Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
Why does flue gas CCS fail?
John Quiggin and others have shown that it unarguably does. The question is why. At first sight it isn’t inherently a much harder problem than others that chemical engineers solve routinely. In a normal learning process, you would expect a mixture of failures and successes, the success rate rising over time but we aren’t seeing this. Hubris and political and marketing pressures overriding engineering judgement are no doubt part of it, leading to hype, corner-cutting and premature deployment at scale.
I came across another interesting candidate for an explanation. Here are two American bioengineering academics, MM Kubis and Lynd, in a recent article touting biofuel production from corn waste (references omitted):
“Commercial bioethanol production is a logical starting point technology because of high-purity CO2 streams (produced via fermentation or anaerobic digestion) compared to more-dilute onsite flue gas. It has been reported that the levelized cost of CO2 capture scales inversely with concentration. The cost of separating CO2 from dilute flue gas (<20% CO2) is projected to be between $30–$70 per ton before compression can be performed, whereas during ethanol fermentation, nearly pure CO2 is generated as a saturated gas at low to atmospheric pressure. Largely related to separation costs, capturing CO2 from combustion diluted flue gas requires around 10-fold more energy than from fermentation sources. [….] Collectively, the total levelized cost of sequestration for high-purity and dilute flue gas sources are generally around $30–$50 per t CO2 and $70–$120 per t CO2, respectively. “
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2023/se/d3se00353a
Looks plausible. There are other possibilities. <speculation>Flue gas is vented in tall chimneys for a reason. It includes a cocktail of very nasty pollutants, NOX, fine and ultrafine particles of soot, and – if what’s being burnt is coal – radon, arsenic and heavy metals. The chimneys are needed to exercise the industry’s droit de seigneur to disperse this muck over a wide area, much cheaper than filtering it out. For this, you want the flue gas to be hot and fast-moving. But this works at cross-purposes to the CCS, for which you want the flue gas to be cool and slow-moving. Look at this diagram of a coal generating plant with CCS. It includes a “flue gas cooler”. Downstream from this, there is still a chimney to vent “cleaned exhaust gas”, presumably heated up again. You could reduce the need for re-heating and tall chimneys by filtering out the crud, which as we already noted is not done today because it’s too expensive. </speculation>
In their comparison, Kubis and Lynd stack the deck in one respect. The wonderful biofuels plant they recommend is a virtual simulation. These tend to run better than real ones, welded together by Uncle Sid who has his bad days. However, there are BECCS plants (bio-energy with carbon capture and storage) in operation. I couldn’t find an up-to-date list, but here is one of 18 plants of different types from 2019, see page 5 and Appendix 1.
Global-Status-of-CCS-Report-1.pdf (globalccsinstitute.com)
It would also be nice to have a professional and independent evaluation of costs and performance, before taxpayers bet the farm (literally) on yet another “promising” carbon removal technology. Still, the BECCS sector does not look like the train wreck of flue gas CCS.
There is something else you can do with pure CO2 than bury it: reduce it with green hydrogen, stripping out the oxygen into harmless water, then add more hydrogen to the carbon to get biomethane (CH4) or the various longer-chain liquid hydrocarbons that make up kerosene, say pentane (C5H12). See here:
https://energypost.eu/extract-co2-from-our-air-use-it-to-create-synthetic-fuels/
I do not endorse Carbon Engineering’s crackpot direct air capture arrays, nor do I know how much the synfuel transformation costs, but it is clearly technically doable.
The flue gas CCS people cannot go down this route. Their whole problem is the karmic burden of burning fossil fuels, which requires carbon removal to offset. A biofuels plant aims at carbon neutrality over the cycle, and pure CO2 streams can be usable for this.
More thoughts on biofuels later.
Biofuels to run a modern physical economy are not viable. See Pimental and Patzek.
Click to access Pimentel-Tadzek.pdf
“Natural Resources Research, Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2005 ( C 2005)
“Ethanol Production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel Production Using Soybean and Sunflower – David Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek.
“Energy outputs from ethanol produced using corn, switchgrass, and wood biomass were each less than the respective fossil energy inputs. The same was true for producing biodiesel using soybeans and sunflower, however, the energy cost for producing soybean biodiesel was only slightly negative compared with ethanol production. Findings in terms of energy outputs compared with the energy inputs were:
• Ethanol production using corn grain required 29% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced.
• Ethanol production using switchgrass required 50% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced.
• Ethanol production using wood biomass required 57% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced.
• Biodiesel production using soybean required 27% more fossil energy than the biodiesel fuel produced (Note, the energy yield from soy oil per hectare is far lower than the ethanol yield from corn).
• Biodiesel production using sunflower required 118% more fossil energy than the biodiesel fuel produces.”
End Quote.
Biofuel production of the above types is a net energy sink not a net energy source. So, carbon capture from biofuel production is a complete illogicality. The process is pointless to begin with, being an energy sink. There are also great problems with the areas of arable land, even marginal arable land, which would need to be devoted to biofuel crops. World food needs could not be met if this were done. But the killer is the net energy loss, the energy sink of the whole process.
