How to avoid a climate disaster?
Everyone in my household has come down with the flu in the past few days. If you’re wondering how we did, it was terrible and thanks for your concern, but it allowed me to step away from day-to-day life and pick up one of the books I wanted to read for a while the book Bill Gates “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster” published by Penguin in 2022.
Let me admit that I’m not a fan of a billionaire coming and telling the world how you need to leave your life. But I had become convinced that Bill G was different from a typical billionaire. He could have invested his money to buy Twitter 😉 Or joined some muscle power show, such as the space race. Instead, Melania and Bill spent/collected more than 50 billion dollars since 2000 in charity work. They have established a foundation called Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, helping children and less privileged citizens worldwide by fighting against diseases such as diarrhoea and pneumonia. I value and respect the gesture.
I wrote this book because I don't just see the problem of climate change; I also see an opportunity to solve it.
30 million elephants per day!
Now the book (How to Avoid a Climate Disaster) is very well written and, right off the bat, gives you some facts and figures as food for thought. The central figure is 52 billion tons. Suppose you recently followed some of the discussions around Climate Change, such as the Sharm el-Sheikh Climate Change Conference (COP27). In that case, you already know that we add around 52 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases (GHG) to the atmosphere yearly. This is about 30 million elephants every single DAY!
This is where we are today. Just think about it for a moment …
Now, how could we get this number to ZERO? This second number (i.e., zero) is our aim to stop the warming and avoid the worst effects of climate change. If getting down from 30 million elephants of GHG every day to Zero sounds difficult because it is. If you’re one of the few climate change deniers or hesitant, I’ll be happy to dedicate a post about that; please let me know in the comment section.
On the path to get humanity out of the hole and avoid a catastrophic disaster, we dug for ourselves; three things are clear:
- The fact is that we have to get to Zero or even negative (I'll talk about it further down)
- The less complicated part is that we need to change our consumption habits and also expand the renewable energy and other relevant technologies we already have but faster and wiser,
- But the hardest is that we must create and deploy breakthrough technologies that can take the CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Now, why do we need the number three? Because more than changing our behaviour toward fossil fuel consumption, expanding the renewable energy network will be necessary. These days I have to watch a bit of German news every day to improve my German listening skills. If you just woke up from a year-long sleep, you need to know that the main topics these days are the energy crisis in Europe and the war. Before that, for two years, the headline was COVID. I’m not an economist, but it’s not rocket science to predict that for the next few years, it will be inflation and economic recovery after all these disasters. Climate change is not the general public’s primary concern, and people have come to some climate change fatigue if you will. Bad-engineered climate change campaigns, climate deniers’ propaganda and mixed messaging, in addition to all these disasters, brought us to the point we are standing right now.
On the other hand, I believe the cost of extending the current renewable energy technology to the middle east and Africa has little business viability. Just look at this table as an example:
Germany vs. Iran
|
|
Germany
|
Iran
|
|---|---|---|
|
Population
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84 million
|
86 million
|
|
Annual budget
|
$930 billion
|
$30 billion
|
|
Energy consumption (toe: ton of oil equivalent)
|
3.4 toe/capita
|
3.2 toe/capita
|
|
CO2 Emissions
|
7.8 tCO2/capita
|
7.3 tCO2/capita
|
|
Share of renewable energy in total energy
|
19.7%
|
less than 0.1
|
This table compares a couple of numbers between Germany as an example of a well-developed country compared to Iran, a developing country in the middle east with roughly the same population and energy consumption. For simplicity, I’ve rounded some of the numbers here. While the energy consumption and the headcounts are the same, Iran’s budget is approximately 30 times less. You might argue that sanctioned Iran is not a good example, but the truth is most countries in the middle east and Africa, one way or another, have some economic difficulties.
Spent on renewable energy projects from 2013 to 2020 in Germany
bilion dollars
Renewable energies have undergone rapid growth in Germany. Their gross final energy consumption share reached 19.7% in 2021 (calculated per EU directive (2009/28/EG)). The electricity sector is the main driver behind this development, with renewables already providing 41.1% of electricity consumption (2021). The energy transition costs (i.e., the cost of transitioning from fossil fuel to renewable) have been a political hot potato since the early days of the so-called “Energiewende” in Germany. But the debate has shifted considerably in the last decade or so. While some early critics called the entire enterprise into question for economic reasons, Germany’s national climate targets and the Paris Climate Agreement firmly established that doing nothing to counter climate change is no longer an option. The Energiewende gained legislative support in 2010, and Germany spent nearly 202 billion euros on renewable energy projects from 2013 to 2020. Since 2010, the share of German electricity generation that has come from solar and wind power has risen from 8% to 31% by 2020, no small feat. To make a long story short, to cut the total fossil fuel consumption by roughly 10%, Germany invested around 200 billion dollars, which is approximately seven times Iran’s annual budget. No doubt that Iran could perhaps use more than half of its uninhabited land to generate enormous amounts of solar energy, but that much investment for transitioning about 10% of the energy consumption, at least now, is not feasible.
Now back to 1.5 degrees C
So as much as we need a more significant share of renewable energy (more cost beneficial and accessible for developing and underdeveloped countries), it might not be enough to hit the net-zero or near-net-zero targets. Or, as Bill G. puts it, making electricity accounts for only 26% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Even if we had a huge breakthrough in batteries and other relevant technologies, we would still need to eliminate the additional 74%.
We must explore ways to create and deploy new technologies to actively reclaim greenhouse gases from the atmosphere to take us the rest of the way. The fact is we have already generated too much CO2. This much GHG puts us on the path where we could see the planet Earth’s average temperature increase by more than 2 degrees in 80 years or so. Unfortunately, only some clearly understand what 2 degrees increase means or how a more significant problem we are at.
I already knew this fact, yet this passage from Gates’s book helps me appreciate the magnitude of the sh** and the risk we face as a human race. Bill writes that 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, crocodiles lived above the Arctic Circle. I’m not sure about you, but I’m going to print this and hang it in my living room 🙂
But just let it sink for a moment, and you will appreciate what all this fuss is about. Also, for the sake of our children and grandchildren, we must do what we can to control our mess. The ultimate goal is net-negative emissions. This means we eventually get to the point where we take more GHG from the atmosphere than we put in. Nonetheless, we are far from that goal, but Gates has a very optimistic approach in his book and believes it will be difficult but doable!
I still need to finish the book, but it has given me enough incentive to write a post about it. By the end, I’m aiming to summarise the book and make another post. But anyway, congratulations and many thanks if you have made it thus far. I hope it was worth your time!!