Some call me a 'climate scientist'. I'm not. What I am is an 'Earth systems generalist'.
Born in 1939, I grew up with passionate interests in both science and engineering. I learned to read from my father's university textbooks in geology and paleontology, and dreamed of building nuclear powered starships. Living on a yacht in Southern California I grew up surrounded by (and often immersed in) marine and estuarine ecosystems while my father worked in the aerospace engineering industry.
After studying university physics for three years, dyslexia with numbers convinced me to change my focus to biology. I completed university as an evolutionary biologist (PhD Harvard, 1973). My principal research project involved understanding how species' genetic systems regulated the evolution and speciation of North America's largest and most widespread lizard genus. Then for several years as an academic biologist I taught a range of university subjects as diverse as systematics, biogeography, cytogenetics, comparative anatomy and marine biology.
In Australia, from 1980, I was involved in various activities around the emerging and rapidly evolving microcomputing technologies culminating in 2 years involvement in the computerization of the emerging Bank of Melbourne.
In 1990 I joined a startup engineering company that had just won the contract to build a new generation of 10 frigates for Australia and New Zealand. In 2007 I retired from the head office of Tenix Defence, then Australia's largest defence engineering contractor, after a 17½ year career as a documentation and knowledge management systems analyst and designer. At Tenix I reported to the R&D manager under the GM Engineering, and worked closely with support and systems engineers on the ANZAC Ship Project to solve documentation and engineering change management issues that risked the project 100s of millions of dollars in cost and years of schedule overruns. All 10 ships had been delivered on time, on budget to happy customers against the fixed-price and fixed schedule contract.
Before, during, and after these two main gigs I also did a lot of other things that contribute to my general understanding of complex dynamical systems involving multiple components with non-linear and sometimes chaotically interacting components; e.g., 'Earth systems'.
Earth's Climate System is the global heat engine driven by the transport and conversions of energy between the incoming solar radiation striking the planet, and the infrared radiation of heat away from the planet to the cold dark universe.
As Climate Sentinel News Editor, my task is to identify and understand quirks and problems in the operation of this complex heat engine that threaten human existence, and explain to our readers how they can help to solve some of the critical issues that are threatening their own existence.
Monthly global CH4 concentrations from satellites (top panel) and derived annual mean growth rates (bottom panel) for 2003–2021. Top: The listed numerical values in red indicate annual XCH4 averages in the latitude range 60oS – 60oN. Bottom: Annual mean XCH4 growth rates derived from data shown in the top panel. The listed numerical values correspond to the growth rate in ppb/year including an uncertainty estimate in brackets. Data source: C3S/Obs4MIPs (v4.3) consolidated (2003– mid 2020) and CAMS preliminary near real-time data (mid 2020-2021) records. Credit: University of Bremen for Copernicus Climate Change Service and SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Leiden for the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service/ECMWF.
The process of global warming that underlies the present climate emergency is continuing to make the crisis worse. There is no evidence yet that humans (or Australians) are doing anything to even slow the process that is leading us ever closer to a point of no return, where nothing humans can do will suffice to stop Earth’s Climate System from flipping to the Hothouse Earth state that will result in a global mass extinction event. (My graphical essay explains the science underlying this claim.)
Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are contributing significantly to this problem. Not only are Captain Humbug and his troop of willing puppets forming our COALition government doing little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they continue to subsidize, promote, and protect their patrons in the fossil fuel industry over working to assure the futures of the citizens who elected them. If we value our own futures and the futures of our children and grandchildren, it is time to replace these coal-handed clowns with people who will give first priority to action on climate change. This year’s Federal Election gives us the chance to do exactly this.
The reality is that if fail to stop and reverse global warming, our families will have no future — meaning that no other issues matter because there will be no one left to be concerned by them.
The Vote Climate One team has assembled a downloadable Traffic Light Voting Guide to help you use your vote to ensure that your preferences will not flow to any of the COALition puppets. We don’t tell you how to vote, but give you a tool to help you decide who you can safely vote for, whose preferences won’t flow to the COAL puppets and clowns should they fail to be elected.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Animal-based foods have higher carbon and land footprints than their plant-based alternatives, and are most commonly consumed in high-income countries. The study, published in Nature Food, investigates how the global food system would change if 54 high-income countries were to shift to a more plant-based diet.
