I don’t know. Changing worldwide economic incentives are in the pipe. I hope you take a close look at the information I’m about to post. But, too many people in Bangladesh? It worked okay for them until other countries caused the ice to melt, flooding their land. You’re kind of blaming the victim.
Again, I hope you take a look at the predictions I’m posting and tell me what you think. The execution kind of already happened, and solar is fast becoming the most sensible energy option.
Okay, you’re getting somewhere. What would I do about overpopulation? The best cure is education and available birth control. We have to get aggressive against the evangelicals, since they oppose birth control (and, really, education too). Taxing the wealthy at a higher rate to fund better education, better paid teachers and so on would be helpful. We ought to expose political candidates who promote ALEC legislation, since those guys are completely counter-productive.
We will want lots of fresh water, so the proliferation of the solar water pumps I mentioned above will be useful to many. And invest in solar to mitigate climate change so that just maybe the melting of polar ice doesn’t strike full force. Teach people to farm and eat bugs for protein. Discourage beef, encourage vegetarianism.
Still, it is a tough problem. What do you suggest?
Quite a cause du jour if it extends through 2100 and beyond, getting worse as it goes, no?
So there’s your mark. Right now it seems like the growth of renewable energy just gets swallowed up by growth in demand, but these industries are just taking off, as I will explain below. If you dispute these numbers, I hope you’ll take the time to see how they are arrived at before you hand wave them away.
I think someone would have to be stark raving barking mad to install nuclear reactors in most parts of Africa. It isn’t stable; warlords will dig them up and threaten each other or us with dirty bombs even if there is no fissionable material in them. An absolute non-starter, and besides, they aren’t available yet. Nor will they be needed, see below.
I think there is a role for government to play, but anymore I mostly let others decide what that will be. On this issue the moves have basically already been made. Germany had their big push for solar- you can make fun of the results, but the fact is that it goosed the solar market such that today it is about to break free from the need for any subsidies, worldwide.
That’s what the Chamber of Commerce would have us believe, but the fact is that the extraction process of natural gas releases so much methane that by the time it is burned we really don’t get much, if any, GHG advantage from it, even if it does release less CO2 during combustion. And, fracking requires Lots of water, and poisons still more water, which will be increasingly unacceptable going forward.
Which is it going to be? Nothing we do will be without an impact. Some impacts are far worse than others. For example, 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico is far, far worse than any consequence of solar. Just for starters.
The analysis was for CSP, but the point was that the results are basically the same for PV. I didn’t mean to promote CSP, I was just borrowing those numbers to make a point. I think PV will be the way to go.
From my cite above:
These estimates are for the year 2020 only, when global grid parity will be only starting to be complete. It seems once solar is cheaper than all other options, its adoption can only be accelerated. It tops out at over 90% of power from solar worldwide (not sure how long that would really take though).
Please take a look at the projections for grid parity around the world. It is astonishing, and observations shows that it is already underway. From my cite above: Europe Asia Americas Africa
I am out of time, but please take a look. The solution to the energy side is staring us right in the face. All we have to do it get out of the way.
But it was in the chart in the AR4, just as it is in the AR5. Pretty much every single damn probability distribution went to 1.5 and well below, just as almost every one went well over 4.5 and many even well over 6.
The bottom line, just to close off this line of argument, is that the available research for the AR4 and the AR5 both showed a diverse range of values from different studies, based on different data, different methodologies, and different assumptions. In both cases, a committee stuck their collective finger in the air and issued a simplistic and subjective statement of likely range, supported by a vast collection of data that actually look much the same in the two reports. If the supporting data had been substantially different, the stated simplified range would have been substantially different. It wasn’t. Indeed, it has stayed substantially the same for 24 years.
That is really my only point, but a rather crucial one. You stated earlier that the AR5 had significantly scaled down the climate sensitivity estimate from what it had been in years past, and the problem with such a false statement isn’t merely an academic one, because the denialist community from the Wall Street Journal to even The Economist has been touting this as scientific proof that climate change mitigation is not as urgent as we had thought. (The Economist, sadly, despite their considerable reputation, has some staff writers who appear to be scientific illiterates on the subject of climate change, and have based some entire articles on egregious factual errors.) Quite simply, given the facts about the underlying data in the AR5 – including the fact that climate model estimations of sensitivity are actually higher in the AR5 than in the AR4 – any suggestion that we now have a lower estimate of such significance that it actually has policy implications is not only wrong, it’s manifestly absurd.
