How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
I read Weather for Dummies, still one of the best books on weather that I’ve found.
Consider what it took to achieve this 5 percent reduction. A million people died, and tens of millions were put out of work. To put it mildly, this was not a situation that anyone would want to continue or repeat.
During the last ice age, the average temperature was just 6 degrees Celsius lower than it is today. During the age of the dinosaurs, when the average temperature was perhaps 4 degrees Celsius higher than today, there were crocodiles living above the Arctic Circle.
Why are some places heating up more than others? In the interior of some continents, the soil is drier, which means the land can’t cool off as much as it did in the past. Basically, continents aren’t sweating as much as they used to.
For hurricanes, it’s unclear whether warmer oceans are causing a rise in the number of storms, but there is growing evidence that climate change is making storms wetter and increasing the number of intense ones. We
We know that when the average temperature rises, more water evaporates from the earth’s surface into the air. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas, but unlike carbon dioxide or methane, it doesn’t stay in the air for long—eventually, it falls back to the surface as rain or snow. As water vapor condenses into rain, it releases a massive amount of energy, as anyone who has ever experienced a big thunderstorm knows.
By the end of the century, soils in the southwestern United States will have 10 percent to 20 percent less moisture, and the risk of drought there will go up by at least 20 percent. Droughts will also threaten the Colorado River, which supplies drinking water for nearly 40 million people and irrigation
On the one hand, wheat and many other plants grow faster and need less water when there’s a large amount of carbon in the air. On the other hand, corn is especially sensitive to heat, and it’s the number one crop in the United States, worth more than $50 billion
In sub-Saharan Africa, farmers could see the growing season shrink by 20 percent and millions of acres of land become substantially drier. In poor communities, where many people already spend more than half of their incomes on food, food prices could rise by 20 percent or more.
Extra heat won’t be good for the animals we eat and get milk from; it will make them less productive and more prone to dying young, which in turn will make meat, eggs, and dairy more expensive.
not only are the seas getting warmer, they’re also bifurcating—developing some places where the water has more oxygen and others where it has less oxygen. As a result, fish and other sea life are moving to different waters, or simply dying off. If the temperature rises by 2 degrees Celsius, coral reefs could vanish completely, destroying a major source of seafood for more than a billion people.
In many ways, a 2-degree rise wouldn’t simply be 33 percent worse than 1.5; it could be 100 percent worse. Twice as many people would have trouble getting clean water. Corn production in the tropics would go down twice as much.
mosquitoes will start living in new places (they like it humid, and they’ll move from areas that dry out to ones that become more humid),
the human body’s ability to cool off depends on the air’s ability to absorb sweat as it evaporates. If the air can’t absorb your sweat, then it can’t cool you off, no matter how much you perspire.
In other words, by mid-century, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.
I’ve heard people object to the idea that rich countries should go first: “Why should we bear the brunt of this?” It’s not simply because we’ve caused most of the problem (although that’s true). It’s also because this is a huge economic opportunity: The countries that build great zero-carbon companies and industries will be the ones that lead the global economy in the coming decades.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”*
The speed of urban growth is mind-boggling: By 2060, the world’s building stock—a measure that factors in the number of buildings and their size—will double. That’s like putting up another New York City every month for 40 years, and it’s mainly because of growth in developing countries like China, India, and Nigeria.
That’s partly because richer countries have outsourced emissions-heavy manufacturing to poorer ones. (UN Population Division; Rhodium Group)
Consider that nearly 40 percent of the world’s emissions are produced by the richest 16 percent of the population.
Global energy demand will go up 50 percent by 2050, and if nothing else changes, carbon emissions will go up by nearly as much. Even if the rich world could magically get to zero today, the rest of the world would still be emitting more and more.
the first Model T that rolled off Henry Ford’s production line in 1908 got no better than 21 miles to the gallon. As I write this, the top hybrid on the market gets 58 miles to the gallon. In more than a century, fuel economy has improved by less than a factor of three.
Technology is only one reason that the energy industry can’t change as quickly as the computer industry. There’s also size. The energy industry is simply enormous—at around $5 trillion a year, one of the biggest businesses on the planet. Anything that big and complex will resist change. And consciously or not, we have built a lot of inertia into the energy industry.
