Chapter 18: Fight Carbon with Better Information
This is Chapter 18 from free climate book A Plan to Save the Planet.
Journalists often ignore decarbonization costs and ignore decarbonization scales when discussing climate solutions. Below are several examples.
Example #1: Electricity Vehicles
Approximately 2.8M EVs and Plug-in EVs were sold in the U.S. between 2010 and 2022. Each reduces CO2 by approximately 3.6 tons a year; therefore, the total CO2 reduction is 10 million tons each year (2.8M x 3.6t). The U.S. emits approximately 5 billion tons of CO2 each year. Therefore, EV production over the last 12 years has only reduced it by 1/500th (10Mt / 5Gt).
The total cost of EV lifetime ownership has been thousands of dollars more than gas cars, partly due to replacement battery costs. If one divides this additional cost by the amount of CO2 reduced, one can see hundreds of dollars for each ton of CO2 reduced. This is much higher than many other decarbonization options.
Example #2: Green Electricity
According to NREL, U.S. electricity costs are ~3¢/kWh with solar farms and land-based wind farms, ~5¢/kWh with solar panels on commercial buildings, ~6¢/kWh with offshore wind farms, and ~9¢/kWh with solar panels on homes. In other words, some sources are cheap, and others are less so. These costs tend to decrease over time, but their ratios change little since the more costly sources are also more difficult to implement.
Consumers rarely buy a product at a high price when they can get it for less. Therefore, higher-cost options are less likely to scale up appreciably.
Misdirection to Make Money
Groups and individuals sometimes provide incorrect or incomplete information to make money. This includes: (a) companies that sell products or services, (b) special interest groups with agendas, (c) professors who promote research to increase funding, (d) shareholders who talk the talk to increase share price, and (e) entrepreneurs who raise capital. These biases sometimes affect reports in national media, published papers, websites, and books.
Where Does One Go for Good Information?
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are tasked with providing unbiased and accurate information. EIA's annual energy and emissions reports, NREL's data on electricity, and NREL's data on vehicles are all good sources of information. Almost all of the numerical data in this book was derived from these sources.
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Prior to writing this book, Weinreb published 30 articles on climate solutions for decarbonization engineers. They need accurate and unbiased information to do their work, and therefore rely heavily on EIA and NREL.
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