Bloomberg published an article a week ago about “The Brutal Economics of Reaching Net Zero”. It is at the following link and copied below. Captions in italics were copied from the article.
For background, the following graph shows Global GHG emissions with a total of 45 Gigatons of GHG annually. NY State’s in state contribution is 195 Megatons, or 0.004 of the total so any costs related to NY State’s efforts would have to be multiplied by 250 to get a Global estimate of the cost.
As brutal as the author thinks the economics are, he is greatly underestimating the cost and the possible time frame, just as NY State has underestimated the issues and is now having to face the reality of the situation. The proposals in the article suffer from the same shortfalls as the CLCPA. They state the following:
In 2022 the global consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that businesses, governments and households worldwide need to put forward a total of $275 trillion between now and 2050, peaking in the near term at 8.8% of global gross domestic product.
Electricity alone probably can’t fully power the future—we’ll still need fuels, too, and the IEA considers hydrogen a promising option.
The cost is severely understated. As Hydrogen is part of their program, the email that I sent yesterday showing a cost in excess of $1.25 trillion just for Hydrogen in NY State is very relevant. That doesn’t include the costs of the wind farms, the rewiring of the state, the solar arrays not related to Hydrogen production, the installation of heat pumps in every building, etc. All of that could easily push NY State’s cost to $2 trillion or more. Multiplied by 250 for a Global effort, that puts the cost at $500 trillion, almost double the McKinsey & Co. projection.
The article also says that we need to hit certain targets by 2030. It also stated, in italics below:
Last year, at the 28th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, almost 200 countries pledged to help reach “net zero”—the point at which human civilization no longer emits greenhouse gases or else removes from the atmosphere the small amount we still do—by 2050. More than half the world’s largest corporations have made comparable commitments.
Germany started in 1990 and won’t even come close to the 2030 goal. NY State started in 2019 and won’t even come close. How will any government starting now do any better? An email that I sent the other day showed a study that said that to electrify industry in Europe would require solar arrays the size of Ireland (32,500 square miles) or wind farms the size of Spain (195,000 square miles). Where is the labor going to come from to implement projects of that magnitude, where is the public willpower going to come from to overcome the NIMBY resistance, and even if that existed, where are the supply chains needed to support that. As I have stated on numerous occasions, there is an acute transformer shortage that predates Covid so people can’t blame Covid for that. All someone has to do is look at the state off offshore wind in the US and the mess that it is in and those supply chain issues are clearly obvious. To triple their capacity across the world with the issues currently bedeviling the effort will be next to impossible. NY State is having issues doubling solar output because of structural issues with the utility system that I have mentioned on numerous occasions, let alone trying to triple it as stated below.
Renewable energy—solar and wind in particular—is the current star of the transition, yet our recent gains put us only at the beginning of the ramp-up that’s required. We need to harness solar and wind energy at unprecedented speed, tripling their output of power by the end of the decade. (2030)
Regarding the EV comment in the following caption, US EV sales last year totaled 7% of all vehicles sales and several manufacturers are actually ramping down production. The issue is a lack of charging stations and even if those existed, the energy to power them does not exist at the necessary scale. In NY State, the CLCPA is actually a hindrance to this effort. By precluding construction of new combined cycle generating plants, there will not be enough energy to operate new EV’s or the heat pumps that the state is trying to add. EV’s operating from combined cycle generation are about 10% to 15% more energy efficient than an internal combustion vehicle. Further, I have spoken to people in the American Southwest and they are adamant that they will not buy an EV because their commuting distances are beyond the current range. Unlike the comment in the caption below, there are going to be many hiccups.
On transportation, most net-zero models foresee an overwhelming reliance on electric cars and trucks rather than increasing use of trains, buses and bicycles. EVs are, along with solar panel deployment, actually a bright spot in net-zero accounting. If existing plans to scale up EV production move ahead without hiccups and the number of charging stations can rise from 3 million to 17 million (neither of these is a sure bet), the sector will continue to match the IEA’s net-zero modeling.
The IEA state that we need to reduce overall energy demand which is actually the most cost effective and fastest way to reduce carbon emissions and it will actually save customers money as opposed to raising costs as the CLCPA has been doing. Unfortunately, many energy saving measures have been precluded by the CLCPA, such as retooling the older gas generating plants. Even the system in my factory runs afoul of the CLCPA and it has helped us to reduce our carbon footprint by 30% – 40% while also cutting our energy bills in half because we are so much more energy efficient. Furthermore, it uses technologies that exist now and not technologies that will not be ready at scale in the IEA proposed time frame.
