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by
Vaclav Smil
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January 26 - February 3, 2023
the global impact of the recent turn toward decarbonizing electricity generation—by installing solar PV panels and wind turbines—has been completely negated by the rapid rise of greenhouse gas emissions in China and elsewhere in Asia.
Another extreme—and completely theoretical—calculation shows that, even should we burn all of the world’s known reserves of all fossil fuels (coal, crude oil, and natural gas: an impossibility due to the prohibitive costs of extracting these fuels from mostly marginal deposits), atmospheric O2 concentration would be reduced by just 0.25 percent.[59]
Informed looks at the three existential necessities of life—breathing, drinking, and eating—concur: there should be no unavoidable apocalypse by 2030 or 2050. Oxygen will remain abundant. Concerns about water supply will increase in many regions, but we have the knowledge and we should be able to mobilize the means needed to avert any mass-scale life-threatening shortages. And we should not only maintain but improve average per capita food supply in low-income countries, while reducing excessive production in affluent nations.
We were unprepared—to a degree even those of us who expected major problems found surprising—for an event whose near-imminent occurrence could have been forecast with 100 percent certainty:
Although we almost immediately identified the full genetic makeup of this new pathogen, national public policy responses to its spread ranged from largely business as usual (Sweden) to draconian (but belated) countrywide shutdowns (Italy, Spain), and from early dismissals (the US in February 2020) to early successes that turned into later problems (Singapore).
global climate change is an extraordinarily complex development whose eventual outcome depends on far-from-perfectly understood interactions of many natural and anthropogenic processes. As a result, we will need, for decades to come, more observations, more studies, and far better climate models in order to get more accurate appraisals of long-term trends and of the most likely outcomes.
To believe that our understanding of these dynamic, multifactorial realities has reached the state of perfection is to mistake the science of global warming for the religion of climate change.
Quests to avoid unnecessary energy use, to reduce air pollution and water, and to provide more comfortable living conditions should be perennial imperatives, not sudden desperate actions aimed at preventing a catastrophe.
During the 2010s, SUVs became the second-highest cause of rising CO2 emissions, behind electricity generation and ahead of heavy industry, trucking, and aviation. If their mass public embrace continues, they have the potential to offset any carbon savings from the more than 100 million electric vehicles that might be on the road by 2040!
And what have we done to avert, or to reverse, the unfolding environmental change in the three decades since global warming became a dominant topic of modern discourse? The data are clear: between 1989 and 2019 we increased global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions by about 65 percent.
The combination of our inaction and of the extraordinarily difficult nature of the global warming challenge is best illustrated by the fact that three decades of large-scale international climate conferences have had no effect on the course of global CO2 emissions.
The IPCC report on 1.5°C warming offers a scenario based on such a sudden and persistent reversal of our reliance on fossil fuels that the global emissions of CO2 would be halved by 2030 and eliminated by 2050
those who chart their preferred paths to a zero-carbon future owe us realistic explanations, not just sets of more or less arbitrary and highly improbable assumptions detached from technical and economic realities and ignoring the embedded nature, massive scale, and enormous complexity of our energy and material systems.
Cutting per capita energy demand by half in three decades would be an astonishing accomplishment given the fact that over the previous 30 years global per capita energy demand rose by 20 percent.
Alas, a close reading reveals that these magic prescriptions give no explanation for how the four material pillars of modern civilization (cement, steel, plastic, and ammonia) will be produced solely with renewable electricity, nor do they convincingly explain how flying, shipping, and trucking (to which we owe our modern economic globalization) could become 80 percent carbon-free by 2030; they merely assert that it could be so.
But these specific critiques of published rapid-speed transformation narratives are really beside the point: it makes no sense to argue with the details of what are essentially the academic equivalents of science fiction. They start with arbitrarily set goals (zero by 2030 or by 2050) and work backwards to plug in assumed actions to fit those achievements, with actual socioeconomic needs and technical imperatives being of little, or no, concern.
Reality thus presses in from both ends. The sheer scale, cost, and technical inertia of carbon-dependent activities make it impossible to eliminate all of these uses in just a few decades.
We can proceed fairly fast with the displacement of coal-fired electricity by natural gas (when produced and transported without significant methane leakage, it has a substantially lower carbon intensity than coal) and by expanding solar and wind electricity generation. We can move away from SUVs and accelerate mass-scale deployment of electric cars, and we still have large inefficiencies in construction, household, and commercial energy use that can be profitably reduced or eliminated. But we cannot instantly change the course of a complex system consisting of more than 10 billion tons of
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De omnibus dubitandum (Doubt everything) must be more than a durable Cartesian quote; it must remain the very foundation of the scientific method.
