You've convinced me - emissions from electric generation today are lower than they would have been if solar and wind had not increased over the last 20 years. I'm glad the discussion seems to have moved beyond rapid, deep decarbonization regardless of cost.
From a real-world perspective, I think the more interesting question is, "How much are people (and governments) willing to pay for emissions reductions in terms of higher energy prices and lower reliability?" A related question would be "How much would solar and wind have increased, absent requirements and subsidies?"
On the first, I think the answer is "Not as much as they have been paying." I think higher energy prices, particularly for electricity, have contributed significantly to economic stagnation in most of Europe, and have reduced growth and prosperity in the US. The economic consequences have contributed to the rise of right-wing populism in both regions. In poorer areas, I think people and governments would have eagerly chosen less expensive energy sources that could provide more energy to facilitate economic growth, if they hadn't been coerced by conditions imposed by international aid and financial institutions.
This implies that the answer to the related question is "Not nearly as much as they have."
I expect China would have pursued wind and solar development, because China wants to reduce dependence on imported fuel. Whether this makes good economic sense is a different question.
It's a fair point, but the obvious problem with counterfactuals is we don't actually know what energy demand would be if more of it hadn't been made available through solar/wind/etc. I imagine it would regardless mean even more co2 output regardless; debatable if it'd be exactly 1:1. Still, from where I'm standing, all that really matters is the actual amount of physical emissions (Which is still going up, and which is much more likely to flatline than net decrease in the next decade or so).
Its possible that no clean energy would have resulted in higher electricity prices and thus less demand. But at the same time that would result in less electrification (e.g. of transportation and heat pumps), which in turn drive emissions reductions.
I agree with your comment, code337, but IMHO flatlining is better than accelerating upward. And emissions have to peak before they decline!
Every new kWh of RE generated is available to demand that would otherwise be met by fossil carbon, thereby depressing the curve of atmospheric CO2 in ppm at the second derivative, if not yet the first (https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/). The global "Green Vortex" (h/t R. Meyer) is still accelerating (US Energy Information Administration, International Energy Agency, Ember). Flattening or reversing the trend of GMST in any time frame is fundamentally a collective action problem: to first cap the growth of atmospheric CO2; then, if feasible, accelerate natural drawdown. The political power of carbon capital is the only reason the slope of the annual emissions curve can't fall to zero within a decade or so, and then turn negative, until emissions eventually fall below natural drawdown; Dr. Hausfather believes the trend of GMST will flatten soon thereafter.
I've been around since the whole, sad political drama of the climate commons opened to US audiences with Hansen's announcement to the Senate in 1988. The precipitous plunge of LCOE+ for renewables plus storage in the last 15 years has turned existential grief and despair into pragmatic optimism for many former doomers (myself among them). We're, uhm, energized to vote for the USA to rejoin the Green Vortex -- four years after the first time when the IRA was enacted by a narrow, strictly partisan legislative majority, two after the country voted by electoral chicanery to ride for free again.
IOW, it's been a 38-year epic of scientific progress by perseverance and growing collective awareness (https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/about/projects/global-warmings-six-americas/), aided by news of both worsening extreme weather and the accelerating green vortex, despite a massive obstructionist disinformation campaign funded by fossil fuel producers and investors. Now in my eighth decade, I'll take another hit of hopium, thanks, then vote Democratic, seek appropriate medical care, electrify my lifestyle as fast as I can afford to, and watch what happens to GMST before my end.
Yes, I said "vote Democratic" first. They are obviously the lesser of two weevils (h/t P. O'Brian), until some Republican lawmaker votes for collective decarbonization in defiance of his petro-plutocratic party!
Yeah. I mean, I'd say it's fairly obvious that flatlining is better than increasing. However, flatlining means continuing to put co2 / ch4 into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate and all that, and heating will continue for years after output (I've seen different figures on that, and then there's crossed tipping thresholds). And then there's how long the drawdown takes, and how unrealistic most carbon removal technology proposals are at the scale required.
Personally, I tend to think hopium is just as bad as its opposite -- at least so far as messaging is concerned. (If it keeps your keel even, then by all means). My real concerns in this department remain the fact that as much as climate science is obviously an important part of this puzzle, we can release and read studies until the end of time, but those aren't what's actually driving the system.
