First: poor folks want power too. I lived in Accra, Ghana for 3 years - in fact, I met you there when you gave a talk at the school where I taught. Power outages there were a given - lasting a few hours to most of a day. My complex, like all housing for westerners, had an adjunct generator and a 24/7 guard tasked with firing it up when the power died. But the vast majority of regular citizens were not so lucky of course - they learned to live their lives around these frequent interruptions.
Ghana is one of dozens of developing nations, all of whom (thanks to the Internet) know about how things are in developed nations and wonder why life can't be the same for them. How do we explain to these folks that all those coal fired power plants their leaders are planning to build will make the planet unlivable, when all they want is air conditioning and televisions, like everyone else?
The other problem is the "kid in the candy store" problem: an 8 year old finds himself in a candy store with no one in attendance and lots and lots and lots of candy all around, just waiting to be devoured. Delicious candy. Sweet, chocolaty, fluffy, crunchy, wonderful candy. Somewhere in the back of the child's mind is the voice of his mother telling him too much candy will make him sick, but it grows quieter and quieter by the moment.
Clearly, the kid is capitalism, and the candy is profit. Expecting capitalists to forego profit is a great deal like expecting that child to steer clear of the candy. What's needed in both cases is an adult in the room to regulate the behavior - a concept that many of us in "The Land of the Free" find abhorrent.
Unfortunately, as we've seen with Biden, there is another factor at play: adults like candy too. So they can be bribed pretty damn easily, especially in an election system like ours that operates much too much like the capitalist system it is tasked with regulating.
And so the solution is as obvious as it is out of reach: we must change the infrastructure of our political system by getting rid of the thinly veiled bribes euphemistically referred to as "campaign contributions."
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of humans living on the planet want to continue doing so; unfortunately the poorest among us don't want to stay that way and the wealthiest among us just can't resist all that candy.
good to be in touch again! that trip to Ghana was for reporting this story in the New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/26/the-race-to-solar-power-africa, which pointed to hopeful signs that in much of the country renewable energy was beginning to provide good power--I was especially impressed with the Black Star Energy company.
As for your candy store analogy, i fear it's precisely correct
Great article! And you're correct - Ghanaians and others can bypass the power grid and go straight to independent systems. Most citizens in sub-Saharan Africa are pragmatic. That's why there are more cell phones than indoor toilets: cell phones are much more useful. Sounds like they're creating a model we can all learn from. Wakanda Forever!
The most powerful way to say NO to fossil fuels is to make the polluters pay. Put a price on carbon pollution at the mine, wellhead, or port of entry. Increase the price automatically every year. Give the money back to the people as dividends to offset their increasing energy costs. Apply a carbon border adjustment to make carbon pricing effective internationally. Carbon fee-and-dividend can take the profit out of fossil fuels, support our people, and quickly reduce emissions.
I have two lines of thought to offer. First, on the veracity of claims that "renewable" tech are the answer. And second, on what I believe is the underlying mistaken belief that the industrial/financial/corporate/legislative/consumer complex can be incentivized to take any measures that will actually reduce GHG emissions.
Before polymath Simon Michaux's important work to calculate the mineral resources needed & available to transition to a global electrified energy system, it has simply been assumed and premised, without evidence, that "clean" energy technologies can replace FFs. The results of his deep diving research show this is clearly not the case. So I strongly recommend familiarity with his work. The unfortunately negative implications that his analysis has for the promise of wind, solar, geothermal, green hydrogen, etc. may be disheartening but may also be the basis (in physics!) for rethinking what our options really are. I recommend the entire hour but you could skip the bio & oil production stats, and start at 11:40.
The point here is that IF we are fooling ourselves about the promise of renewables we had better know it & be talking about it sooner than later. FF production & use is only accelerating – and renewables are entirely dependent on FFs for their manufacture, deployment, etc. If we are then left with geoengineering intervention, this too is fraught with contention and uncertainty. I DO think we are fooling ourselves that civilization can repair the damage we have done or prevent further damage by deploying "green" energy intensive technologies. What we need, IMO, is a global pivot to focus on preservation of Nature and human strategic adaptation to baked-in further climate disruption across the globe.
Second, my argument against the proposition that the industrial/financial/corporate/legislative/consumer complex can be incentivized to take any measures that will actually reduce GHG emissions is simple: Any move that restricts economic growth is politically forbidden. No politician, no nation, has or will commit to radically reduce emissions. The reason is that the fragile fabric of commerce & attendant social contracts would disastrously fall apart if FF energy supplies were to be severely restricted. Millions of jobs and businesses dependent on supply chain stability enabled by FF abundance would face disaster if bold interventions are attempted to reduce energy use. Where does this leave us?
