This article pisses me off because it takes the one piece of good news on the climate front in the last decade — the incredible rise of cheap solar — and dismisses it. And with talking points from 2019. Technology has changed!
1. “But everything is not yet electrified” — yes, that is why the strategy IS to electrify! Heat pumps exist, BEV exist. We can take stuff that isn’t electricity and MAKE it run on electricity. Deploy deploy deploy.
2. “But some things are hard to abate” — fewer every year! We have green fertilizer, green cement, and fully electric smelting in the pipeline. There’s been a bunch of startups attacking all of these hard-to-abate sectors.
3. “The West’s carbon emissions don’t even matter anymore” — and that’s a success story!!! Rich countries have decoupled standard of living from carbon intensity. So now the goal should be “make green electricity so cheap that it’s the default option”. Which China is working on. The West can invent green tech, China can scale its production, and the whole world can reap the benefits.
4. “What about deforestation and animal rights” — yes these things are bad too. And yes, “electrify everything” does not stop deforestation, why did you think it would? But the existence of a second problem has NOTHING to do with how effective green electrification solves greenhouse gas emissions. Oh, and also there’s a bunch of people working on plant-based meat and lab-grown meat. Cheap, clean power *does* help them.
5. “What about the changing albedo” — This is in fact another problem. And it is not one that electrification solves. I don’t know what to do about it, but I DO know that advocating for more greenhouse gas emissions does not solve it.
6. “What about the carbon in the atmosphere already” — There is a large group of people working on DAC and other sequestration techniques! All that tech works a lot better when you have cheap clean power! Everyone is talking about this, all the time!
I’m not even sure what policies the author prefers, since he raises only objections, no solutions. But advocating against cheap green electricity is stupid and wrong.
Yeah I agree. Totally down for more nuclear which feels like a solution he is pushing (and there’s some rad nuclear powered ice busting ships in Russia that might solve the shipping problem?). But shifting developed countries still leads the way for other countries
And many less developed countries are shifting very rapidly, like Pakistan. His dismissal of China is ridiculous too. Yes, they use lots of all kinds of energy, but even a cursory look at the actual numbers for solar, wind, nuclear, EVs— they’re just staggering. And they are actually reducing fossil consumption as a result, which is a big reason the Iran war is causing them less pain than most of Asia.
Yes. The article totaly read as "this solution is so bad because it does not solve everything". It would be like saying "let’s not vaccine people against herpes because they could still get smallpox anyway"
Yes, this article seems to be saying "there's no perfect solution, so we might as well give up." Hopefully a follow up article will tell us what we should be doing instead. And, yeah, nuclear seems like a good part of the solution.
Ah promoting the primary energy fallacy! Electrify and use 3-4x less energy for heating and 4-5x less for transport. This compounds with less energy needed for extracting refining and transporting hydrocarbons. Next.
I welcome your own numbers. My point is it is the refrain to dismiss 50-60% of today's energy as not requiring replication is putting lipstick on the pig of wind and solar's failure - being only 3.3% of energy after 25 years. This primary fallacy argument is mostly employed to shut down or diminish discussion of this fact. I contend this is counterproductive.
Since 2000, consumption of fossil fuels is up 56%, 86% of all energy is still fossil fuels and CO2 is up 52%. Clean nuclear is down in both absolute and relative terms. Our chosen strategy has been exclusively wind and solar, and it has failed us, significantly.
I have to ask, what is gained by dismissing the failure of wind and solar?
It is not a failure to solar and wind that nulcear nad geothermal have not progressed more. Why pose dfferent zero emissions tecno;ogies as alterntives? It's as bad as posing mitigation and adaption as alternatives.
Here are some of the resources I used. I have written specific essays on some of these as well over the past few months.
1. Sector-narrow multiplier. 3–4x holds for light vehicles and space heat. Steel, cement, plastics, trucking, shipping, aviation run near 1:1 — 30% of energy emissions now, ~60% by mid-century.
