I think you're mischaracterizing the nature of the problem. Take a look at [1] for example - US total CO2 emissions and CO2 emissions per capita have been dropping for a while now. The same is true for the EU as a whole [2]. So where is the increase in CO2 emissions each year coming from then? The developing world that wants a western world standard of living. Take a look at India for example [3]. It's not sufficient to tell people in western countries that they shouldn't drive SUVs or take long flights, you have to tell people in poorer (populous) countries that they can't have a better standard of living because doing so means more GHG. Would you like to tell people that?
By all means, we should be doing better in the west, but it's a lie to tell ourselves that driving an electric car and putting solar panels on the roof is going to solve the problem.
> It's not sufficient to tell people in western countries that they shouldn't drive SUVs or take long flights, you have to tell people in poorer (populous) countries that they can't have a better standard of living because doing so means more GHG.
No, we should tell them to leap frog the energy systems of the West and go straight to more efficient, cheaper (in medium to long term) energy sources like nuclear and solar. The same way many developing countries skipped over land lines and went straight to cellular for communications technology.
We should tell them with tariffs and economic sanctions if necessary. Renewables are cheaper (even when firmed with battery storage), there is no reason not to use them versus fossil fuels. You have to internalize the carbon emission costs into the economic system to encourage the desired outcome, otherwise humans will do the human thing: pollute with wild abandon when there is no cost to do so.
South Africa just commissioned a new coal plant expected to operate until 2075, one that will never turn a profit (for various reasons). It should be extremely economically painful for them to make such a decision, so much so that they revisit the depreciation schedule of the asset and alternatives.
Electric cars and renewable energy are cheaper in the long term than gasoline cars and fossil energy, but gasoline cars and fossil energy require less capital up front.
The problem is that the third world is short of capital. So lend them the capital at really good rates (0% for example). That'll make the adoption of green solutions a no brainer for them.
If the new renewable energy sources were really as good as advertised - not only cleaner than fossil fuels, but also so much cheaper as well - then this would indeed be both obvious and inevitable. China in particular has a lot of the world's capacity to produce renewable generation equipment, they shouldn't need to rerun the pollution of western countries to have prosperity and this would solve both their massive pollution problems and their need to find new infrastructure projects to fund in order to prop up the economy, both major political headaches domestically. Yet they keep on pointing to the West's emissions as justification for why they should increase CO2 output instead. They also don't have the NIMBY problems of some Western countries.
My general conclusion is that the reason for this is that switching to green energy is neither as easy nor as cheap as advertised. Sure, on paper the cost per GWh is great and you can even realise much of that for the first few projects, but the cost of dealing with a lack of dispatchability and of intermittency from sources like solar and wind ends up massively outweighing that in practice. So no-one actually wants to switch to an all-renewable grid.
Growing economies might install as much solar as they're able, but they can still be tempted to burn fossil fuels on top of that, to grow even faster. Limiting climate change is going to require moderation, which is a tough ask for capitalism...
The reason why the West emissions are (slowly) decreasing is not because it's getting more sober or efficient, but because it is exporting emitting activities to the rest if the world.
We are shuffling emissions around, which at a global scale is pointless.
You don't need to tell them that. Rich countries could subsidize clean energy projects in poor countries. That's only fair given that most carbon emissions per capita have come from rich countries. Like a retroactive carbon tax.
Talking beyond your snark to anyone else reading this -- obviously I mean solar, wind, nuclear or hydro installations either in the poor country, or in the rich country and piped into the poor country via HVDC at discount rates.
Anything less is quite morally unfair if you think about it. Rich countries have imposed this massive externality on poor countries and they haven't compensated the poor countries for doing so. If you make money by dumping waste into my backyard, the least you can do is give me a small slice of the profits.
Subsidizing clean energy in poor countries is a way to satisfy this moral obligation while also solving the problem you raised.
You mean wind, solar, nuclear, batteries and electrolysers? Because we have them available right now. In fact, we had them for the last couple of decades.
we have them yes, and at this moment, the richest country in Europe is rationing hot water and restarting coal power plants due a temporary disruption of supply of another fossil fuel.
Europe + North America is 10% of the world population, and we can barely carry our own burden.