This part is true. Taking the consensus range estimation at face value, the median probability of climate sensitivities is now lower than it was in the AR4 (but the same as it was in prior assessments). This is basic math.
And this part is false. You would be hard pressed to find a credible scientist to call such a change “significant”, much less to suggest that it has any policy implications whatsoever, either within or outside of the IPCC AR5 group. Indeed, a number of respected scientists have gone on record to specifically refute such a suggestion.
Elizabath Kolbert has a new short piece in this week’s New Yorker that is worth a read for a few reasons. Kolbert is a wonderful writer on environmental matters who is a frequent contributor to the magazine, the most memorable IMHO being a two-part serialized article called “The Climate of Man” which appeared in The New Yorker in the spring of 2005 and is in my view one of the best introductory lay news articles ever written on the subject.
Someone asked here what successes we’ve ever had in mitigating any kind of emissions anywhere, and I already mentioned that we’ve been very successful in curtailing sulphate emissions and therefore largely eliminating the worst of acid rain. Kolbert reminds us that we’ve also been successful in curtailing CFCs after its effect on stratospheric ozone was discovered. She also rather pointedly reminds us of the industry opposition that the science created – sound familiar? The chemist who discovered the effects of CFCs on ozone was accused by the industry periodical Aerosol Age of being an agent for the KGB.
The chemist, F. Sherwood Rowland, is reported to have asked “What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?”. Kolbert continues:
And what struck me about all these arguments we’ve been hearing here about how costly and difficult it would be to engage in serious mitigation efforts is that, far from even trying, it appears we’re actually going in exactly the opposite direction. Kolbert again:
For anything that involves real pain now to mitigate predicted–even predictable–pain later, we always take the easy way out.
The archetype for the Tragedy of the Commons should not be an easily-solvable problem like acid rain or CFCs. A better index case of how we behave is our collective willingness to borrow our children’s money when they will have to pay it back.
AGW is on that scale, both in terms of financial cost and the degree of coordination required to fix it. As with the financial houses of nations, patches here and there give just enough credence for the naive to take hope, but financial Alarmists like me take a step back and say, “Kids; I predict Doom, and frankly it’s kind of obvious.”
I’m pretty sure we could have an International Panel on Fiscal Change that could use very sound financial science to give some ranges about how much Doom is coming if we don’t do anything, and how much Doom might be mitigated if we do X. They could also show how, in theory, the problem is solvable. Some nations might even solve for fiscal irresponsibility at a national level, for one reason or another. The collective world debt borrowed from future generations would nevertheless increase. An occasional harbinger recession would sober everyone up briefly; business as usual when a short term patch covers up the crisis.
And in the cacophony, a thousand smart voices mulling around with a thousand plans and a thousand analyses. But underneath it all, never enough absolute certainty about what financial calamity to predict in order to move the masses to collective and specific action, even if such a collective and specific action were clear (which it never is).
What we can do in theory is never driven into action by a concern for the remote (temporally or geographically) over a concern for the proximate.
We need AGW catastrophes, narrowly and accurately predicted, and we need 'em now. They have to be in the direction of predicted warming events, and they have to be frequent enough to be separated from background variation noise. When the ACC Alarmists make a land grab for every climate extreme in every direction and a “variation” defense post hoc every non-event or unexpected variation, they behave like a room of economists from differing schools all claiming their individual prediction for that particular event turned out to be correct. But of course as a collective event, the economy just muddles along, unfolding as some sort of net average for human behavior.
So the behavioral response to ACC warnings will muddle along, and the IPCC among others will be viewed–in parallel with economic predictions–as some interesting guys whose job it is to warn us that we might collapse in some future scenario but who don’t really understand that right now we need to keep borrowing today’s good life from the future, and let the future sort itself out when it arrives.
There are so many things wrong with that font of pessimistic gloom. Let me count the ways…
I never said sulphates or CFCs were an equivalent problem, I was responding to an equally gloomy assertion that we’ve never managed to control emissions at all.
