Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #21 "We can’t solve climate change" with Hannah Ritchie

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Bad Idea #21 "We can’t solve climate change" with Hannah Ritchie · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

0:00
No, we are not headed for 5 or 6° of warming.
0:04
And actually it's not too late to to, to, to make a difference
0:10
here. Like I think the key, I think
0:11
the key misconception there is this notion that there's some
0:16
point of no return. And actually some people think
0:20
that point of no return or they assume that point of no return
0:22
is 1.5° or 2°. The notion that we're suddenly
0:25
going to go from 1.5 to 5° within a decade or a couple of
0:30
decades is, is not the case. That if you look at the speed at
0:35
which we can deploy many low carbon sources of energy now, in
0:38
particular solar and wind, they're growing incredibly fast
0:41
and much, much faster than we've deployed any energy source in
0:45
history. Welcome to saving the world from
0:48
bad ideas. I'm Mark Linus, and I've had a
0:51
few bad ideas in my time. I used to go out in the night
0:54
time to destroy GMO crops, and I also posed nuclear power.
0:57
But then when I looked at the science, I found I got it wrong.
1:00
Oops. I've learned the hard way that
1:02
none of us are right all the time.
1:03
So now I'm here to challenge the assumptions that we all too
1:06
often take for granted because the future depends on us getting
1:09
it right. Hello and welcome.
1:11
Today we've got Hannah Ritchie, who's deputy editor of Our World
1:16
and Data and also runs Sub Stack Sustainability by numbers.
1:20
We love numbers and data, and that's why we're delighted to
1:24
have Hannah back for a second time.
1:26
Plus she has a new book out called Clearing the Air, a
1:30
hopeful guide to Solving Climate change in 50 questions and
1:34
answers. So I thought producer Rob, who
1:36
was just asking me what today's big idea might be, that rather
1:40
than having a single bad idea that Hannah's saving the world
1:43
from, there's probably 50 because you know, Hannah.
1:46
I don't tell me whether whether I'm right.
1:48
But it seems to be like a lot of the time, the wrong answers to
1:52
the questions that you pose in the book are the ones that are
1:54
most popular and most widespread, if you know what I
1:57
mean. Yeah, I mean, the we actually
2:01
try to work out the best framing for the book.
2:04
Is it questions or as someone rightly pointed out, like a lot
2:07
of these are myths or what I might frame as half truths where
2:10
there's like there's some seed of truth to them, but the
2:13
context is missing to understand them.
2:15
But yeah, like the 50 questions are generally the 50 most common
2:20
arguments I see. I get against many of the
2:23
climate solutions that I think we need and and the world needs
2:26
to cycle climate change. So yeah, I think that's probably
2:28
a pretty accurate framing. Is that OK then producer Rob, we
2:31
have 50 bad ideas. That's handy saving role from
2:33
well, we don't have, we don't have time to obviously go
2:36
through all 50. But I thought what we could do
2:39
is, I mean there's 10 basic sections and you're going from
2:41
climate, fossil fuels, renewables, nuclear energy,
2:44
geoengineering and maybe we'll take one or two questions from
2:47
each section and see how much we can get through in in the next
2:52
hour. If you want the full Q&A, you'll
2:54
of all 50 you'll have to buy the book.
2:56
Does that sound reasonable? That sounds good, I should say.
2:59
I also did not know what the bad idea I was showing up to argue
3:02
against was. So.
3:04
I like to keep it as a surprise, mostly because I haven't thought
3:06
about it in advance. All right, let's let's kick off
3:09
the first one from the climate section, which is the way you
3:12
start the book. Obviously you're sort of setting
3:14
out the kind of landscape of where we are with climate
3:16
change. The question of isn't it too
3:17
late, You know, the, the sort of doom, sterism, the pessimism.
3:21
And in fact, you put it, aren't we heading for a 5 or 6° warmer
3:24
world? So what?
3:25
What's the your current thinking on that?
3:27
I mean, the book is pretty much framed around climate solutions,
3:30
but I've got the very first question to answer.
3:32
And one of the most common questions that I get asked is,
3:35
is there even any point in paying attention to what's the
3:38
cost of renewable energy or how much land will it need?
3:41
Because whatever we do won't make a difference.
3:43
Enemy because we're kind of at the point of no return on
3:47
climate and we're kind of heading for this scenario of 5
3:50
or 6° of warming regardless this kind of doomsday type thinking.
3:54
And the first question is really saying, no, we are not headed
3:59
for 5 or 6° of warming and actually it's not too late make
4:03
a difference here. I think the key misconception
4:05
there is this notion that there's some point of no return.
4:12
And actually some people bring that point of no return or they
4:14
assume that point of no return is 1.5° or 2°.
4:17
And therefore now that we are basically at 1.5° or very close
4:21
to it. But we're going to get tipped
4:23
into this runaway climate scenario and there's no point in
4:26
us taking action and and looking at the other 49 questions in the
4:29
book on how we actually solve this.
4:31
Yeah, I mean, I think we had a bit of this conversation with
4:33
Roger Pelka Junior actually that you know, just reminding people
4:36
at 1.5 and indeed 2 are were political targets.
4:39
It wasn't like the scientists ever came to the policy
4:42
community and said, hey guys, we've discovered a huge number
4:45
of tipping points at 1.5, therefore you need to have this
4:48
as the Paris goal. It actually emerged the other
4:51
way around. And I think 1.5 is a
4:54
suspiciously round Number as people have said same to two
4:56
degrees. It wasn't like 1.73, you know,
4:59
or something where you'd actually, you know, have have
5:03
the scientists making a very precise prediction.
5:05
So we just don't, we just don't know where most of these tipping
5:08
points are. But the, the scientists, of
5:10
course, then came round and did a whole study in the IPCC with
5:13
1.5. But it worked that way around
5:15
policy first, you know, so this was a political number and then
5:19
the science then then came in behind.
5:20
But it doesn't look like there's you know, we're going to lose
5:23
the Amazon or we're going to lose the, you know, the, the a
5:25
mark, you know, the, the the Atlantic current or, and, or
5:29
even big ice sheets at 1.5 does it?
5:32
No, not at 1.5. To be clear, we there are
5:34
tipping points there and we don't know where they are and
5:37
they took tipping points. I think there's two aspects to
5:39
them. One is the kind of physical
5:42
consequences of that particular tipping point, like the amok
5:46
shutting down would have pretty large consequences for for
5:49
climate and large parts of the planet, but in particular in
5:51
Northern Europe. Then there's another dimension
5:54
to I think tipping points, which is the increased carbon and
5:58
climate temperature impacts of that, right?
6:00
So like there are tipping points where you would say that that
6:03
would also cause a release of carbon and an increase in in
6:06
global temperatures. But for most of the tipping
6:09
points. And then that climate dimension
6:12
you're probably talking about for some of them adding a couple
6:15
of point 1.2° C for each one. So again, the risks are real and
6:22
the risks of climate change increase with temperature and
6:25
they don't necessarily increase linearly, right?
6:27
They can create increase nonlinearly.
6:29
So it's not that it's fine that we reach 2° or or more than two
6:33
degrees. The point is that there's,
6:34
there's no temperature where there's no point in US
6:37
continuing to try to take action because by doing so we reduce
6:41
risks, right? If we go past 2°, it's worth us
6:43
trying to keep below 2.2° or 2.3 because we reduce the risks at
6:47
that that level. But the notion that we're
6:50
suddenly going to go from 1.5 to 5° within a decade or a couple
6:55
of decades is is not the case. Right.