My bet? It's not going to be as bad as the so-called doomers think (who say all life on earth will die, or even necessarily that it leads to a true mass extinction on par with the "big ones"-- possible, if a cascade is underway, certainly not a necessary outcome), but it's also incredibly hard to imagine how the global civilization that currently exists will survive. I guess that's tomorrow's problem.
On the scale we can actually act upon, we can do what we can do. The rest I suppose will be what it'll be.
This article is written by a man trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, with other men arguing in the comments about exactly which way to rearrange them. It's exhausting.
Does anyone actually think this civilization can (or should be) saved? Humanity is too big for its britches. Why is no one talking about how to plan for the inevitable collapse of energy? Wind turbines, solar, nuclear, and all the rest are fantasies. They cannot be sustained without oil. We are going back to wood world, friends. Let's start preparing for that inevitability now. And for god sakes, let's put our energy into dealing with the envuironmental nightmare we've created with nuclear energy.
"Wind turbines, solar, nuclear, and all the rest are fantasies. They cannot be sustained without oil."
Pure mood-congruent ideation. You're committing a classic static-system fallacy: confusing a path-dependent temporal transition with an unalterable physical law. There's no thermodynamic reason carbon-free energy can't eventually replace oil in all supply chain and downstream economic activity. It's primarily a collective action (i.e. political) problem. You're not helping, except to sustain carbon capital ROI by suppressing collective action to decarbonize the global economy.
"Let's start preparing for that inevitability now. And for god sakes, let's put our energy into dealing with the envuironmental nightmare we've created with nuclear energy."
You can hunker in a bunker waiting for apocalypse, climate or nuclear. Fossil fuel billionaires are paying to discredit renewable and nuclear energy both. I don't expect nuclear to contribute much to future global energy supplies, mostly because for now it's too expensive to build and takes too long to bring online; and then there's the easily socialized risk, small but finite. But its environmental impact isn't the nightmare open-ended global warming is, either.
Me, I'll vote for politicians who support public investment to drive down the LCOE+ of renewables and storage, until nobody buys fossil fuels anymore because renewable electricity is cheaper, without subsidies or carbon's socialized cost. That will at least increase the chances global doom will hold off until the end of my medically-assisted lifespan. Après moi, le déluge 😏!
"The CO2 avoided by solar and wind growth between 2005 and 2025 has prevented about 0.01C of warming."
That's not true. All of the growth of solar and wind has taken place by using conventional vehicles for the transportation involved in their delivery and installation. Obviously, CO2 has been added and cannot be avoided when gasolines and renewable biofuels are burned for energy. The same holds true for the transportation involved in growing and delivering food for eight billion people who need to be fed. That's the real endangerment finding.
The transportation of materials for renewables projects is a negligible part of their lifecycle emissions, at least compared with the combustion emissions of fossil fuels they are displacing.
Zeke you can't displace emissions significantly until the projects are on stream. The same is true for growing and delivering food to the growing number of people and their domesticated animals. In other words the transition to the all electric world needs to be completed. The correlation between Mauna Loa CO2 and global population remains almost perfect since it was first identified in 1987 by Newell & Marcus.
Going by personal experience our rooftop solar + batteries provide above 95% of our household energy usage. Even that 5% seems more about... inverters taking advantage of the grid as fast shock absorber for fast switching bigger loads and 'handshaking'.
More than twice what our household uses goes TO the grid. Rather than that energy abundance leading to ever more consumption a lot of the biggest loads are vastly improving in efficiency - heat pumps mostly. Not even Jevon can keep up.
I'll add that 15% of Australia's grid input is already just the leftovers of (privately owned) rooftop PV. Wind and solar farms are pushing it towards 50% RE and batteries are shifting that from 'just daytime' towards anytime.
I think bidirectional EV's will do even more; our very modest sized PV system as it is would run one - for our admittedly frugal usage. But frugal for us is overwhelming abundance for most of the world.
Not all the way there, especially for difficult climates but science, engineering and innovation is awesmacking.
