I’m a pessimist. It’s already too late to mitigate the problem. Not that it shouldn’t be mandatory given that we have young’s we’re screwing over. At least they’re not taking it sitting down politically:
Now off to my e-bike for the 5 mile commute home…
This is already playing out in California, where Pacific Gas & Electric’s defective equipment caused massive wildfires on public & private lands dessicated by drought. PG&E corporation faces slap-on-the-wrist fines; the individuals responsible were unindicted by then-AG Kamala Harris & will go off scot-free. The people who lost it all in the fires get nothing. PG&E threatens bankruptcy to avoid paying out on individual lawsuits. And they just applied for a rate hike to deal with the costs!
Please show your math.
A trillion dollars - well-spent - buys a LOT of renewable tech.
There is also turnover involved with existing infrastructure right now. Somehow, our economy comes up with the money for all these things already. People upgrade their furnaces/cars/stoves all the time. Imagine if we increased targeted subsidies for renewables to the point where a Tesla 3 cost less than a Honda Civic. Or retrofitting your home with heat exchangers cost less than a new gas furnace.
Right now, the average American household spends about $3000.00 for every single person in that household year after year just for fossil fuels. We will not have to spend money for that anymore.
We will save billions on healthcare with cleaner air and water. Thousands of trillions (globally) in climate adaptation costs. There is a ton of money that will be available both short- and long-term.
The transition will be easy and cheap. Unless we think it won’t take government spending and mandates and instead rely on nebulous market forces.
I think you should go back and look at their qualifications. Here, for example, is from Jacobson’s cv:
Degrees and Employment
B. S., with distinction, Stanford University, Civil Engineering, 1988
B. A., with distinction, Stanford University, Economics, 1988
M. S., Stanford University, Environmental Engineering, 1988
M. S., UCLA, Atmospheric Sciences, 1991
Ph. D., UCLA, Atmospheric Sciences, 1994
Research Asst., UCLA, Atmospheric Sciences, 1989-1994
Teaching Assistant, UCLA, Atmospheric Sciences, 1989-1994
Postdoctoral Student, UCLA, Atmospheric Sciences, June-September, 1994
Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, 1994-2001.
Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford Univ., 2001-2007
Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, 2007-present
Professor by Courtesy of Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford Univ, 2007-2010
Associate Director, Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, Stanford University, September, 1996-2004.
Director and co-founder, Atmosphere/Energy Program (link), Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, 2004-present.
Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment (link), January 2008-present
Senior Fellow, Precourt Institute for Energy (link), January 1, 2010-present
Co-founder, The Solutions Project (link), July 10, 2011-present.
Here is a description of Mark Delucchi research interests. Ecology is not mentioned:
Dr. Mark A. Delucchi is a research scientist at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis and a private consultant, specializing in economic, environmental, engineering, and planning analyses of current and future transportation systems. He is a member of the Alternative Fuels Committee and the Energy Committee of the Transportation Research Board.
Dr. Delucchi’s research is in several areas: comprehensive analyses of the full social-costs of transportation; lifecycle analyses of emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants from transportation systems; modeling the lifetime cost and energy use of advanced electric and conventional vehicles; planning suburbs and transportation infrastructure to minimize the negative impacts of transportation; and comprehensive assessments of alternative transportation fuels.
Let’s put it this way: J&D are the best available information, as far as I can see. Unless there is a better source(s), we should be using the best available information.
Have you seen the latest bids for solar+storage? $0.025 per KwH. 2.5 cents.
Granted, these are in areas with great insolation, but./… so what? That’s still 5 cents a KwH in the northeast U.S. (!)
Plus, the latest degradation rates of good PV panels indicates that 80% of them will still be outputting at spec at 125 years after install. New design wind towers are expected to be working for 50-60 years.
There is good reason to be optimistic.
Great, we have the resources to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Do we have the resources to do that while also paying to repair the current effects of climate change? That will be a much different answer.
From fighting wildfires to rebuilding after hurricanes to increased costs to deal with pests and vermin who are exploding into new biomes to who knows what all, we are already rapidly increasing spending just trying to deal with the early effects of climate change. Even now, we do a terrible job helping the less fortunate get back to normal life after climate change events, which brings us increased homelessness and instability, which only makes paying for everything else harder. The insurance and mortgage companies in these areas are going to throw up their hands and walk away, and the downward spiral continues.
There was a time (November 2007, as a matter of fact) when I thought we might be able to get humanity’s shit together. When the benefits of improvement in our production and efficiency might be spread among everyone rather than the asshole 1%, but that hope is long gone. Now we’re going to be using that largess to pay for (mostly wealthy) people’s climate change emergency and security needs.
I need to go apologize again to my teenage nieces.
I don’t see the figures in their research for fighting the thousand of lawsuits that companies with a vested interest in the old system are going to bring to stonewall the change and prolong their profits…
Also, $3,000 per person per year in fuel costs? My family of 5 burns through $15k of oil, gas, and coal every year? No way. Assuming that’s the sum of all this year’s electric bills plus gas that’s about an order of magnitude off, and I’m hardly an eco nut. Back of the envelope it’s about $2500-$3000 for my entire household.
