The Crisis Report - 22

We are moving too slowly. We need a coordinated plan.

Speeding up our clean energy build-out by having a “PV Allocation Plan” would greatly reduce embedded emissions.

We are going to need billions of these panels over the next 20 years.

The construction of wind and solar farms comes with a price. Right now, the energy to build them comes from fossil fuels. It’s estimated (in a 2013 paper that gets cited a LOT by the PV industry) that GLOBAL PV electrical generation “broke even” with the energy required for Global PV production sometime in 2020.

This usually surprises people. Most people don’t think about where the energy required to make PV solar panels, like those shown above, comes from. Or how much is required.

In Climate Action Resistance (CARs) circles they still preach that it requires more energy to make a PV solar panel than it generates during its lifespan. In their world, the solar energy array shown above actually makes things worse. To them it’s a “woke boondoggle” because it required more energy to make than it will generate.

This is not true.

Since 2012 PV Solar Panels generate enough electricity in about four (4) years to equal the amount of energy required for their manufacture. Panels are estimated to have a 20-25 year lifespan (it’s an estimate, we won’t know for sure until 2032 when we can see how the panels made in 2012 held up).

The new generation of PV Solar Panels is the first that produces more energy than was required to manufacture them. In “FUSION” terms, 2012 was their “ignition” point. Their deployment worldwide has exploded and the amount of energy produced by PV has soared.

BUT, IT WASN'T UNTIL 2020 THAT THE ENERGY PRODUCED BY ALL OF THE PV INSTALLATIONS GLOBALLY ROUGHLY EQUALED THE ENERGY REQUIRED TO PRODUCE THOSE INSTALLATIONS. Very little of that energy is powering the PV manufacturing process. That’s a BIG problem.

We need a Global Plan for how to allocate PV Solar Cells. Because right now, even though they generate more energy than they require to manufacture, the energy used to make them is putting even more CO2 into the atmosphere.

Right now, every PV Solar Panel made is making the Climate Crisis WORSE.

Because they wear out in 20-25 years.

But the CO2 generated in making them will warm the Earth for roughly 10,000 years.

According to a new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Adapting to increasing climate risks while deploying renewables to stabilize the climate will require large amounts of energy and materials, which will initially cause emissions. Fossil fuel energy use to deploy renewables contributes the vast majority of embedded emissions, with a much smaller contribution from adaptation.

As a result, embedded emissions increase substantially for slower decarbonization pathways.

However, when renewables are rapidly deployed, the ongoing transition can be powered by cleaner energy, minimizing embedded emissions. Our results demonstrate an underappreciated benefit of enhanced climate ambition and the importance of accounting for embedded transition emissions to achieve climate objectives.

Translation:

What we should be doing is allocating ALL of the new PV produced to powering the PV industry. The PV industry needs to be powered by renewables so that it doesn't contribute to the global CO2 level. Until we do this, we will continue to make the situation worse.

We need a “coordinated global plan” for how we allocate PV renewable resources, other than “sell them to the highest bidders”. Because they are not unlimited and how we use them makes a BIG difference.

MEANWHILE

A report was released, The Impacts of Climate Disinformation on Public Perception that found.

Fox News remains a significant source of false and misleading information about the climate crisis, fueling unfounded public skepticism in a way that could even inspire violence against policymakers who advocate for strong climate action.

The report included a scientific survey on the media consumption habits of thousands of people in six different countries: Brazil, Australia, India, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. It found that Americans, especially those who regularly watch Fox News, are the most likely among the study’s participants in all six countries to hold false beliefs about global warming.

Americans are the most likely people in the world to hold false beliefs about Global Warming.

The report found that people who watch Fox News at least five times a week, were far more likely than the general public to believe a host of false climate narratives. Including that renewable energy sources are unreliable and more expensive at generating electricity than fossil fuels and that the world’s science community is still debating the cause of global warming.

These findings, show that climate misinformation remains a rampant problem around the world and continues to be disproportionately spread by right-wing media. If more isn’t done to address the issue, they said, those false narratives will continue to hinder constructive debate and action.

“The misconception around climate change is too widespread and significant to ignore,” Erika Seiber, a press officer with environmental nonprofit Friends of the Earth and a spokesperson for the coalition that produced the report, said in an interview.

