If the world doesn't get over fossil fuel addiction and allowing oil companies to push us to near extinction for their profits, really soon, the worse is yet to come.
Maybe in your part of the world. But grant me that it would be dumb to pay twice as much for electricity as for gas to heat my home to the same temperature which is the case. Heat pumps? For huge numbers of poor people across the world this a Marie Antoinette-esque gesture. I'm aware that there's no evidence she ever said words to the effect 'let them eat cakes' (people had no bread) but we all understand the metaphor.
Let's not forget that much of the cost of electricity is down to the massive costs involved in its distribution.
> Heat pumps? For huge numbers of poor people across the world this a Marie Antoinette-esque gesture.
We were specifically talking about Europe. And there, lots of people even in relatively wealthy countries like Germany still use gas for heating. The government could definitely be encouraging/subsidizing the use of heat pumps instead.
Obviously the idea is for transitioning where it's economically feasible, not demanding that poor people freeze to death, jesus christ.
and the current price is not the total cost, which should include externalities like this. (yes, electricity generation currently is also mostly a GHG emitting travesty, but not fundamentally, like nat.gas.)
Cost of resistive heating is around 2-5x the amount you'd pay for nat gas equivalent. Probably not that dumb, unless your actually point is that poor people just need to be cold for climate change.
As much as I would like to end such an addiction, there aren't even viable replacements for every ICE yet. What do we do about aircraft, freight trucks, and sea vessels?
To be clear, those three categories combined probably represent (spitball) less than 7% of total global emissions. We have a pretty clear path towards eliminating 80%+ of overall emissions, and that would buy us some time to figure out solutions for the remaining 20%.
But since you asked:
1- Freight trucks, for now, will likely be either carbon capture, or a clever EV retrofit like SixWheel. Batteries probably aren’t quite there (in 2022) to go full EV for all applications but the learning curve slope is such that that could conceivably be only 5 years away.
2- Aircraft are most certainly going to be SAF eg a green/renewable fuel until battery tech improves by an order of magnitude (10-20 years?)
3- Similar story for sea vessels on the batteries front, though for those CCS is likely to be the most promising interim solution.
For all of the categories you mentioned there are relatively promising 10-30 year prospects for full electrification and much more short term prospects for emissions mitigation. And these are part of the hardest 20% of emissions.
Long story short the situation is not nearly as bleak as you make it out to be.
> To be clear, those three categories combined probably represent (spitball) less than 7% of total global emissions. We have a pretty clear path towards eliminating 80%+ of overall emissions, and that would buy us some time to figure out solutions for the remaining 20%.
This is a problem that is going to take care of itself. World population is peaking and there's nothing that will get the world back to replacement fertility (2.1 children per woman) in the near term. As the world takes its long gentle slide into depopulation, carbon emissions will taper off. Problem solved.
Not just that, practically every petrochemical (plastic, fertilizer, synthetic rubber, etc) is derived from oil and/or natural gas. We need more fossil fuels to make the green tech in the first place (in the form of mines, powering factories, and producing petrochemicals). To convert the entire globe, we actually need to be producing a lot more than we currently are!
Sure a day may come when there's enough solar/wind/nuclear to restrict oil/natural gas to petrochemical production, but until that day green tech, like all others, follows the price of oil. You want to cut oil production now? Say good-bye to the green transition.
This is actually why I'm buying an ICE truck rather than an EV. We need fossil fuels for so much, including fertilizer. It feels irresponsible to buy an electric.
That would be rather logical now, wouldn't it? However, I'm afraid that when someone says that we must reduce our dependence on petrochemicals I must mention that there are things for which we have no replacement for petrochemicals. I must argue that eliminating petrochemical use is impossible any time you ask to reduce use. I don't make the rules.
Would you like to hear about how some Americans need a truck to do work too? Just go ahead and mention that we should aim to use smaller vehicles.
