What can the United States really do? They produce 15% of global CO2 emissions. China produces 30%, and is building new coal plants every year. Its coal consumption has tripled since 2000. Aside from Japan, Russia, and India, no other single nation produces more than 5% of the total. The entire EU produces 9%.
Even if the U.S. and the EU immediately stopped emitting 100% of their CO2, would it have any real effect on climate change? China would make up the difference within a decade or two. The entire continent of Africa is ready to industrialize, and its population is projected to decuple to 10 billion by 2050.
I don't blame people for being skeptical of the idea that America investing in green energy will save the world. It's a drop in the bucket.
The US and the EU are some of the biggest consumer markets. If they for example implement a carbon price and levy import tariffs for imports from countries who don't this will have a big effect.
That would be more us versus them. China isn't worse than we (Europe and US) when we were "growing up". The fair choice would be giving benefits to wares made with green energy, not taxing wares. China didn't get the planets pollution where it is now. We did.
Yes but the alternatives are much easier for a country to afford, understand and build when at a lower tech level (like China compared to the US when old powerplants were build in China for example).
The difference is that taxing something means less people are likely to buy it and when they do we make money, while giving a tax break make the product more competitive while costing us the income we might have had. One is a carrot, the other is a stick. It might not matter on income in the end but it will help push for greener products while taking the high road.
You could prevent a lot more pollution with the same amount of money if the money goes to low hanging fruits in countries with older power infrastructure than trying to tweak something brand new. You don't need to use extra money, just use it smarter. There're lots of ways to finance this smarter if trade wars and nationalism wasn't the top priorities.
There are multiple view points. The country with the largest current annual total emissions is China with 27-30% and the US with 15% (see 2m10s).
The country that produced the most CO2 in total historically which got us to this point of climate change (see 3m30s), were US first at 25% of historical emissions, and the EU in second at 22%, and China in third with 13% of historical emissions. India, all of Africa, and all of South America each had 3% of historical emissions.
Then there's per capita emissions (see 5m10s of the video).
So which of these three metrics should be used? Or should it be some other metric or a combination?
Also probably worth noting that China seems to have peaked in coal plants. They've built too many already, but hopefully it should be going down now.
For example, the US could start to reduce their emission to the level of the EU on a per-capita basis. A 7% reduction in total emissions is not little. If you look at the population, it's expected that China will pollute ~4 times as much as the US.
You state the United States is producing 15% of global CO2 emissions - but that presumably ignores all the CO2 produced on the behalf of the United States in producing the products we import. Including those imports makes our CO2 emissions jump significantly higher - which is really bad seeing as how the United States has only 5% of the world's population. So even discounting imports the United States has the opportunity to reduce its CO2 emissions by 66%. How we achieve that can be a model for others to follow. I'd much rather be in a position of do as I do rather than do as I say.
The US and EU are the big end customers for Chinese goods - Western economies shipped off the pollution from manufacturing, so it's not as straightforward as "its China's fault"
- Manufacturing in the states/EU where pollutant levels can be regulated is a good idea.
- Reducing consumerism as a culture would be useful.
Both of these go against trends (many in technology). Less consumerism means less stuff which is something wall street and SV are both pushing for. Moving to a service economy has been classified as a higher level than one with manufacturing. In the gamification metrics it would be to go backward.
The trick is to start 30 years ago, when everybody knew that climate change was real and serious. Then the US can join with other countries to implement any of a variety of carbon control measures, such as a carbon tax. With a worldwide consensus, it would be much more difficult for China to grow its carbon production so rapidly (and for Western countries to outsource all of their carbon-producing activities to China).
Of course, that involves not having spent three decades inculcating paranoid conspiracy theories in the American public. Instead, we can move on to stage 5 climate denialism, "Well, it's too late to do anything about it now".
If you look at the history of pollution it isn't until recently that China started being a polluter on par with Europe and the US when we were growing our industry. Most of the pollution on earth hasn't come from China and if we acknowledge this and take our part in cleaning up, instead of pointing fingers and saying "today we are polluting less so you should too", we could for example lower import taxes on items made with green energy and lower export prices on things China need for going green(er).
China are not going to pay for fixing our pollution going back a hundred years. We are or China will just turn a deaf ear on our talk.
