Energy and Environment: Some Tough
Questions
We have entered the climate-change ‘pledge’ season once again. The president of the United States has pledged to cut U.S.’s emissions of greenhouse gases by half compared to 2005 levels by the end of 2030. The good news is that we now have a commander-in-chief who knows something about climate science and is conscious enough of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions to advance a plan that may reduce them significantly. We would not have had such an experience seven months ago, when the official line emanating from the White House was that coal was good for us—and any whisper otherwise was a tree-hugging, hippie hoax. With Joe Biden, climate-wise, The United States is back in the game.
The other news is that a ‘pledge’ isn’t a reality. Not yet, at any rate. The United States and other countries have signed plenty of these pledges, including Kyoto in 1992 and Paris in 2015. (The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and Trump of course pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement.) Overall, talk about breaking the upward curve of greenhouse gases has had an effect, but a small one, in the United States and the European Union.
The extremely bad news is that China eclipsed the U.S.’s emissions in 2014, and kept on running, doubling them by 2020. You read that correctly: China added enough greenhouse gases to create a whole new country that spews more effluent than any other in six years, as the United States and the European Union’s effluent was slowly falling. This was occurring as China also was becoming the world’s largest producer and exporter of wind turbines and solar panels. China also remains the world’s largest user of coal (the dirtiest of fossil fuels). It isn’t alone. The World Energy Agency projects that annual use of coal will increase 4.5 percent in 2021, mainly because of increasing demand for electricity.
Even with China’s prodigious appetite for fossil fuels, the United States still uses much more per capita. The Chinese used 10.1 tons of greenhouse gases per person in 2019, while U.S. citizens used 17.6 tons per capita. The European Union used 7.4 tons per capita, and India 2.5. What ought to be obvious from such numbers is that no one is going to win any kind of climate change battle against greenhouse gases without China’s full-throated co-operation.
The same goes for many other countries that we have not even mentioned yet: Bangladesh, Australia, Japan, Canada, Russia, India, Indonesia, all of Africa. Some of these countries have sizable populations (India: 1.3 billion; Indonesia: 320 million; Bangladesh: 160 million; Nigeria: 140 million). Most of these are flooded with people who want only what most of us take for granted: enough food to survive; a small house, with electricity; a car, small truck or motorbike, perhaps, and a tank of gasoline.
Many of these people live in the tropics, with hot, humid summers, where air conditioning would be very nice, but at present is an unaffordable luxury. Anyone who has lived through a New Delhi pre-monsoon summer knows what I mean. To reduce worldwide emissions, are we, in Nebraska, going to give up our summer air conditioning? Or… are all of us going to find new ways to supply electricity from renewable resources, such as sun and wind, rather than dirty coal? Our Omaha Public Power District is already moving off of coal and into sun and wind, to a limited extent.
Trump liked the sound of “clean coal”, but it is an oxymoron and a joke. Just look at the type of physical infrastructure that is required for such a thing as ‘carbon capture’ and try to tell me that it isn’t expensive. President Biden’s plans contain some items that will call for Herculean efforts: by 2030, for example, two-thirds of cars and SUVs would be battery operated, up from 2 percent today.
So, back to President Biden’s pledge: More than half of our new cars, trucks, and SUVs would have to be powered by electricity. Whenever you see that magic wand, ask where the electricity comes from. We do not yet have enough electric power produced by wind and solar power to make a dent in demand if oil-based gasoline is eliminated. To do that enormously good deed, we will need new infrastructure, probably funded at least in part by Uncle Sam (or ‘Uncle Joe’?). How many Republicans will vote to pass that? Shall we ask Mitch McConnell? How much will summer temperatures have to climb, how strong will hurricanes need to get, and how high must sea levels rise to convince Republicans that we’ve got a real problem?
The United States already has shed 21 percent of its greenhouse-gas emissions since 2005. Hooray for us (until, that is, we realize that one third of that is due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Now friends, a show of hands: How many of us would favor 570,000 agonizing deaths in 16 months to help meet our pledged greenhouse-gas- emissions target? Surely, we can find a less painful way to do this. All of us need to have more than a serious conversation. We need to produce solid results—and quickly.
