> you would think that it would at least be worth trying to save the world
Not if "saving the world" means spending trillions of dollars on things that (a) might well not fix the problem, and (b) could be better spent on other things with a much more certain payoff. For example, bringing people out of poverty and building up our infrastructure so it is more robust against any kind of disruption. Especially if doing those things makes it a lot easier to adapt to whatever happens to the climate anyway.
Yeah, that "trillions of dollars" is a baseless assumption that's just pulled out of somebody's behind. There's this assumption that it's going to cost so much, when in reality, renewable energy and storage are shaping up to be cheaper than fossil fuels in the coming decades.
Pretty much the worst case spending on mitigation plans is 3% of GDP. Less than we spend on the military. And that's worst case. Over the long run, most mitigation analyses have us saving money.
I think that these baseless assumptions about the cost of mitigation are just as much a problem as the denial. A good amount of the denial comes from people that assume that they'll have to give up driving and eating meat. Another good amount of the denalism comes from dark money that influences political thought. That dark money is hard to eliminate, but we need to stop the speculation that fighting climate change means a significantly lower quality of life.
> that "trillions of dollars" is a baseless assumption that's just pulled out of somebody's behind
No, it isn't. It's what is quoted by the people advocating mitigation.
> most mitigation analyses have us saving money
Because they claim that the savings from adopting all these clean energy technologies will more than outweigh the costs of switching to them. Which is based on...assumptions pulled out of somebody's behind. Or, if you prefer, economic models that have no track record of predictive success.
In other words, mitigation means we pay the costs, and then we find out whether all those models that said the savings would make up for it were right, or not. Yeah, sure, let's bet the entire world economy on that.
>Which is based on...assumptions pulled out of somebody's behind.
No, absolutely not. They are based on data. And projections.
However, if you're going to assert that it's impossible to know anything, than my estimates are just as good as yours, and I say it's going to save us $100 trillion/year! Tada!
Economic models are subject to manipulation, just as a business model is, but that doesn't mean that none of them have any credibility.
The credible answers, the ones where somebody has tried to make honest efforts, have mitigation costs as a tiny percentage of current GDP. In the US, that could be easily paid for by the amount of government waste in defense.
> if you're going to assert that it's impossible to know anything
I made no such assertion. I said that the economic models have no track record of successful predictions. We should not be making huge bets based on models that have no track record of successful predictions.
The difficulty is that it is also a huge bet to continue "business as usual". Not making significant changes is also a choice, and based on the best science (indeed, imperfect models) we have so far, it does not look good...
> it is also a huge bet to continue "business as usual"
Yes, but that's true for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with climate change. I'm simply saying that if we're going to redirect a large amount of resources, we should redirect them to actions that will have a positive impact regardless of things in the future that we can't predict. As I said in my original post in this subthread, I think two important such actions are bringing people out of poverty (since the wealthier people are, the better able they are to adapt to change) and making our infrastructure more robust.
Right, going forward, the need of government action is going to be considerably less necessary. But new technologies have a certain cost disadvantage, and government support helps to cross that gap quicker. Especially, when new power plants have to compete with 30 year old coal plants, which are cheap to operate but very dirty.
But the crossover point seems to be very near - here in Germany a big offshore wind project failed to qualify for government support, but the driving company decided to go ahead nevertheless, as they plant to be cost efficient enough without any support. So this is very good news.
There's been a ton of government action to build the early industry, though, in the form of subsidies. It's something that we've seen in aerospace, the history of the semiconductor industry, and even in a ton of biotech. Government subsidies fund the early risky research, and often the military provides the early price-insensitive customers of new expensive technologies. With renewables, tax credits have been very influential in widening the market of early entrants.
Even ignoring climate change, our use of fossil fuels is extremely harmful to people. It's also extremely helpful, but we can do better. Fossil fuels only look cheap because we hide so many of the costs. When you look up the cost per kWh of electricity generated from coal, that number doesn't include the death and diseases it causes, nor the economic impact from contaminating ecosystems. Price that stuff in and the alternatives look a lot better. Add in climate change and it's better still.
Trillions of dollars sounds much - unless you consider that just Apple alone is worth 3/4 of a trillion dollars.
And in reality, you need to consider the costs we are paying for energy already. How much is spent on coal and oil? How much do the various power plants cost? A large part of the western power infrastructure is at an age, were plants have to be replaced anyway soon. The additional cost for "clean" energy is surprisingly low, if not already negative.
> The additional cost for "clean" energy is surprisingly low
Only if it can supply reliable base load power. Which it can't, unless you include nuclear power in "clean energy". Which most clean energy advocates don't appear to be doing.
The trick is in the mix. 100% clean energy (wind, solar, hydro) might be somewhat of a challenge. But it is rather easy to raise its share of the total energy production to about 80%. The rest would be provided mostly by gas, and perhaps a very few coal plants, which would run only in absolute emergency times. This would reduce our carbon footprint considerably. And for this, the additional cost is very small, if not already money can be saved. When we are at 80% renewable, we can then discuss the technical and financial requirements for the rest.
