No THIS is the sort of solid plans I can see actually making a difference with climate change

In My Humble Opinion
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I’m going to link to this YouTube video (What the Divestment Movement Doesn’t Understand (w/ Rob West)). Basically, it’s this guy, Rob West (no idea who he is) talking about technology, climate change and investment, with an emphasis on realistic technologies that could actually make a difference, and why the Divestment Movement is getting it wrong (i.e. by pulling capital out of these companies they are not doing what they want, and are having some very negative unintended consequences, or could if they ever actually made any sort of difference at all). But really, what I like about this video is he actually goes through some ways that WILL reduce our CO2 emissions substantially, though he also explains why a lot of the savings will actually just be mitigation against the increase in CO2 due to expansion of our energy systems in the next 50 years. But he goes on to point out things we could or should do to actually mitigate them, instead of pie in the sky or anger fueled rage.

What I really found interesting was towards the end where he’s talking about potential future technologies that could be real game changers. The one that really struck me was when he was talking about drones, especially delivery drones, and all of the implications and ramifications of just that one technology becoming ubiquitous, which, according to him, is fairly near term. Anyway, if you are interested in a rather long video that has no interesting music, no space battles or flashy lights, but is just this guy talking about this subject, feel free to watch it. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, watch the a bit at the beginning, skip to some in the middle, then watch the end. Or, don’t watch it at all. I found it interesting, but usually when I find videos interesting folks talk about how boring they were and how they couldn’t get through them, so c’est la vie.

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Needs an update. It sounds like I would rather read it.

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I knew this would be a Youtube link as soon as I saw who posted it. So for you, this.

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I watched it but I had it playing in the background while I did other stuff, so I may not have gotten all the info.

A big part of what he talked about was how fossil fuel industries invest in clean energy, so divestment is a bad idea because we’re just divesting from clean R&D sponsored by the fossil fuel industry.

However fossil fuel industries only spend 1% of their budgets on green energy, and an even smaller % went to R&D into clean energy.

Plus fossil fuel industries do not seem to be hurting for investment capital.

So the idea that we should invest (as an example) 100 billion in fossil fuels because maybe 100 million of that will go to renewable R&D isn’t a very persuasive argument. It would be much easier to just invest that 100 million directly into renewable R&D (including carbon capture and carbon neutral fossil fuel technology) rather than invest 100 billion into fossil fuels so <1% can end up invested into clean R&D. Not only that but 100 million invested by the public sector in the form of tax credits, subsidies, grants, etc. for renewable R&D should have a multiplier effect, and maybe end up with 200-300 million in total R&D when matched by the private sector and other aspects of the public sector.

Globally, renewable R&D is only 22 billion. Increasing that number should speed up the transition to a carbon neutral economy. But I don’t think investing in fossil fuel industries is the most efficient way to do this.

Also one of the biggest appeals of things like wind and solar is that they are lower priced than fossil fuels. Solar and wind have dropped dramatically in price and are now cheaper than fossil fuels in many places. Prices should continue to go down as the technology improves, and one of the big appeals is just economic rather than environmental. I live near a very red, rural area that has invested heavily in windmills because those windmills are profit generating and produce energy cheaper than coal or natural gas. They didn’t build them to be environmentally conscious, they did it to make money and produce cheap energy.

Plus one benefit of solar is that you do not need the large grid infrastructure, the same way that cell phones do not need landline infrastructure. Granted solar may not be able to be a base load energy anytime soon, but we can use nuclear, hydroelectric, carbon neutral fossil fuels, geothermal, etc. for those energies instead. Solar may help places like Africa industrialize faster since they require less infrastructure to maintain.

I feel like he didn’t address several of the major benefits of renewable energy. Its cheaper, it can require less infrastructure, it causes less health issues (fossil fuels like coal cause a lot of health problems). These are all selling points outside of the impact on climate change.

I did enjoy the ending when he talked about how a sharing economy powered by drones could lower prices and improve standard of living. His statement that people who own a drill have only used it for 18 minutes was pretty true in my case, and a sharing style economy where people share those things would be nice. I know with self driving cars and electric cars (which supposedly last half a million miles due to fewer moving parts) we may end up in a society where a lot of people share cars rather than have their own.