“One quarter of Americans think that climate change is a hoax, a consistent and false talking point from Trump and the GOP. We can’t do much to address the climate crisis with this level of discrepancy over reality.”

Meanwhile

Things are rapidly getting worse.

That’s how many metric tons of carbon dioxide are expected to be released into the atmosphere by the end of the year, according to a new analysis. This breaks the global record in 2019 and makes it 50 percent likely the planet will warm to a Global average of 1.5 degree Celsius in the next nine years.

Which Means we can can expect more of this.

Damage from Hurricane Ian in Florida, 2022.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tracks weather-related disasters in the U.S. that cause more than a billion dollars’ worth of damage.

According to NOAA.

In the 1980’s the U.S. saw an average of 3 such disasters per year.

In the 1990's, the average was 5 per year.

In the 2000’s, the average was 6 per year.

In the 2010’s, the average was 12 per year.

In 2020, a record-shattering 22 disasters costing more than a billion dollars struck the country.

In 2022 we matched that number.

MEANWHILE

Saudi Arabia plans to sell oil for decades — regardless of climate impacts

Saudi Arabia is trying to rapidly green its domestic economy — while opting to sell more of its oil abroad in coming decades and defying calls from climate scientists, The New York Times reported.

This strategy aims to keep the world “hooked” on oil. By sowing doubt about electric cars and marketing oil to the developing world as their most certain energy source for growing their economies.

MEANWHILE

The US will have to engage in a massive rebuilding of its infrastructure and electrical grid. While a “population shock” reduces the number of workers available.

In just four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, due to a rolling demographic aftershock of the Great Recession of 2008.

Traumatized by uncertainty and unemployment, people decided to stop having kids during that period. Even as we climbed out of the recession, the birth rate kept dropping.

We will soon start seeing the consequences on college campuses everywhere. Classes will shrink, year after year, for most of the next two decades. People in the higher education industry call it “the enrollment cliff.”

Think the labor shortage is bad now. It’s about to get a whole lot worse. Just when we desperately need workers.

For The “Great Electrification”

If you add up all the energy America uses in a year and you divide that by the total number of Americans, the result is per-capita consumption. The figure comes to about eighty thousand kilowatt hours.

Toss in the energy used to manufacture the goods imported into the U.S., and the Per Capita energy consumption for Americans rises to almost a hundred thousand kilowatt hours each.

To put this in terms of power, Americans EACH consume roughly eleven thousand watts every moment of every day. A string of incandescent Christmas lights uses about forty watts. It’s as if each of us had two hundred and seventy-five of these strings wrapped around our bodies, like the chains around Scrooge, burning 24/7.

This every-day-is-Christmas level of consumption,means that annual emissions in the U.S. run to sixteen metric tons of CO2 per person.

Americans don’t have the world’s highest per-capita emissions — that dubious honor goes to Kuwaitis and Qataris — but we’re up there.

Per-capita consumption in Thailand and Argentina runs to around two and a half thousand watts and emissions to around four tons.

Ugandans and Ethiopians use a hundred watts and emit a tenth of a ton.

Somalis consume a mere thirty watts and emit just ninety pounds.

This means that an American household of four is responsible for the same emissions as sixteen Argentinians, six hundred Ugandans, or a Somali village of sixteen hundred.

Now here’s the essential question. Are we going to build enough renewables in the next 20 years for everyone in the world to live like Americans currently do, or are American’s going to have to use less?

What’s the narrative we want to hear?

“Narratives are socially constructed ‘stories’ that make sense of events,” thereby lending “direction to human action.” So observes a paper published recently in the journal Climatic Change by a team of European researchers.

Climate-change narratives, the team notes, typically foreground “doom and gloom.” Often they emphasize risk. If they’re not retelling the latest warming-related disasters (fires, floods, food shortages), they’re predicting a future filled with even grimmer warming-related disasters (bigger fires, more severe flooding, famines that threaten entire regions).

Which sounds like “Climate Realism” to me.

This approach, the researchers argue, can be counterproductive.

“Narratives of fear can become self-fulfilling prophecies.” If people believe that things will only get worse, they feel overwhelmed. If they feel overwhelmed, they’re apt to throw up their hands, thus guaranteeing that things will only get worse.”

They argue that a diet of bad news leads to paralysis, which yields yet more bad news. What’s needed instead, are narratives that “empower people to act.”

