People don’t want coal, oil or gas. Rather they want the products and services that the energy provides — home heating, public transport or sheets of steel. The distinction is important as we move away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy, because it will mean the world could be consuming less energy in total without losing out the benefits it currently enjoys.
We waste about a third of the total energy produced on mining, refining and transporting fossil fuels. Crude oil on its own isn’t much use until it is converted to gasoline, jet fuel and fuel oil. But creating those products requires huge refineries consuming vast amounts of energy. Crucially, all that dirty energy has a huge planet-warming impact. Producing solar panels and wind turbines has a much smaller carbon footprint.
Moving to clean energy could also bring savings of up to $4.6 trillion each year, according to new research from Colorado-based think tank RMI.
Another third of the world’s total energy is wasted in burning fossil fuels in highly inefficient machines. For example, a fossil fuel-powered car converts only a quarter of the energy in gasoline into motion. An electric car converts more than three-quarters of the energy in the battery to moving. Similarly, while burning one unit of natural gas in a boiler generates one unit of heat, an electric heat pump uses one unit of electricity to provide three units of heat.
Experts refer to the sum total of energy content found in nature, such as blocks of coal, as primary energy. After accounting for losses from production and transportation, what remains is final energy.
Over the past few decades, the energy intensity of the economy — or energy efficiency — has been increasing at between 1% and 2% each year, while global economic growth hovers at 3%. That means, even as the global economy is becoming more energy efficient, it’s not enough to reduce the total amount of energy the world uses. Doubling of energy efficiency up to 4% annually could help the world use less energy, even while keeping economic growth at the same levels.
When discussing global warming, “us” means all humans. And based on recent actions (a decade or two), it isn’t quite true that “most of us” agree. China and India, a HUGE part of “us”, would rather grow their economy more rapidly than to slow it while using cleaner forms of energy. As such, they are still increasing their use of coal, and will use substantial quantities of other fossil fuels for quite a while. They are also using cleaner forms of energy, but due to their growth, both forms are growing in use. And then, of course, there are many other countries that will use whichever form of energy is expedient at the time, regardless of clean or not clean.