There is a vast difference between the potential difficulty you allege of strong mitigation measures and exacerbating the problem by doing exactly the wrong thing. As pointed out, subsidizing oil while not subsidizing renewables is a classic example of doing exactly the wrong thing. It stems from ignorance and denialism, much like an individual I know of who celebrates Earth Day by turning on every light in the house just out of spite. In the context of the subject of this thread, “what can be done?”, I suppose the very first step would be to stop doing exactly all the wrong things. That surely shouldn’t be that hard.
Your view of the inability to control government deficits and government debt is US-centric and is largely attributable to a particular style of moneyed politics and to a large extent a particular political party enamored of tax cuts and pork-barrel spending. It is not true of many other nations. Even in the US, the growth of the national debt had actually stabilized under Clinton.
(3) and (4) actually have relatively little to do with any alleged human short-sightedness, and much more to do with politicians who should be in lunatic asylums instead of enacting legislation. Even as I write this, I’m sure that Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) is off somewhere ranting about how climate change is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind”, and Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) is trying to intimidate climate scientists into changing their careers to something that is less bothersome to the Texas oil industry.
I wonder if we can at least all agree that government subsidies of fossil fuel production should end. That’s one area where I think you can get the left and right to agree in principle - although I’m guessing that when it comes down to the regions that get the subsidies, they’ll be against eliminating them regardless of whether they’re Democrat or Republican.
You think I am too gloomy but then blame politics-- Republicans in particular. Perhaps we have a different idea of what Democracy is. I think of it as government by the people so maybe I am more inclined to blame me and not my elected official. I am gloomy because in a Democracy the polloi will always vote their immediate interest over mitigation of future peril.
But could you at least remind me of the great strides we made when the President, Senate and House were all Democrat-controlled?
All right. The first one identifies the problem- too much CO2 emissions. And I’ll grant you, there isn’t anything we can do about the past. But as you ought to know, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
I’m not sure what the point is with the second one. Another Really Big Problem? Proof that the people at the top can see that the world is screwed and are leveraging the crap out of everything while they can? I’m guessing- feel free to explain some more.
Seems like there is a disconnect. I think this post refutes most or all of the position you’ve been taking in this thread. Your position looks to me like a lot of bare assertions- I was hoping to see a cite to back some of it up. Allow me to elaborate.
Right. This seems to be the crux of your argument, that we won’t ‘collectively’ sacrifice enough to make a difference. But to repeat this feels like you didn’t read my post (see the handy linky above). The gist is that solar power is going to be cheaper than all other forms of power, in nearly every country in the world, by 2020. Solar is the easy way out.
Actually, I think acid rain and CFCs make for a better comparison. Environmental catastrophe will bite everyone in the ass, while the elites can always skate away from whatever is the financial crisis du jour.
Sure, we could fail. If things turn out the way you predict, I won’t be the most surprised I’ve ever been. But I think you are just wrong when you assert that ‘financial cost’ and ‘coordination’ are required to fix it- that’s one thing I’d like a cite for. Again, I tried to explain that solar is going to be cheaper than other forms of energy. ‘Cheaper’ doesn’t require any coordination to achieve, it is THE incentive. The ‘financial cost’ will fall on those who stick with fossil fuels- why are they paying more? Dunno, but they won’t have the competitive advantage. See what I mean?
You seem to be saying that some kind of Liberal Hitler needs to arise and bind everyone in one global collective action. But no, the ‘thousand plans and thousand analyses’ does sound like a modern-day Babel, but it doesn’t matter. Please peruse the information I posted and see that solar going past grid parity cuts through [del]all[/del] most of the bullshit. No need to coordinate anything or have certainty about what exactly is going to happen. People will choose cheaper energy, and that’s the whole story.
But the solution doesn’t depend on ‘a concern for the remote over a concern for the proximate.’ Cheaper energy is proximate, not remote. Why will people pay more to poison their water for fracked natural gas when solar will be cheaper And cleaner. Why, Pedant? This is one point I’d like a cite about.
I don’t know what to say. I thought everyone understood that precise predictions are not what you get with climate science. You’ll see trends in sea ice, global tempratures, maybe storm intensity, rising sea levels… not ‘New York will be destroyed in 2017.’ It just doesn’t work like that. Do you doubt this? Do you have a cite to the contrary?
