CHAPTER 2
THIS WILL BE HARD
Please don’t let the title of this chapter depress you. I hope it’s clear by now that I believe we can get to zero, and in the coming chapters I will try to give you a sense of why I feel that way and what it will take to get there. But we can’t solve a problem like climate change without an honest accounting of how much we need to do and what obstacles we need to overcome. So with the idea in mind that we will get to solutions—including ways to speed up the transition from fossil fuels—let’s look at the biggest barriers we’re facing.
Fossil fuels are like water. I’m a big fan of the late writer David Foster Wallace. (I’m preparing for his mammoth novel Infinite Jest by slowly making my way through everything else he ever wrote.) When Wallace gave a now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, he started with this story:
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”*
Wallace explained, “The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”
Fossil fuels are like that. They’re so pervasive that it can be hard to grasp all the ways in which they—and other sources of greenhouse gases—touch our lives. I find it helpful to start with everyday objects and go from there.
Did you brush your teeth this morning? The toothbrush probably contains plastic, which is made from petroleum, a fossil fuel.
If you ate breakfast, the grains in your toast and cereal were grown with fertilizer, which releases greenhouse gases when it’s made. They were harvested by a tractor that was made of steel—which is made with fossil fuels in a process that releases carbon—and ran on gasoline. If you had a burger for lunch, as I do occasionally, raising the beef caused greenhouse gas emissions—cows burp and fart methane—and so did growing and harvesting the wheat that went into the bun.
If you got dressed, your clothes might contain cotton—also fertilized and harvested—or polyester, made from ethylene, which is derived from petroleum. If you’ve used toilet paper, that’s more trees cut down and carbon emitted.
If the vehicle you took to work or school today was powered by electricity, great—though that electricity was probably generated using a fossil fuel. If you took a train, it went along tracks made of steel and through tunnels made using cement, which is produced with fossil fuels in a process that releases carbon as a by-product. The car or bus you took is made of steel and plastic. The same goes for the bike you rode last weekend. The roads you drove on contain cement as well as asphalt, which is derived from petroleum.
If you live in an apartment building, you’re probably surrounded by cement. If you live in a house made of wood, the lumber was cut and trimmed by gas-powered machines that were made with steel and plastic. If your home or office has heating or air-conditioning, not only is it using a fair amount of energy, but the coolant in the air conditioner may be a potent greenhouse gas. If you’re sitting in a chair made of metal or plastic, that’s more emissions.
Also, virtually all of these items, from the toothbrush to the building materials, were transported from someplace else on trucks, airplanes, trains, and ships, all of which were themselves powered by fossil fuels and made using fossil fuels.
In other words, fossil fuels are everywhere. Take oil as just one example: The world uses more than 4 billion gallons every day. When you’re using any product at that kind of volume, you can’t simply stop overnight.
What’s more, there’s a very good reason why fossil fuels are everywhere: They’re so inexpensive. As in, oil is cheaper than a soft drink. I could hardly believe this the first time I heard it, but it’s true. Here’s the math: A barrel of oil contains 42 gallons; the average price in the second half of 2020 was around $42 per barrel, so that comes to about $1 per gallon. Meanwhile, Costco sells 8 liters of soda for $6, a price that amounts to $2.85 a gallon.
Even after you account for fluctuations in the price of oil, the conclusion is the same: Every day, people around the world rely on more than 4 billion gallons of a product that costs less than Diet Coke.
It’s no accident that fossil fuels are so cheap. They’re abundant and easy to move. We’ve created big global industries devoted to drilling for them, processing and moving them, and developing innovations that keep their prices low. And their prices don’t reflect the damage they cause—the ways they contribute to climate change, pollution, and environmental degradation when they’re extracted and burned. We’ll explore this problem in more detail in chapter 10.
Just thinking about the scope of this problem can be dizzying. But it does not need to be paralyzing. By deploying the clean and renewable sources we already have while also making breakthroughs in zero-carbon energy, we can figure out how to reduce our net emissions to zero. The key will be to make the clean approach as cheap—or almost as cheap—as the current technology.
We need to hurry up, though, because…
It’s not just the rich world. Almost everywhere, people are living longer and healthier lives. Standards of living are going up. There is rising demand for cars, roads, buildings, refrigerators, computers, and air conditioners and the energy to power them all. As a result, the amount of energy used per person will go up, and so will the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per person. Even building the infrastructure we’ll need to create all this energy—the wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear plants, electricity storage facilities, and so on—will itself involve releasing more greenhouse gases.
