3

ELIMINATING ALL EMISSIONS

EFFICIENCY TACTICS ARE NOT SOLUTIONS

Think of the example given in the previous chapter of building solar panels and running methane power plants a bit less. It worked for the 10% scenario, but it didn’t include a plan for the 100% scenario accounting for when electricity wouldn’t be generated at night. Different measures, such as mixing in other electricity generation technologies or adding long-term electricity storage systems, would be needed to preserve a steady flow of electricity in the 100% scenario. But those measures won’t be pursued if our efforts remain fixated on the 10% solution.

The mindset that all 10% solutions could be pushed to become 100% solutions makes a lot of advocacy rhetoric unfocused right now. It implies that tactics that can bring immediate emissions reductions are the same tactics that need to be pushed further to achieve all emissions reductions, which is often not true. This conflation of 10% and 100% solutions might come partly from a combination of normal-issue thinking (reduce the cause of a problem a bit and that will reduce the impacts a bit) and subconscious cynicism (we’ll probably fail at the 100% solution so I won’t even try to think about the full picture, but will focus on a piece that I can understand or affect). A lot of efforts and proposals up to this point have focused mainly or entirely on tactics that can reduce emissions by some percentage economy-wide or in a given sector, but cannot, by definition, ever reduce them to zero.

We’ll call these efforts “efficiency tactics.” Some include efforts for literal efficiency: requiring cars to have better miles per gallon, or subsidizing consumers to buy more efficient oil boilers for heating homes and businesses. Some are indirectly in this “efficiency” category: some climate change proposals have called for efforts to expand education of women and girls and access to contraception in developing countries. These are worthy causes, but their climate change impact is limited to reducing the growth in population, a minor factor contributing to our current emissions trajectory (as noted before, the countries with the fastest population growth are those in the first stage of development, which will not see massive energy access expansion in the next thirty years).

Reducing population growth equates to reducing the 2050 demand for energy and food, but can never get near eliminating that demand. And incentivizing more efficient fossil fuel equipment, or replacing the first 10% of methane electricity generation with solar, means reducing emissions within a system that still causes emissions. What we need instead is to shift to systems that cause no net emissions.

Many efficiency tactics can be helpful in driving system shifts. For example, carbon pricing (charging a fee on fossil fuels and emissions-intensive goods) would itself reduce but not eliminate emissions, but it would also create markets for new clean energy technologies and accelerate the adoption of clean options (in fact, carbon pricing is probably the single best incentive policy to support and accelerate the implementation of this framework). Efficiency tactics can reduce the total cost and make the transition to non-emitting systems easier. It’s even possible that in some countries, the only way to implement the needed physical changes is through a combination of many such efficiency measures. But they cannot themselves add up to 100% globally. Policy leadership and advocacy need to focus mostly on the minimum framework that constitutes “enough” to actually reach a 100% solution.

Here’s another related example. Many activists emphasize the need for individuals and institutions to “do their part.”

When everyone who is willing pools their individual behavior changes, these steps might all add up to a 10% solution. But these are only the most tangible sources of emissions from individual lifestyles. Aside from the fact that many, if not most, people will not be convinced to “sacrifice” and change their behavior to reduce emissions, even if they did we would be doing nothing about the many emissions that are inherently tied to larger systems. We must not confuse steps that put small dents in emissions—the 10% solutions—with system-changing steps that could add up to eliminating all emissions globally—the 100% solutions.

Size proportional to potential global emissions reductions.

Even the best advocacy efforts focused on 10% solutions may still take away effort or momentum from the 100% solutions that are really needed. And worse, some movements toward 10% solutions actually make it harder to later implement 100% solutions, by locking in infrastructure that can’t accommodate key 100%–solution technology, or by creating a mindset that ignores the need for other tactics to reach 100%—a mindset that can be difficult to reverse in time.