Since the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, America has broken ground on just two nuclear plants, even though more people die from coal pollution in a single year than have died in all nuclear accidents combined.
You could work on an idea for years, only to see a new administration come in and eliminate the incentive you’ve been counting on.
Tip: Whenever you see some number of tons of greenhouse gases, convert it to a percentage of 51 billion, which is the world’s current yearly total emissions (in carbon dioxide equivalents).
How much greenhouse gas is emitted by the things we do? Making things (cement, steel, plastic) 31% Plugging in (electricity) 27% Growing things (plants, animals) 19% Getting around (planes, trucks, cargo ships) 16% Keeping warm and cool (heating, cooling, refrigeration) 7% You might be surprised to see that making electricity accounts for just over a quarter of all emissions.
Tip: Remember that emissions come from five different activities, and we need solutions in all of them.
A megawatt is a million watts, and a watt is a joule per second. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter what a joule is, other than a bit of energy. Just remember that a watt is a bit of energy per second.
The largest power station in the world, the Three Gorges Dam in China, can produce 22 billion watts. (Remember that the definition of a watt already includes “per second,” so there’s no such thing as watts per second, or watts per hour. It’s just watts.)
A kilowatt is 1,000 watts, a megawatt is a million, and a gigawatt (pronounced with a hard g!) is a billion.
How much power does it take? The world 5,000 gigawatts The United States 1,000 gigawatts Mid-size city 1 gigawatt Small town 1 megawatt Average American house 1 kilowatt
Tip: Whenever you hear “kilowatt,” think “house.” “Gigawatt,” think “city.” A hundred or more gigawatts, think “big country.”
How much power can we generate per square meter? Energy source Watts per square meter Fossil fuels 500–10,000 Nuclear 500–1,000 Solar* 5–20 Hydropower (dams) 5–50 Wind 1–2 Wood and other biomass Less than 1 * The power density of solar could theoretically reach 100 watts per square meter, though no one has accomplished this yet. Notice
Tip: If someone tells you that some source (wind, solar, nuclear, whatever) can supply all the energy the world needs, find out how much space will be required to produce that much energy.
So working with partners around the world, we funded various studies to find out what was killing children. Eventually, we were able to track deaths with much more detail, and this data pointed the way to big breakthroughs. For example, we saw that pneumonia was behind a large number of children’s deaths each year. Although a pneumo vaccine already existed, it was so expensive that poor countries weren’t buying it. (They had little incentive to, because they had no idea how many children were dying from the disease.) Once they saw the data, though—and once donors agreed to pay most of the cost—they began adding the vaccine to their health programs, and eventually we were able to fund a much cheaper vaccine that’s now in use in countries around the world.
We’d need to build more than 50,000 DAC plants around the world just to manage the emissions we’re producing right now. In addition, DAC doesn’t work on methane or other greenhouse gases, just carbon dioxide. And it’s probably the most expensive solution; in many cases, it will be cheaper not to emit greenhouse gases in the first place.
Tip: Keep the Green Premiums in mind and ask whether they’re low enough for middle-income countries to pay.
Here’s a summary of all five tips: Convert tons of emissions to a percentage of 51 billion. Remember that we need to find solutions for all five activities that emissions come from: making things, plugging in, growing things, getting around, and keeping cool and warm. Kilowatt = house. Gigawatt = mid-size city. Hundreds of gigawatts = big, rich country. Consider how much space you’re going to need. Keep the Green Premiums in mind and ask whether they’re low enough for middle-income countries to pay. SKIP
When you cover land with water, if there’s a lot of carbon in the soil, the carbon eventually turns into methane and escapes into the atmosphere—which is why studies show that depending on where it’s built, a dam can actually be a worse emitter than coal for 50 to 100 years before it makes up for all the methane it’s responsible for.*2
Either we need to store excess electricity in batteries (which, I’ll argue in a moment, is prohibitively expensive), or we need to add other energy sources that use fossil fuels, such as natural gas plants that run only when you need them. Either way, the economics won’t work in our favor. As we approach 100 percent clean electricity, intermittency becomes a bigger and more expensive problem.