Such narratives tell a “positive and engaging story.” They “articulate a vision of ‘where we want to go’ ” and outline steps that could be taken to arrive at this hypothetical destination.

The researchers argue that positive stories can become self-fulfilling.

People who believe in a brighter future are more likely to put in the effort required to achieve it. When they put in that effort, they make discoveries that hasten progress. Along the way, they build communities that make positive change possible.

“Optimism is a choice,” notes Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who led the effort to get the Paris climate accord approved in 2015.

“Do you know of any challenge that mankind has had in the history of humankind that was actually successful in its achievement that started out with pessimism, that started out with defeatism?”

However, False Hope is also “Disinformation”

“The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast.” So observes Vaclav Smil, a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba.

The observation could apply to almost anything. But Smil, who has written more than a dozen books about energy and society, is concerned with the gap between the aspiration to fight climate change and the immense on-the-ground effort entailed in actually doing so.

He argues that studies that purport to show how the world could radically reduce or eliminate its carbon emissions by one date or another, tend to presuppose what they claim to be proving.

To arrive at the conclusion they want, they rely on a variety of unreliable assumptions. The most common are these.

That existing technologies will be deployed at fantastic rates.

That nonexistent technologies will be deployed at fantastic rates

That humanity’s ever-growing appetite for energy will suddenly be curbed and everyone will voluntarily adopt a “low energy” lifeway.

Smil labels such studies “the academic equivalents of science fiction.”

Consider “green concrete.”

As promising as a company like CarbiCrete may be, the niche it fills is a narrow one. Since it has to be cured in chambers filled with concentrated CO2, CarbiCrete can’t be poured at a work site. It can be used only for pre-cast products, such as cinder blocks or patio tiles.

Although the blocks and tiles absorb CO2 as they harden, a great deal of CO2 is released in the process of producing the slag that went into making them. The company uses the slag produced by the steel industry.

Globally, the steel industry is responsible for roughly the same number of tons of emissions as the concrete industry, roughly three billion.

Cleaning up one industry by using the waste products of another sounds good. But, if “carbicrete” became the new cement that leaves us still producing three billion tons of CO2 in order to make the slag we need for the carbicrete.

To say that amazing work is being done to combat climate change and to say that almost no progress has been made is not a contradiction; it’s a simple statement of fact.

At the time of the Rio summit in 1992, fossil fuels provided roughly eighty per cent of the world’s PRIMARY ENERGY.

Thirty years later, fossil fuels still provide roughly eighty per cent of the world’s PRIMARY ENERGY.

In the meantime, total global energy use has increased by almost two-thirds.

As Smil puts it, “The inertia of large, complex systems is due to their basic energetic and material demands as well as the scale of their operations.”

This is really important to understand because the “hopium” Climate Writers always want to breathlessly tell you how “cheap” renewables have become. How “the market” has priced fossil fuels out of competition with renewables.

They always want to convince you that it’s inevitable renewables will replace fossil fuels over the next 30 years.

The reality is that all of the renewables installed over the last 30 years. Haven’t reduced the percentage of the world’s PRIMARY ENERGY that comes from fossil fuels even 1%.

All of the renewables installed over the last 30 years haven’t even kept up with the massive increase (of about 70%) in electricity usage.

As long as demand for electricity keeps increasing, our current level of renewable replacement for fossil fuels will keep falling behind. Until that 80% number starts coming down, we aren’t winning, we’re just running in place as things get worse.

Here’s a really important example.

The U.S.’s power grid has been called “the largest machine ever built by man.” It comprises more than eleven thousand generating plants, more than six hundred thousand miles of high-voltage transmission lines, and some six million miles of distribution lines.

Several recent studies claim to show that decarbonizing the the US Power Grid in the “nearish”” future is feasible. All of them, as per Smil, involve a certain amount of “science fiction”.

They describe what is “technically possible” while glossing over the barriers to implementation.

These barriers, are huge. Some are economic, some are legal, some are logistical, some are political, and some are legal-logistical or economic-legal-logistical-political.

Take what’s been called the “transmission quagmire.”

To clean up America’s grid, it’s not enough to build new generating capacity, or even new generating capacity plus new storage capacity. Power has to be transported from places that have a lot of wind and sun to urban centers that use a lot of electricity.