Yeah, how about we shut down large swaths of national economies. That's produced nothing but positive effects for all involved over the last couple of years.
Keep in mind, there are a (relatively) small number of ecomonies and peoples causing the majority of the damage / side effects. The others can continue as they have been.
The current model isn't sustainable. Something *must* change. There can be no actual change without change.
The point is, the economies in question (i.e., the over-contributors) need to change and all we're talking about is getting back to normal. In what reality is a normal that's so deadly so normalized and worshipped?
Something people don't seem to understand is that when it comes to externalities there are economic activities whose benefits exceed the downsides of the negative externality and activities whose negative externality by far exceeds its benefits. The latter makes everyone poorer except the person doing it but that person isn't even getting a reward that is worth the effort, he is just not losing out.
If you internalize a negative externality everyone will get wealthier simply because people only ruin the environment when it is actually worth it. People always say how fossil fuels were necessary for the industrial revolution but that only means that its benefits exceeded its negative externalities and therefore a pigovian tax would actually help it.
No, the others can't "continue as they have been" if things change.
Most of those countries "not causing a problem" accept a great deal of food and fuel imports from the "over-contributors", never mind goods, services and financing. They literally cannot support their populations without these imports. If the global economy comes screeching to a halt as major players scale down and just see to their own needs, many of the minor players literally starve in the dark. Just look at the impact of the Ukraine/Russia wheat supply disruption on North Africa/The middle east for a tiny example of what a global disruption would look like.
The current model can be made sustainable with time, proper policy and technological advancement. If for whatever reason we can't manage that, we're screwed.
People say "growth can't continue to infinity", and technically they're right. Problem is we know what no economic growth looks like. It's some form of feudalism, where powerful entities hoard all the wealth and we all rent the rest. The only attempt at something other than that was 20th century communism, and that... didn't work to say the least. So either we make history by creating the first ever successful re-distributive economic system, on a global scale, or we keep doing what we've been doing for centuries and hope technology and enlightened democracy can save the day.
My vote's on the latter, at least it has an overall positive track record.
> The current model can be made sustainable with time, proper policy and technological advancement. If for whatever reason we can't manage that, we're screwed.
Given history, the human psyche, as well as "progress" to date...then I'm betting on the fact that there are better odds of oil and water mixing.
We'd have a better chance 100 or 200 years ago when the masses we comfortable with and embraced sacrifice. Now it's all about comfort sans any sort of sacrifice. In addition, there's a destructive symbiotic relationship with those expectations and how leaders lead and how political parties think (i.e., short term, at best).
Climate change aside, the current model in the USA simply isn't sustainable. Infant mortality rate, obesity, mental health, gun violence, opioids...the list goes on and on. Covid was an opportunity to adjust course. Maybe even pivot. But we didn't have the will and our commitment to "back to normal" (which is corrupt and problematic at best) is stronger than ever.
We can't get off the sofa. How we gonna face climate change?
As far as technology solutions, we're headed for some form of The Matrix. The masses will be comfortable and consumption and pollution will be far less.
> They literally cannot support their populations without these imports.
That's no accident. It's by intent. Those countries can't develop their own healthy local economies when most everything is shipped in.
Look up clothing donations to Africa. Long to short, there was no way to have say a local cotton + clothing economy when free clothing was been dumped on a given economy.
>Problem is we know what no economic growth looks like. It's some form of feudalism, where powerful entities hoard all the wealth and we all rent the rest.
Powerful entities keep growing and getting a bigger share of the economy so we have to grow it just to not become poorer? Isn't it strange that no growth is considered the same thing as a shrinking standard of living? In any sane theoretical economics model, a lack of growth shouldn't mean a reduction of living standards, it should mean a continuation of our existing very high living standards which also precludes any form of automatic runaway wealth accumulation.