It is apparent that there are no realistic solutions that get us off of FFs. We are screwed in the long run for so many reasons, not least because no amount of new tech helps other than for the few who can afford it as a short-term fix. With “green” tech we think we have the goose that lays golden eggs. We think so because we’ve been sold a fairy tale.
Indra Adnan talks us to us about "the missing social architectures of agency for human beings" in these, our times.
Politics is not what is missing.
The politicians that you lionize as "leaders" are elected or appointed civil servants who work for us, through the authority and accountability architectures of constitutional representative self-government and electoral politics.
They do the job they are elected to do. Or they lose their next election, and get fired from that job.
Elections are not the social architecture for agency by humans that is missing in the climate crisis.
Money is.
Politicians are not leaders. They are regulators. Architects of redistribution policies to correct for the worst failures of minimally acceptable social equity in distribution through enterprise, in the markets.
The climate challenge is this one: we cannot let the markets make the initial energy distribution decisions, and then use politics to correct the market's wrong choices through regulatory redistribution. We have to find a way to change our energy choices, pre-distribution. The way that will let us do that is the social architecture that is currently missing.
Money and Finance are the social architectures of predistribution. It is through Money and Finance that we have to take control of our social choices of energy technologies. How are we going to do that?
There is only one kind on money in our economy today that has the mission, the duty and the scale to take control of our energy technology choices, globally, and change them, everyone, all at once, from energy extraction from hydrocarbons to new energy technologies that do not cannibalize humanity's future. This is not a simple choice. It involves a comprehensive and cohesive plan to rapidly replace-to-retire hydrocarbons by Commissioning the deployment of new energy technologies that are sized and timed to the Decommissioning of existing energy extraction from hydrocarbons, to keep the lights on, and people well employed in life-affirming, socially-engaging work, as we restore the balance in our energy accounts with Nature, without creating problematic deficits in other accounts.
This is not a choice of growth. It is a choice of prudence.
Our current financial system is created by design to choose growth. It is not fit to the task of choosing prudence.
But we do have The Pension Promise. We're just not using it.
Pensions are the most important social innovation of the 20th Century, precisely because they are built for predistributive prudence in the financing of enterprise that shapes the patterns of distribution within our economy. On energy, and virtually every other thing.
But we inherited The Pension Promise only half-finished. People figured out in the 20th Century how to aggregate social superfunds to provision The Pension Promise. But they did not figure out how to deploy those funds as financing for enterprise that is prudent.
It falls to us to finish that job.
It's not a fight. It's work. The work of a new kind of 21st Century Global Citizenship in a new kind of 21st Century Global Social Contract. For prudence. Through finance. By pensions.
It is work that needs to be organized. By civil society.
Bill, I totally agree that we have to limit the use of oil by the countries of the world, but we also have to be honest about the many negative features of transitioning off of oil, e.g. the dramatic increase in the need for rare earth metals that transitioning to electricity will take, the continued need for oil at some level to power the machinery needed to build wind farms, EVs etc. and the huge increase in mining that’ll be needed to get these rare earth metals adding yet another element that will contribute to despoiling our planet, add to a decrease in water availability not to mention the ensuing problems with decreasing biodiversity. It bothers me that folks think getting off of oil will solve all our problems. A carefully planned effort to decrease fossil fuel usage is certainly necessary but even then IMO the concomitant problems may also be as existentially catastrophic.
These posts are great. My minor quibble is I don’t know what ’Adnoc’ means. Could you define what an acronym means the first time you use it in a post? Thank you.
Mr. McKibben, thank you for another excellent column. I dont know why the President and Congress are agreeing to fossil projects. I guess Joe Manchin's yacht payment. Nor why Mr. Kerry supports UAE is hosting climate negotiations.. seems like a mockery almost, perhaps even something forced on him through blackmail or extortion. Seems like something guaranteed to humiliate him in history's eyes.
I had a comment about that 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground. I apologize because I'm sure someone else has said this before in this forum. But I have read about oil is just so useful for heart valves and plastics lubrication you name it. If we could just keep from oxidizing into CO2, or NOx as combustion byproduct, AND keep from having it react with H to create CH4, it is so useful.
I know it sounds like a pipe dream, and that the ravenous fossil companies dont want that smaller market. But I could imagine every person in the world could utilize, without burning, say one barrel of oil a year, for plastics, tools, vehicles, medical devices, synthetics, housing, energy systems, and lube. Thsts 8 B bbl/yr, at say $200/bbl at wholesale at the "low" volume.
