Ditch fossil fuels

2013-09-28 00:00:00

Climate scientists assume that those who understand the science of climate change will take actions to drastically reduce carbon emissions. That is, if a person understands that adding carbon to the atmosphere makes the planet get hotter, and that a hotter Earth will negatively affect natural ecosystems, agriculture, water supply, sea level and extreme weather, then that person will have no choice but to buy a Chevy Volt, swear off meat, join the Sierra Club, or – at least – support a transition to energy sources that don't use the sky as a waste dump.

But that's wrong. The reason gasoline cars are still popular and Congress hasn't passed legislation restricting carbon emissions has little to do with misunderstanding climate science. And it has even less to do with the persuasiveness of climate science deniers. The real reason is simple: options for stopping fossil carbon emissions just aren't all that attractive. When carbon-free energy becomes more attractive than fossil fuels, emissions will decline. And at that point, understanding greenhouse physics won't even be necessary.

The current energy system is formidable. Nearly 90 percent of the energy humans use comes from fossil fuels, and the existing global network of fossil-fuel infrastructure has taken tens of trillions of dollars and more than a century to build. The inertia of thousands of power plants and millions of cars means that even if we stopped building these things today, emissions would continue for decades. Transforming this vast system into one that provides the same quantities of carbon-free energy won't be quick or easy.

What about energy efficiency and natural gas? Aren't they attractive options? Yes, and they have contributed to the recent decreases in U.S. emissions. But stopping the planet from getting hotter ultimately means stopping emissions altogether, and no combination of efficiency and gas can achieve that goal.

We should strive to do more with less energy, but economies will always require lots of energy. No matter how efficient American cars and buildings get, global energy demand will grow for many years before it declines.

Burning natural gas for energy produces about half as much carbon dioxide as burning coal, but half isn't none. So every new gas-burning power plant commits us to 40 years of emissions. That's 40 years of not burning coal, but it's also 40 years of not using or needing a carbon-free option like solar power. If rising global demand for energy is met with gas, total emissions will go up, not down. We must do better than gas.

So what about the options for producing energy without fossil fuels? The technologies we have now aren't yet competitive with fossil fuels at large scales.

In certain places, wind and solar technologies can produce power as cheaply as burning fossil fuels. But to generate reliable, on-demand power at the levels now supplied worldwide by fossil fuels, these technologies run into big problems: where to put all the wind turbines; how to store large amounts of energy for when the wind stops blowing or the sun sets; and how to transmit power from far-flung turbines and solar farms to where we need it. Nuclear power has problems of public acceptance, storage of waste, risk of weapons proliferation and finding long-term sources of uranium. None of these problems are insurmountable, but they make it very expensive to generate enough carbon-free energy to power the planet.

Fossil fuels also have unfair advantages. Fossil energy continues to receive direct subsidies on the order of a $500 billion a year, roughly 100 times as much as we spend on clean energy research each year. What's more, few of the environmental costs of burning fossil fuels are included in the price we pay for gasoline or fossil electricity.

We will make energy efficiency and carbon-free energy sources more attractive than fossil fuels in two ways: By removing subsidies to fossil fuels and putting an escalating price on carbon emissions. We can also drive down the cost of carbon-free technologies with large, sustained public investments in research, development and deployment.

Carbon emissions will decrease when the benefits of avoiding climate change clearly outweigh the costs. Scientists have focused on assessing the benefits. It's time to reduce the costs. When carbon-free energy becomes an affordable alternative to fossil fuels at large scales, a gradual energy transition away from fossil fuels will be inevitable.

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