While thinking about decarbonizing transport, I dug out this old post from 2005. It’s interesting to see how the debate has evolved (or not) since then.
The big change has been that the prospects for technological alternatives like alternative energy sources and electric vehicles have improved dramatically. As regards transport, I don’t see much reason to change the analysis I presented in 2005. Unfortunately, while some progress has been made along the kinds of lines I suggested, it’s been very limited compared to the radical changes in electricity generation. So, we are only at the beginning of the process of decarbonizing transport.
Tim Worstall gets us past that pesky NYT paywall to link approvingly to a John Tierney column arguing that the way to encourage energy conservation in the US is not to fiddle with standards but to raise prices. Broadly speaking I agree. At a minimum, getting prices right is a necessary condition for an adjustment to sustainable levels of energy use. Nevertheless, the rate of adjustment and the smoothness with which adjustment takes place can be greatly enhanced by the adoption of consistent pro-conservation policies, or retarded by the adoption of inconsistent and incoherent policies.
This is as good a time as any to restate the point that, given a gradual adjustment, very large reductions in energy use and CO2 emissions can be achieved at very modest cost. Rather than argue from welfare economics this time, I’ve looked at the kind of adjustments that would be needed to cut CO2 emissions from motor vehicle use (one of the least responsive) and argued that price increases would bring this about over time, without significant pain.
With the price of gasoline in the US passing $3/gallon and most of the remaining sceptics now conceding the reality of human-caused climate change, it seems like a good idea to re-examine some fundamental assumptions in the debate over climate change. Rather than focus on the short-run arguments about the Kyoto protocol, it seems more useful to focus on the question of whether anything can really be done to stop climate change.
A common estimate is that to stabilise the global climate, we would need to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 60 per cent, and proposals to achieve this by 2050 have been put forward. Assuming only a limited role for alternative energy sources, it seems reasonably to look at a 50 per cent reduction in primary energy use.
It’s a widely-held view that the kinds of changes required to stabilise the global climate must imply a fairly radical reduction in our material standard of living. This view is shared by radical environmentalists, who see such a reduction as a good thing, and by opponents of such changes most of whom, at least in developed countries are on the free-market right.
The fact that radical environmentalists view the modern economy as critically dependent on unsustainable patterns of energy use is not surprising. On the other hand, supporters of the free-market generally praise the flexibility of dynamism. Currently, energy use accounts for about 6 per cent of GDP. The suggestion that reducing this proportion to, say, 3 per cent, is beyond our capacity seems to represent a very pessimistic view of our economic potential.
There’s a standard economic technique for giving a rough estimate of the economic cost of such a shift. Begin with the assumption that in the long run, the demand for energy is sufficiently flexible that a 10 per cent increase in costs will eventually produce a 10 per cent reduction is usage, relative to the underlying trend. Although energy use responds slowly to price changes in the short run this is a fairly conservative estimate of price responsiveness over periods of a decade or more.
Given this assumption, halving energy use would require a 100 per cent increase in prices (by coincidence this is about the change that’s been seen in US gasoline prices in the last few years). A standard economic calculation suggests that the reduction in economic welfare associated with such a tax would be somewhere between 50 and 100 per cent of the revenue raised, or between 1.5 per cent and 3 per cent of GDP. That’s about one year’s worth of economic growth. Remember that this estimate is not for the modest first steps required under Kyoto, but for a reduction in emissions on the scale required to stabilise climate.
Is such a broad-brush estimate reasonable? One way to check is to look in detail at the kinds of changes that would be needed to achieve such a reduction in the most sensitive single category of energy use, that of private motor vehicles.
Consider changes over twenty years, a period long enough for the vehicle fleet to turn over, and for people and firm to make adjustments to home and work locations, commuting and shopping patterns, and so on.
First, a significant reduction could be achieved simply by improvements in the technical efficiency of fuel use. The motor vehicle industry, although technologically mature, still exhibits steady improvements in the efficiency of engines and other aspects of vehicle design. When fuel prices are low, much of the effort is allocated to improving performance.
When fuel prices are high, and policy is oriented towards reducing energy use, innovations that improve fuel economy are favoured. Over 20 years, and with support from publicly funded research, it seems reasonable to anticipate a 20 per cent improvement in fuel economy, for all types of vehicles, relative to the ‘business as usual’ trend.
Second, some shift towards alternative fuels could be anticipated. While radical alternatives such as ethanol and hydrogen and alternatives to internal combustion such as electric cars have so far proved disappointing, an increase in the effective cost of petrol would encourage greater use of existing alternatives such as LPG and diesel, which are more efficient in terms of carbon emission.
Yet further improvements could be achieved with measures to reduce traffic congestion, including purely technical innovations such as more sophisticated management of traffic lights and market innovations such as congestion charges.
Next, the mix of vehicles in the fleet would change over time. The gain from this source can be illustrated by a simplified example. Suppose that half of fleet uses 10l/100km, and half uses 5l/100km, yielding an average of 7.5l/100km. If the proportions changed to 25:75, the average would fall to 6.25,and fuel use would fall by 15 per cent. Most of this change would arise as a result of consumer responses to changing prices. However, existing policies that favour the use of large, inefficient vehicles (such as the special treatment of SUVs in US fuel economy regulations) should be scrapped, and replaced by policies pointing in the opposite direction.
