This is my reply to COP21: Final push for climate deal amid 'optimism'.
Negotiators at the Paris summit aim to wrap up a global agreement to curb climate change on Saturday - a day later than expected.
"We are nearly there. I'm optimistic," said French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who is chairing the summit.
Mr Fabius told reporters in Paris that he would present a new version of the draft text on Saturday morning at 0800 GMT, which he was "sure" would be approved and "a big step forward for humanity as a whole".
Anybody can send them comments, which they will review and consider for on-air use.
UN bafflegab is not the densest form of political language I have encountered, but it is up there. We actually have an agreement today that, amid the recognizing and acknowledging and suggesting and proposing, commits governments to proposing CO2 reduction plans and little else. Although my point, below the light gray line in the sand, is that what governments do or do not do is not that big a deal on this issue.
Although COP21 is likely tohas produced a better agreement than previous Global Warming conferences, it matters only marginally. Governments are discussing pushing a few hundred billion dollars around in the next decade or two, perhaps by repealing subsidies for Fossil Carbon fuels, perhaps with investments, perhaps with funding for developing countries. Meanwhile, private funding for renewables worldwide is at about $300 billion and rising rapidly.
In order to attain any meaningful progress on CO2 emissions and thus on Global Warming, we have to reach Peak Carbon and then start the slide down from that peak. As with the well-studied Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the decline starts at the Empire's greatest power and extent, when it is widely supposed that it is permanent. And similarly for the other great empires of conquest in history, from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union. In environmental terms, we have seen the same story with lead, acid rain, DDT, ozone-depleting chemicals, and so on. Carbon is bigger than any of them, and has resisted the facts of the case mightily, but this is no longer a question of politics, of ideology, of science denial, of obfuscation.
It is now a question of real money.
Money is being made and lost on the grandest scale, trillions (million millions) of dollars, by utilities, developers, technologists, and investors, with tens of trillions more to come.
We have passed the first two of many notable tipping points, Grid Parity and Peak Coal, on the way to Carbon Neutrality and then going sufficiently Carbon Negative to restore the temperatures of the air, the land, and the oceans, to de-acidify the oceans, and to start rebuilding our glaciers, sea ice, and permafrost.
All wind and solar energy that we can produce worldwide is being sold, at prices below energy from coal. This is known as Grid Parity, Renewables < Coal. We began the Grid Parity transition in Germany in 2011, and it is taking in wider areas in more countries every year. In 2013, according to Goldman Sachs, investments in coal for electricity generation ("thermal coal") could no longer be financially justified. This year, Goldman Sachs reported that the world had passed the Peak Coal tipping point in 2013, through a combination of lower cost renewables, increased efficiency in generation and transmission, and conservation. In spite of continued construction in India and China, more old, dirty, inefficient coal generation capacity is now being shut down than is being built new, a trend that can only accelerate. Coal plants on the drawing board are also being cancelled in great numbers because they can no longer make money. Of the 1400 coal plants now proposed, it is unlikely that more than a few hundred will ever be built.
To get from Peak Coal to Peak Carbon requires reaching Peak Oil and Peak Gas. Both are in the offing due to new battery technologies coming into mass production, for example at the Tesla Gigafactory.
Electric cars are not quite ready to replace gas guzzlers, but the Peak Oil tipping point will come when new electrics and plug-in hybrids replace their equivalent in old, dirty, inefficient gasoline and diesel cars, long before electrics command a majority of the market. New batteries only need to enable a few percent more of electrics to reach that point.
New battery technologies will have several effects in electricity markets worldwide, by enabling cost-effective real-time load balancing, and then large-scale time shifting. Both will greatly reduce the amount of variable wind and solar energy spilled because the grid cannot accept it. This will significantly increase the efficiency of wind and solar, and reduce cost per kWh, thus further increasing pressure on fossil fuels. In particular, load balancing will greatly reduce financial incentives for peaker natural gas plants and other load-following generation systems that do not run 24/7, but have fixed costs even when not running. Again, Peak Gas will happen at the absolute maximum of production from conventional wells and from fracking both.
Thus we come to Peak Carbon and the long and ever-steeper slide down from there to Carbon Neutrality, when natural processes and technology can sequester as much CO2 as we still emit. Past that point it is much harder to foresee just what technologies and markets and politics will do. But there is no question that among the new technologies being proposed and researched for capturing carbon on the scale that we have been emitting it something will emerge as the best choices. Without Global Warming Denial funded by Fossil Carbon, we can have a serious discussion about what level of investment is reasonable and practical in restoring the health of the world entire.
Ed [Mokurai] Cherlin is a retired global market analyst and Buddhist priest who now blogs at Daily Kos.
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