The sheer complexity of climate change stops most solutions in their tracks. How do we give up fossil fuels when energy is connected to everything, from great-power contests to the value of your pension? Global economic growth depends on consumption, but that also produces the garbage now choking the oceans. To give up cars, coal, or meat would upend industries and entire ways of life. Faced with seemingly impossible tradeoffs, politicians dither and economists offer solutions at the margins, all while we flirt with the sixth extinction.
That’s why humanity’s last best hope is the young science of complex systems. Quitting coal, making autonomous cars ubiquitous, ending the middle-class addiction to consumption: all necessary to head off climate catastrophe, all deemed fantasies by pundits and policymakers, and all plausible in a complex systems view.
In his new book A Climate Policy Revolution: What the Science of Complexity Reveals about Saving Our Planet, Roland Kupers shows how we have already broken the interwoven path dependencies that make fundamental change so daunting. Consider the mid-2000s, when, against all predictions, the United States rapidly switched from a reliance on coal primarily to natural gas. The change required targeted regulations, a few lone investors, independent researchers, and generous technology subsidies. But in a stunningly short period of time, shale oil nudged out coal, and carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 10 percent. Kupers shows how to replicate such patterns in order to improve transit, reduce plastics consumption, and temper the environmental impact of middle-class diets. Whether dissecting China’s Ecological Civilization or the United States’ Green New Deal, Kupers describes what’s folly, what’s possible, and which solutions just might work.
Dan Lennon
March 23, 2020 @ 6:52 pm
The replacement of coal with natural gas is not a good parallel to the challenges inherent in switching from fossil fuels to renewables. (I[‘m leaving nuclear out because of the irrational fear that has kept it on the sidelines for 40 years.) Easy math will tell you that you need at least10 million 2MW wind turbines or 20 million 2MW solar farms or some combination to replace current energy consumption. For discussion purposes, let’s say we go with a 50/50 arrangement – 5 million wind turbines and 10 million solar farms. In order to get these built by 2050 we would have to build 1,000 wind turbines a day and 2,000 solar farms a day. And we would have to replace them every 20 years. And we would have to build a global infrastructure of energy storage facilities. Assuming we want to backup 25% of the renewable energy produced (based on the EIA forecast), we would need capacity equal to 180 million plants like the one Tesla build at the Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia. And we would need to replace all 1.3 billion vehicles on the road with electric vehicles and build a global network of charging stations for them. And we would need to treble the size of the global electric grid and upgrade it to electronically perform sophisticated load balancing. And we would need to convert all non-electric applications (in addition to cars) to electricity (eg – gas heat must become electric heat) which entails a huge infrastructure change in the retail, commercial, and industrial sectors. How is all this even remotely doable?