$1.6T/yr gross, just thecrude revenue, before all the huge value added sevices of refining and processing. Maybe it would be SWAG $8T/yr total lrevenue, from 1 bbl/yr/capita?
At the end of their life cycle the plastics or materials if they were disposed of by savvy burial or sequestration, without combustion or decomposition, they would end up right back in the ground. Of course there would be some inevitable GHG emission
Perhapsscience and engineering could perhaps keep it "low", and we would benefit from all the really remarkable things, especially medical devices, graphene, carbon fiber, motor oil, machine oil, asphalt, tires, metamaterials,..that oil is best suited for. Just not make CO/CO2, CH4, or CFCs nor NOx or SOx while doing so?
Sure no problem, go away, trust us...
So yes it is a pipe dream, and I'm sure I'm also neglecting inevitable required oxidations and hydrogenation, during refining and processing;.
A colleague in a google group wrote, "we now have to reduce global GHG emissions from an estimated 58 GT CO2e in 2022 by 6.12% per year to reach 35 GT by 2030."
In 2013, Jim Hansen advocated for a 6% annual decline in his December 3, 2013, paper "Assessing 'Dangerous Climate Change': Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions …" (Bit.ly/HansenPLOS). That jives with an eight-year compounded 6% decline from 58 to 35 GT CO2e he highlighted.
It occurred to me that a metrics that could track progress in visible terms could be expressed in two hashtags: #RetireRefineries #OnePerWeek
Retiring 750 global refineries at 6% would have initially shut down 45 refineries beginning in 2014, and 6% more in 2015, etc. That would equate to the termination of oil production and refining output equal to two “ExxonMobils“ annually. How many refineries have been shuttered in the past decade?
What physics of climate science has changed such that the decline in emissions has been relaxed so significantly? What in “Hansen’s science“ has caused the goal posts to be moved so dramatically?
If Hansen's work was solid, shouldn’t the appropriate hashtags now be #RetireRefineries #TwoPerWeek or faster?
Houston, we have a conundrum … It's going to take an act of Congress ... as if that is possible ...
I see two problems here.
First: poor folks want power too. I lived in Accra, Ghana for 3 years - in fact, I met you there when you gave a talk at the school where I taught. Power outages there were a given - lasting a few hours to most of a day. My complex, like all housing for westerners, had an adjunct generator and a 24/7 guard tasked with firing it up when the power died. But the vast majority of regular citizens were not so lucky of course - they learned to live their lives around these frequent interruptions.
Ghana is one of dozens of developing nations, all of whom (thanks to the Internet) know about how things are in developed nations and wonder why life can't be the same for them. How do we explain to these folks that all those coal fired power plants their leaders are planning to build will make the planet unlivable, when all they want is air conditioning and televisions, like everyone else?
The other problem is the "kid in the candy store" problem: an 8 year old finds himself in a candy store with no one in attendance and lots and lots and lots of candy all around, just waiting to be devoured. Delicious candy. Sweet, chocolaty, fluffy, crunchy, wonderful candy. Somewhere in the back of the child's mind is the voice of his mother telling him too much candy will make him sick, but it grows quieter and quieter by the moment.
Clearly, the kid is capitalism, and the candy is profit. Expecting capitalists to forego profit is a great deal like expecting that child to steer clear of the candy. What's needed in both cases is an adult in the room to regulate the behavior - a concept that many of us in "The Land of the Free" find abhorrent.
Unfortunately, as we've seen with Biden, there is another factor at play: adults like candy too. So they can be bribed pretty damn easily, especially in an election system like ours that operates much too much like the capitalist system it is tasked with regulating.
And so the solution is as obvious as it is out of reach: we must change the infrastructure of our political system by getting rid of the thinly veiled bribes euphemistically referred to as "campaign contributions."
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of humans living on the planet want to continue doing so; unfortunately the poorest among us don't want to stay that way and the wealthiest among us just can't resist all that candy.
good to be in touch again! that trip to Ghana was for reporting this story in the New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/26/the-race-to-solar-power-africa, which pointed to hopeful signs that in much of the country renewable energy was beginning to provide good power--I was especially impressed with the Black Star Energy company.
As for your candy store analogy, i fear it's precisely correct
Great article! And you're correct - Ghanaians and others can bypass the power grid and go straight to independent systems. Most citizens in sub-Saharan Africa are pragmatic. That's why there are more cell phones than indoor toilets: cell phones are much more useful. Sounds like they're creating a model we can all learn from. Wakanda Forever!