Far better to stick with solar power, wind power, plus hydro, wave and tidal power where each of these can be economically and built and used for positive energy production over the life-cycle.
CO2 removal at useful physical scale from the atmosphere and ocean on any timescale useful to humans is fundamentally impossible. All technologies that could be used are prohibitively expensive in financial and energy terms. It won’t happen. It’s just another boondoggle.
On the positive side, solar, wind, hydro, tidal and wave power do work. We have to scale down our economies to work with these only with all widespread fossil fuel use rapidly reduced to zero and prohibited. That’s the only path.
Further to my post above. Drawdown (on a human timescale) will fail. Indeed it has already failed
https://drawdown.org/programs/drawdown-science
People speak about limiting temperature rise to below 1.5C. Well, guess what. We have already failed. We have already passed 1.5C warming against the correct pre-industrial benchmark. And carbon drawdown does not work and cannot work anyway. It is completely unfeasible energetically and in the timescale of the phase-up needed to save us.
Carbon drawdown is a distraction. It will do its intended job of distracting people while fossil fuel emissions are continually increased. That is what is happening every year with no sign of any substantial change.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2406318-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-fossil-fuels-hit-another-all-time-high/
Egg on my face. After warning people on this blog about heatstroke from high wet bulb temperatures, I think I inflicted moderate heatstroke on myself a couple of days ago. Got frustrated and angry because of a needful job hanging over my head (one of several) and worked in the sun in the middle of the day – Something in the range of 60 to 90 minutes intense effort (for me as an old, slightly overweight man). Left 10% of the job undone because suddenly I felt “If I finish this I won’t be able to stagger up the hill to get shade and water.”
I have since suffered 48 hrs of (slowly abating) moderate symptoms – Back pain (kidney area) side pain, stomach pain, dull headache, nausea and increased arthritic pain in the fingers. I am no medical or other doctor, as I always make clear, but it seems to me I heat stroked myself. The ongoing symptoms I guess are the body clearing toxins from damaged tissue and the body’s inflammation reaction to those toxins. I am coming good now or otherwise I would have gone to the doc. Just resting my way through it.
Clearly, with old age encroaching, I have to get smarter and actually live up to my own advice. At 178 cm and 82 kg I still need to lose about another 3gk to 4 kg to get to the top of the heathy range. That would help.
Frankly, I wouldn’t care if I died on the spot. I couldn’t care could I? Because I would be non-existent as a sentient being. However, it is the damaging of oneself and then the living on more damaged that is to be rightly feared. I must be more careful in future, as should we all.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1753450232707248447.html
“24.4% (say 25% for a round number) of Americans ages 18 and over who have received a positive #COVID19 test or diagnosis have experienced symptoms of #LongCovid that persisted for 3 months or longer. Long COVID (is) generally worse/more frequent with more severe COVID survivors.”
By the end of 2022 just over 3 in 4 U.S. adults and older teens had caught COVID-19. I would say younger children caught it at a similar rate. By now, a fair guess is that 4/5ths of all Americans have had COVID at least once. One quarter of 4/5 is 1/5. One fifth of Americans is about 68 million… who have or have had Long COVID. A third of those surveyed report “reductions in quality of living”.
Sarc on. Nothing to see here. Sarc off.
Iko:
The paper by Pimentel and Tadzek was published in 2005. It was based on data now over twenty years old. A lot of water has flowed under many bridges since then. They concentratd, reasonably so for the time, on the waseful conversion of food crops and cropland into bioethanol for combustion in cars. Can you name any accredited biofuels expert supporting this scheme today? What I and Mike Barnard (read him) are interested in is biodiesel for ships and biokerosene for aircraft, where batteries don’t yet work, made from the plentiful biomass that does not compete with food – food waste, animal manure, offcuts from sustainable forestry, a few plants that grow on marginal land like salt marshes.
Of course biofuels don’t look good from an energy balance perspective. But this framing is wrong. In the net zero economy of the future, the ultimate source of enegy is sunlight (which also creates winds), captured initially as solar and wind electricity. Its supply is cheap, even allowing for transmission and storage, and unlimited for all practical purposes. Converting this energy into biofuels or green steel or green fertiliser is going to waste a lot of it. Per kwh used, these will always cost more than electricity. But so what? We don’t always have alternatives. The inefficiency also goes for green hydrogen as an energy carrier, where the unpalatable facts are beginning to deflate the bubble.
What we have to focus on is not energy balance but GHG emissions. Biofuels are definitely second best here to renewable electricity, as the best they can achieve is only net zero, not true zero or carbon removal. I have already given reasons why you are wrong on that too.
Sorry to hear about your health troubles. Take care. Slow down.
I’m glad you’re feeling better, Ike!! That sounds quite awful. I’ve had dehydration a time or two - and I was quite surprised that it laid me out for the rest of the day - you can’t just drink water and snap out of it, as it turns out - but I don’t think I’ve ever had a serious sun problem (yet).
Also, I’m sorry there’s no one around to help you with these tasks - I know what that’s like too. (Well in my case I could probably find someone if I were more sociable. Goals, as the kids say.)
