There is one thing I really like about this proposal. Gates believes our future depends upon scientific advances and resulting technological innovation, supported by modest and easy-to-justify infrastructure improvements. This breaks away from demand-side policy-centered approaches, yes. But more importantly -- to me, at least -- it breaks away from an over-reliance on old science.
To me, this emphasis on science AND technology -- rather than exclusively technology -- is perhaps an even more significant idea than primarily-supply-side thinking.
I think Gates' C=0 goal is probably the locus of this shift in thinking from "force mass deployment of existing technologies using the levers of policy" to "science the shit out of this, then innovate like madmen, and only then enlist public policy when it's truly the only missing piece (see: power grid example from article)".
So "demand side" means industrial efficiencies? I always thought of it as, you know, less end-usage.
Yes it's a small share of the total, and no I don't believe it's a matter of policy. It's cultural. Whose job do we think it is to "spend within our means" energy-wise? Everyone's? Or is it industry's job to just "make it work" so that we can keep black-boxing power, as we do water.
Example: I was at an airport café this morning and I noticed that the menu was displayed on three big display monitors. They were probably 42-inch screens, all showing the same static image. There were like 6 menu items, all minor variants on a cup of coffee. They were all clearly visible from every possible angle. The same job could have been done undistinguishably well by any single one of them—not to speak of a printed board.
I know, it's an airport for crying out loud. The energy used by those screens is too small to measure. What concerns me is that we (Americans at least) live in a society where someone—I would say thinks this is okay, but really just doesn't think about it at all.
So I completely agree about where our priorities should be, but I think that those levers would be easier to pull if we as a culture had a little more "mechanical sympathy."[0]
Problem is, we have no idea how long it will take to find a breakthrough technology. But we have the problem now. Do we just invest in research and pray?
> Gates doesn’t blame the paucity of miracle technologies on the absence of a price on carbon
So governments introducing no regulations or taxes around carbon pollution isn't a problem? Would he have said that about ozone depletion or SOx/NOx emissions standards?
This reads like a typical free-marketer's apology for Exxon lobbyists and paid denialists screwing up international cooperation on global warming.
I think we will require a lot more energy than ever before. To produce clean water - possibly from ocean water (desalination) - and to add more and more A/C, possibly using different technologies than today (but they'll still require energy input). Water and heat are becoming more and more of a problem for vast regions. The Middle East already is next to unlivable, setting new temperature records (which will probably be broken again and again in the foreseeable future). We can move hundreds of millions or even billions of people to more livable climate regions, we can let them die, or we can use technology - and energy, plenty of it, on a huge scale.
Neither fracking nor animal agriculture are being done in the Gulf region, or AFAIK (at least not in large scale, and not in regions without sufficient water) in the Middle East. Regions that have enough water can do whatever they want, why would I save water e.g. in Germany or Washington State (coastal region) when there's a shortage in the middle of India, how would that help? Also, I don't see the US as having a water problem - well it does, but they have the resources to do something about it whenever they wish to do so. I'm talking about regions that have a "real" problem, not just one of politics.
I've put fracking numbers to point out the comparison.
Animal agriculture is being done everywhere.
I'm doubting people are eating meat from Brazil, Australia and Denmark in US, Asia or Africa so much that these are the main dots of world animal agriculture.
I wonder what Gates thinks about the Gigafactory, whether it will result it the "magic breakthrough" for energy storage. Without it, Gates asserts we need large DC grids and a 20% gas based peaker capacity.
The story is about the new Breakthrough Energy Coalition. But there's no information on how to contact the coalition with technologies they should consider. http://www.breakthroughenergycoalition.com/en/index.html In fact, their website says this: "BEC does not accept or consider unsolicited ideas, suggestions, information, or materials of any nature whatsoever"
That doesn't necessarily mean they aren't going to solicit ideas -- either from public calls or (especially) from recognized experts.
Most grant-giving organizations don't accept unsolicited requests for money, but then regularly put out completely public solicitations for proposals on specific topics.
From the article, it sounds like 1) they already have a lot of pretty specific ideas about where to invest; and 2) they're waiting until they coalesce matching funding from other foundations to start making solicitations/rewarding grants/investing in companies.
What's he saying about a carbon tax? I found it hard to parse.
My best guess at a translation is "the USA is too politically dysfunctional to do the obvious thing that a believer in free market capitalism would do, and so instead we need to rely on pork barrel spending going to energy projects".
Problem is, good wood grows extremely slowly. Not sure if that can be genetically engineered, or if it is intrinsic to the process of growing cellulose in the right arrangements...
His piece on China about being the energy hub was interesting. I always get amazed how much China has progressed being the world's manufacturer. China and India have similar number of humans and land but China is really moving its GDP.
A ton of corn costs about $166, let's say that's half carbon. So each gigaton will cost about $300 billion, and thats just to buy the corn, not including the digging, etc.
