#COP27 - the same procedure as every year...
Like with every climate summit, elites from all over the world will fly (often via private jets) to stay at a luxury resort. This time they will come to Egypt.
Like every time, they will be focused on years and temperature targets ending in 5 or 0, with absolutely no known way of achieving them. Not without condemning the developing world to poverty and reversing 150 years of progress in the developed world, that is. Roger Pielke Jr. has an article detailing how we locked ourselves into this box via “social construction of ignorance”.
What seems different this time around, is that there are more voices that seem frustrated to the point of disgust by this meeting. Two great articles have appeared on GOP27, one by Ted Nordhaus and Vijaya Ramachandran in Foreign Policy (TN&VR), and another by Bjorn Lomborg and Jordan B. Peterson in the Telegraph (JBP&BL).
Why are people frustrated by COP?
Measured by the impact of these summits on CO2 emissions, we have to conclude:
“In a surprisingly honest review of climate policies, the UN revealed a “lost decade”: The report found that it couldn’t tell the difference between what has happened and a world that adopted no new climate policies since 2005. Consider that: all those climate summits and grandiose promises – all that expense and trouble – and no measurable difference whatsoever.” - JBP&BL
But it is worse. Because the Western elites try to implement a rather narrow set of technologies on a global scale with the aim of mitigating emissions. Naturally, this strategies has costs and benefits.
While this strategy might become a net benefit for people born after 2050,
the immediate costs of this strategy — to put it bluntly — puts the lives of people at risk. Not only in far away countries.
”How is that?” you might ask? By shifting investments away from “adaptation” efforts that try to increase the resilience of people to climate change.
"Climate adaptation [...] works. It includes [...] buildings that withstand disasters, dikes and dams that protect from floods, air conditioning and cold storage for food and medicines, early warning systems, well-equipped first responders, and evacuation routes [.]" - TN&VR
Building such infrastructure requires huge amounts of concrete and steel.
Unfortunately, there is no substitute for fossil energy in creating such materials beyond the lab scale.
Because renewable energies like solar and wind are intermittent, they are no complete substitute for fossil fuels. You cannot build an industrial manufacturing base on intermittent energy sources, because production plants are severely damaged by any distruption in energy inputs. A few 1/1000 of a seconds disruption can lead to weeks of maintenance work. We do not know how to store energy anywhere near the scale or cost we need to smooth the intermittency.
Industrialization is the developmental path that every prosperous country had to go through, except for some resource exporters that fueled the industrialization efforts under the Bretton Woods system. And it is this route that Western elites are tying to prevent developing countries from taking. Instead, developing countries are supposed to “leap frog” fossil fuels. But it remains unclear how that is supposed to work.
“Tackling climate change with current technology is essentially impossible. This means that climate policy-makers tinker at the margins, offering deceptive solutions, and morally grandstanding. This pattern has repeated for three decades.“ - JBP&BL
Instead of celebrating the fortuitous coincidence that making people richer makes them simultaneously safer from climate change, the West’s approach creates a global divide:
"But the confusion and disinformation about adaptation [...] shift the focus away from proven development pathways, transforming a wildly successful global development project into a zero-sum conflict that [pits] rich countries against poor." - TN&VR
Instead of helping developing countries with adapting their infrastructure and becoming richer and more resilient in the face climate change, the West is focused on mitigation at all costs — especially if these costs have to be paid by the developing world. If that means a blanket ban on financing of developing projects that are not using the “approved” technologies, so be it.
What shoud we do differently?
To be frank: we need a 180 on our approach towards tackling climate change.
“A complete shift of international efforts to address climate change toward a shared global effort to accelerate economic development, build resilient infrastructure, and accelerate low-carbon innovation and deployment is long overdue.” - TN&VR
Electricity is the easiest sector to decarbobize. Alas, the narrow set of technologies that are not “verboten”, are too costly and cannot reliably replace fossil fuels. Concrete, steel, fertilizer and long-haul transport are a much tougher challange. There are simply no substitutes for fossil fuels in their production on the scale that is needed.
We consume 1.8 billion tonnes of steel, 4.5 billion tonnes of concrete, 150 million tonnes of ammonia and 370 million tonnes of plastics. These are the “four pillars of modern civilization” as Vaclav Smil is calling them. As far as we know today, none of that is possible without fossil fuels. We probably need more of these pillars, if we want to make people resilient against climate change.
