in time. Hence step 3.
2. I’m no expert but:
- water is much better at forcing CO2 exchange with elements. The fact this is on ground and not in water might be part of the problem?
How ground is it?
Would love to see the math to see where the approaches differ.
3. I hear your concern that what I say is dangerous. Funny enough, I think what YOU say is dangerous!
The argument that we shouldn’t say something because it’s dangerous doesn’t resonate at all. There are very few things that are better untold. People can judge better than we think. Truth shines stronger than lies in the long run.
More importantly, your core argument there is the precautionary principle, which, used the way many environmentalists use it today, is very badnfor the environment.
There is NO path in front of us where we keep the earth below 2°C without solar geoengineering. None. Zero.
So the question should be: do we prefer to fry, or explore solar geoengineering?
And since here the alternative is global warming, not doing anything means choosing global warming.
Once you realize that’s the question, the answer becomes: OK SGE should be assessed in a cost-benefit analysis vs global warming.
It turns out we know enough to try, and that what we know is actually pretty safe.
So the next step should be “test and monitor”, not “uuuhhh we don’t know enough let’s choose global warming while we test this SGE thing for the next 3 decades”.
1. Will definitely do :D
2. My understanding is that olivine/basalt cannot be spread directly in oceans - rather it needs to find its way to oceans AFTER having captured carbon from the athmosphere thanks to CO2-rich rain. I looked at the article you are basing your argument of (https://worksinprogress.co/issue/olivine-weathering/), and I think the author is making an error when he writes "how olivine sequester carbon from the sea, and the form the air". Olvine captures carbon from the air, and then sequesters it in the sea - that's why people spread it on land (or beaches) and not directly into the sea. Actually I don't think the author is saying that it should directly be spread into the sea "Silicates usually find their way down to the ocean via rivers, so we’ll have to build our own." [...] The slurry is pumped into a large concrete pipe (since it’s flowing downhill, energy costs are minimal), and our particle of magnesium silicate comes to rest on the ocean floor of the Java Sea". I'm no expert as well but I know carbon markets well enough to know a lot of people are looking at those solutions and that's it's not simply overlooked by the world.
3. I get your point but I don't agree with two things :
(A) - "There is NO path in front of us where we keep the earth below 2°C without solar geoengineering". -> The IPCC is giving us one, the world is just chosing to not follow it (continued fossil fuel exploration, not enough climatetech investments, etc.).
(B) - If that plan is not realistic, you're implicitely assuming we cannot reduce CO2 emissions materially. That means we keep adding CO2 in the athmosphere, and pray Geoengineering works (without actually causing more harm). Let's say it does - what do you think will happen with transition efforts and CO2 emissions ? I would bet they will keep increasing because we can just spread sulfure and cool off the earth. But if they keep increasing, we'll have to keep increasing our geoingeneering efforts. I would argue this spiral is one we really don't want to end up in.
Sure, you could say that we will be reasonable and just use geoingeneering to buy us time to reduce CO2 emissions - that it's just going to be for a few years until we've transitioned aways from fossil fuel - but do you really believe that ? Do you believe humanity will be reasonable ? I unfortunately don't.
2. I'm 75% confident that the idea is to just dump it in the ocean. It's just rock. It captures the CO2 diluted in the water. This is exactly how I read your quote.
3.A. What path did the IPCC suggest that is viable? As in, that humans can do?
Because stopping all fossil fuels overnight ain't gonna happen.
If it's something that is actually doable, I'm curious.
3.B. Not correct. We can. Here's the thing: The key insight from capitalism is that people are selfish. If you align what's good for the individual and what's good for all, then you get human flourishing. Stopping fossil fuels overnight ain't gonna happen because it's good for society but bad for individuals. However, building up solar and nuclear is good for both individuals and society, and hence will happen.
In fact I foreseee CO2 in the air being a *resource* in the future, as I explain here
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/solar-energy-solves-global-warming
2. If by "my quote" you mean the quotes in my post, they are from the article you're using and I'm saying the quotes are wrong. Anyway both seem to exist (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fclim.2019.00007/full) but I still have very large doubts on our capacity to get to $7/ton (mostly because it only represents theoretical energy costs - and everyone seems to argue the process is much more complex and costly).
3. A. I believe this one is the reference - would love to summare key findings here, but that's slightly challenging... https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-roadmap-a-global-pathway-to-keep-the-15-0c-goal-in-reach
B. I never mentioned we needed to stop fossil fuels overnight, what we need is to stop new explorations. And we're not doing it because it's simply cheeper than alternatives in most cases - to solve this, we'd need higher carbon taxes, but we're not doing it because it's painful and would cause massive inflation and recession. So what we're doing is essentially massively discounting future risk so that the cost of inaction is vitually lower than the cost of action (again, inflation and recession). My argument is that we are currently discounting future costs way too much, which I think we'll continue doing because states are run for 4-5 year periods, not 50 (in the western world, at least). So as you introduce geoingeenering and to buy some time (and again, we have no idea if it'll work), what you'll do is add massive costs into a massively discouted future. My opinion is that when we'll get to that future, it will be bad.
Also I very much like capitalism - I think we're just bad at pricing long-term risk.
I'd have to go read my thesis again (that's from 43 years ago when we used to write by hand) but I am absolutely 100% sure that I never used the word "badder".