The most powerful way to say NO to fossil fuels is to make the polluters pay. Put a price on carbon pollution at the mine, wellhead, or port of entry. Increase the price automatically every year. Give the money back to the people as dividends to offset their increasing energy costs. Apply a carbon border adjustment to make carbon pricing effective internationally. Carbon fee-and-dividend can take the profit out of fossil fuels, support our people, and quickly reduce emissions.
I have two lines of thought to offer. First, on the veracity of claims that "renewable" tech are the answer. And second, on what I believe is the underlying mistaken belief that the industrial/financial/corporate/legislative/consumer complex can be incentivized to take any measures that will actually reduce GHG emissions.
Before polymath Simon Michaux's important work to calculate the mineral resources needed & available to transition to a global electrified energy system, it has simply been assumed and premised, without evidence, that "clean" energy technologies can replace FFs. The results of his deep diving research show this is clearly not the case. So I strongly recommend familiarity with his work. The unfortunately negative implications that his analysis has for the promise of wind, solar, geothermal, green hydrogen, etc. may be disheartening but may also be the basis (in physics!) for rethinking what our options really are. I recommend the entire hour but you could skip the bio & oil production stats, and start at 11:40.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc
The point here is that IF we are fooling ourselves about the promise of renewables we had better know it & be talking about it sooner than later. FF production & use is only accelerating – and renewables are entirely dependent on FFs for their manufacture, deployment, etc. If we are then left with geoengineering intervention, this too is fraught with contention and uncertainty. I DO think we are fooling ourselves that civilization can repair the damage we have done or prevent further damage by deploying "green" energy intensive technologies. What we need, IMO, is a global pivot to focus on preservation of Nature and human strategic adaptation to baked-in further climate disruption across the globe.
Second, my argument against the proposition that the industrial/financial/corporate/legislative/consumer complex can be incentivized to take any measures that will actually reduce GHG emissions is simple: Any move that restricts economic growth is politically forbidden. No politician, no nation, has or will commit to radically reduce emissions. The reason is that the fragile fabric of commerce & attendant social contracts would disastrously fall apart if FF energy supplies were to be severely restricted. Millions of jobs and businesses dependent on supply chain stability enabled by FF abundance would face disaster if bold interventions are attempted to reduce energy use. Where does this leave us?
It is apparent that there are no realistic solutions that get us off of FFs. We are screwed in the long run for so many reasons, not least because no amount of new tech helps other than for the few who can afford it as a short-term fix. With “green” tech we think we have the goose that lays golden eggs. We think so because we’ve been sold a fairy tale.
Indra Adnan talks us to us about "the missing social architectures of agency for human beings" in these, our times.
Politics is not what is missing.
The politicians that you lionize as "leaders" are elected or appointed civil servants who work for us, through the authority and accountability architectures of constitutional representative self-government and electoral politics.
They do the job they are elected to do. Or they lose their next election, and get fired from that job.
Elections are not the social architecture for agency by humans that is missing in the climate crisis.
Money is.
Politicians are not leaders. They are regulators. Architects of redistribution policies to correct for the worst failures of minimally acceptable social equity in distribution through enterprise, in the markets.
The climate challenge is this one: we cannot let the markets make the initial energy distribution decisions, and then use politics to correct the market's wrong choices through regulatory redistribution. We have to find a way to change our energy choices, pre-distribution. The way that will let us do that is the social architecture that is currently missing.
Money and Finance are the social architectures of predistribution. It is through Money and Finance that we have to take control of our social choices of energy technologies. How are we going to do that?
There is only one kind on money in our economy today that has the mission, the duty and the scale to take control of our energy technology choices, globally, and change them, everyone, all at once, from energy extraction from hydrocarbons to new energy technologies that do not cannibalize humanity's future. This is not a simple choice. It involves a comprehensive and cohesive plan to rapidly replace-to-retire hydrocarbons by Commissioning the deployment of new energy technologies that are sized and timed to the Decommissioning of existing energy extraction from hydrocarbons, to keep the lights on, and people well employed in life-affirming, socially-engaging work, as we restore the balance in our energy accounts with Nature, without creating problematic deficits in other accounts.
This is not a choice of growth. It is a choice of prudence.
Our current financial system is created by design to choose growth. It is not fit to the task of choosing prudence.
But we do have The Pension Promise. We're just not using it.
Pensions are the most important social innovation of the 20th Century, precisely because they are built for predistributive prudence in the financing of enterprise that shapes the patterns of distribution within our economy. On energy, and virtually every other thing.
