Epistemic status: You asked, so I’m answering, though I’m open to having my mind changed on several details if my assumptions turn out to be wrong. I probably wouldn’t have written something like this without prompting. If it’s relevant, I’m the author of at least one paper commissioned by the EPA on climate-related concerns.
I don’t like the branding of “Fighting Climate Change” and would like to see less of it. The actual goal is providing energy to sustain the survival and flourishing of 7.8+ billion people, fueling a technologically advanced global civilization, while simultaneously reducing the negative externalities of energy generation. In other words, we’re faced with a multi-dimensional optimization problem, while the rhetoric of “Fighting Climate Change” almost universally only addresses the last dimension, reducing externalities. Currently 80% of worldwide energy comes from fossil fuels and only 5% comes from renewables. So, simplistically, renewables need to generate 16x as much energy as they do right now. This number is “not so bad” if you assume that technology will continue to develop, putting renewables on an exponential curve, and “pretty bad” if you assume that renewables continue to be implemented at about the current rate.
And we need more energy generating capacity than we have now. A lot more. Current energy generation capacity only really provides a high standard of living for a small percentage of the world population. Everybody wants to lift Africa out of poverty, but nobody seems interested in asking many new power plants that will require. These power plants will be built with whatever technology is cheapest. We cannot dictate policy in power plant construction in the developing world; all we can do is try to make sure that better technologies exist when those plants are built.
I have seen no realistic policy proposal that meaningfully addresses climate change through austerity (voluntary reduced consumption) or increased energy usage efficiency. These sorts of things can help on the margins, but any actual solution will involve technology development. Direct carbon capture is also a possible target for technological breakthrough.
One of the major problems with solar is that it’s diffuse. The second law of thermodynamics means that diffusing energy is very easy and concentrating it is effortful. When you take a bunch of photocells that are producing milliamps of current at about a volt (i.e. milliwatts of power), the process required to combine their output into a usable voltage and current is rather inefficient. I don’t have any recent data for how inefficient; does anyone?
Fossil energy is concentrated from the start. Nuclear energy isn’t; turning dilute ores into concentrated fuels takes a good deal of processing (but it still works more scalably than solar).
We have been working on technological fixes for over 50 years, and we don’t have anything that could realistically address the problem to show for it.*We should at least consider the possibility that a technological fix will not be available. **
Humans are often wrong-genre savvy. Most people in the rationalist community seem to think we’re in a Star Trek prequel, but we may actually be in a big budget reboot of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For what it’s worth, the guy who’s playing Caligula is a great performer. Huge talent. The biggest talent ever.
*Someone will inevitably say that we are just about to have a solar revolution. Some of us heard Jimmy Carter say that, and the promise to payoff ratio is getting a bit on the implausible side.
**I once had a job interview that went like this:
Interviewer: After coal is burned, we’re looking for a way to turn the carbon dioxide back into coal. Can you do that?
Me (hesitantly): Yes, but it would consume energy.
Interviewer: Energy is available.
Me: I mean, it would consume so much energy that you’d be better off never having burned the coal. That’s not really something you can engineer around; that’s basic thermodynamics.
A brief pretense of completing the interview was made by both parties.
Not sure that I disagree with you at all on any specific point.
It’s just that “Considering the possibility that a technological fix will not be available” actually looks like staring down the barrel of a civilizational gun. There is no clever policy solution that dodges the bullet.
If you impose a large carbon tax, or other effective global policy of austerity that reduces fossil fuel use without replacing that energy somehow, you’re just making the whole world poor, as our electricity, food, transportation and medical bills go up above even their currently barely affordable levels, and the growth of the developing world is completely halted, and probably reversed. If your reason for imposing a carbon tax is not “to incentivize tech development” but instead “punish people for using energy”, then people will revolt. There were riots in France because of a relatively modest gasoline tax. An actual across-the-board policy implementation of “austerity” in some form would either be repealed quickly, would lead to civilizational collapse and mass death, or both. If you impose a small carbon tax (or some other token gesture at austerity and conservation) it will simply not be adequate to address the issue. It will at best impose a very slight damping on the growth function. This is what I mean when I say there is no practical policy proposal that addresses the problem. It is technology, or death. If you know of a plan that persuasively and quantitatively argues otherwise, I’d love to see it.
I agree that it’s technology or death. I’m just not seeing the necessary technology, or any realistic hope of inventing it. Which is why the comparison I used was the fall of the Roman Empire, which took Western Europe about a thousand years to fully recover from.
You might respond that I should go into renewable energy research to try to solve the problem. I did, for four years. I’m out of ideas.
If you impose a large carbon tax, or other effective global policy of austerity that reduces fossil fuel use without replacing that energy somehow, you’re just making the whole world poor
We have been working on technological fixes for over 50 years,
No, we did our best to stop the technology developement with a lot of regulation. As a result we stopped working on more efficient nuclear plants likely would have solved out problem if we would have went for them.
I agree that nuclear is the best path going forward on a technological level, but from a political standpoint it’s just not going to happen. And yes, that is a civilization-level tragedy.
Me: I mean, it would consume so much energy that you’d be better off never having burned the coal. That’s not really something you can engineer around; that’s basic thermodynamics.
That seems like a major misunderstanding of our problem. We basically have the technology to create enough energy via solar cells. Our problem is that we don’t have enough energy at the times where the sun doesn’t shine. Our problem is energy storage and if you could effectively turn your energy a form that can be stored for longer timeframes, everything would work out.
