Leave All Energy Options Open for the Future, says Ken Caldeira

Part 2 of “Powering Earth 2050” Debate

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.

On the con side: Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science and a professor of earth systems science at Stanford. To read other positions, click here.

Ken Caldeira: I became an environmental scientist and a climate scientist because I’m concerned about nature, and I’m also concerned about people, that people live a good livelihood. And so we need to find affordable ways of solving climate and other environmental problems while providing people with energy services.

I’m a climate scientist. I’m not an energy expert. But I read reports from energy experts. And many of these reports indicate that Mark [Jacobson], in limiting his pallet of technologies to wind, solar, and hydropower, is oversimplifying the challenges and underestimating how difficult it will be to solve this problem.

So, to say that a problem is technically soluble doesn’t mean that that proposed path is the best way. We can say, “We can solve the problem of war, and we can get world peace tomorrow. It’s just a political problem. Everybody just has to put down their guns.” But we don’t do that. We engage in negotiations. We try to have incentives for people not to engage in violence. We use every tool that we can get ahold of.

Let’s just focus on the IPCC for a bit. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is several thousand scientists and engineers who come together and analyze the climate problem and how to solve it. And it comes up with three reports. The first report identifies that the climate change problem is real and very serious. The second report says that the impacts will be dramatic and that adapting to them will be difficult. But the third report says that transforming our energy system will be very difficult, and that we need to use every tool. We have to let every possible tool that could contribute compete on a level playing field and let them all contribute what they can contribute.

This Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had hundreds of energy experts, collectively, with thousands of years of experience analyzing energy systems. And one of their conclusions was that later in this century, we might need to use biomass electricity, bioelectricity, coupled with carbon capture and storage to generate electricity and put some of this carbon underground. And in Mark’s vision, using these agricultural products and carbon capture and storage, is not even on the table.

Pushing technologies like carbon capture and storage, bioenergy, nuclear, and so on off the table not only makes the problem technically harder to solve. it also makes it politically harder to solve because, basically, you’re telling the fossil fuel industry, you’re telling the agricultural industries, the nuclear industries, that you have no participation in any future energy system, and so you should oppose this politically. And you just take several narrow technologies.

And what if these things don’t work? What if we don’t get good thermal storage. And what if all this pumped hydro can’t be deployed? What do we do then?

So maybe we want to have a natural gas plant with carbon capture and storage, injecting the carbon underground. Maybe we want to have limited use of bioenergy. So expanding our portfolio of options can only be better for the environment, because we can use denser systems that don’t impinge on the environment as much. It can only be better technically and economically because if we expand our pallet, our portfolio of available options, we can only find better solutions. And it expands the political base that can support a broad portfolio of approaches to try to address this problem.

It’s like we’re going into a boxing ring, and we want to tie an arm behind our backs and say, “Look, we don’t want to use all the technologies at our disposal. We just want to limit ourselves to wind, solar, and hydro.” And it just makes no sense — 100 percent renewable is not even a good goal. Even if you could do it, if you can get a system that’s better for the environment, why wouldn’t you want something better for the environment? Hydropower. Do we really want dams all over the place? Do we really want wind turbines on top of every mountaintop?

I’m actually pretty good on solar. If Mark’s vision works, and solar, wind, and hydropower is as good for the environment and cheap and easy to deploy as he thinks it is, I’m 100 percent for it. But if it is that good, it should be able to compete with carbon capture and storage, with bioenergy, nuclear, in the marketplace, and it should just win. We should be going for a broader carbon tax, price on carbon, and let these things compete in a marketplace.

This debate took place as part of the Oppenheim Lecture Series at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. To watch the whole debate, click here.