If this land were all allowed to revert to its natural state, it would capture almost 100bn tonnes of carbon – equal to 14 years of global agricultural emissions – the authors note. They add that this level of carbon capture “could potentially fulfill high-income countries’ CO2 removal obligations needed to limit warming to 1.5C under equality sharing principles”.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Amongst many other growing perils resulting from global warming, as long as we allow our only Earth to go on warming urban firestorms will become more frequent, fiercer, and deadlier. Many of Australia’s close packed and leafy suburbs would also be susceptible to this kind of urban firestorm.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
The climate emergency is an existential crisis for humans. Bill McKibben explains why the Press and politicians ignore the climate emergency even though we risk extinction by ignoring it.
We face an existential crisis of our own making. It threatens to exterminate the human species and most other complex life on our only planet. Yet, day after day, after day, …. the Australian daily press will print multiple pages with nothing but news about the ‘Covid crisis’. And this doesn’t include long articles on the travails of a multi-millionaire anti-vaxer tennis star not being allowed to play his usually tantrum punctuated game at the Australian Open.
At it’s worst, even if nothing is done to minimize its effects, Covid would only kill 1 to 5% of the population. The 1918 ‘Spanish’ flu pandemic (see Wikipedia’s List of Epidemics) killed about this many people. Similarly, 100 years later the Covid Pandemic would be hardly noticed as a minor ripple in human history. Even the Black Death around 1350 that may have killed 50% of all humans at the time had no particularly detrimental consequences on the success of our species.
Today, the ultra-conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts utterly dire consequences for humanity and our biosphere if we don’t solve the climate crisis. If we fail here, there will be no human history at all, not just a minor blip! Yet the Press and politicians ignore the climate emergency Surely, this is the crisis that the press should be covering every day.
Journalism is constructed around finding something new. (I think that’s why they’re called newspapers). Which is a problem when it comes to the climate crisis. In geological terms, we are speeding toward the abyss—we’re pouring carbon into the atmosphere hundreds and thousands of times faster than during the volcanic outpourings that marked the previous great extinction events in earth’s history. But in journalistic terms, it happens just a little too slowly to quite register—climate change today is pretty much the same as climate change yesterday and tomorrow. Over a decade or two it will profoundly change the planet, but a decade is not a unit that really registers for TV, much less Twitter. The climate crisis is at all times the most important thing happening on earth, by far, but there’s rarely a twenty-four-hour period when, by the standards we’re used to, it’s the most important thing happening that particular day. It is inexorable, and inexorability is hard for journalists to capture.
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And so, even though there’s finally skilled and deep coverage of the issue in some corners of the press (I think over the last five years the Times and the Post have done a better job of covering global warming than any other subject, with one remarkable reporting job after another), its scale—the fact that it threatens everything we know and hold dear—hasn’t sunk in. It requires repetition, constant reiteration of the same small set of facts: the planet is heating rapidly, cheap solar and windpower can slow it down, these are being blocked by vested interest. But repetition and constant reiteration are precisely what reporters and editors don’t like doing, hence the constant search for a “new angle.” I follow, for instance, the Twitter feed of Terry Hughes, the Australian marine scientist who has done more than anyone to chart the ongoing realtime destruction of the Great Barrier Reef. If journalism worked better, that destruction—over the course of a very few years, of the largest living structure on the planet—would be a compelling story. But instead, to his constant and correct exasperation, absurd updates about, say, 3-D printers producing new corals help take the edge off the tragedy. They get attention simply because they’re new; the mass death of an enormous ecosystem is the same story as before.
McKibben nails the issues where the 4th Estate (journalism) is concerned, but says nothing (here) about how the press’s selective inattention helps serve the special interests of the patrons and puppet-masters of the 2nd Estate (our government) over the rest of humanity. Unfortunately, here in Australia (and in many other areas of the world) we are cursed by the fact that many of our governing politicians are more concerned to support the selfish short-term special interests of their multi-billionaire patrons rather than the life-time interests of the people who elect them. By default, the press’s easy distraction by trivia, humbug, fake news, misrepresentation, and misdirection so easily created by the special interests and their government lackeys works to hide the real crisis that threatens our survival.
