Justifying $15 Trillion for Renewables

Yesterday I received a joint press release from a group of renewable energy trade associations. It touted a new report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the potential growth of renewable energy by 2050. The report has already garnered an impressive array of headlines, such as "Renewable Energy Can Power the World" and "Renewable Energy Key to Solving Climate Change". The headline from the Financial Times was characteristically more concrete, "World faces $15,000 bn renewable energy bill." Unfortunately, although the final report, rumored to run 1,000 pages, might support all of those conclusions when it is issued at the end of the month, the 25-page "Summary for Policymakers" falls far short of inspiring such confidence. Heaven help those policymakers if the summary is all they actually read.

I'm not even sure if "read" is even the correct verb to apply to this document. Once I got beyond the introductory paragraphs it seemed to degenerate into jargon and bureaucratese that was very hard to parse into plain meaning. The report's genesis as the product of pure consensus is readily apparent. Or as Andy Revkin of the New York Times' Dot Earth blog kindly put it, "it doesn't take readers much beyond what is already well established." That's a shame, because we don't need yet another report telling us that we are swimming in enough renewable energy to power our civilization umpteen times over, if we can merely muster the willpower to reach out and tap it. What we urgently need is a roadmap that describes a path--or preferably several possible paths--through the brambles that separate the energy status quo of 2011 from its ideal low-carbon state of 2050.

For example, we need to understand just how renewables will supplant the petroleum that currently provides around 94% of all transportation energy, at least in the US. That demand might be met by biofuels, although the report points out that the first-generation biofuels that supply nearly 3% of global road transport fuel today, but are still the only kind available on a commercial scale, have serious shortcomings. Closing the gap between 3% and 94% would require a true revolution in next-generation biofuels from sources such as cellulose and algae, yet after reading the Summary for Policymakers we are no wiser about when and how this will occur. I might note that such developments are rarely amenable to precise timetables, as the EPA is learning to its chagrin.

Alternatively, or in combination with biofuels, renewables might replace petroleum in transportation via the potentially more robust pathway of vehicle electrification, matching improved batteries with rapidly expanding supplies of intermittent renewables (wind, solar, tidal, etc.) delivered via increasingly intelligent power grids. But if that's the scenario, its crucial details are barely hinted at here.

The basic message of the summary appears to be that with enough investment, supported by the right policies, the currently identified renewable energy sources could expand by enough that in the very best case (out of 164 scenarios they considered) they could supply roughly as much energy by mid-century as we currently get from fossil fuels. That corresponds to 77% of total expected energy consumption in 2050 and may be the source of the headlines I saw. Of course the median level of those 164 scenarios is quite a bit lower, and the determination of the share of renewables in total energy relies on a projection implying that total global energy consumption will grow by an average of just 0.25% per year over the next 40 years. That suggests either a massive energy efficiency effort or minimal further economic uplift in the developing world. On a more reasonable track of 1% annual energy growth, the top scenario in the scatter chart on page 19 would meet 58% of total 2050 demand, while the median result would cover just a third of global energy needs. That's still impressive, compared to where we are today, but not quite as headline-grabbing.

I will be keenly interested to see what sort of scenarios the IPCC looked at in putting together the report on which this summary is based. Something tells me that they are likelier to fall into the category of what I would call projections or "cases" than true scenarios, which dig deeply into underlying trends and uncertainties and are not merely the output of a mechanistic model. That's not just a technical quibble, because I'm not aware of a single model-type forecast from 1970 that accurately projected the economic and sociopolitical conditions in which we find ourselves today. The intervening improvements in computing power and econometric sophistication still seem insufficient to conquer the fundamental unpredictability of looking that far into the future. But then the IPCC has a built-in bias to accept the results of such work, since long-term climate models underpin its entire effort. I hope I'm not alone in thinking that the expenditure of up to $15 trillion requires a much more rigorous justification than anything provided in this document. Whether or not Saint-Exupery really said it, a goal without a plan is just a wish.