I don't see your argument. Everybody knows that we're not deploying carbon free technology sufficiently quickly. That's why we're reading these articles.
in your reality, we're a type 1 civilization with unlimited resources, so obscenely rich that providing the rest of the world with free clean energy is a matter of political will
in my reality, we're 95% dependent on fossil fuels, dams and nuclear power stations cost tens of billions and take decades to build, there are no viable energy storage technologies, and even the few somewhat viable renewable energy technologies we possess still rely on a limited supply of expensive things like lithium. also, in my reality, double digit percentage of our population lives in poverty, and about half lives paycheck to paycheck, and our richest country is 30T in debt
We spend literal trillions on waging war. Every rocket fired in Ukraine today would pay for solar panels for a house or two. It's not a matter of money. Look how well we managed to to switch literally all industry to building weapons during the last world war. If we wanted to we could do the same for renewable energy. It's a matter of priorities.
But in actuality, it's much easier to do than that, because renewable energy is not all that expensive or hard to build. In many scenarios it's profitable to build it today, but bureaucracy is in the way. The proper market incentives and a bit of legislation would probably be enough to have private industry take over.
> Every rocket fired in Ukraine today would pay for solar panels for a house or two.
But it's more important that we stop Putin from just taking whatever territory he wants and killing as many civilians as it takes to do that than it is to put solar panels on a few more houses.
If you don't spend any money on your military except when you need it, it will take so long to get it back up to speed that you'll probably lose the war in the meantime.
And if you don't spend any money on renewable energy life for a large fraction of our species will become much harder.
And it's not like military spending is really necessary either. The US for example spent a lot of money in Afghanistan and Iraq even though the country wasn't under reasonable threat from those actors.
You interpret little action and a lack of political will as evidence for "too hard and too expensive", when it's mostly ideological possession and corruption by anti-renewable conservatives, and to a smaller extent anti-nuclear greens.
Solar and wind costs are roughly on par with fossil fuels now. Variability doesn't matter when you can pipe excess amounts into poorer countries. It's all excuses.
"double digit percentage of our population lives in poverty"
So you're taking the moral high ground huh. Will you be happy to accept a hundred million immigrants from SEA when the pollution from your country has made their region too hot to be liveable? Or will there be a convenient excuse to not do that?
Nobody forces developing countries to go through the same process as developed countries for raising the standard of living. We have the technology to achieve a very good standard of living with very low carbon emissions. It's not that much more expensive than burning fossil fuels either.
Before asking people in developing countries not to have a proper house, we could try to forbid private planes and reduce military spending by half, for instance.
The military use of fuels is just ridiculous. If we are not able to stop "small" and superfluous things like that, then, simply there is not hope.
> When I say the military, I mean, all the military, that's the minimum we the citizens of the world should be requesting.
You can ask, but you won't get it. Disarmament, and I don't just mean nuclear, requires a level of trust that simply does not exist, because a relatively small group defecting (in the game theory sense) would be able to conquer the world.
It has been done in the past and can be done in the future. If we can't even do something like that forget about other changes. And I'm not talking about nuclear.
In fact, if your goal is really only defend your territory, you could keep nuclear and downsize all those war airplanes and tanks burning oil, and you would not be worse for it.
This is so misleading it's not even funny anymore.
The USA and Europe have both delegated most high CO2 footprint industries to the developing nations through globalisation. It wouldn't be going down if we hadn't.
The issue isn't the evil developing nations which want to get the same quality of life. That contributes too, obviously... but making it sound as if the developed world has already gotten on the right track is incredibly misguided
It doesn't look like the links you provided show enough evidence to support the claim that CO2 emissions per capita are the result of poorer countries increasing their standard of living (it could be the result of industries that trade with wealthy countries to increase their std of living), but I would really like to see that idea explored and properly proven
If you look at history, you don't economically catch up to the top dogs of the world by aping their technology. You catch up to them by leapfrogging them in technology--the newer technology allows you to undercut them, while throttling them of the cash necessary to retool to use newer technology. This is most historically most prominent in something like steelmaking.
Populations will not accept limitations on energy availability, no matter what goal is lauded. Look at Sri Lanka: the president fled and the people took over his opulent home. This will happen everywhere given enough pressure.
All artificial energy restriction scams are doomed to fail for this very reason. They will all usher in even lower-trust societies than exist now.
1. Breaking this down by country doesn’t make much sense. Per capita emissions makes more sense, from a humanitarian point of view.
2. India/China are ramping up solar and wind but it is a relatively poor country. Such investments should be funded by countries that have already “developed” and have the ability to fund such change.
Interesting post. You are very much aware that it's the wealthy who do most of the damage, yet you somehow blame the so called developing world but don't want to be the to tell them to fuck off.
I think they’re saying economic development in other places will create emissions that dwarf any mitigation achievable in today’s economically developed regions. Any plan that doesn’t address this likely scenario probably won’t work.
First thing you need to understand about India — it's not the same as everybody else. The country is unique unlike any other country in the world. What works in other places might not work there.