Stopping human greenhouse gas emissions on its own, will probably not be enough. To initiate actual cooling we will probably also have to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere and safely sequester it somewhere that it will not simply return to the atmosphere, and increase Earth’s ability to reflect excess solar energy away from the planet.
One of the few ways I can think of to remedy this situation is to take charge of the electoral process to purge our Parliament of puppets working for special interests and replace them with people we have good reasons to think will understand the real dangers that face us, take the climate emergency seriously as a first priority, and begin the work to mobilize society to begin effective actions to reverse global warming. In every electorate, Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting Guide will help you direct your votes away from the puppets and towards people our research suggests will put climate action first where their parliamentary actions are concerned.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Can we believe anything this crew of special interest puppets says on climate change?
The Crikey article presented here documents our Prime Minister’s deeeep respect for truth and honesty in government and shows how the COALition misrepresents reality. Can we afford to allow him or any of his fellow puppets stay in Parliament?
A Dossier of Liesand Falsehoods identifies a litany of statements, interviews, speeches and comments over the past two years from Morrison that are demonstrably untrue. Some were clearly intended to mislead, and these are marked as “lies”. Other statements were untrue, or turned out to be so, and these are marked as “falsehoods”.
“There are a great many of both,” writes Crikey politics editor Bernard Keane, “and most of them have been uttered while Morrison occupied the highest office in the land.”
The PM “lies openly and frequently, about matters large and small — Australia’s carbon emissions, or an inquiry in relation to a sexual assault within the ministerial wing in Parliament House, or simply whether he spoke to someone who refused to shake his hand”, Keane writes.
“Most of his lies are about himself, or his government, and what it has done, or failed to do; often he has lied about things he himself has said or done, as if he wasn’t present when a woman refused to shake his hand and he turned his back on her, or he didn’t carefully explain to Parliament that the secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet had given him no update about his report in relation to Brittany Higgins.”
Why have we made a distinction between “lies” and “falsehoods”? Because we appreciate that sometimes the PM might misspeak or be poorly briefed. We are not inside his head. We don’t always know his motive.
But when he repeats or fails to correct the same untruth, in the face of evidence to the contrary, we can only conclude that someone of his intelligence and high status objectively understands and knows what he is doing is lying.
As I have shown in many posts here and elsewhere there is a vast array of factual evidence that our we face an existential climate emergency from human caused global warming. Now that the warming is started it is further amplified by increased rates of ice melting, permafrost thawing, ocean warming, increasing aridity, increasing wildfires, weakening and wandering jet streams, etc.
If we cannot stop and reverse the warming process soon, the heating will continue to accelerate until our world literally becomes too hot for most living organisms to survive. Whole ecosystems will fail and collapse, including our agricultural ecosystems. If the heat doesn’t kill our species directly (e.g., death by heat stroke), crop failures, famine, social disorder, extreme weather, etc. will.
Given that we probably have not yet passed the point of no return — where nothing humans could do would be enough to stop the runaway warming process — there are many actions we can and should be making to mitigate and avoid the risk of extinction. Many of these would benefit from Government promotion and coordination: e.g., to immediately stop the production of greenhouse gases by stopping the burning of fossil fuels and methane gas producing agricultural practices. However, even the best science tends to understate the risks of inaction. Unfortunately, this makes it easy for our present COALition government to lie, misrepresent, obfuscate, distract, and humbug to hide any uncomfortable facts. And further, to actively work to prevent and delay any emergency actions that might in any way inconvenience their patrons and puppet masters in the from positive actions to control global warming.
To help you with your voting decisions we have reviewed all of the parties (even the microparties) and independent candidates to see who they are likely to pass their preferences to and where they stand on climate. Our conclusions inform our Stoplight Voting Guide. We don’t tell you who we think you should put at No.1 on your ballot, but using the Stop Light Guide, by putting our red-light candidates last you will ensure that your vote doesn’t helps to remove them from or keep them out of Parliament. Green-light candidates are those we think will put addressing the climate emergency at the top of their agenda in Parliament.