When looking ahead, we must regain a critical perspective when dealing with all models exploring environmental, technical, and social complexities. There are no limits to assembling such models or, as fashionable lingo has it, constructing narratives.
Regardless of the perceived (or modeled) severity of global environmental challenges, there are no swift, universal, and widely affordable solutions to tropical deforestation or biodiversity loss, to soil erosion or to global warming.
As a result, non-carbon energies could completely displace fossil carbon in a matter of one to three decades ONLY if we were willing to take substantial cuts to the standard of living in all affluent countries and deny the modernizing nations of Asia and Africa improvements in their collective lots
Still, major reductions in carbon emissions—resulting from the combination of continued efficiency gains, better system designs, and moderated consumption—are possible, and a determined pursuit of these goals would limit the eventual rate of global warming.
Most notably, what remains in doubt is our collective—in this case global—resolve to deal effectively with at least some critical challenges. Solutions, adjustments, and adaptations are available. Affluent countries could reduce their average per capita energy use by large margins and still retain a comfortable quality of life. Widespread diffusion of simple technical fixes ranging from mandated triple windows to designs of more durable vehicles would have significant cumulative effects. The halving of food waste and changing the composition of global meat consumption would reduce carbon
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There are ways to reduce those impacts but the resolve to deploy them at required scales has been lacking, and if we start acting in a sufficiently effective manner (and this now requires doing so on a global scale) we will have to pay a considerable economic and social price.
Catastrophists have always had a hard time imagining that human ingenuity can meet future food, energy, and material needs—but during the past three generations we have done so despite a tripling of the global population since 1950.
Catastrophists are wrong, time after time.
As a result, even a tripling or quadrupling of the recent pace of decarbonization would still leave fossil carbon dominant by 2050.
While it has been possible to replace a billion landlines by mobile phones within a generation, it will not be possible to replace terawatts of power installed in steam and gas turbines by photovoltaic cells or wind turbines within a similar time span.
The country that spends more than half a trillion every year on its military (more than all of its potential adversaries put together) was unprepared for an event that was absolutely certain to occur, and it did not have enough basic medical supplies: investment in domestic production worth a few hundred million dollars could have significantly reduced the economic losses of COVID-19, measured in the trillions![45]
Crises expose realities and strip away obfuscation and misdirection. The response of the affluent world to COVID-19 deserves a single ironic comment: Homo deus indeed!
lowered the overall risk of living, but it has not made many existential perils either more predictable or more manageable.
In some critical instances, our successes and our abilities to avoid the worst outcomes have been due to being prescient, vigilant, and determined to find effective fixes. Notable examples range from eliminating polio (by developing effective vaccines) to lowering the risks of commercial flying (by building more reliable airplanes and introducing better flight control measures), from reducing food pathogens (by a combination of proper food processing, refrigeration, and personal hygiene) to making childhood leukemia a largely survivable illness (by chemotherapy and stem cell transplants).
The future is a replay of the past—a combination of admirable advances and (un)avoidable setbacks. But there is something new as we look ahead, that unmistakably increasing (albeit not unanimous) conviction that, of all the risks we face, global climate change is the one that needs to be tackled most urgently and effectively.
The UN’s first climate conference took place in 1992, and in the intervening decades we have had a series of global meetings and countless assessments and studies—but nearly three decades later there is still no binding international agreement to moderate the annual emissions of greenhouse gases and no prospect for its early adoption.
No real progress can be achieved until at least these top five countries, now responsible for 80 percent of all emissions, agree to clear and binding commitments. But we are nowhere close to embarking on such a concerted global action.
even drastic reductions going well beyond anything that could be realistically envisaged will not show any convincing benefits for decades.
This raises the extraordinarily difficult problem of intergenerational justice—that is, our never-failing propensity to discount the future.[59]
A commonly used climate-economy model indicates the break-even year (when the optimal policy would begin to produce net economic benefit) for mitigation efforts launched in the early 2020s would be only around 2080.
Are the young citizens of affluent countries ready to put these distant benefits ahead of their more immediate gains? Are they willing to sustain this course for more than half a century even as the low-income countries with growing populations continue, as a matter of basic survival, to expand their reliance on fossil carbon? And are the people now in their 40s and 50s ready to join them in order to bring about rewards they will never see?
Failures revealed during crises offer costly and convincing illustrations of our recurrent inability to get the basics right, to take care of the fundamentals. By now, readers of this book will appreciate that this (short) list must include the security of basic food, energy, and material supply, all provided with the least possible impact on the environment, and all done while realistically appraising the steps that we can take to minimize the extent of future global warming.
The future, as ever, is not predetermined. Its outcome depends on our actions.
