This installment was originally posted on July 25, 2021.
I’ve been omitting the historical quotes I used in early installments, but this one is apt:
Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. … It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent, but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
Aldous Huxley (author of Brave New World), from Amor Fati (“Love of Fate”) in Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 278.
“Decarbonization” refers to “the process of reducing ‘carbon intensity’, lowering the amount of greenhouse gas emissions produced by the burning of [geologic carbon].1” So the question is, “Are we intelligent enough yet to rely on decarbonization as a solution to climate change? Or is it a modern rain dance intended to ward off droughts or evil spirits?” In other words, are we behaving as a group of lunatics based on theory?
The answer: We’re not yet intelligent enough, and because scale tends to be an afterthought, it’s more like a rain dance than a strategy. And it’s pretty easy to see why outsiders might think we’ve lost our collective mind.
What I learned: Nostalgic environmentalism wishes us to return to a past state when per capita carbon intensity was much lower. This intrinsically discounts the scale that follows the population. Earth could not sustain its human population if it weren’t for geologic carbon.
I’d appreciate your help getting the message out, and if I can attract enough new paid subscribers, I’ll distribute some collectible swag accordingly. Yes, Substack tracks that sort of thing. Here’s a link to make it easy:
Let’s reiterate what the problem is. Stated concisely:
The increase in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, attributable to human extraction and combustion of geologic carbon over 350 years of industrialization, threatens to destabilize Earth’s climates.
To solve this problem, we must control the Earth’s atmosphere. Specifically, we need to adjust the amount of carbon dioxide it contains if we expect to control the planet’s temperature. Regardless of how you slice it, adjusting Earth’s “thermostat” will require “geoengineering”, in other words, an intentional process of applying human ingenuity (backed by Science).
Today’s question is:
Will decarbonization avoid climate change?
For illustrative purposes, I like to consider simple edge cases rather than complicated directional metrics like “reducing ‘carbon intensity’” that require a lot of analytical skill. Instead, let’s ask what would happen if the world went cold turkey and eliminated geologic carbon entirely. We already know that we’re making no measurable progress2 toward this goal. Our efforts, however well-intentioned, are as effective as a rain dance! But, for the sake of argument, let’s see what “models” say would happen to Earth after quitting geologic carbon cold turkey:
I chose the axes to represent recovery from today’s carbon dioxide levels to those present before industrialization and began the timeline, for illustration, to be the year 2000. This simple, open-source model incorporates the conventional “carbon cycle” components and predicts the time course of long-term sequestration of carbon dioxide into land and ocean. Even if it’s only qualitative, it describes the mess we find ourselves in: In this impractical, ridiculous scenario, even at the turn of the next millennium in the year 3000, a significant amount of the carbon we’ve already emitted will still be in the air! If our goal is to revert to pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (where our climates were stable for 10,000 or so years), then choosing decarbonization as our sole course of action is destined for failure. Even if we stopped geologic carbon extraction completely (in other words, no more using oil, natural gas, and coal for energy), we would still need to wait for thousands of years for the Earth to recover! If we don’t stop completely, then the top edge of this chart will continue to rise, and the recovery time will continue to expand. I’m pretty sure that once we reach a tipping point for climate change (at whatever point that is), this model will likely fail, but it won’t matter by then—we’re already screwed.
This edge scenario would also require some pretty massive sociopolitical changes. But, given the severity of the problem, are the changes needed worth it? After all, we’re saving the world! So what would need to change, and what could stay the same?
Well, just like our climate models, we can “hindcast” (at least qualitatively) to get a picture of what life for humans might be like. A lot has changed since 1750, when Earth last supported a fully sustainable, carbon-neutral population.3
This is a lot of data to digest. Still, to a first approximation, to decarbonize completely, the maximum human population that the Earth’s ecosystems could reasonably support would probably be smaller. Moreover, without the energy content of geologic carbon, we’d be hard-pressed to meet our expectations of quality of life. For example, traveling between North America and Europe, a crossing that now takes under 8 hours by air, took two months by sail in 1750. So any “quality of life” that includes international travel would certainly be hard to support!
As always, I welcome other interpretations.
To support their prescriptions, respected academicians, too numerous to cite, have done complicated calculations in a piecemeal approach. These calculations, as a rule, show that building from a base of understanding about our current energy use, humanity can theoretically satisfy all of its needs without resorting to geologic carbon. I respectfully disagree with this conclusion. The historical record (which I covered in the last issue) shows that none of these “wedges” have been implemented to the point that they’re addressing the problem we need to solve. And this record also shows that it is sociologically impractical to return to a time of carbon neutrality. In other words, “net zero” has to become “gross zero” worldwide, or we’re never going to get there with decarbonization alone. More needs to be done.
There is a fundamental truth that underlies this dilemma. In today’s world, carbon is energy. Therefore, by extension, decarbonization is de-energization, consciously (if superstitiously) avoiding certain energy sources with the expectation of averting climate change.
From the Weldon Institute, https://www.twi-global.com/technical-knowledge/faqs/what-is-decarbonisation
Land use is derived from Goldewijk et al., Global Ecol. Biogeogr. 20 (2011) 73–86, and the 2020 value is estimated from data in this paper. Current extraction of geologic carbon is quoted in terms of elemental carbon, not CO2 (which weighs 3.7 x as much). Global Energy Statistical Yearbook 2019, Enerdata. Oil and gas were converted using the calculator found at https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/ Tonne_of_oil_equivalent. Energy use per capita in 1750 is sourced as the average energy use for humans, animals, wood, wind, and water from 1561-1859, in England & Wales, from Wrigley E. A. (2013) “Energy and the English Industrial Revolution”, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A. 371, 20110568. Even though coal was in limited use in Britain even as early as 1561, for modeling, I assume that before 1750, the population as a whole was supported solely by renewables, so I have consequently discounted any energy from coal. Per capita energy use in 2020 comes from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which calculates 77 MMBTU of energy consumption per capita worldwide. Accessed at https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/other-statistics/energy-intensity-by-gdp-and-population