‘Powering Earth 2050’ Debate: Is California’s 100 Percent Renewable Strategy Globally Viable?
California’s renewable energy march is on. State-regulated utilities must now get 50 percent of their electricity from wind, water, and the sun by 2050—no fossil fuels or biofuels, no nuclear power. But even if the Golden State can achieve these goals, are they a roadmap for the rest of the United States—or the world?
Four experts debate. You decide. Click on their names to read their opening statements.
On the pro side: Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and Dale Bryk, director of programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
On the con side: Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a professor of earth systems science at Stanford, and Michael Shellenberger, president of Environmental Progress.
This debate took place as part of the Oppenheim Lecture Series at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability on 23 February 2016. It was moderated by Oliver Morton, briefings editor for The Economist, who introduced the debate.
Oliver Morton: This topic couldn’t be more, well, I was going to say timely, but it’s going to be timely for a long time. But it couldn’t be more important. And one of the things that I’m looking forward to hearing the panel talk about is actually some of these questions of time scale. This is not an issue that we can settle tonight, but it is an issue that we can turn over tonight in the knowledge that we’re going to keep turning it over in our minds and in our policies and in our beliefs for years to come.
So the question that’s before us is: Is a 100 percent renewable strategy globally viable? And that really makes you ask three different questions about renewable technologies. One is, how much can they do? Another is, how much do they need to do? How much energy are we actually going to be using in the future? And the third, without which the first two become slightly academic, is: Is there a pathway, an economic and legislative and political pathway, which gets us to where the renewables are doing all those things that they may be able to do? You’ve kind of got to hope that there’s at least some of that, otherwise we’re slightly wasting our time here.
But we do have a context that allows us to hope that, because we do know that in the past, human civilizations have done through major energy transitions. We no longer rely mostly on the muscles of the beasts of the field to move us around. And indeed, in many cases, we don’t rely that heavily on our own muscles to move us around. We no longer, by and large, burn wood or dung or anything else in order to warm our homes, unless it’s gas or bunker fuel. We use fossil fuels in a way that we never did 200 years ago or even just 100 years ago. But, when we look at those transitions, and they are epochal, they define modern history, the post-1750 history of the world, very fully. We see that they are complex, and they are contingent. They depend on very finely balanced questions sometimes. We also see that they are rarely complete. So the 100 percent number there is an interesting one to use for an energy transition because, although we don’t mostly warm our homes through burning things, we do still burn things. We burn wood. We do still use animal labor for some things, and especially if we use “we,” as we probably should, to mean the people of the planet as a whole. As people, as a human species, we do still use animals. We do still burn wood. We do not make complete energy transitions normally.
However, this energy transition that we’re talking about tonight, the energy transition that we are, to some extent, embarked upon, is a bit different from those of previous transitions in that this is something, which, through political will up to a certain extent, and through a clear-eyed view of the risks that the current climate system poses to us or the common energy system poses to us through the climate, we are actually trying to make this transition. And, by and large, that was not a characteristic of earlier transitions. They were not willed into being by acts of political consensus. At the same time, that might give you a sense that maybe this transition could be quicker or more efficient or more thorough than previous ones, which just kind of happened.
There is another side to that, which is that previous energy transitions happened because at least some groups within society had an urgent or pressing or, certainly important to them, need for a different sort of energy, an energy that could do different things. Steam engines could do different things from the energy that they replaced. Internal combustion engines and steam turbines could do different things. That, we have possibly a little bit less of in this transition, in this possible revolution.
And so we really are in uncharted water. We know that there can be transitions in energy systems. We know that they are brought about by various different, as I say, complex, contingent, and rarely complete historical processes. We don’t know at this stage what this one is going to look like and how it’s going to turn out. One thing we do know, though, is that predictions of energy futures often look very dubious only a few decades later.
So, with that caveat, I am going to ask the panel, to each outline the position that they take.
Click on their names to read their opening statements:
On the pro side: Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and Dale Bryk, director of programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
On the con side: Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a professor of earth systems science at Stanford, and Michael Shellenberger, president of Environmental Progress.