Fertilizers alone are responsible for 4 billion people being alive today that would not be without them. Even if we scraped every little dropping of poo and dung as fertilizer, there is no way that we could feed all of us. Almost all fertilizer that allows people to live is made from natural gas.
“Pretending that the proper technological answer currently exists, and is not being implemented because we lack conviction and willpower is reckless and misleading. Worse, it stops us from pursuing real solutions to the many problems that confront us – only one of which is climate change.” - -JBP&BL
Believing that we already got all technologies we need, has led us to devote $600 billion per year to financing ineffective climate remediation strategies. A better strategy is to innovate our way to better solutions.
“According to the Copenhagen Consensus Nobel Laureates, we should increase our current spending five-fold, to $100 billion per year.” - JBP&BL
While for example the EU’s mixed strategy of cutting carbon with a mix of market and planning dictates is estimated to spend one pound to avoid a mere three pence of long-term climate damage, green energy R&D is estimated to return eleven pounds for every pound invested. Improving our efficiency in tackling climate change by a factor of several hundreds is nothing to look down at.
Finding that $100 billion per year should not pose a problem, given that we already spend 6x that amount on alternatives. Judiciously spending the remaining $500 billion per year on critical infrastructure projects like hydropower or flood protection would certainly help to improve climate resilience. Better yet, some of it could be spent on those areas that the Copenhagen Consesus Center has identified as the most efficient projects to reduce suffering the world over: like deworming pills, vitamins, vaccines, better family planning and education.
Innovation has already helped the USA to become the leader in carbon emission reduction via an unexpected route.
“The ten-year $10 billion US public investment in shale gas, which originated under George W. Bush. [I]t led the way for a production surge (with all the attendant economic benefits, particularly for the poor) that allowed natural gas to become cheaper than the dirtier coal it partially replaced. […] The consequence? The US has the best record of C02 emission reduction of any country in the past decade – and simultaneously reduced its reliance on foreign suppliers of uncertain reliability and cost.” - JBP&BL
But exactly that is the nature of innovation. It is open-ended. You do not know, what you do not know. Therefore, you cannot predict, what you will discover.
If innovation leads to a low-carbon energy form that is cheaper than fossil fuels, countries all over the world will choose it. That is a far better solution for the poor than an effective carbon price of infinity generated by “keep it in the ground” rhetoric.
Fortunately, there are already people working on solutions that could help us to power the future. There are some rather obvious solutions, like nulcear fission in various instantiations. Huge GenIII+ light water reactors like the Korean APR1400 or the American AP1000 have already provided reliable energy around the world, smaller, more modular and supposedly better deployable versions of essentially the same technologies in Holtec’s SMR-160, NuScale’s VOYGR or GEH’s BWRX-300 are getting ready.
GenIV reactors developed by the likes of Kairos Power, Moltex Energy, Terrestrial Energy, TerraPower, Exodys or X-Energy are supposed to be cheaper and run hot enough to be used in industrial heating applications.
There are over two dozen of members in the Fusion Industry Association that are working on various and ingenious ways to realize the promise of fusion energy, Commonwealth Fusion, General Fusion, Zap Energy, Helion, TypeOne Energy, Focused Energy or FirstLight Fusion.
There are companies working on high-altitude wind, which is much more predictable, or on geothermal power, people working on genetically modified algae to produce CO2-free oil.
Most of it is far from cost-effective today. But research on these and many other solutions is not only comparatively inepxensive, but offers the opportunity of finding a real breakthrough.
Instead of lecturing people in developing countries, the developed countries have the opportunity of making them safer and creating a path towards a lower-carbon future that could actually be attractive.
But, alas, this would mean to ditch the role of grandiose, self-righteous, wise and generous benefactor, accepting some humility, and getting out of the way of real improvements for the world’s poor. Too many people seem too comfortable in their role and are getting too much praise from activists and media to make that a likely outcome.
And so COP27 will probably be just like its 26 predecessors: a great PR event, where the world’s poor are sacrificed to quell the angst of rich, Western narcissists.
But at least people are starting to see it for the ineffective and damaging theater that it is.