But it’s not just that each person will be using more energy; there will also be more people. The global population is headed toward 10 billion by the end of the century, and much of this growth is happening in cities that are highly carbon intensive. The speed of urban growth is mind-boggling: By 2060, the world’s building stock—a measure that factors in the number of buildings and their size—will double. That’s like putting up another New York City every month for 40 years, and it’s mainly because of growth in developing countries like China, India, and Nigeria.
Where the emissions are. Emissions from advanced economies like the United States and Europe have stayed pretty flat or even dropped, but many developing countries are growing fast. That’s partly because richer countries have outsourced emissions-heavy manufacturing to poorer ones. (UN Population Division; Rhodium Group)
This is good news for every person whose life improves, but it’s bad news for the climate we all live in. Consider that nearly 40 percent of the world’s emissions are produced by the richest 16 percent of the population. (And that’s not counting the emissions from products that are made someplace else but consumed in rich countries.) What will happen as more people live like the richest 16 percent? Global energy demand will go up 50 percent by 2050, and if nothing else changes, carbon emissions will go up by nearly as much. Even if the rich world could magically get to zero today, the rest of the world would still be emitting more and more.
It would be immoral and impractical to try to stop people who are lower down on the economic ladder from climbing up. We can’t expect poor people to stay poor because rich countries emitted too many greenhouse gases, and even if we wanted to, there would be no way to accomplish it. Instead, we need to make it possible for low-income people to climb the ladder without making climate change worse. We need to get to zero—producing even more energy than we do today, but without adding any carbon to the atmosphere—as soon as possible.
The world will be building the equivalent of another New York City every month for the next 40 years.
Unfortunately…
History is not on our side. Judging only by how long previous transitions have taken, “as soon as possible” is a long time away. We have done things like this before—moving from relying on one energy source to another—and it has always taken decades upon decades. (The best books I have read on this topic are Vaclav Smil’s Energy Transitions and Energy Myths and Realities, which I’m borrowing from here.)
Many farmers still have to use ancient techniques, which is one of the reasons they’re trapped in poverty. They deserve modern equipment and approaches, but right now using those tools means producing more greenhouse gases.
For most of human history, our main sources of energy were our own muscles, animals that could do things like pull plows, and plants that we burned. Fossil fuels did not represent even half of the world’s energy consumption until the late 1890s. In China, they didn’t take over until the 1960s. There are parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa where this transition still hasn’t happened.
And consider how long it took for oil to become a big part of our energy supply. We started producing it commercially in the 1860s. Half a century later, it represented just 10 percent of the world’s energy supply. It took 30 years more to reach 25 percent.
It takes a really long time to adopt new sources of energy. Notice how in 60 years coal went from 5 percent of the world’s energy supply to nearly 50 percent. But natural gas reached only 20 percent in the same amount of time. (Vaclav Smil, Energy Transitions)
Natural gas followed a similar trajectory. In 1900, it accounted for 1 percent of the world’s energy. It took seventy years to reach 20 percent. Nuclear fission went faster, going from 0 to 10 percent in 27 years.
This chart shows how much various energy sources grew over the course of 60 years, starting from the time they were introduced. Between 1840 and 1900, coal went from 5 percent of the world’s energy supply to nearly 50 percent. But in the 60 years from 1930 to 1990, natural gas reached just 20 percent. In short, energy transitions take a long time.
Fuel sources aren’t the only issue. It also takes us a long time to adopt new types of vehicles. The internal combustion engine was introduced in the 1880s. How long before half of all urban families had a car? Thirty to 40 years in the United States, and 70 to 80 years in Europe.
What’s more, the energy transition we need now is being driven by something that has never mattered before. In the past, we’ve moved from one source to another because the new one was cheaper and more powerful. When we stopped burning so much wood and started using more coal, for example, it was because we could get a lot more heat and light from a pound of coal than from a pound of wood.
Or take a more recent example in the United States: We’re using more natural gas and less coal to generate electricity. Why? Because new drilling techniques made it much cheaper. It was a matter of economics, not the environment. In fact, whether natural gas is better or worse than coal depends on the way carbon dioxide equivalents are calculated. Some scientists have argued that gas can actually be worse for climate change than coal is, depending on how much leaks out while it’s being processed.
Over time, we would naturally start using more renewables, but left to its own devices, this growth won’t happen nearly fast enough, and as we’ll see in chapter 4, without innovation it won’t be enough to get us all the way to zero. We have to force an unnaturally speedy transition. That introduces a level of complexity—in public policy and technology—that we’ve never had to deal with before.
