Energy is the lifeblood of the economy. Without ample, safe, and low-cost energy it is impossible to secure the benefits of modern life, a point underscored by Sustainable Development Goal 7 to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.” For two centuries, fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—offered the key to America’s and the world’s growing energy needs. Now, because of global warming, we have to shift and shift rapidly to a new low-carbon energy system.
Despite considerable hullabaloo, there is nothing very mysterious about the world’s energy challenge. The Earth and moon are about the same distance from the sun, but the Earth is about 30 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the moon because of the Earth’s atmosphere, which traps energy from the sun and thereby warms the Earth. The heat-trapping effect of the atmosphere is called the greenhouse effect.
It’s been known for about 150 years that atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is one of the “greenhouse gases” that contribute to the greenhouse effect. It’s been known for 120 years that burning fossil fuels adds to the CO2 in the atmosphere and thereby warms the planet. And it’s been known with considerable precision for at least thirty years that atmospheric CO2 is increasing rapidly and thereby causing global warming. The year 2015 was the warmest on instrument record (dating back to 1880), and 2016 was warmer than 2015.
For this reason, every nation in the world, including the United States, agreed in December 2015 in Paris to shift from a high-carbon energy system based on coal, oil, and gas to a low-carbon energy system based mainly on wind, solar power, hydroelectric power, nuclear energy, and geothermal power. The Paris Climate Agreement, which went into force in November 2016, is part of the sustainable development agenda as SDG 13. The Paris agreement aims to keep human-caused global warming to “well below 2 degrees Celsius” (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and to aim for no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), all measured relative to the Earth’s temperature at the start of the fossil fuel era (around 1800). The warming of the Earth up to 2016 is already around 1.1 degrees Celsius, more than halfway to the globally agreed upper limit.
President Trump rejected climate science on the campaign trail and is surrounded by oil and gas interests. He seems intent, at the start of his administration, on turning the clock backward on climate policy, and has even threatened to pull the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. This is certainly an issue where Americans will have to take a stand, to put the common good ahead of the narrow interests of the oil and gas lobby. The climate risks are so dire, the technological opportunities for energy transformation so positive, and the global urgency and consensus so clear, that any reversal of U.S. policy would necessarily be short-lived, though deeply frustrating and costly.
Moreover, climate policy and infrastructure policy are deeply intertwined. When we rebuild the transport, energy, communications, water, and other infrastructure, the key will be to build it sustainably, in a way that protects Americans and projects the U.S. economy into global competitiveness on leading zero-carbon energy and transport technologies. Otherwise we’ll end up with a massively costly but useless infrastructure, and watch as other countries that make breakthroughs in energy efficiency and zero-carbon technologies displace U.S. economic leadership.
The needed path forward is now relatively clear. Climate scientists have come up with a helpful tool called the “carbon budget” to guide us back to climate safety. Roughly speaking, the Earth’s warming is proportional to the cumulative amount of carbon dioxide we burn and release into the atmosphere in other ways, such as by cutting down forests. To have a “likely” (that is, 67 percent) probability of staying below 2 degrees Celsius warming, humanity has a remaining carbon budget of around 900 billion tons of CO2.
To put the remaining 900 billion tons into context, the world as a whole is currently emitting around 36 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. At the current rate of global energy use, the world therefore has only about 900/36 = 25 years of fossil use remaining if it is to stay below 2 degrees C, and even that stringent limit on fossil fuel use still leaves a 33 percent probability of exceeding 2 degrees Celsius! To add to the world’s challenge, most of the poor countries desperately need to increase their overall energy use in order to benefit from energy-using modern technologies.
The name of the game is therefore a “transplant” of the world’s energy system, replacing fossil fuels with low-cost, low-carbon alternatives, such as wind and solar power. Such a transplant may seem impossible, but it’s actually well within reach. Most of the changes wouldn’t even be noticed by most of us. Instead of driving a Chevy Malibu with a gasoline-burning internal combustion engine under the hood, we will instead drive a Chevy Volt with an electric motor under the hood. Instead of charging the Chevy Volt with electricity generated by a coal-burning power plant, the power plant would instead use wind, solar, nuclear, hydroelectric, or some other non-carbon energy source to generate the electricity.