A small further saving, say 5 per cent, could be achieved through discretionary decisions on which vehicle to use for a given trip. Given high fuel prices, a household with a small car and a 4WD might be more inclined to use the small car when dropping the kids off at school, for example.
A similar small change, say a 5 per cent reduction in fuel use, could be achieved through improved driving habits. These include stricter adherence to speed limits on open roads, and avoiding excessive acceleration and braking in urban areas.
So far, we’ve considered changes which involve no change at all in travel patterns (with the exception of congestion pricing, which would actually improve things), and only marginal adjustments in lifestyle. The biggest single change, in the fleet mix, would do little more than restore the mix prevailing in, say, 1980. Yet taken together, these changes would be sufficient to reduce energy use by between 30 and 40 per cent and CO2 emissions by an even larger amount.
Now consider some changes in travel patterns. The most important single variable is the distance travelled by each person. To get an idea of feasible magnitudes let’s consider a 20 per cent reduction in distance travelled. For commuting, the biggest single use of time, this could be achieved if people chose to live a little closer to work, to rearrange schedules to allow a four-day week, or to telecommute one day each week. Similar savings could be made on shopping and leisure travel with only modest costs.
The fuel cost of travel also depends on the extent to which people share cars. The average occupancy of cars has declined steadily reaching about 1.1 persons per vehicle for commuting trips in the US in 2000, and about 1.5 persons per vehicle for all trips. A partial reversal of this trend, raising occupancy to 1.65 persons would reduce fuel use by 10 per cent for a given number of person-km travelled.
Finally, there’s public transport and alternatives to cars like bicycles and walking. Doubling the share of these would reduce the number of vehicle trips by around 10 per cent, though the reduction in fuel use would be smaller since mostly short trips would be avoided.
Adding all of these modest changes together would yield a reduction in fuel use of more than 50 per cent Some of these changes would be imperceptible, others would require marginal adjustments over a couple of decades. Taken all together, they would be barely noticeable relative to the changes in lifestyle that most people experience over such a period.
You might think that adding together a whole lot of small changes in the same direction is stacking the deck in some sense. But this is the way markets work. An increase in the effective cost of some commodity generates adjustments on many different margins, all in the direction of economising on that commodity.
It is also the way coherent public policy works. If a goal of reducing energy use or CO2 emissions is properly embedded in public policy, it will be reflected in modest shifts in many different dimensions of policy, producing a significant aggregate impact.
The combination of price responsiveness and public policy can be seen working together in the reduction in tobacco use over the forty-odd years since the link between smoking and cancer was first officially recognised in the US in the Surgeon-General’s report of 1964. At the time, the proportion of men who smoked was 52 per cent and smoking among women was rising rapidly as older social taboos lost their effect. In 2000 the proportion who smoked was down to 25 per cent for men, and 20 per cent for women and was declining for both groups.
Admittedly, the health risks of smoking are borne mainly by the smoker, so the link between giving up and receiving benefits is direct and personal. Against this, nicotine is possibly the most addictive drug known to humanity. Giving up smoking requires an effort far greater than the modest changes discussed above.
The reduction in smoking was achieved by a combination of higher taxes, aggressive public information campaigns and public policies that gradually limited smoking in various public places, but without any radical changes or any element of compulsion comparable to Prohibition of alcohol or of the many drugs that are currently illegal.
What is true for driving and smoking is even more so for other forms of energy use, particularly in business and industry. Given a consistent upward trend in prices and a coherent set of public policies, massive reductions in energy use would follow as surely as night follows day.
John Quiggin 
That is an interesting comment, Jim Birch. Have you got any technical references to the Aluminium/Copper copper properties. I had a quick look but could not find any. If practical it would reduce the weight of our transformers by perhaps 30%, but from what I can see they would be larger, and the coefficient of expansion might be the killer. But I would be interested to see what your information said.
The composition of modern high voltage transmission lines, visible in section, perfectly bears out Jim Birch’s contentions at comment 50.
However, don’t take this as me saying that I believe there are no limits to growth. It turns out that energy and material limits might not be the limits we need to be concerned about. John Quiggin discerned this a long time ago, to give him his due. Waste limits now appear to be the near and potentially very dangerous limits we face. Waste materials and waste heat have the clear potential to seriously damage the biosphere and degrade or overwhelm the “natural services” and “bio-services” which the rest of the biosphere and “external geosphere including atmosphere” (too lazy to look up correct term) provide us.