There is nothing ‘clean’ about solar/wind energy generation. The materials like pure silica for solar panels; copper and rare earth elements for electric motors; steel and concrete for infrastructure all depend on mining and high temperature manufacture, both of which are fossil fuel driven. The accelerated mining associated with solar/wind materials is one of the biggest causes of habitat destruction and commonly occurs in the Global South where it impacts Indigenous peoples and animals. Ore processing involves large scale water and air pollution and use chemicals such as sulphuric acid at scale. Installation of wind and solar farms destroys habitats for many animals.
Sure, fossil fuels cause global warming, but two wrongs do not make a right. Use less energy, period.
Mining is a rounding error in terms of biodiversity loss. Beef, palm oil and subsidence farming dominate, and even fossil fuels alone use more land. Plus, most mining is for concrete and steel, not renewables. High-temperature heat requiring fuels like methane or hydrogen is a talking point of gas companies so they can keep selling gas and avoid electrification. Mining is going green, with large Australian mining giants using electric rigs powered by solar. Sulfur is a common element, found in gypsum.
"There is nothing ‘clean’ about solar/wind energy generation. The materials like pure silica for solar panels; copper and rare earth elements for electric motors; steel and concrete for infrastructure all depend on mining and high temperature manufacture, both of which are fossil fuel driven. "
This is transparent decarbonization obstructionism, helping to sustain carbon capital ROI intentionally or not. 'Clean' is always relative, and fossil carbon is catastrophically dirty. While not without external cost, wind and solar carbon debt is currently repaid within 2 years, whereupon they both produce virtually free electricity for decades more. And inconveniently for obstructionists, consumer, supply-chain, and manufacturing demand are all being electrified with RE as I type. Confusing a temporal transition with an unalterable physical law is motivated cognition. There's no long-term dependence on fossil carbon!
"Sure, fossil fuels cause global warming, but two wrongs do not make a right. Use less energy, period."
Even if you're sincere, you don't get to choose austerity for eight to ten billion people, my dude. Piss off.
I'm curious, Roger. Why do you think people block you on social media? Perhaps if you spent some time thinking about that you could solve the seemingly intractable problem, "how do I get people to unblock me".
Hi Andrew, No offense, but I could care less who blocks me on social media, you included. But since Zeke wants to have an exchange, we could do a lot better than sharing links here and just converse like normal people.
Normal people don't "converse" only on X, or else no one here is normal. Your Political Science credentials don't entitle you to decide what's normal for the rest of us, you partisan hypocrite!
It goes beyond the scope of the rebound issue, but it is worth noting that the massive expansion of wind and solar in many climate scenarios is accompanied by a parallel expansion in CDR technologies that currently do not exist. If such technologies are indeed to come, then the case for substitution gets even more complex, see:
I have read that book from JB Fressoz you're talking about (that is interestingly called "without transition" in french).
His argument runs deeper than the addition of energies. He describes their symbiotic nature alongside their competition, and the fact that despite having tamed better forms of it, we're still consuming more and more of the old ones:
* we can extract more coal and wood thanks to diesel and chainsaws
* we can build more dams and windmills thanks to ciment (so, coal) and diesel to transport and extract everything required
Alongside replacing some of the fossil fuels usage (which we should absolutely do, don't get me wrong), abundant cheap energy could make extracting more fossil fuels easier. Examples of this are offshore wind turbines powering offshore oil and gaz rigs, AC in deep coal mines getting cheaper, warming viscous oils and bitumen becoming more economically viable. Could this be larger than the rebound effect you describe in footnote 2?
In other words, if we consider the fossil fuel extraction to be both supply-constrained and demand-contrained, solar and wind are increasing the supply while lowering the demand. Long-term, should we worry about that supply having gotten larger?
Given that EV's are a new demand for electricity, how much of the growth in demand is by replacing gasoline with electricity? How much does data center growth increase electricity demand?
The 0.002 °C will get quoted without the paragraph that follows it. I would argue the problem is not that the number is small, but that it uses the wrong denominator.
A tonne not emitted is out of the atmosphere for the whole excursion. The published multi-millennial runs still hold three-quarters of their peak warming ten thousand years out, so carbon avoided now is avoided for longer than recorded history. Measured against twenty years of deployment, 23 Gt looks like very little. Measured against the lifetime of the carbon, it is permanent the first time.