6:58
And you know, I obviously wrote a lot about this myself in in
7:01
six degrees that that was a book I published many years ago.
7:04
But you know, the emission scenarios that drive you to that
7:06
very high levels of warming. We could get into the weeds of
7:10
our CP 8.5 if you want and, and, and you know, so all of this
7:13
sort of stuff, but you know, you have to this that has to be a
7:16
world where where quadrupling or quintupling coal-fired, power
7:21
burning and you know, it's just not going to happen.
7:22
It's not plausible. We're already seeing probably
7:24
peaks in coal consumption even in China.
7:27
So, you know, the human emissions are probably Adam, you
7:30
tell me. But I think looks like they're
7:32
plateauing now and will probably fall off quite slowly.
7:35
But there's definitely not going to carry on rising all the way
7:37
through to 2085. Globally, emissions are looking
7:40
like they're approaching a peak. They've kind of been plateauing
7:42
for around a decade now. They're going up, going up very
7:45
slowly. But it looks likely that in the
7:48
next few years we might hit the peak.
7:50
It's very hard to predict a peak and I don't expect that the
7:53
downward slope is going to be that fast, but I don't think
7:56
they're going to continue to keep rising for a long time.
7:59
But there's, there is 2 dimensions to this.
8:00
One is the, the emission scenario, like how much we're
8:04
emitting. And I think they are the very,
8:05
very high scenarios are looking much less likely than they were
8:09
when you wrote six degrees. So the so the RCP 8.5 just looks
8:12
like incredibly unlikely. There's no way that we're going
8:15
to emit that much. There is another dimension which
8:17
is the concerns around what we call the equilibrium climate
8:23
sensitivity, which is how the climate responds to our
8:26
emissions. So even if our we say we go for
8:29
this metal emission scenario, you'd be could see a very
8:33
pessimistic climate response where you might get more warming
8:38
than you would have anticipated in another scenario.
8:40
So I think there is no increased concern about higher equilibrium
8:45
climate sensitivity than there was maybe even just a few years
8:48
ago. Even there if you're looking at
8:51
the distribution of potential temperatures that we we end up
8:55
at on that kind of middle scenario, we're probably heading
8:59
for around 2 1/2 to 3° at the moment.
9:02
Like we need to get that down, but that's at the moment.
9:04
And then at the tail, like there's probably like a 5%
9:07
chance that that's actually 4° because we are a more
9:10
pessimistic climate sensitivity scenario.
9:13
But the the likelihood of the four degree scenario is is is
9:17
relatively low but non 0. Right, but equilibrium, some
9:21
climate sensitivity isn't the end of the century.
9:22
It's like several centuries away, right?
9:24
Most of the ice caps and things like that time.
9:27
So anyway, we've gone down a rabbit hole here because it's
9:29
interesting on climate. This was basically, this is
9:30
basically question 1. So like to move on to Part 2,
9:34
which is about fossil fuels. There's there's a question, can
9:37
we transition to clean energy fast enough?
9:39
Do most people think that it's just going to be too slow and
9:42
therefore we're doomed because, you know, the clean energy
9:45
transition will just take far too long?
9:47
Yeah, So the the argument there is that if you look through
9:50
history and look at the energy transitions that societies have
9:53
gone through, people sometimes frame it as a global energy
9:55
transition. And I think that's probably
9:57
wrong. The world has never really gone
9:58
through a full energy transition, at least all at the
10:01
same time. Like that tends to happen in
10:03
different stages across different fields in different
10:05
parts of the world. Like we've never fully
10:07
transitioned away from wood, right.
10:09
Even though many societies rely very little on wood, many people
10:12
in the world still rely on wood. So we haven't even transitioned
10:15
away from from wood yet, but you tend to see these transitions
10:18
like from wood to coal or coal to gas.
10:21
And these tend to take a pretty long period of time, like 70
10:24
years or so in in many countries.
10:27
So the argument is that it's going to take us at least 70
10:30
years or more to then go through the transition from fossil fuels
10:33
to lower carbon sources of energy.
10:35
And therefore that's just not really compatible with the
10:38
timescales that we're trying to address climate change on.
10:40
So that's the argument that's put forward that we can't
10:42
possibly do this fast enough. The argument against that is
10:46
that if you look at the speed at which we can deploy many low
10:51
carbon sources of energy now, in particular solar and wind,
10:54
they're growing incredibly fast and much, much faster than we've
10:56
deployed any energy source in history.
10:59
And I think there are a couple of reasons for that.
11:01
One is that fossil fuels are a commodity and the energy
11:08
technologies that we're deploying today are
11:10
technologies. And they just have very, very
11:13
different fundamentals in terms of the economics, in terms of
11:16
the modularity, in terms of how quickly you can can deploy them,
11:20
especially in different countries without the levels of
11:23
infrastructure that you might need to to build out a fossil
11:27
fuel network. So I think there are fundamental
11:29
differences between this transition and many of the
11:32
transitions that have gone before, which means that I think
11:35
we can do it faster, doesn't mean we do do it faster, but I
11:37
think the potential is there for us to do it much, much faster.
11:40
And there's evidence that many countries are doing so.
11:43
Yeah. I mean, I was talking about this
11:44
with Bill McKibben, who's got a new book out called Here Comes
11:47
the Sun, which is obviously very bullish about the solar.
11:49
And you know, to a lesser extent when the solar and batteries
11:52
basically driving this enormous clean energy transition, which
11:56
is well underway in China and also in other countries in the
11:59
global S Pakistan is one that gets mentioned.
12:01
I mean, they're just buying these things dirt cheap and
12:04
sticking them on the ground, literally just plugging them in
12:06
all over the place. It does feel like, you know,
12:08
this is formed the same question by the way, but does feel like
12:10
we've passed, we've passed a kind of there's a tipping point.
12:13
Is there kind of an S curve shape in terms of how rapidly
12:16
the sort of solar and batteries aspects of the clean energy
12:19
transition can happen? Yeah.
12:20
Many of these technologies follow what's called an S curve.
12:23
And the key point about the S curve is that on the bottom of
12:27
the slope, it looks like you're making no progress, right,
12:29
Because you're that's growing extremely, extremely slowly.
12:32
And I think that's the position that we've been in, which I
12:34
think because I made people, a lot of people very, very
12:36
pessimistic about our ability to do this because they think,
12:38
well, we've been trying this for a while and it's just getting
12:41
nowhere. But then you start to reach, as
12:43
you see the kind of inflection point where things really take
12:46
off and then you get very, very fast growth and then it tails
12:49
off towards the top. Once you're reaching, you know,
12:52
8090%, that starts to slow down until you get this gradual rise
12:56
up to 100%. But I think we many countries
12:59
are around that kind of inflection point.
13:01
Some passed it like if you look at the deployment of electric
13:04
vehicles in some countries, I guess just being incredibly
13:06
rapid like Norway follows a perfect S curve and is now 96%
13:11
of new cars in Norway are our electric China.
13:15
More than half of new car sales in China are electric and you go
13:19
back to 2020, which seems really not a long that long ago it was
13:23
6%, right. So these curves can go really
13:26
really rapidly and actually keep catch a lot of people off guard
13:29
because they are still looking at the gentle slope at the
13:32
bottom until it gets to the inflection point.
13:34
A lot of people are just out of date on a lot of this stuff.
13:37
So while we're on renewable engine, this is part three.
13:40
Yeah, I thought I'd go to question 15.
13:42
What happens when the sun doesn't shine and the wind
13:44
doesn't blow? You know, it's like the classic
13:47
question, isn't it? Do they not realize that it gets
13:49
dark at night and that there won't be any?