For an example of how the changes can be positive, in a recent article I read about there is a really beautiful design for a building in Singapore with a forest inside:
http://www.techinsider.io/singapores-cloud-forest-revolutionizes-green-spaces-2015-11
And another example I read about in Singapore is turning a long railroad into a linear park like the High Line linear park along some no longer used rail tracks in New York :
“It will run along the route of the former Keretapi Tanah Melayu railway line, which was built in the British colonial period to transport tin, rubber, and other resources from the Malay Peninsula to the Singapore port.”
http://qz.com/586269/singapore-is-creating-its-own-version-of-new-yorks-high-line-but-10-times-longer/
On copper:
Yearly world production is around 18.7 million tonnes. One estimate is there’s about 25 kilograms of copper in an internal combustion engine car and 75 kilograms in an electric car. That means one year’s copper production is sufficient to produce quarter of a billion electric cars. With autonomous driving, which may be superior to human driving under natural conditions within only a couple of years (or now by my standards), perhaps one vehicle per 10 people will be required to provide road transport services equal to or better than what currently exists in the world’s richest countries. With the population expected to peak at under 10 billion the maximum number of vehicles we might require would be around one billion. So it would take four years copper production over 40 or so years to build that many vehicles.
Except that it won’t.
Currently there are over one billion vehicles in the world today and the copper in them can be recycled, protentially providing enough for a third of the billion or so electric cars the world might need. So that means a billion electric cars might need around two and two third years of world copper production.
The world now appears appears to have now passed peak copper. Along with peak steel, peak aluminium, and no doubt many other elements. And China’s current economic difficulties makes this even more certain. Just to be clear, the peak is peak extraction of new metal, not use of metal. We are mining less new metal because the portion of metal we use that is recycled is increasing. When lots of new infrastructure is being built, as took place in China, it pushs up the demand for metals. But China has now had rapid development for over 30 years and is now scrapping some of its older infrastructure and recycling that material and so relying less on new material. It is following the course every fully industrialised country has.
So, since we appear to have passed the peak, an increase in demand for copper to produce electric cars is just likely to slow the decline in new copper production rather than push it higher.
And if for some strange reason there actually somehow turns out to be not enough copper we could just use aluminium. The electric motors would be about 5% less efficient, which is annoying, but it’s not the end of the world. But if we don’t stop burning oil that will be the end of the world as we know it. And future developments could improve things even further. It has been suggested that carbon could be more effective than copper in electric motors, although that’s nowhere near to being practical at the moment.
My point about the cost of building a transmission grid was not speculation, it’s a simple observed fact.
@John Quiggin
No further interest in “peak minerals”, ProfQ ? Can’t say I blame you, especially as my partial repost seems to have caught Tim Worstall’s attention – a pity really, because his juvenile writing style makes him effectively unreadable. Though I do accept his sermon on ‘substitutability’ to a large extent.
Anyway, we’ve had some informative input from Jim Birch and Ronald Brack on the copper situation at least. Though I’m amused that nobody seems to have considered argentum (aka silver) as a copper substitute which was done in the USA to a significant degree during WWII – even including high power transmission lines, IIRC.
Anyway, my interest was basically nostalgic: I remember reading about 45 years ago of some research being done to see if efficient ways could be found to extract various elements from ocean water. The key point, IIRC, was that a largish ship (25,000+ tons in the old scale) displaces about half a cubic mile (it was an American article) of sea water in voyaging from England to America, and that a cubic mile of sea water contains, in solution/suspension about 100,000 tons of iron – and even 80 tons of gold, too, I think.
So if an efficient way could be found to extract stuff from sea water, a largish ship could extract enough to sink itself several times over.
The main problem, as I recall, was actually extracting the good stuff from the sea water efficiently enough for it to be competitive with standard mining. Apparently some progress had been made in designing and synthesizing various more or less complex molecules that could be designed to basically capture just one specific mineral ion, and then that had to be separated from the water and the ion removed as more or less pure metal.
And that was the last I ever heard of that idea (not entirely surprising) and I can’t even remember what magazine it was I read about this in (it might even have been Astounding/Analog which published stuff like that fairly often – see Isaac Asimov’s “The Sound of Panting” for an example. But more likely to have been a ‘popular science/technology’ magazine).
Faustus 10. Terje 0 (as usual).
Faustus: ‘And none of this takes into account the fact that the long-term global warming effect of coal will make the short term disadvantages of slow development look like a walk in the park – something you consistently refuse to accept.’
Greenblue, silver is a better conductor than copper, but as it is about 100 times more expensive than copper we are unlikely to see its use in electric motors outside of maybe space programs. They don’t even use silver wires in aviation, although silver plating of wires and connections is common.
@GrueBleen
I don’t think J.Q. bought into the peak minerals thesis any more than he bought into the peak energy thesis. His market / economic understanding of ‘substitutability’ is probably why. I, on the other hand did buy into the peak minerals / peak energy thesis for a long time.
Now, it is becoming clearer to LTG proponents like me that LTG is still in principle correct on a finite planet but the near limits are waste limits and biosphere / bioservice damage limits rather than material resource limits. Material limits are still there of course but they are further out and not likely to become operative. The waste limits will limit us first.
So the name of the game is that LTG is still 100% real and irrefutable in terms of quantitative or material production, though much further away, in theory, for qualitative production (knowledge, technical and cultural progress). If we can avoid trashing the biosphere this century, and avoid unleashing certain millennia timescale problems like major sea level rise, humanity could be in a good place for further progress in the order of 10,000 years or more. The trouble is we look at least 50% likely to trash the biosphere this century. Natural biosphere recovery, which would still be possible of course, would then take in the order of 100,000 years or multiples thereof. That’s kinda too long to be of any real long-term hope for humanity.
