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It’s a shame we don't talk more about solving global warming
This idea of stopping global warming by reducing our personal consumption is akin to vegetarians solving the problem of cruel factory farming by not eating meat. There are vast millions of vegetarians in the world, yet 50 billion chickens are slaughtered for food every year, most of them raised in factory farms. In other words, the vegetarian strategy of personal abstinence is losing big time. I’ve become a reducetarian myself, but I know that this is mostly symbolic and that if I really want to do something about animal suffering, I should set aside substantial amounts of money and listen to Animal Charity Evaluators’ recommendations about how I can actively spend it on reducing animal suffering.
Global warming has a similar problem. So many people focusing on individual action that they completely ignore the most important things we can do.
Kornelija said that the most important thing to do is vote. But if you live in the United States and you are not in one of the swing states, your vote cannot affect the outcome of the presidential election. Always remember that votes are not equal in the U.S.! While the list of swing states isn’t definitive yet, it is at least clear that some states, such as California and Missouri, are not swing states. In such places you should probably still vote, as House votes are competitive in some districts, your Senate vote could matter if you live in a smaller state and the incumbent isn’t unassailable, and a vote that doesn’t affect the outcome can still act as a signal, however tiny, that the incumbent might not always be unassailable in future elections. (In my experience, even when the race is competitive, I rarely like either of the candidates, but to each his own.)
People get confused by listening to activists because each activist has his own grab-bag of preferred causes. For example, will banning single-use plastics reduce global warming? Well, no, of course not! About 90% of global warming happens because of the greenhouse gases we add to the atmosphere (with the remaining 10% blamed on land use change). The Annual Greenhouse Gas Index reports that two-thirds of current greenhouse-gas warming is from carbon dioxide (CO2), and one-sixth is from methane (CH4), as shown in their chart:
Much of the the remaining one-sixth is caused by CFCs that were banned in the 1990s but still linger in the atmosphere. There’s nothing here you can blame on plastic. Among activists there is a tendency to focus too much on methane, because they don’t like some of the sources of methane, such as cattle farming. But scientists tend to be less worried about methane because chemical reactions in the atmosphere tend to break down CH4 in a matter of several years, and because of this, CH4 doesn’t accumulate the way CO2 does. Natural carbon sinks, like the ocean, absorb much of the excess CO2 in the atmosphere, but in a thousand years, it is estimated that about 25% of it will still remain in the atmosphere.
The Zero Goal
For this reason, stopping global warming will ultimately require reducing our carbon emissions to zero.
You don’t reach zero by simply reducing your use of energy. Instead, we need clean energy, and we need it now. I’m not saying reducing energy use or increasing efficiency isn’t helpful — it is, and I do make efforts to reduce energy usage in my personal life. It’s just not enough.
As an effective altruist, I recognize that often the best strategies for individuals to focus on are the most neglected — the uncrowded strategies that don’t get enough coverage. Climate change itself is not neglected — endless millions of people around the world are eager to “do something” about it. But somehow the best things are the most ignored. In this case, liberal activists have focused overmuch on the American value of personal responsibility, while often ignoring free-market solutions and nuclear energy as being associated too much with conservatives.
The fundamental idea of free-market solutions is that entrepreneurs will find solutions if you simply structure incentives correctly. This is the idea behind “carbon fee and dividend”, supported by the Citizen’s Climate Lobby — a special kind of tax in which all the tax money is immediately returned to the taxpayers equally. More interesting perhaps is that a group of Republicans have proposed a similar plan.
These are excellent plans, but political opposition to carbon taxes is strong, and carbon taxes do end up favoring some technologies over others, just as subsidies do — especially those technologies that are almost ready to “make it big” in the free market and just need a little “push”. For example, suppose an energy-intensive business process suddenly costs $5000 more per year due to a carbon fee, and there is a less energy-intensive way to do the same thing that would have cost $3000 more but now costs $2000 less, plus a $3000 one-time investment. The new process can thus pay for itself in 18 months, so many businesses will switch to the less energy-intensive process, at least if they think the carbon tax is here to stay (for at least two years) and won’t just get voted out again.
This is way more effective than reducing carbon emissions by individual choice, because it aligns business interests with the planet’s interests. But by itself, does it put us on a path to zero carbon emissions? Can we do better? I think so, mainly because there is more opposition to carbon taxes than to clean energy itself.
Recognizing this, the Let’s Fund Clean Energy campaign is an effort to fund a think-tank that will attempt, via cool-headed analysis, to persuade policymakers to follow through on existing commitments to fund R&D for clean energy and related technology. This would include enhanced geothermal systems, more affordable energy storage technology, smart-grid technology, and more. I’ve given a few thousand dollars to this campaign so far.
The other topic I want to bring up is nuclear energy, which is zero-carbon. At this point, solar and wind power are actually cheaper than fossil fuels in many (most?) places, so in a sense they’ve won: the free market likes them, and businesses are choosing to build numerous wind and solar farms, not because they are good for the environment but because they cost less. However, both of these are variable renewable energy: demand does not match supply. The worst case of this would be solar energy in Canada: energy demand peaks in winter, when solar panels are producing the least energy. So in Canada, building a solar farm might sometimes make economic sense today, but I wouldn’t be surprised if building a solar farm were actively detrimental to the goal of reaching zero emissions. Whereas in a hot region like Dubai, energy demand (driven by A/C) tends to peak soon after solar panels receive peak sunlight, so that solar farms make a ton of sense there.
But I have been following the nuclear space for some years, and I believe fears of nuclear energy are vastly overblown. I mean, look at this:
It’s obvious when you think about it: scientists have found that Chernobyl is likely to be responsible for several thousand cancer deaths in and around Ukraine, but coal & oil are responsible for tens of thousands of respiratory deaths every year in the U.S. alone, and millions of deaths worldwide. And it’s physically quite impossible for a nuclear reactor to cause a nuclear explosion, since a nuclear explosion requires weapons-grade uranium.
So why do people fear nuclear power more than fossil fuels? Well, if you read a news article, any news article, about nuclear energy, chances are it will mention Chernobyl and/or Fukushima, whereas if you read an article about hydro-electric dams, it probably won’t mention the Banqiao disaster of 1975 that killed about 171,000 people. Nor will a story about fossil fuels lead with the most deadly fossil-fuel-related disasters (of which there are many).
“nuclear power prevented an average of over 1.8 million net deaths worldwide between 1971–2009” - climate scientists Pushker Kharecha and James Hansen
Nevertheless, given these fears it is important to support the very safest forms of nuclear energy. My favorite category, therefore, is the molten salt reactor (MSR) which promises high safety at relatively low cost (in particular, competitive with fossil fuels). Currently, my favorite concept is the Stable Salt Reactor by Moltex energy, and in particular their first model, the SSR-W Waste Burner reactor, which will consume transuranic high-level waste from older reactors as fuel. In the process, waste that would pose a minor radiation hazard for thousands of years will instead be converted to fission products, which pose a radiation hazard for hundreds of years. This makes the waste easier to manage but, more importantly, doesn’t require any new waste to be created. And yes, I’ve invested in MSRs too. Other interesting companies working on MSRs include Terrestrial Energy and Thorcon.
The Earth has warmed by more than 1°C since preindustrial times, and about 1.5°C over land. It’s time to put every option on the table, and focus on the ones that are likely to be the most effective.