Decarbonizing the grid will, by one estimate, demand more than a million miles of new transmission lines. The cost of stringing all these lines will, by another estimate, come to more than two trillion dollars.

Does that give you a sense of how laughably inadequate the great victory of Biden’s IRA “win” is? He went to COP27 and touted the US commitment of $375 Billion for infrastructure projects as “massive”.

We are on the brink of Global Warming causing catastrophic failures in the global food supply. We don’t have time for this “penny ante” investment.

Reaching net zero in the U.S. will require building out the transmission system while, at the same time, expanding its capacity so that hundreds of millions of cars, trucks, and buses can be run on electricity. It will require installing tens of millions of public charging stations on city streets and even more charging stations in private garages.

The challenge of electrifying vehicles like trucks isn’t necessarily the electricity, as even under worst-case scenarios electrifying vehicles won’t put a massive dent in the electricity supply. The acute problem is how to deliver that electricity to them.

It’s estimated that a new truck recharging station might require a connection to the grid that can handle 5 megawatts. Which would take years to build and cost tens of millions of dollars.

If we electrify the trucking industry as planned. In 2030, a highway plaza charging stop will require about the same amount of electricity as an outdoor sports stadium, and by 2035 could require as much electricity as a small town.

Just assembling the electric cars and trucks planned will necessitate extracting massive amounts of nickel and lithium for their batteries. Which will mean siting new mines, either in the U.S. or abroad.

The new cars and trucks will themselves have to be manufactured in an emissions-free manner. Which will involve inventing new methods for producing steel or building a new infrastructure for capturing and sequestering carbon.

Otherwise every new EV produced MAKES THE CO2 PROBLEM WORSE.

The list goes on and on. The fossil-fuel industry will essentially have to be dismantled, and millions of leaky and abandoned wells sealed.

Concrete production will have to be re-engineered. The same goes for the plastics and chemicals industries. Currently, ammonia, a critical component of fertilizer, is produced from natural gas, so the fertilizer industry will also have to be refashioned.

Practically all the boilers and water heaters that now run on oil or gas, commercial and residential, will have to be replaced. So will all the gas stoves and dryers and industrial kilns.

The airline industry will have to be revamped, as will the shipping industry.

Farming is responsible for roughly ten per cent of America’s greenhouse-gas emissions, mostly in the form of nitrous oxide and methane. (Nitrous oxide is a by-product of fertilizer use; methane is released by rotting manure and burping cows.) These emissions, too, will have to be eliminated.

All of this MUST be done in the next 10–25 years on a Global scale. We waited until the very last minute to start and now we have to do “everything, everywhere, all at once”.

Because, if WE don’t do this All Together. We will ALL burn, Together.

Officially, the U.S. is committed to reaching net zero by 2050. But no one really knows if this is possible in the real world.

Because Zeroing out emissions means rebuilding the U.S. economy completely.

Most Americans don’t want to hear this reality. In early July of 2022, at a time when much of the country was baking in ninety-five-degree-plus heat, the NYT took a poll of registered voters.

Asked to name the most important problem facing the nation.

Twenty per cent of the respondents said the economy.

Fifteen per cent said inflation.

Eleven per cent said partisan divisions.

Only one per cent said climate change.

Among registered Republicans, the figure was zero per cent.

As I look back at the last 50 years I wonder whether optimism and false hope lies at the heart of the problem. For the last fifty years we have lived as if someone, or some technology, were going to rescue us from ourselves.

We have lived for the last 50 years as if the “FUTURE” would always be there for our children and grandchildren.

We are still living that way now. We are still “hoping” that things will “be OK”.

In a speech scolding E.U. politicians, Greta Thunberg observed.

“You can’t just sit around waiting for hope to come,” “Then you’re acting like spoiled, irresponsible children. You don’t seem to understand that hope is something you have to earn.”

Whatever we might want to believe about the future, there are physical limits to how much we can “course correct” at this point. We have been monumentally stupid and let the Fossil Fuel Elites enrich themselves while destroying the planet we live on.

Now, we are up against the wall and things are about to get a lot worse.

These next few years are our last chance to shape what kind of world our grandchildren of 2100 live in. Right now, we are squandering them.

Right now, we are talking about WAR.

This is my analysis.

This is what I see.

This is my “Crisis Report”.

-rc 03012023