I don’t go to “great lengths” to avoid mentioning it. Coal pollution is a genuine health hazard in many places. Not as bad as wood fires in houses but still a reasonable thing to be conerned about. Solar power and wind are much cleaner. But also a lot more expensive and unreliable. Especially at high grid penetration rates. If clean matters more than cheap then go solar. But if dirty isn’t too bad go coal. If you want clean and reasonable cheap go nuclear.
1. If solar is cheaper then fine. No policy intervention needed. Let the market rip.
2. as above.
3. Yes.
4. Not sure this is relevant. Electricity is not just for industry.
5. Lots of vaccines need refrigeration as does the healthy storage of many foods. I would not wish a shortage of electricity on anybody. In fact I want electricty to be more abundant for all. I wish we had much cheaper electricity in Australia.
6. According to you. Some examples might help your case. Which countries have deceloped without coal? How did they do it?
7. Do you have any sources for that claim. Not saying you’re wrong just keen to see your evidence.
8. Starving people is the problem not the solution.
I don’t think copper availability will be a problem and this site lays it all out quite simply.
Click to access ica-long-term-availability-1303-A4-lr.pdf
Much more can be done to prevent copper being lost to the cycle but as a horticulturist I am responsible for some of that unrecoverable loss due to it’s importance as a fungicide. Strangely enough copper is rated for organic production despite its toxicity.
TerjeP, coal pollution affects a lot more people than wood fires in houses, and you need to include it in your claims about coal. You conspicuously don’t. In particular you said:
I’m pointing out to you that this is not true, especially the second point. To justify your first sentence you need to at least concede that coal is also a cause of huge mortality and illness. You haven’t. As for your response to my points.
1&2: You said greenies are stupid and nasty for opposing a technology you claim is cheap and Reliable. This is not an argument about the market, it’s about your criticism of greenies. I’ve pointed out to you that coal is not reliable and cheap. Instead of deflecting the argument onto your mythical market, accept that your criticism of greenies is ill-founded. And then we can get onto talking about how solar power has always, since its invention, been a free market success, and you can try and propose some realistic development pathways that don’t involve coal. ALso if you think the free market is operating in developing nations, I have a bridge to sell you.
3: try not to dismiss the negative effects of your preferred development path; or agree that it is not always preferable.
4: This is relevant because if it’s impossible for a country to develop an industrial base, it’s even less likely that it is going to develop the infrastructure that is primarily only useful for an indsutrial base. Remember that coal is not just about the powerplant, it’s also about hte grid, the ports and the connecting roads and the engineering workforce.
5: Refrigerators don’t need coal power. There are lots of simple alternatives to coal that ensure vaccines can be kept cool. I note you have avoided conceding my point about the other easy gains. You’re fetishizing coal. Why?
6: Why do you care about examples of industrial development that used coal 100 years ago? They didn’t have access to solar and wind power and hydro. We do. So why focus on one development pathway? Others include nuclear, gas, hydro, and (as I mentioned before) solar plus generators. You are aware that some countries in Africa have ubiquitous cell phones but poor landlines? Why do you think that is? the world hsa changed since your granddaddy drove a steam train.
7. It’s trivially easy for you to find infant mortality statistics from the UK, Japan, Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh. You’ll note that they all observed rapid gains after the 1940s. This is because we know what works to reduce infant mortality, and it’s got very little to do with coal-fired power stations.
8: People don’t starve from a lack of coal.
Here is your problem TerjeP: You’re fetishizing one power source as the only development pathway, because you seem to have fixated on a model of industrial development that is 100 years out of date, I presume because your good friends in the Chinese Communist party happened to be lucky enough to be sitting on a huge bunch of coal. But this development pathway you’re fetishizing would be exactly the wrong pathway to use in much of Africa and has largely not been followed slavishly in parts of South America. So your demonizing greenies for the “war on coal” is both factually wrong and ethically shallow, since it discredits the role of coal in causing health problems while exaggerating its role in improving the human condition. I’ve presented you with lots of information about why your demonization of greenies and fetishization of coal is wrong. I predict you won’t drop this line of attack though because your real reason for opposing action to prevent global warming is your hatred of greenies.
It’s particularly sad because back in thw 1970s libertarians were big proponents of energy decentralization and the development of local mixed economies of renewables. But since you’ve become patsies for big tobacco you’ve developed a big love affair with centralized power systems that are heavily govt subsidized, bad for health, bad for human equality and fatal for industrial civilization.
I doubt I need to point out to anyone on this thread that the hypocrisy of libertarians who adopt this line is unsurprising.
I would also point out that coal’s health effects are a negative externality problem the free market can’t solve, while indoor air pollution is not. Your political philosophy has no solution to the problem of negative externalities, which is why you refuse to accept the science of global warming – you’d rather look ignorant about climate science than admit your ideology is a failure.