13:51
You know, What's your answer to that?
13:53
Yeah. I mean, the variability of
13:55
renewables is very clearly a problem.
13:57
And like I should say, it was very what wanted to make very,
14:00
very clear in this book is I'm not saying that none of these
14:04
are issues, right? I'm making very clear these are
14:06
actually often issues that we need to address and the
14:10
deployment of these technologies or the solutions we deploy often
14:13
will generate new problems and for themselves, right.
14:16
But we are capable of tackling those those problems.
14:19
But when it comes to the the variability of renewables, the
14:22
key point there is that we need to fill in gaps at different
14:26
time scales, right? So you need to fill in gaps of
14:29
minutes to hours. You need to fill in gaps from
14:31
Evers to days. And then in some countries you
14:33
need to somehow fill in the gap between when you don't have
14:36
wonder and you have very, very low sun for, you know, can be
14:41
weeks or or more. And the solution to those
14:43
different time scales is slightly different, right?
14:45
And the the very short time scales, standard lithium ion
14:49
batteries do very, very well, right?
14:51
And I think many countries in the world will actually get
14:53
extremely far with just solar, wind and batteries, and they
14:57
might need a little extra or something to fill in the gap.
15:01
So, So when you say very, very far, you mean like 90 plus
15:03
percent? Yeah, of their energy.
15:05
Generally countries closer to the quarter that have better
15:08
sunlight than than than elsewhere, but I think many
15:11
countries can get pretty close to 90% or more from just solar,
15:16
wind and and batteries. And the batteries are very good
15:19
for this, these minutes to hours storage.
15:22
Then you get to the hours today's and they are the UK is a
15:27
very, very good example of this. We wouldn't be able to do wind,
15:30
solar and batteries year round, but there are a range of
15:34
solutions there, right? So you can mix it with other low
15:37
carbon sources. You can do nuclear, you can do
15:40
hydro, you could utilize geothermal.
15:43
There are other top forms of storage.
15:45
So iron redox is becoming very popular.
15:48
There's thermal battery storage which is becoming popular.
15:51
What's really underrated I think is long range transmission is
15:55
always windy or sunny somewhere. So if you can build very strong
16:01
alliances with other countries and have this long range
16:03
transmission, you can often fill in the gaps.
16:06
Hydro storage is obviously a very, very cheap and easy one to
16:10
do. In many places there's hydrogen
16:12
as a fall back. I think hydrogen is relatively
16:15
expensive as a storage solution, but but might be needed.
16:18
But the key point is that we have these options across these
16:21
different time scales. And for a given country, it's
16:24
really about picking the correct 1 based on the energy mix and
16:28
energy supplies that they have. And that's the key point there
16:32
is that there's no just one silver bullet for every country.
16:35
It really depends on the local context, but there are options
16:39
there. And this is not an excuse to not
16:41
do this, because it is a very solvable problem.
16:44
Yes. I mean, what are the objections,
16:45
and you hear this a lot from the pro nuclear crowd, is that
16:50
renewables take a lot of land. And particularly if you have to
16:52
overbuild, build a lot more solar and a lot more wind than
16:54
you're going to need because you're going to have to charge
16:56
batteries or you, you know, it's going to stop for a number of
17:00
days or weeks or whatever. So this is, well, what is this
17:03
question, this question 18 won't we run out of land to use a
17:06
solar panels and wind turbines? Like how how landing extensive
17:09
or land intensive are renewables?
17:11
I mean, the nuclear crowd are correct.
17:13
If you wanted to just build an energy supply using as little
17:17
land as possible, nuclear would be a great option, right?
17:20
You have the chart in the book and nuclear is is extremely land
17:23
efficient. So if you wanted to land spare
17:25
as much as you can as you go nuclear.
17:27
But the I think the notion that our landscapes are going to be
17:31
completely overrun with renewables or will run out of
17:33
land to do renewables is just not true.
17:36
Like for so for solar for most countries, if you wanted to
17:39
power the grid predominantly through solar, you'd be talking
17:44
you're talking about percentage points of land in most, most
17:48
countries. What?
17:49
You mean like 2 or 3% sort of thing?
17:51
Yeah, it obviously depends on the context and how much sun,
17:53
but yeah, so in some countries it can be two to 3% in less
17:57
sunny climate. So maybe a bit more, but you're
17:59
probably you're talking about less than 10% percentage points
18:03
of of land. Obviously, you can utilize
18:05
rooftops and that will reduce total land use a bit.
18:09
And then when it comes to wind, I think two things to
18:13
distinguish here, 1 is the land footprint, the amount of land
18:17
you're using for the wind, and then the visual footprint.
18:21
And I think those are very, very different things, right?
18:23
So most wind farms are built on in very rural, rural areas that
18:29
are often farms like actual agricultural farms and natural
18:32
land use of the wind. Wind farm is extremely low,
18:36
right? It's just the turbine going into
18:38
the ground. And then if there's roads that
18:40
need to be built to connect it, that's your physical land use
18:43
there is low. And the farmer can still farm
18:47
between the turbines perfectly fine.
18:49
So the the total land use there is extremely, extremely small,
18:51
like less than solar, like less than percentage points.
18:54
What most people mean is the visual footprint, right?
18:57
So it's drawing a huge perimeter around the field that has the
19:01
one's turbines and it's the one, it's the turbines and their,
19:04
their line of vision. And they're the, the, the
19:06
footprint can be pretty high, like you were talking about well
19:10
over 10 percent, 10 to 20% in many countries for a reasonable
19:14
amount of of wind power as the visual footprint.
19:17
But the total land use is is relatively small.
19:21
Yeah, I mean, I think again, referring to the conversation I
19:24
had with Bill McKibben on this this very podcast, it were, you
19:26
know, I think the era of land that's used for corn ethanol.
19:30
I don't know if you remember the the stats for this off hand, but
19:33
you know it's a which is a very inefficient use of land.
19:35
Just that would produce enough solar to to run the entire
19:38
country, right? Yeah, I did some back of the
19:40
envelopes on this and the, if you covered the land the US
19:45
currently uses for corn ethanol, which is to boost a really,
19:49
really small amount of biofuels and it's it's a car supply.
19:52
It could power the US two to three times over in terms of.
19:56
So basically it could decarbonize the US. the US
19:59
wouldn't go fully solar plus batteries.
20:01
That would be a bad idea. But the the total.
20:04
Amount of electricity produces like 2 to three times how much
20:07
EU, the US currently consumes. So it's just huge amounts of
20:11
electricity that could be produced on that, that land
20:13
that's currently not being used for very much and is doing very,
20:17
very little climate wise. Yeah, I mean, to my mind,
20:20
renewables is almost a rounding error compared to the big land
20:23
use which is. Agriculture.
20:25
Yeah, and, and livestock in particular.
20:28
Yeah, I mean, half of the world's habitable land is used
20:31
for for farming. So a renewable energy is
20:34
incredibly small compared to that.
20:36
And what's key is that again, like often you're not using the
20:41
land per SE. You're often implementing
20:45
renewable energy technologies on existing land that's still being
20:48
used for that previous purpose. So the notion that once you put
20:52
renewable energy on that land, you can't use it for anything
20:54
except renewable energy production is wrong.
20:57
Yeah, I mean, I've got solar panels in in one of our fields
21:00
and well, I could have sheep around them if I didn't hate
21:03
sheep, which I do. But as it is, they're kind of a
21:05
wildflower Meadow. So it's still, it's still an
21:07
improvement biodiversity. But hey, we should, we should
21:09
move on. Part 4 is nuclear power.
