Why Carbon Dioxide Emissions Are Going to Keep Rising

We could be mobilizing our awesome resources to help the developing world get off of fossil fuels. But we aren't. Because we're not over our nuclear hang-up.

You need economic activity for people to flourish. You need energy to power economic activity. You often emit carbon dioxide to produce energy.

This is the core insight of the Kaya Identity, the most important climate concept everyone should know about, but few people do.

carbon dioxide emissions = population * GDP/population * energy/GDP * CO2/energy

To get to net zero, one of those four terms is going to have to go to zero. Hopefully, it won’t be population (=everyone’s dead.) Or GDP/population, (=everyone’s penniless.)

Really, it has to be the third or the fourth: the amount of energy you need to make a unit of GDP (energy intensity), or the amount of CO2 you need to produce a unit of energy (carbon intensity.)

The good news is that energy intensity and carbon intensity have been falling, globally speaking, for a very long time. The bad news is that GDP per capita and population are growing way faster than energy intensity or carbon intensity are falling. So much faster that they more than swamp them, leaving us with carbon emissions that are fast rising worldwide:

Now, a chart like this inevitably confounds the contributions of developing and developed countries.

In the developed world of climate, population is stagnant or falling and GDP growth is relatively slow, while transition policies have seen both carbon and energy intensity fall quicker. If the developed world was all there was to this problem, we’d be doing ok.

In the developing world of climate, the situation looks very different. Populations are growing fast, and GDP even faster. This is good news, it means there are many fewer people living in abject poverty. Only a monster would decry that on climate grounds.

But growing economies and populations put developing country energy systems under huge pressure to keep increasing supply. And that pressure comes in countries that are poor, and where the luxury of greener-but-dearer or greener-but-unreliable are both out of reach.

People don’t just demand energy, they demand reliable energy at prices they can afford.

More and more, renewable sources are competitive on cost. But they’re not competitive on reliability. Your energy system will need a backbone that remains stable even when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. Perhaps in 20 years, or 50, battery technology will solve this problem. As of today, it hasn’t.

So developing country decision-makers really have a choice between three technologies: hydropower, nuclear, or fossil fuels. In many places, hydro-power potential has been exhausted, the rivers are already dammed. So the choice is really only between nuclear, on the one hand, and fossil fuels-based thermal generation on the other.

In reality, though, nuclear is only really an option for a small minority of developing countries: places with the scientific, technical, regulatory and financial muscle to put into place a complicated thing like a network of nuclear power plants.

So in reality, most developing countries have no choice but to either increase their thermal capacity, burning gas, diesel or coal to generate power. I mean, their other choice is to let their grids collapse.

Grid collapse isn’t an impossible option, by the way. It’s one main reason why South Africa’s economy has underperformed so badly for so long. But grid collapse is never, as far as I know, the product of a thought-out decision. It’s, instead, a symptom of a system gone drastically off the rails, whether through corruption, mismanagement, war, or some godforesaken combination of the three.

Now, what can we in the developed world do to alter this dynamic? As far as I’m aware, three broad strategies are imaginable.

1. Make lots of nice-looking powerpoints with wind turbines about renewable energy and the transition and lecture developing countries that won’t get on board. In other words, what we’ve been doing. Pros: it makes us feel good. Cons: It doesn’t actually address the problem. Like, at all.

2. Recolonize the developing world and impose our climate policies on them. Pros: might work. Cons: Impossible.

3. Go all out to make nuclear attractive and affordable to developing countries. Pros: realistic and achievable. Cons: Nuclear makes us feel icky.

And that, pretty much, is all you need to know about why carbon emissions are set to keep rising indefinitely. We continue to declare climate an emergency in increasingly doomerist terms. But we won’t make the strategic choices we’d need to make to reverse the trend. Because we don’t like the vibes.