James, thanks again for the great news!! Here are some high in the bleachers questions: would human pooh work? Or is our pooh not as useful? And do you think geothermal energy will ever compete with solar in cost terms? My guess is it won’t, but, otoh, it stays on at night … so what do I know? ; ) I suppose, given that geothermal would have to be utility scale, maybe it is too hard to compare them.
I am just thankful that there appear to be options. Hope is alive!
Ikonoclast: – “We have already passed 1.5C warming against the correct pre-industrial benchmark.“
What “correct” pre-industrial benchmark? The “Paris Agreement” pre-industrial benchmark is for 1850-1900. I’d suggest earlier period benchmarks would have inadequate data for global coverage. This benchmark issue is dependent on having adequate global coverage data. That’s where the arguments continue to be.
Meanwhile, Professor Eliot Jacobson tweeted on Feb 21:
The included graph shows Months Per Year Above Global Mean Surface Temperature Milestones for +0.25 °C, +0.50 °C, +0.75 °C, +1.00 °C, +1.25 °C, +1.50 °C, & +1.75 °C relative to the 1850-1900 baseline, for Berkeley Earth land & ocean dataset, dated 19 Feb 2024.
+1.00 °C has been at 12 months since late-2010s
+1.25 °C is currently at 9 months
+1.50 °C is currently at 5 months
+1.75 °C is currently at 1 month
Geoff,
This data. I don’t make up data. 🙂
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01919-7
I am perhaps willing to make more radical interpretations and draw more negative conclusions from the data than most people. But then I think on any objective measure most people are excessive optimists, at least for the present times. Evolutionarily, including in evo-psych terms, a moderate optimism bias makes sense. A moderate optimism bias turns out to be optimal under most natural and more nearly natural and/or relatively stable ecological conditions. Optimal essentially for species survival that is. But in special conditions, like the ones we find ourselves in now, this optimism bias is perilous and leads us into ever deeper trouble.
On a lighter note, why am i only now finding out about the mankini? C’mon, y’all …
How could you have missed Borat in a mankini? I mean how does anyone get so lucky as to miss that?
Mind you, my wife said of the complaints about the equestrian in the mankini, “How did everybody get so prudish? I think he looks alright!”
From the Santos full year financial report on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS):
“Phase one of the Moomba Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project remains on track for first injection mid-2024. Moomba CCS phase one will be one of the lowest-cost CCS projects in the world and will have capacity to store up to 1.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. This is equivalent to around 28 per cent of the total annual emissions reduction from Australia’s electricity sector2 making Moomba CCS very significant in Australia’s journey to net-zero emissions.”
Time for the CCS scoffers to rethink?
Harry Clarke
CCS is a complete boondoggle.
As at June 2021;
“Currently there are only 26 CCS plants operating globally, capturing about 0.1 per cent of the annual global emissions from fossil fuels.
Ironically, 81 per cent of the carbon captured to date has been used to extract more oil from existing wells by pumping the captured carbon into the ground to force more oil out. This means that captured carbon is being used to extract oil that would otherwise have had to be left in the ground.” – Friends of the Earth, Scotland.
So basically, they withdraw some CO2 from gas/oil burnt during operations and use it to inject wells to get more gas (or oil) to burn elsewhere and send more CO2 straight into the atmosphere. Total boondoggle. Who can’t see through this?
CCS is a complete boondoggle.
As at June 2021;
“Currently there are only 26 CCS plants operating globally, capturing about 0.1 per cent of the annual global emissions from fossil fuels.
Ironically, 81 per cent of the carbon captured to date has been used to extract more oil from existing wells by pumping the captured carbon into the ground to force more oil out. This means that captured carbon is being used to extract oil that would otherwise have had to be left in the ground.” – Friends of the Earth, Scotland.
So basically, they withdraw some CO2 from gas/oil burnt during operations and use it to inject wells to get more gas (or oil) to burn elsewhere and send CO2 straight into the atmosphere. Total boondoggle. Who can’t see through this?
I think the Santos report is out by an order of magnitude. 1.7 million tonnes is about 2.8 per cent of current electricity emissions (around 60 million tonnes a year). And “up to” covers the entire range from 0 to 1.7
I think the Santos claim is wrong. It’s an official report. I’ll ask them. Harry Clarke.
Geoff,
Reposted link, in case you missed my post of the relevant data. According to this paper, we have already passed plus 2 degrees C warming compared to a more accurately calibrated pre-industrial baseline. I presume it is peer reviewed and its methods, calculations and conclusions are sound. The emerging picture from new research and data is that the IPCC’s conservative consensus methods and conclusions have consistently under-estimated the severity of the real situation re climate change.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01919-7
Iko: Of course CCS through oil recovery should not be counted as a form of carbon removal, and the attempts to present it as such are dishonest. That’s irrelevant to the merits of flue gas CCS, even when also defended in bad faith by a different set of lobbyists. The Nazis opposed Communism, smoking and cruelty to animals. That does not discredit these positions, or buy them a pass on the other stuff.
Harry: you pass on some mildly good news on CCS. I note that no operational gas injection has yet taken place. Also, this is not a flue gas CCS plant. Like the Sleipnir offshore project in Norway, running since 1996, it simply prevents the venting of the natural CO2 that comes out of the ground with fossil methane. There is no reduction of the much larger volume of CO2 released when the methane is burnt, a much harder problem, which would have to be solved for gas to have any part in in a net zero future. This part is probably zero, so the mined gas band-aid will disappear too.
