I find this pervasive belief that we need some great technological breakthrough in order to combat the worst of climate change to be both wrong and counter-productive. We have the tools at our disposal both to massively curb emissions as well as to (start) sequestering carbon. Will it’s implementation be incredibly expensive, complicated to implement and disruptive? Absolutely - but business as usual will be even worse
But this “great technological breakthrough” hope encourages inaction and ultimately more damage. Rather than use the already effective tools in our arsenal (combined with ones that are close to being scale-ready) it becomes an excuse to do nothing in the hope that something better will be invented that will be lower cost and more effective.
Energy storage technologies are the most important developing field for a truly clean grid and are not yet available on the required scale. Once energy storage becomes more efficient and economically viable then we will be able to harness zero emission energy sources in a more usable manner.
You seem to think we have done nothing despite multiple posts above demonstrating the progress of the past 15 years implementing renewable energy sources. Renewables are being implemented, breakthroughs in energy storage are going to make a massive difference.
Agree that continued expansion of those sources of energy is important. Im also pro-nuclear; zero carbon energy source which can function with the reliability required for the base of the power grid.
Continued development of greener technology is incredibly important, I have no arguments there. What I am saying though is that ‘emerging/future tech’ is often used as an excuse not to move forward in a very big way right now on multiple fronts, often in the hopes that something cheaper and better will come along and the magic of technology will save us from having to make these large investments and very tough choices.
We don’t need any further technological leaps to:
Build net-zero energy homes and buildings
Retrofit/replace existing inefficient buildings
Massively expand charging infrastructure
Raise the gas tax (repeatedly)
Set up a carbon market
Remove cars from urban centers
Incentivize the heck out of carpooling, telecommuting etc.
Re-think minimum lot size and square footage regulations
Accelerate construction of renewable energy sources
Shut-down the highest emitting power sources
Improve broadband
Raise fuel standards (including on light trucks)
Support/fund education, health care and anti-poverty measures in developing nations
..and that’s just some of the most obvious, low-hanging fruit for scaling back our footprint. We need to do those now, en masse, and before we worry about higher-density large-scale energy storage or carbon capture and sequestration technologies that are still bench-scale. We need those too, but to paraphrase another poster, we haven’t even shut the water off, and that’s the most straightforward problem to solve.
There's a big difference between available and feasible. Even if we had political will, each of those actions entails its own costs and unanticipated consequences.
- My city could ban cars downtown tomorrow. And the result would be everything would shut down, because the city does not have the mass transit capability right now to meet those needs. Where is it going to get the money to buy all those extra buses? We've been futzing with a subway for decades, and we can't even afford one additional line -- and now we have even less money available because tax receipts are down (hello pandemic) and expenses are up (again: pandemic). It would take literally billions of dollars of investment that we don't have to create the infrastruction required to support a functioning city and keep downtown in business.
- Retrofit or tear down inefficient buildings? That's almost every building where I live. Easily trillions of dollars. Who pays?
- Shut down power sources? In my area, we get rolling brownouts in the summer already. If you decrease supply, you increase the risk of taking the whole grid down. At a minimum, you raise rates significantly -- which is good, as it will provide a natural incentive to reduce demand. But that incentive hurts poor people the most. We already have older people who die every summer and winter because they can't afford to keep the power on and freeze or overheat. So you'd need to combine that with a very serious subsidy program for the poor -- so, again, more money. Oh: and what happens to that coal when you shut down the US-based coal-fired power plants? It goes to China and other developing countries, where it is burned in much less sophisticated power plants and emits even more pollution. If we're going to address a global problem, sending the bad stuff to somewhere where it will be even worse doesn't help. It just makes us feel better because we don't have to look at it any more.
- Reduce lot sizes? I would love that. But that is a local issue: every single county has independent authority to make its own rules. And the rich counties where that would do the most good are the ones where every single resident will vote out anyone who advocates that kind of change, because "property values."
- Net-zero building codes? I would love this too -- it always works better when you can design something properly from the beginning. But that's going to dramatically increase housing costs. Now, that may well be a feature instead of a bug, because it will require smaller builds and keep people in smaller rentals for longer. But that's also why it won't happen as long as people have the authority to vote out the local politicians who would push for that solution.
All of this underscores why individual decisions matter so much. It's not about whether one person deciding not to use straws will fix climate change. It's more about whether that same person will vote for politicians who will push for those kinds of programs, instead of punishing them for doing so.
You're not a fan of the technological "magic bullet" -- nor am I. But I am also not a fan of "we just need to do XYZ" arguments, when our entire political and economic system means that those actions are largely non-starters. All that does is shift responsibility to those unnamed Others who refuse to make such obvious changes, which again makes us feel better about ourselves without actually accomplishing anything.