This platform is for people who want to communicate. In communication theory we have the concepts of the "sender", the "medium" and the "receiver". One of the most important parts of this process is that the sender and the receiver are able to understand the same protocol. (The protocol is the method of encoding and decoding the information so that the medium can carry it without error. )
Unfortunately, this particular receiver is unable to decode the sender's data after receiving it.
Well said. Problem solved. Thank you Chris!
Good point. Well, he said it, not me. I studied Thermodynamics for engineering purposes, but I'm not a scientist.
Maybe the size of the body has an effect too.
Practically, the use of a cable-tube to send SO2 to the stratosphere is probably very difficult and possible dangerous. Surely it would be easier and simpler to just keep sending up balloons with a pack of SO2 for dispersal, then burn the balloons?
Yes this is the method that brings it to $0.35/kg!
Hi Tomas, great article. I recently joined your subscription, thanks for your work.
One comment on the EV transition. You refer to two sources that bring very differrent results. The first link predicts that 100% of car sales will be EV by 2030.
https://medium.com/enrique-dans/the-internal-combustion-engine-is-dead-and-about-time-too-3acd70b74f9f
Then the Bloomberg chart predicts a much more conservative EV% sales.
What seems off in the Bloomberg chart is that 2025 seems to be at <10%, when according to the first source, we are already at 20%
what's your view here?
is there an definition problem here? (ie some sources counting Hybrid cars as EV?)
I think all predictions are more or less bogus, you have to figure out which ones are best and then take them in and make your informed opinion.
Electric cars are structurally cheaper than ICE cars. They consume less fuel. They are better for the environment. They just haven't benefited from over 100y of improvements. Therefore, EVs will win, it's a matter of time. The question is how fast.
Now that we have Tesla and Chinese companies flooding the market, we're at the beginning of the exponential curve. It's unstoppable. So it's a matter of years or decades, not much more than that.
Of course, the installed base of ICEs is big, and the infra sturdy, so it will take time to replace their network effects and economies of scale. But it will happen.
Based on all of this, when will a majority of cars be EVs? Can't be less than 10y (installed base) and I'd be surprised if it was 30y (over a generation).
The details don't matter beyond this I think?
You can do all those things and the climate will still change. The climate changed before humans and will continue to do so.
The pandemic has shown us that if you mess with complex systems (i.e reflect sunlight), you will get a whole load of unintended consequences that often will be much worse.
There’s a fun book by Neal Stephenson called “Termination Shock” that explores the unintended consequences of using atmospheric particulates for the reflective based geo engineering.
Despite the inevitability of unintended consequences, we have high confidence that doing nothing in the face of climate change is going to be pretty catastrophic for billions of people. Hard to imagine that second order effects of expanded non-fossil fuels and carbon sequestration will be dramatically negative. The nice thing about putting SO2 into the atmosphere is that it has a short decay time (according to this post). So we could turn that experiment off if we don’t like what we’re seeing.
Well said. Another way to say the same thing:
“We can’t put SO2 in the atmosphere! Who knows what will happen! Better fry with CO2”
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/how-bad-is-co2
Poor scientific assumption: increased CO2 increases temperatures. The temperature record supports the reverse. Predictions from climate models that cannot even account for clouds are useless as evidenced by their inability to predict anything. There should be a debate about climate change - pit the scientists whose livelihood depends on govt/corp funding and pit them against independent scientific voices:
https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/psyop-climate-change-update-1200
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/how-bad-is-co2
Spoiler - the captured scientists don't want a scientific debate
You would do better by listening to actual climate scientists, which that link did not do. 100% of actual climate scientists agree on AGW, indeed, the natural cycle would have our planet nominally cooling at present rather than warming. Ergo, man is overwhelming nature.
Proof:
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society
Volume 39, Issue 1-2, February-June 2019, Page 3
'Man is overwhelming nature' - The hubris of man.
Man killed almost all the Buffalo, man's CFC pollution wrecked havoc on the Ozone layer, man's actions in response saved the Ozone layer. Man is capable of immense triumphs and horrible tragedies, particular on the scales of global industry and decades of work.
More stupidity than hubris.
That said, I don't get the urgency to phase out fossil fuels (which is not a zero cost endeavor for human wellbeing) nor the necessity to deploy vast amounts of land and resource for renewables, when you already have the option of an highly concentrated energy in the form of nuclear generated electricity
You will love next week’s article!
Thanks for the great write-up on S02 geo-engineering and CCS. I wish more smart, climate oriented people would focus on them.
Because #1 is not going to happen anytime soon. It just baffles me that it's presented as a choice. It's not a choice. We cannot do it. We are not even remotely close to being able to do it. Over 75% of world wide energy comes from fossil fuels. The rest is mostly nuclear and hydro. Nuclear is effectively illegal to build in most of the Western world, and we've already built most of the hydro we can.
We can go all out developing all the technologies listed here and it will still be a decade before we even begin to make a large dent. This isn't just a matter of political will, or investments. It's a matter of dealing with the physical world. You can't just snap your fingers and choose to update 75% of the world's energy infrastructure.
We still have no real solution to deal with the seasonality of solar and wind. This will take decades to build out. We still have no real solution to make concrete, steel, fertilizers and plastics. This will also take decades to build out.
Donate to https://makesunsets.com/ everyone
I mentioned step 1 will take 2 decades
That’s about it.
Just follow the exponential trend of solar and wind.
And nuclear comes next week!
Looking forward to it