To effectively deal with climate change, policymakers, as well as the public at large, have to do three things:
- Accept the science
- Understand the numbers in that science
- Understand the real world implications of those numbers and act on them.
An article in “Dagens Nyheter”, a Swedish daily newspaper, includes this animated chart showing the various dates for CO2 reductions in order to have a two-thirds probability of avoiding a 1.5°C change, beyond which the models fall apart and things get very bad, very quickly.
That is the year 2036 for net CO2 emissions to reach zero assuming a linear decrease. Worldwide. Not 2050 as in the EU and Biden plans, or 2060 in the Chinese plans. We are past the point where more political can kicking is viable. We are past the point for “more studies”. We are past the point for hoping for a magical CO2-sucking technology to appear.
And every year we continue along our current path makes it worse.
Remember how you hated word problems in math class? A figure I like to use to put all this in perspective is oil refineries.
- Total US oil refining capacity is around 20 million barrels per day.
- 75% of that capacity is producing petroleum products that end up getting burned.
- Assume that action to shut that all down begins on January 21, 2021.
- How fast do we have to shut down refining capacity in order to reach a goal of zero on December 31, 2036?
20,000,000 * 75% = 15,000,000. Available time is 179 months. 15,000,000 divided by 179 is, in round figures, 84,000 barrels per day of capacity, per month. That is just under 20,000 per week.
The largest refinery in the US is the Saudi Aramco refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, with a capacity of 607,000 barrels per day. Most are less than half that size. Of the 138 refineries operating in the US, twenty are smaller than 20,000 Bbl/day.
How do you shut down refineries that fast? The Houthi rebels in Yemen demonstrated one way just last fall. It wasn’t pretty.
Surely we can find a more graceful way of doing it. But one thing is for sure, the market is not going to do this for us. Nothing I have seen from any national administration in the world is going to do it.
And that is just petroleum products. I have not talked about natural gas at all. It does not matter what form it comes in, Carbon Dioxide and Methane are the issue.
You can’t negotiate with science and the numbers.