@faustusnotes
(way back in the thread, but worth a shout-out:
“8. Some countries developed through the use of child labour and starving the Irish. Just because a development pathway works doesn’t mean we should use it.”
It’s even worse than that. The Lancashire textile boom depended on cotton grown by plantation slaves in the USA. Earlier, profits from slave-grown sugar, and the slave trade itself, allowed the initial accumulation of English capital that made the first investments in iron, coal, and textiles possible.
BTW, do you have evidence that the extraction of rents from Ireland (which continued during the famine) made a significant contribution to British capital investment in the 1840s, and not just consumption by absentee Irish landowners? By then, the industrial workers were generating their own surplus, contributing to the financing of the railway boom. Later, this surplus was invested abroad, allowing a less brutal development pathway in other countries.
My understanding is that the expropriation of Irish agricultural products was essential to keep British workers fed, ensuring that build up of urban labour at low wages could proceed. I’ll grant you I could be wrong, but the role of colonialism in building markets for British goods is a pretty established thing too, I think. Destroying development in India to support development in the uk is a strategy that doesn’t have much link to coal…
@Ronald Brak
Yes I am aware of the large difference in market price of copper and silver, Ron.
But of course when needs must, then suddenly large amounts of silver could be released from the USA’s ” massive reserve located in the West Point vaults “. I don’t know if it still has a large amount of silver but silver is in fact very plentiful, as the Hunt Brothers found to their cost some years ago.
@Ikonoclast
Of course there are real limits to growth, Ikono – when the entire mass of planet Earth has been transformed into human flesh, then we’ll either have to learn how to massively migrate elsewhere or give up on growth at last. And asinine propositions aside, there are practical limits which we will run up against one of these days.
However, so far tactics such as substitution and continuing technological progress has staved off the evil day – and is capable of continuing to do so for a very long time to come.
But why limit the timeframe to 10,000 years: Homo Sapiens Sapiens has only been around for about 200,000 years (albeit that predecessor hominids have been around for several million). So, if we ultra successful synapsids are around for about as long as the sauropsids our clade replaced back about 65 million years ago, then we should be able to keep going for 100 – 200 million years at least. Time for LTG to really cut in, do you reckon ?
Unless, of course, we really are as stupid as we look and do commit massive planetary destruction one way or another.
Paraphrasing rather poorly.
You mean the criticism that you paraphrased rather poorly.
Yeah but you’re wrong.
You mean the criticism that you paraphrased rather poorly?
You described them as “an obscenity I am proud to oppose”
As opposed to the destruction of industrial civilization, which is just your grandkids’ fate so nothing to care about.
Coal took millions of years, tens of millions of years, to form. We burn it up so quickly, we could, if we continue as if ignorant of the consequences, effectively remove the coal layer from geological history in the blink of a geologic eye.
If we choose to dismiss the consequences as having no cost, then of course coal is cheap to burn up. But that is a hell of a lot of carbon that nature drew down and locked up.
It seems that climate scientists can draw graphs until they are blue in the face, it just can’t be knocked into some people what a big mistake is being made, unnecessarily made, by our fossil fuel habit. Just because coal was the “best” way to fuel our economic growth in the past, it doesn’t follow that it remains so; not only do we know a lot more about the negative consequences—the costs—and how they are distributed forward in time, we have more options available to us for avoiding coal-based power than our ancestors did. Those who made their fortunes selling coal will manage the transition to a non-coal future, well enough, if they choose to do so; they wouldn’t be the first wealthy people confronted with a major transition in their markets of choice, and I dare say they won’t be the last. Why are some people so keen to shore up a few tycoons, when those tycoons have far more options at their disposal, thanks to their extraordinary wealth, and yet are willing to sell the rest of us down the river?
@ZM
It is extremely unlikely as it would require 2.5% reduction every year from 2016 and when the population growth rate is over 1% and China and India (and other nations) will be increasing fossil fuel consumption.
As we emit 38GT/yr for 7 billion people a 40% target amounts to around 15 GT/year when the population will be over 9 billion.
So we have to move our lifestyles from 5 tonnes per capita to 1.6 tonne.
For comparison Australia’s per capita electricity is over 8,000 kwhr per year. see:
http://www.tinyurl.com/8000KwHr
This is around 8 tonne CO2 (or bit less depending on the emission factor)
Or is there an alternative outcome.
India’s energy Minister, Piyush Goyal, has announced that solar power is now cheaper than coal. Their latest solar auction has bid in a new record low price of 4.34 rupees a killowatt-hour, which is 9.1 Australian cents or 6.5 US. Other countries have installed utility scale solar for less than this on account of their having lower costs of capital.
That is excellent news. It means we can immediately scrap the MRET system of renewable mandates in Australia and just let the market rip.
@Ronald Brak
So what year has India indicated they will peak CO2 emissions or start to reduce CO2?