Thanks Quico, a brilliant summary. You say the role of albedo is hotly contested, but the facts from NASA and NOAA data are abundantly clear. The IPCC recognises NOAA's calculation that new emissions add 0.04 watts per square metre to Earth's Energy Imbalance through the greenhouse effect each year. Since 2023, NASA CERES satellite data has measured annual albedo loss at 0.2 w/m2, adding five times as much new warming as new emissions. And the darkening rate is doubling each decade. Ignoring albedo is a recipe for collapse.
Climate activists understand the stock of CO2 in the atmosphere perfectly well. That's why they don't want to add to it. Some part of the red in your pie chart would always be there, and the only way to reduce the stock is to wait for it to degrade.
Other parts of this read like "ok so the climate activists have been right all along, but it's too late to do anything about it now".
"the only way to reduce the stock is to wait for it to degrade"
Let's put the cost of removing a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere, and the cost of preventing the emission of a ton of CO2, in the same currency. If decarbonizing an industrial process costs more than removing the equivalent CO2 from the atmosphere, the industrial process should not be decarbonized. Sponsor an innovation prize for cheap carbon capture and use that as a baseline by which other green interventions can be measured.
(Note that carbon taxes basically accomplish this)
My equation tells you the most efficient way to remove any given quantity of carbon. It's then up to society to determine what quantity of carbon to remove.
Has Quico written on his positive interactions with activists or journalists in the climate community? For example, David Wallace-Wells has a huge audience: what does he think about Quico's work?
1. Everything is going to be electrified for additional reasons anyway, may as well advocate for it to happen faster.
2. Cement is a big problem. Others not so much: green virgin steel is possible, synthetic jet fuel is possible. We already have days where electricity prices are going negative due to solar, when the price of electricity is zero suddenly a lot of industrial processes become possible.
3. Reforestation is already the norm in rich countries.
Ultimately I think we disagree on perspective: I see global warming as a long term problem, while you think more immediate solutions are necessary. This leads me to focus on solutions that prioritise avoiding make the problem worse, while you focus on solutions that will work the fastest even at the expense of higher risk.
How big is that risk. Don't know. I certainly agree it would be worth funding large studies. But! Don't underestimate solar electricity, it's going to get very, very cheap.
The price of electricity hitting zero during periods when it isn't in demand (as is common for renewables) actually raises the cost of energy, see e.g. the UK
Shouldn't this sort of excess-electricity scenario create demand for green molecules technology, in order to capture the extra power for use when it's dark? I don't understand why people aren't discussing this more.
Yes, that's what negative prices means; the power plant has to pay to get rid of the excess which just increases their overall costs. However if an intermittent industrial user were to buy that excess power...
Negative prices are a result of excess solar and wind energy above demand. If you look at roof top solar there's no incentive to switch off (the panels have already been bought and there's no negative cost for the homeowner, hence why people are paid to take the power if they can. A fuelled generator will just switch off, as will as a wind or solar farm operator if they would actually have to pay to export, which will depend upon their specific contract. This zero cost or negative cost energy is obviously great for arbitrage with energy storage or industrial heat production.
Like a factory that make aviation fuel out of air and water using electricity. Normally far too expensive to be worth it, but if the electricity is practically free the economics suddenly look a lot better.
There are problems of amortizing the capital cost over all the time you *don't* use it, but with enough free electricity and scale I suspect capital costs of the equipment will come down enough for it to work.
Also I was referring more so to how users in the UK have to pay utilities for electricity they can't use, since otherwise said utilities will be disincentivized from producing
I just believe we have a lot more headroom to solve the problem than you or Quico do. That's what it really comes down to: how much time do we have and are there tipping points primed to go off, like AMOC.
Global warming is certainly a very big problem for humanity (and other life too for that matter), but I've built up a lot of scepticism for Doom scenarios over the years.
I think "electrify everything" is a) something I've never heard said, and b) is rolled out here like a Straw Man.
So called activists are pushing for much more change, one of the golden sayings: reduce, reuse and recycle. Just consuming less has to be better. Regardless, I agree the argument needs to be had more globally.