Forward-looking engineers have already given us a pretty good road map from fossil fuels to zero-carbon energy. There are three guidelines.
The first is energy efficiency. We need to cut back on excessive energy use by investing in energy-saving technologies: LED lighting rather than incandescent bulbs, smart appliances that do not draw energy when not in use, better housing insulation and passive ventilation that cut heating needs (and heating bills), and so forth.
The second is low-carbon electricity. Depending on where you live, your power today is generated by a mix of coal, natural gas, nuclear power, hydroelectric power, and a bit of wind and solar power. By 2050, electricity should be generated by non-carbon sources (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, tidal, biofuels, and others) or by using fossil fuels together with technologies that capture CO2 and pump it underground, a process called “carbon capture and storage” (CCS).
The third is called fuel switching. Instead of burning gasoline in the car, use electricity in its place; instead of burning heating oil to warm the house, use electric heating in its place; instead of using aviation fuel to fly planes, use advanced biofuels in its place; instead of a large industrial furnace, use a stationary hydrogen fuel cell (with the hydrogen produced by non-carbon electricity) in its place. For every current use of fossil fuel, we can find a low-carbon fuel substitute. Clever engineers have already shown how this can be done, but with practice and experience, we’ll have even better options.
Most of us would hardly notice the difference in how our electricity is generated, our vehicles are powered, our homes are heated, or our steel is produced. The main thing we would notice is a slightly higher electricity bill and a vastly safer climate. Even the extra costs are likely to be transitory. As producers slide down the learning curve, the costs of electric vehicles, industrial fuel cells, fourth-generation nuclear power plants, and solar grids are likely to fall significantly.
We’ll also enjoy the new low-carbon technologies more than today’s. Smart electric vehicles not only will be cleaner and safer, but also will drive you to work while you read the morning news. The shift from coal to renewable energy and from gas-guzzlers to electric vehicles will also clear the deep smog from Delhi, Beijing, and other places that are now literally choking on their air.
Even if the Trump administration starts out as ideological and political champions of the old fossil-fuel industries, I think they won’t get very far. The recognition of the climate dangers and energy-system needs is already a consensus beyond a narrow group of businesses and ideologues. Indeed, I’ll bet that it will soon be a standard high school homework assignment across the country to chart America’s future path from fossil fuels to zero-carbon energy. In each part of the country, students will be assigned a challenge: How can California, or North Dakota, or Boston make the least-cost and fastest transition?
California students will wax rhapsodic about the vast low-cost solar energy that can be tapped in the Mohave Desert. North Dakota students will sing the praises of North Dakota’s remarkable wind power potential, big enough not only for the Dakotas but also for the industrial Midwest from St. Louis to Chicago, Cleveland, and beyond. And Boston students will gaze northward to the vast lakes and rivers in Quebec stretching up to Hudson Bay, with enough hydroelectric power potential to provide the energy for the U.S. northeast, especially when combined with the vast onshore and offshore wind energy from Maine to Virginia.
The challenge is to make this transition quickly and seamlessly and without destabilizing the energy system or putting America’s industrial companies at a competitive disadvantage with enterprises in China, Mexico, and India. The beauty of the Paris Climate Agreement is that all countries are now in this effort together. Not only American high school students but also students in Bangalore, India; Chengdu, China; and Monterrey, Mexico, will be completing the same homework assignment. And those students, in turn, will discover the vast hydroelectric potential of the Himalayas, the wind potential of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, and the solar energy in Mexico’s Sonora Desert.
But is the transplant really worth it? Much of the transplant will pay for itself, in the sense of cleaner air, better appliances, and better services. Yet some parts of the energy transition will require extra costs for essentially the same energy services.