Maybe they’re going all the way down the rabbit hole and including gas burned for delivering packages, mail, etc… Farmers burning fuel to raise crops. That kind of analysis. Basically if the entire economy is dependant on oil then the figure is basically just GDP.
PG&E is in bankruptcy, not threatening it.
I’ve read a lot of places (including here) that renewables are now a lot cheaper than fossil. Then there’s this:
So it seems that there must be a state or a couple of states that have the political will to go all in and pilot this. Once people find out that not only will it not cost anything, but that there will be huge cash dividends, the rest of the country will be pounding on their door.
I did, before I posted the post you replied to. Rather than copy-pasting their entire CVs, why not point out the part that contradicts what I said?
All true, and none of it relates to the problem of storage, which is the hard part. If we even had a 50% efficient storage system that was cheap enough to scale, that would be plenty, but we don’t.
There are a number of (also peer-reviewed) critiques of their articles ( such as Ted Trainer’s) that mostly focus on their assumptions that a number of storage technologies that have never been deployed at scale will be easy, when people actually working on developing those technologies don’t necessarily think so.
I’m not sure where you got that figure.
From this article
100% solar and wind (which is pretty much what Jacobson and Delucchi are proposing) would require 3 weeks of energy storage. Based on $209/kWh just for the batteries (full systems are ~2x this, but you could probably minimize costs for the rest if you had sufficient economies of scale ) , you’re looking at ~$350 trillion just for the batteries.
The article above also points out that you could get to 80% solar and wind with only 12 hours of storage, which would only cost ~$8.2 trillion, just for the batteries. Assume ~1.5x that for the entire storage system. That doesn’t include the actual solar cells or wind turbines, or grid upgrades, and assumes we can get enough lithium to make all the batteries.
This is actually a totally plausible project, but the costs are several times Jacobson’s estimates, even just from a back-of-the-envelope calculation, when you restrict your assumptions to technology that exists and is deployed at scale (which Jacobson and Delucchi do not), and it only gets us to 80%.
We could totally plausibly do that, and make up the remaining 20% for base load with nuclear, but there’s a lot of opposition to nuclear. Personally, I think people opposed to putting nuclear in the mix to go carbon neutral significantly overestimate the danger of nuclear, and enormously underestimate the danger of global warming.
I mean like I said, I can keep thinking of things.
But fine.
It cost half a billion dollars to get the Empire State Building a little more than one third the way to net zero. So let’s say, to be generous, that half a billion is the cost to net zero a building 150m or taller.
In just the ten tallest cities, there are ~1400 buildings 150m or taller.
500,000,000 x 1,400 ~ .7 trillion. Just to net zero the tallest buildings in the ten tallest cities in the world. With an extremely generous assumption.
So yeah, I think making the entire building stock of the world net zero alone will cost a fuckload, probably by itself somewhere near global gdp right now wouldn’t be shocking.
You said it, meng
Yeah, before CNN et al., of course, was:
CNN is not managing the debates. Surely there is a better way to run them, and it’s really doing a terrible job this round.
Heck yeah.
From 2017:
3 weeks of energy storage?!?
Never seen that before.
And you are quoting 2017 prices for storage batteries, already down to $187 early this year and assumed to be under $100 in a few years.
There are a variety of solutions that do not cost hundreds of trillions of dollars of storage batteries. Overproduction, HVDC transmission = distance storage including international distances, EV fleet battery storage, hydro storage.
4 years ago, energy managers were writing articles saying we won’t even need storage until RE penetration of the grid reaches 80%! And there has been a lot of local PV projects since then, reducing storage needs even further.
It is a complicated subject all right, but room for both optimism and pessimism.
It’s just not a gravy train for the “right”* people.
To back up your point, renewable energy in the US already employs 3 times as many people as the entire fossil fuel industry and 17 times as many as coal. In fact, the more coal a state produces or uses, the further behind other states its “GDP” is.
So if your state government is pushing coal-fired power plants or coal mining as an industry, make them stop. They’re not just killing the planet, but also wasting 10-20% of your pay packet.
Just a quick aside. We’ve all profited from CO2 contamination of our planet. We are an industrialized society and could not have become so without fossil fuels. The real question is do we have the chutzpah to not only change our energy source but also our wasteful (looking at you 3d printed do dads) avaricious appetites.
As noted above, I agree. It’s not even a question, because those of us still alive in 20 years will have no choice but to change our wasteful ways whatever happens. So as individuals we’re already on the hook one way or the other in a way and to a degree only a minority of people understand.
What isn’t acceptable, and what’s sadly still open to question thanks to “free” market fundies, is if the large corporate “persons” responsible for most global emissions will be paying now to start helping repair the damage they caused and knew they were causing.
Well, if it requires our elected officials’ true interests to sacrifice even a penny, no sufficient response will be coming.
I guess decades of electing corporate tools has a cost.
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