21:12
I mean, there's a number of questions here which, you know
21:15
people will be very familiar with.
21:16
Isn't it dangerous? Doesn't it take too long to
21:18
build? And I thought we'd look at isn't
21:20
nuclear power too expensive? This is question 23 in your book
21:23
because I saw some figures for Sizewell C which is the new Big
21:27
light water reactor plant which is proposed.
21:30
And I think they've made the final investment decision.
21:32
So they're actually going to go ahead and build this thing now.
21:34
But there were talking like £100 billion who include the long
21:37
term financing and stuff. I mean, that's just unbelievable
21:41
in terms of expenditure. There's no way you're going to
21:43
build loads and those of these things at that kind of price.
21:45
So that's the question, Isn't nuclear power too expensive?
21:48
Yeah, it's too expensive. It's pretty much what I say in
21:50
the book. For me, the Achilles heel of
21:53
nuclear is just speed and cost. You can't build this stuff
21:57
quickly and you cannot build it a cost that's competitive with
22:03
the marginal cost of renewables. I would caveat that by saying
22:08
that some countries are building nuclear relatively quickly,
22:13
right. China and South Korea, for
22:14
example, are, are still building nuclear.
22:17
They're building these plants maybe six or seven years, which
22:20
is not too bad. But the point is that the speed
22:23
and I'll come on to the cost, the speed they are, is, is
22:26
nothing compared to the speed by which they're deploying
22:29
renewables. If you look at solar and wind
22:31
deployment in China relative to nuclear, and to be clear,
22:35
China's doing best on nuclear in the world, you know this, it's a
22:38
drop in the ocean. Is it like, yeah, don't you, do
22:40
you know the gigawattage sort of off by?
22:42
Hand off the top of my head, it's extremely, extremely small
22:46
compared to the rollout of solar and wind.
22:49
So my my perspective there is that nuclear for most countries
22:53
is not going to make up the bulk of electricity.
22:55
It's just not going to be deployed quickly enough and
22:57
cheaply enough to do so. But I do still think that
23:00
nuclear can play some role. And that's because in some
23:04
countries, like we discussed with the solar, the sun not
23:07
always shining, the wind not always blowing, get in the final
23:12
10% or 20% depending on on where you are of low carbon
23:16
electricity just could be expensive, right?
23:18
Like if you take the UK, for example, I think the UK can get
23:21
to 80 percent, 85% low carbon electricity, mostly with solar
23:26
and wind pretty cheaply. But I think often the last 10 to
23:30
15% is a squeeze and could be relatively expensive.
23:35
And they are even though nuclear is quite expensive, it might
23:38
might be the least expensive of the alternative options that we
23:42
have. So I think nuclear for many
23:44
countries could fill in part of of that gap, even though I don't
23:48
think it's going to be the biggest source in most
23:51
countries. We talked about electric cars
23:52
already a bit because you mentioned about how rapid the
23:55
adoption rates have been in, in Norway and also in China now
23:58
where more than 50% of new cars are electric.
24:01
You've got to, you've got some, I mean, some of these questions
24:03
that you that you address here are quite sort of zombie myths,
24:06
I think on the electric cars, just as bad for the climate as
24:08
petrol cars. They're on the various op eds by
24:11
famous people in in UK newspapers making that case a
24:14
couple of years ago. I'm not sure how widely held
24:16
that is, but do you find people still think that?
24:18
Yeah. Wow.
24:19
So what's the answer then? There's no like an electric car
24:22
is, is better. Like the, the, the point that
24:24
always comes up is, you know, there's two points that come up.
24:27
1 is that it takes a huge amount of energy to build the battery
24:30
in the car in the 1st place. And that's much, much worse than
24:33
than a petrol car. And to some extent that's true.
24:36
Like it does take more energy and, and there are higher carbon
24:39
emissions in the production of the car, even though I think
24:42
that will come down with time. And we've actually started to
24:45
see that come down one of the challenges that often people
24:48
trying to make this case, as we said, we'll say really old data,
24:52
really out of date data, when the carbon intensity of the
24:55
production of these cars was extremely high.
24:57
And then the other argument is, yeah, but most countries run
25:00
their electricity on coal, coal, and they'll take China or India
25:04
as the example. And therefore running your
25:06
electric car on coal electricity surely can't be better for the
25:09
claim. And actually is isn't is not
25:12
hugely better if you have a very, very cool intensive
25:15
electricity mix, but it's actually still better.
25:18
And of course, most countries don't run or no country runs on
25:22
100% coal power. And the point is that we're
25:25
trying to decarbonize our electricity grids.
25:27
So your electric car will get better and better over time as
25:31
we decarbonize. Yeah, I think people don't
25:33
appreciate, and this comes up in the primary energy use stats
25:37
about, you know, in, in, in the fossil fuel age, people don't
25:40
appreciate how much more efficient electric cars are
25:44
converting energy into work done and namely moving somewhere,
25:47
right? Because in internal combustion
25:49
engine cars, I think it's like 2/3 gets wasted as heat.
25:53
So that's where you know, 2/3 of your petrol or your, your
25:55
diesel's going. Whereas for for EVs, I mean it's
25:59
a much more efficient, isn't it, in terms of how much electricity
26:01
actually goes to move the thing? Yeah, like as a kind of rule of
26:04
thumb, in a petrol car, you're probably losing 70 to 80% of the
26:08
energy is waste and only 20 to 30% is actually turning the
26:12
wheels. And in an electric car, it's
26:15
basically the inverse of that. So you're wasting around 20 to
26:19
30% and you're getting 70 to 80% turning the wheels and and
26:23
moving you to where you want to go.
26:25
So per mile driven, your electric car is maybe three
26:28
times more efficient than a petrol car, which again, is like
26:32
one of the fallacies, as you said, is that, and this is
26:35
broader than just electric vehicles.
26:37
But I think As for the energy transition as a whole, one
26:40
moving from fossil fuels to low carbon energy and to trying to
26:45
move from a current system to a more electrified system is that
26:48
you get all of these efficiency benefits.
26:50
So when people make the argument, they show this, you
26:53
know, huge stack of how much energy we currently use and say,
26:55
oh, no, you obviously you can't replace all of that with
26:58
renewables or low carbon electricity.
27:00
And the point is that we will need much less electricity to
27:04
get the same societal benefits, which in this case is the amount
27:08
of miles you're driving. You just need need much, much
27:11
less energy than you currently do with a petrol car.
27:15
But we have an aside. Did David McKay get this right
27:17
or wrong in his in his sustainability, you know, his
27:19
his book without without the hot without hot air, because, you
27:23
know, he had a big, big stack and the whole thing got really,
27:26
really difficult to do with renewables.
27:27
But it seems actually not not to be that difficult after all.
27:31
Yeah, like I was reflecting a bit on David Mckay's book when I
27:34
was was writing this one and, and, and the key point there,
27:39
which will also be the case with my book, because it's really
27:41
hard to write these types of books because the stuff changes
27:44
over time, right. So it's you're writing a static
27:47
book, but the stuff moves quickly.
27:49
So in a few years it's kind of out of date.
27:51
David Mckay's case, it was, was it 2007 or 2000?
27:55
Yeah, on this. No, I think he was right.
27:58
He was very clear on the electrification angle.
28:01
I think. I'm not sure if it made it into
28:03
the stack, but he was definitely seemed quite bullish on electric
28:07
cars and and electric heat pumps because of the efficiency gains,
28:12
which isn't a fault of his because it was very unclear at
28:16
the time that electric cars would actually become a thing,
28:19
right. So you he was probably quite
28:20
pessimistic that it would actually breakthrough from a
28:23
cost perspective and A and a technological perspective.
