We have won on renewables. That means that the argument about the human causes of Global Warming doesn't matter so much, and that it will someday go away.
The Denialists are still out in force, but they are the proverbial dinosaur that is too stupid to realize that it is dead and should fall down now. No amount of obfuscation and obstruction can keep us from switching entirely to lower-cost, cleaner, planet-saving renewable energy, finding replacements or offsets for every other source of greenhouse gases, and eventually going strongly Carbon Negative. They can only delay things around the margins.
Those are strong claims requiring real evidence. Let's unpack a few facts below the orange windmill blade.
1) We have won on renewables, even though not on Anthropogenic Global Warming Denial
Meteor Blades had an important Front Page story a few days ago: A few maps show Americans' views on climate change confused. But they like renewable energy
Short version: A majority of Americans, in a study by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, almost everywhere in the country still deny that greenhouse gases cause Global Warming. At the same time, a majority of Americans almost everywhere in the country supports increased funding for renewable energy, including both wind and solar.
Renewable energy is non-polluting and cheaper than coal, cutting electricity costs to homes, businesses, non-profits, and government. Rooftop solar with batteries promises to let homeowners cut the cord to the utility companies and become immune to power outages on the grid, or sell power back to the utilities at times of peak demand. Improved batteries promise quiet, non-stinky electric cars with improved power and range, at lower cost (including maintenance) than gas guzzlers, with no need to drive to the gas station ever, rechargeable from home or workplace rooftop solar, or while stopping to eat or sleep on a road trip. What's not to like?
So even people who deny Global Warming completely, or admit to "Climate Change" but not to the effects of greenhouse gases, are on board with renewables. Even Kansas and Texas, two of the Reddest and most Denialist states, are strong on wind power and moving into solar. Republicans in Kansas, who have cut taxes more than any other state, pay no attention to the Koch brothers, who have their headquarters there, when it comes to installing wind generators.
The case is even better when we turn to the utility operators. It has been two years since Goldman Sachs explained to investors that Grid Parity was happening, that investments in thermal coal for power generation could no longer return their principal, much less a profit, and the rest of the non-captive analyst community and financial press increasingly agreed. That lesson is sinking in not only among investors but in the industry itself, because this is about real money.
RenewEconomy: Graph of the Day: How utilities see themselves in 2030
Power utility businesses around the world are finally, and rapidly, waking up to the enormous changes taking place in the global energy market. That is what we have been noticing here in Australia, and that is the major message from the latest PwC [Pricewaterhouse Coopers] global power & utilities report.
The report, released on [May 20th], shows that over two-thirds (70 per cent) of senior energy industry executives they surveyed (and they surveyed 73 of them, from 70 different companies and across 50 different countries) expected significant or very significant market model change by 2030 – a huge increase of awareness, or acceptance, from 2014, when less that half of survey respondents (41 per cent) said utility business models would be ‘completely transformed’ by then.
…more than three-quarters – 77 per cent – told PwC that large-scale, centralised renewable energy generation would be the most important operational strategy for their company in 2030…
Yes, even in
Australia, which has one of the most Denialist and obstructionist Conservative governments in the world.
Look at those numbers again. That is shift of opinion of 29% among utility managers in one year, only because renewables are actually cheaper than coal, and the costs for renewables continue to decline rapidly. There is only room for one more such shift, which would take us from 70% to 99%. So I don't expect to see it in only one more year, but I will be looking forward to next year's survey, mainly to see how many deadenders remain.
OK? That one is over. We won. Or you could say the markets won on our behalf. As Texas Democrat Jim Hightower once put it
Free markets are wonderful. We should try them.
2) The political debate over the cause is becoming irrelevant
Now that we are well into Grid Parity, renewables cheaper than coal, nothing that politicians can do, and no amount of money spent by fossil carbon interests, will stop utilities from converting. Limiting factors are primarily the rate at which renewables can be built, and the delay while existing long-term contracts for power run out.
Similarly, nothing politicians or Denialist fossil carbon interests can do can prevent the advance of battery technology, or any of the other technologies in development or early deployment. They will stand or fall based on considerations of real money. Lots and lots of real money.
The hallucinogenic industry money deployed against Global Warming and its remedies in our hallucinatory politics amounts to a few billion dollars. It is attempting to prevent trillions of dollars in investments with returns in the many trillions of dollars. No contest.
Existing subsidies are in the hundreds of billions of dollars, but they don't matter any more either. Renewables are cheaper than subsidized coal. Getting rid of subsidies would speed things up a little, but the main problem is supply of solar panels and wind turbines.