I have read a short anarchist book and I have seen the argument that it is the state that causes the problem but I am not fully convinced that just having a government is the problem but rather something the government does that is invisible to the naked eye. Subsidies are a classic example. Everyone drives because the road is free, nobody wants to pay the fully internalized costs of buses because the subsidy exposure of a car for every potential bus passenger is greater. The bus has to be subsidized to the same degree as the bus to compete! Those subsidies are paid for by taxes which decouples the amount of subsidies received from the amount of effort put in and the amount of labor paid into the system through taxes. This disconnect is most likely the problem when it comes to government activity. You can build a business and receive subsidies proportional to the size of the company while someone else has to pay for the subsidies.
Now, transportation is important but it only serves as an obvious in your face example where the subsidy structure is visible and how competition demands subsidies.
The real question is whether there are state subsidized factors of production. If they exist, then every other industry will have to ask for an equal level of subsidies to continue doing business.
The food industry is a classic industry where doing without a subsidy is unthinkable. The question is, why does food production need a subsidy in the first place? Can't farmers just be obligated to overproduce food on their own and pass this on as higher food prices, why does the government have to pay?
It has most likely to do with land as running a farm is impossible without it. If the land is leased, the farm is under intensive pressure to produce profitable crops rather than a surplus or the farmer won't be able to pay the lease. How is land subsidized? The military complex and police forces are in charge of protecting the country and enforcing property laws. How much can the owner of the land charge to the farmer? At least as high as the subsidy paid on land by providing free protective services plus the quality of the land itself. The latter subsidy might be paid by nature rather than the government but the government could tax this difference and remove the positive externality.
But even if production has succeeded, distribution must still happen and it can only happen through trading via the national money system which is practically speaking a monopoly. If you start out with no money, how do you get more money? By borrowing it for interest. That interest rate forces another profitability pressure on the farmer, he simply cannot produce food for everyone without a subsidy if that interest rate itself originated from a subsidy. Competing borrowers might be borrowing to buy land which receives subsidies thereby outcompeting farmers. There is also the fact that the money system is free but it generates massive amounts of costs for the economy. Printing physical bank notes costs money, providing bank accounts and branches costs money, providing loans costs money and accepting electronic payments require specialized terminals which cost money, opening a shop and providing goods every day aka widespread acceptance also costs money beyond the goods themselves.
What this means is that the holders of money get to sleep while everyone else without money must toil and keep moving and stay active. The subsidy isn't paid out in money but in real terms but the lender can now step in and market these subsidies as if he provided them, he can turn them into cold hard cash by charging interest. Thus the lower bound on interest on money that borrowed from another is somewhere between 3%-5% and the only way it is lower in practice is because banks create new money through loans rather than lending on existing deposits via CDs. If interest originates from subsidies then wealth accumulation must be automatic.
> The question is, why does food production need a subsidy in the first place?
Short answer, it's how politicians buy votes. Subsidies get the votes of the farmers. Lower food prices get the votes of the masses.
To your point, if politicans don't have the backbone to reduce such subsidies, and the masses don't have the will to demand it...how are we going to address a problem 100x as big?
Trains could replace a large portion of trucking and short haul flight. Food production can be much more localised in many places, and supply chains which see products circumnavigate the world several times will end themselves the second they have to pay for externalities.
The remained can be covered by already mentioned mechanisms.
Trucking industry is looking at hydrogen fuel cells. The hope is that renewables will create the hydrogen from water. For aircraft, the dream is to create synthetic fuels from ammonia. Ocean going vessels are hoping Diesel engines can be converted to use ammonia.
Unfortunately hydrogen has really low energy density, electrolyzers are slow, and it is also pretty explosive. I don’t see hydrogen fuel cells being nearly as attractive as EV retrofits or CCS as an interim solution until battery tech cost curves improve to the point of making full electrification a no brainer (probably not that far away…)
It's idiotic from an economic point of view too. There'd still be an industry if they'd scaled it back and made it more sustainable. Instead the industry has been wiped out and that's that.
So sad to see how easily long term catastrophic damage is justified by short term gains.