But we inherited The Pension Promise only half-finished. People figured out in the 20th Century how to aggregate social superfunds to provision The Pension Promise. But they did not figure out how to deploy those funds as financing for enterprise that is prudent.
It falls to us to finish that job.
It's not a fight. It's work. The work of a new kind of 21st Century Global Citizenship in a new kind of 21st Century Global Social Contract. For prudence. Through finance. By pensions.
It is work that needs to be organized. By civil society.
Will you help organize it?
Bill, I totally agree that we have to limit the use of oil by the countries of the world, but we also have to be honest about the many negative features of transitioning off of oil, e.g. the dramatic increase in the need for rare earth metals that transitioning to electricity will take, the continued need for oil at some level to power the machinery needed to build wind farms, EVs etc. and the huge increase in mining that’ll be needed to get these rare earth metals adding yet another element that will contribute to despoiling our planet, add to a decrease in water availability not to mention the ensuing problems with decreasing biodiversity. It bothers me that folks think getting off of oil will solve all our problems. A carefully planned effort to decrease fossil fuel usage is certainly necessary but even then IMO the concomitant problems may also be as existentially catastrophic.
These posts are great. My minor quibble is I don’t know what ’Adnoc’ means. Could you define what an acronym means the first time you use it in a post? Thank you.
Mr. McKibben, thank you for another excellent column. I dont know why the President and Congress are agreeing to fossil projects. I guess Joe Manchin's yacht payment. Nor why Mr. Kerry supports UAE is hosting climate negotiations.. seems like a mockery almost, perhaps even something forced on him through blackmail or extortion. Seems like something guaranteed to humiliate him in history's eyes.
I had a comment about that 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground. I apologize because I'm sure someone else has said this before in this forum. But I have read about oil is just so useful for heart valves and plastics lubrication you name it. If we could just keep from oxidizing into CO2, or NOx as combustion byproduct, AND keep from having it react with H to create CH4, it is so useful.
I know it sounds like a pipe dream, and that the ravenous fossil companies dont want that smaller market. But I could imagine every person in the world could utilize, without burning, say one barrel of oil a year, for plastics, tools, vehicles, medical devices, synthetics, housing, energy systems, and lube. Thsts 8 B bbl/yr, at say $200/bbl at wholesale at the "low" volume.
$1.6T/yr gross, just thecrude revenue, before all the huge value added sevices of refining and processing. Maybe it would be SWAG $8T/yr total lrevenue, from 1 bbl/yr/capita?
At the end of their life cycle the plastics or materials if they were disposed of by savvy burial or sequestration, without combustion or decomposition, they would end up right back in the ground. Of course there would be some inevitable GHG emission
Perhapsscience and engineering could perhaps keep it "low", and we would benefit from all the really remarkable things, especially medical devices, graphene, carbon fiber, motor oil, machine oil, asphalt, tires, metamaterials,..that oil is best suited for. Just not make CO/CO2, CH4, or CFCs nor NOx or SOx while doing so?
Sure no problem, go away, trust us...
So yes it is a pipe dream, and I'm sure I'm also neglecting inevitable required oxidations and hydrogenation, during refining and processing;.
Sigh..maybe things change (lol).☹️
Hi Bill ... Any way to read the Rolling Stone piece without subscribing for $8 a month?
Thanks,
Phil Ritter, Sammamish, WA
Bill,
A colleague in a google group wrote, "we now have to reduce global GHG emissions from an estimated 58 GT CO2e in 2022 by 6.12% per year to reach 35 GT by 2030."
In 2013, Jim Hansen advocated for a 6% annual decline in his December 3, 2013, paper "Assessing 'Dangerous Climate Change': Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions …" (Bit.ly/HansenPLOS). That jives with an eight-year compounded 6% decline from 58 to 35 GT CO2e he highlighted.
It occurred to me that a metrics that could track progress in visible terms could be expressed in two hashtags: #RetireRefineries #OnePerWeek
Retiring 750 global refineries at 6% would have initially shut down 45 refineries beginning in 2014, and 6% more in 2015, etc. That would equate to the termination of oil production and refining output equal to two “ExxonMobils“ annually. How many refineries have been shuttered in the past decade?
What physics of climate science has changed such that the decline in emissions has been relaxed so significantly? What in “Hansen’s science“ has caused the goal posts to be moved so dramatically?
If Hansen's work was solid, shouldn’t the appropriate hashtags now be #RetireRefineries #TwoPerWeek or faster?
Houston, we have a conundrum … It's going to take an act of Congress ... as if that is possible ...
Doug