Are you defending Moomba and CCS in general as operational investments or as R&D projects? As investments in emissions reduction, they have to be compared with firmed renewables. Currently these have an LCOE roughly half that of gas electric generators with CCS: A$94-134 per Mwh vs A$177-266. The gap is still wide without the CCS. The implication is that gas and coal generation will disappear from Australia. The numbers don’t allow a simple calculation of the comparative cost of prevention of a tonne of CO2 emissions by CCS vs. marginal new renewables, but common sense suggests that the latter are better emissions value for money in the short run.
Go the other way and defend CCS as a research programme. The comparison now is with other methods of carbon removal, including geochemical ones like enhanced weathering (eg basalt on farmland) and seaweed dumping. This is a very young field and current costs per tonne of CO2 are unimportant; what matters is the potential for future economies of scale. I agree that CCS deserves a place on this R&D list, and enough money to test its potential. But to put it mildly CCS projects are not being run as research ones ought to be, with lots of small projects being carried out on specific parts of the scheme, rigorously planned and independently evaluated. Instead CCS promoters panicked politicians into thinking their pet scheme was the only game in town, then rushing into premature deployment at scale of untested technology.
The Santos statement is wrong and John’s arithmetic on the fraction of emissions addressed is correct. The Santos writer in the report released yesterday here got confused between Phase 1 of the project and the “potential” output of emissions reduction across the whole Moomba Basin if it was used as a whole for CCS which is claimed to be 28 million tons of CO2 stored. My mistake. I should have checked.
https://www.santos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Fact-sheet_Moomba_CCS.pdf
Harry Clarke
Struggling here: 20 million tons not 28 and across the entire Cooper and Eromanga Basins in South Australia and Queensland. Harry Clarke.
Ikonoclast: – “Reposted link, in case you missed my post of the relevant data.“
I did see it the first time, thanks. I’m well aware of this paper.
This is one proxy data point (for the Caribbean), not a global mean.
I’d suggest it’s similar to the Medieval Warming Period argument that global warming deniers try to use to say global warming has happened before the industrial era – but it’s a regional indicator, not a global one.
The “Paris Agreement” pre-industrial benchmark is for the period 1850-1900. I’d suggest earlier period benchmarks (like this McCulloch et al. paper is suggesting) don’t attract sufficient scientific agreement because there is insufficient data representative for global coverage.
I’d suggest what the scientific community do know is that the ‘sweet spot’ for human civilisation is the Holocene period (zero to +0.5 °C relative to 1850-1900 baseline).
I’d suggest what the McCulloch et al. (2024) paper doesn’t change is:
Geoff Miell,
I accept the currently validated science as covered in your 8 points. All of these factors are already concerning enough. Indeed, they are existentially terrifying for those who are fully aware of them and understand the profound implications and near certain consequences.
I’d suggest that we can walk and chew gum at the same time. That is we can get ourselves across the peer-reviewed, cross-checked, re-tested and validated science and we can at the same time take an interest in new research at the cutting edge. Scientists and philosophers must always hold that human paradigms, even scientific ones, exist to be refined, challenged and revolutionized further. Further research on sclerosponge thermometry should continue in my view, hopefully at other suitable locales too. This should happen along with exploration of other rationales for base-line setting and further possible historical thermometry methods.
What we need to remain on our guard against is the excessive academization of a certain stage of scientific knowledge along with the status quo gatekeeping of ensconced careerists in the academy, the bureaucracy and worse still the interests of those in the political-economic interstices where science is politicised and capitalized. There is, often enough, another scientific revolution bubbling up under these people and they can’t see it or won’t see it.
We saw this and still see this in the failed response and continued failed response to COVID-19 at all levels, with massive scientific, moral, public health and governance failures. Even successes (like the m-RNA vaccines) were egregiously misused (applied with no other measures leading to a failed race against viral mutation) and hijacked for billionaire wealth creation despite most of the research being publicly funded. Seeing this has made me suspicious about how much the IPCC industry (it is an industry now) has in turn been hijacked, manipulated and even captured for the purposes of institutionalizing delay in action. The IPCC certainly seems to have persistently low-balled the scenario dangers by very concerning margins and every piece of new data seems to confirm this.
Ikonoclast: – “What we need to remain on our guard against is the excessive academization of a certain stage of scientific knowledge along with the status quo gatekeeping of ensconced careerists in the academy, the bureaucracy and worse still the interests of those in the political-economic interstices where science is politicised and capitalized.“
Meanwhile, the Albanese government and the Coalition opposition are apparently likely to combine political forces to block a proposal to enshrine a climate change ‘duty of care’ in legislation that would compel federal ministers to protect young people and future generations from the impacts of climate change.
Senator David Pocock tweeted Feb 23 (including a 2 minute 15 second video of excerpts of statements from witnesses called to the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee public hearing on 22 Feb 2024 concerning the inquiry into the Climate Change Amendment (Duty of Care and Intergenerational Climate Equity) Bill 2023):
It seems to me that both Labor and the Coalition apparently don’t wish to support legislation to enshrine a ‘duty of care’ to protect young people and future generations from the impacts of climate change.
