Solutions to the Climate Crisis — 2

Electrify Everything

Wind and solar (with storage), photos by the author

Our climate crisis may be discouraging, but I’m not a “doomer.” My focus is on climate solutions and strategies that can work now, not a return to subsistence living.

An example of the latter is in Bright Green Lies, chapter 14, “Real Solutions” (p.433), where one finds, “Stop industrial civilization. … The Tolowa lived just fine in Northern California, just south of the Oregon border, … and they did it without destroying the place.” But Wikipedia estimates the Indigenous fisher-hunter-gatherer population of California before Europeans arrived at 300,000, less than 1% of the current population of 40 million. Not. A. Solution.

So what climate solutions can work? To answer, here are three authors citing “electrify everything.”

The key to tackling climate change: electrify everything

First, David Roberts wrote succinctly about “electrify everything” in Vox.com (links 2017, above, and 2020, below, about Saul Griffith of Rewiring America), and followed up about potential current federal actions (2021, below, at his new volts.wtf).

How to drive fossil fuels out of the US economy, quickly

On climate policy, there's one main thing and then there's everything else

The Short List Of Climate Actions That Will Work

Second, Medium’s Michael Barnard posted a similar list of consensus climate actions (2019, link above).

POLbook

Third, Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson literally wrote a college textbook (© 2021) on how to do it, fast and at scale. I strongly recommend buying the book, to understand the technologies and Jacobson’s response to common concerns raised. But as a free introduction, his website (linked above) has notated PowerPoint presentations of the book’s chapters.

Here are Jacobson’s five areas of policy options (pp. 384–5):

1. Energy Efficiency and Building Energy Measures — efficiency standards, heat pumps for HVAC & water heating;
2. Energy Supply Measures — renewable portfolio standards & tax credits;
3. Utility Planning and Incentive Structures — storage & demand response;
4. Transportation Measures — electric vehicles & charging, transit, biking & walking infrastructure, electrification of rail & shift freight to rail;
5. Industrial-Sector Measures — electricity for high-temperature & manufacturing processes, demand response.

Here is a results chart from these aggressive actions, followed by his notes (emphasis added). Fossil fuel use (black in the center) dwindles rapidly due to energy savings (upper layers) and substitution of clean electricity sources (lower layers):

Jacobson, chapter 9, slide 21

Figure 9.5. Timeline for 143 countries, representing 99.7 percent of world emissions, to transition from conventional fuels (BAU) to 100 percent wind-water-solar (WWS) in all energy sectors. Also shown are the annually averaged end-use power demand reductions that occur along the way. The energy sectors transitioned include the electricity, transportation, building heating/cooling, industrial, agriculture/forestry/fishing, and military sectors. The percentages next to each WWS energy source are the 2050 estimated percent supply of end-use power by the source. The 100 percent demarcation in 2050 indicates that 100 percent of end-use power in the annual average will be provided by WWS among all energy sectors by no later than 2050, but ideally sooner. An 80 percent transition is proposed to occur by no later than 2030.

End-use power demand reductions occur for five reasons: (1) the efficiency of moving low-temperature building heat with heat pumps instead of creating heat with combustion; (2) the efficiency of electricity over combustion for high-temperature industrial heat; (3) the efficiency of electricity in battery-electric (BE) vehicles and in electrolytic hydrogen fuel cell (HFC) vehicles over combustion vehicles for transportation; (4) eliminating the energy to mine, transport, and process fossil fuels, biofuels, bioenergy, and uranium; and (5) improving end-use energy efficiency and reducing energy use beyond in the BAU case. The total demand reduction due to these factors is 57.1 percent (Table 7.1). From Jacobson et al. (2019).

So this is what we should want when we call for “action.” Federal support for these may be difficult in our political environment, but the good news is that clean energy technologies are already cheaper than dirty ones, and a number of states are already driving this market.

My next post will dive into Transportation. Here is the series of four:

Solutions to the Climate Crisis

Solutions to the Climate Crisis — 3

Solutions to the Climate Crisis — 4