If it seems that I'm being overly critical of a 1,000 page report that I haven't even seen on the basis of the horse-by-committee summary that I have seen, I plead guilty. But isn't that the same sin that the journalists and industry spokespeople are committing when they use this summary as the basis of glowing claims about the potential of renewables? And then there are the politicians and bureaucrats who will attempt to commit vast sums without ever reading any more than summaries such as this--at best--and without questioning the host of assumptions that went into them. If anything, this Summary for Policymakers reinforces my concern that the UN climate process has become so unwieldy and unresponsive that we must look elsewhere for leadership on this complex challenge. Meanwhile, we deserve a clearer articulation of how renewables can overcome the considerable obstacles that stand between their recent impressive performance and the achievement of the milestones this report suggests lie ahead.

Read More

The Post-Kyoto World

Saturday's conclusion of the Cancun climate talks yielded modest agreements that allowed the meeting to be described in positive terms by its hosts and organizers, but at least on the major question of a globally-binding treaty to extend or replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol, it merely kicked the can down the road to the late-2011 session in Durban, South Africa. As low as the expectations going into Cancun were, keeping the UN climate process on life support looks like a good result, compared to last year's fiasco in Copenhagen. However, in light of the objections raised by Japan, Russia, Canada and others, it's difficult to see how the Durban meeting could succeed where Cancun and Copenhagen failed. It looks increasingly likely that the replacement for Kyoto might appear face-savingly similar, but will lack that document's cohesiveness and global authority.

As I read the portion of the "Cancun Agreements" dealing with the extension of the Kyoto Protocol beyond its previously-set 2008-2012 term, the delegates mainly agreed to keep talking and to try to come up with a framework in time to avoid a "gap between the first and second commitment periods." Considering that last year's session in Copenhagen was widely viewed before its start as the last, best chance to accomplish that goal based on the timeline set in Bali two years prior, the end of 2011 looks pretty late in the game to deliver on that. Moreover, while Cancun was able to get by on low expectations, Durban will be unable to repeat that trick and avoid the kind of set-up that helped doom the Copenhagen talks.

The chasm that remains to be bridged doesn't seem to have changed much: the developing countries still insist on binding emissions reduction targets from the developed countries, to which the UN process attributes the majority of emissions under the "principle of historical responsibility, their emissions debt and addressing the needs of developing countries", but won't commit to binding targets themselves. (I've discussed this notion of "emissions debt" previously.) But while the US has signed up for voluntary emissions reductions under the Copenhagen Accord, it won't agree to binding cuts unless the world's largest emitter, China, also does. And all China appears willing to agree to, based on its Copenhagen commitments, is the sort of productivity-based reductions that the rest of the developed world rejected when the US advanced this idea for managing our emissions in the first term of the Bush administration. Even if China succeeds in cutting its emissions per GDP by 40-45% while its economy continues on its present growth trend, its overall emissions would still increase in absolute terms. Japan and some other Kyoto signatories are understandably reluctant to sign up for deeper cuts themselves, unless the world's two biggest emitters commit to sharing their pain.

And this is where the timing of any substantive Kyoto extension hits the wall of US politics. If the administration wasn't able to pass cap and trade legislation in the last Congressional session, when its party had an effective majority of 60 seats in the US Senate in 2009 and 59 in 2010, the prospect of ratifying a climate treaty with a majority of just 53 next year--including one who campaigned vocally against cap and trade--is nearly non-existent. The administration is struggling just to get the new strategic arms treaty with Russia ratified in the Lame Duck session--a treaty with solid bi-partisan endorsements from the foreign policy leadership of past administrations. The likely reception for a new climate treaty would be much less favorable than that until at least 2013 and probably beyond, in light of the ratio of seats up for reelection in 2012.

Unless I'm missing something major, without the US and China on board for binding cuts Japan and others won't agree to deeper reductions in the next round of Kyoto. That doesn't mean that the Durban Climate Conference won't cobble together an eleventh-hour agreement that looks like an extension of Kyoto, in order to avoid an irreparable rupture between the developed and developing world parties to the talks. The subtext for that is already in place in the Cancun outcome. However, it seems highly unlikely that such a document would actually do what Kyoto was intended to do. As a result, the UN process seems to be consigned to focusing on the secondary areas that progressed in Cancun, relating to funding for adaptation and technology transfer, and emissions reductions from sectors like land-use changes and forestry. With the economies of the developed world looking as weak as they do, and with domestic expenditure cuts in the EU having generated noisy and sometimes violent protests, coming up with the funding for those efforts looks more than challenging enough for now.

Read More