Why do energy transitions take so long, anyway? Because…
Coal plants are not like computer chips. You have probably heard of Moore’s Law, the prediction made by Gordon Moore in 1965 that microprocessors would double in power every two years. Gordon turned out to be right, of course, and Moore’s Law is one of the main reasons the computing and software industries took off the way they did. As processors got more powerful, we could write better software, which drove up demand for computers, which gave hardware companies the incentive to keep improving their machines, for which we kept writing better software, and on and on in a positive feedback loop.
Moore’s Law works because the companies keep finding new ways to make transistors—the tiny switches that power a computer—smaller and smaller. This allows them to pack more transistors onto each chip. A computer chip made today has roughly one million times more transistors on it than one made in 1970, making it a million times more powerful.
You’ll sometimes hear Moore’s Law invoked as a reason to think we can make the same kind of exponential progress on energy. If computer chips can improve so much so quickly, can’t cars and solar panels?
Unfortunately, no. Computer chips are an outlier. They get better because we figure out how to cram more transistors on each one, but there’s no equivalent breakthrough to make cars use a million times less gas. Consider that the first Model T that rolled off Henry Ford’s production line in 1908 got no better than 21 miles to the gallon. As I write this, the top hybrid on the market gets 58 miles to the gallon. In more than a century, fuel economy has improved by less than a factor of three.
Nor have solar panels become a million times better. When crystalline silicon solar cells were introduced in the 1970s, they converted about 15 percent of the sunlight that hit them into electricity. Today they convert around 25 percent. That’s good progress, but it’s hardly in line with Moore’s Law.
Technology is only one reason that the energy industry can’t change as quickly as the computer industry. There’s also size. The energy industry is simply enormous—at around $5 trillion a year, one of the biggest businesses on the planet. Anything that big and complex will resist change. And consciously or not, we have built a lot of inertia into the energy industry.
For context, think about how the software business operates. There’s no regulatory agency that has to approve your products. Even if you release a piece of software that’s imperfect, your customers can still get enthusiastic and give you feedback about how to make it better, as long as the net benefit you’re offering is high enough. And virtually all your costs are up front. After you’ve developed a product, the marginal cost of making more of it is close to zero.
Compare that with the drug and vaccine industry. Getting a new medicine to market is much harder than releasing a new piece of software. Which is as it should be, considering that a drug that makes people sick is much worse than an app that has some flaws. Between basic research, drug development, regulatory approval to test the drug, and every other step required, it takes years for a new medicine to reach patients. But once you have a pill that works, it’s very cheap to make more of it.
Now compare both with the energy industry. First, you have huge capital costs that never go away. If you spend $1 billion building a coal plant, the next plant you build will not be any cheaper. And your investors put up that money with the expectation that the plant will run for 30 years or more. If someone comes along with a better technology 10 years down the road, you’re not going to just shut down your old plant and go build a new one. At least not without a very good reason—like a big financial payoff, or government regulations that force you to.
Society also tolerates very little risk in the energy business, understandably so. We demand reliable electricity; the lights had better come on every time a customer flips a switch. We also worry about disasters. In fact, safety concerns have nearly killed off new construction of nuclear plants in the United States. Since the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, America has broken ground on just two nuclear plants, even though more people die from coal pollution in a single year than have died in all nuclear accidents combined.
We have a large and understandable incentive to stick with what we know, even if what we know is killing us. What we need to do is change the incentives so that we can build an energy system that is all the things we like (reliable, safe) and none of the things we don’t like (dependent on fossil fuels). But that will not be easy, because…
Our laws and regulations are so outdated. The phrase “government policy” doesn’t exactly set people’s hair on fire. But policies—everything from tax rules to environmental regulations—have a huge impact on how people and companies behave. We won’t get to zero unless we get this right, and we’re a long way from doing that. (I’m talking here about the United States, but this applies to many other countries too.)
One problem is that many of the environmental laws and regulations in place today weren’t designed with climate change in mind. They were adopted to solve other problems, and now we’re trying to use them to reduce emissions. We might as well try to create artificial intelligence using a 1960s mainframe computer.
For example, America’s best-known law related to air quality, the Clean Air Act, barely mentions greenhouse gases at all. That’s hardly surprising, because it was originally passed in 1970 to reduce the health risks from local air pollution, not to deal with rising temperatures.
