Could the World’s Energy Systems Look Completely Different in 50 Years?

The Climate Change Problem

A few prominent views notwithstanding, there is no scientific question about the fact that the higher the atmospheric levels of certain gases, known as greenhouse gases (GHGs) — primarily carbon dioxide (CO₂) and, to a lesser extent, methane (CH₄) — the warmer the atmosphere will become over time.¹ Modern human civilization emits more of these gases than it absorbs. As a result, warming of the atmosphere and climatic changes that may be caused by it become likely. The more GHGs emitted, the warmer the atmosphere will become.

The question is: How fast will this happen and what damages (or benefits) might it cause? Computer models called IAMs (Integrated Assessment Models) try to answer this question. If the answer were that a rise in the global temperature of 20 degrees Fahrenheit would happen in the next five years, the situation would be desperate. Fortunately, that is not the case.

The models indicate an increase of roughly four or five degrees Fahrenheit in the next 80 years is more likely. This probably needs correcting over time, but should not lead to immediate panic. Nevertheless, in some quarters people did panic — a phenomenon that more or less reached its peak when then-16-year-old Greta Thunberg was invited to speak at the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In her speech, she angrily chided her distinguished elders, who were presumed to have caused the problem, with “How dare you?”

To eliminate this source of warming so the atmosphere doesn’t continue warming forever, a transition away from fossil fuels will be necessary. But how fast can or should the transition occur, and can it even occur at all? Can GHG emissions be reduced to zero or near-zero?

Until I read Hannah Ritchie’s new book, I was inclined to believe the view of Mark Mills, a former senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, that a transition away from society’s dependence on hydrocarbons “is not feasible in any meaningful time frame.” But Ritchie changed my mind.

Hannah Ritchie’s Realistic/Optimistic View of the Energy Transition

Ritchie is Deputy Editor of Our World in Data and a researcher at the Oxford Martin Programme in Global Development. The information she posts at Our World in Data is widely cited and highly trusted. I previously reviewed her first book, “Not the End of the World,” which argues that our environmental problems are not as bad as many environmentalists think.

Her new book, “Clearing the Air: A Hopeful Guide to Solving Climate Change in 50 Questions and Answers,” claims that the transition from the current, largely fossil fuel–powered system to one that emits little or no greenhouse gases could come about in the relatively near future.

This is not a book that is fueled by “hopium” (a combination of hope and intoxicant), like many predictions, or “pledges” that we will reach “net zero” emissions by 2050. Ritchie warns that “A completely fossil-free world is not going to happen overnight. Not even in the next 20 years. We should be upfront about that. It is a transition, not an on-off switch.”

Yet, her belief that it could happen sooner — perhaps much sooner than we think — is well supported in her book. The main reason for this is something that has transpired only in the last ten years or so: the incredible shrinking cost of renewable energy.

During 1978–1981, I worked at the then-new Solar Energy Research Institute, launched by Jimmy Carter’s administration in response to the 1970s energy crisis. It was later renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). A significant part of the work there was on photovoltaic (PV) cells (the components of solar panels) and wind turbines. The cost of PV was phenomenally high, but people who seemed like starry-eyed optimists to me predicted, on the basis of “learning curves,” that the cost would plummet over time. Wind turbines didn’t work very well and also cost a lot.

This has all changed dramatically in the intervening decades. It turns out the learning-curve optimists were right. Germany and a few other European governments that were infused with hopefulness paid an enormous amount to subsidize buyers of solar panels and wind turbines. Meanwhile, China leveraged its manufacturing diligence to develop solar and wind industries that compete fiercely with each other. Thus, that learning curve was indeed followed, in fits and starts, over the next 45 years, and the cost of wind and solar now sits at a level lower than I believed it could reach.

But that’s not enough. Wind and solar both qualify as “intermittent resources”; they aren’t available whenever we want them, like coal- and gas-fired and nuclear power plants are. That means some combination of supplementary technologies, including batteries and other strategies and technologies, such as nuclear energy and perhaps geothermal, needs to fill the gaps. Progress on some of these fronts is also greater than I would have expected.

Ritchie seals the deal for me in one particular respect. I have seen pictures of what look like unlimited acres of solar panels covering huge swathes of land. My environmentalism, since I was a child, was what I would call “John Muir” environmentalism — it was all about the preservation of wilderness, which means large quantities of land must be left pristine. I didn’t like the idea of covering so much land with solar panels or wind turbines.

However, Ritchie points out that compared to agriculture, only a trivial amount of land will be needed to provide all the energy for the entire world. One particular comparison she makes is truly incredible, but it checks out. She says, “The U.S. uses 2.5% of its land — an area the size of the U.K. — to produce bioethanol, which provides 10% of its motor petrol supply. If it used that land for solar farms instead the U.S. could generate enough electricity to power itself two to three times over. Yes, you read that right.”

In a Substack post, she asserts that if the land currently used to produce global biofuels were used instead for solar panels, it would provide all of the electricity the world consumes in a year. This is because biofuels convert solar energy to chemical energy with only 1% efficiency, while solar panels convert it directly to electricity with 20% efficiency.

The “50 questions and answers” in her book are presented in 50 short, concise, and easy-to-read chapters. Each chapter includes a section on “What we need to do” and one on “Things to bear in mind.” In each case, these sections are eminently contributory to the knowledge we need. The chapters cover not only energy, but also mineral mining, agriculture and food, as well as hard-to-abate industries that emit carbon dioxide through their chemical processes, like concrete.

Making concrete involves heating limestone rock to produce calcium oxide, leaving CO₂ as a by-product that is then emitted. But it turns out that instead of using limestone we could use basalt, which would not emit CO2 and is more abundant than limestone. The problem, as in many of these solutions, is to bring down the cost. But in almost every case of a solution that Ritchie cites, she also highlights a commercial company that is working to bring the cost down. These companies are funded by the likes of Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy, and by other wealthy investors — often under the banner of “impact investing,” which seeks to have a long-term positive impact while ideally eventually profiting — as well as by venture capital. There is a lot of serious commercial activity in these areas.

As renowned energy expert Vaclav Smil has pointed out, energy transitions in the past — from wood to coal, from coal to oil, from oil to gas — have taken 100 years or more and have never been complete. This tends to suggest that we should expect this energy transition to take 100 years and still not be finished.

Yet it is possible that, though Ritchie never makes the mistake of predicting a time frame for the transition, in perhaps 50 years or so we may look back and be astonished to realize how much things have changed.

Endnote

¹A few scientists who are sometimes wrongly regarded as climate deniers, such as Richard Lindzen or Stephen Koonin, agree with this scientific fact but disagree that it is necessarily cause for great alarm.

Economist and mathematician Michael Edesess is an adjunct professor and visiting faculty at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In 2007, he authored a book about the investment services industry titled The Big Investment Lie, published by Berrett-Koehler. His new book, The Three Simple Rules of Investing, co-authored with Kwok L. Tsui, Carol Fabbri and George Peacock, was published by Berrett-Koehler in June 2014.

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