What strikes me is that this is the same durability that makes the problem frightening, and it is only ever said one way around. Removal has to be built and paid for. SRM has to be maintained for as long as the carbon is up there, with termination shock if anyone stops. Not emitting is the one intervention you pay for once.
The frame is uncomfortable in both directions, which is what recommends it. It is why 0.002 understates what has been built. It is also why 23 Gt against 2,600 Gt since 1850, and a current-policy figure that has not moved in four years, is sobering rather than reassuring. Both of those are permanent in the same sense, and a reader who holds both has the only version of this that motivates anything.
asking people to think in terms of gains in 500 or 1000 years isn't going to win any fans, and will bring on mockery. A few tens of trillions spent has avoided a couple hundredths of a degree C within a reasonable outlook that people care about. If this is a science blog, those are the facts.
The spending was not a climate expenditure. Demand grew 75% between 2005 and 2025 and had to be met by something — that is the premise of the post. The counterfactual is not "spend nothing," it is "spend comparable money building fossil plants." In most markets today that would cost more. Wind and solar also produced the electricity.
On the timescale, I am not asking anyone to care about the year 3000. The lifetime of the carbon is the denominator of the number you are quoting. It is why 0.002 °C today becomes about 0.01 by 2035 with nothing further built — the aerosols clear and the CO₂ does not.
And the assessments already work there. AR6 sea level projections run to 2300, CMIP7 asks modeling groups for runs to at least 2150, and the published scenario extensions go to 2500. If this is a science blog, that is where the science already is.
Investors, mostly national governments themselves, get many-fold returns on their fossil fuel infrastructure expenditures, not including the downstream consumption taxes and economic activity. That's why oil rich countries are rich.
One historian! One. Not even an energy historian. And he managed to create a whole fuss about the addition story. England is burning less coal now than when W.S.Jevons wrote “The coal question” back in the 1865. If the addition story was as simply as told we will have steam engines running along electric vehicles. We do not. One story is the aggregated one. A different one going in different spaces.
Most coal today is burned in China and India. The rest of the Western world is historical minimums.
Thanks for putting some clarity on this, but do not say “historians”. Energy historians know better.
When you say "Without wind and solar growth, EU power emissions would have fallen by only about 16% since 2005 rather than 55%, US emissions by about 17% rather than 37%, and UK emissions by about 53% rather than 75%. In these regions clean energy has not just met new demand, its actually pushed fossil generation down." that always sounds great, UK emissions down 75%,wow... But is the Scope 2 or Scope 3?
How much of that is true reduction and how much is 21 years of UK de-industrialisation offshoring manufacturing to emerging economies?
I find it immensely frustrating, and disingenuous, when Western countries pat themselves on the back about emissions reductions and in the next breath blame China and India for emissions growth.
Where the f&ck do they think all the goods from those CO2 emitting factories go? Mars?
The UK, US, and EU's progress on decarbonization holds even if you measure it using consumption (rather than territorial) emissions, which account for emissions embodied in goods traded: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling
Zeke you are right. And that matters. Thanks for writing this piece.
However, the degrowthers etc are right too. It is a very important fact that fossil use has not yet declined. It’s what is predicted by economics, absent swingeing Govt regulation.
The conclusion: there is no certainty at all that market forces and consumer choices alone will end the fossil fuel etc. far from it. Absent dramatic CITIZEN (ie political) choices, what will most likely end it is civilisational collapse.
Ps I love counter factuals. I’m writing a book of them. So, thanks for that too!
You've convinced me - emissions from electric generation today are lower than they would have been if solar and wind had not increased over the last 20 years. I'm glad the discussion seems to have moved beyond rapid, deep decarbonization regardless of cost.
From a real-world perspective, I think the more interesting question is, "How much are people (and governments) willing to pay for emissions reductions in terms of higher energy prices and lower reliability?" A related question would be "How much would solar and wind have increased, absent requirements and subsidies?"
On the first, I think the answer is "Not as much as they have been paying." I think higher energy prices, particularly for electricity, have contributed significantly to economic stagnation in most of Europe, and have reduced growth and prosperity in the US. The economic consequences have contributed to the rise of right-wing populism in both regions. In poorer areas, I think people and governments would have eagerly chosen less expensive energy sources that could provide more energy to facilitate economic growth, if they hadn't been coerced by conditions imposed by international aid and financial institutions.