28:27
I think on the physics of the efficiency gains, I think he.
28:30
Got it. Yeah, it's amazing looking back.
28:32
I mean, obviously I've been in this business because I'm old, a
28:34
lot older than you, a lot longer.
28:36
And I remember George Mumbia writing this book called Heat, I
28:39
think was in also 2007, 2008 thereabouts.
28:42
And we all had to travel by bus and and bike and walking, you
28:45
know, electric cars weren't even a thing.
28:47
So in what is a, you know, decade and a half a bit longer.
28:50
So it really goes to show what what technological innovations
28:52
can do in, in terms of the TNH transition.
28:55
Yeah, I mean, and we've like the also feature in the book, we all
28:58
now know the massive underestimations people have
29:02
made about the one, the drop in the cost of batteries and solar
29:07
panels and and wind turbines, but also about the rate of
29:10
deployment. It surprised a lot of people how
29:12
rapidly this stuff changed. Yeah, So what about heat pumps
29:16
then? This is part 7 Heating and
29:17
cooling people are quite there's, there's been a lot of
29:19
controversy in Germany about heat pumps in the UK as well.
29:22
I mean they are quite expensive. I put one in our house and air
29:25
source heat pump and you know, it's it's many thousands of of
29:28
pounds, which is a lot more expensive than than your average
29:31
gas boiler. So I guess that's, well,
29:34
actually question 39. Aren't heat pumps much more
29:36
expensive than a gas boiler? What's the?
29:39
Answer to that. The answer is yes, they are.
29:40
Yeah, the heat pumps are fantastic, fantastic technology,
29:44
probably the best weapon or solution we have to decarbonize
29:48
heating. But again, I think the Achilles
29:51
heel for heat pumps is not the running cost, but the upfront
29:56
cost of installing 1. So when it comes to running
29:59
cost, heat pumps in most countries are cheaper to run
30:03
than gas boilers are. And again this comes back to the
30:05
huge efficiency gains you get with this electrification.
30:08
The gains are less good in the UK because our electricity
30:12
prices are very high, right. So what's going to determine
30:15
your, how much you save from installing a heat pump is really
30:20
about the price ratio of gas to electricity.
30:23
And in the UK that ratio is extremely poor.
30:26
So, so the UK is really losing out less, other countries less
30:29
so when you get higher savings. But the, the, the big challenge
30:33
I think is the upfront cost of, of installing a heat pump.
30:36
So in the UK the average cost is around 12 and a half, 1000 LB.
30:43
As you see you can install a gas boiler for 2 or 3000 lbs.
30:47
So there's a £10,000 gap there which people are not going to
30:50
pay or most people are not going to pay.
30:53
The government does offer a 9000 or 9500 grant.
30:58
Even then, you're just about making up that difference.
31:03
For some households, if it's a more complex build, they'll
31:05
still have to pay a bit extra. But the key point is that that
31:09
because the government is paying 9500 and a grant doesn't mean
31:12
that that's free. Like someone's paying for it.
31:14
And it's just not the necessarily the the consumer
31:17
directly. Something the the economics
31:20
Upfront economics of heat pumps are the biggest challenge.
31:23
It's not going to change. I mean, the Chinese are now, you
31:25
know, they used to cost 50 K 50,000 lbs or to take to, to buy
31:29
an EV electric vehicle. And the Chinese are now these
31:32
BYD cars are showing them out for $10,000 or something.
31:36
I mean, do you think heat pumps can go in the same direction and
31:40
just become a lot more, a lot cheaper?
31:41
I think they can become cheaper, but probably not at the same
31:44
rate and at the same and to the same extent as batteries or
31:48
electric cars. I think probably the learning
31:50
curve there is much, much shallower than it is for for
31:54
batteries or or electric cars. So I think the prices will come
31:58
down somewhat, but I would be highly skeptical if you saw them
32:02
coming down to the point where they're without without a grant
32:05
competitive with the upfront cost of a gas boiler.
32:08
I think the upfront cost for heat pump will just be higher
32:11
than a gas boiler for a long time.
32:13
One of the potential benefits, which I think is actually
32:15
becoming increasingly important even in climates like the UK, is
32:21
the fact that heat pump can also operate as an air conditioning
32:23
unit I. Don't know that.
32:25
So you can kind of just reverse it.
32:26
Yeah, you can do that. I think there is some weird
32:30
caveat with EU KS grant system for the heat pumps that you're
32:34
not have to use it for, right? But I think for many people that
32:37
would be the incentive that would tip them over the edge,
32:40
right? I think we're increasingly hot
32:42
summers and heat waves, maybe a bit less so in Scotland, but
32:45
like definitely in the South of England.
32:47
I think this is becoming a problem.
32:48
And I think for many people, they will very soon consider
32:51
getting an EC unit. And if they can get a heat pump
32:54
that operates as a heat pump and an air conditioning unit in the
32:57
same unit, that would greatly increase the, I guess the
33:01
attractiveness of that that option.
33:03
So I think that's one area where trying to promote the the dual
33:07
use of of these would be would be really crucial.
33:11
Let's move on to the Part 8 we're on now, which is food.
33:14
We've talked a bit about land. I was quite surprised with this
33:17
question 41 that there's a some people think that there's not
33:20
enough land for them to go plant based.
33:22
I thought everyone knew that going plant based was a lot less
33:24
land. Oh no, they don't know.
33:26
Really. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the, the
33:29
argument for why we use so much grazing land is that we need to
33:34
use that land to produce food because if we didn't, then we
33:36
even have food. So that, so the argument is that
33:40
we're using and it's true like a lot of the land that's used as
33:44
grazing land is not of a high enough quality for us to grow
33:47
crops on. So the argument is that because
33:49
that's not good enough quality to grow crops, we therefore have
33:52
to use it to produce animal products, otherwise we wouldn't
33:55
be able to produce enough food. So I think, I don't think most
33:58
people know that fact. Yes, I'm going to guess it's
34:01
true, but that land can be used for rewilding and for, you know,
34:04
bringing back. Yeah, yeah.
34:06
We have to use. We have to use it for humans,
34:09
always. Oh, I see.
34:10
Right. OK.
34:11
Well, I mean, obviously the way to get away from this dramatic
34:14
use of lambs for for livestock is meat substitutes, right?
34:18
And there's a lot of pushback on, you know, proteins, meat
34:20
substitutes now because of this notion that they're ultra
34:23
processed and that makes them unhealthy.
34:25
And you've got a question on that.
34:26
So what's your take on that issue?
34:28
I mean, I just have major issues with the catch all label of
34:34
ultra processed and I think it has very much been become
34:38
equivalent in most people's minds to junk food or unhealthy
34:42
or in some cases unsafe or dangerous.
34:46
So you have this categorization system that categorizes foods
34:50
based on how processed they are, and you have this label ultra
34:53
processed and includes every vein from Coca-Cola to doughnuts
34:57
to supermarket bread to Beyond Meat burger.
35:03
And as if these products in any way are nutritionally
35:05
equivalent. Just makes absolutely no sense.
35:07
It's literally apples and oranges, isn't it?
35:09
It's literally apples and oranges, right?
35:11
And the of course the equivalence is that the natural
35:14
unprocessed food is best and anything that's processed is bad
35:18
and ultra processed is extremely, extremely bad.