China is increasing their pollution. The issue is around leadership. How can the US lead China to lower pollution levels, something they are currently increasing?
The question on how to lead them doesn't point fingers. It doesn't ask China to cleanup any past mess done by others. Bringing this up avoids dealing with the very difficult issue of... how do outside parties lead China to be more environmentally friendly when they are increasingly going in the opposite direction.
Let me ask you this: If in scenario A the US (or EU) uses X billion dollars to lower pollution by tweaking an already high tech industry or in scenario B uses the same amount of money helping China getting their older technologies upgraded, which scenario do you think lowers the pollution the most?
If I could donate money and remove X amount of CO2 pollution from the US or X+10% from China with the same amount I would not care at all about national borders. Pollution doesn't. Nationalism does. Technology transfer for greener technology at a discount would help a lot more than trying to get some newer SUVs on the road in the States.
Btw. stating that China is "increasingly going in the opposite direction" is not fairly stating the situation. China is doing a lot better than most in many areas if you compare apples to apples. The main drive for the increase is the increase of people having access to something akin to what we have (smartphones, cars, etc). That a population being lifted out of poverty is polluting more than earlier isn't a surprise. They pollut more because they need more powerplants, more cars are on the road, etc. Not because the don't try to build efficient powerplants and don't try to tax old dirty cars.
China isn't doing worse than Europe and US when they were "growing up" as China is now. Asking China to do better than we did because we have polluted the earth without helping China out is unfair and China likely (and rightly) won't listen. So to answer your question: The US and the EU can do our part which is to help clean up (even if that help is to help China polute less) instead of pointing fingers or start trade wars. Carrots work a lot better than whips. AFAIK the EU does more carrot than whip which gives me some hope.
The article offers a window into subtle antagonism. This is one of the elements causing division and lack of movement.
For example, I know some people who love and want to preserve the great outdoors. They don't like litter and they want to treat the land well. A bunch of them happen to have supported Trump and Republicans. So, against their normal flow they argue against climate change. It's easy to get them to want to see change in fishing (over fishing and dragging nets is damaging coral reefs). It's hard to get them to get them to close on climate change.
How we treat people makes a difference. It's helped fuel the people fighting against discussing or dealing with climate change.
-> President Biden has identified cutting greenhouse gas emissions linked to rising global temperatures as one of his top priorities, insisting that a shift away from fossil fuels and to cleaner forms of energy also could create needed U.S. jobs.
This argument that green energy creates new jobs... is this not a version of the broken-window fallacy?
Not quite. It’s more of a political salve. “Look those jobs are going away, but we’ll also have other jobs with this new green energy”. Cutting carbon jobs can hurt specific areas quite a bit.
A broken window fallacy would be more like “Let’s adopt this new green energy because it is currently less efficient on a cost basis and so will create new jobs”
Or saying “green energy won’t cost anything because it will create new jobs”. Some people may be saying that one, but I think most people spouting the jobs line are trying to build political goodwill on places currently dependent on carbon jobs.
So which is better, Hydrocarbon Power or Poor People?
Forgive me for being facetious, but to make my position more clear: I think electrifying the country has had demonstrable benefits to our society. To claim the costs outweigh the benefits is dubious and requires support.
You make a really good point. There's a very clear link between electrification and well-being.
1) Coal pollution kills 10,000 people a year, most of them poor because no rich person would live close to a coal plant. So that's a massive cost weighing heavily on the benefits of coal electrification.
2) Wind & Solar power are cheaper than coal, and not just by a little bit. So much so that in some places the capital and operating costs of wind and solar are cheaper than just the operating costs of coal. In those places abandoning the coal capital is still a win.
3) Much of the capital costs of a coal plant are in it's steam plant and in its grid interconnects. That makes them superb places to turn other heat sources into electricity and great places to inject non-heat sourced green electricity into the grid. So we don't lose all the capital investment into our coal plants.
4) mitigation costs of a tonne of CO2 at $50-$300/tonne make it a no brainer. adaptation costs for climate change would be even higher.
Bill Gates argues your point very strongly in his book. Before he was a climate change activist he was an activist for the health and welfare of the global poor. He understands the importance of electricity to the global poor and firmly rejects any solution that stops the progress of getting it to them.