You'd need to collect about 900 gigatons to return the atmosphere to preindustrial CO2 levels.
It's a far better idea to dump the carbon in after it has been used for it's energy and is bound up in a more stable configuration, ie biochar (a.k.a. terra preta or low temp charcoal). Biochar is stable in the soil for thousands of years, and provides a matrix on which soil organisms can thrive. There are also some indications that the biochar induces greater plant growth because the residual bio-oils and aromatic hydrocarbons cause the plants to think that there was a recent fire and this is there opportunity to take over.
But more importantly, and to your point, it is a carbon sink, and if made through gasification produces a carbon negative energy source.
Plenty of empty tankers leaving US shores, I'm sure the captains wouldn't mind having a heavier ship, and it shouldn't hurt the fuel efficiency much at all. But, mechanically, how to empty it into the sea? Put conveyers on deck and dump it over the side as you go?
I ran numbers on energy equivalence of fossil fuels to wood in a recent comment. Very roughly, a ton of coal or barrel of oil equals a cord of wood (actually somewhat more, but close enough).
Given US timber production and multiplying by five to get an estimate of global timber ... estimated fossil fuel resources are equal to about 200,000 years of global timber production.
That's a lot of wood.
Even if you're only looking at a small recoverable portion, say 10%, it's 20,000 years.
Energy translates reasonably well to carbon. There's some allowance for natural carbon sinks. But truth is we're messing with the carbon cycle in a huge way.
Because the rotting process would create methane which would seep out easily, its wasteful and ethically questionable (people are still starving, so not even using corn as fuel is pretty horrible). Storing Carbon cheaply and safely is to me an unsolved problem. Especially if you want to do it without wasting tons of minerals (before someone talks about vacuumed dried algae or stuff like that).
After transport, building materials are a large energy consumer. Coming up with alternatives to concrete, steel, aluminium, and similar materials, possibly though biologics, whether low-tech like wood, or self-forming biocrete and biobrick.
I'm aware of that (and pointed to a few examples myself).
What I'm pointing out is that energy is a means to some service goal, and in the case of construction, alternate means to ends may well obviate much the need for new energy supplies.
Or taking an alternate formulation: rather than tap energy and convert and store and transform it multiple times to accomplish some goal, employ biological means to achieve the same end with far fewer (loss-entailing) energy transforms.
Trees, plants, algae, and/or microbes, operating over a large area, accomplish a very large net throughput. The questions are whether we can manage that, what outputs are possible, at what rates, and what subsequent changes in capabilities result. I suspect no biologic will have, say, the capabilities of steel. If we're limited to masonry or ceramic-based structures, the age of the 100-storey supertower is gone, but there are a many 10-20 storey towers which might be possible, resulting in high urban densities, if that's what we want.
You're half right on the wasteful and ethically questionable part: corn is very low nutrition, and is basically junk food. Growing it at all while people are still starving is pretty horrible.
There are actually proposals to do something like that, however it's more likely to be wood, not corn.
But this has all kinds of potential issues. The likely biggest one is that whatever you want to bury needs to be grown somewhere. It needs space where things can grow, that means space and soil that can't be used otherwise to grow food. If you cut down existing trees you're likely causing more emissions than you bury. If you create even stronger competition around fertile land you also create more carbon emissions through indirect landuse changes.
So yes, this is a potential option, but it needs to be carefully weighted against potential downsides.
Fresh Kills landfill could hold about 3 gigatons of biochar at 1.5 g/cm3, assuming an average depth is 100 m. So we need 300 of those.
There are some deep canyons in the Rockies where there are very high bridges and little meaningful waterway below. I'll bet you could fit a lot more than 1 Fresh Kills in some of them.
Coal trains run those tracks. American coal cars empty from the bottom. When the coal trains are empty in Wisconsin, Chicago, etc, they have to go back to the mines anyway. They can dump the biochar in a ravine en route. just need to remove a few ties and install the coal emptier.
Wood or coal, the corn trains and timber trains deliver to similar places. Build biomass energy facilities in those rail transportation hubs. Omaha, Kansas City, Fargo, the Twin Cities.
Of course it would make more sense to just leave the coal in the ground. But humans don't do well with static equilibrium.
And you can add it to the food price: this hamburger was made from stover-fed beef. And twice the animal's feedstock in biomass was burned in biomass plants, and the biochar was sequestered.
To an extent, that actually works to sequester carbon, but it's not clear that it's the most cost-effective way to do it. Nor would people be OK with the perceived waste.
Just use the stover. And slaughterhouse cities like Omaha and Kansas City and Chicago also import their fuel and receive timber.
Let's take Omaha. Omaha Steaks could sell carbon-negative beef if the USDA inspectors can certify that 2x the carbon went into biomass energy plants. It would create demand for 3x, 4x, and 10x beef.
I see some interesting points raised here, though I also have some fundamental disagreements.
