I’m not as gloomy as he is (reasons below) but one of his his points is that there is a floor as to how much carbon-free energy costs can come down. For example, for a very long number of years, the cost of steel production dropped steadily. Ovens got bigger, fuel switched from wood to coal to coke, etc. and steel kept getting cheaper and better. But now we’ve reached a floor where there are no longer any big improvements to be had and the price of steel is at a floor. Same thing is going to happen with wind, solar, and batteries.
My rough guess is we are about ten years behind where we need to be in order to get to net zero by 2050. Even then, getting there will require two things 1) policy and 2) innovation. Policy is a crapshoot. Bad policy notably the early mistake of the US rejecting the Kyoto Protocol was a big set back and short periods of good policy haven’t been able to make up for it.
Innovation of course means relying on things that haven’t been invented yet, which is typically not a good plan. But there are reasons for optimism. We’re right on the door of zero carbon steel making.a 600 mile car battery, and so on. Renewables are already the low cost solution for new electricity generation in many areas. This is all great news. It would have been better news five or ten years ago, but we’ll have to take what we can get.
So I don’t think we’ll get there, but there are reasons to believe I’m wrong. We’ll see.
Well you are both wrong about steel. It can be done with electric only, and wind or solar.
Can steel be made with electricity?
About one-quarter of the world’s steel is produced by the electric-arc method, which uses high-current electric arcs to melt steel scrap and convert it into liquid steel of a specified chemical composition and temperature.
Thank Donald Sadoway MIT material sciences. No coal is used in the production of the steel.
Yes, I gave a link to an example non-carbon steel production in my post. However, the point is any incremental improvements in steel production will be tiny.
People who want the changes are taking the other side of the bet. Running scared that if they say there is progress idiots will say lets be fair and save some money. We do not need more progress.
So act as if it is a crisis that is impossible to fix. We are the underdogs. Cheer us on.
I agree with zero emissions. I get tired in all of politics with the lying.
Nothing gets done by human beings without a lie. People have a need to be lied to.
The truth seems forced upon us.
The exact truth I do not know but solar and wind are profitable. Steel is already one quarter made with electricity. Hydrogen is going to rush into place.
All is not lost. The big bad meanies of fossil fuel make us look sad. Help is on the way.
Life as a spectator is a cynical game played by people with false advertising.
Melting down existing scrap steel is not the same as making new steel from iron ore. There are some ways of making new steel without coke, but I don’t think those methods are in wide use.
It would take regulation possibly. It is more expensive than the older methods with coke. Utility companies are regulated to use renewables. At least in CT, they are regulated.
I am not sure the price will drop. Depends possibly on the cost of electricity.
With a deflationary energy policy in renewables, it is more doable eventually.
Looking at the US, last summer the EIA published a report on federal energy subsidies. Here are the 2022 numbers by energy type (subsidies and total energy produced).
This is like debating the invention of the transistor. If we did not have a space race we would not have the transistor. The cost of the moon shots were through the roof. In real terms today astronomical costs. Pun intended.
Do you say no computer chips to save government money? Look at how profitable the tech industry is.
Do you say not interstate highways to save the government money? Look at the auto industry, shipping industry, and transport of gasoline.
Well, subsidies distort the information one would otherwise get from the marketplace, so that is a permanent negative. Otherwise, whether they make sense depends upon the goal(s). For example, most of the global oil subsidies mentioned in an earlier post are from developing countries that are subsidizing the transition to their growing middle classes. Even here in the US there are petroleum subsidies for lower income households. One could also argue that China subsidies it coal power plants to encourage diversity and security of energy supply. All of these goals have both positives and negatives.
That’s in the US. If we focus on the US rather than globally, you make my point. As a result of higher subsidies, the use of renewables is rising rapidly relative to fossil fuels in the US. That is also according to the EIA.
Maybe you are thinking of the “integrated circuit” (i.e. computer chips) that were co-invented (made practical and given Nobel prizes years later) around 1957 by Kilby (TI) and Noyce (Fairchild then Intel) and made commercial a couple of years later.
See here:
Snip from above;
In October 1961, Texas Instruments built for the Air Force a demonstration “molecular computer” with a 300-bit memory. Kilby’s colleague Harvey Cragon packed this computer into a volume of a little over 100 cm3, using 587 ICs to replace around 8,500 transistors and other components that would be needed to perform the equivalent function. In December 1961, the Air Force accepted the first analog device created within the molecular electronics program – a radio receiver. It uses costly ICs, which had less than 10–12 components and a high percentage of failed devices. This generated an opinion that ICs can only justify themselves for aerospace applications. However, the aerospace industry rejected those ICs for the low radiation hardness of their mesa transistors.
Next, the space race helped by funding advances and improving those fragil chips after they were invented. The Apollo program created a market for more and more chips during the 60s and 70s.
Upthread we saw how subsidies for solar are much higher per unit of energy produced. Solar subsidies make even less sense in the northern parts of the country such as New England and the upper Midwest.
For example, the Executive Office of the State of New Hampshire received more than $43.5 million, while the Vermont Department of Public Service is being awarded nearly $62.5 million and the Maine Governor’s Energy Office is taking home $62.1 million from the EPA…
The EPA also awarded slightly more than $156.1 million to Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy… Elsewhere in the Great Lakes region, the EPA opted to give nearly $62.5 million to both the Minnesota Department of Commerce and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation.
Investing $0.5 trillion per year is not enough. Global GDP is now about 100 trillion U.S. dollars.
New study calculates climate change’s economic bite will hit about $38 trillion a year by 2049
The economic commitment of climate change
“Global projections of macroeconomic climate-change damages typically consider impacts from average annual and national temperatures over long time horizons1,2,3,4,5,6. Here we use recent empirical findings from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years to project sub-national damages from temperature and precipitation, including daily variability and extremes7,8. Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07219-0