But here’s a critical point to keep in mind. The last time Earth was just 1 degree Celsius warmer than it is now (a period called the Eemian, about 130,000 years ago), the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland had disintegrated to such an extent that the global ocean level was between 3 and 9 meters higher than today.1 Today’s small island economies would disappear.
I’m not talking only about the Maldives and Vanuatu. I live on a small island economy. It’s called Manhattan. It would disappear too. Don’t be smug, Boston. You too would be mostly under water.
But the risks transcend the inundation of New York City, Boston, Orlando, New Orleans, and countless other low-lying cities around the world. The global warming to date (with accompanying droughts and floods) has already destabilized food supplies in many parts of the world, and there is much worse ahead unless we undertake the energy transplant. Syria, to name just one case, experienced its worst drought in modern history between 2006 and 2010, leading to impoverishment, hunger, forced migration, and social instability that provided tinder for the war that broke out in 2011.
Yet Americans understandably fear the job displacements that would hit today’s coal miners and oil roustabouts. Fortunately, the news on this front is entirely reassuring. At latest count, the total number of coal miners in America is 18,000, out of a labor force of 150,000,000. The total number of field workers in coal, oil, and gas is no more than 150,000, less than 0.1 percent of the workforce. We could very easily compensate or retrain the workers who will lose their jobs. Other workers in the fossil fuel sectors—accountants, managers, programmers, and the rest—will be needed in the new energy sectors and other parts of the economy.
There are really only a few true “losers” in America’s energy transformation, and David and Charles Koch are perhaps among them. The Koch brothers own the largest private oil company in the world. In their narrow private interest, it might be better for them to defend their $100 billion oil industry investment and wreck the rest of the world. They, after all, can afford to buy new property above the rising sea level. Yet even on that narrow, callous calculus, it’s probably not better for the Koch family children and grandchildren, who will suffer dire consequences from their parents’ and grandparents’ selfish disregard for humanity’s needs.
Recent excellent work by my colleague Dr. Jim Williams has charted the full scale of the U.S. energy transition to 2050.2 (Again, using Williams’s tools, students galore will soon be doing take-home problem sets.) It turns out that indeed renewable energy, nuclear power, and carbon capture and storage technologies offer a range of possible pathways to decarbonization. If you don’t like nuclear power or CCS, it’s still possible to make the transition to low-carbon energy, but at a higher cost. (Not surprisingly, the costs rise when options such as nuclear energy are taken off the table.)
The bottom line of Williams’s scenarios is very reassuring. The cost of decarbonizing the U.S. energy system is around 1 percent or less of national income per year (currently around $180 billion per year out of today’s $18.4 trillion US GDP). One percent of GDP is not cheap, but it is after all just 1 percent, a very small price to pay for global climate safety. Similar calculations, and similar bargains, will be the case for the energy transplant operation in other parts of the world. A few lucky places with magnificent wind, solar, or hydroelectric power will find the incremental costs of zero-carbon energy systems to be negligible.
If the energy challenge is all so clear, why isn’t it happening? There are really three answers. First, some part of the energy transformation is already underway, with a rise in deployments of wind and solar energy. Now that the climate risk is finally appreciated worldwide, the entire world is ramping up for energy transplant surgery. The second is that powerful vested interests, including the Koch brothers, ExxonMobil until recently (but no longer), and Peabody Coal, told the American people lies about climate change for years and, even worse, funded the campaigns of politicians who have been willing to oppose climate legislation in return for campaign dollars.
And third, stunningly, because of the same lobbying pressures, there has been far too little long-term energy planning in Washington. The first job of President Trump and the new Congress should be to call upon the National Academy of Sciences and the great engineers across America to come up with an energy plan. Yes, this won’t be the instinct or desire of the incoming administration, but I believe that the climate and energy reality will hit and hit hard, especially as infrastructure planning gets underway. It’s the job of all Americans to speed the process of returning energy policy to science and sanity.
Washington had better make up for lost time. As the 2016 Nobel Laureate in Literature declared half a century ago, “Come Senators, Congressmen, Please heed the call, Don’t stand in the doorways, Don’t block up the halls…For the times they are a changin’.”