@GrueBleen
I agree with your first paragraph. Argumentum ad absurdum (Latin: “argument to absurdity”) is a perfectly valid way to proceed when demonstrating the impossibility of any kind of endless growth in the earth’s biosphere. One can demonstrate the impossibility of human biomass or human infrastructure mass growing indefinitely. Thus endless quantitative growth is ruled out as a possibility. The next argument advanced by those in favour of the thesis of endless economic growth is that such growth can be qualitative. Quantitative growth can cease but qualitative growth can continue. This is what they argue. This is true for a time but quantitative growth also cannot continue indefinitely.
Quantitative growth means an increase in knowledge, cultural progress and technology and its applications. This in turn means increasing complexity. To create and maintain complexity requires energy. Thus, once again there must be a limit to complexity in the biosphere (including technological complexity). This limit will be set by an energy flow not energy stores. Energy stores on earth (like coal, gas etc.) are limited. However, the remaining stores are unusable in any case as they will cause severe climate change. All we are left with energy flows from the sun which impact on earth as insolation. These flows are enormous by our standards but still certainly finite. Wind and wave power are driven by solar energy. Tidal power is driven by the moon slowly losing orbital energy via the frictional drag of tides. (Physicists can pull me up on that last sentence if it is not entirely accurate.) We also need to note that a good proportion of insolation needs to be left for “nature” which in turn provides us with necessary bio-services.
The general argument of enlightened economists like Prof. J.Q. is that qualitative growth could yet occur for a long time. There is no near energy limit worth worrying about now that solar power is viable economically and in terms of EROEI and also taking into account the extra energy efficiency of an electrical and electronic economy. This is perfectly true. But also, as Prof. J.Q.has convinced me, the real near limits are to do with wastes, damage to the ecology and loss of bio-services.
Coming to your second paragraph namely: “However, so far tactics such as substitution and continuing technological progress has staved off the evil day – and is capable of continuing to do so for a very long time to come.” This is where we differ. The evil day is near in historical terms. And it is near because we have not solved the problems of waste including waste from fossil fuels which are not being phased out nearly quickly enough. Another example of a massive waste problem is plastic in our oceans. The site plasticoceans is worth a visit.
We cannot really talk about longer time frames yet. The rest of this century is an emergency period which will make or break global advanced civilization. If we don’t rise to the challenge very soon and take code red, emergency action then there will be no next century except for a few tattered remnants of humanity.
Errors above. There are at least two sentences in my entry above where I typed “quantitative” when I meant “qualitative”. I refer to the last sentence of the first paragraph and the first sentence of the second paragraph. Without an edit facility one cannot make corrections. Even my favourite computer game forum has an edit facility.
Regarding how the debate has evolved since 2005
At the time it seemed likely that stabilization at 550 ppm was about the best that could be hoped for. A 60 per cent reduction in global emissions by 2050 would be roughly on target for that. According to Wikipedia, the more ambitious 2 degree target first became current as a result of meetings in 2005
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoiding_dangerous_climate_change
Also, it seemed at the time that developed country emissions would remain the major problem for a long time to come. So, taking the required global reduction and working out what was needed in a country like Australia wasn’t as obviously incorrect as it is now.
Ikonoklast the near limits are water. It’s not fungible. Then comes arable land, which is also not fungible and declines in quality as water declines. Note too that LTG incorporated waste in their model, and although greenhouse theory is in its infancy then I think they have said that is included in the waste category. Do you read ugo bardi ‘s blog? He was one of the authors of LTG and has a lot to say about its modern interpretation.
A lot of these resources follow what bardi calls the Seneca cliff. Water for example is being mined not harvested in California, so farmers can increase profitability even in drought years. Once the groundwater is exhausted the collapse will be rapid. No one is seriously trying to tackle this problem in the worlds 8th(?) largest economy…
I am interested to note that in 2016 there are big fears of a global economic slowdown. Recall the prediction of LTG was an end to global growth starting at around 2015…
@Faustusnotes
We have been “around 2015” for a couple of years so far, and will be “around 2015” for a couple more years yet.
In historic terms 2007 can stand as the start of near 2015.
For those who want to replace “near 2015” with “in 2015”, there is a general tend for global stockmarkets to commence a long-run falling trend since April 2015. It looks like this will continue into 2016. Stockmarkets are a nominal index so any rise has to be seen in the light of injection of over $200 trillion of helicopter money.
The fall in oil price seems a good pointer to the fact that capitalism can no longer generate industrial output based on oil.
So we may well be right in it, now?
John reducing emissions by 60% won’t “stabilize” anything, surely? Also the OP suggests a final goal of 60% reduction, not an interim target at 2050. Anyway … That change in goals has had a significant impact on what price alone can achieve, surely?
@Ikonoclast
Fear not, I kinda gathered what you’d done – being prone to similar malfunctionings myself. Otherwise, I’m thinking about your thesis and just about how I should proceed to disagree with it 🙂
@Faustusnotes
I am trying to be a little bit careful about asserting what the near limits are after making several mistakes in that arena. But I guess I am still picking horses, only they are categories now not items in a category. The category of wastes, geo-services and bio-services now seems to me to the general problem area rather than resources as such. But these categories will interact anyway so ultimate assignment of cause might be difficult.
