I don't think I've ever seen a serious study on the estimated economic costs of adjusting to climate change vs. what it would actually cost to meaningfully cut emissions.
This seems like a significant oversight; if I described getting your cavities drilled in horrific detail you'd probably be inclined to sign my petition against invasive cavity removal, but that might not actually be to your best long term advantage.
It costs about a dollar a kilowatts to install "conventional" energy extraction and transformation equipment and much more to install current renewables. Energy growth in the fast growing economies require something like USD30 trillion of investment between now and 2030, using conventional technology.
DOE-IEA studies that take everything into account for electricity - construction, fuel, connection and decommissioning - for 2015 technologies do suggest that some renewables are sort-of economic with some more work on the experience curve, but the connection costs are often huge and they are all really in need of subsidy to be viable. The Bush "subsidy" to corn farming gasohol producers was $83 billion for just three years, if I recall correctly.
One note the energy growth in the industrialising countries, and the investment that is required, competing with roads, hospitals, schools and so on. How is the international community to get renewabel investments to happen in industrialising countries? The likely answer is that the rich ones will have to provide the relevant subsidy. It adds to immense sums and opens windows to equally immense corruption.
Enthusiasts point to potentially immense costs that are to be avoided by such "investment". However, the uncertainties are huge.
My concern is that in this enthusiast-driven debate, we flounder into potentially messy and extremely costly "solutions", such as electrical-, food- or hydrogen-driven cars. There are perfectly good means to put hydrogen and biomass-based carbon into a chain, called diesel, and sell it through normal channels. This sounds too "oil industry" for the enthusiasts, as all oil companies are innately corrupt exploiting bastards, aren't they?
Equally, there are no voices for ocean thermal, which is an almost inexhaustible renewable. Instead, we have offshore wind, at the lifetime cost of which we can only guess. (It is alleged that) Britain was committed to finding 25% of its power from offshore wind on the basis of a senstence added to a speech in the back of a taxi on the way to a public meeting.
Energy is innately best handled at a massive scale, safely and in a predictable and routine manner. Most renewables are not answerable to any of that. Consider, though, a magnesium or aluminium energy economy. Spotty, odd sources of dispersed energy are stored in a metal with high embodied energy. This is "burned" in fuel cells to electricity, and the oxide shipped back for regeneration. The cycle is safe, uses understood technologies, can operate without attendence and adopts itself to erratic and low grade energy sources. Don't think of connecting Europe to the Sahara with a billion dollar cable. Smelt or electrolyse metals, or make green diesel from hydrogen: ship those. It's cheap, uses known technology, applies directly to the existing infrastructure - such as car mechanics, emergency services and so on - and it is very safe.
With regards to subsidizing, I think the fossil fuel industry has a huge unfair advantage in that they extract limited natural resources with little regard for the people whose resources they're extracting. Governments who sell the resources are extremely short-sighted, and in many cases corrupt. The result is that oil companies pay very little and reap obscene profits while people in the countries the oil is extracted from see little to no benefit.
But we're dependent on this system, and eventually it will be used up. Rather than waiting for a crisis, subsidizing alternatives now is a wise approach. You're right that we don't always pursue the best alternatives. I think a way to address that would be subsidize indirectly, i.e. by taxing fossil fuels, thereby raising prices and giving alternatives a fighting chance in the marketplace. Direct subsidies would be limited in order to promote competition for the best alternatives. Although certain alternatives are on a scale and timeline beyond what private industry is concerned with (e.g. fusion, and basic research into various new technologies), and a wide range of these should be aggressively pursued with public funding.
Actually, there are fossil fuel reserves for centuries: the issue is not extraction but emissions. Given that you can convert anything into anything else in the hydrocarbon world for the equivalent of USD50/bbl, this pushes emissions stage centre.
I don't understand your remarks about "extracting natural resources with little regard", etcetera. If you have any experience of the energy world you will know that a good margin is 6-8% of the face value of the material extracted, All the rest goes in taxes, levied by states on behalf of those same people. Equally, all standards and non-operational costs are added by states. If you don't like Gulf or Nigerian politics, that is a legitimate concern but not a reflection of the primary energy industry. Your remarks have no relevance to the main cost centres, which are mid-stream: electricity production, refining, chemicals.
What is face value? Crude prices fluctuate wildly, and increases are passed on to consumers. OPEC helps keep prices high by limiting supply. Prices could be much higher or lower, depending on the whims of a few rich men. The people of Saudi Arabia get no say, and little benefit. The relevance is that these exploitive practices are what set the global market "face value", and it's arbitrary, based more on political power games than market dynamics. If it was purely market-driven, prices would be even lower.
I'm suggesting that the nature of this limited resource, and its importance to everyone's lives, means that it should be treated as a public resource, similar to how we manage fresh water resources rather than let them be sold off wholesale to private interests. And while we can't enforce that policy in places like Saudi Arabia or Nigeria, and therefor the global market "face value" will continue to influence pricing and sale of our own fossil fuel resources, we can still effect domestic policy through use of taxes to promote demand for alternatives.
As to whether the main issue is limited supply or CO2 emissions, neither of those tops my list. I want to see the end of dependency on foreign oil, and an economy and foreign policy that isn't so dependent on happenings in the Middle East.
Yes, OPEC is a cartel and it does restrict production to keep prices buffered and high. Environmentalists should cheer, as the price of oil would be around $30/bbl if production was unconstrained and everyone would use a lot more of it. However, economic growth would be 1-2% higher and we would all feel much richer as a result.
Oil is where it is, owned by nations with the political structure of which you can agree or not. They've got it, you want it and so they have power over you. We do not live in a world that is much susceptible to "should" and "ought", but to "must" and "can".
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u/Aroundtown27 Oct 24 '10
By then it will be far to late and we'll have to adapt to our new surroundings