Well, this is twenty years old, and they predict the melting of the ice caps that we are witnessing today. Why isn’t that accurate enough?
You keep saying this, but can you tell us who in this discussion is doing this? Or cite someone who is? This sounds like the behavior of a disreputable news crew. Prove me wrong.
It isn’t ‘the good life’ that is causing ACC. It is mostly how we get our energy. I wish you’d look at that post I cited- clean energy is going to be cheaper, worldwide, than dirty energy by 2020. In some places it already is. Why will people pay more for dirty energy?
The good life for most people around the world is not reading books by candle light, although it can be quite appealing to some.
Take me for example. I drive 50 miles round trip to work every day in a Suburban. I have a Suburban so I can tote my family around when needed and pull my camper to a campsite about 7 times a year. I cannot afford two cars for these purposes and there aren’t many options for vehicles that can pull a 5000LB trailer.
That is my version of the “good life”. The good life is energy intensive, which I understand to be Chief’s point.
Chief Pendant has nailed the human nature side of this discussion. You may be correct that clean energy will be cheaper in six years but converting to cheaper energy does not happen over night.
My first cite was showing that the problem is the total CO2 output curve, which reflects the net of what we actually do. That’s the curve that needs to change in the direction of less total CO2 output (less in absolute terms; not “less” meaning “less than it would be without renewables”). I do not see that happening over the next two or three decades. Too many people wanting the good life. The good life needs energy. Lots and lots and lots of energy to live like me and Mr Gore instead of Mr Tanzania.
Renewables will add to the total energy pool, enabling a greater number of people to live the good life. They won’t substitute for fossils, because there are too many people who have not yet achieved the good life. We will consume all the energy we can produce, from all sources, and want even more. I believe you are missing that key point.
My second cite was to show that our average behavior as humans is to live the best life we can now even if the cost is passed to subsequent generations. We figure, on average, they will figure out how to deal with their set of problems–even ones foisted on them by us. For this reason, the idea that we will sacrifice collectively out of fear for future consequences is badly overestimated by the Alarmist crowd.
If we want ACC to drive collective behavior change, we need those consequences to be frequent, severe, predicted accurately and proximate. IPCC’s laundry list of mights, could-be’s and ranges–all for future scenarios–will not move public action in the way that a dead lake moves action for acid rain. It’s also a terrible PR move to try and land-grab every outlier event, especially items at opposite extremes such as both droughts anywhere and floods anywhere. The prediction quality has to be “drought here, in this time frame” and “flood there in that time frame” if you want credibility. Otherwise it just looks like marketing–and especially so when you tend to remember after the fact how your theory “predicted” the event (as with some of the attempts about making ACC be responsible for the polar vortex meander that gave parts of the US its most brutal winter in 140 years). Live by the sword; die by the sword. You can’t hog credit for a harbinger while you post-explain a non-event, and then expect the public to think you are doing anything but over-reaching.
A word about solar and renewables (beyond pointing out that they will only add to total energy and not actually decrease fossil fuel use in absolute terms).
I assume you’ve seen the Bloomberg Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2014 report. Lots of interesting statistics, including some for solar. Average renewable investment is way down for the second year (and 23% off the 2011 high), but the good news is that we are getting more energy per dollar in solar because PVs are less costly. (How long that will last might depend on how long the solar panel price wars last, but I think we should assume solar will continue to get less expensive.) The disastrous drop in renewable energy equity prices made a fantastic rebound. Also good news. Some less good news: Developing countries backed off 14% in renewable energy investment, and Europe was down 44%. While there were lots of startups and good ideas, private money was highly skeptical, investing the least they had since 2005. Smallscale PV? Off 25%–attributed to lower costs, but not exactly an overwhelming endorsement that small scale PV is an expanding trend.
But what was the net? The net was that renewables went to 8.5% from 7.8% as a share of total worldwide energy generation. Given the pace at which the total demand for energy in the world is increasing ( US EIA predicts a 56% increase in consumption over the next 25 years ), a 0.7% rise last year for the contribution of renewables is not exactly cause for encouragement, is it? EIA predicts that fossil fuels will still produce 80% of the energy consumed 25 years out. Given our insatiable appetite for energy to drive our comfortable lives, I see no reason to discount that. I just don’t see us holding back while we wait for a better grid to fix things.