While it may be true that electricity is only 20% of the energy we use, it is still the case that it is responsible for a lot of CO2 emissions. In 2023 it was about 17 out of 50 billion tonnes, so about 35%, which means it's something worth tackling. Assume that people are not parochial about wanting to lower CO2 emissions from electricity (and other sources.) That is, assume that Germans, for example, understand that reducing emissions from Germany is not as important as reducing emissions from China. In that case, what we are talking about is a movement aimed at lowering emissions from the biggest hitters. That list is basically China, India, Iran, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and the US. They are responsible for over 70% of the emissions (from electricity) in 2023. I have tried to project out, to 2100, CO2 emissions, by country, both from electricity and non-electricity sources, and I let the non-energy sources abate much more slowly (because they are harder.) That model says that by 2100, using current trends, the world will be putting about 1900 Gt of CO2 into the atmosphere. If resources (money, technology, talent, etc.) from everywhere were aimed at just those countries in terms of reducing electricity-based emissions to zero, and abating non-electricity-related emissions, (both by 2050, very aggressive, I know) that number can be pushed down to more like 1100 Gt, so in the neighborhood of a 40% reduction in CO2 released. While this may not be enough to solve the entire problem, it seems like a major contribution to a solution, and not something to be dismissed out of hand. And while I recognize that this is looking only at the flow, not the already emitted gases, I don't see why the argument has to be either/or. Pushing these levels down would be hard. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere will also be hard. It feels to me like this effort requires all approaches.
One relatively easy to control contributor to global warming is aircraft contrails. Air traffic can be programmed to avoid contrail forming altitudes with a small penalty in fuel consumption.
Right, but apart from the lab meat startups, the carbon sequestration financial bonds, the iron filings in the ocean experiment, the Tesla-BYD electrification of the transport chain, and the rewilding projects across Europe, what has the environmental movement ever done for us?
Dude, you're overly concerned with what some journalists write. All of the things you mention have been the subject of intense interest and commercial efforts. If you have better ideas, write about them.
(With the exception of the albedo problem - I've never heard of anyone trying to find a commercial solution to that.)
I started reading you for life in Tokyo takes and I’ve kept reading you for this. But OK, what’s your positive vision? What should climate activists be doing? What should the rest of us be doing?
1. Nuclear is really not economically viable. It takes massive investment and then requires massive amounts of maintenance.
2. Solar and storage are already the cheapest forms of energy when considering maintenance.
3. Did you know that the same technology that makes EVs work in America and Europe also works in poorer countries? Columbia has just seen a massive rise in EVs. E-scooters are everywhere in China with battery swapping technology a refill takes but seconds.
4. When you have fewer ships hauling oil and fewer refineries making oil products, you need less oil to move those ships, less electricity to run the refineries, and less concrete to build the refineries. Its a reverse snowball effect where the more you generate and use locally the less demand you put on heavy industry.
This article pisses me off because it takes the one piece of good news on the climate front in the last decade — the incredible rise of cheap solar — and dismisses it. And with talking points from 2019. Technology has changed!
1. “But everything is not yet electrified” — yes, that is why the strategy IS to electrify! Heat pumps exist, BEV exist. We can take stuff that isn’t electricity and MAKE it run on electricity. Deploy deploy deploy.
2. “But some things are hard to abate” — fewer every year! We have green fertilizer, green cement, and fully electric smelting in the pipeline. There’s been a bunch of startups attacking all of these hard-to-abate sectors.
3. “The West’s carbon emissions don’t even matter anymore” — and that’s a success story!!! Rich countries have decoupled standard of living from carbon intensity. So now the goal should be “make green electricity so cheap that it’s the default option”. Which China is working on. The West can invent green tech, China can scale its production, and the whole world can reap the benefits.
4. “What about deforestation and animal rights” — yes these things are bad too. And yes, “electrify everything” does not stop deforestation, why did you think it would? But the existence of a second problem has NOTHING to do with how effective green electrification solves greenhouse gas emissions. Oh, and also there’s a bunch of people working on plant-based meat and lab-grown meat. Cheap, clean power *does* help them.