We must not confuse steps that put small dents in emissions—the 10% solutions—with system-changing steps that could add up to eliminating all emissions globally—the 100% solutions.

THE FULL PIE

A 100% solution has to deal with all the greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

A 100% solution means eliminating all these emissions, and then starting to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to get negative emissions. Current political discourse in industrialized countries focuses mostly on electricity generation, which is responsible for only about 25% of global emissions. Some efforts target transportation and building heating, which together add only about 20% more. In total, all the usual rhetoric addresses less than half of emissions.

GLOBAL SOURCES OF GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS20

ELECTRICITY GENERATION
(INCLUDES DISTRICT HEAT PLANTS AS WELL)

Mostly coal-powered, lots of methane and some oil; centralized infrastructure, owned by public or private utilities and energy companies; lasts for many decades.

TRANSPORTATION

Virtually all oil-powered; mostly road travel (personal vehicles and freight trucks); decentralized infrastructure, owned by billions of people and companies; lasts ten to twenty years; ships ~2%, airplanes ~1.5% of total pie, owned by smaller number of entities.

BUILDING FUEL USE

Mostly methane and oil (furnaces) with some coal and wood (heat stoves); mostly for space heating, some water heating and cooking; decentralized infrastructure, owned by billions of people and companies; lasts fifteen to thirty-plus years.

INDUSTRY FUEL USE

Mostly coal, mostly for heat to drive processes; many subcategories, most significant are steel furnaces and cement kilns; semi-centralized infrastructure, owned by many companies, large portion in China.

INDUSTRY PROCESS EMISSIONS

Direct emissions from chemical reaction byproducts other than burning fuels (e.g., CO2 off-gassed when limestone heated to make cement; CO2 released when methane split to get hydrogen for chemical feedstock); centralized infrastructure, subset of industry fuel use ownership.

FOSSIL FUEL PROCESSING

Burning fuels to extract and move coal/oil/methane.

ESCAPED METHANE

From extraction and distribution leaks, incomplete combustion in compressor engines along methane pipelines, and extraction equipment; centrally-owned but physically spread out infrastructure.

WASTE

Organic waste in landfills produces methane and wastewater treatment plants produce several greenhouse gases; mostly-decentralized infrastructure.

OTHER

Processes that don’t fit into other slices.

AGRICULTURE AND DEFORESTATION

Cutting and burning forests (and other ecosystems) releases CO2 (7–10% of pie); livestock belch methane (~5%); fertilizer generates nitrous oxide emissions (4–5%); soil, residues, and equipment release other emissions.

If we want a 100% solution, we need proposals to address 100% of the pie. The less-discussed half of the pie includes many smaller slices that aren’t even related to burning fossil fuels—non-energy direct emissions from certain industrial processes, waste, and more. The largest of these slices is agriculture, which includes emissions from deforestation and other changes to land.

All the usual rhetoric addresses less than half of emissions.

Non-energy emissions are about a third of the global total.

Some of the larger fossil fuel slices in the chart are composed of many different processes—most notably industry fuel use, which encompasses various activities with totally different kinds of equipment used to produce everything from steel and cement to paper and ammonia. None of these slices tend to be included in mainstream rhetoric, yet they need to be eliminated as well. Many of these specific sources of emissions will be discussed in more detail when we look at solutions to them in Chapters 6 and 7 (for industry energy, as well as transportation and heating) and Chapter 8 (for non-energy emissions from industry, agriculture, and wastes).

TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT IS NEEDED

We can simply look around and see that there aren’t widely deployed non-emitting technologies for many of these slices. Researchers and startups are working on most innovations needed, but a large portion are still in lab stages or are still far too expensive to implement, even with serious subsidies. For example, there isn’t a technology readily available to power airplanes in a fully carbon-neutral way, even at a modestly higher cost than that of jet fuel.21 In fact, the majority of the pie does not have currently affordable technology that could be mandated immediately to eliminate the slice in question. A 100% solution requires lowering the cost of technologies to address the remaining emissions.

