The “really” in the title of Vaclav Smil’s newest book, “How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going,” is doing some heavy lifting. Implicit in the renowned energy scientist’s usage is the idea that most of us are uninformed or just plain wrong about the fundamentals of the global economy. He aims to correct that — to recenter materials rather than electronic flows of data as the bedrock of modern life — largely through examining what he calls the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics and ammonia. (The production and use of all four currently requires burning huge amounts of fossil carbon.) Which brings us back to that “really.” In the context of Smil’s book, which will be published May 10, the word is also a rebuke to those calling for rapid decarbonization in order to combat global warming. “I am not talking about what could be done,” says Smil, who is 78 and who counts Bill Gates among his many devotees. “I’m looking at the world as it is.”
One of the fundamental
arguments in
1Smil,
a distinguished emeritus professor at the University of Manitoba, has published
more than 40 books on an impressively broad array of topics. They include
“Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities”; “Global Catastrophes and Trends:
The Next 50 Years”; and “The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and
Change.”
is that in order to have
a serious discussion about an energy transition that gets us away from burning
fossil carbon, we need a shared acknowledgment of the material realities of the
world. Which is to say, an acknowledgment that our current way of life is
dependent on burning that fossil carbon. But do you believe decarbonization
should be the goal? And if rapid decarbonization isn’t feasible, then what’s
the best way to stop heating the planet? The
most important thing to understand is the scale. An energy transition affecting
a country of one million people is very different from a transition affecting a
nation of more than one billion. It is one thing to invest a few billion
dollars, another to find one trillion. This is where we are in terms of global civilization:
This transition has to happen on a billion and trillion scales. Now, according
to
2The
26th United Nations Climate Change Conference, held in Glasgow last fall.
we should reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent
by 2030 as compared with 2010 levels. This is undoable because there’s just
eight years left, and emissions are still rising. People don’t appreciate the
magnitude of the task and are setting up artificial deadlines which are
unrealistic. Now, to answer your question. If you assume that carbon dioxide is
our deadliest problem, then of course we should decarbonize totally. But people
say by 2050 — they call it “net” carbon emissions. The I.P.C.C., they don’t say
zero, they say “net zero.” Leaving that cushion — one billion, five billion, 10
billion tons of CO2 we will still be emitting but taking care of by carbon
sequestration. Is it realistic that we’ll be
sequestering
so rapidly on such a scale?3
3Especially
considering that we have yet to develop a widespread and widely agreed upon
method of carbon sequestration.
People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on
the scale and the complexity of the problem. Decarbonization by 2030? Really?
I understand the problem of
setting difficult goals, but aren’t goals necessary for orienting our
actions? What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People
call it aspirational. I call it delusional. We are forging ahead with
4On
average, S.U.V.s in the United States put out 14 percent more carbon dioxide
than small passenger cars. Additionally, the International Energy Agency
released a study in 2019 that found S.U.V.s to have been more responsible for
increasing carbon emissions over the previous decade than heavy industry,
trucks, aviation and shipping.
we are building bigger houses, we want to invent new
techniques to make more steel. But do we need all that more and bigger? I’m not
against setting a goal. I’m all for realistic goals. I will not yield on this
point. It’s misleading and doesn’t serve any use because we will not achieve
it, and then people say, What’s the point? I’m all for goals but for strict
realism in setting them.
When you talk about S.U.V.s and
building bigger houses, you’re really talking about people’s consumption
choices. Do you think changing those is an easier goal than
decarbonizing? Well, we changed people’s consumption by letting them have their
S.U.V.s. We can change people the other way. We could say, To save the planet
people should drive smaller cars. If you drive a smaller car, you get a rebate.
If you drive an S.U.V., you pay a surcharge. There are many ways to go around
bringing rational goals. You don’t have to invent new things to solve these
problems. This promise of inventions — 3-D printing! Houses will be printed!