In terms of guaranteeing that our children and grand children have a viable future, stopping global warming is the only issue in the upcoming election that really matters. If we fail here, we might as well practice singing hymns as our house burns down around us, because nothing we might do will have any effect on the outcome.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
Wildfires and special interest politics in Colorado paint a similar picture to what we see in Australia
This Denver Post article summarizes the longer term impacts and costs of wildfires to society. This applies to Australia as well as the USA and elsewhere. Despite all the political humbug to the contrary, global warming continues to accelerate.
The picture above shows the smoke plume on 30 December, 2022, when hurricane-force winds in Boulder County whipped fires across drought-parched grasslands and suburban neighborhoods, incinerating 991 structures, including part of a shopping center, a hotel, and a town hall. Two people are still missing, presumed dead. (Aqua-MODIS Satellite view. NASA).
Costs and damages due to wildfires will increasingly overlap and concatenate as fire conditions become hotter, drier, and windier. If global warming cannot be reversed, we will sooner or later have no more forests to catch water, and society will eventually be overwhelmed by fire damage and costs.
The only long term solution will be to attack the cause of the accelerating climate emergency by stopping and reversing the warming. Besides stopping all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, this will almost certainly require global geoengineering. I think this is still possible, but it will take global mobilization of the scale of a war effort to save our biosphere from the heat death in the Hothouse Earth.
Stability landscape showing the pathway of the Earth System out of the Holocene and thus, out of the glacial–interglacial limit cycle to its present position in the hotter Anthropocene (Will Steffen et al. PNAS 2018;115:33:8252-8259
Australia is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world with its obstinate approach to the climate crisis. Leaders like US climate envoy John Kerry and COP26 President Alok Sharma have been focused recently on the climate challenge of China — but it’s Australia that’s emerging as the real pariah of the COP26 talks.
Of all the developed countries, Australia has the poorest standing on climate. It’s clear that Australia will just be absent, basically, from the talks,” Bas Eickhout, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, told CNN.”
They were quite happy with the role the United States played until last year, and now of course they seem to be the last-man standing from the Western countries to block progress,” he said, referring to the US’ absence in global climate efforts during the Trump years.
It appears that lobbying fossil fuel companies have hijacked climate policy from the Australian people. Most Australians support more climate action from the government, according to a poll by the Lowy Institute in May. The poll found that 78% of Australians would support a net zero emissions target for 2050. Around the same number support the government subsidizing electric vehicles. And 63% support a ban on new coal mines opening in Australia. Yet of the world’s 176 new coal projects, 79 of them are in Australia, according to Fitch Solutions’ Global Mines Database.
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Lucy Manne, the CEO of 350.org, which is an international organization with an Australian presence, accused the Morrison government of deliberately slowing down climate progress.
“This is extremely frustrating, and the government will only see the movement calling for action grow,” she said.”
The Morrison government risks Australia becoming not just a pariah state on the world stage, but also our economy falling behind. Australia has the potential to become a clean energy superpower and exporter, and the Australian public wants us to be a leader, not a laggard.“Angela Dewan, 13 Sept. 2021. Australia is shaping up to be the villain of COP26 climate talks. CNN World.
‘NB4′ is a very useful neologism for our times and we all need to seriously think about why we need to invent this term for the crescendo of climate related catastrophes and what that is telling us about our species’ prospects for the future. And note, with one exception, the Yale Climate Connections article below only lists NB4s affecting North America. Based on the last few years of news, most countries in the world would be able to list their own crescendos of NB4s.
The exception in the Climate Connections article is, of course, the plethora of NB4s associated with the ‘amplification’ of global warming in the Arctic, including the NB4s of ice melting, high temperature records, and associated wildfires.
The unmentioned elephant in the room of this article is to think about what is the climax that the crescendo of NB4s is building to. If we do not stop the process causing the crescendo, the inevitable climax will be the sixth global mass extinction, including our own species extinction — and this will be in the near term.
It is time for the Congress and its citizen constituents, decision-makers of all sorts, and opinion-makers of all political persuasions [and particularly in Australia] to acknowledge that human-driven climate change is undeniably causing catastrophic effects in ways never seen before. And those often-calamitous effects are not only in the “usual suspect” places and the results of predictable reasons.