Some of the technology required is a piece of equipment—for example, someone has to design and commercialize an electric motor to power long-distance ships. Some of the technology required is a process—for example, cement production currently off-gasses CO2 when limestone is heated in a cement kiln, and someone has to design and implement a new process that reduces or eliminates those direct emissions. Some of the “technology” required is in the form of new practices—for example, someone will have to work with farmers to get most farms in the world to adopt better soil management systems (which relate to crop rotation, interspersing of crops and livestock, organic practices, and more) to reduce emissions from farmland soil, and to start sequestering CO2 in soil, which there is significant potential for. And finally, some emissions—for example, direct emissions which are caused by fertilizer spread on fields (see Chapter 8)—probably can’t be fully eliminated by 2050.

The majority of the pie does not have currently affordable technology that could be mandated immediately to eliminate the slice in question. A 100% solution requires lowering the cost of technologies to address the remaining emissions.

By 2050, we will need sequestration to compensate for those emissions that can’t be fully eliminated. Sequestration, of course, is needed by definition to go from zero emissions to negative emissions.

These slivers of emissions probably can’t be eliminated by 2050.22

“Sequestration” means removing CO2 that is already in the atmosphere and storing it (as pure CO2 gas or as another chemical that it gets turned into) in some way that it will not be released again for a long time, if ever. CO2 can be locked into the wood, soil, and other plant matter in forests; mixed into farm soils by microorganisms and crops; pumped as a gas into underground caverns; or chemically converted into plastics or other goods that lock the carbon inside their materials. These and other methods will be explained in Chapter 9.

Some of the ways to accomplish sequestration—especially soil management and replanting forests—are cheap or might even save farmers money, and they come with other benefits to ecosystems, outdoor recreation areas, and agricultural yields. But they can only sequester a certain amount of CO2 each year—there’s only so much land area where we can plant forests.

Cost to sequester each next ton of CO2 increases significantly the more tons that are required because we will have to use more expensive methods—see Chapter 9.23

The more emissions remain in 2050, the more we will have to rely on higher-cost sequestration methods, such as capturing CO2 directly from the air and pumping it into deep underground caverns. Doing so will require serious technology development and improvement to bring down costs to a reasonable level. Even then, governments will have to pay for this portion of sequestration outright, with no co-benefits. Hopefully that will be politically viable by the late 2040s. In the best-case scenario, the total cost worldwide might be in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. If sequestration technology isn’t improved—or more significantly, if other emissions aren’t reduced to near zero—and the cost is in the trillions of dollars per year, it may not be politically feasible to pay for enough sequestration. Therefore, the work of not only reducing, but virtually eliminating, emissions is essential to bring the world to the point that negative emissions can ever be achieved. This will depend on innovation to improve the cost of various technologies.

THE FIVE PILLARS

We now have an understanding of the full scope of where emissions come from and the full, global scale of transformations needed. Efficiency tactics will not get us to negative emissions by 2050, nor will incrementalist policies that drive small- or moderate-scale adoption of clean technologies but have to be enacted one by one in every single country. The viability of a thirty-year transition to negative emissions depends on dramatic amounts of innovation to lower the cost of clean technologies and practices.

Putting all the pieces together, we can now see exactly what that innovation has to consist of.

The obvious culprit for climate change in most people’s minds is electricity generation. This is indeed the area that offers the most immediate opportunities for switching to non-emitting systems. We’ll call decarbonizing electricity generation Pillar 1, the first area of work that is essential to a 100% solution.

With lots of clean electricity available, we can then transition the rest of the energy system to clean options—many processes can be electrified, as is starting to happen with cars and home heating. As noted, electric ship engines could be designed and commercialized. Such efforts are the work of Pillar 2.

