David Roberts claims that going to 100% renewables costs too much, and is too hard. But he thinks he is on our side. He is wrong, and some of his claims along the way are flat-out ludicrous.
It turns out every one of these scenarios — pretty much any scenario you can imagine that leads to rapid decarbonization — envisions “historically unprecedented improvements in the energy intensity of the global economy.”
and therefore it cannot be done. Well, the premise is false, and the logic is fallacious, so there is not much hope for the conclusion, either from Roberts or from the authors of the paper he quotes from. The entire Industrial Revolution going back to the 18th century is a whole series of counterexamples. But the quoted study looks back no further than 1965.
The article in question is We can solve climate change, but it won’t be cheap or easy
Reported here on dKos in Abbreviated pundit roundup: Climate change, Social Security and more, where I left a comment. Then I went to Grist.com and left the more detailed comment reproduced below the Great Orange Windmill Blade.
Added in This Diary
Roberts quoted A critical review of global decarbonization scenarios: what do they tell us about feasibility?) on the energy intensity claim.
You want rapid improvements in energy intensity? Start with stationary steam engines and industrial machinery, then steamships and railroads, then steelmaking, then gas and electricity, then cars and other transportation and movable machinery, then the many stages in the ongoing communications revolution since the telegraph, then HVAC, then home appliances, then electronics and computers, and so on to renewable energy technologies. Every single one spread across many countries within a few decades of becoming viable at all, in many iterations each replacing most or all of what went before as technologies advanced.
The reality is that since we got to Grid Parity converting to renewables is a profitable investment, not a cost. Well, those whose fossil carbon assets will be stranded, particularly those who refuse to put current profits into transitioning to renewables, are going to see real costs, but not the rest of us. The Koch brothers, poor fellows, for example. It can't happen to more appropriate people.
My Comment at Grist.com
(Reformatted, with an image added)
When much of the US, and much of the world, is at Grid Parity (fully-loaded cost of electricity from renewables less than from coal and other fossil carbon), and when the US gets more than 4% of its electricity from wind (US Energy Information Administration, American Wind Energy Association), and utility-scale solar PV installations are on line, we cannot say that renewables are merely thought experiments. We are talking about deployment of radically new and radically more efficient technologies year over year. I have considerable experience in studying such rollouts as a long-time technology market analyst (before I went into global education with One Laptop Per Child, as you can see above this Diary).
Basically, unless you thoroughly understand exponential and even hyper-exponential growth, you cannot think clearly about problems such as going renewable. For example, in exponential growth there is a consistent doubling time, whether it is going from 1% to 2%, or in the end from 50% to 100%. Thus half of the growth necessarily takes place in the last doubling period. Realistically, as we near saturation the growth rate slows somewhat, but that is countered by the fact that such markets always overshoot what we thought of as 100% saturation, because we always find new applications for the technology. Thus, for example, we have far more than one radio, TV, phone, and computer per person in the more developed economies.
One reason to go well beyond 100% renewables relative to current electricity demand is using renewables to charge all-electric vehicles. Another is the variability of wind and solar, where it is necessary to integrate output over wide areas to get stability of supply. (This is also a reason for the Smart Grid, and for interconnecting all of our regional power grids.) Another reason is to generate the power to go carbon-negative in order to extract carbon from the atmosphere and oceans, and so restore the air, water, and ice of the world. While we are not ready to pick a technology for doing so, there are several that have considerable promise, for which we have to investigate costs and possible environmental effects, and weigh them against the known costs and effects of leaving carbon in the environment.
This article also makes fundamental errors in logic, or possibly reading comprehension.
Krugman wrote that
reduction in economic growth would basically amount to a rounding error, around 0.06 percent per year. [emphasis added]
To claim that this is the "utterly fantastical"
idea that aggressive climate mitigation is going to shave precisely 0.06 percent off GDP growth [emphasis added]
is a Cornflakes on Fire Epic Fail.
Similarly, the claim that
Even if you take the IPCC’s number at face value, it is meant as the low bound of possible costs
is in flat contradiction to Krugman and the IPCC, who posit this as the highest practical cost,
the most ambitious goals the [IPCC] assessment considers.
It is true that "special interests have power, built infrastructure carries enormous inertia", but instead of market failure, we have many in the markets enthusiastically taking up renewables, while others determinedly play the role of buggy-whip manufacturers. Goldman Sachs was the first Wall Street firm to advise against investing in coal for energy production and in coal export terminals, more than a year and a half ago now, but the entire financial press has taken up the plain and obvious fact that investments in coal will inevitably be stranded, with no way to pay back their principal. I have found both Grid Parity and doom for coal in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg/Business Week, Fortune, The Economist, the Financial Times, and elsewhere.
Neither mindless cheerleading nor mindless naysaying will help us now. What is helping is technology development and acceptance of the technologies in the market, where it is now a matter of real money, not subsidies, tax preferences, and artificial obstacles to competition. Politicians and fossil carbon interests can delay things at the margin, but they can no longer block the transition to renewables, which is rapidly gathering steam, and will advance faster than almost anyone now imagines.
We have seen this sort of effect in many areas. Global Warming has always been worse than any of the models predicted, no matter how many times they were adjusted. At the same time, technology costs have consistently fallen much faster and much further than the most optimistic estimates, and market growth has consistently been faster than predicted.
I can confidently predict that the pundits who do not understand these basic facts, including David Roberts, will be wrong again.