Cars will be printed! Have you seen any printed houses and cars? We live in
this world of exaggerated promises and delusional pop science. I’m trying to
bring it onto some modest track of reality and common sense. The official goal
in the U.S. is complete decarbonization of electricity generation by 2035.
That’s Biden’s program: zero-carbon electricity in 2035. The country doesn’t
have a national grid! How will you decarbonize and run the country by wind and
solar without a national grid? And what will it take to build a national grid
in a NIMBY society like the U.S.?
That I don’t know, but aren’t
there credible pathways to decarbonizing the grid? Mark Jacobson at Stanford
has said we have most of the technology we need to produce America’s power
renewably and keep the grid secure and stable by 2035. Or what about the
example of countries like Norway or Namibia that are producing a vast majority
of their energy from renewables? Check the China statistics. The
country is adding, every year, gigawatts of new coal-fired power. Have you
noticed that the whole world is now trying to get hands on as much natural gas
as possible? This world is not yet done with fossil fuels. Germany, after
nearly half a trillion dollars, in 20 years they went from getting 84 percent
of their primary energy from fossil fuels to
5In
2000, Germany began its Energiewende policy, an attempt to decarbonize the
country’s primary energy supply. At the time, fossil fuels accounted for nearly
84 percent of that supply. By 2020, that share had decreased by only about 8
percent.
Can you tell me how you’d go from 76 percent fossil to zero
by 2030,
2035? I’m sorry, the reality is what it is.
You know
6Which,
roughly speaking, is the argument proposed by the 17th-century French
philosopher Blaise Pascal that belief in God is a good bet because the
potential benefits far outweigh any drawbacks.
Yes,
of course.
Couldn’t we think about the
problem of decarbonization in similar terms? Like, yes, maybe all the effort to
transition to renewables won’t work, but the potential upside is enormous. Why
not operate according to that logic? This is the misunderstanding
people have: that we’ve been slothful and neglectful and doing nothing. True,
we have too many S.U.V.s and build too many big houses and
7U.S.
food waste has been estimated to total between 30 and 40 percent of our entire
food supply.
But at the same time we are constantly transitioning and
innovating. We went from coal to oil to natural gas, and then as we were moving
into natural gas we moved into nuclear electricity, and we started building
lots of large hydro, and they do not emit any carbon dioxide directly. So we’ve
been transitioning to lower-carbon sources or noncarbon sources for decades.
Moreover, we’ve been making our burning of carbon much more efficient. We are
constantly transitioning to more efficient, more effective and less
environmentally harmful things. So, yes, we’ve been wasteful, but our engineers
are not asleep. Even those S.U.V.s, as wasteful as they are, are getting better
than they were 10 years ago. The world is constantly improving.
Even though we’re constantly
improving, we’re also facing an imminent catastrophe in climate change. I
wonder if that makes it hard for people to internalize the improvement. This is
also making me think of a paper you wrote about the future of natural gas in
which you referred to Bill McKibben as America’s
“leading
climate catastrophist.”8
8That
was in a paper published by a nonprofit arm of the Spain-based natural gas and
electricity company Naturgy, in which Smil took aim at the climate activist
McKibben’s contention that moving from coal to natural gas was tantamount to
breaking “our Oxycontin habit by taking up heroin instead.”
Is he wrong? What
is “imminent”? In science you have to be careful with your words. We’ve had
these problems ever since we started to burn fossil fuels on a large scale. We
haven’t bothered to do anything about it. There is no excuse for that. We could
have chosen a different path. But this is not our only imminent and global
problem. About one billion people are either undernourished or malnourished.
The fact of possible nuclear war these days. Remember what they used to say
about Gerald Ford? He can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. This is the
problem of society today. We cannot do three things at the same time. So who
decides what is imminent?
That’s not quite an answer to
the question. I may have used the word “imminent” coarsely, but what about the
word “catastrophe”? For more than 30 years, global warming has
been making headlines. We’ve been aware of this for 30 years, on a planetary
scale — all these I.P.C.C. meetings. Our emissions have been going up steadily
every year. So here’s the question: Why haven’t we done anything? I could give
you a list of things we could do but we haven’t done. Why do we keep saying
it’s a catastrophic problem but do nothing about it?