I’d suggest a vote for Labor and/or the Coalition is a vote for our future suffering and perhaps even our untimely death.
To change the subject, V2G inches forward, Via Steve Hanley at CleanTechnica, a Delaware engineering researcher has worked out what utilities need to accept V2G with the basic Level 1 and 2 AC chargers people have at home, rather than the expensive high-powered DC chargers they use on highways and fleet operators in depots. Paraphrasing Professor Willett Kempton:
“When something is pushing power onto the grid, they [utilities] want to know what that is. They don’t want to be like, ‘We’re 95 percent sure which car it is”. Today, the charging technologies in use in EVs and charging stations just aren’t set up to provide and manage that information. V2G is particularly complicated when it’s the EV itself, rather than the charging station it is plugged into, that needs to communicate with the utility. Level 1 and Level 2 chargers that operate on AC are not equipped to send utilities the data needed for V2G to work.” ( JW: a Level 1 charger is just a dumb home power socket, 110V in the USA, a more usable 220-240V in most other places.)
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/22/sae-adopts-new-standards-for-vehicle-to-grid/
Kempton has got the American SAE standards body to adopt technical standards for AC charging, relying on communication with the cars – which will need modest hardware upgrades. The SAE is for once apparently ahead of the international ISO, which will hopefully fall into line, though baffling standards wars have been prolonged on occasions.
This has all taken far too long, given how critical agreed standards are to the great carbon-saving opportunity offered by terawatts of vehicle batteries as backup grid storage. Regulators have been dozing rather than lighting fires. It does at last seem to be happening.
There are three facts we can draw from the above discussion.
(a) My prose is getting worse. I thought I would get that one out of the way first. Though, in my defence, I may still have been heat-stroke addled that day.
(b) The current political economy system is doing nothing about GHG emissions and global warming. Last year, 2023 saw record emissions.
(c) Our global political economy set-up creates diversions and misdirection to prevent people from noticing the simple facts and to give them false hope via deceptive promises and schemes. The system does this in order to permit business as usual to continue without doing anything about the fundamental issue; the global aggregate GHG emissions and their impacts on climate, weather, societies and ecosystems.
Let us address the important points, namely (b) and (c).
Human generated emissions continue to increase, with blips.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/
From this graph, our CO2 emissions in this phase appear to be rising in linear fashion, not exponentially. This is still disastrous. They should have been dropping rapidly for us to meet our targets. Every year, our task gets harder. We now need ever more precipitous drops in emissions to prevent reaching not just +2C (which has already happened on one arguable measure) but +3C and onwards.
The next point is that natural positive feedbacks (wildfires, habitat destruction, methane de-gassing from seabed and tundra etc.) have kicked in to the extent that global mean CO2 is still rising steeply.
https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/greenhouse-gases-continued-to-increase-rapidly-in-2022
This intensifies the need for our emissions to fall and to fall precipitously. This is not happening.
Our system, global neoliberal capitalism, is not designed, not conformed, not geared to address this. Indeed, the people who run this system are not minded to do anything about emissions. The system as it stands cannot address this crisis and it actively resists doing anything real about it. It puts off real action with faux schemes and initiatives. It is studied and premediated inaction replete with diversions and misdirection.
This article is of general interest.
https://theconversation.com/ipccs-conservative-nature-masks-true-scale-of-action-needed-to-avert-catastrophic-climate-change-202287
Of great specific interest is this very short discussion of the fundamental problem plaguing climate-change mitigation scenarios. It helps explain how we are being misled.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02744-9
I hope all these links get through. They should suffice. It may be best if I write less, a lot less, and don’t attempt to re-explain and embellish.
PS on oil recovery CCS. Mike Barnard has the numbers on Exxon-Mobil’s token CCS:
https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/24/ccs-redux-exxonmobils-co2-sequestration-is-just-a-tiny-fraction-of-its-co2-emissions/
Iko: we should give some weight to recent qualified predictions that global industrial GHG emissions from energy will flatline or fall in 2024, on the back of the slowdown in China coupled with insane global numbers for PV installation. https://www.rfi.fr/en/environment/20240101-world-s-carbon-emissions-could-start-to-fall-for-first-time-in-2024-environment
I’ve made a case here that because clean energy investment alone prevented a politically threatening recession in China in 2023, the CCP is unlikely to switch the strategy back to emissions-spewing coal, cement and steel. It really does look as if global emissions peaked in 2023 and will now fall. Of course, this is 30 years too late, CO2 concentrations will keep rising till we hit net zero, the pace of the transition is far too slow, nonlinear feedbacks may kill us all, etc : the glass is at least half empty. But it is much, much easier to accelerate a trend than to reverse one, which is now done.
