Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

> Not on the table are ecological tax reform (beyond investment incentives and carbon taxes), structural changes to the economy that would lower consumer demand and reduce energy and material throughput, policies for income/wealth redistribution, major lifestyle changes or strategies to reduce human populations.

The broadside attack on capitalism is going to be the undoing of the climate advocacy movement. Neoliberalism has become the global consensus, and it’s not going anywhere. Neoliberals and outright conservatives have been in charge of the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Australia, the United States, etc., for decades. Even “socialist” Macron has reinvented himself as a neo-liberal. People remember the depredations of socialism and the stagnation of “democratic socialism” and don’t seem eager to repeat them. (Greta Thunberg’s home country of Sweden cut spending as a percentage of GDP by almost 20 points since 1990, slashed corporate taxes, deregulated and privatized, etc.).

Telling people we need a command economy to effectively combat climate change is a non-starter. “Major lifestyle changes” or ghastly thoughts like “reducing human population” will result in climate advocates being pilloried.

There are basically three possible outcomes:

1) We don’t change, technology doesn’t save us, and climate change turns out to be not as bad as some people feared. (A recent UNDP report estimated that a “high warming” scenario would case Bangladesh’s GDP growth rate to decrease from 6% to 4% by 2100. Bangladesh would be vastly better off taking that hit than departing from neoliberal economic policies.)

2) We don’t change, but technology reverses climate change.

3) We don’t change, technology doesn’t save us, and contrary to consensus science, runaway greenhouse effects kill us all.

So much I want to say here...

I'm part of the choir to whom the author is preaching but I find this weak tea. (Although he's not preaching, he's RFC'ing his assumptions.)

If we grant that fusion isn't around the corner (and I don't, see "Fusion in a magnetically-shielded-grid inertial electrostatic confinement device" https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.01788 abstract: "Theory for a gridded inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) fusion system is presented that shows a net energy gain is possible if the grid is magnetically shielded from ion impact. A simplified grid geometry is studied, consisting of two negatively-biased coaxial current-carrying rings, oriented such that their opposing magnetic fields produce a spindle cusp. Our analysis indicates that better than break-even performance is possible even in a deuterium-deuterium system at bench-top scales. The proposed device has the unusual property that it can avoid both the cusp losses of traditional magnetic fusion systems and the grid losses of traditional IEC configurations." So that's neat.)

If we grant that we must massively reduce our energy consumption that is not necessarily mean lower Q-of-L. Our systems are hugely wasteful (count the number of LEDs in your house tonight. A first-world household burns so much energy so pointlessly. The not-really-off nature of modern electronics is a small part of it. Bad insulation. Pilot lights. Refrigerators that open like cabinets rather than drawers. Incandescent "light" bulbs that put out more heat than light: they're literally heaters that also give off light. I could go on and on and on...)

Bottom line: if we took physics seriously and gave a shit about efficiency we could cut our emissions in half overnight without any major technology change in production. (Although we should still do that too.)

Also, ever since the 70's people have studied e.g. passive solar design for buildings. We can easily make our cities more efficient and more ecological with just a little cleverness. (Remember that time when we accidentally built a solar furnace in London: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/london-skyscrap... ) The power is there we just have to use it wisely. "It's raining soup, grab a bucket!"

And with applied ecology (e.g. "Permaculture", regenerative agriculture, urban "food forests", etc.) we should be able to recycle wastes and produce food in situ in urban and suburban areas in densities great enough to sustain Arcologies ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology ) integrated ecological city-buildings that provide high quality-of-life in an ecologically harmonious and sustainable way. (The beginnings of this are already happening in parts of asia. ( E.g. https://www.quora.com/How-is-China-able-to-provide-enough-fo... ))

> You don't seem to understand either pumped-hydro,

No, you don't seem to understand pumped-hydro. The largest pumped-hydro plant in the US, the Bath County Pumped Storage Station, can store enough energy to satisfy US energy use for 250 milliseconds. Yes, milliseconds. Suppose you want to have enough pumped-hydro to store US energy use for, say, 1 hour. There are 3600 seconds in an hour. You need ~15 000 pumped hydro plants. Where are you going to build them? Where are you going to get enough water from?

> or economics. Using hyperbolic language like "through the roof" when we cannot magically wave a wand to make a 100% renewables world in one go, but are approaching it asymptotically means that the pricing function, the costs, and the outcomes are not 'through the roof' but a function of where we are in a migration.

Of course it will be "a function" of something. The above sentence is devoid of content. The real question is, what will be the shape of the function? I argue that if we depend on renewables on majority of our energy, the cost per kWh produced will go through the roof. I argue why it is so. Do you have any argument? Show me your math, like I do in my every comment.

> And have upside consequences like increased employment, which means the spend is not 'hole in the ground' but actually has net beneficial effects on the economy.

This is just a broken window fallacy. Having lots of people spend lots of effort on something that before didn't require so many people will be greatly detrimental, not beneficial to economy.

> To repeat what I said elsewhere you have mis-represented the 2/3 losses figure.

Ah, thanks. I misinterpreted the figure.

> A week's supply of biofuels, given our current energy use of 101 quadrillion BTU/year, and assuming 100% efficiency, is 2 quadrillion BTU. At the peak of our production, we produced around 0.2 quadrillion BTU worth of biodiesel. This means that a week's supply of biofuels is around 10 years of production.

We produce around ten times as many gallons of ethanol as biodiesel. It has about half as many BTUs, which implies we would need around two years of production. Not really a problem if we only need that much once every two years.

It's also assuming we couldn't produce more than we do now, or do something more efficient like convert existing coal fired plants to burn biomass from algae.

> The real question is, why would you do so, if it would be much, much cheaper to just build enough nuclear plants to cover your needs. France managed to do it in the 70s., why can't we do it 50 years later?

Because we do whatever costs less. Nuclear plants are expensive. On the other hand, so is storage. It's not actually clear which one is going to cost less in the long term, so what we should probably be doing is building both at the same time.

Which has the additional advantage of replacing fossil fuels even faster, because the two technologies have very little overlap in terms of either labor expertise or materials use, and complement one another in that there is more electricity demand during the day when solar is generating but there is still non-trivial demand at night which can be handled by nuclear. They're not coming at the expense of one another, they're both coming at the expense of fossil fuels, so the more the merrier.