Richard Heinberg
In a
recent paper,
Justin Ritchie, a Ph.D. candidate in resources and the environment at
the University of British Columbia, and his co-author, UBC professor
Hadi Dowlatabadi, pointed out that global estimates of the amounts of
coal that are economically and technologically recoverable have fallen
by two-thirds since the 1990s. This observation also formed the
substance of my 2009 book,
Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis, so it’s nice to see the point taken up by others
. However,
Ritchie and Dowlatabadi go a step further and think through the
implications of the ongoing coal reserves downgrades for climate
modeling.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has for years
produced computer-generated models of several possible trajectories for
future greenhouse gas emissions through the remainder of the century.
These “representative concentration pathways,” or RCPs, include an
extreme high emissions case,
RCP 8.5, that is commonly referred to as “business as usual.” In this
scenario, “coal use in particular increases almost 10 fold by 2100”
according to IPCC authors.
At the 2015 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, at a
session co-organized by Post Carbon Institute and other organizations,
PCI Fellow
David Hughes gave a presentation
in which he showed that actual recoverable fossil fuel reserves are
consistent only with low-emissions RCP scenarios. The new paper from
Ritchie and Dowlatabadi reaffirms much of Hughes’s argument (though
Hughes looked more broadly at reserves of all fossil fuels, plus
uranium).
What does this downgrading of likely carbon emissions mean for
climate change modelers, climate activists, policy makers, and concerned
citizens? According to Ritchie, the implication is clearly not as
simple as “don’t worry, fossil fuel depletion will solve climate change
for us.” Instead, “The same finding that shrinks CO2 emissions may also
lower the cost of dealing with global warming, making the Paris
Agreement that addresses climate change easier to achieve,” as a
Bloomberg article
on Ritchie’s paper puts it. That’s because costs of climate action are
typically measured against the economic growth presumed to occur if the
world continues burning coal and other fossil fuels at ever-increasing
rates extrapolated from recent decades. If those extrapolations are
unrealistic (too high), then keeping emissions within a two-degree
Celsius limit will be easier and cheaper.
Ironically, Ritchie’s and Hughes’s questioning of likely future
carbon emissions (no official change has filtered through the IPCC
apparatus as of yet) occurs just as Donald Trump undertakes telegenic
coal advocacy and abandons the Paris climate accord. In view of the
reality that America’s best coal has already been dug and burned, the
notion that the industry can somehow be revived at our president’s whim
would be laughable—except that the sad joke is on the hundreds of
thousands of coal country voters who fell for
Trump’s fake promises.
Why has the world dragged its feet in adopting more realistic fossil
fuel resource estimates? Pushback from the fossil fuel industry is
certainly understandable: coal, oil, and gas companies—whether traded on
stock markets or government owned—derive market value from their
assets, which consist of future production potentials. Lower reserves
estimates translate to lower asset valuations. The motives of climate
scientists and activists in overestimating burnable carbon reserves are
harder to divine; one can only guess that they accept at face value the
numbers from the fossil fuel industries, and then pad those numbers
further out of caution (more on this in a moment). In any case, more
realistic fossil fuel reserves estimates should help us come to terms
with reality in several ways—not only with regard to climate modeling,
but economic expectations and political prospects as well.
Every few years, the IPCC issues a major new “assessment” crammed
with data and models, aimed at informing policy makers. Unfortunately,
these assessments are also filled with what Oliver Gedens has called “
magical thinking.”
For example, the most recent IPCC assessment (its fifth, released in
2014) described a series of computer-generated models of energy and
emissions pathways that would keep the world below two degrees C. Eighty
percent of these rely on negative emissions technologies, of which the
primary one is Bio Energy with Carbon Capture and Sequestration (BECCS).
The idea with BECCS is to grow enormous amounts of biomass, burn it,
then capture the carbon and bury it. In order to capture and bury enough
carbon to make enough of a difference, lots of biomass would be needed;
by Gedens’s calculations an area larger than the size of India would
have to be planted in fast-growing crops destined to be combusted. The
carbon dioxide that’s captured would have to be compressed and moved
through thousands of miles of pipelines to old, depleted oil and gas
wells to be buried forever, requiring an infrastructure comparable to
that of the current global oil industry. The costs would be enormous, as
would be the risks.