35:20
And when you look at the the research on this, it just
35:22
doesn't stack up. Again, it is often because all
35:26
of these foods are thrown together and under this one
35:31
label. So you'll find studies which are
35:33
true, which find that people that have a higher intake of
35:37
ultra processed foods overall tend to have poorer health
35:41
outcomes. And I can absolutely believe
35:43
that. But the notion that that somehow
35:45
applies to every single ultra processed food item and that
35:49
whole category just doesn't make sense.
35:51
Often when you drill down tends to be more strongly correlated
35:54
with one sugary drinks like Coca-Cola and two processed
36:00
meats. Right?
36:00
Like the key point is that many of the meats that people would
36:03
be replacing are also defined as as highly processed or ultra to
36:07
processed. So a meat sausage is also a UPF,
36:10
is it? Yeah.
36:11
Oh, OK. A lot of the more recent
36:14
research tends to find that the correlations there are strongest
36:17
between particular groups of items within the auto process
36:21
category, not the whole category as a whole.
36:23
So I think this notion that you know, Beyond meat burger or
36:27
veggie sausages are much somehow much worse than than standard
36:31
processed meat is it just is not in line with with the research.
36:36
So, so just to be clear, are you better off eating a Beyond Meat
36:39
burger or an actual beef burger? And I'm not talking about the
36:42
environment, I'm not talking about animal welfare, but
36:43
literally in terms of the the human health issue.
36:45
The research would suggest the Beyond Meat butter.
36:49
I think this also goes in the opposite direction where people
36:51
overstate I think the health benefits of a fully plant based
36:57
diet. You often see lots of studies
36:59
coming out saying vegans, vegetarians, etcetera live much
37:02
better health outcomes. I think the the problem there is
37:05
that a lot of these studies are correlational.
37:08
So often the types of people that have a vegan diet or a
37:12
vegetarian diet tend to be correlated with one the probably
37:15
higher income. They're often younger, they
37:18
probably are more conscious of other parts of their health
37:21
beyond so they probably are less likely to smoke, they're
37:23
probably more likely to exercise.
37:25
So often these correlational studies I think are are not as
37:28
clear cut as people make out, but I would probably say that
37:32
the Beyond Meat burger is probably marginally better for
37:34
your health than the beef burger.
37:37
Yeah, I don't know how they can ever do these studies because
37:39
there's so many confounding factors like you say, and you
37:42
know, people aren't Lab Rats. You can't make people eat a
37:44
single thing for, you know, 20 years or something.
37:47
You might need to find out whether it's going to cause
37:49
cancer. So I guess all the studies here
37:52
are correlation, right? I mean, they're, they're all
37:54
trying to look at cohorts of people and, and, and, and try
37:57
and identify dietary differences and then see whether there's how
37:59
health, incomes and then outcome differences and then correct for
38:02
all of the confounding factors. But I guess the the devil's
38:05
always in the detail with these things, particularly with the
38:07
correction. You can do, yeah, most of them
38:09
are correlational. You can do shorter term ones
38:11
where you take a group of people when you put them on this very,
38:14
very stressed diet and see how they respond in shorter term
38:18
health outcomes like weight or cholesterol levels or.
38:21
But yes, these longer term ones are nearly always correlational.
38:25
OK, let's move on to Part 9. And I actually want to take a
38:28
couple of questions from this because they they are the ones
38:31
that I still don't know the answers to.
38:32
The producer, Rob is smiling like I should know the answer to
38:34
everything. But no, I don't know the answer
38:36
to this one, which is question 45.
38:38
Will we ever be able to produce low carbon cement?
38:41
I'm quite optimistic about this one.
38:43
I think we know, I mean we can, right.
38:47
The the key thing is going to be cost.
38:50
Can we produce low carbon cement, a cost that's
38:54
competitive with current cement or what we have to pay much,
38:56
much more for low carbon cement, I think is the real question.
38:59
And what I also, the point I also make in the book is that
39:02
this is in the section called the hard to abate sectors.
39:05
As I see in the book, I think this people often equate this
39:08
with impossible to abate these. These are the sectors that we
39:10
just have no idea how to do. And I think that was maybe true
39:14
10 years ago, but I think we've actually made quite a bit of
39:16
progress in the last 10 years where I think we're now at the
39:18
stage where we actually know how we could do this.
39:21
It's about cost, right? So there are kind of three key
39:25
ways. I mean, we can do this.
39:26
The first one is you won't get 0 carbon cement, but you can
39:30
reduce, dramatically reduce the amount of CO2 you produce from
39:34
cement. And that's actually just by
39:36
changing to basically changing the ratio of the amount of
39:40
cement in your concrete, right? So to get concrete, you take
39:43
cement and you mix it with water and sand and gravel and stuff.
39:47
And currently we have pretty high, especially in Europe and
39:51
North America, we have pretty high concentrations of cement in
39:55
our concrete. And actually you could probably
39:57
reduce that and still have the same strength of material and
40:02
and and the same kind of safety standards and having less cement
40:06
in there would reduce your emissions.
40:07
I think cement's actually quite big in terms of sector of
40:10
emissions. Isn't it bigger than aviation?
40:12
Yeah, it's like 7 or 8%. Yeah, But people say to me, why
40:16
are you flying to New York? I'm like, well, why are you
40:17
still using cement in your house, you know?
40:19
But it does seem to have quite the same salience, does it?
40:21
But I always thought that with cement, it was literally, it was
40:24
a fundamental chemistry, right? You you take calcium carbonate,
40:27
you reduce it to calcium oxide, which means.
40:29
Calcium oxide, which means you have CO2 as a byproduct from the
40:33
process. So what do you do about that?
40:35
So if you just use less cement, then you just reduce the amount
40:37
of CO2 you produce, right? So that's one option.
40:40
The second option is carbon capture and storage.
40:43
So you capture the CO2 directly from the process.
40:49
When it comes to cost competitiveness, I think the we
40:53
can reduce that somewhat, but you're never, you're never going
40:56
to make it the same price as carbon cement production without
41:00
capture, carbon capture and storage, right?
41:01
When you add CCS, you just add on a price, right.
41:05
So, so you're probably talking about maybe 50% or so premium on
41:12
a carbon capture and storage cement using that.
41:16
And then the final method, which I'm probably most optimistic
41:19
about because rather than using limestone as the feedstock, you
41:25
can use a calcium silicate. And calcium silicate is, is in
41:31
basically one of our most abundant and most of our
41:33
abundant rocks on Earth. So there's no, some, there's no
41:36
risk of us running out of this stuff.
41:37
The process doesn't produce CO2 at the end of it, right?
41:39
You're taking calcium silicate rather than CACO 3 limestone,
41:44
more calcium carbonate. So you're not producing CO2 as a
41:47
as a byproduct. And I think there are a number
41:49
of startups working on that. And I'm like pretty optimistic
41:53
that that's the solution that wins here.
41:56
How about steel? And this is this is question 46,
41:58
What about low carbon steel? I mean, again, it's the
42:00
chemistry issue, isn't it? You take iron oxide, you reduce
42:03
it by putting coke in there. So you put carbon in there and
42:07
that takes off the oxygen, oxygen into in the form of CO2,
42:09
right? So yeah, so again, steel, we can
42:13
do it. It's just about how much we can
42:15
close the price premium and how much more we're willing to pay,
42:19
if any for low carbon steel. So yeah, rather than using coke,
42:23
you can use. Making not coca.
42:25
Cola, but actual Coke? Coke, yeah, you can basically
42:31
electrify the process. Or you can incorporate hydrogen
42:34
as a different feedstock. Again, the process we can do,
42:38
the fundamental problem is the cost, like you automatically add
42:40
some cost on there. I think currently the premium
42:44
with some of these methods is around 25%.