Lack of a carbon tax doesn't matter any more. Renewables are likewise cheaper than coal even without charging the cost of coal pollution and Global Warming. We will need the carbon tax to fund going Carbon Negative, after we win the second half of the debate.
Actually subsidizing renewables more would speed things up, but subsidies are not necessary any more.
States can try to put impediments in the way of renewables, just as some do with Marriage Equality and women's reproductive rights and other issues. But this is different. It is a matter of technology and markets, not of defining legal rights. There is no way to resist the combined power of advancing technology, functioning markets, and public opinion.
3) We are going to win the debate over the cause
Earlier fights against science denial, over lead, tobacco, DDT, acid rain, and so on, all followed the same trajectory from the initial hints of problems, through verification, to the decades-long full court press against the facts, to vindication, the collapse of opposition, and appropriate regulation. And yet never has the sky fallen, or the economy collapsed.
Along the way numerous tactics of denial were deployed, notably the tobacco industry inventing the phrase "junk science". They applied it to all of the real science on lung cancer from smoking, while claiming that the the junkiest science they could buy was the real truth. Some of them, notably at junkscience.com, still do. The same has happened over Global Warming and renewable energy, but there is a fundamental difference in this case.
The difference is that replacing lead and DDT, cutting back on smoking, and cleaning up sulfur in coal all were costs to industry, or direct reductions in sales, revenue, and profits. Renewable energy is cheaper than coal, so for the utilities the switch is now wholly profitable. It is only deadenders like the Koch brothers who refuse to get out of coal and into renewables who will suffer financially. Certainly most of the relatively few jobs remaining in coal extraction will go away, but many more jobs are appearing in manufacturing, installing, maintaining, and financing renewables for utilities, business in general, government, and homeowners.
4) What next?
So we have won the debate over renewable energy. We or the markets, I don't mind. We may have achieved Peak Coal in the US in 2008, in large part due to replacement by cheap fracked natural gas. The ultimate peak will come when we can shut down old, dirty, inefficient coal-fired power plants as fast as we finish building the last few new ones contracted for, and also start to get rid of natural gas for generating electricity. This has nothing to do with the old Peak Coal and Peak Oil theories due to running out of resources. It is the beginning of the end for demand, not supply.
Thermal coal, coal for burning to make steam to run turbines, is going away. Coal for alloying with iron in steelmaking will continue as a viable market. They call that metallurgical coal. The steelmaking industry has cut its carbon emissions in half, and is continuing to work on further reductions, such as replacing coke with charcoal from biomass.
The next step, which is entering a critical phase this year, is batteries that should enable large-scale load leveling, time shifting, and much more cost-effective all-electric cars. Replacing gas guzzlers will cut sharply into oil, and there will be other technologies cutting into other uses of oil (except petrochemicals, where the idea is to put the carbon into the product rather than the atmosphure) and gas.
A few of the technologies partially deployed and still to come are
- Subsidized corn ethanol, which is more a contribution to the problem than the solution
- Cellusolic ethanol, which is not yet economical, and would require vast tracts of land, but not farmland
- Biodiesel for trucks and trains, which we do not yet know how to scale up
- Synthetic jet fuel made from air, water, and renewable energy, being pursued by the US Navy, although using nuclear power on aircraft carriers rather than wind or solar
- Improved insulation, greater efficiency, and lower-cost renewables to replace heating oil
- Energy storage to replace natural-gas-fired peaker power plants that run only a fraction of the time
- Cracking water for hydrogen to make ammonia, rather than extracting it from methane, CH4, and burning the carbon
This covers the vast majority of Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emissions listed by EPA in its U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report: 1990-2013. It should be noted that in the US
Greenhouse gas emissions in 2013 were 9 percent below 2005 levels.
A few of the remaining uses, particularly in industry, will have to be offset by extracting CO
2 from effluent gases or the atmosphere, whether by biological or other means. Overuse of nitrogen fertilizer is the main factor (74%) in nitrous oxide (N
20) emissions, which account for 5% of greenhouse gas emissions (by effect, not by mass).
We can go much further than offsets. There are technologies being researched to take us past Carbon Neutrality to go strongly Carbon Negative on the scale that we have been burning coal, to restore the temperatures of the air, land, sea, and ice all around the world, and de-acidify the oceans. We do not know which of them might prove effective, affordable, and ecologically safe enough to deploy, but it will be some time before we cut back on carbon emissions enough to make that the critical final step.