This implies that the answer to the related question is "Not nearly as much as they have."
I expect China would have pursued wind and solar development, because China wants to reduce dependence on imported fuel. Whether this makes good economic sense is a different question.
It's a fair point, but the obvious problem with counterfactuals is we don't actually know what energy demand would be if more of it hadn't been made available through solar/wind/etc. I imagine it would regardless mean even more co2 output regardless; debatable if it'd be exactly 1:1. Still, from where I'm standing, all that really matters is the actual amount of physical emissions (Which is still going up, and which is much more likely to flatline than net decrease in the next decade or so).
Its possible that no clean energy would have resulted in higher electricity prices and thus less demand. But at the same time that would result in less electrification (e.g. of transportation and heat pumps), which in turn drive emissions reductions.
I agree with your comment, code337, but IMHO flatlining is better than accelerating upward. And emissions have to peak before they decline!
Every new kWh of RE generated is available to demand that would otherwise be met by fossil carbon, thereby depressing the curve of atmospheric CO2 in ppm at the second derivative, if not yet the first (https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/). The global "Green Vortex" (h/t R. Meyer) is still accelerating (US Energy Information Administration, International Energy Agency, Ember). Flattening or reversing the trend of GMST in any time frame is fundamentally a collective action problem: to first cap the growth of atmospheric CO2; then, if feasible, accelerate natural drawdown. The political power of carbon capital is the only reason the slope of the annual emissions curve can't fall to zero within a decade or so, and then turn negative, until emissions eventually fall below natural drawdown; Dr. Hausfather believes the trend of GMST will flatten soon thereafter.
I've been around since the whole, sad political drama of the climate commons opened to US audiences with Hansen's announcement to the Senate in 1988. The precipitous plunge of LCOE+ for renewables plus storage in the last 15 years has turned existential grief and despair into pragmatic optimism for many former doomers (myself among them). We're, uhm, energized to vote for the USA to rejoin the Green Vortex -- four years after the first time when the IRA was enacted by a narrow, strictly partisan legislative majority, two after the country voted by electoral chicanery to ride for free again.
IOW, it's been a 38-year epic of scientific progress by perseverance and growing collective awareness (https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/about/projects/global-warmings-six-americas/), aided by news of both worsening extreme weather and the accelerating green vortex, despite a massive obstructionist disinformation campaign funded by fossil fuel producers and investors. Now in my eighth decade, I'll take another hit of hopium, thanks, then vote Democratic, seek appropriate medical care, electrify my lifestyle as fast as I can afford to, and watch what happens to GMST before my end.
Yes, I said "vote Democratic" first. They are obviously the lesser of two weevils (h/t P. O'Brian), until some Republican lawmaker votes for collective decarbonization in defiance of his petro-plutocratic party!
Yeah. I mean, I'd say it's fairly obvious that flatlining is better than increasing. However, flatlining means continuing to put co2 / ch4 into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate and all that, and heating will continue for years after output (I've seen different figures on that, and then there's crossed tipping thresholds). And then there's how long the drawdown takes, and how unrealistic most carbon removal technology proposals are at the scale required.
Personally, I tend to think hopium is just as bad as its opposite -- at least so far as messaging is concerned. (If it keeps your keel even, then by all means). My real concerns in this department remain the fact that as much as climate science is obviously an important part of this puzzle, we can release and read studies until the end of time, but those aren't what's actually driving the system.
My bet? It's not going to be as bad as the so-called doomers think (who say all life on earth will die, or even necessarily that it leads to a true mass extinction on par with the "big ones"-- possible, if a cascade is underway, certainly not a necessary outcome), but it's also incredibly hard to imagine how the global civilization that currently exists will survive. I guess that's tomorrow's problem.
On the scale we can actually act upon, we can do what we can do. The rest I suppose will be what it'll be.
This article is written by a man trying to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, with other men arguing in the comments about exactly which way to rearrange them. It's exhausting.
Does anyone actually think this civilization can (or should be) saved? Humanity is too big for its britches. Why is no one talking about how to plan for the inevitable collapse of energy? Wind turbines, solar, nuclear, and all the rest are fantasies. They cannot be sustained without oil. We are going back to wood world, friends. Let's start preparing for that inevitability now. And for god sakes, let's put our energy into dealing with the envuironmental nightmare we've created with nuclear energy.