[Extracted from the article below]
If we are to have a future, acknowledgement of the reality must be urgently followed by total mobilization and action to slow, stop, and reverse global warming. Because the process is clearly accelerating (as demonstrated by the rapidly growing sequence of NB4s), if we don’t do this pretty damn quick it will be too late as Earth’s Climate System flips us and our biosphere into its Hothouse Earth mode.
This is why we must Vote Climate One to elect Parliamentarians who will put stopping global warming as the number one priority guiding their actions in government.
A recurring and troubling pattern of first-time historic weather events provides firm support for citizen and leaders to acknowledge human causation and take needed needed mitigation and adaptation steps.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy visits storm-ravaged Mullica Hill on September 2, viewing damages caused by ‘remnants’ of Hurricane Ida. (Photo credit: Edwin J. Torres/NJ Governor’s Office)
Attributing extreme events to climate change – including those highly reported though the media – is a difficult task frequently requiring lots time to complete rigorously. The usual mantra is that climate change did not cause X, but climate change did contribute significantly to its intensity and/or its frequency. Which raises the question: “By how much?”
But experience on the ground sometimes makes that attribution to climate change a no brainer. How so? Because no other influence can explain many of the recent events because there is no precedent for their having ever been happened before. Call them “Never Before” in history events (NB4s).
The mundane “Who cares?” version of an NB4 event can be found in the time series of an index of annual mean surface temperature. The five-year trend comparison has been de rigueur for decades, but over just the past 20 years, the “This has been the hottest year ever” framing has been assigned to five of those years.
Another example of a time series worrisome to many experts involves Hurricane Harvey, in 2017. Harvey stalled over Houston for nearly two days. It dropped 42 inches of rain while it was just hanging around with nowhere to go. Stalling of hurricanes has been attributed to a reduced temperature difference between the poles and the tropics. It is a signature of climate change that now includes Ida over Louisiana. In Houston, climate change caused the third “500-year flooding” event in four years – certainly a damaging NB4.
In the summer of 2020, leaking methane from the melting permafrost across tundra in Siberia released methane that spontaneously ignited when temperatures well above the Arctic Circle exceeded 100oF. The high temperatures are a product of global warming, but the interaction with the tundra is a very troubling NB4.
Hurricane Ida was the second Category 4 (nearly a Cat 5) storm to make landfall in Louisiana in two years. Ida tied the record for gaining intensity when approaching landfall. The cause of that rapid intensification? Temperature of the Gulf of Mexico waters provided fuel to buttress the intensity. Those water temperatures across the Gulf ranged between 88oF and 90oF to a depth of 150 feet – never before in recorded history.
Subsequently, how is it possible that more than 15 times as many people died from exposure to Ida in eight mid-Atlantic states than in Mississippi and Louisiana combined? Because the severity was unexpected, and many people were unprepared.
In New York City, sustained rain for one hour exceeded three inches during Hurricane Henri in early August, an all-time record. Less than two weeks later, the remnants of Ida piled on with a new all-time record of 3.15 inches for New York City and 3.24 inches for Newark, New Jersey. Surely another NB4, and especially for piling on. IDA was an NB4 event at least three times over.
Who should care? Surely insurance companies should … and do. They diversify by geography against severe storm events. They increasingly face storm liabilities not only in the anticipated urban and rural and coastal areas along the Gulf of Mexico, but also, and increasingly, in the more densely populated broadly distributed areas of New York City, New Jersey, and even Philadelphia. The former they’ve anticipated. The latter, not so much.
And then, not to be outdone or forgotten, there are the rampant wildfires in California: 2018 brought the largest fire in Cal Fire’s recorded history. The following year, 2019, was more modest in its aggression, but 2020 erupted with a new largest fire in history. The conflagration was also burning at the very same time as the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th largest fires in history. Why the intensity? Megadrought, pine bark beetles that had not suffered through their usual winter freeze for a decade, and extreme record heat combined with record dry lightning. 2020 was an NB4 year.
