Real Emissions Reductions
According to Yale University in December of 2023, 72% of Americans think global warming is happening, and 64% of Americans are worried about it. 58% think it is caused mostly by human activities.
Under half think it’s going to get us personally.
As of this writing, in October of 2024, there are three active hurricanes at one time in the Atlantic basin. This is the first time this has happened since humans have had the technology to know if and where active hurricanes existed.
Last week Hurricane Helene created major disasters for the residents of Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina and North Carolina.
Hurricane Milton is forecast to land on Florida’s Gulf Coast tomorrow. (Author’s note: it did.)
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On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen spoke to the United States Senate regarding the then current state of knowledge regarding global warming and its direct link to burning fossil fuels and the resultant CO2 exhaust emissions. To summarize, we were in trouble already and it was getting worse fast.
Not to minimize Hansen’s work, but this was 92 years after Svante Arrhenius used the principles of physical chemistry to show that a doubling of Earth’s atmospheric C02 would result in a temperature increase of 5 to 6 degrees Celsius1, and 132 years after Eunice Newton Foote became the first published researcher to demonstrate that CO2 and water vapor in the atmosphere captured energy in the form of heat, and to hypothesize that increasing atmospheric CO2 and water vapor would directly result in increases in surface temperature2. Hansen was right, but he wasn’t the first to figure this out, nor was he the first to be largely ignored for his work.
Four years after Hansen spoke to the Senate, in March of 1992, the UN formed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC. This framework has, by now, been ratified by 197 nations.
Two years after it was created, the UNFCCC “came into force,” whatever that means.
Four years later, in December of 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was signed. Considered the first global commitment to reining in the emissions responsible for global warming, it was not to go into effect for another 7 years, until February of 2005. There were 192 parties to the Kyoto Protocol in 2020.
Since the UNFCCC, there have been 28 consecutive numbered meetings called Conference(s) of Parties, or COPXX . One memorable event occurred at COP21 in Paris in 2016, the signing of the Paris Agreement.
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Beginning in 1958, building on the work of Foote, Arrhenius, and others, and using an atmospheric carbon measurement device which he had developed at CalTech, Charles David Keeling began collecting and recording samples of atmospheric carbon daily at a base he had developed on Mauna Loa in Hawaii, some two miles above sea level. He observed the recurrent seasonal variations caused by photosynthesis during northern hemisphere summers, and he observed that over time both peaks and valleys were trending steadily higher. By 1961 Keeling was able to produce the first iteration of the Keeling Curve, showing that concurrent with the seasonal variations in atmospheric CO2 there was also a steady, year over year, increase to both peaks and valleys.
In the early 1960s the National Science Foundation stopped funding Keeling’s work, calling the outcome “routine.” In spite of this, the Foundation used his work in a 1963 document warning of rapidly increasing heat-trapping gases.
In 1965, President Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee warned, again, about the steady increase in heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
Keeling died in 2005 at 77 years of age but his work has continued, giving us the longest continuous record of atmospheric carbon in the world. Keeling’s recorded measurements show an unbroken exponential growth in atmospheric CO2. It is not unreasonable to extrapolate this curve back to the introduction of concentrated energy machines in the late 1700s with coal burning steam engines.
Here is an image of the Keeling Curve in blue, overlaid on a quadratic trendline for the same years in red. This image of the Keeling Curve begins in 1959, one year after he began collecting samples, and extends to 2024. It is easy to see that all the meetings, all the agreements, and all the actions taken with respect to the meetings and agreements, have had no measurable effect
.Here is the original Keeling Curve which shows the annual cycle.
If it was a priority of any developed society to reduce emissions, we could literally start tomorrow. We know what we burn fossil fuels to do. We know what sectors of our lives require the most energy, and we know what forms of energy they demand.
The way to reduce emissions is to lower energy throughput. Not “fossil fuels.” Energy. We get the vast majority of our energy by burning fossil fuels. Want to lower emissions? Burn less fossil fuels. Want to burn less fossil fuels? Demand less energy.
Yes, it really is that simple.
A national 55 mph speed limit would immediately reduce emissions by easily 100 million pounds of CO2 a year.3 A national 35 mph limit would reduce them farther.
