Climate Change: 4 Things We Don’t Talk About (Enough)
The year is 2017. While the reality, extent, and risks of climate change have been broadly known for decades, much of the public debate still focuses on these basic issues. Scientific papers on the consensus on the consensus on the consensus on anthropogenic climate change continue to dominate the headlines. The climate papers most frequently cited in the media are those that focus on climate change effects, not solutions.
This has opportunity costs. Collectively, we should have long moved past such basic debates and focused on some of the more intractable and difficult issues that require real solutions in the long-term. The fact that it has taken many decades to establish a basic public consensus on climate change has prevented an analysis of the new challenges that come with mitigation strategies. Below, I outline four of these challenges.
1 | Recycling Renewables
Renewables are, by definition, renewable. That applies to the source of energy that devices like solar panels and wind turbines draw on to produce power or heat. Essentially, all energy being harvested on earth comes from the sun, which supplies virtually unlimited amounts of it. Some exceptions include nuclear fission and geothermal energy.
But solar panels, for example, require raw materials before they start harnessing the sun’s energy. These are not renewable. Depending on the type of panel being produced, raw materials used over the course of the manufacturing process include quartz, silver, copper, and cadmium, as well as rare earths such as indium and gallium. Aluminum is in most cases used for panel frames.
Some of these materials are abundant, while others are relatively scarce. In all cases, these resources need to be mined. Mining is a disruptive process that damages the local environment, can lead to groundwater pollution, and diminishes biodiversity. A second problem is that some materials used in solar panels, such as cadmium and lead, can have negative environmental consequences when they seep into the groundwater. This can happen when materials are not properly disposed of, for example by just chucking panels into landfills.
A sustainable supply chain would therefore be one that ensures a high degree of recyclability in order to prevent both of these potential problems. While availability of materials is not necessarily a significant problem, the detrimental effects of mining and disposal of materials are.
The International Renewable Energy Agency highlights the opportunities of recycling renewables. In a report it published last year, the agency found that “by 2050, the recoverable value [from PV panels] could cumulatively exceed USD 15 billion, equivalent to 2 billion panels, or 630 GW”.
2 | Negative Emissions
The dirty secret of the Paris Climate Agreement is this: it relies on technologies that haven’t been developed yet. Barring an unprecedented cut in global carbon emissions, CO² will need to be removed from the atmosphere by 2050 at the latest. In other words, we need negative emissions.
On the one hand, this is because some amount of emissions are likely unavoidable. This applies to agriculture, cement manufacture, and the steel industry, for example. These carbon sources undercut the need for net zero emissions. On the other hand, we are moving forward with mitigation at such a slow pace that even moderate climate goals are quickly becoming highly unrealistic.
The Paris Agreement is therefore banking on the development of carbon removal solutions, although none have so far been deployed at scale. In Iceland and Sweden, prototypes of carbon removal plants have recently started operations. In the academic world, increased attention is being paid to negative emissions scenarios. A special issue has just been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. More and more, media sources are also discovering negative emissions as a pivotal component to climate change reporting.
The problem with negative emissions is one of moral hazard. Rely on them too heavily, and vital mitigation efforts in the present could fall by the wayside. Since we don’t know if any of the possible technological options can ever be developed at scale, this would be fatal. Therefore, a careful policy deliberation needs to take place that encourages negative emissions research and implementation without undermining greenhouse gas cuts in the present.
3 | New Power Structures
It’s difficult to understate the degree to which the global economy is conditioned by energy use. Alternative non-fossil scenarios of historical technological and economic development require a high degree of imagination. Modern society as presently constituted depends on the provision of fossil fuels in the form of oil, gas, and (decreasingly) coal.
Around the supply of these central resources, a power structure has entrenched itself. Saudi Arabia derives its power from its vast oil reserves. The oligarchy in Russia is able to maintain control over the state through the distribution of oil and gas rents. For the better part of the 20th century, the biggest American corporations were those operating in the fossil fuel sector.
As fossil fuel use and demand decline, there will be consequences for both individual governments and the global system at large. To some extent, this is happening already. Take Saudi Arabia: persistently low oil prices have forced the Saudi monarchy to curtail government spending and entertain a sale of its giant state-owned oil and gas company, Saudi Aramco. In a move to modernize the economy in anticipation of an imminent post-oil future, the country’s new leadership is also cracking down on corruption and anachronistic social values to attract foreign investment.
As the global economy gradually shifts from fossil fuel use to more technologically advanced energy carriers, international relations will also change. Governments that have typically placated both elites and the masses by showering them in fossil fuel rents might see increasing political pressure — and possibly revolutions — as the returns from oil and gas exploitation dwindle. What’s more, there are increasing financial risks, as those investors who have plowed their money into fossil fuels may never see a return on these investments. In the worst-case scenario, this could spark a massive global financial crisis.
4 | Large Hydroelectric Dams Are Not Sustainable
Hydroelectric power is the OG when it comes to renewables. The first hydroelectric power station began operations in 1882 in Wisconsin, generating about 12.5 kilowatts of power. Since then, hydropower has come a long way. In 2014, 17 percent of world electricity production came from hydro. That is a problem.
As it is, large dam projects are already economically questionable enterprises. But their true costs are even more staggering once we take a look at the damage dams are doing to communities and the environment they live in. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Amazon.
Brazil has long depended on the massive resources of the Amazon for power generation. Currently, more than 70 percent of the country’s power comes from hydro. As a result, the share of carbon emissions from Brazil’s electricity sector is very low. Yet, this dependency on hydropower has created all kinds of problems. The government has had to resettle local indigenous populations, often times forcibly. Moreover, excessive dam construction disturbs the natural flow of the river. This has consequences for the ecosystem supported by the river’s flow.
It is also wrong to assume that dams do not emit greenhouse gases. On the contrary, particularly large dams built in tropical environments tend to cause high amounts of methane emissions, an especially potent climate killer 34 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. The result is that reservoirs are responsible for more than one percent of global annual human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
Continued operation of these dams would therefore necessitate even more negative emissions, as outlined above. In an ideal scenario, large dams would disappear bit by bit, releasing the rivers back into freedom. One example where this happened recently is the restoration of the Elwha River in Washington State. Of course, less hydropower would require more alternative clean energy sources, particularly in countries like Brazil or Canada, which use large amounts of hydro. The same is true for storage solutions, given the role dams play in electricity storage.
This takes us right back to the first point: more solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries will boost the need for more recycling. This is where this story comes full circle.