Because of systemic and
institutional inertia combined with vested interests working against change.
But you aren’t suggesting that because we haven’t done enough in the past, then
we don’t need to do something in the future? No. I’m
just telling you that this is a totally unprecedented problem, and people don’t
realize how difficult it will be to deal with. You don’t have to have 200
countries to sign on the dotted line to reduce emissions. But you have to have
at least all the big emitters: China, the United States, India, Russia. What
are the chances today of Russia, China and the U.S. signing on the dotted line
as to the actual reduction of emissions by 2030? Also please notice that the
Paris agreement has no legally binding language. In an ideal world, we could
cut our emissions
9In
Smil’s view, that means, as he told me, “doing things on the margins” — i.e.,
with far greater efficiency and less waste than we do them now.
But the point is it has to be done by all these actors
in concert. Are we going to come together and make that global compact to make
it work? That’s the question.
So how do you understand the
risk of climate change? Are we just screwed? The key
to understanding risk — forget about climate change — is very simple. It’s discounting
the future. People will eat pork bellies and drink a liter of alcohol every day
because the joy of eating pork belly and drinking surpasses the possible bad
payoff 30 years down the road. Suppose we start investing like crazy and start
bringing down the carbon as rapidly as possible. The first beneficiaries will
be people living in the 2070s because of what’s already in the system. The
temperature will keep rising even as we are reducing these emissions. So you
are asking people now to make quote-unquote sacrifices while the first benefits
will accrue to their children and the real benefits will accrue to their
grandchildren. You have to redo the basic human wiring in the brain to change
this risk analysis and say, I value 2055 or 2060 as much as I value tomorrow.
None of us is wired to think that way.
I wonder if you and I might
just have different ideas about human behavior. Isn’t it in our nature to help
our children survive? Or, I don’t know, I eat much less meat than I used to;
I’m moving into a new house and looking at solar panels and heat pumps. These
aren’t things I was thinking about until climate change caused a social tipping
point. So am I naïve, or are you pessimistic? Yes and
no. It depends. Also, there is nothing wrong with the heat pump, but proper
insulation, that’s much better in the long run. The point is that we are being
greedy, we are wasting yet improving our efficiencies at the same time. This is
where I become unpalatable to the media because I do not have one message like
“everything is getting better.” I see it as checkered. People do sacrifice for
our children, take the right steps. But the same people who will buy a solar
panel and heat pump will buy an S.U.V. People will stop eating meat, then fly
for a vacation in Toscana. We are messy, hard-to-define individuals. We are
subject to fashions and whims — this is the beauty of humanity. Most of us are
trying to do the right things with climate, but it is difficult when you have
to move on the energy front, food front, materials front. People have to
realize that this problem is unprecedented because of the numbers — billions of
everything — and the pressure of acting rapidly as we never acted
before. This doesn’t make it hopeless, but it makes it excruciatingly more
difficult.
Do you think we are facing a
civilizational threat in climate change? I
cannot answer that question without having the threat defined. What does it
mean? You’ve seen it with Covid: Was Covid an unprecedented catastrophe, as
many people portrayed it? Or was it nothing, as other people portrayed it?
Anti-lockdown, anti-mask people would say, Oh, it’s another flu. Clearly it was
not another flu. But you know as well that it was not an unprecedented
catastrophe. What do you want me to say? I cannot tell you that we don’t have a
problem because we do have a problem. But
I cannot tell you it’s the end of the world by next Monday because it is not the
end of the world by next Monday. What’s the point of you pressing me to belong
to one of these groups? We have a problem; it will be difficult to solve. Even
more difficult than people think.