However, not everything in the energy system can be electrified—long-distance plane trips, for example, rely on such concentrated fuels that it is highly unlikely there will be affordable electric options by 2050. The same goes for various industrial processes. Furthermore, not every building will be renovated between now and 2050 to replace its existing furnace with electric heating. Therefore, this book’s framework adds a piece often left out of popular rhetoric: synthesis of carbon-neutral fuels to substitute for fossil fuels in energy applications that can’t be electrified by 2050, or aren’t converted in time. This may include some amount of biomass-derived fuel, but mostly, assuming imperfect policy around the world, much of it will have to be directly synthesized using clean electricity to drive chemical reactions. This, Pillar 3, accounts for the remaining gaps of emissions reductions in the energy system that couldn’t be solved with Pillar 2.

And then there is that third of global emissions which comes from non-energy processes. Pillar 4 is about shifting industrial processes and agricultural practices to emit less or not at all. This pillar encompasses a wide range of steps, from technology development to policy to outreach on farms around the world.

Finally, by 2050 significant levels of sequestration will be needed to put the negative-emissions “brakes” on global temperature rise. Whether or not that sequestration is possible—politically and physically—to pay for depends on technology development and scale-up for sequestration methods, and on having nearly eliminated global emissions. Sequestration, Pillar 5, is the bit that makes up for remaining emissions and gets the world to the goal of negative emissions.

In all, then, there are five pillars to solving climate change 100%:

  1. Deploy clean electricity generation.
  2. Electrify equipment that can be electrified.
  3. Create synthesized fuels for equipment that can’t be electrified or isn’t electrified by 2050.
  4. Implement various non-energy shifts.
  5. Make up for the remaining emissions and get to negative emissions using sequestration.

Pillars 1–3 address 100% of energy system emissions, and Pillars 4–5 address 100% of non-energy emissions plus the need for negative emissions. Pillars 2 and 3, and much of Pillar 5, rely heavily on cheap, clean electricity being abundantly available from Pillar 1 to power all the new end-use, fuel synthesis, and sequestration equipment.

These five pillars are the physical transformations needed—at a minimum—to solve climate change 100%. No matter what combination of policies, initiatives, public actions, and private actions drive the enactment of these pillars, climate change impacts will continue to get exponentially worse until all five are fully implemented. To avoid the worst effects of climate change, that implementation must happen by 2050. So a 100% solution means implementing all five of these pillars in the next thirty years, which entails a huge transformation in energy, industrial, and agricultural systems, faster than any in history.

That is the scale of “what needs to be done.” Now we need a plan that can add up to it. So far, we are wildly off track, still increasing the rate of emissions from year to year as almost all clean options fail to gain the initial momentum to scale globally. We don’t have “all the technology we need” affordable enough even in countries where political will could mandate slight cost increases. There are large slices of the pie for which full decarbonization would currently mean massive increases in costs.

There are five pillars to solving climate change 100%:

  1. Deploy clean electricity generation.
  2. Electrify equipment that can be electrified.
  3. Create synthesized fuels for equipment that can’t be electrified or isn’t electrified by 2050.
  4. Implement various non-energy shifts.
  5. Make up for the remaining emissions and get to negative emissions using sequestration.

And then we face the fact that two-thirds of emissions come from developing regions, where air pollution makes clean options politically popular but where fossil fuels are still being expanded because they are by far the cheapest energy sources, pulling huge populations out of poverty.

To put the world on a path that gives us a good chance of reaching negative emissions by 2050, we need the clean options that make up the five pillars to be fully adopted to address 100% of the pie. For any given clean option, there are essentially two ways to make it happen:

The latter approach is generally faster, but where viable the former can give more certainty. The definitively cheaper approach requires massive tech improvement efforts in a short timeframe, while the modest-improvement-and-policy approach requires significantly more political will and campaigns across many different countries. Of course, some clean options will be better suited to one approach than the other. Both approaches require some level of innovation for most technologies, and both approaches may require incentive policies to drive innovation or ensure adoption of new technologies.