"Wind turbines, solar, nuclear, and all the rest are fantasies. They cannot be sustained without oil."
Pure mood-congruent ideation. You're committing a classic static-system fallacy: confusing a path-dependent temporal transition with an unalterable physical law. There's no thermodynamic reason carbon-free energy can't eventually replace oil in all supply chain and downstream economic activity. It's primarily a collective action (i.e. political) problem. You're not helping, except to sustain carbon capital ROI by suppressing collective action to decarbonize the global economy.
"Let's start preparing for that inevitability now. And for god sakes, let's put our energy into dealing with the envuironmental nightmare we've created with nuclear energy."
You can hunker in a bunker waiting for apocalypse, climate or nuclear. Fossil fuel billionaires are paying to discredit renewable and nuclear energy both. I don't expect nuclear to contribute much to future global energy supplies, mostly because for now it's too expensive to build and takes too long to bring online; and then there's the easily socialized risk, small but finite. But its environmental impact isn't the nightmare open-ended global warming is, either.
Me, I'll vote for politicians who support public investment to drive down the LCOE+ of renewables and storage, until nobody buys fossil fuels anymore because renewable electricity is cheaper, without subsidies or carbon's socialized cost. That will at least increase the chances global doom will hold off until the end of my medically-assisted lifespan. Après moi, le déluge 😏!
"The CO2 avoided by solar and wind growth between 2005 and 2025 has prevented about 0.01C of warming."
That's not true. All of the growth of solar and wind has taken place by using conventional vehicles for the transportation involved in their delivery and installation. Obviously, CO2 has been added and cannot be avoided when gasolines and renewable biofuels are burned for energy. The same holds true for the transportation involved in growing and delivering food for eight billion people who need to be fed. That's the real endangerment finding.
The transportation of materials for renewables projects is a negligible part of their lifecycle emissions, at least compared with the combustion emissions of fossil fuels they are displacing.
Zeke you can't displace emissions significantly until the projects are on stream. The same is true for growing and delivering food to the growing number of people and their domesticated animals. In other words the transition to the all electric world needs to be completed. The correlation between Mauna Loa CO2 and global population remains almost perfect since it was first identified in 1987 by Newell & Marcus.
Going by personal experience our rooftop solar + batteries provide above 95% of our household energy usage. Even that 5% seems more about... inverters taking advantage of the grid as fast shock absorber for fast switching bigger loads and 'handshaking'.
More than twice what our household uses goes TO the grid. Rather than that energy abundance leading to ever more consumption a lot of the biggest loads are vastly improving in efficiency - heat pumps mostly. Not even Jevon can keep up.
I'll add that 15% of Australia's grid input is already just the leftovers of (privately owned) rooftop PV. Wind and solar farms are pushing it towards 50% RE and batteries are shifting that from 'just daytime' towards anytime.
I think bidirectional EV's will do even more; our very modest sized PV system as it is would run one - for our admittedly frugal usage. But frugal for us is overwhelming abundance for most of the world.
Not all the way there, especially for difficult climates but science, engineering and innovation is awesmacking.
Absolutely excellent explainer post!
There is nothing ‘clean’ about solar/wind energy generation. The materials like pure silica for solar panels; copper and rare earth elements for electric motors; steel and concrete for infrastructure all depend on mining and high temperature manufacture, both of which are fossil fuel driven. The accelerated mining associated with solar/wind materials is one of the biggest causes of habitat destruction and commonly occurs in the Global South where it impacts Indigenous peoples and animals. Ore processing involves large scale water and air pollution and use chemicals such as sulphuric acid at scale. Installation of wind and solar farms destroys habitats for many animals.
Sure, fossil fuels cause global warming, but two wrongs do not make a right. Use less energy, period.
Mining is a rounding error in terms of biodiversity loss. Beef, palm oil and subsidence farming dominate, and even fossil fuels alone use more land. Plus, most mining is for concrete and steel, not renewables. High-temperature heat requiring fuels like methane or hydrogen is a talking point of gas companies so they can keep selling gas and avoid electrification. Mining is going green, with large Australian mining giants using electric rigs powered by solar. Sulfur is a common element, found in gypsum.