> it is rather easy to raise its share of the total energy production to about 80%
I know advocates claim this, but I am highly skeptical. The problem is capacity factor: yes, you might be able to build enough wind farms and solar panels (hydro is pretty much already built out--every site that is feasible for hydroelectric power in significant quantity already has a dam) so that their nominal capacity, if they were all running 24-7 at their rated output, exceeds 80% of total world energy usage. But they won't ever be running 24-7 at their rated output; not even close. Typical capacity factors, AFAIK, are less than 30% for these sources. Whereas nuclear plants (and fossil fuel plants, but we're assuming those are out of bounds since we're talking about clean energy) can run close to 24-7 at their rated output; typical capacity factors exceed 95%.
It is also quite possible and affordable to produce 80% taking the 30% capacity factor into account. Germany is already at 30% of all electricity being produced by renewables. The capacity factor only tells you how many you need to build.
That a nuclear power plant runs 24/7 causes also a lot of problems, because energy consumption heavily changes over the course of a day, especially at night there is little demand, and you cannot throttle a nuclear power plant quickly enough. That is why Belgium built illumination systems for all their highways, just to get rid of surplus nuclear power at night.
I doubt the 95% capacity factor for nuclear plants - perhaps for freshly built stations. Nuclear appears to be very reliable, but there are actually quite a lot of issues. One is, that for technical reasons, a nuclear power plant might have to be shut down entirely with no forewarning. This happens quite regular and has to be compensated for by the grid. Currently 50% of the German power plants are down for maintenance, and about 25% of the French, which caused electricity shortages in France last winter. And nuclear plants even are sensitive to the weather, because in hot summers or dry winters there might not be enough cooling water in the rivers that support their cooling needs.
"We have to get to 80%, then we can talk about cost"? Is this like the "we have to do it to find out if we can afford it" version of "we have to pass it to find out what's in it"?
No. Up to 80% the cost of renewables is, what you pay to set up the solar cells or wind generators. And these costs are known and quite competitive (if not cheaper already) to building a new coal plant, and definitely cheaper than building a nuclear plant. If there is enough controllable power generation in the other 20%, by todays technology that would be gas power plants mostly, this is about how far smart grids can deal with the varying nature of the renewables. Only going beyond 80% there are significant additional costs for storage. But as battery costs are significantly falling, it makes only sense to discuss the costs, when we really need them and then know the true numbers, as this is quite a few years in the future.
I think the idea of enormous batteries storing megawatts of power is potentially more dangerous than nuclear plants. At least reactors have control rods, but what do you do with a huge battery with an internal short? And compared to stores of coal, oil, or gas, at least they won't spontaneously combust like batteries have the potential to.
No, there is no comparison. Large battery storage are not a single large battery, but is split in small units. So, if there is a short, a few cells, at worst one rack of batteries burns down, the other batteries in the storage facility are physically separate.
Fukushima has shown us, how severely things can go wrong. The reactor was completely shut down, but that didn't help much. Even with the control rods deployed, these reactors had a thermal load of several megawatts, and when the cooling failed to keep up with this load, 2 of the reactor cores melted, and the landscape around was contaminated. Pure luck that it wasn't worse and most of the radioactivity went out to the ocean.
> Fukushima has shown us, how severely things can go wrong.
It should be emphasized, though, that this had nothing to do with the reactor; it was bad siting of the backup generators and switchgear for decay heat cooling. Other reactors in the same complex that did not suffer from this problem had no issues.
Also, newer reactor designs do not need a backup generator for decay heat cooling, so they are not vulnerable to this failure mode at all.
This is the sophisticated version of the 'do nothing' argument. It's not a good argument in any form. If the greenland ice mass melts billions of people who live on the edge of the sea are at risk. If rising ocean temperatures continue to degrade coral reefs, a big part of the world's food supply is at risk. how does bringing people out of poverty offset that?
> how does bringing people out of poverty offset that?
By giving them the ability to adapt. Most of The Netherlands is below sea level, and has been for centuries. They responded by adapting: building dikes and levees and other systems for water management. They could do this because they had enough wealth to do so. The more wealth we create, the more the world as a whole has the ability to adapt.
If we knew for certain that putting all that wealth into CO2 mitigation instead of bringing people out of poverty would keep things static indefinitely, it might perhaps be worth considering mitigation (though you will note that nobody who advocates mitigation asks all the poor people what they would prefer). But we don't know that, not even close. We have to assume that things will change no matter what we do. Given that, our only realistic option is adaptation.
Not if "saving the world" means spending trillions of dollars on things that (a) might well not fix the problem, and (b) could be better spent on other things with a much more certain payoff. For example, bringing people out of poverty and building up our infrastructure so it is more robust against any kind of disruption. Especially if doing those things makes it a lot easier to adapt to whatever happens to the climate anyway.