The EIA says CO2 emissions will rise by 46% over the next 25 years from 2010 levels.
That once again you are pointing at the problem as if that would be a reason of why we should not deal with it. You are only pushing a nirvana fallacy.
In the end it is indeed leaving the extremists to take control in the future as the ones that pushed for the freedom to do nothing will have no good explanation for how unprepared they will leave us in the future.
So apparently your strategy is to ignore the points I make, such as the fact that Europe has indeed successfully reduced CO2 emissions, and then post a graph that shows that Europe has successfully reduced CO2 emissions.
If your point is that other countries haven’t, then I agree. It’s clear from the graph that Asia is the worst offender. But if your point is that it’s not doable, then you’ve just refuted your own claim.
And once more ignoring the evidence to the contrary that I posted. The chart is also deceptive because it shows debt but not trend, which is what I posted. It’s also arguable whether there’s any validity to the broad philosophical connection you’re trying to make.
No, we probably have exactly the same idea of what democracy is: a form of government where the majority of the people determine policy, and where the necessary precondition is that presumably they do so in their own best interests. Perhaps you missed some of the threads here or in the news in general about the considerable and malign influence of money in politics. Maybe you missed the fact that the current right-leaning Supreme Court has, in two consecutive landmark decisions, removed the last vestiges of any kind of restraint at all on advocacy spending by corporations and the very rich. The US today on most policy issues is more of a corporatocracy than a democracy, and either all this propagandizing is working on behalf of the propagandizers, or else it’s just an amazing coincidence that the voting majority support exactly all those things that corporations want, and none of the things that are in their own best interests. This not only includes shouldering a disproportionate amount of the tax burden while offering generous subsidies and other forms of public largesse to corporations, but it also includes things like inexplicably supporting the world’s most costly and least efficacious system of health care despite all the facts, or inexplicably having major doubts about the veracity of AGW despite the conclusiveness of the science.
I had a good look at it, and I am very hopeful for solar electric - much more so than I was five years ago. But I think you are greatly overestimating how quickly it will dominate.
First, one of the reasons solar panels are so cheap right now is because Europe created a bunch of subsidies for them, which caused a spike in production of the panels. Then the subsidies became unaffordable, and the result was a glut of panels. Lots of supply + lower demand == lower prices. But if solar really takes off, that bubble in supply will vanish, and prices may increase again.
Second, everyone in the alt-energy biz seems to underestimate lifecycle costs and ignore intangibles. They want to believe in this stuff, so they take ‘studies’ and data sheets provided by the manufacturers as gospel, rather than as advertising for a product they are trying to sell.
When you are dealing with a low-intensity energy source like solar or wind, you generally need a LOT of infrastructure to get the power you need. That means the little details of construction become much more important. Stuff that never seems to make it into these analyses, such as dirt and leaves collecting on the panels, breakage, defect rates, ongoing maintenance, lawsuits, yada yada. In the mature energy industries, these costs have been internalized in the pricing. For solar and wind, we’re still discovering them.
Second, a massive changeover in infrastructure takes a long time. The average car on the road is about 12 years old. That means even if we came up with a cost-effective electric car tomorrow that had as much range as people wanted, it would still take 12 years to change out half the fleet. And that’s assuming 100% market penetration. In reality, what is likely to happen is that electrics and hybrids will slowly penetrate the market for passenger cars and light trucks, a few percent per year, over a period of a couple of decades.
As an example, the efficiency of new cars with turbocharged direct injection engines is WAY higher than the old cars. And yet, we still drive a lot of old cars and new car sales are still filled with big-engined muscle cars and big trucks. In fact, as engines have gotten more efficient the market has moved towards more horsepower rather than optimum mileage. Your average family sedan today has more horsepower than most ‘sports cars’ of the 1980’s.