Putting those first: what we need isn't more time, or an energy miracle. It's to embrace limits, the fundamental limits of Earth's carrying capacity, and how many people, of a given material affluence, can be supported. This is a question I've been looking at for the past several years, or more accurately, I've spent much of that time trying to figure out what the fundamental question was, starting from "what are the big problems?" My answer:
How do we embrace limits to growth?
Gates raises a few really excellent points.
He dismisses the problem of not having a price on carbon. I'd return that not only is that a problem, but we've a much larger issue of not fully accounting for the creation or replacement price of the fossil fuels we've been consuming at a breakneck rate -- some 5 million years of petroleum accumulation are consumed every year. That itself is an accident and error of early economic theory (one which was very nearly corrected in the late 19th century), and of early theories, and derived law, of mineral rights law (look up the "rule of capture" for a few hours of entertainment).
His mini-biographies on Parsons and Deisel, collectively the two people who now power much of the world, was a telling rebuttal to the claim that capitalism rewards innovation. Neither man made much from their inventions, Deisel, as Gates says, committed suicide in the face of bankruptcy.
On the storage front, there is one possiblity that's open to us: liquid hydrocarbons. They're not a net energy gain, but if we're looking for a storage solution that's high-density, highly flexible, and has very long-term proven storage life (100 million years and counting), electrically-generated synfuels offer a plausible pathway. Specifically seawater-based Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis, studied for over 50 years by Brookhaven National Labs, M.I.T., and the US Naval Research Lab. There are undoubtedly complications, but it's an underconsidered option.
Also on the storage front, the Dr. Sadoway mentioned is one of the recent superstars in battery storage technology. His molten salt battery isn't something you'd want to put in a car, but with extremely abundant (cheap!) substrates, could form the basis of city-scale electrical storage. Not for hundreds of millions of years, but days to weeks, evening out supply inconsistancies for a grid dependent on intermittent renewables. The fact that this technology is facing obstacles is disheartening. It's also why I advocate both considering sustainable, carbon-neutral paths to liquid hydrocarbon fuels, and embracing limits.
I think you missed his point. The earth's carrying capacity for atmospheric co2 has already been exceeded to the point where we have to achieve zero net carbon emissions. Under that assumption, a carbon tax that is not effectively an outright ban is pointless. Also, he does advocate in the article for carbon neutral liquid hydrocarbon fuel production as one possibility although his point is more general.
No, I agree regarding CO2. I think it's also only one of multiple global binding constraints we're encountering, though possibly the greatest.
My point is that in achieving the goal of zero or negative net carbon emissions, changing the economic price structure which allows carbon emissions may prove to be an effective tool. It's not that the market solves all problems (something with which I strongly disagree), or that an unregulated market is the only option (a view I reject absolutely as absolutely false, blatantly ahistorical, and a complete misrepresentation of market theory). But markets are powerful.
At a sufficiently high level, and in the case of a carbon tax, that's likely to be exceedingly painful, the option to emit simply doesn't exist.
Bake that price structure, through both depletion amortisation (a much stronger update to Hotelling's Rule, which was based on multiple false premises), and an at-the-source sequestered carbon introduction tax, at all levels of international banking, finance, and trade, and you make it a money-losing proposition to mine coal, pump petroleum, or drill natural gas, anywhere.
When I say that the taxes would be painful, I mean increasing costs not by a few percent, but by orders of magnitude. That's going to be heavily traumatic -- it's a large part of what's exploded social unrest across the Middle East in the past five years, and is in the process of tearing Venezuela to shreds. Saudi Arabia and Russia are likely next on the block even if only present trends continue.
So yes: the carbon tax would be an outright ban, though it might take some time (~10-20 years) to fully reach that stage. I'd prefer faster. Hell, I'd prefer we'd taken this approach in 1960 when the consequences were first becoming apparent.
Infrastructure and capital take time to replace. We're looking at rebuilding an airplane in flight. I'm not at all sanguine that we'll succeed.
And: if we do address the CO2 problem, there remain numerous others, most reducing to total population and absolute average wealth (which is to say, resource consumption). Which are likely to destroy what we call modern civilisation even if we do manage the carbon crisis.
There is one thing I really like about this proposal. Gates believes our future depends upon scientific advances and resulting technological innovation, supported by modest and easy-to-justify infrastructure improvements. This breaks away from demand-side policy-centered approaches, yes. But more importantly -- to me, at least -- it breaks away from an over-reliance on old science.
To me, this emphasis on science AND technology -- rather than exclusively technology -- is perhaps an even more significant idea than primarily-supply-side thinking.
I think Gates' C=0 goal is probably the locus of this shift in thinking from "force mass deployment of existing technologies using the levers of policy" to "science the shit out of this, then innovate like madmen, and only then enlist public policy when it's truly the only missing piece (see: power grid example from article)".