Global Warming’s Technology Deficit
Bjørn Lomborg
COPENHAGEN – Our current approach to solving global warming will not work. It is flawed economically, because carbon taxes will cost a fortune and do little, and it is flawed politically, because negotiations to reduce CO2 emissions will become ever more fraught and divisive. And even if you disagree on both counts, the current approach is also flawed technologically.
Many countries are now setting ambitious carbon-cutting goals ahead of global negotiations in Copenhagen this December to replace the Kyoto Protocol. Let us imagine that the world ultimately agrees on an ambitious target. Say we decide to reduce CO2 emissions by three-quarters by 2100 while maintaining reasonable growth. Herein lies the technological problem: to meet this goal, non-carbon-based sources of energy would have to be an astounding 2.5 times greater in 2100 than the level of total global energy consumption was in 2000.
These figures were calculated by economists Chris Green and Isabel Galiana of McGill University. Their research shows that confronting global warming effectively requires nothing short of a technological revolution. We are not taking this challenge seriously. If we continue on our current path, technological development will be nowhere near significant enough to make non-carbon-based energy sources competitive with fossil fuels on price and effectiveness.
In Copenhagen this December, the focus will be on how much carbon to cut, rather than on how to do so. Little or no consideration will be given to whether the means of cutting emissions are sufficient to achieve the goals.
Politicians will base their decisions on global warming models that simply assume that technological breakthroughs will happen by themselves. This faith is sadly – and dangerously – misplaced.
Green and Galiana examine the state of non-carbon-based energy today – nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, etc. – and find that, taken together, alternative energy sources would get us less than halfway toward a path of stable carbon emissions by 2050, and only a tiny fraction of the way toward stabilization by 2100. We need many, many times more non-carbon-based energy than is currently produced.
Yet the needed technology will not be ready in terms of scalability or stability. In many cases, there is still a need for the most basic research and development. We are not even close to getting this revolution started.
Current technology is so inefficient that – to take just one example – if we were serious about wind power, we would have to blanket most countries with wind turbines to generate enough energy for everybody, and we would still have the massive problem of storage: we don’t know what to do when the wind doesn’t blow.
Policymakers should abandon fraught carbon-reduction negotiations, and instead make agreements to invest in research and development to get this technology to the level where it needs to be. Not only would this have a much greater chance of actually addressing climate change, but it would also have a much greater chance of political success. The biggest emitters of the twenty-first century, including India and China, are unwilling to sign up to tough, costly emission targets. They would be much more likely to embrace a cheaper, smarter, and more beneficial path of innovation.
Today’s politicians focus narrowly on how high a carbon tax should be to stop people from using fossil fuels. That is the wrong question. The market alone is an ineffective way to stimulate research and development into uncertain technology, and a high carbon tax will simply hurt growth if alternatives are not ready. In other words, we will all be worse off.
Green and Galiana propose limiting carbon pricing initially to a low tax (say, $5.00 a ton) to finance energy research and development. Over time, they argue, the tax should be allowed to rise slowly to encourage the deployment of effective, affordable technology alternatives.
Investing about $100 billion annually in non-carbon-based energy research would mean that we could essentially fix climate change on the century scale. Green and Galiana calculate the benefits – from reduced warming and greater prosperity – and conservatively conclude that for every dollar spent this approach would avoid about $11 of climate damage. Compare this to other analyses showing that strong and immediate carbon cuts would be expensive, yet achieve as little as $0.02 of avoided climate damage.
If we continue implementing policies to reduce emissions in the short term without any focus on developing the technology to achieve this, there is only one possible outcome: virtually no climate impact, but a significant dent in global economic growth, with more people in poverty, and the planet in a worse place than it could be.
Bjorn Lomborg is Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, author of Cool It and The Skeptical Environmentalist, and Adjunct Professor at Copenhagen Business School.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009.
www.project-syndicate.org
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KaareFog 05:31 12 Oct 09
Lomborg is writing about papers that were contributed to the "Copenhagen Consensus on Climate". These papers may be seen at www.fixtheclimate.com.