5. “What about the changing albedo” — This is in fact another problem. And it is not one that electrification solves. I don’t know what to do about it, but I DO know that advocating for more greenhouse gas emissions does not solve it.
6. “What about the carbon in the atmosphere already” — There is a large group of people working on DAC and other sequestration techniques! All that tech works a lot better when you have cheap clean power! Everyone is talking about this, all the time!
I’m not even sure what policies the author prefers, since he raises only objections, no solutions. But advocating against cheap green electricity is stupid and wrong.
Yeah I agree. Totally down for more nuclear which feels like a solution he is pushing (and there’s some rad nuclear powered ice busting ships in Russia that might solve the shipping problem?). But shifting developed countries still leads the way for other countries
And many less developed countries are shifting very rapidly, like Pakistan. His dismissal of China is ridiculous too. Yes, they use lots of all kinds of energy, but even a cursory look at the actual numbers for solar, wind, nuclear, EVs— they’re just staggering. And they are actually reducing fossil consumption as a result, which is a big reason the Iran war is causing them less pain than most of Asia.
Yes. The article totaly read as "this solution is so bad because it does not solve everything". It would be like saying "let’s not vaccine people against herpes because they could still get smallpox anyway"
Yes, this article seems to be saying "there's no perfect solution, so we might as well give up." Hopefully a follow up article will tell us what we should be doing instead. And, yeah, nuclear seems like a good part of the solution.
He also looks at only the problem through climate, not affordability and geopolitics. That’s the only way his ‘argument’ works.
Ah promoting the primary energy fallacy! Electrify and use 3-4x less energy for heating and 4-5x less for transport. This compounds with less energy needed for extracting refining and transporting hydrocarbons. Next.
The fallacy of the primary energy fallacy - https://needsofthemany98.substack.com/p/the-fallacy-of-the-primary-energy?r=gwg0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I've replied to your double fallacy. Your numbers seem rather out.
I welcome your own numbers. My point is it is the refrain to dismiss 50-60% of today's energy as not requiring replication is putting lipstick on the pig of wind and solar's failure - being only 3.3% of energy after 25 years. This primary fallacy argument is mostly employed to shut down or diminish discussion of this fact. I contend this is counterproductive.
Since 2000, consumption of fossil fuels is up 56%, 86% of all energy is still fossil fuels and CO2 is up 52%. Clean nuclear is down in both absolute and relative terms. Our chosen strategy has been exclusively wind and solar, and it has failed us, significantly.
I have to ask, what is gained by dismissing the failure of wind and solar?
It is not a failure to solar and wind that nulcear nad geothermal have not progressed more. Why pose dfferent zero emissions tecno;ogies as alterntives? It's as bad as posing mitigation and adaption as alternatives.
Here are some of the resources I used. I have written specific essays on some of these as well over the past few months.
1. Sector-narrow multiplier. 3–4x holds for light vehicles and space heat. Steel, cement, plastics, trucking, shipping, aviation run near 1:1 — 30% of energy emissions now, ~60% by mid-century.
ETC, Mission Possible: https://www.energy-transitions.org/publications/mission-possible/
Davis et al., Science 2018: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aas9793
2. Net energy. Buffered wind EROI falls 16 → 3.9; system-level energy invested consumes much of the 40%.
Weißbach et al. 2013, Energy 52:210: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360544213000492
Turver applying it to Eyre: https://davidturver.substack.com/p/electrification-efficiency-gains-illusion
3. Static snapshot. Eyre holds demand at today's level. IEA projects car energy falls only ~40% by 2050 despite a 3–4x device gain.
Ritchie on IEA scenarios: https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/iea-energy-scenarios
Thanks Quico, a brilliant summary. You say the role of albedo is hotly contested, but the facts from NASA and NOAA data are abundantly clear. The IPCC recognises NOAA's calculation that new emissions add 0.04 watts per square metre to Earth's Energy Imbalance through the greenhouse effect each year. Since 2023, NASA CERES satellite data has measured annual albedo loss at 0.2 w/m2, adding five times as much new warming as new emissions. And the darkening rate is doubling each decade. Ignoring albedo is a recipe for collapse.
