This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1395746
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1395746
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As always, the solution to any problem caused by major corporations is for them to continue to sow doubt then, when that stops working, propose grossly inadequate solutions until the catastrophe they cause is so bad that everyone will just throw up their arms and say “it’s too late, there’s nothing we can do anymore.” Then, the problem is solved (for the corporations anyway).
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The proof that the Big Oil knew it was doing damage since the 70s is incontrovertible.
Sue them for everything and then nationalize them. Sure, it will tank the DJIA. So what?
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Greed and the opportunity to get greedier. Because money is power.
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Energy transition is something that is coming, but we don’t have clear indications as to the eventual energy mix. Part of the problem is that energy needs to be cheap for economic growth, and decarbonization means further electrification of the economy. The current mix is gas, solar, hydro and wind. About 22% of US electricity comes from solar, wind and hydro combined, about 20% from nukes, and 40% from natural gas. Nukes are the most intractable of power sources to phase in or out, so Biden’s goal should be on continuing to increase solar, wind and electrical storage capacity as both solar and wind are intermittent sources (assuming you don’t do the solar collection in space). The US has to decide on whether it goes down a green or blue hydrogen path as well. The shale bubble of the past decade left many investors burned and reluctant to invest even in gas at this point. Also, as we have seen in Alberta and Alaska, the sovereign wealth funds that were supposed to set aside wealth for future generations have been grossly mismanaged (something quite typical of countries or regions suffering a resource curse. Biden has to lay out a transition to clean cheap energy or the nonsense, foot-dragging and political sabotage from incumbent hydrocarbon producers will continue.
The plutocrats who are tied to the fossil fuel industry are engaging in a new climate war—this time to prevent meaningful action. Over the past few years, you’ve seen a lot of conservative groups pulling their money out of the climate-change-denial industry and putting it instead into efforts by ALEC [the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative lobbying group], for example, to fund legislative efforts blocking clean-energy policies.
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That’s definitely one of their strategies, but hard-working, determined individuals have managed to force changes in these industries in the past. Neil DeGrasse Tyson spent a whole episode of his Cosmos show talking about Dr. Clair Patterson, who stumbled across the pollution and poisoning from leaded gasoline while trying to accurately measure the age of the Earth. It didn’t happen overnight, but he kept up the fight once he identified the issue and kept advocating until the gas companies were forced to comply.
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There’s the rub. The transition from fossil fuels to alternatives isn’t going to be pretty nor is transitioning going to be cheap.
Take the car industry – as cars become more fuel efficient and other transport modes become more popular, the decrease in demand causes market egress by companies that cannot efficiently perform extraction at scale/cost. Fewer suppliers trying to match an increasingly shrinking market actually has an inflationary effect on oil prices.
Gasoline is a cheap, portable energy source. Electricity is not – at least not the way our current grid & battery technology is set up.
Fundamentally, it’s not just a shift away from fossil fuels but also adjusting the current economic dependency on consumption in the U.S. economy.
As to development of carbon capture technologies – let’s not discount it out of hand. The article authors ignored the fact that the world’s largest carbon capture plant just opened in Iceland… and since it uses geothermal for power, is less problematic than other efforts. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/worlds-largest-carbon-capture-plant-opens-iceland-180978620/) At the same time, we shouldn’t overlook the earth science & engineering expertise pool from the current fossil fuel industry. They are quite good at figuring out how complex molecules move through the so-called solid earth. Right now it’s used for extraction, but could fairly easily be pointed in other directions. Which is basically to say: scaled carbon capture is impossible, until it isn’t.
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The problems I see there is that sources like geothermal are very situational. A lot of places, particularly in the middle of tectonic plates aren’t going to have anything like that to rely on. So I question how much that could be scaled up across the globe.
It’s possible that scalable carbon-capture technology could be developed; we’ve certainly had similar major breakthroughs for much of the modern technology we rely on today, but I doubt how much we can rely on the fossil fuel companies themselves to be the ones “guarding the henhouse” on this. Until/unless the companies’ focus is moved from extraction to wholly on capture, they will never willingly be the primary movers and shakers on the tech, as I see it. I don’t see a capitalistic solution for that and it’s going to take public investment or some enterprising new industry that isn’t tied to the old extraction mentality before that tech dam is liable to break.
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True – but market pressures are already making some shifts. This Forbes article is instructive: so-called “grey hydrogen” costs $1-3/kg to make whereas “green hydrogen” costs $3-5/kg.
Chevron patented a hydrogen generation technology that relies off of natural gas feedstock that comes somewhere between grey and green… with a physical footprint about the size of most current service stations… this would work for many fleet vehicles and they are also pursuing pilot projects with Caterpillar and Cummins. (I would also note that the average age of Chevron’s employee base skews younger than the other oil majors – by a generation – which means people in the company are more intune with climate change than you might get with older O&G workers.)