"There is nothing ‘clean’ about solar/wind energy generation. The materials like pure silica for solar panels; copper and rare earth elements for electric motors; steel and concrete for infrastructure all depend on mining and high temperature manufacture, both of which are fossil fuel driven. "
This is transparent decarbonization obstructionism, helping to sustain carbon capital ROI intentionally or not. 'Clean' is always relative, and fossil carbon is catastrophically dirty. While not without external cost, wind and solar carbon debt is currently repaid within 2 years, whereupon they both produce virtually free electricity for decades more. And inconveniently for obstructionists, consumer, supply-chain, and manufacturing demand are all being electrified with RE as I type. Confusing a temporal transition with an unalterable physical law is motivated cognition. There's no long-term dependence on fossil carbon!
"Sure, fossil fuels cause global warming, but two wrongs do not make a right. Use less energy, period."
Even if you're sincere, you don't get to choose austerity for eight to ten billion people, my dude. Piss off.
Since Zeke has me blocked on X, I share some thoughts on this post here: https://x.com/rogerpielkejr/status/2107215223568367987?s=46&t=WMSRPCBBWz_Ojw7zB5V3AA
Thanks for the comments Roger, I've responded to them here: https://github.com/hausfath/wind-solar-counterfactual/blob/main/writeup/rebound_writeup.pdf
If you were to just unblock me on X we could converse out in the open like normal people do in science and academia. 🤷♂️
I'm curious, Roger. Why do you think people block you on social media? Perhaps if you spent some time thinking about that you could solve the seemingly intractable problem, "how do I get people to unblock me".
Hi Andrew, No offense, but I could care less who blocks me on social media, you included. But since Zeke wants to have an exchange, we could do a lot better than sharing links here and just converse like normal people.
Normal people don't "converse" only on X, or else no one here is normal. Your Political Science credentials don't entitle you to decide what's normal for the rest of us, you partisan hypocrite!
Pasting Zeke takeaway from his response doc; So what are the takeaways here?
Rebound effects are real, and the original analysis left them out. In my central estimate they cut
the emissions avoided by wind and solar by around a sixth, and by more than half if every
assumption is set to its most pessimistic value at once. But the size of the fuel market rebound
depends on how integrated markets are and how readily supply responds. Neither favours a large
rebound for Chinese coal, which is where most of the avoided emissions are.
The rebound question will matter more over time as wind and solar start pushing fossil generation
down rather than just covering demand growth. If that drives coal and gas prices down, keeping
the cheaper fuel from being burned elsewhere will depend on climate policy in industry, buildings
and transport. In case its helpful, I’ve put the code and data to reproduce this analysis on my
GitHub here.
It goes beyond the scope of the rebound issue, but it is worth noting that the massive expansion of wind and solar in many climate scenarios is accompanied by a parallel expansion in CDR technologies that currently do not exist. If such technologies are indeed to come, then the case for substitution gets even more complex, see:
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/renewables-are-not-renewable
It's up to our hosts, but I'm quite willing to criticize you right here.
For non X folk: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2107215223568367987.html
how hard would it be to extend the analysis specifically to Germany's phase out of nuclear? That is, the emissions from using coal instead of nuclear. Similar to https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14786451.2024.2355642
I have read that book from JB Fressoz you're talking about (that is interestingly called "without transition" in french).
His argument runs deeper than the addition of energies. He describes their symbiotic nature alongside their competition, and the fact that despite having tamed better forms of it, we're still consuming more and more of the old ones:
* we can extract more coal and wood thanks to diesel and chainsaws
* we can build more dams and windmills thanks to ciment (so, coal) and diesel to transport and extract everything required
Alongside replacing some of the fossil fuels usage (which we should absolutely do, don't get me wrong), abundant cheap energy could make extracting more fossil fuels easier. Examples of this are offshore wind turbines powering offshore oil and gaz rigs, AC in deep coal mines getting cheaper, warming viscous oils and bitumen becoming more economically viable. Could this be larger than the rebound effect you describe in footnote 2?
In other words, if we consider the fossil fuel extraction to be both supply-constrained and demand-contrained, solar and wind are increasing the supply while lowering the demand. Long-term, should we worry about that supply having gotten larger?