42:47
So you're adding 25% to the price tag.
42:51
One of the, the points I make in the book is that 25% for many
42:56
products is a big hefty price tag to add on for some products
43:04
because the steel is actually a relatively small component of
43:08
the final price. Actually, if you were to filter
43:11
that through to the consumer, they actually might not meet,
43:14
they might not notice that much or it may not make a big
43:17
difference to the final price of the product.
43:19
And that's also the case with cement.
43:20
The cost of the cement for your house is a really, really small
43:24
fraction of the cost of your house, right?
43:26
Most of it's other materials, it's the construction, it's the
43:29
the workers, a pretty small percentage of, of the final cost
43:33
of your house is actually cement.
43:35
Therefore, even if you were to increase it by 25%, the
43:40
increased cost of your house would be really, really small.
43:42
And, and I think for many products that you steal, it's
43:45
the same. So for a car, the premium on a
43:47
car that uses low carbon steel might not actually be that much
43:51
in total terms, even if the steel is 25% more expensive.
43:55
All right, So what about aviation and shipping?
43:57
I mean, that's another really, really tough one, isn't it?
43:59
You can't electrify these easily.
44:00
The batteries are too heavy to get off the ground.
44:03
So is there a, you know, there's, there's a lot of talk
44:05
about sustainable aviation fuels, but those tend to come
44:08
from biological material and that's limited and so on.
44:11
Is there a silver bullet for aviation in particular?
44:13
Oh, no, there's no, no. So for both shipping and for
44:19
aviation, I'm pretty confident that for short haul, short haul
44:24
flights or or shorter journeys that batteries will get there
44:28
like they're already getting there.
44:30
There are ferries now running on batteries.
44:32
You get short haul flights like really pretty small planes with
44:36
batteries, but I think there's still a lot of potential for
44:39
battery technologies such that I think that short haul aviation
44:44
is, is possible. Long haul aviation will need
44:46
some alternative and it will probably either be biofuels or
44:51
hydrogen. They both have their significant
44:55
downsides and I think they're those downsides are pretty
44:58
unavoidable. So for hydrogen just the main
45:02
cost is the amount of electricity you need to produce
45:04
to generate that, that amount of green hydrogen it's pretty
45:08
hefty. If I can recall, I think it's
45:10
maybe 25% of our current electricity, global electricity
45:15
demand we would have to add on top just to to produce enough
45:18
hydrogen. So that's the major downside
45:20
there. And of course that has knock on
45:21
impact on price. So the the cost of flying would
45:24
go up. And then for the other
45:27
alternative, there is biofuels and, and they are, the big cost
45:32
is just land. So there's a lot of hype about
45:35
vegetable oils because Virgin Atlantic did that flight, that
45:38
transatlantic flight using vegetable oils, but there's just
45:42
nowhere near enough vegetable waste vegetable oils.
45:45
The, the focus was that there was waste fats and oils and
45:49
there's just absolutely not, not enough waste fats and oils.
45:52
Even if we gathered it all up for it to power flights, like I
45:55
think even if we gathered all of the world's waste oils and fats,
45:58
it would be less than 10% of aviation demand of maybe 5%.
46:03
So we would need to look to alternatives.
46:04
So we'd need to look to either just using directly vegetable
46:07
oils or you could use cereals, but that just comes at a really,
46:13
really high land cost. These are like corn that they're
46:16
using for ethanol in the US Corn Belt.
46:19
Yeah, you could use, you could use corn.
46:21
I think I estimated that if we were to use, if we were to power
46:26
global aviation with corn, we would need land the size of
46:31
India to produce the amount of crops, which is a.
46:35
Lot. That is a lot.
46:37
I remember sitting down with Richard Branson of all people
46:39
back in I think it was like 2010, and he told me personally
46:42
that Virgin Atlantic would be fully running on biofuels by
46:47
2020. I don't even got this on film.
46:49
I don't know what I've done with the footage, but I don't think
46:51
that ever happened, did it? No, they did again.
46:54
They did that one very publicized flight with the
46:57
vegetable oils. I think Richard Branson was on
46:59
it. I think he was very chuffed with
47:01
it. But yeah, notice it's got
47:04
decarbonisation of aviation is going extremely slowly.
47:07
I mean, it might even be better and I'm skipping here to part 10
47:09
to just use goddamn fossil fuels for aviation and sequester the
47:13
carbon some other way and just take it back out of the
47:15
atmosphere. Can we solve climate change
47:17
without carbon dioxide removal? But is that, is that an option?
47:20
I mean, it would depend on the relative price and scalability
47:22
of that. But is Cdr a big thing?
47:25
There are definitely proponents that for aviation that would
47:29
that would just be the most cost effective way to do it is just
47:32
to continue using jet fuel and to sequester the carbon some
47:35
other way. With that.
47:36
There's always there's always the politics of it as well,
47:39
though, right? So like even if you're to decide
47:42
that that's the most cost effective way to do this, and I
47:45
think even if you were to prove that you were doing this in a
47:49
very permanent storage in a very permanent way, I think there
47:52
would still be political and social ramifications of the fact
47:56
that aviation was not decarbonizing in the sense that
47:59
it was switching away from from fossil fuels.
48:02
But yeah, I think that is one option for aviation that that
48:05
might be most cost effective. It's a bit like a return to
48:08
offsetting, though, which was got very badly damaged by, well,
48:12
political concern. You know, the moral calculus of
48:14
offsetting never felt good. And a friend of mine hadn't set
48:17
up a offsetting company, and one of the products they were
48:20
selling was, you know, literally peasants in Bangladesh using
48:24
treadle pumps to reduce their diesel consumption from diesel
48:26
pumps. So they'll actually be, you
48:28
know, treading these things to get the water up out of the
48:30
brawl hole to water the crops. And this the idea of like people
48:35
flying in business class overhead while these peasants
48:37
were using treadle pumps to reduce their diesel consumption,
48:39
which just felt morally outrageous, even even if it did
48:42
reduce CO2. And that was sort of happened to
48:45
offsetting as a whole didn't? It, yeah, there's that.
48:47
There's that angle to it, but then there's also just the fact
48:50
that I think a lot of offsetting programs were just not good,
48:53
actually didn't make any actual carbon reductions.
48:56
Yes, 1 is like the moral akiness of it, and then 2 is this.
49:01
That actually just wasn't reducing emissions or offsetting
49:04
emissions in the first place. Yeah.
49:07
And and you know question 50 which you've left to the very
49:10
end obviously is the issue of solar geoengineering, which
49:13
we've done a couple of episodes on.
49:14
So we've our audience will be a bit will be fairly familiar with
49:17
what this is and and and in fact your question is, isn't solar
49:20
Geo engineering too risky? What's your take?
49:22
Yeah, I felt like I had to include something on solar Geo
49:26
engineering because I get asked about it a lot, but it was quite
49:29
hard to distill into a single question.
49:30
I'll admit. The argument put forward for
49:32
solar geoengineering is often that it is actually an
49:39
incredibly cheap way for us to reduce global temperatures,
49:44
right? If you look purely at the
49:46
upfront or the very visible cost of that, that's completely true.
49:50
Like the estimates for how much it would take for us to reduce
49:52
warming by have a degree or a degree or incredibly small
49:56
relative to them, and that we're currently paying to transition
49:59
our whole economies away from fossil fuels to to low carbon
50:04
energy sources. I think the key caveat to that
50:07
is that we don't sufficiently know the true costs if you were
50:12
to factor in the risk of something going wrong.
