Read Online Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming by McKenzie Funk - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: McKenzie Funk
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expires in 2012, a meaningful international carbon-trading framework with robust verification and accreditation emerges from the patchwork of regional and city-city schemes.” By 2050, under Blueprints, the vast majority of coal- and gas-fired power plants in the world’s richest countries would have CCS, reducing overall emissions by up to 20 percent.
Jeremy Bentham, the British theater enthusiast and former head of Shell Hydrogen who now sits in Wack’s and Schwartz’s seat leading the scenarios team, later explained to me why having a carbon price would be crucial to having CCS. “A rule of thumb is that a one-gigawatt coal-fired power plant costs $1 billion,” he said, “and it’s another billion to equip it with CCS. There’s no return on that second billion unless you have carbon dioxide pricing.” There was another rule of thumb to keep in mind. “Once something is technically and commercially proven,” he said, “it will then grow at double-digit figures.” But 25 percent growth per year, projected over thirty years, was still minuscule. “That’s just 1 percent of the global energy system,” he continued, “because the global energy system is so large.” In other words, Blueprints, Shell’s hopeful scenario, was only so hopeful. “The best climate outlook, pushed to extremes of plausibility, was Blueprints,” he told me. “Blueprints was a 3.5-degree kind of outlook. I think we can be open about the fact that we hope for something more, but we have to think about what it’s like to operate in a world that’s on that trajectory. Ocean-level rises. Climatic turbulence, storms, and whatnot. I used to be a physicist. The more energy you’re capturing in any fluid, the more turbulent would be the behavior.”
The companion to Blueprints, Scramble, described an even scarier future—and one that has seemed closer to reality in the half decade since. Its world’s key feature is that it is reactive: “Events outpace actions.” Countries keep burning coal and oil deposits, racing one another for them, emitting more and more carbon, and changing course only when nature forces them to. “Policymakers pay little attention to more efficient energy use until supplies are tight,” wrote van der Veer. “Likewise, greenhouse gas emissions are not seriously addressed until there are major climate shocks.”
In the early years of Scramble, despite some “turbulence,” the global economy continues to grow. “National governments, the principal actors in Scramble,” Bentham’s team explained, “focus their energy policies on supply levers because curbing the growth of energy demand—and hence economic growth—is simply too unpopular for politicians to undertake.” Much of the energy powering these unfettered times comes from coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, which emits twice as much carbon as does gas and nearly a third more than does oil: “Partly in response to public pressures for ‘energy independence,’ and partly because coal provides a local source of employment, government policies in several of the largest economies encourage this indigenous resource. Between 2000 and 2025, the global coal industry doubles in size, and by 2050 it is two and a half times as large.”
In their hunger for energy, the nations of Scramble also turn to biofuels. These compete with agricultural production, especially in the corn-growing regions of the world, and drive up global food prices. Biofuels importers inadvertently encourage poorer nations to destroy rain forests in order to grow palm oil or sugarcane, resulting in major emissions of the CO 2 stored in the soils of the former forests. Investors also pour “more and more capital into unconventional oil projects”—such as Canada’s tar sands—that are opposed by environmental groups for their high emissions and water use.
In Scramble, climate campaigners get louder, but “alarm fatigue afflicts the general public. International discussion on
Jeremy Bentham, the British theater enthusiast and former head of Shell Hydrogen who now sits in Wack’s and Schwartz’s seat leading the scenarios team, later explained to me why having a carbon price would be crucial to having CCS. “A rule of thumb is that a one-gigawatt coal-fired power plant costs $1 billion,” he said, “and it’s another billion to equip it with CCS. There’s no return on that second billion unless you have carbon dioxide pricing.” There was another rule of thumb to keep in mind. “Once something is technically and commercially proven,” he said, “it will then grow at double-digit figures.” But 25 percent growth per year, projected over thirty years, was still minuscule. “That’s just 1 percent of the global energy system,” he continued, “because the global energy system is so large.” In other words, Blueprints, Shell’s hopeful scenario, was only so hopeful. “The best climate outlook, pushed to extremes of plausibility, was Blueprints,” he told me. “Blueprints was a 3.5-degree kind of outlook. I think we can be open about the fact that we hope for something more, but we have to think about what it’s like to operate in a world that’s on that trajectory. Ocean-level rises. Climatic turbulence, storms, and whatnot. I used to be a physicist. The more energy you’re capturing in any fluid, the more turbulent would be the behavior.”
The companion to Blueprints, Scramble, described an even scarier future—and one that has seemed closer to reality in the half decade since. Its world’s key feature is that it is reactive: “Events outpace actions.” Countries keep burning coal and oil deposits, racing one another for them, emitting more and more carbon, and changing course only when nature forces them to. “Policymakers pay little attention to more efficient energy use until supplies are tight,” wrote van der Veer. “Likewise, greenhouse gas emissions are not seriously addressed until there are major climate shocks.”
In the early years of Scramble, despite some “turbulence,” the global economy continues to grow. “National governments, the principal actors in Scramble,” Bentham’s team explained, “focus their energy policies on supply levers because curbing the growth of energy demand—and hence economic growth—is simply too unpopular for politicians to undertake.” Much of the energy powering these unfettered times comes from coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, which emits twice as much carbon as does gas and nearly a third more than does oil: “Partly in response to public pressures for ‘energy independence,’ and partly because coal provides a local source of employment, government policies in several of the largest economies encourage this indigenous resource. Between 2000 and 2025, the global coal industry doubles in size, and by 2050 it is two and a half times as large.”
In their hunger for energy, the nations of Scramble also turn to biofuels. These compete with agricultural production, especially in the corn-growing regions of the world, and drive up global food prices. Biofuels importers inadvertently encourage poorer nations to destroy rain forests in order to grow palm oil or sugarcane, resulting in major emissions of the CO 2 stored in the soils of the former forests. Investors also pour “more and more capital into unconventional oil projects”—such as Canada’s tar sands—that are opposed by environmental groups for their high emissions and water use.
In Scramble, climate campaigners get louder, but “alarm fatigue afflicts the general public. International discussion on
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