Back to our joint hobby-horse of neoliberalism. You write: “Our system, global neoliberal capitalism ..” Where is this system? There are only two socialist command economies left in the world, Cuba and North Korea, and I’m not too sure about Cuba. Everywhere else is capitalist. That includes China, Russia, and India. None of them is any sort of liberal, from palaeo to neo. China has a large class of capitalist billionaires about whose political opinions we know nothing, since they have no more freedom of speech than their armies of wage slaves. India is crony capitalist (see Adani), Russia an outright kleptocracy. The OECD countries fit the neoliberal paradigm better, but even there Davos Man does not rule unchallenged by libertarian cranks (Musk and Bankman-Fried), and on the other side by closet Keynesians like Mark Carney.
My take in summary. I define “capitalism” minimally as a form of economic organisation, or part of an economy, characterised by concentrated private ownership of the means of production and trade, and consequently also a large class of non-owner workers, with exchange largely through arm’s-length markets. It’s been around since at least the Phoenicians.
It is based on self-interest not ideology, and over the millennia has shown an astonishing capacity, matched only by the malaria plasmodium, to survive and protect itself in a huge range of political and religious environments – feudalism, theocracy, divine-right monarchy, fascism, social democracy, and others. Oligarchy is no doubt the ideal form for capitalists, but they have rarely been able to get and keep it.
WW2 was fought, with the striking exception of the Soviet Union, between capitalist countries – the USA, the British Empire, Germany, Japan, Italy – with diametrically opposed political values and systems. Further back, late mediaeval merchant capitalists found ways of coexisting with a Catholic religion opposed to usury and luxury, as their Arab and Persian counterparts worked round the odd Muslim prohibition of fixed-interest lending, and still do. The strangest adaptation is perhaps the British East India Company, which before the upheaval of 1857 controlled a private army of 250,000 soldiers.
Neoliberalism (roughly synonymous with the policy ideas of Friedman and Hayek) is a fad that is already fading, as it doesn’t have anything useful to say about our current challenges of environmental catastrophe and a broken information economy. Capitalism will survive as long as civilisation does.
PS: Russia is a capitalist country. It is at war with Ukraine, another capitalist country, and indirectly with the OECD club of rich capitalist countries. If there is a neoliberal capitalist world order, why has it allowed a war which will destroy the Russian state, economy, and capitalist class, and severely damage those of Ukraine?
The Corolla killer. EV vehicles now a cheap sedan option around $23k(Aust):
https://thedriven.io/2024/02/22/corolla-killer-byd-launches-us15000-ev-in-direct-attack-on-legacy-makers/
HT: Marginal Revolution
Harry Clarke
James W.,
Capitalism certainly will survive as long as civilisation does if we define it as broadly and loosely as you do above. I write that in a friendly spirit. We all use simple words as labels for complex phenomena. “Capitalism” falls under that heading. We would need to define “capitalism” in a mutually acceptable way before we could debate your points above. I will leave that aside, except to suggest reading the Wikipedia definition of capitalism. It is good enough as a starting point.
Then I suggest you read “Capital as Power” by Bichler and Nitzan. It gives a further interesting interpretation of these matters from a scientific viewpoint, after it recounts historical political economy from the perspectives of classical / neoclassical economics plus the Marxist perspective which it also accounts as classical. That is to say it posits orthodox economics and Marxist economics as both misunderstanding the nature of modern economies (and power) in a fundamental way. It posits capital in our system (money and financial capital but not physical assets except in the form of having a capitalized value under the formulae of valuation) as power. Capital is essentially power and as an identity a measure of that power and not a measure of value. A full readin is required to understand this.
https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/259/2/20090522_nb_casp_full_indexed.pdf
But life is busy and reading deeply takes time. In addition, possibly coming to understand (in some deeper way) of phenomena that one cannot affect or change, as a powerless individual, starts to feel quite pointless and fruitless: as I myself have finally apprehended. So I leave the reading decision up to you.
Behind some of your questions is the assumption that capitalist power is monolithic (rather than having competing capitals and competing nation blocs) and that having a global capitalist system comes with having central capitalist command and control of the whole system: something obviously antithetical to capitalism per se. There is also the flavour of accepting a standard myth of capitalism: namely that if we only had free markets everywhere then peace, harmony and climate change solutions would follow naturally or axiomatically.
The system is monolithic but not the powers in it. This is a key statement. Think about it slowly. The system is monolithic but not the powers in it. It’s a little hard to break this open and I am not sure I can do it in a blog. I am probably willing to give it a try in the Sandpit if anyone expresses an interest. Experience shows I am pretty safe from that request.
I am thinking about defining capitalism in terms of an economy based on control/ownership of physical capital (factories, shops, vehicles and so on). On that definition, all modern economies so far have been capitalist. But, we are in the process of moving to “capitalism without capital”, based on control over information. That may need a new name.
James, thanks for info on V2G. I’m still trying to work out G2V (three-phase power for example). Idle curiosity until I get around to looking for an electric car.
It is easy to see that the possession of capital confers power. Persons without capital tend to be powerless and persons with a lot of capital tend to be powerful. This holds whether we consider capital to be physical capital, financial capital or the two connected (made fungible?) by the processes of market capitalization and market trade.
What type of power is referred to here? It is power as per Ulf Martin’s definition: … “(socioeconomic) power is the ability of persons to create particular formations against resistance.” [1] We see that this definition of power accords with that found in physics, albeit defined in a generalized manner with words. Power is the rate of doing work. work is the energy transferred to or from an object via the application of force along a displacement. Work is performed against resistance (against inertia, friction etc.).