This calendar year, 2021, has shown no sign of backing down from the challenge to be the worst. It, too, boasts an NB4 claim not only from the same causes, but also for a different reason: No California fire in history had ever climbed the Sierra Nevada mountains and rolled down the eastern side toward Nevada. The Dixie fire accomplished that heretofore-unprecedented feat. But wait, as the cheap cable commercials say, there’s more: A month or so later, the Caldor fire did the same thing, soon seriously threatening South Lake Tahoe for the first time in history. Consider it an NB4 two-fer.
With regard to heat waves, look across the U.S. Pacific Northwest and western Canada. Seattle, for instance, experienced three successive days in the summer of 2021 with maximum temperatures of more than 100oF (June 26-28, 2021). In all of prior recorded history, Seattle had seen only three days above 100oF (July 16, 1941; July 20, 1994; and July 29, 2009). Portland, Oregon, and other areas – places where residential air conditioning are few and far between – fared no better and in some places worse.
And then there is rain in Greenland for the first time, the biggest tornado (spawned by Ida) in New Jersey history, seven inches of rain in Central Park tying the 1927 record, and so on …
It is time for the Congress and its citizen constituents, decision-makers of all sort, and opinion-makers of all political persuasions to acknowledge that human-driven climate change is undeniably causing catastrophic effects in ways never seen before. And those often-calamitous effects are not only in the “usual suspect” places and the results of predictable reasons.
They are occurring unpredictably and in surprising and unexpect[ed], and therefore often [the] least prepared, places.
Gary Yohe is the Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He served as convening lead author for multiple chapters and the Synthesis Report for the IPCC from 1990 through 2014 and was Vice-Chair of the Third US National Climate Assessment.
Absolutely everyone concerned in any way with our futures [humanity, ourselves, our families] on our fragile planet Earth must read Umair Haque’s latest essay linked below.
This man is a true spokesman for reason, science and politics. Here he explains what we need what we need to transform in order to continue living for long in this world. I also try to communicate these things, but Umair does it far better here than I have ever done.
Our civilisation needs a great transformation
We need three decades of transformation, but are we capable of it?
Where Australia is concerned, the only area where I disagree with Umair’s sequence of priorities is that our first order of business must be to fix the political frameworks we live in that are specifically managed by Liberal/National party puppet governments that work across many levels to stop or delay us from doing anything that might inconvenience their masters representing special interests in the fossil fuel industry and their friends. Only then will we be able to devote our full interests to completing the moral and economic transformations that will see us progress towards solving the existential climate emergency. And there is very little time left (if any) to actually do that.
We all need to work together to achieve his prescription. Think seriously about what he says, and then lets get to work.
Our Vote Climate One guide provides a simple way for you to use our preferential voting system to vote for only those candidates who will support and work for immediate action on climate change. Our stoplight system doesn’t tell you who to vote for, but does flag those parties or individuals whose record suggests they are more likely to support the special interests and others trying to delay action than prioritize actions to deal with the existential climate emergency.
Past projections of energy costs have consistently underestimated just how cheap renewable energy would be in the future, as well as the benefits of rolling them out quickly, according to a new report out of the Institute of New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford.
The report makes predictions about more than 50 technologies such as solar power, offshore wind, and more, and it compares them to a future that still runs on carbon. “It’s not just good news for renewables. It’s good news for the planet,” Matthew Ives, one of the report’s authors and a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin Post-Carbon Transition Programme, told Ars.
And yet, our COALition Government is still working assiduously to hinder any actions that may diminish the profits or ‘harm’ the fossil fuel industry’s continued profligate mining and burning of greenhouse gas emitting carbon-based fuels. By driving continued global warming, these emissions fueling the accelerating climate emergency of droughts, storms, wildfires and rising sea-levels. If the warming is not stopped and reversed we will soon be seeing global famines, economic and social collapses, and mass extinctions (including our own species) as positive feedbacks drive increased greenhouse emissions from soils, burning forests, dying and drying wetlands, and thawing permafrost, plus additional warming enabled by melting polar ice and global ‘dimming’ (where the world absorbs a greater percentage of the solar energy received every day).