⁹Didn't Aretha sing out loud a piece of the silver buckshof plan 60 years ago :
R-E-F-L-E-C-T!
looked it up :-)
And Melanie sang, “Lame Down”
Lame Down! Lame Down!
Candles in the rain.
We sure get an inferno climate with lame drawdown 😀
also a good one! :-) just read 30% error from underestimate less growth from vapor pressure deficit (VPD)
Doesn't past CO2 emissions, warming explain the albedo reduction?
I get the ethos of dunking on sierra club activists but this article is technically unrigorous.
Climate activists understand the stock of CO2 in the atmosphere perfectly well. That's why they don't want to add to it. Some part of the red in your pie chart would always be there, and the only way to reduce the stock is to wait for it to degrade.
Other parts of this read like "ok so the climate activists have been right all along, but it's too late to do anything about it now".
"the only way to reduce the stock is to wait for it to degrade"
Let's put the cost of removing a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere, and the cost of preventing the emission of a ton of CO2, in the same currency. If decarbonizing an industrial process costs more than removing the equivalent CO2 from the atmosphere, the industrial process should not be decarbonized. Sponsor an innovation prize for cheap carbon capture and use that as a baseline by which other green interventions can be measured.
(Note that carbon taxes basically accomplish this)
Plus taxing fuels in proportion to carbon content incentvizes emission-reducing and CO2 sequestration technology creation!
Your equation is missing the cost of doing nothing, which appears to be considerable.
My equation tells you the most efficient way to remove any given quantity of carbon. It's then up to society to determine what quantity of carbon to remove.
Only if there is an actual mechanism for removal, which removes less than it creates.
There's a choice between doing something and doing nothing and I agree that it needs to be framed in financial terms.
With cheap energy sequestration is possible.
If you frame a solution that does not solve everything as a bankruptcy, your avocating for paralysis.
Has Quico written on his positive interactions with activists or journalists in the climate community? For example, David Wallace-Wells has a huge audience: what does he think about Quico's work?
1. Everything is going to be electrified for additional reasons anyway, may as well advocate for it to happen faster.
2. Cement is a big problem. Others not so much: green virgin steel is possible, synthetic jet fuel is possible. We already have days where electricity prices are going negative due to solar, when the price of electricity is zero suddenly a lot of industrial processes become possible.
3. Reforestation is already the norm in rich countries.
Ultimately I think we disagree on perspective: I see global warming as a long term problem, while you think more immediate solutions are necessary. This leads me to focus on solutions that prioritise avoiding make the problem worse, while you focus on solutions that will work the fastest even at the expense of higher risk.
How big is that risk. Don't know. I certainly agree it would be worth funding large studies. But! Don't underestimate solar electricity, it's going to get very, very cheap.
The price of electricity hitting zero during periods when it isn't in demand (as is common for renewables) actually raises the cost of energy, see e.g. the UK
Shouldn't this sort of excess-electricity scenario create demand for green molecules technology, in order to capture the extra power for use when it's dark? I don't understand why people aren't discussing this more.
Yes, that's what negative prices means; the power plant has to pay to get rid of the excess which just increases their overall costs. However if an intermittent industrial user were to buy that excess power...
Negative prices are a result of excess solar and wind energy above demand. If you look at roof top solar there's no incentive to switch off (the panels have already been bought and there's no negative cost for the homeowner, hence why people are paid to take the power if they can. A fuelled generator will just switch off, as will as a wind or solar farm operator if they would actually have to pay to export, which will depend upon their specific contract. This zero cost or negative cost energy is obviously great for arbitrage with energy storage or industrial heat production.
Wdym by "intermittent industrial user"? Someone not connected to the grid?
Like a factory that make aviation fuel out of air and water using electricity. Normally far too expensive to be worth it, but if the electricity is practically free the economics suddenly look a lot better.
There are problems of amortizing the capital cost over all the time you *don't* use it, but with enough free electricity and scale I suspect capital costs of the equipment will come down enough for it to work.