Electrifying the country happened a long time ago and had clear benefits. Continuing to emit GHGs happens today and has clear negatives. Alternatives are available, and switching does not increase the number of poor people. The cost of CO2 today outweighs the benefit of having to invest less into new infrastructure. Poor people, by the way, are those who are most affected by climate change.
Bill Gates' book "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster" would be a great place to start.
Mitigation costs are expenses to prevent climate change.
Adaptation costs are expenses incurred because of climate change. Some of them are relatively easy to calculate like $200B to build a sea wall for New York City. Some of them are more handwavy -- what are the costs of mass migration? Most of these costs are incurred by farmers.
"Based on an extensive industrial and engineering analysis, our new report demonstrates that an aggressive national commitment to electrify all aspects of our economy would create up to 25 million good-paying American jobs over the next 15 years and 5 million sustained jobs by mid-century. This is the first analysis of the job opportunities that would result from a rapid and total decarbonization of the economy as a whole. Unlike other approaches, which tend to see climate change policy as primarily environmental in nature, the study also imagines the electrification of America as fundamentally infrastructure designed to power America and its economy in the 21st century."
Thank you for providing this detailed and thoughtful analysis.
"Job creation on this scale and at this pace is not without precedent. The U.S. followed avery similar path in mobilizing for WWII. Winning the war for the Allies had a total cost ofaround 1.5 1939 GDPs. Transitioning to a completely decarbonized energy system probablyhas a cost closer to just 1 2019 GDP of $22 Trillion.
Recognizing the terrifying realities on the front lines of battle, and the deprivations at home, is this a fair comparison?
"In the most simplistic analysis, only considering jobs in the energy industry, we cansee that decarbonization will produce at steady state a few millions more direct jobs thanwhat we are doing today with fossil fuels. In a more complete economic analysis based onthe typical methodologies for modeling economy-wide job creation we see the net creationof around 23 million jobs at the peak settling at around 4-6 million more jobs at steadystate (2040 and beyond)"
4 million net jobs represents an increased cost of $200 billion per year for the same level of service ($600/yr per US citizen). The article estimates the capital costs of decarbonization to be approximately $3 trillion ($9,000 per US citizen).
Very good. We have a baseline understanding of the real costs of the project. Now what is the cost of the null alternative? Could we realized a decarbonized society without government intervention? Is this the most efficient use of capital?
"More jobs" for the same production of goods/energy is less efficient and produces less total prosperity. You're better off using the most efficient means of production, and letting the other people produce something else of value.
Perhaps... The moneyed participants in the Renewable Energy industry are economic frontrunners - preparing for what they see is an inevitable future of expensive hydrocarbons. While the Green Jobs are less efficient today, they speculate they will become more efficient tomorrow, and make them all rich. But this is hardly a marketable proposition to the millions of taxpayers who are being asked to stabilize their less-efficient market offerings, and so baser arguments are made.
You can see that it's Washington Post, well-known both for its ideological bent and its owner, as is generally the case for all major news outlets. As I see it, you should (1) use it understanding that; (2) pick other major news publications whose biases your prefer, and/or (3) find outlets that you find to be neutral, understanding that they're probably small and you should keep knowledge of them to yourself, lest they should become very successful and thus worthy of being bought or steered into something you don't like.
Isn't this precisely the type of comment that goes against site guidelines? Curiously, because of the ideological bent of many in the SV crowd, a comment like this evades the downvoting that the OP gets.
It seems to me that there's a de facto ideological standard around flagging and downvoting, where certain people are allowed to pearl-clutch and pose opposing viewpoint as plainly absurd and lacking the dignity of intellectual consideration.
Yes and OP started it with his comment which shows perfectly why the rules are as they are. That the later comment was also against the guidelines could easily be predicted.
It is from a newspaper, Washington post, which had entirely anti Trump news leanings for years. It’s very obvious the items and quotes they choose to include here while offering almost no new information on climate. Excluding Trump, this article could have been written 20 years ago.
Even if the U.S. and the EU immediately stopped emitting 100% of their CO2, would it have any real effect on climate change? China would make up the difference within a decade or two. The entire continent of Africa is ready to industrialize, and its population is projected to decuple to 10 billion by 2050.
I don't blame people for being skeptical of the idea that America investing in green energy will save the world. It's a drop in the bucket.