Climate Incoherence: In the Style of Big Oil
News from the climate front has become incoherent. One day a report comes out noting how fast solar and electric vehicles (EVs) are transforming power generation and transportation, and how the world can still limit climate warming to 1.5℃. A few days later, new reports, including one from the UN, conclude the world is lagging “massively” in efforts to keep climate change within those same 1.5℃ bounds.
Meanwhile, temperatures and ocean levels keep on rising at rates that exceed expectations, suggesting we may be relying on unrealistic assumptions about the impacts of greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution.
Some of the incoherence is inevitable in an unprecedented, fast-moving, and frightening situation. But some of it is created on purpose. It’s Big Everything throwing up a smoke screen, putting out misleading information designed to improve the chances of its own survival. Big Everything includes but is not limited to Big Oil. It also encompasses Big Finance, Big Tech, Big Manufacturing, and a bunch of billionaires.
Organizing Principles
One helpful approach is to organize the reems of incoherent incoming information into two streams, based on the often-conflicting goals and principles of their originators.
One stream has its headwaters in the climate-activist and other environmental communities whose overriding priority is to save the Earth’s inhabitants from the worst of climate change and from human- and other species-endangering pollution of various sorts. For them, climate solutions are obvious and simple in conception: use less energy and generate the energy we do use with solar and wind, battery, and hydro backup. That clean power will be used partly to replace oil in electric vehicles (EV), large and small. Partly to heat and cool buildings. And partly to make (a hopefully limited amount of) stuff.
These solutions are becoming progressively cheaper and more distributed — and finally spreading fairly quickly. Not quickly enough to check the momentum of climate change, much of which is already baked in. But hopefully fast enough to keep much of the world habitable by humanity and many other species.
Some more than others in this group see economic growth as incompatible with their goals and opt for degrowth and a fundamental restructuring of human society along less consumptive, less centralized lines.
The other information stream is fed by Big Everything. It (mostly) accepts that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions must fall, but its top priority is to preserve the economic and social system powered by — and structured to suit — fossil fuels. Not surprisingly, Big Everything’s schemes for replacing “unabated” fossil fuels are big, complex, and costly in terms of both money and resources. So their buildout is beset by delays and uncertainty.
Incorporating such fixes into forecasts for the transition incorporates their delays and uncertainty. Prospects for limiting climate change look terrible if success is contingent on gigantic offshore windmills, carbon capture and storage (CCS), “green” hydrogen, and large-scale biofuels. Specific schemes cooked up by the saviors of Big Everything become increasingly absurd as their goal becomes more evidently less feasible. Take the Bill Gates-supported scheme to take wood and rice “waste,” squeeze and chemically sanitize it, package it in plastic so it never (hardly ever) rots, and bury it. Really?
Efficiency of Simplicity
Things as foundational as a worldwide energy transition are never as simple as that, of course. Because Stream 2 flows from Big Everything, for example, doesn’t mean the technologies it touts are always the ones that scale up best, or benefit most from economies of scale. Ironically, the relatively simple solutions in Stream 1 are the ones most likely to benefit from economies of scale in manufacturing. Solar panels and all their component parts, as made in China, are an obvious example.
The result can be stunning: The IEA expects seven times more solar capacity to be installed worldwide this year (350 gigawatts) than in 2015 (50 GW). That meteoric rise, and the rapid spread of EVs that will increasingly be powered by solar electricity, are the grounds for IEA claim that the 1.5℃ target is attainable.
Which isn’t to say that value should always be placed on maximizing economies of scale. To move fast and break the pervasive grip of fossil fuels, the world needs all the cheap and plentiful Chinese solar panels it can get for the next few years. But the US, EU, India, and others aren’t necessarily wrong in pursuing solar manufacturing ambitions even if their solar equipment ends up costing a bit more than the Chinese version.
One of the lessons humanity should have learned from its disastrous neoliberal turn of the last few decades is that it doesn’t pay anybody to have everybody depending on a few, low-cost sources for anything important. Nor can we afford in the post-carbon age to move everything around all the time in big ships, trains, and trucks. So a buildout of capacity to manufacture clean energy generating equipment is a good thing — if it isn’t allowed to massively slow the movement off fossil fuels.
Expense of Complexity
What distinguishes the supposedly low- or no-carbon projects of Big Everything is their complexity and the large scale of individual ventures, not their manufacturing efficiency or size. Very big, one-off projects are what Big Oil thinks it does best. Modest-sized wind turbines that can be manufactured in bulk and installed in lots of places onshore and near-shore aren’t the sort of thing that suits oil companies, for example, even if their cost is low. Because (relatively) small windmills are simple, they become “commodified,” meaning they have a modest profit margin.
Making a little money on each of a large number of sales isn’t what oil companies like. It would be much more fun and profitable, they think, to have the world’s biggest offshore turbine, far out to sea on a floating platform. Much like the huge offshore oil and gas platforms these companies already operate. If you do it right — which they often don’t, but never mind — you make a lot of money from that one big oil platform. Or that one big wind installation. Or that’s how they mostly see it.
Several high-profile wind projects of just this over-sized sort off the US Atlantic Coast have been cancelled lately, supposedly because unpredictable cost inflation and rising interest rates made them money-losers. The biggest cancellations were by Orsted, which in another life was known as Dong, for Danish Oil and Natural Gas.
Whether such enormous floating offshore wind platforms, with all the lengthy supply chains and technical and regulatory complexity they entail, will ever be competitive remains to be seen. Recent financial results from General Electric, the biggest US maker of wind turbines, illustrate the point. Its onshore wind division is now profitable, reportedly thanks partly to cuts in the variety of turbines it makes to a few “workhorse” models. The best thing Bloomberg can say about GE’s offshore division is that it will benefit from Orsted’s cancellation of a $1 billion contract for giant offshore turbines that would have lost GE a lot of money.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is even more evidently geared to save and suit Big Oil, although oil companies themselves have been trying unsuccessfully to make the technology economical for decades, and they aren’t actually signing up to do many projects. Arab Gulf oil producers are moving a bit more determinedly in the CCS direction. That’s what they say, anyhow. But it’s all still peanuts compared to the CCS volume the IEA and others figure into their Net Zero emissions scenarios. CCS is “in deep trouble,” to quote a Politico headline.
Fundamental Reality
It isn’t happenstance that oil and the other fossil fuels containing the energy of eons came into use in the same two centuries as a political economy built around globalization; heavy use of natural resources at low- to no-cost and little or no thought to Earth-destroying pollution; technology-driven, large-scale manufacturing; and Big Everything. These are mutually reinforcing parts of a coherent — if massively destructive — system.
Solar electricity that has access only to the energy of the moment, not the energy of the ages, can’t simply be slotted into the socio-economic system designed to run on oil and coal. To retain coherence, all those other factors reflecting humanity’s relationship to the Earth must change, too. This becomes clearer as we progress through the energy transition. Climate change and other expressions of Earthly rebellion will get worse the longer people deny this. Letting Big Everything continue to obscure this fundamental reality risks catastrophe.