With all the additional electricity we’ll be using, and assuming that wind and solar play a significant role, completely decarbonizing America’s power grid by 2050 will require adding around 75 gigawatts of capacity every year for the next 30 years. Is that a lot? Over the past decade, we’ve added an average of 22 gigawatts a year.
Construction on the TransWest Express, a transmission project designed to move wind-generated power from Wyoming to California and the Southwest, is scheduled to begin in 2021. The project is supposed to become operational in 2024—some 17 years after planning began.
For example, power lines are less of an eyesore if they’re run underground. But today, burying power lines increases the cost by a factor of 5 to 10. (The problem is heat: Power lines get hot when there’s electricity running through them. That’s no problem when they’re aboveground—the heat just dissipates into the air—but underground there’s no place for the heat to go. If the temperature gets too high, the power lines melt.) Some companies are working on next-generation transmission that would eliminate the heat problem and reduce the cost of underground lines significantly.
Nuclear fission. Here’s the one-sentence case for nuclear power: It’s the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale.
How much stuff does it take to build and run a power plant? That depends on the type of plant. Nuclear is the most efficient, using much less material per unit of electricity generated than other sources do. (U.S. Department of Energy)
Imagine if everyone had gotten together one day and said, “Hey, cars are killing people. They’re dangerous. Let’s stop driving and give up these automobiles.” That would’ve been ridiculous, of course. We did just the opposite: We used innovation to make cars safer. To keep people from flying through the windshield, we invented seat belts and air bags. To protect passengers during an accident, we created safer materials and better designs. To protect pedestrians in parking lots, we started installing rear-view cameras. Nuclear power kills far, far fewer people than cars do. For that matter, it kills far fewer people than any fossil fuel. Nevertheless, we should improve it, just as we did with cars, by analyzing the problems one by one and setting out to solve them with innovation.
TerraPower’s reactor could run on many different types of fuel, including the waste from other nuclear facilities.
The United States has considerable offshore wind available, especially in New England, Northern California and Oregon, the Gulf Coast, and the Great Lakes; in theory, we could generate 2,000 gigawatts from it—more than enough to meet our current needs.
Today, getting a permit requires you to run a bureaucratic gauntlet: You buy one of a limited number of federal leases, then go through a multiyear process to generate an environmental impact statement, then get additional state and local permits. And at each step of the way, you may be opposed (rightly or not) by beachfront property owners, the tourism industry, fishermen, and environmental groups.
It’s easier to store the gas if you pressurize it (you can squeeze more into the same-volume container), but because hydrogen molecules are so small, when they’re under pressure, they can actually migrate through metals. It’s as if your gas tank slowly leaked gas as you filled up.
Not because it’s the longest floating bridge in the world, but because it’s a bridge that floats. How can this massive structure made with tons of asphalt, concrete, and steel, and with hundreds of cars sitting on it, float on top of a lake? Why the hell doesn’t it sink?
There’s copious data to back up this claim—we’ll be producing 50 percent more steel by mid-century than we do today,
To make steel, you need pure iron and carbon; on its own, iron isn’t very strong, but add just the right amount of carbon—less than 1 percent, depending on the kind of steel you want—and the carbon atoms nestle themselves in between the iron atoms, giving the resulting steel its most important properties.
To make steel, you need to separate the oxygen from the iron and add a tiny bit of carbon. You can accomplish both at the same time by melting iron ore at very high temperatures (1,700 degrees Celsius or over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit), in the presence of oxygen and a type of coal called coke. At those temperatures, the iron ore releases its oxygen, and the coke releases its carbon. A bit of the carbon bonds with the iron, forming the steel we want, and the rest of the carbon grabs onto the oxygen, forming a by-product we don’t want: carbon dioxide. Quite a bit of carbon dioxide, in fact. Making 1 ton of steel produces about 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide.
Several other countries now produce more raw steel than the United States does—China, India, and Japan among them—and by 2050 the world will be producing roughly 2.8 billion tons every year.
That adds up to 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide released every year by mid-century, just from making steel, unless we find a new, climate-friendly way to do it.