We have to be careful of the fallacy of single cause. “The fallacy of the single cause, also known as complex cause, causal oversimplification, causal reductionism, and reduction fallacy,[1] is a fallacy of questionable cause that occurs when it is assumed that there is a single, simple cause of an outcome when in reality it may have been caused by a number of only jointly sufficient causes.” – Wikipedia.
If we suffer a collapse, the causes even in the arenas of resources and wastes (the general LTG factors) are likely to be complex and often interacting and reinforcing. But certainly, for example, the effective exhaustion of the Ogallala Aquifer (quite a bit east of California) looms sometime this century.
Certainly in some areas of the world things look very grim.
“In Tamil Nadu, a state with more than 62 million people in southern India, wells are going dry almost everywhere. According to Kuppannan Palanisami of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, falling water tables have dried up 95 percent of the wells owned by small farmers, reducing the irrigated area in the state by half over the last decade.” – The Encyclopedia of Earth – Aquifer depletion.
I discussed this back in 2014. The paper I cited (written in 2014) there focuses mainly on oil as the source of collapse
So, I don’t think that a slowdown in demand that results in prices of oil falling below $30/barrel really fits the LTG prediction, even the result is a global recession.
This is interesting – the position of India at Paris
Agriculture is excluded.
Reducing emissions intensity could mean that emissions stay the same or increase.
China told the Paris COP21
So like India they are offering reduction in intensity based on 2005 levels.
This means that emissions will remain well above 2005 levels for both India and China for the near future.
It is far too late for national economies to be merely planning to reduce either emissions or just CO2 intensity to a % of 2005.
TerjeP, I will list some of the reasons why I found your last comment quite bizzare. In no particular order they are:
1. This is Australia, not India.
2. New solar has been cheaper than new coal in Australia for some time now. And new wind too. But this does not mean they beat existing coal generators on marginal cost which is what would be necessary for Australia’s electricity sector to show rapid declines in CO2 emissions in the absence of such things as a carbon price or Renewable Energy Target.
3. You don’t appear to understand from the context that Piyush Goyal was referring to the cost of new solar capacity vs. new coal capacity and not the marginal cost of coal generation. Or you don’t understand the distinction at all.
4. A danger facing the world was that emissions from India’s electricity sector per captia would approach those of Australia, and a danger facing the world is that Australia’s electricity sector emissions per capita will remain those of Australia. New solar and new wind being cheaper than new coal prevents the first danger while not necessarily preventing the second.
5. You don’t appear to understand how the electricity market works and what determines what generating capacity gets used or built. But despite this, you still appear to have firm opinons on some matters relating to it.
6. You appear to favour the scrapping of commitments the Australian government has made with regards to the Renewable Energy Target which would affect the value of private investments and erode people’s confidence in government commitments and so reduce people’s freedom.
Terje, if a thickie like me can be mostly right might of the time on the matter of what kind of electricity generation gets built or used, a bright person like you can do it to. You just have to make sure you think things through and take things one step at a time. Don’t skip steps because when people do that they tend to slot in things they think are right but turn out not to be when they take the time to examine them. That is how a lot of smart people come a cropper.
Do this and I’m sure you’ll find you’ll be writing strange comments like your last one significantly less often and you can start making a whole brand new category of mistakes.
I do realise that technically it is possible that you are not ignorant, but I would never be so uncharitable as to assume that.
Ivor, India has not indicatied a year in which they will reach peak emissions or start to reduce emissions. But I’m sure I feel just as much joy as you do at the news that a new record has been set for the cost of Indian solar.
@Ikonoclast
I’ve got two heavy horses in training for drays and cartwork around my little town; already have done some delivery work, to the pleasure of the townsfolk and my purse. The future is wide open, hey?
Australia’s effort is weird. It is a taget that is a reduction (not a reduction in intensity) but is clouded by hedging double speak – in short…
Australia’s emissions reduction is “unconditional’ but based on conditions.
It will will be implemented “should circumstances allow”, (ie costs).
Text is (August 2015):
To protect the planet we have to get below 1990 levels if all nations have the right to the same quantity of GHG emissions.
So what is the current situation since there is no “Agreement applicable to all”???
Ivor it depends how you are interpreting “all”. There is an agreement applicable to all the parties, I assume that is what the Australian statement refers to.
If you are thinking ‘all the nations of the world’ or something like that, I don’t think that’s relevant.
Of course the proof is in what countries actually do, and countries need to increase their targets if they are to achieve a maximum of 2C (or increase them more to teach 1.5C which is the aspirational target). However all the parties did agree in theory.
I am afraid I am with Ivor on this one. The official agreement (Paris Agreement) means nothing. The nations have agreed to precisely nothing of any substance. If anything gets done about climate change it will not be done by agreements. As Tolstoy remarked, diplomacy and international agreements are the foam at the bow of the ship. To believe that diplomacy and international agreements lead to changes of direction is like believing the bow wave steers the ship.
The material base will determine what happens. Endless recessions as secular stagnation could reduce emissions. Material technological advances (solar power) could determine what happens. We have to hope that nations begin to see economic and strategic advantage in clean energy. They won’t change to save the world but they will change to gain an advantage over their neighbour. Under this system of production (capitalism) that is the only way it works.