Electricity is much the same. The numbers you posted for breakeven are not wholesale prices. They’re comparing the cost of residential solar against retail energy pricing. But home solar is a very expensive and complicated thing, similar to doing a significant home renovation. That alone is going to act as a brake on solar adoption - it’s one thing to say that solar is at breakeven if it can return its capital costs in 10 years - it’s quite another to actually get people to go to the trouble and expense of installing the things - especially if it’s going to put them in a financial hole for years.
Again, look at the example of refitting homes with weatherstripping and other simple energy saving simple modifications. One of the plans for the ‘stimulus’ was to hire thousands of people to retrofit homes. And the government provided a big subsidy for the homeowner and could show a truly impressive ROI. And no one cared. The programs collapsed because no one wanted the jobs, and the employeers that did get trained found out that the people targeted for upgrading their houses simply weren’t interested. Humans are very good at ignoring deferred benefit in favor of immediate gratification. I’ll bet you that 20 years from now you still won’t see solar panels on more than a small percentage of houses - even if it’s better than grid parity with a 5-year ROI.
And there are very serious and reasonable concerns about safety, and the continual effort of cleaning them, and the ‘eyesore’ potential. Early adopters who put solar panels on their houses have often found that the panels actually lower the resale value of their houses.
You also have to remember that as alternative energy starts to cut demand for fossil fuels, that will drive down the price of fossil fuels, slowing adoption of the alternatives.
I’m actually very bullish on the prospect of a lower-CO2 future. But it’s not going to be because of one big thing. It’s going to be a combination of changes to society and technology that all drive us in that direction. VR improves telecommuting, which cuts driving. Small family units means smaller housing. New manufacturing techniques makes for more efficient new homes. Plug-in Hybrids and high efficiency engines are still gaining market share. Natural gas is displacing coal and saving almost half the CO2 per BTU. Etc.
We’re getting there. But I have to say, I was in Germany a couple of years ago and there were solar panels everywhere. But I asked a few people, and didn’t find anyone who was happy with them. One homeowner I spoke to said the government basically lied to him about ROI and in real life he wasn’t getting anywhere near the savings the government said he would. And Germany’s electrical costs are killing them and hurting their industry. Change is hard, and even when things look superior on paper it takes hard engineering and a lot of experience in the real world before we really learn to do it right.
That said, solar EV is certainly starting to look promising, and faster than I thought it would. That’s a great development. If we get another breakthrough or two in efficiency or cost, a changeover could happen faster.
Except that overpopulation is not a problem. Birth rates have been crashing around the world. The exception is in some of the large predominantly Muslim countries, and I assume that’s for religious and cultural reasons. You’re not going to change that with ‘education and birth control’.
Bullshit. First of all, ‘getting aggressive with evangelicals’ sounds a little intolerant to me. Second, it’s not evangelicals who are against birth control - it’s Catholics. And Muslims. And inner city blacks. How come you’re not calling them out? Perhaps your biases are coming into play?
In any event, the first world isn’t your problem. We’re barely reproducing at replacement rates. We don’t have to do anything at all.
And this is the crap that makes the right so suspicious of the environmental movement. As the old joke goes, environmentalists are watermelons - green on the outside, and red on the inside. It’s amazing how often the ‘solution’ to environmental problems turns out to be the same laundry list of changes the left has been wanting to make for the last century.
Taxing the rich isn’t going to fix the environment. Better education would be nice, but is not even remotely correlated to teacher salaries. You want to improve education overnight? Fire the worst 10% of teachers, and spread their kids around in the classes of the rest. That bottom 10% is doing tremendous damage, yet they sit fat and happy, protected by union rules better suited to assembly line workers than for creative work like teaching our children. While you’re at it, get rid of the teacher’s unions, break the archaic credential system, and base teacher pay on merit.
Just what form will your ‘encouragement’ take? Because people have been encouraging vegetarianism for a long time - people just don’t want to do it. Them’s the breaks.
That’s why I said you can start with 3rd world countries that are more politically stable. But we’re not talking about thousands of these things in a country - we’re talking about dozens. And they’re buried underground, sealed, and can be encased in as much concrete or steel as we need to ensure their security.
Is there a risk? Sure. There are risks with all energy sources. Do you have any idea how many people will die per year if we put solar panels on millions of homes? Falls are one of the prime causes of accidental death. So how do I keep my panels clear of snow? Or leaves? Or dirt? Thousands of people per year will die as a result of solar power.