Again, unrealistic assumptions about fossil fuel reserves, and
therefore emissions, lead to unrealistic (i.e., implausibly expensive
and risky) methods for keeping those emissions down. The only realistic
solution to our climate crisis is not to put so much carbon in the
atmosphere in the first place. But that path runs counter to
expectations about economic growth—which requires energy. And that is
almost surely at the root of the IPCC’s assumptions about future fossil
fuel consumption (regardless of whether those fossil fuels are actually
available to be consumed).
So far humanity has increased the global atmospheric CO2
concentration from 280 parts per million to over 400 ppm—an already
dangerous level. David Hughes figures burning our remaining realistic
reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas would send us to about 550 ppm.
There’s an easy way of
not getting to 550 ppm: leave most of
those fossil fuel reserves in the ground. But that would sink the
economy, unless we very rapidly develop alternative energy sources
(nuclear, which is expensive and risky; or solar and wind, which are
more realistic alternatives). Is it even possible to make the energy
switch so quickly and completely as to avoid major bumps along the road?
Building alternative energy infrastructure will itself require energy,
and during the crucial early stages of the transition most of that
energy will have to come from fossil fuels. There’s
no way to bootstrap the energy transition
process with energy from, say solar panels and wind turbines, because
wind, and especially solar, technologies take years to energetically pay
for their own manufacture and installation. So to avert burning even
more fossil fuels than we otherwise would (in order to build all those
solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, heat pumps, and so on),
resulting in a big pulse of carbon emissions, we would have to severely
curtail the use of fossil fuels for current purposes—the maintenance of
business as usual. That would also imperil economic growth. And we are
talking about a remarkably small time window available for the shift,
compared with the decades required for past energy transitions. It’s all
so complicated that one can get a headache just thinking about it.
The main stumbling block that leads policy makers to twist their
logic into pretzels is economic growth. Remove the requirement for
growth, and it’s barely possible (not easy, but possible) to reconcile
carbon reserves, emissions, energy sources, and warming targets—
if
governments somehow dedicate enough money and policy effort to the job.
However, with further economic growth as an absolute requirement, the
resulting climate models fester with internal contradictions and with
assumptions about speculative technologies that very few people believe
can be scaled up sufficiently, and that may have economic,
environmental, and political repercussions that no one is prepared to
deal with.
We cannot afford to hide the implications of realistic fossil fuels
reserves estimates behind magical thinking. Perhaps the most important
of those implications is that the world is probably just about at peak
energy right now, give or take a decade. If we act immediately and
strongly to rein in climate change, then a peak in world energy usage
will likely occur more or less immediately. If we don’t act, then we may
have another decade before fossil fuel depletion results in peak energy
anyway. Our energy mix will shift: in the case of strong climate
policy, oil will start to decline first (due to depletion), probably
before 2020, and coal as well (due to policy), with
natural gas growing until roughly 2020-2050, when it peaks globally from depletion. Without strong climate policy,
coal peaks anyway
(due to depletion) around 2025 (Chinese coal consumption appears to
have peaked in 2013-2014). The amount of energy we get from nuclear
power probably won’t change much over this time period. Renewables will
contribute a larger share, depending on investment levels and policy
supports, but cannot realistically expand far enough, fast enough, to
maintain energy growth and therefore economic growth.
So overall, one way or the other, we have just about hit the maximum
burn rate our civilization is likely to achieve, and it’s mostly
downhill from here. That has implications for robust economic growth
(it’s essentially over), and hence for war and peace, inequality,
political stability, and further population expansion. Dealing with the
end of energy growth, and therefore economic growth, is the biggest
political and social challenge of our time—though it’s unlikely to be
recognized as such. (Our biggest ecological challenges consist of
climate change, species extinctions, and ocean acidification.) The
impacts of the end of growth will likely be masked by financial crashes
and socio-political stresses that will rivet everyone’s attention while a
quiet trend churns away in the background, undoing all our assumptions
and expectations about the world we humans have constructed over the
past couple of centuries.
If we’re smart, we will recognize that deeper trend and adapt to it
in ways that preserve the best of what we have accomplished, and make
life as fulfilling as it can be for as many people as possible, even
while the amount of energy available to us ratchets downward. We’ll act
to rein in population growth and aim for a gradual overall population
decline, so that
per capita energy use does not have to decline
as fast as total use. We’ll act to minimize ecological disruption by
protecting habitat and species. We’ll make happiness, not consumption,
the centerpiece of economic policy.
If we’re not so smart, we’ll join the dinosaurs.
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