Given that EV's are a new demand for electricity, how much of the growth in demand is by replacing gasoline with electricity? How much does data center growth increase electricity demand?
EVs are one of the largest drivers of increasing global demand (larger than datacenters in recent years).
The 0.002 °C will get quoted without the paragraph that follows it. I would argue the problem is not that the number is small, but that it uses the wrong denominator.
A tonne not emitted is out of the atmosphere for the whole excursion. The published multi-millennial runs still hold three-quarters of their peak warming ten thousand years out, so carbon avoided now is avoided for longer than recorded history. Measured against twenty years of deployment, 23 Gt looks like very little. Measured against the lifetime of the carbon, it is permanent the first time.
What strikes me is that this is the same durability that makes the problem frightening, and it is only ever said one way around. Removal has to be built and paid for. SRM has to be maintained for as long as the carbon is up there, with termination shock if anyone stops. Not emitting is the one intervention you pay for once.
The frame is uncomfortable in both directions, which is what recommends it. It is why 0.002 understates what has been built. It is also why 23 Gt against 2,600 Gt since 1850, and a current-policy figure that has not moved in four years, is sobering rather than reassuring. Both of those are permanent in the same sense, and a reader who holds both has the only version of this that motivates anything.
asking people to think in terms of gains in 500 or 1000 years isn't going to win any fans, and will bring on mockery. A few tens of trillions spent has avoided a couple hundredths of a degree C within a reasonable outlook that people care about. If this is a science blog, those are the facts.
The spending was not a climate expenditure. Demand grew 75% between 2005 and 2025 and had to be met by something — that is the premise of the post. The counterfactual is not "spend nothing," it is "spend comparable money building fossil plants." In most markets today that would cost more. Wind and solar also produced the electricity.
On the timescale, I am not asking anyone to care about the year 3000. The lifetime of the carbon is the denominator of the number you are quoting. It is why 0.002 °C today becomes about 0.01 by 2035 with nothing further built — the aerosols clear and the CO₂ does not.
And the assessments already work there. AR6 sea level projections run to 2300, CMIP7 asks modeling groups for runs to at least 2150, and the published scenario extensions go to 2500. If this is a science blog, that is where the science already is.
Investors, mostly national governments themselves, get many-fold returns on their fossil fuel infrastructure expenditures, not including the downstream consumption taxes and economic activity. That's why oil rich countries are rich.
3GTpa down, 50GTpa to go. We may need a bigger boat.
One historian! One. Not even an energy historian. And he managed to create a whole fuss about the addition story. England is burning less coal now than when W.S.Jevons wrote “The coal question” back in the 1865. If the addition story was as simply as told we will have steam engines running along electric vehicles. We do not. One story is the aggregated one. A different one going in different spaces.
Most coal today is burned in China and India. The rest of the Western world is historical minimums.
Thanks for putting some clarity on this, but do not say “historians”. Energy historians know better.
When you say "Without wind and solar growth, EU power emissions would have fallen by only about 16% since 2005 rather than 55%, US emissions by about 17% rather than 37%, and UK emissions by about 53% rather than 75%. In these regions clean energy has not just met new demand, its actually pushed fossil generation down." that always sounds great, UK emissions down 75%,wow... But is the Scope 2 or Scope 3?
How much of that is true reduction and how much is 21 years of UK de-industrialisation offshoring manufacturing to emerging economies?
I find it immensely frustrating, and disingenuous, when Western countries pat themselves on the back about emissions reductions and in the next breath blame China and India for emissions growth.
Where the f&ck do they think all the goods from those CO2 emitting factories go? Mars?
The UK, US, and EU's progress on decarbonization holds even if you measure it using consumption (rather than territorial) emissions, which account for emissions embodied in goods traded: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-gdp-decoupling
Zeke you are right. And that matters. Thanks for writing this piece.
However, the degrowthers etc are right too. It is a very important fact that fossil use has not yet declined. It’s what is predicted by economics, absent swingeing Govt regulation.
The conclusion: there is no certainty at all that market forces and consumer choices alone will end the fossil fuel etc. far from it. Absent dramatic CITIZEN (ie political) choices, what will most likely end it is civilisational collapse.
Ps I love counter factuals. I’m writing a book of them. So, thanks for that too!