It’s not clear at all that they ‘goosed’ the market. In fact, they may have hurt it. Your Q-Cell link is for a company that already declared bankruptcy. Something like 15 solar companies have gone bankrupt as a result of fluctuating subsidy prices. The current glut of panels and depressed pricing may be inhibiting further investment.
Got a cite for that? I did some research on this today, and what I’ve found is that there is evidence of some methane leakage at the wellheads of some sites, but it’s not clear how much of that is making it into the upper atmosphere. Also remember that methane has a short half-life in the atmosphere so even though it’s a potent greenhouse gas, it’s not as critical to long-term warming as CO2. This paper in Nature attempts to track ethane, which is produced along with methane from natural gas wells. What they found is that ethane has actually been decreasing, and they say a possible reason for that is reduced flare gas emissions from natural gas wells.
Again, the main paper is gated, but what they seem to be saying is that traditional oil fields simply vent off or flare off the natural gas released at the well, causing all the methane to go into the atmosphere. A natural gas well, on the other hand, captures the natural gas. So moving from oil to natural gas may actually reduce methane emissions, even if natural gas wells do release some methane.
In addition, the abstract to one of the papers in AAAS science says that methane is increasing again, but the factors that control the atmosphere’s methane budget are poorly understood so no ‘culprit’ can be assigned to it. Unfortunately the paper itself is gated.
Really? Do we understand the implications of going from 1-2% solar to 50%? How many rare-earth materials are required? How much mining? What will that do to the efficiency of the power grid if it lowers the duty cycle of current plants? How many people will die from falls from high-mounted solar panels? If solar costs us $50 billion per year that could have been spent on R&D, health care, other environmental cleanup, is that better?
You shouldn’t make sweeping statements about what is ‘obviously’ true. We’re mucking about with complex systems here, and real-world engineering is a lot different than thought experiments on paper. We’ve had this debate many times, but the utopians never seem to learn. High-speed rail is a perfect example of ‘simple’ ideas turning into disasters once they meet the real world.
I prefer it when people put their money where their mouths are. If solar PV is obviously the way to go, the first leading indicator should be a flow of investment money into the field. I haven’t checked, so many investment growth in solar IS exploding. But do you know?
Again, the ‘grid parity’ I’ve seen referenced is parity with retail prices, not wholesale prices. That’s fair for some analyses, and not fair for others. For example, if solar is ever going to replace major grid sources as part of the base power load, it will have to compete at the wholesale level.
Also, some of those ‘grid parity’ studies make assumptions like, ‘Assuming we can get a carbon tax of at least $40/tonne placed on fossil fuels…’ That’s a big assumption. We need to compare apples to apples. If we’re going to rely on taxes and subsidies to force a form of ‘parity’, then that’s not sustainable growth.
You will never see 90% adoption of solar. There are just too many industries and activities that need highly concentrated sources of energy. We already talked about the non-feasibility of electric tractor-trailers. Shipping is another one. Heavy industry, cold climates, areas that don’t get much annual sunlight…
The pattern for solar is that it will achieve grid parity in some isolated places like California where electricity is already very expensive and sunlight plentiful. Areas that use more expensive energy sources might come next. But changeover takes a long, long time.
Changeover also involves risk. Low-intensity energy sources require a lot of capital investment in infrastructure. That means the total cost is highly dependent on things like long-term interest rates and the stability of prices of raw materials and alternative energy sources.
As an example, here in Alberta we made a very large ‘bet’ on oil sands in the 1980’s when gas prices went through the roof. That made oil sands profitable even though it cost more to extract, and investment took off. Then the price of oil collapsed, and devastated our industry. So the next time oil prices started climbing, the investment stayed away for a long time, fearful that it was just another fluctuation. Even though prices dropped below our cost floor again, it took another 20 years to attract big-time investment because of worries that the price would drop again.
Even when an energy source becomes cheaper, it doesn’t get adopted until the long-term ROI makes changeover cost-effective. We have trillions of dollars of sunk costs in the current infrastructure. You will see movement to solar piecemeal as old power plants face upgrades or obsolescence. Then solar might be considered as an option to refurbishment or building a new fossil plant. But you’re not going to see the widespread destruction of a well functioning fossil fuel infrastructure just to transition to a fuel source that is slightly cheaper in the long run. These things take time.