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But we are too busy cutting down the Amazon rain forest to graze more cattle and raise oil palms. We are so screwed…
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Carbon “capture”, mainly through plate subduction and the “slow” carbon cycles, is the biggest geological process on the planet for at least the past billion years.
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Your post is brilliant in the sense that it is excellent and it suggests the benefit of enlightened governmental interaction with the Private Sector and The Academy.
The part I really like I am reposting above…
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Even Putin is not contemplating grey or brown hydrogen. Even Forbes would agree that we do not want to end up on the other side of a Sixth Great Extinction Event.
Humans contribute to the current extinction crisis by habitat destruction and fragmentation, poaching, illegal trade, overharvesting, the introduction of non-native and domesticated species into the wild, pathogens, pollution, and climate change. “The ongoing sixth mass extinction may be the most serious environmental threat to the persistence of civilization, because it is irreversible,” the authors of the most recent study write.
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…there are ways to sequester carbon that build upon the system we already know works: biological sequestration. Trees in the U.S. already sequester almost a billion tons of carbon dioxide per year.
Trees can save the world.
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Which is a great start. We have to sequester about 6 times that much annually.
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So let me get this straight. Renewables will save us because of unknown innovations. CCS will never work because it hasn’t in the past. Thank you for clarifying.
But maybe we need it all.
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China has planted billions of trees this past decade:
China is planting 6.6 million hectares of new trees in a colossal reforestation project that’s almost the size of Ireland. The State Forestry Administration of China announced its ambitious plans to increase the country’s tree-covered territory from 21.7% to 23% by 2020 last week.
Some people claim Silver Maples are a weed tree. Going by the janka scale, silver maples are ten percent harder than Douglas Fir. And that’s the most popular wood in the building and flooring industry.
And silver maples are the champions in carbon capture and storage:
Yet even the giants of the plant kingdom are not equally adept at gobbling up CO2. In fact, the differences can be dramatic. Silver maple (Acer saccharinum) tops the list of “best trees” compiled from data collected by the U.S. Forest Service’s Center for Urban Forest Research, which in recent years has been at the forefront of efforts to determine which species are the true champions of carbon capture and storage. Researchers at the Davis, California, facility calculate that a silver maple traps almost 25,000 pounds of CO2 after 55 years—25 times more than cherry and plum trees, which ranked last
I had to cut down two huge silver maples only because they were providing too much shade on my roof and encouraging moss on the South side. Power company had been trimming them for the past twenty years on the street side. Consequentially, they grew too much on the house side. They kind of looked too weird the way they were growing. But in all the wind storms we have had around here since 1986, the trees held up great and never had any branches fall. One should never plant them too close to a house because of the seeds getting into the rain gutters and etc. My rule of thumb is plant them where you can cut them down and they have enough room to fall if you ever need to cut them down. Never plant them near power lines.
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As the saying goes, nothing is so simple that people won’t complicate the hell out of it. The answers are pretty obvious and involve a massive restructuring of the way we live. We can do it ourselves, or it will be done to us by events. One obvious example is cars. We don’t need better cars, electric cars, self-driving cars, or cooler cars (replete with computer chips so that the car can park itself). What we need is FEWER cars. Far fewer cars. The problem is that so many people make a living, one way or another, in the auto industry. So, disruptive it would be, indeed, to remove, say 90% of the cars on the road. But it’s going to happen, sooner or later, when coastal cities begin to experience massive floods, etc., etc. Crisis management might just be the human condition, but it doesn’t have to be. Instead of paying these oil companies to pretend to sequester CO2, pay people not to drive. There’s an idea.
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These bastards won’t stop until they’re made to stop. For them, the oil in the ground is vast wealth and they refuse to give that up, even if it kills us all. Such is the imbecility that happens when money is your only incentive.
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You do realize that without fossil fuels, we’d be living a much simpler life. No EVs, no wind turbines, no solar panels. No food, no planes and not much of anything would be possible. But it’s kind of cute to read comments by people like you who are dependent on fossil fuels for nearly everything you own except your pet rock. And curse what enables you to live your comfortable life. Sometimes I wish I could fly people like you out to Montana on a fenced in ten acre spread and say… OK , you’ve got a world without fossil fuels. I’ll check up on you in a year and see how you’re doing after you have burned the last tree (fossil fuel) for heat.
And FYI, I’m not invested in fossil fuels anymore, Biden made it possible for me to exit everything with a nice profit. Now… I may short some overvalued stocks in the renewable sector.
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