The good news on climate: Part 1 (Working Draft)

May contain some factual innaccuracies and poor phrasing

Something curious has started to happen in the past few years. Hyper focused technological nerds have gotten a lot more enthusiastic about climate change while policy focused people as well as newspapers have become more and more dire and more and more stressed as they talk about recent progress and COP goals and as we get further and further away from the projectsions that we are supposed to hit for net zero by 2050. Most people are pretty depressed about climate change so let me tell you a story about how I became a bit more of an optimist.

I checked out of climate change updates in about 2014 and doubly checked out in around 2016 after the election of Trump. It felt like things weren’t going quite fast enough despite best efforts in 2014, and it felt doubly dire in 2016 after the change in administrations. I was still hyper focused on the idea that US federal policy would be the major driver of climate change improvement and when I ddin’t see large changes here I simply decided that very little could be done and I should just accept that in the middle of the century, civilization might just begin to fall apart.

But I had a number of flaws in my thinking, and I have since gradually started to change my mind about the exact trajectory that we are on. The centrality of the United States in something as large and important as climate change is never assured. Governing bodies like the European Union and the Chinese Communist Party began to move full speed ahead towards solutions to climate change and some magical trends began to emerge. One trend was simply continued, and that was the dramatic lowering in price of both wind and solar panels. Here we will focus on solar panels as one of the defining technologies for green energy production that have emerged recently. Secondly is the quality of batteries as well as their energy density has begun to “take off” ever since the introduction of mass produced electric cars. Both of these trends together have led to

With these two developments, this current decade starting in 2020 has begun to see a shift. Creating energy from renewable resources is quickly becoming cheaper and easier than creating energy from sources such as coal and natural gas. Secondly providing storage for these sources and dealing with intermittency has begun to have something of a revolution. Starting with the price of batteries decreasing for electric cars simply some grid companies simply use lithium ion batteries for storage to stabilize their grid and lower the usage of natural gas peaker plants during peak grid usage times.

Clearly however, we aren’t quite there yet. Batteries are still too expensive to completely allow for a totally stable grid electrical system, worse, lithium as a battery source is fairly rare within the earth and fears of running out are an issue that we might run into if we decided to only use lithum for batteries. Fortunately this isn’t the case and newer battery storage systems that are beginning to come online with companies like form energy or antora with their rust oxide and heat batteries have the potential to offer even cheaper and longer lasting forms of electrical storage. These examples are nice as single sstories but they are emblematic of a wider truth. Solutions to a lot of problems can be found fairly quickly in modern research but are often not obvious to the lay person, or even the semi experienced expert in an area, and it is very difficult to know if an engineering difficulty could be solved easily with just easier R and D budgets and more research focus.

Indeed we appear to be on the cusp of a major tipping point, for years climate activists have pushed against the prevailing economic winds that favored drilling for oil and using natural gas and coal for fuel. Coal it seems has alredy become the first victim, coal mining and burning have entered something of a “death spiral” recently as coal simply can’t compete on price for the total amount of price per megawatt hour./ price per megajoule.

There are some criticisms as to how fast things can change and how quicly we can change our economic system to increase production of green energy as well as other sources. But Energy production increased rapidly over the 1920s to the 1970s. At about 3% per person per. Between 2022 and 2023 solar power increased 20% in total installed gigawatts. If we keep up this pace for the next two or three decades we would easily be able to create enough solar power by 2050 to cover all of the united states energy needs. However any reader who is worth their salt will note that extrapolation at this level is something of a public policy sin, especially with using exponential numbers. Proponents of exponential population growth showed that this would be a major issue despite expoential growth slowing and growth estimated to begin a long decline in around 2100 (another extrapolation).

Besides if you look at the expansion of natural gas and oil drilling from around 1920 to 1970, the massive increase of energy usage was done in around 50 years. Not a huge amount of time, but a time frame that is compareable to time frames for decarbonization globally (again only good news for someone who comes from an ultra pessimistic background). However these trends are self sustaining. Once energy becomes cheap enough from renewable resources it seems likely that these trends will become self sustaining and we will begin to see an accelleration of them before we see a saturation of them. Its quite possible that instead of a linear spinup we will see rapid decarbonization if we can only get things to a point where green energy can win on cost. As technology advances and solar becomes cheaper and more and more high performance and batteries of all forms begin to follow suit, its quite possible we will see massive shifts on the horizon in the next decade. For me this was a rallying cry, research has given us seemingly miracle solutions in the form of extremely cheap solar. If trends continue soon solar energy will become inescapable regardless of political or environmental leanings, and that gives me hope.