A unified conception of power is important for a unified analysis of what happens in our socioeconomic or political-economic world. Such analysis relates to how formal systems interact with real systems via the operations of agents, computers, and automatic machines on information. Information in turn is patterns in media. All of this action occurs in the physical relational system arena which one holds if one is a monist physicalist and not a dualist (like Descartes) or a monist immaterialist / idealist (like Berkeley).
A strict monistic conception of existence, subsuming in one system all those categories considered dualistic or mutually exclusive in other metaphysical systems, suggests that the ontology of real system / formal system interactions can be systematized and investigated within a single, physicalist, framework. Executable information exists and can only exist as real patterns in real media. I mean here information able to be created, read, modified, transmitted or executed by a human agent, a logic processor, a biological organism or a non-biological fabricator. The real patterns which encode such information exist in real media and the “actors” mentioned above interact and act with the information existing as patterns in real media. The interactions are all of a real physical nature involving transfers of matter and energy and the creations of new structures patterns in matter and energy, some of which may meet the definition of information given above.
This theory is not what is termed metaphysics, in standard parlance, though it still requires a prioris as does every endeavour, including the hard sciences. (See quoted paragraph below.) It is assuredly physicalist in methods and application. Where does thinking like this get us? It prevents us, in the case of economics, from making the bifurcation mistake which is unfortunately fundamental to orthodox economics (in my view).
For the bifurcation mistake it is best to look at the full literature of Capital as Power (Bichler and Nitzan). For example,
https://capitalaspower.com/2023/09/bichler-nitzan-the-capital-as-power-approach-an-invited-then-rejected-interview/
There is another B&N paper which explains the bifurcation problem of orthodox economics less discursively than this. I found it and must re-find it. I will post when I find the link. A key result of their analysis is the insight that capital and capitalization do not measure value (in any sense) they quantify power and the whole of our system is about power (a new form of power). Economics per se is spurious in toto. There is no economic sphere separate from the power sphere of political economy.
As expressed here there are variously my opinions, deductions and/or interpretations of Capital as Power theory. I understand it puts me contra just about everybody.
(“Science does make some a priori assumptions, which are fundamental beliefs or principles that are accepted without empirical evidence. One example is the assumption that the laws of nature are consistent across time and space. This assumption underpins the scientific method and the belief that experiments conducted in one location and time should yield similar results when repeated elsewhere. Another example is the assumption that natural phenomena can be explained by natural causes, known as methodological naturalism. This assumption forms the basis for scientific inquiry and the rejection of supernatural explanations in scientific theories.”) – Quroa Assistant Bot.
(Yep, we are quoting bots now, or at least I am.)
Note 1: “The Autocatalytic Sprawl of Pseudorational Mastery” – Ulf Martin
Dr Andrew Forrest said at yesterday’s (Feb 26) Australian Press Club Address (from time interval 0:31:00):
“On misinformation, let me directly address nuclear energy. I’m agnostic, but I’ve done the numbers, unlike many of the fear-spreading politicians. Who’s going to pay the nuclear electricity bill, when it’s four to five times more expensive than the renewables next door? Even ignoring the decade or two plus it takes to develop nuclear. And how hopeless is it that politicians say that they want to wait for new technology in twenty years time, that may never happen? It’s just an excuse for doing nothing. This is a straight admission that fossil fuels have to go, but their solutions risk leaving us destitute. With wind and solar, you are up-and-running, lowering energy costs, and eliminating pollution within one to three years. We’re doing it today; we’re proof. Small and declining amounts of natural gas, sourced from existing, not new, developments can act as firming power as Australia massively ramps-up green hydrogen. But as soon as there’s replacement we must go for it, because it’s not gas in the long term.“
Why is Dr Andrew Forrest doing the job Australian journalists should be doing about calling out the Coalition selling false hope with nuclear power ‘bulldust’?
The trouble is most of the main solutions touted by the right and the left (as judged by the column inches they give them in articles) are boondoggles. The following claimed solutions for AGW are boondoggles and won’t achieve anything significant (some are actually worse than useless):
(a) CCS (Carbon capture and Storage);
(b) BECCS (Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage);
(c) DAC (Direct Air Capture);
(d) Green Hydrogen;
(e) Nuclear Power; and
(f) EVs for everybody who currently has an ICE vehicle.
The claimed solutions below are useful and take us in the right direction:
(a) Solar PV and maybe other forms of solar power;
(b) Wind power; and
(c) Hydro power and pumped storage.
These are the main ones. There are minor ones too. Almost everything else that will help us is about energy efficiency and even more would be about simply abandoning all the energy wasting things we do as part of our non-negotiable, flagrantly profligate lifestyles. This would start with giving up personal transport, except for bicycles, pedal or pedal-electric. It would end somewhere in the vicinity of eating much less meat and giving up pets, tourism, international flights, cruise ships and many other energy wasting entertainments and recreations. Doing anything less than all these measures merely scratches surface of what is needed.