Yet we need to reduce overall demand for energy, too, even as the world population and economy keep growing. According to the IEA, the solution here is a drastic boost in energy efficiency—
If the IEA recognizes that there will be a resistance to lifestyle changes in wealthy countries so that only a 5% GHG reduction can be achieved through that option, why do they believe that people in western countries will be accepting of massive solar or wind installations on the property next to their homes that will also result in perceived lifestyle changes. There has been growing resistance to these projects for years.
The IEA gives more weight to behavioral changes such as driving and flying less or turning down the thermostat, noting these “achieve demand reductions rapidly and at no cost.” Nonetheless, the agency’s scenario anticipates just 5% of emissions reductions will flow from such lifestyle shifts, mainly in wealthy countries.
Planting a massive number of trees will help to reduce carbon emissions and compared to other items on this list, it is relatively inexpensive. It would seem that the deforestation shown in the movie “Green Madness” about wind turbine installations runs counter to that goal. Between the energy used to build the turbines and the associated GHG emissions plus the loss of carbon sequestration from the deforestation, what is the net carbon benefit?
The way we use land also needs to change dramatically. By 2030 deforestation—the global loss of trees that absorb carbon dioxide—needs to reach its own net zero through reduced logging and increased forest restoration, the cost of which McKinsey puts at $40 billion annually.
Another thing ignored by the IEA and the author is that in diverting the enormous amount of resources to certain industries to support the effort that they are proposing will require diverting an enormous amount of resources away from other industries because the resources, including labor, material, and capital, are finite. Those industries are going to resist having their ox gored. That will likely be a larger hurdle than Nimby resistance because the politicians in the districts on the “Short end of the stick” will vote against any legislation that damages their constituents.
Look no further than what happened in New Zealand with the farmer’s response to the Cow Burp tax. It was passed in 2022 and scrapped in 2024. See the two following links. People don’t want their ox gored, or in this case it is cows and sheep.
New Zealand Farmers hit streets to protest cow burp tax plan (AP NEWS)
New Zealand scraps plan to tax livestock burps farts
The IAE plan proposers are not dealing with reality and that will hinder implementation of something that might work..
R. Ellenbogen
The Brutal Economics of Reaching Net Zero
Businessweek
By J.B. MacKinnon
Illustrations by Rad Mora
September 4, 2024 at 6:00 AM EDT
Last year, at the 28th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference, almost 200 countries pledged to help reach “net zero”—the point at which human civilization no longer emits greenhouse gases or else removes from the atmosphere the small amount we still do—by 2050. More than half the world’s largest corporations have made comparable commitments. If we pull it off, we might limit the planet’s heating to not much more than 1.5C, which would already be costly and damaging.
The necessity of reaching net zero has been extraordinarily difficult for humankind to accept. It was only during last year’s UN meeting that world leaders acknowledged for the first time in writing that a livable Earth requires “transitioning away from fossil fuels.” Now we face a second mental leap that’s just as hard: accepting the staggering scale and urgency of the net-zero transition. Only then will there be any chance of achieving it.
The timeline to hit net zero is agonizingly brief—just 26 years. The International Energy Agency produces detailed transition scenarios, tracking more than 550 clean-energy technologies and 400 milestones we’ll need to reach along the way. The list of fields requiring revolutionary progress includes energy efficiency, wind power, solar infrastructure, energy storage and many, many more. In only a small handful of these areas are we currently moving in the right direction at the necessary speed.
There are many potential paths to net zero, but none is remotely easy. Beyond the technological challenges, the transition involves staggering amounts of money. Estimates vary: In 2022 the global consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that businesses, governments and households worldwide need to put forward a total of $275 trillion between now and 2050, peaking in the near term at 8.8% of global gross domestic product. (For comparison, the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act—widely considered to be America’s most important climate action policy to date—is expected to generate climate and energy spending that, even if it were all carried out in a single year, would only amount to an estimated 2% to 4.5% of US GDP.) A new report from the BloombergNEF research group pegs the price of achieving net zero lower than McKinsey did, though still at a mind-boggling $215 trillion.