Epistemic status: You asked, so I’m answering, though I’m open to having my mind changed on several details if my assumptions turn out to be wrong. I probably wouldn’t have written something like this without prompting. If it’s relevant, I’m the author of at least one paper commissioned by the EPA on climate-related concerns.
I don’t like the branding of “Fighting Climate Change” and would like to see less of it. The actual goal is providing energy to sustain the survival and flourishing of 7.8+ billion people, fueling a technologically advanced global civilization, while simultaneously reducing the negative externalities of energy generation. In other words, we’re faced with a multi-dimensional optimization problem, while the rhetoric of “Fighting Climate Change” almost universally only addresses the last dimension, reducing externalities. Currently 80% of worldwide energy comes from fossil fuels and only 5% comes from renewables. So, simplistically, renewables need to generate 16x as much energy as they do right now. This number is “not so bad” if you assume that technology will continue to develop, putting renewables on an exponential curve, and “pretty bad” if you assume that renewables continue to be implemented at about the current rate.
And we need more energy generating capacity than we have now. A lot more. Current energy generation capacity only really provides a high standard of living for a small percentage of the world population. Everybody wants to lift Africa out of poverty, but nobody seems interested in asking many new power plants that will require. These power plants will be built with whatever technology is cheapest. We cannot dictate policy in power plant construction in the developing world; all we can do is try to make sure that better technologies exist when those plants are built.
I have seen no realistic policy proposal that meaningfully addresses climate change through austerity (voluntary reduced consumption) or increased energy usage efficiency. These sorts of things can help on the margins, but any actual solution will involve technology development. Direct carbon capture is also a possible target for technological breakthrough.
You can drown in a river that’s on average 1cm deep. The problem is a lot harden then simply producing 16x as much energy with renewables.
One of the major problems with solar is that it’s diffuse. The second law of thermodynamics means that diffusing energy is very easy and concentrating it is effortful. When you take a bunch of photocells that are producing milliamps of current at about a volt (i.e. milliwatts of power), the process required to combine their output into a usable voltage and current is rather inefficient. I don’t have any recent data for how inefficient; does anyone?
Fossil energy is concentrated from the start. Nuclear energy isn’t; turning dilute ores into concentrated fuels takes a good deal of processing (but it still works more scalably than solar).
We have been working on technological fixes for over 50 years, and we don’t have anything that could realistically address the problem to show for it.* We should at least consider the possibility that a technological fix will not be available. **
Humans are often wrong-genre savvy. Most people in the rationalist community seem to think we’re in a Star Trek prequel, but we may actually be in a big budget reboot of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For what it’s worth, the guy who’s playing Caligula is a great performer. Huge talent. The biggest talent ever.
*Someone will inevitably say that we are just about to have a solar revolution. Some of us heard Jimmy Carter say that, and the promise to payoff ratio is getting a bit on the implausible side.
**I once had a job interview that went like this:
Interviewer: After coal is burned, we’re looking for a way to turn the carbon dioxide back into coal. Can you do that?
Me (hesitantly): Yes, but it would consume energy.
Interviewer: Energy is available.
Me: I mean, it would consume so much energy that you’d be better off never having burned the coal. That’s not really something you can engineer around; that’s basic thermodynamics.
A brief pretense of completing the interview was made by both parties.
Not sure that I disagree with you at all on any specific point.
It’s just that “Considering the possibility that a technological fix will not be available” actually looks like staring down the barrel of a civilizational gun. There is no clever policy solution that dodges the bullet.
If you impose a large carbon tax, or other effective global policy of austerity that reduces fossil fuel use without replacing that energy somehow, you’re just making the whole world poor, as our electricity, food, transportation and medical bills go up above even their currently barely affordable levels, and the growth of the developing world is completely halted, and probably reversed. If your reason for imposing a carbon tax is not “to incentivize tech development” but instead “punish people for using energy”, then people will revolt. There were riots in France because of a relatively modest gasoline tax. An actual across-the-board policy implementation of “austerity” in some form would either be repealed quickly, would lead to civilizational collapse and mass death, or both. If you impose a small carbon tax (or some other token gesture at austerity and conservation) it will simply not be adequate to address the issue. It will at best impose a very slight damping on the growth function. This is what I mean when I say there is no practical policy proposal that addresses the problem. It is technology, or death. If you know of a plan that persuasively and quantitatively argues otherwise, I’d love to see it.
I agree that it’s technology or death. I’m just not seeing the necessary technology, or any realistic hope of inventing it. Which is why the comparison I used was the fall of the Roman Empire, which took Western Europe about a thousand years to fully recover from.
You might respond that I should go into renewable energy research to try to solve the problem. I did, for four years. I’m out of ideas.
For the case that our civilisation’s energy efficiency is substantially below optimal, see [Factor 4](https://sustainabilitydictionary.com/2006/02/17/factor-4/) (Lovins & Lovins, 1988)
No, we did our best to stop the technology developement with a lot of regulation. As a result we stopped working on more efficient nuclear plants likely would have solved out problem if we would have went for them.
I agree that nuclear is the best path going forward on a technological level, but from a political standpoint it’s just not going to happen. And yes, that is a civilization-level tragedy.
That seems like a major misunderstanding of our problem. We basically have the technology to create enough energy via solar cells. Our problem is that we don’t have enough energy at the times where the sun doesn’t shine. Our problem is energy storage and if you could effectively turn your energy a form that can be stored for longer timeframes, everything would work out.