Also I was referring more so to how users in the UK have to pay utilities for electricity they can't use, since otherwise said utilities will be disincentivized from producing
Quico is spot on in getting the climate beast tamed now so we can slay it before it slays us.
If we don't reflect drawdown would be pissin' in the fiery winds.
I just believe we have a lot more headroom to solve the problem than you or Quico do. That's what it really comes down to: how much time do we have and are there tipping points primed to go off, like AMOC.
Global warming is certainly a very big problem for humanity (and other life too for that matter), but I've built up a lot of scepticism for Doom scenarios over the years.
Nicolas, I really hope you are right. But, the numbers I see and my experiences in life sound red alarms that blare, "Reflect Now!".
Again, I really do hope you are right.
I think "electrify everything" is a) something I've never heard said, and b) is rolled out here like a Straw Man.
So called activists are pushing for much more change, one of the golden sayings: reduce, reuse and recycle. Just consuming less has to be better. Regardless, I agree the argument needs to be had more globally.
While it may be true that electricity is only 20% of the energy we use, it is still the case that it is responsible for a lot of CO2 emissions. In 2023 it was about 17 out of 50 billion tonnes, so about 35%, which means it's something worth tackling. Assume that people are not parochial about wanting to lower CO2 emissions from electricity (and other sources.) That is, assume that Germans, for example, understand that reducing emissions from Germany is not as important as reducing emissions from China. In that case, what we are talking about is a movement aimed at lowering emissions from the biggest hitters. That list is basically China, India, Iran, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and the US. They are responsible for over 70% of the emissions (from electricity) in 2023. I have tried to project out, to 2100, CO2 emissions, by country, both from electricity and non-electricity sources, and I let the non-energy sources abate much more slowly (because they are harder.) That model says that by 2100, using current trends, the world will be putting about 1900 Gt of CO2 into the atmosphere. If resources (money, technology, talent, etc.) from everywhere were aimed at just those countries in terms of reducing electricity-based emissions to zero, and abating non-electricity-related emissions, (both by 2050, very aggressive, I know) that number can be pushed down to more like 1100 Gt, so in the neighborhood of a 40% reduction in CO2 released. While this may not be enough to solve the entire problem, it seems like a major contribution to a solution, and not something to be dismissed out of hand. And while I recognize that this is looking only at the flow, not the already emitted gases, I don't see why the argument has to be either/or. Pushing these levels down would be hard. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere will also be hard. It feels to me like this effort requires all approaches.
One relatively easy to control contributor to global warming is aircraft contrails. Air traffic can be programmed to avoid contrail forming altitudes with a small penalty in fuel consumption.
The places where most climate activists live are the places with the highest emissions per capita, their work is needed.
Right, but apart from the lab meat startups, the carbon sequestration financial bonds, the iron filings in the ocean experiment, the Tesla-BYD electrification of the transport chain, and the rewilding projects across Europe, what has the environmental movement ever done for us?
Dude, you're overly concerned with what some journalists write. All of the things you mention have been the subject of intense interest and commercial efforts. If you have better ideas, write about them.
(With the exception of the albedo problem - I've never heard of anyone trying to find a commercial solution to that.)
Well solar geoengineering is probs the closest ppl have gotten to theorizing (note: not *implementing*) a solution to the allbedo problem
Excellent piece Quico.
I started reading you for life in Tokyo takes and I’ve kept reading you for this. But OK, what’s your positive vision? What should climate activists be doing? What should the rest of us be doing?
1. Nuclear is really not economically viable. It takes massive investment and then requires massive amounts of maintenance.
2. Solar and storage are already the cheapest forms of energy when considering maintenance.
3. Did you know that the same technology that makes EVs work in America and Europe also works in poorer countries? Columbia has just seen a massive rise in EVs. E-scooters are everywhere in China with battery swapping technology a refill takes but seconds.
4. When you have fewer ships hauling oil and fewer refineries making oil products, you need less oil to move those ships, less electricity to run the refineries, and less concrete to build the refineries. Its a reverse snowball effect where the more you generate and use locally the less demand you put on heavy industry.