> elect politicians who build renewable power instead of electing politician who build coal plants.
I think politicians across party lines want to switch to renewable.
Please understand that this switch to renewables can't be done overnight. And there's a huge population who can't be kept in the dark during the transition period.
Also, India is the 3rd largest producer of renewable energy (and 3rd largest consumer) in the world, behind USA and China [1]. They're making an effort.
Roughly 5 Billion people, or more, rely on the Haber process to turn hydrocarbons in nitrogen fertiliser so they can eat.
Carrying capacity of the earth before this mass manufacture of artificial fertiliser was maxxed out at around 1.5B, maybe with better plant strains that could be edged up, but not by 500% you would think.
We are still a fair way off from green steel, we are going to need metallurgical coal for some time, unless you like driving a wooden car pulled by a horse.
And alumina and lithium are both gas heavy in refining at the front end, needing calcination at 1000 DegC, plus or minus.
Then there is plastic, from lighter fractions of liquid hydrocarbons in many cases (condensate) - I can't believe you are still allowed to buy water in a plastic bottle or food in a plastic container that's a once use, that's crazy.
Hydrocarbons aren't going to become non-existent parts of the industrial landscape if any kind of life as we know it is to continue - we just need to start by stopping stupid waste in transient use cases like once use water bottles and food containers, decorative wrapping, short lived non repairable consumer appliances and goods, and synthetic fabrics that are made into clothes that could last for years or even decades, but get disposed of after 10 or 20 wears because of "fashion" or poor manufacture renders them useless in this time.
Growing up in New Zealand in the 70's, if someone had tried to warn that in the future you would be paying for drinking water (any water actually), by the half litre and more expensive than petrol in some cases, and you would get a free bottle that you immediately discarded when you finished drinking from it, you would have been ignored as a fringe lunatic at best, and may well have been taken in for some kind of assessment. And yet some decades later, here we are.
Indians have other ecological problems on our hands. Unchecked pollution (air, water, soil), poorly designed cities, burning stubble, etc. On per-capita CO2/CH4, India is doing great.
Your post contains three sources, but I respectfully have to say I consider it completely misleading.
There is no real evidence "decoupling", that is GDP growth combined with stagnation or decline in resource consumption and emissions.
All studies that are widely cited claiming that European and other western industrialized nations have achieved any measurable reduction in per-capita emissions and resource consumption have, to my knowledge, been debunked.
> US total CO2 emissions and CO2 emissions per capita have been dropping for a while now. The same is true for the EU as a whole
Economic growth depends on very material and observable effects on the physical world.
I admit that I only looked closely at your first link, but arguing against this trope again and again is tiring.
So far I feel that all of these statistics have gaping logical holes, the worst and most obvious being considering "territorial emissions". Your first link seems to suffer from that too, at least at first glance.
It is outrageous to me that questioning "Green capitalism" is still considered a fringe position.
I can recommend e.g. this read (don't focus on the relatively tame headline):
> we should be doing better in the west, but it's a lie to tell ourselves that driving an electric car and putting solar panels on the roof is going to solve the problem.
I agree, at least in part.
But your conclusions are off to me.
Solar panels on the roof should mostly a net-positive thing (or net negative after a couple of years, in terms of emissions). The more widely deployed, the better.
What a pity that they are not widely deployed. Seems to be a systemic problem, fracking and coal are more lucrative.
Also they can ot offset an ever-increasing resource demand, eco-blind urban planning etc in their own.
That's a problem with most of the "eco products" out there.
We don't
just need a new product, we need new politics.
As far as I know, western countries have not effectively reduced their per-capita emissions or resource consumption. At best, temporarily in times of recession, but the overall trend remains upwards. .
Even countries with stagnating population numbers keep on broadening the trail of destruction they impose on the world.
The way we delude ourselves into being "ahead in green progress" compared to developing nations sounds to me very neo-colonialistic and delusional.
Your comment hints at this fact, but only in a away that most people seem to paraphrase with "India matters, while us accelerating the global depletion of NNRs and raise of emission does not".
I feel like most coverage of climate change and environmental is purposefully framed in a way that implies there was no alternative to growth and capitalism. Also downplaying the scale of the problem and how we continue to perpetuate it.
The spurious statistics mostly reward countries that let others do the "dirt work" for them, sustaining absurd excesses of the rich and the population clashing over the "trickle-down" remains.
By all means, we should be doing better in the west, but it's a lie to tell ourselves that driving an electric car and putting solar panels on the roof is going to solve the problem.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...
[2] https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/greenhous...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/india