I agree that the paper by Green and Galiana makes a good point when it warns against underestimating the difficulties of pacing up the speed of technological innovation in order to fit the "straitjacket of targets and non-credible commitments to them". It must be added, though, that Green and Galiana fail to stress the many opportunities for reducing energy consumption already now at no net cost.
In the end of his article, Lomborg writes: "Compare this to other analyses showing that strong and immediate carbon cuts would be expensive, yet achieve as little as $0.02 of avoided climate damage. " Here, he refers to the analysis paper by Richard Tol, also available at the above web site. A comment to the figure of $0.02 is necessary. This figure is based on computer runs with the socalled FUND model. In these computer runs, the social cost of carbon (SCC), i.e. the total discounted costs of climate damage per ton of emitted carbon, is calculated to be $2/tC. Therefore, the model tells that any carbon tax in excess of this does not pay. However, Tol´s own review of SCC estimates indicates that the figure is much too low. It should probably be around $25/tC or even higher (depending on the discount rate). I have asked Tol about this discrepancy, and he answered that this was the output that the computer run gave, and yes, this does not agree with other estimates. One might think that the output of the computer runs are therefore not credible. But Lomborg uses just this output to argue that a high tax on carbon does not pay.
bkroon 01:08 11 Sep 09
Dear Bjorn,
Thank you very much for this article, it clarified some thoughts I had about the upcoming Copenhagen event.
The carbon problem, and its mitigation, might be a rather a simple problem, but large when measured by the volume and scale of the problem; what makes it difficult to solve is the lack of a decisive will to solve the problem.
Reading through Mr. Soros latest book, one starts wondering how much of the perception of the problem and its solution originates from a manipulated reality. There seem to be good arguments to assume that the carbon discussion is embedded in a world, which is currently far away from being an open society. If true, one should worry about the question if a sufficient large fraction of the political power of this earth id really willing to engage on a path, such as you suggest, which might lead to a solution.
On that path, I expect a dominant role for technologies, which are based on producing plants living on saltwater, and growing at 20 times higher yields than the best known terrestrial crops, without claiming any fresh water, at the same time using of hitherto non-economic land areas such as deserts, and providing resources to replace all basic needs for feed, food and energy.
Such a technology is known and has been published about many times in the last 60 years. I left science 10 years ago to challenge my ability as an entrepreneur to contribute to the realization of such a technology– successfully so far.
I am not sure if this post allows me to add an explanation of the potential of growing marine phytoplankton on an industrial scale, which I called 'Marine Agriculture', but I hope it might find some interest, since I feel it may contribute to the solution seeking activity that will hopefully follow the Copenhagen event.
Marine Agriculture in a nutshell:
Agriculture provided the means for the development of sustainable societies, states, trade and arts, starting about 10,000 years ago. Only 150 years ago, the development of societies accelerated, when mineral oil provided more energy, and products. However, fossil reserves are not renewable, their burning caused global warming and we currently face a consumption rate of resources by a minor fraction of humanity that requires 3 earths to be sustainable.
The marine system (the oceans) covers 2/3 of our planet. All life in the oceans is solely dependent on the food and products produced by microscopically small plants: the phytoplankton. It takes about 12 years to renew all the plant biomass on land, but only about a week to renew all plants of the ocean. This fact shows the remarkable growth potential of phytoplankton. Marine Agriculture is the name for an industrial activity which produces phytoplankton profitably on land without using freshwater, in dedicated production systems.
Products of Marine Agriculture are phytoplankton (feed & food), derived products from it (omega-3 oils, pigments, plant proteins, nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, bio diesel), or organisms grown on phytoplankton and their derivatives (e.g., chitin, chitosan, glucosamin, pigments, oils). Marine Agriculture is sustainable forever. Even the technology can be fully recycled. It only needs land (desert), salt water, sunlight, minerals and enormous amounts of carbon dioxide. This innovative platform has the potential to contribute significantly to the furthering of all human societies in a just, fair and sustainable way and as side effect, turning deserts green and mitigating global warming.
Best regards,
Bernd Kroon