Does your understanding of the
science around energy and climate change compel you in any particularly political
directions? No. I used to live in the westernmost part of the evil empire,
what’s now the Czech Republic. They forever turned me off any stupid politics
because they politicized everything. So it is now, unfortunately, in the
West. Everything’s politics. No it is not! You can be
on this side or that side, but the real world works on the basis of natural law
and thermodynamics and energy conversions, and the fact is if I want to smelt
my steel, I need a certain amount of carbon or hydrogen to do it. The Red Book
of Mao or Putin’s speeches or Donald Trump is no help in that. We need less
politics to solve our problems. We need to look at the realities of life and to
see how we can practically affect them.
So, practically speaking, what
are the implications for natural gas of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Germany
halted the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and the United States banned Russian oil.
Might an effect of the war be speeding up the transition away from natural
gas? No, not at first. It’s the quantities and how embedded it is.
Germany just struck a massive agreement with the United Arab Emirates for
liquid hydrogen. Germany has been successful in
replacing a
large share of electricity generation with wind and solar.10
10For
2021, Germany provided a little more than 41 percent of its electricity via
renewable energy sources.
However, if you would switch on your satellites and
look at the German autobahn right now, there are millions of cars moving down
the autobahn at unlimited speed. That’s burning crude oil right, left and
center. Famous German industries which make glass and plastics and chemicals
are running on natural gas. You need gas for processing. Yes, Ukraine will make
people rethink strategically, but
at the same time they cannot move rapidly. Germany is a nation of some 83
million people. If half of them are using natural gas for heating, you just
cannot rip up those natural gas furnaces and replace them in a year.
But is there a viable path
built on burning natural gas that gets us to a future of less warming? This is
one thing that caused tremendous misunderstanding: You can produce
natural gas in the right way. Unfortunately there are too many places around
the world where we produce natural gas in the wrong way. Your plumbing is too
loose, your pipelines are too leaky and you have unwanted emissions of methane.
However, if I produce natural gas in the right way, as in most cases in the
U.S., then I’m obtaining it without these fugitive emissions. If I were in
charge of the planet: The most practical thing to do to reduce the emissions
during the last 20 years would have been to rapidly close down as many
coal-fired power plants as possible and replace their generation with
combined-cycle 60-percent-plus-efficient natural gas plants. This would have
saved billions and billions of tons of carbon dioxide over the last two
decades.
You’ve talked elsewhere about
how the real challenge in decarbonizing is in the developing world, where
countries will rely on burning carbon as they try to ramp up building their
infrastructure. Is there an argument to be made, though, that countries
developing new infrastructure have incentives to orient themselves toward
renewables? There are real-world examples: Indonesia has made a
commitment to electric vehicles; Thailand is investing in solar energy. The
more photovoltaics the better. However, to have photovoltaics on a large scale,
you have to have interconnections. If the country doesn’t have any grid or has
a weak national grid, how will you distribute electricity? Countries need
electricity for giant plants, for making chemicals, processing foods, making
textiles. So you have to have photovoltaics on a large scale, which means a big
electric grid. As I say, even the U.S.
has a poor
11An
electricity distribution network that is able to respond dynamically and
proactively to changing conditions and energy demands and adapt to the latest
communication technology.
So forget about Nigeria. Putting a photovoltaic panel
on a roof is very easy. Developing a system around photovoltaics for the whole
country — very difficult. No country in the world today runs itself on pure
photovoltaics.
Not today. Maybe
tomorrow. Not tomorrow. Again, it’s the scale. You
see, you have almost become a victim. It’s inevitable because you are living in
it, you are soaked in it, you are in New York City — this pushing people to one
side or the other. We don’t need pushing to the sides. What we need is the
dull, factually correct and accurate middle. Because only from that middle will
come the solutions. Solutions never come from extremes. It’s also irresponsible
to state the problem in ways where, when you look closer, it’s not like that.
There are these billions of people who want to burn more fossil fuel. There is
very little you can do about that. They will burn it unless you give them
something different. But who will give them something different? You have to
recognize the realities of the world, and the realities of the world tend to be
unpleasant, discouraging and depressing.
from NYTimes
------ thanks Gregory Johnson
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