50:16
So my my take on it would be that I am not someone that
50:21
completely shuts the door and say we should never touch this
50:23
ever. But I'm also not, let's go out
50:26
there and deploy it right now because we need it right now and
50:28
it's cheap to do. I'm, I'm very much kind of in a
50:32
middle position where I think we should actually be researching,
50:35
putting small amounts of funding into researching this.
50:38
I think for two reasons. One, if we were to say if we
50:42
were to decide collectively and collectively is a very charged
50:47
term here because I don't think it would be in any way a kind of
50:50
unanimous collective decision to do it.
50:52
But if there was some decision that, you know, we actually
50:55
really do need to deploy to reduce temperatures, I would
51:00
hope that we would really know what the consequences of that
51:02
would be. And two, because I think there
51:06
are scenarios where because it is relatively cheap to deploy
51:11
some country or some small collection of countries could
51:13
just decide, no, we just won't take any more warming.
51:17
Our populations are suffering and therefore they will just
51:19
deploy it. And then that scenario, I would
51:22
really like us to understand what the consequences of that
51:24
might be. So I'm very much in this mid
51:26
position of I don't think we should rule it out completely,
51:30
but we shouldn't also just rush in and start deploying this
51:32
stuff. I mean we should invest small
51:34
amounts and and research. So that was question 50.
51:37
You mentioned earlier on about how difficult it is to keep the,
51:42
you know, something like a book, which obviously needs to have a
51:44
shelf life by definition, up to date.
51:46
I would recommend that people rush out and buy it straight
51:48
away because like, what are you going to do?
51:54
I mean, a book isn't a, isn't a live thing.
51:56
I mean, obviously you've got, you've got the websites, you've
51:58
got our welded data, which covers so many different
52:00
questions. I mean, I use it all the time.
52:01
You've got your Substax Sustainability by numbers,
52:04
wasn't it? What can you do to keep a book
52:06
up to date? Can you do some online presence
52:07
of it for it? Or have you tried to answer the
52:10
questions in a way which is going to have a longer, you
52:12
know, longer shelf life for one? I think one thing to my.
52:15
I think it's too hard, but I think one thing to my, I guess
52:19
benefit is that often the stuff I'm saying is trending in a
52:23
particular direction. I think we'll continue to trend
52:25
in that direction. What I'm saying about the pretty
52:28
rapid rollout of electric vehicles and many cases the
52:33
curve continues to go up, right. So if I was to give the stats
52:37
for China saying, you know, China's deployment of electric
52:40
vehicles has been rising rapidly.
52:42
This year it was offered and then next year it was 50%.
52:48
Like, yeah, you'd be one year out of date, but you get the
52:50
general point and you might need to go and check the latest
52:53
number. But your general point is that
52:56
electric vehicles are taking off rapidly in China.
52:58
So I think there are a lot of trends like that that are
53:01
pointing in a particular direction at a pretty rapid
53:03
rate. And therefore, what I'm saying,
53:06
even though the number will be one or two years out of date,
53:09
the general message is sound and probably hopefully won't be out
53:14
of date. But this stuff because it moves
53:17
quickly, like I'm always covering it on my newsletter and
53:20
blog and doing small updates and stuff.
53:22
So that's probably like the best I can do.
53:24
And then like you, I'll need to write you did like an update of
53:28
6° in you. So I'll need to come up with
53:30
that in the future. I did.
53:31
And so that was like 15 years further on and we'd already
53:34
moved on a degree by then for a chapter further forward.
53:39
But that's why I mentioned about David Mckay's book because I I
53:43
messed up the title early, but it's sustainable energy without.
53:46
The Yeah. I mean, and people were contact,
53:50
have contacted me many times and also Ramesh is David's widow
53:55
about maybe doing an update. And, and actually I thought, I
53:58
actually think it, it is, it is of its time and it and it, and
54:02
it was incredibly inspiring and meaningful to a lot of people
54:06
when it came out. So I think it, it can just stay.
54:09
It can just stay as it is. What do you think?
54:11
I've also been approached to do an I'm having the work in this
54:14
year because people are dead, because it was such a good book.
54:16
I think people are desperate for for an update of it.
54:19
I I would love a dynamic version of his book that had been
54:25
updated, but I also really like just going back to the version
54:29
he wrote. And I find it interesting to
54:33
just think that this was how everyone was then thinking about
54:37
energy at this point in time. And I think it's very actually
54:40
quite different to how we're thinking about things today in
54:43
many ways. And I think that contrast over
54:45
what's not a huge amount of time is super interesting and really
54:49
valuable, right? Probably people might listen to
54:51
this conversation that we're having 10 years from now and
54:54
we're just talking absolute nonsense because stuff has moved
54:56
on so quickly. And I think there's, there's
54:58
value to that rather than somehow trying to erase it and,
55:02
and, and make it exactly how people think about energy now.
55:06
I mean, maybe we're a bit more hopeful than we were.
55:08
I mean, David was quite sort of pessimistic and you call your
55:13
book a hopeful guide. Is that because, you know, it's
55:16
the cynics and the pessimists who tend to get the data wrong?
55:19
Or is, you know, why are you pushing back more against the
55:21
pessimists than maybe the the, the sort of techno optimists?
55:24
I think there's a bit of trying to ground the hyper optimistic
55:30
techno optimists. I mean, they, I mean, I try to
55:33
be clear and honest as I can and the answers and not overstate
55:37
that somehow these are like perfect solutions that are going
55:39
to fix everything with no downsides.
55:41
And you know, it'll cost us no money and there's no barriers to
55:45
us doing that. I want to be very clear about
55:46
what the barriers are so that we can overcome them.
55:50
So I I also try not to be like, so Pollyanna ish about this and
55:54
think that it's just going to be easy for us to, to make this a
55:57
reality. The reason I call it a hopeful
55:59
guide is because, as I, as I said, I've framed it as 50
56:02
questions, but for many people, it's basically 50 reasons why
56:06
this is totally impossible for us to do this.
56:09
I don't think there's really any of the questions where the
56:11
answer is there's no, absolutely no chance of us doing this.
56:15
There's many of the questions where the answer is, we can do
56:17
this right now and we can do this right now cheaply and we
56:19
just need to go for it. And there are some parts of it
56:22
which are harder, but again, or like we have several options
56:26
here. There's options for getting
56:28
better. I'm sure in the next 20 to 30
56:30
years we can work this out. So I think that's why it's
56:34
hopeful. There's like, to me, there's no
56:36
deal Breakers on the answers that suggest that this is an
56:39
impossible feat for us to do. I think many people think that
56:41
it's an impossible feat for us to do.
56:43
Well, I think that's a wonderful place to end actually.
56:46
And I again, can't recommend this highly enough.
56:49
I, I really enjoyed reading it and I, I, I insist and highly
56:54
recommend that people rush out and buy it straight away.
56:56
Have you got another project in the offing or are you, you know,
56:59
you sound like you've already have several full time jobs.
57:01
Yeah, I'm trying to calm down for a bit and not jump into
57:04
something new that's a full time job.
57:06
Just trying to keep up with how fast this stuff is moving so.
57:09
Good. Well, enjoy the warm
57:10
temperatures in Edinburgh and best of luck with all of the
57:13
other all of the other work that you're doing.
57:14
And thanks again for joining us. And yeah, come back when you've
57:17
got your next book. Oh.
57:18
Well, thanks very much, Mark. Thanks so much, Hannah.
57:24
Thanks so much for listening to Saving the World from Bad Ideas,
57:26
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