We must replace the COALition fossil fuel puppets in our Parliaments with genuine representatives of the people who will work with the economic reality that we must replace greenhouse gas emitting industries with those don’t, and may even engineer effective solutions for recapturing and sequestering some of what was emitted in the past.
Vote Climate One won’t tell you how you should vote. However, we will show you which candidates we think will actively work to help us develop a sustainable future versus those who seem to be indifferent or are actively working to protect their puppet masters in the fossil fuel industry from any changes that might harm their short-term special interests.
Past projections of energy costs have consistently underestimated just how cheap renewable energy would be in the future, as well as the benefits of rolling them out quickly, according to a new report out of the Institute of New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford.
The report makes predictions about more than 50 technologies such as solar power, offshore wind, and more, and it compares them to a future that still runs on carbon. “It’s not just good news for renewables. It’s good news for the planet,” Matthew Ives, one of the report’s authors and a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin Post-Carbon Transition Programme, told Ars.
The paper used probabilistic cost forecasting methods—taking into account both past data and current and ongoing technological developments in renewables—for its findings. It also used large caches of data from sources such as the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and Bloomberg. Beyond looking at the cost (represented as dollar per unit of energy production over time), the report also represents its findings in three scenarios: a fast transition to renewables, a slow transition, and no transition at all.
Compared to sticking with fossil fuels, a quick shift to renewables could mean trillions of dollars in savings, even without accounting for things like damages caused by climate change or any co-benefits from the reduced pollution. Even beyond the savings, rolling out renewable energy sources could help the world limit global warming to 1.5º C. According to the report, if solar, wind, and the myriad other green energy tools followed the deployment trends they are projected to see in the next decade, in 25 years the world could potentially see a net-zero energy system.
“The energy transition is also going to save us money. We should be doing it anyway,” Ives said.
Plateau, or no?
The cost for renewable energy has consistently dropped as the world started its transition away from fossil fuels. Solar, for instance, is now cheaper than the creation of new coal or gas-fired power plants, according to an International Energy Agency (IEA) report. However, several reports in the past have suggested that, at some point or another, the falling costs of renewables will begin to level out. For instance, the same IEA report suggests that offshore wind prices will begin to level off now. Advertisement
However, another recent paper reviewed projections for the future of renewable resources and also found that much of the earlier research underestimated future cost reductions in the field. According to Ives, past reports consistently underestimate the technological advancements that are leading to the continued decrease in the price of renewables. Ives’ paper suggests that the models used in these other forecasts have had two problems: they make assumptions about the maximum growth rates of renewables, and they use “floor costs,” a point at which the prices can’t fall further.
Ives’ report focuses mainly on the process of technological advancement, which is part of what has made renewables cheaper. Renewables have routinely performed beyond the expectations of previous papers. “They’ve been getting these forecasts wrong for quite some time,” Ives said. “You can see we’ve consistently broken through those forecasts again and again.”
The Institute of New Economic Thinking report doesn’t place a hard deadline on a cost plateau for renewables. Rather than there being a plateau caused by advancements, Ives said the greater likelihood is that the prices will decrease slower once things like solar and wind end up dominating the market. At that point, technological advances may very well still happen, but they might not be rolled out as frequently as they are now. “It’s the deployment that slows it down,” Ives said.
“Overly pessimistic”
This largely fits with IRENA’s finding as well, according to Michael Taylor. He’s a senior analyst with the group, which recently released its own report. According to Taylor, the group found that the cost-reduction drivers—improved technology, supply chains, scalability, and manufacturing processes—for solar and wind are likely to continue at least for the next 10 to 15 years. It’s possible that previous forecasts were conservative in their estimations, he said.
“I would expect they’re overly pessimistic,” Taylor told Ars.
However, he noted that some issues might see the reductions slow down. The pandemic, for instance, disrupted global supply chains and made it harder to obtain some essential materials, like the polysilicon used in solar panels. There are also some barriers to fully implementing renewables, such as oil and gas subsidies, public opinion, permitting, etc.
“Just on purely economic grounds, there are increasing benefits to consumers to be had by accelerating the rollout of renewable power generation,” Taylor said. “We’d encourage policy makers to look very seriously at trying to remove the barriers that currently exist.”