We wanted to win WWII badly enough, that is, winning WWII was a high enough priority to us, to implement a national 35 mph speed limit. If reducing emissions was a priority we could do it tomorrow.
In the United States, the number one use of energy is in transportation. A close second is industry.
The boxes to the left represent sources of energy. The pink boxes to the right represent end uses. The orange box in the middle shows the conversion of various forms of energy from the left hand column into electromotive force, electricity.
The light and dark gray boxes and lines at the far right represent energy lost in the various processes, (rejected energy) also known as an increase in entropy and inevitable under the laws of thermodynamics, and energy which transferred through to accomplish work (energy services.)
The colored lines crossing the graph represent the distribution of energy from the left hand column into intermediate use (orange box) and end uses (pink boxes.)
The energy total in the graph is 100.3 quadrillion BTUs. For easy calculation, disregard the three tenths of a quad and all quantities represented by numbers in boxes or along lines can be read as percentages of the total.
In the US (as of 2022) transportation and industry consume 53.2% of all our energy. In spite of this fact, much of the typical US climate conversation focuses on reducing home energy consumption. Discussions of heat pumps and stoves focus almost entirely on homes. Homes in the United States consume 12.3% of all our energy.
If, magically, tomorrow, all homes in the US were 100% zero emissions, we would still use 87.7% of all the energy we use today. We would still burn more than 87% of the fossil fuel we burn today. Homes are the most electrified sector of our economy, the most electrified part of our lives. Of the 12.3% of our energy that goes into our homes, 5.19% - almost half - of that total is already electricity. 42% of our home energy is electricity. If every home in America ran on 100% electric energy, since roughly 55% of our electricity is generated with fossil fuel powered heat engines, we would still emit 92.9 percent if the CO2 we emit today.
To reduce emissions by meaningful amounts we must address our highest emissions sources first. A modest reduction to either transportation or industrial energy throughput would benefit us more than totally zeroing out home emissions.
We have been told, assured, convinced, that the way to reduce emissions is to build things which will operate without directly requiring fossil fuels. Transition. The national and global conversation on emissions focuses entirely on doing the same tasks but miraculously doing them without burning fossil fuels. Any respectable “what we must do” article from virtually any source comes down to “transition” to “carbon free energy.”
We’ve been on this road for ~40 years. Without exception, year in and year out, the more non-emitting things we have built, the more wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, and nuclear electricity generating plants, the more fossil fuels we have burned, the more CO2 we have emitted. This fact is clearly documented worldwide.
The problem with all built solutions is that, regardless of what their intended end savings is, they begin by immediately increasing emissions from both our largest sectors. Everything we make, everything we transport, adds energy throughput to both our largest emitters.
Globally the picture is similar, but it is weighted differently. The United States has largely exported all heavy and polluting industries to Asia. Worldwide, industry is by far the largest consumer of energy, over half the total, almost 55%. Transportation, in turn, takes over half the world’s remaining energy, while global residential throughput at 12.6% isn’t significantly different from the US.
Globally, the greatest reduction in emissions would come from reducing mining, smelting, manufacturing, and industrial agriculture. The second greatest reduction in emissions would come from a reduction in transportation energy, but only if it came without an increase in industrial activity.
Building electric cars doesn’t satisfy those requirements.
Astute readers will observe that I’m not talking about fossil fuels. The only relevant topic is energy throughput. The entire conversation about living like we do today, except without fossil fuels, is fiction.
In May of 2021 John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy, inadvertently told the truth: over half of all promised technological emissions reductions, should they ever come, would come from technology not yet invented.
Kerry was savaged by the professional climate community for saying this and was never again so foolish as to admit this inconvenient fact, but fact it was and fact it remains.
A look at the Lawrence Livermore chart of US energy shows that the supposed savior energy, electricity, is heavily used in our two lowest energy sectors, commerce and residential. We focus on converting transportation to electricity based on the fact that electricity converts to rotary motion significantly more efficiently than liquid fuels do, but it ignores that fact that well over half of our electricity is generated with fossil fuels. Almost ten percent of our input energy for electricity, still as of 2023, was coal fire.
And of all the energy we convert to electricity, roughly two-thirds is lost in the generation process. So, the vast majority of the losses that electric cars are alleged to prevent have already occurred before the juice even hits the wires on the way to the newly built charging stations. (See Lawrence Livermore chart above.)