To make cement, you need calcium. To get calcium, you start with limestone—which contains calcium plus carbon and oxygen—and burn it in a furnace along with some other materials.
in the marginCaCO3
Nobody knows of a way to make cement without going through this process. It’s a chemical reaction—limestone plus heat equals calcium oxide plus carbon dioxide—and there’s no way around it. It’s a one-to-one relationship. Make a ton of cement, and you’ll get a ton of carbon dioxide.
you need to understand where emissions come from when we make things. I think of it in three stages: We emit greenhouse gases (1) when we use fossil fuels to generate the electricity that factories need to run their operations; (2) when we use them to generate heat needed for different manufacturing processes, like melting iron ore to make steel; and (3) when we actually make these materials, like the way cement manufacturing inevitably creates carbon dioxide.
Clean electricity would help us solve another problem too: making plastics. If enough pieces come together, plastics could one day become a carbon sink—a way to remove carbon rather than emit it.
With agriculture, the main culprit isn’t carbon dioxide but methane—which causes 28 times more warming per molecule than carbon dioxide over the course of a century—and nitrous oxide, which causes 265 times more warming.
As people get richer, they eat more calories, and in particular they eat more meat and dairy. And producing meat and dairy will require us to grow even more food. A chicken, for example, has to eat two calories’ worth of grain to give us one calorie of poultry—that is, you have to feed a chicken twice as many calories as you’ll get from the chicken when you eat it. A pig eats three times as many calories as we get when we eat it. For cows, the ratio is highest of all: six calories of feed for every calorie of beef. In other words, the more calories we get from these meat sources, the more plants we need to grow for the meat.
gas emissions that’s common to every animal: poop.
About half of poop-related emissions come from pig manure, and the rest from cow manure.
There’s so much animal poop that it’s actually the second-biggest cause of emissions in agriculture, behind enteric fermentation.
efforts have mostly been unsuccessful, though one promising exception is a compound called 3-nitrooxypropanol, which reduces methane emissions by 30 percent. But right now you have to give it to the cattle at least once a day, so it’s not yet feasible for most grazing operations.
depends a lot on where the cow lives; for example, cattle in South America emit up to five times more greenhouse gases than ones in North America do,
If we can spread the improved breeds and best practices more broadly—especially crossbreeding African cows to be more productive and making higher-quality feed available and affordable—it’ll reduce emissions and help poor farmers earn more money.
Another has developed a “smart bin” that uses image recognition to track how much food is wasted in a house or business. It gives you a report on how much you threw away, along with its cost and its carbon footprint. The system may sound invasive, but giving people more information can help them make better choices.
synthetic fertilizer was a key factor in the agricultural revolution that changed the world in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s been estimated that if we couldn’t make synthetic fertilizer, the world’s population would be 40 to 50 percent smaller than it is.
That’s because in poor countries most farmers don’t have good enough credit to buy fertilizer, and it’s more expensive than in rich countries because it has to be shipped into rural areas over poorly built roads.
In the same way that Norman Borlaug is one of the great unsung heroes of history, Haber-Bosch might be the most important invention that most people have never heard of.*
being able to meet people from other countries helps us understand our common goals.
Although many of the Bullitt Center’s technologies are currently too expensive for widespread use (which is why it remains one of the world’s greenest buildings seven years after it opened), we can still make homes and offices more efficient at a low cost.
The Bullitt Center in Seattle is one of the greenest commercial buildings in the world.
As sea levels and floodplains change, we’ll need to rethink where we put homes and businesses. We’ll need to shore up power grids, seaports, and bridges. We’ll need to plant more mangrove forests (stay tuned if you don’t know what a mangrove is) and improve our early-warning systems for storms.
CGIAR is the world’s largest agricultural research group: In short, it helps create better plants and better animal genetics. It was at a CGIAR lab in Mexico that Norman Borlaug—you may remember him from chapter 6—did his groundbreaking work on wheat, sparking the Green Revolution.
In fact, doubling CGIAR’s funding so it can reach more farmers is one of the main recommendations by the Global Commission on Adaptation, which I lead along with the former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon and the former World Bank CEO Kristalina Georgieva.*2
Governments (as well as big companies) can help energy start-ups make it out of the valley alive because they’re massive consumers. If they prioritize buying green, they’ll help bring more products to market by creating certainty and reducing costs.