If I were to make a bet, I’d say that once solar hits price parity at the retail level we might see adoption go up by 10% or so in the next decade. After it hits price parity at the wholesale level things will pick up, but I’d be shocked if solar ever supplies more than maybe 50% of our total energy needs, and more likely 25%.
So let’s see…you want to take a stable population of wealthy and developed countries (Europe) with a high CO2 output per capita and compare them with developing countries (Asia) with burgeoning populations and a much lower CO2 output per capita so that you can point out how “this can be done.” You want to assign to countries like China all their per capita CO2 even when it’s created to make goods consumed in Europe (and not much vice versa). You want to let France have all its nuclear power when there isn’t a bat’s chance nuclear will get off the ground on a broader level any time soon. Along the way you want to label Asia as “the worst offender” when they consume far less and their main “offense” is to want to raise their standard of living to that of Europe. It’s like the fat guy showing the starving guy how easy it is to consume fewer calories.
Then you want hold up Europe and say, “See? Proof we can reduce CO2 emissions.”
OK. Point conceded within those finer points I just listed. yourself.
But I think if you are Asian, what you are thinking is that reducing CO2 is a fine hobby pursuit for the wealthy. And that as soon as you get wealthy, you may consider taking up the hobby as well. In the interim you’ll consume whatever energy is necessary from whatever grid is economically viable, and that’s why the 2040 CO2 output worldwide is going to be about where the EIA predicts, I predict.
As to debt and “philosophy” and trends. Politicians love trends, except ones like this. But between you and me, when do you think that debt trend will start to show us actually paying down our debts instead of slowing the rate at which we increase them? When do you think the public will decide that slowing down the rate at which we borrow from our kids is not quite the same as actually not borrowing from them so that we can live better today?
I think that cite says exactly what I cited it for: Philosophically, our collective behavior is the Tragedy of the Commons, even when the Commons is our own kids and the Tragedy is spending their money for us to live well.
*"Total investment in renewable power and fuels
(excluding large hydro-electric projects) fell for
the second year running in 2013, reaching $214
billion worldwide, some 14% lower than in 2012
and 23% below the 2011 record. The decline
reflected a sharp fall in solar system prices, and the
effect of policy uncertainty in many countries. The
latter issue also depressed investment in fossil fuel
generation in 2013…
Among the different types of investment, asset
finance of utility-scale wind farms, solar parks and
other new installations fell 13% to $133 billion,
while outlays on small-scale projects such as rooftop
solar lurched downwards 25% to $60 billion –
mostly due to the decline in PV system costs…
If the drop in investment was a cloud, it had several
silver linings. One was the sharply reduced cost
of solar photovoltaic systems, which meant that a
record amount of PV capacity (some 39GW) was
constructed in 2013, and for less money than the
smaller 2012 total of 31GW. A second silver lining
was that 2013 brought a 54% recovery in clean
energy share prices, stimulating equity raising by
specialist companies on the public markets…
Last year was the first ever that China invested
more in renewable energy than the whole of
Europe. The Chinese total, although down 6%
to $56 billion, finished well ahead of Europe’s
shrunken $48 billion, down 44%. The US saw a
fall of 10% to $36 billion, while India moved 15%
down to $6 billion, and Brazil 54% down to $3
billion, the lowest since 2005.
"
*
PV definitely getting cheaper (as long as the price wars last for panels) but this doesn’t seem to support the idea that if PV is cheaper per watt, demand will expand commensurately.
I was talking about environmental strides, since the context in which you raised the Republican congressional evildoers was over failure to act around ACC.
If you want to talk fiscal policy and blame Republicans, you have a friend here.
I loved Mr Clinton.
I have publicly castigated Mr Bush and his asinine expenditures, particularly on stupid stupid wars trying to fix Islamic states. Ain’t gonna happen. Now comes Mr Obama giving away the rest of the store (well; I guess Mr Bush already gave away the store so maybe Mr Obama is giving away the ARs or something…).
A one-two punch borrowing from our kids from which we will not recover.