In the real world where we live, if we actually wanted to reduce emissions, the fastest three reductions available to us would be
Significant, strictly enforced reductions in speed limits.
GPS enforcement could easily approach 100% compliance. Speed five times in a day, get five tickets in the mail.
GPS speed governors could accomplish this all without anyone ever paying a single ticket.
An immediate, nationwide halt in highway & related construction
Elimination of airport expansion
Elimination of seaport expansion
Elimination of strip mall construction
An immediate cessation of new electric generation facility construction.
This would include all new utility scale generating facilities, wind, solar, nuclear, fossil fuel, hydro.
Once again, if it were a priority of developed nations to reduce emissions, non-necessary new technologies like crypto currency and AI would not be allowed to draw from an already overloaded public grid. There is no reasonable dispute that all these technologies increase fossil fuel burning. In the case of AI, the increase is in orders of magnitude.
It is worth noting that none of the real, available reductions in emissions available to us have any upfront dollar cost. They do not require tax increases, debt increases, deficit increases, nor Congressional appropriations. There are real economic costs, but they are not upfront expenditures. More on this later.
Besides these three obvious, publicly visible changes, if we choose to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the space program will have to go. This is not about whether we obtain value from the space program, this is about retaining a habitable Earth for humans and other life forms.
The industrial defense machine will also have to go. The US faces no threat greater than those which come from excess energy in the ecosystem, including fire, flood, and wind. We have been violently attacked on three of our four borders this summer by excess atmospheric energy, killing hundreds to thousands and losing multiple billions of dollars worth of infrastructure and homes.
We would be safer defending our homeland against invaders using sticks and stones than we are defending our homeland with jets, tanks, bombs and rockets against hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and fires. In sad fact, our industrial war machine has not emerged victorious from any major conflict since World War II.
It is obvious that any action to actually reduce emissions and combat climate change, let alone the overall ecosystem catastrophe which we are creating, would halt or reverse GDP growth. It is equally obvious that the priority of developed nations is economic growth. Economic growth, GDP growth, is a measure of the outcomes of a direct process of adding additional energy into the economy. In order for GDP to grow, processes must occur at higher speeds over larger scales. In order for energy throughput to shrink, processes must occur at lower speeds over smaller scales. For developed societies to combat climate change in any remotely real way requires reducing energy throughputs, i.e. reducing speeds and scales.
If we were to decide we cared, we could begin today, with gradual slowing and rethinking of what constitutes an ideal economy. The outcomes we get are the results of our value system at work.
There are many critical jobs which need to be done at a walking pace, using low energy tools, tools like shovels, rakes, and saws. Humans on foot. We need ecosystem restoration. We desperately need to police up our nationwide surface layer of plastic trash.
Currently highway construction, wind and solar energy harvesting construction, and battery based energy storage and delivery systems are funded virtually entirely with government money. Battery plant construction is subsidized heavily with government money. Electric vehicle purchases are subsidized. At the same time, fossil fuel extraction, refining, and delivery are federally subsidized. The same money could be used to fund food energy-powered, human powered, work projects employing the same populace.
What we lack is the interest. We don’t actually want to reduce emissions. We want to build new gee-whiz stuff and promise ourselves that it will miraculously result in emissions reductions someday. We’ve been at it for over a generation and every day, things are worse than the day before.
Personally I expect us to continue it. I am not able to sit by and remain silent.
It’s not working. It never will.
Footnotes
2: .org/wiki/Eunice_Newton_Foote
3: Personal calculation based on Google searches. Searches, results, and calculations are shown in a Tweet thread I wrote on what is now X. https://x.com/JeffAndDonkeys/status/1628537135887450112. It is worth noting that this calculation only considers mpg, and ignores the obvious savings of reducing miles per day. In a ten hour day, the drop from average 70 mph to 55 mph would reduce total mileage driven by 150 miles per vehicle. At 30 mpg unchanging, this would save 5 gallons per vehicle per day; at 20 mpg it would save 71/2.
At 22 pounds of CO2 per gallon, at 30 mpg, this would reduce emissions an additional 110 pounds per vehicle-day.