Bruce E. Johansen, Frederick W. Kayser Professor at the University of Nebraska–Omaha, is author of Climate Change: An Encyclopedia of Science, Society, and Solutions (2017).
The other news is that a ‘pledge’ isn’t a reality. Not yet, at any rate. The United States and other countries have signed plenty of these pledges, including Kyoto in 1992 and Paris in 2015. (The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and Trump of course pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement.) Overall, talk about breaking the upward curve of greenhouse gases has had an effect, but a small one, in the United States and the European Union.
The extremely bad news is that China eclipsed the U.S.’s emissions in 2014, and kept on running, doubling them by 2020. You read that correctly: China added enough greenhouse gases to create a whole new country that spews more effluent than any other in six years, as the United States and the European Union’s effluent was slowly falling. This was occurring as China also was becoming the world’s largest producer and exporter of wind turbines and solar panels. China also remains the world’s largest user of coal (the dirtiest of fossil fuels). It isn’t alone. The World Energy Agency projects that annual use of coal will increase 4.5 percent in 2021, mainly because of increasing demand for electricity.
Even with China’s prodigious appetite for fossil fuels, the United States still uses much more per capita. The Chinese used 10.1 tons of greenhouse gases per person in 2019, while U.S. citizens used 17.6 tons per capita. The European Union used 7.4 tons per capita, and India 2.5. What ought to be obvious from such numbers is that no one is going to win any kind of climate change battle against greenhouse gases without China’s full-throated co-operation.
The same goes for many other countries that we have not even mentioned yet: Bangladesh, Australia, Japan, Canada, Russia, India, Indonesia, all of Africa. Some of these countries have sizable populations (India: 1.3 billion; Indonesia: 320 million; Bangladesh: 160 million; Nigeria: 140 million). Most of these are flooded with people who want only what most of us take for granted: enough food to survive; a small house, with electricity; a car, small truck or motorbike, perhaps, and a tank of gasoline.
Many of these people live in the tropics, with hot, humid summers, where air conditioning would be very nice, but at present is an unaffordable luxury. Anyone who has lived through a New Delhi pre-monsoon summer knows what I mean. To reduce worldwide emissions, are we, in Nebraska, going to give up our summer air conditioning? Or… are all of us going to find new ways to supply electricity from renewable resources, such as sun and wind, rather than dirty coal? Our Omaha Public Power District is already moving off of coal and into sun and wind, to a limited extent.
Trump liked the sound of “clean coal”, but it is an oxymoron and a joke. Just look at the type of physical infrastructure that is required for such a thing as ‘carbon capture’ and try to tell me that it isn’t expensive. President Biden’s plans contain some items that will call for Herculean efforts: by 2030, for example, two-thirds of cars and SUVs would be battery operated, up from 2 percent today.
So, back to President Biden’s pledge: More than half of our new cars, trucks, and SUVs would have to be powered by electricity. Whenever you see that magic wand, ask where the electricity comes from. We do not yet have enough electric power produced by wind and solar power to make a dent in demand if oil-based gasoline is eliminated. To do that enormously good deed, we will need new infrastructure, probably funded at least in part by Uncle Sam (or ‘Uncle Joe’?). How many Republicans will vote to pass that? Shall we ask Mitch McConnell? How much will summer temperatures have to climb, how strong will hurricanes need to get, and how high must sea levels rise to convince Republicans that we’ve got a real problem?
The United States already has shed 21 percent of its greenhouse-gas emissions since 2005. Hooray for us (until, that is, we realize that one third of that is due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Now friends, a show of hands: How many of us would favor 570,000 agonizing deaths in 16 months to help meet our pledged greenhouse-gas- emissions target? Surely, we can find a less painful way to do this. All of us need to have more than a serious conversation. We need to produce solid results—and quickly.
Bruce E. Johansen, Frederick W. Kayser Professor at the University of Nebraska–Omaha, is author of Climate Change: An Encyclopedia of Science, Society, and Solutions (2017).