Or consider the fuel-economy standards known as CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy). They were adopted in the 1970s because oil prices were skyrocketing and Americans wanted more fuel-efficient cars. Fuel efficiency is great, but now we need to put more electric vehicles on the road, and CAFE standards haven’t helped much at all with that, because they weren’t designed to.
Outdated policies are not the only problem. Our approach to climate and energy keeps changing with the election cycle. Every four to eight years, a new administration arrives in Washington with its own energy priorities. There’s nothing inherently wrong with changing priorities—it happens throughout the government with every new administration—but it takes a toll on researchers who depend on the government for grant money and entrepreneurs who rely on tax incentives. It’s hard to make real progress if every few years you have to stop work on one project and start from scratch on something else.
The election cycle also creates uncertainty in the private market. The government offers various tax breaks designed to get more companies to work on clean energy breakthroughs. But they’re of limited use, because energy innovation is so hard and can take decades to come to fruition. You could work on an idea for years, only to see a new administration come in and eliminate the incentive you’ve been counting on.
The bottom line is that our current energy policies will have only a negligible impact on future emissions. You can measure their effect by adding up the extent to which emissions will go down by the year 2030 as a result of all the federal and state policies now on the books. All told, it comes to about 300 million tons, or about 5 percent of projected U.S. emissions in 2030. That’s nothing to scoff at, but it’s not going to be enough to get us near zero.
Which is not to say that we can’t come up with policies that make a big difference on emissions. CAFE standards and the Clean Air Act did what they were designed to do: Cars got more efficient, and the air got cleaner. And there are some effective emissions-related policies in place now, although they’re disconnected from each other and don’t add up to enough to make a real difference for the climate problem.
I believe that we can do this, but it will be hard. For one thing, it’s much easier to tinker with an existing law than to introduce a major new one. It takes a long time to develop a new policy, get public input, go through the court system if there’s a legal challenge, and finally implement it. Not to mention the fact that…
There isn’t as much of a climate consensus as you might think. I’m not talking about the 97 percent of scientists who agree that the climate is changing because of human activities. It’s true that there are still small but vocal—and, in some cases, politically powerful—groups of people who are not persuaded by the science. But even if you accept the fact of climate change, you don’t necessarily buy the idea that we should be investing large amounts of money in breakthroughs designed to deal with it.
For example, some people argue, Yes, climate change is happening, but it’s not worth spending much to try to stop it or adapt to it. Instead, we should prioritize other things that have a bigger impact on human welfare, like health and education.
Here’s my reply to that argument: Unless we move fast toward zero, bad things (and probably many of them) will happen well within most people’s lifetime, and very bad things will happen within a generation. Even if climate change doesn’t rank as an existential threat to humanity, it will make most people worse off, and it will make the poorest even poorer. It will keep getting worse until we stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and it deserves to be as much of a priority as health and education.
Another argument you often hear goes like this: Yes, climate change is real, and its effects will be bad, and we have everything we need to stop it. Between solar power, wind power, hydropower, and a few other tools, we’re good. It’s simply a matter of having the will to deploy them.
Chapters 4 through 8 explain why I don’t buy that notion. We have some of what we need, but far from all of it.
There’s another challenge to building a climate consensus: Global cooperation is notoriously difficult. It’s hard to get every country in the world to agree on anything—especially when you’re asking them to incur some new cost, like the expense of curbing carbon emissions. No single country wants to pay to mitigate its emissions unless everyone else will too. That’s why the Paris Agreement, in which more than 190 countries signed up to eventually limit their emissions, was such an achievement. Not because the current commitments will make a huge dent in emissions—if everyone meets them, they’ll reduce annual emissions by 3 billion to 6 billion tons in 2030, less than 12 percent of total emissions today—but because it was a starting point that proved global cooperation is possible. The U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement—a step that President-elect Joe Biden promised to reverse—only illustrates that it’s as hard to maintain global compacts as it is to create them in the first place.
To sum up: We need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar. To do it, we need lots of breakthroughs in science and engineering. We need to build a consensus that doesn’t exist and create public policies to push a transition that would not happen otherwise. We need the energy system to stop doing all the things we don’t like and keep doing all the things we do like—in other words, to change completely and also stay the same.
But don’t despair. We can do this. There are lots of ideas out there for how to do it, some of them more promising than others. In the next chapter, I’ll explain how I try to tell them apart.
* You can read the whole speech, “This Is Water,” at bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu. It’s wonderful.