Chapter 1: The Climate Solution
This is Chapter 1 from free climate book A Plan to Save the Planet.
This book presents a realistic plan to resolve climate change at the lowest cost. We define “realistic” as observing political, economic, and technical principles (which will be discussed later). Also, this is open-source, which means others can copy and modify the original files for free.
The world currently burns coal, natural gas, and oil-based products to generate electricity, push vehicles, heat buildings, and fabricate materials. Unfortunately, the exhaust contains carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas that warms the planet. A little warming is ok; however, harmful amounts of warming are expected this century.
In theory, carbon-based fuels could be replaced with energy created at solar farms, wind farms, hydro-electric dams, and nuclear power plants. However, replacement is not occurring fast enough. For example, the U.S. government projects U.S. CO2 emissions to decrease from 4.8 billion tons in 2022 to 4.0 billion tons in 2052. This is a 20% reduction over 30 years, and is far short of our planet's needs.
As one can see from the above graph, President Biden's $391B Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) caused the 2052 expectation to drop from 4.3 to 4.0 billion tons a year. In other words, the IRA did little.
The U.S. government does not have a plan to reduce CO2 significantly, and when it spends money on climate, it is often not effective. This is due to several reasons that include: (a) the hi-jacking of climate (i.e. organizations use climate to make money), (b) a lack of websites that model cost and impact of policy before it is enacted, and (c) government leaders often delegate to entities that do not have the physical ability to reduce CO2 at the lowest cost and at large scales.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th Report expects current national policies to facilitate warming between 2.2°C and 3.5°C, as illustrated above. This would lead to catastrophic amounts of sea level rise, damage from storms, and increased food costs due to drier land. In other words, nations need to change their current policies to avert disaster.
What is the Lowest-Cost Solution?
This begs the question, “What is the lowest cost way to make these policy changes and what would it cost?” One can look at U.S. gov't cost data and do a little math to see this would probably entail building solar farms and wind farms at a rate that is approximately 4-times greater than current construction levels. In the U.S. this would cost approximately $20 per person per year in year #1, $40 in year #2, $60 in year #3, etc. In the typical case, this would pay the mortgage on new solar farms and new wind farms, minus the cost of carbon-based fuels that were not burned due to being replaced with green electricity. Ultimately, these costs would appear as an increase in the cost of goods and services.
The Prisoner's Dilemma Problem
Companies, cities and states are not likely to spend significant amounts of money to reduce CO2 since they do not benefit. In other words, they can reduce emissions to zero and the world will still emit CO2 and cause them harm. This is referred to as a “prisoner's dilemma problem.”
Therefore, decarbonization to zero over a reasonable duration, is not likely to occur unless required by law. And this law does not exist. This begs the question, “How does one structure an effective climate law that has majority support?”
U.S. Climate Politics
States that import natural gas and coal benefit from decarbonization in two ways: (a) they gain green jobs while carbon jobs are lost elsewhere, and (b) their costs decrease when the price of fuel decreases due to less consumption. The opposite is true for states that produce natural gas or coal. They are hurt by decarbonization due to loosing carbon jobs, and lower fuel price entails less revenue. Therefore, one can expect carbon producers, which is approximately one-third of the U.S. states, to not support significant decarbonization legislation.
According to survey, 40% of Republicans and 95% of Democrats are concerned about climate and want to decarbonize. We can do some math to see that approximately half of Americans want to decarbonize and are from states that do not produce natural gas or coal. In other words, we are close to majority support for significant decarbonization legislation.
This would need to meet the satisfaction of Republicans and Democrats who want to decarbonize. Republicans typically require two things: (a) lowest cost, and (b) minimal federal involvement. And Democrats typically require one thing: government engineers at EIA need to score the proposed initiative as reducing CO2 significantly over a reasonable period of time.
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What Might a Real Climate Law Look Like?
A federal law that meets that meets the above requirements might: (a) do more R&D, and (b) require states to reduce CO2 emissions by 1/N each year relative to today. The later would cause emissions to decrease to zero over N years. For example, to decarbonize over 30 years, one would set N to 30 and reduce today's emissions 1/30th each year (i.e. “30 Year Climate Law”).
Part (a) of this law uses R&D to decrease the cost of new green infrastructure. This infrastructure is likely to cost 100 trillion dollars globally over several decades. Therefore, spending billions of dollars to reduce this is reasonable. Yet what might one develop that is not already being worked on? And what might one develop that would have a big impact? One could work on these questions within a business plan for more R&D. This could be reviewed and reworked to the satisfaction of the various participants. Also, researchers could potentially be paid approximately $10K each to develop proposals for R&D referenced in the plan. For example, 50 proposals might cost $500K total.?
Part (b) of this law (e.g. 1/30th reduction) would probably require a website that models cost and impact. In other words, a website that calculates how much CO2 is reduced, and cost per ton of CO2, for each decarbonization initiative. Already some of this is done by the U.S. government's NEMS model. However, it needs a website user interface to be more useful.
Reasonable Next Steps
To move lowest cost decarbonization forward, universities, foundations, and non-profits can do several things:
In summary, climate is a 100 trillion dollar problem and we need to think about how to spend billions of additional R&D dollars to save trillions; think about how to create better tools for lawmakers; and think about how to better educate the public on how to tackle climate at the lowest cost.
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