Project Drawdown’s list seems useful where it does not run counter to what I have said above.
https://drawdown.org/solutions/table-of-solutions
John: unless you are thinking of buying an electric bus, you won’t need a 3-phase power supply, and any normal single-phase domestic connection will have enough amps.
A typical EV battery has 50 kwh. Using a Level 1 AC charger – basically a standard 10 amp dumb socket – a full charge from empty, which never happens, will take 22 hours. (10A x 230V = 2.3 Kw, 50 kwh/2.3 kw = 21.7 hrs)
This is doable but inconvenient, so you upgrade to a Level 2 AC charger running at 10kw,which will do the full charge in a handy 5 hours, less than a full night. The snag is that it draws 43.5 amps, most of your domestic rating. and also needs a fatter than normal cable installed especially from your supply box, not a DIY project.
Since my mains supply is a miserable 5.5 kw, which can’t be increased, I throttle the programable Level 2 charger to 5KW, which can give my 39kwh Kona a full charge in 8 hours. I also paid for a gadget that prioritises other household appliances.
Do it.
John Quiggin; – “I’m still trying to work out G2V (three-phase power for example). Idle curiosity until I get around to looking for an electric car.“
Why do you need fast charging capability?
The main options for home EV charging are:
A) A regular Australian General Power Outlet (GPO): 10 amps (or preferably 15 amps) providing ~ 10-15 km of range per hour;
B) A single-phase hard-wired EV charger providing ~ 45 km of range per hour;
C) A three-phase hard-wired EV charger providing ~ 70 km of range per hour (but some can charge at ~140 km per hour).
I think it would be wise to have at least one 15 amp GPO on residential properties near where EVs are parked.
There are portable type 1 / 2 EV chargers with Selectable Charge Rate between 6, 10 and 15 amps available, fitted with 15 amp Australian plug (larger Earth pin). Up to 3.6 kW charging rate or approx. 15-20km of range per hour – example here.
If only a 10 amp GPO is available (say when charging overnight away from home), then a power adapter can be used, like the range of Ampfibian 15A To 10A Power Adaptors (for indoor, undercover and weatherproof applications).
“I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.” – Isaac Newton, after being criticised for losing money in the South Sea Bubble.
The “madness” of humans, or rather our irrationality, is the key problem we face. Respectfully, I feel most economic discussion these days is irrational. And people’s responses to modern problems and crises in general are also irrational.
Beliefs that markets and technology, as interlinked systems, are going to automatically save us (from climate change etc.) by our “free choice” moves in the markets, are completely irrational and unsupported by all empirical outcomes to date.
In strong form, the rationality hypothesis (rational choice theory) in Neoclassical Economics assumes that rational individuals:
I will assume here that “framing manipulations” include not only enculturation, social and peer pressure, propaganda and advertising pressure but also systemic framing pressure where many theoretically possible choices are outright excluded by overall socioeconomic system design and infrastructure design, that is by the extant “built system”.
Perhaps the above strong hypothesis is a strawman and I am criticising the wrong position. But I feel as an educated layperson that I can say the strong form is blatant nonsense. And even weak forms would appear to fall to the full list of objections I raise in the paragraph above.
Rational choices in a market (if rational human choices were even possible) also cannot not be rational if the market structure itself is irrational re incentives, disincentives, subsidies and taxes (especially but not only Pigouvian). Markets structures arise out of the rules of the market. The rules in turn are politically generated, in a system of our type (neoliberal capitalist with strong private influence including politician, law and regulation capture), via a funding and lobbying process dominated by the rich oligarchs, companies and corporations.
Rationality, which exists in humans only in limited ways, is relative to goals. Our current system delivers us the goals of the rich and powerful (close to the same thing in our system). Arguing within their system and their rules is foolish. Playing by their rules is even worse if one wants progressive change and solutions to crises like climate change. But not playing by the rules ends in ostracization, personal ruin or worse. Choose your poison.
EVs are a case in point of fiddling while the world burns. We can’t save the world with ICE personal automobiles for everyone and we can’t save the world with EV personal automobiles for everone. The carbon footprint is still too large. But this is the way the capitalist consumerist cornucopia is always presented. The next level of tech and gadgetry will save us from the impacts of the last tech and gadgetry. The system is geared to sell tech and gadgetry to enrich the 0.1%, or less. The rest is not their business and it is not in their business model, notwithstanding all claims to the contrary.
Saving the world? You can’t get there from here: “here” being the current political economy system or anything like it.
Just so people don’t think I am complete pessimist. What about white hydrogen? Any hope in that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_hydrogen
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/prospectors-hit-the-gas-in-the-hunt-for-white-hydrogen
I am not getting my hopes up yet but it is maybe a remote tantalising possibility. In Tolkien’s philosophy “eucatastrophe” has to be viewed as possible as well as catastrophe. Otherwise, rather obviously, there is never any hope at all.
On the other hand, if there is some or even a lot, in the ground, it still won’t annul all the problems with hydrogen storage and transport.
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/08/07/no-white-hydrogen-isnt-a-limitless-source-of-clean-fuel/
But maybe, sustainability and beating AGW will require a thousand solutions with each solution supplying, on average, 1/1,000th of the answer.