@Ronald Brak
Brak 10. Terje 0 (as usual).
@Val
Yes – the turn-up of countries was almost 100% and can be understood as “all”. And they may an sort of agreement which really just says that every nation will implement their own program as submitted and provide reports.
So as for an agreement as to targets – for all – which is the basis for Australia’s implementation of its commitments, this I do not see.
Some nations just they would reduce in the future compared not to 1990 or 2005 but to business as usual. Some merely said they would reduce intensity not emissions.
In general I see COP21 as a form of publicity placebo. There will be a slow down in global GHG emissions BUT the amount of atmospheric CO2 will still increase.
CO2 was increasing from the start of the Keeling curve 1950 and global warming was well established.
This is unequivocal proof that if CO2 emissions are even at 1950 levels – global warming continues.
1950 is some 75% less than 1990, and global warming only ceases at lower levels of emissions.
This level is the amount of human emissions that can be 100% absorbed by global sinks (after natural emissions)and this is around 1-2GT pa.
If anyone has any other understanding of emissions levels such that warming ceases, or atmospheric CO2 levels off, then this should be presented.
This will create a real sensible target, for a real agreement useful for humanity.
As it is, the existing COP21 paper is nothing but a delayed suicide note.
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John I think the slow-down in demand and crash of oil prices can probably be seen in the predictions of LTG (bear with me here). In the language of the LTG models: excessive wastes due to an industrial process all economies depend on leads to rapid development and implementation of alternatives which leads to demand reduction which leads to a price war amongst the sellers of that industrial process, but the society as a whole is not yet ready to shift away from this crucial industrial process and as a result a decline in global growth.
The problem with LTG is that its predictions are so far in teh future that the specific mechanism by which the turning point in the models is achieved obviously could not be described back when it was written. And pinning economic problems on environmental damage is really hard except in localized cases (c.f. the debate over whether AGW is linked to ISIS).
I think LTG had to be right at least as regards water, but as others have observed their predictions on metals probably didn’t pan out. However I don’t think AGW science was advanced enough when LTG was written for them to have understood the overriding role of greenhouse gas emissions in the future of industrialized civilization, so their valiant effort to predict the future of the global economy will become irrelevant in the face of the maelstrom of destruction that the planet is going to unleash on human civilization over the next 50 years.
@faustusnotes
It is better far to cry wolf than to be eaten by one.
@Ivor
Unless every single reporter at COP21 is misled, China confirmed the absolute emissions cap it agreed earlier with Obama, a peak by 2030 and if possible earlier. The target is ridiculously soft and bears no relation to the likely outturn. With coal burning already falling, the expert sense is of an emissions peak by 2020. Outliers say it’s already happened.
India indeed avoided committing to a cap, and the official line is still a large expansion in coal, which the big corporations who would build the plants are curiously reluctant to start. Goyal’s historic tweet is an admission that the cost assumptions behind the policy are now falsified. So the policy will change.
There is no longer any compelling reason for India to keep its embarrassing refusal of an absolute cap.
As far as the numbers go, both countries could at no cost up their NDCs when they sign the Paris Agreement in April or soon after. The timing is just a PR decision.
@James Wimberley
Yes the 2030 peak is part of the Chinese official position.
The submission and translation is HERE
The current CO2 annual Chinese figure is around 9 GT. 2015 CO2 emissions growth in China has been very small, just 0.24% due to economic factors.
So what will the peak emissions figure be in 2030 or before?
Over 12 GT?
@Ivor
I think we are saying similar things but you are more pessimistic about what happens next. I am very concerned about what happens next, but I think it is possible that countries will increase their targets.
However in order to achieve targets that will keep warming within 2C or 1.5C, I believe we need major social change. This should include renewable technologies but also needs to include major demand reduction, which in turn means an end to the growth paradigm as we know it.
Ikon and JQ above seem to have translated me above as saying we need “generational change” and JQ has therefore dismissed this saying we can’t afford to wait for generational change. But that’s not actually what I said – I said we need “major social change” and commented that some degree of generational change already seems to be happening in regard to declining car use in Melbourne.
However I certainly don’t think we have to wait for generational change. We need to change the way we live, right now (preferably yesterday) as a society, in ways that reduce demand on the environment and resources. We cannot rely on technology alone to save us, even though renewable energy is very important.
Many of these changes, such as shifting to more active forms of transport and growing more fresh food locally, can be actually beneficial to us in social and health terms. Contrary to what Terje and his ilk suggest, the major health problems of the world now are not related to under consumption. There are still people who go hungry and live in harsh conditions, but their needs can be met by better sharing of resources rather than requiring more consumption overall. The major causes of death and illness for the world now are chronic diseases related to over consumption and sedentary lifestyles, such as diabetes and heart disease (http://www.who.int/chp/about/integrated_cd/en/)
Ivor I replied to your comment #94 but my comment has gone into moderation – I don’t know why, it only had one link. Commenters here say there are some apparently innocuous words that can trigger moderation so maybe I used one of them. Anyway if it doesn’t come out soon I’ll try again