Beyond Carbon Neutral: How We Fix the Climate Crisis Now

Beyond Carbon Neutral

Beyond Carbon Neutral

How We Fix the Climate Crisis Now

Samuel M. Goodman, PhD

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Samuel M. Goodman, PhD

All rights reserved.

Beyond Carbon Neutral

How We Fix the Climate Crisis Now

ISBN

978-1-63676-823-6 Paperback

978-1-63730-219-4 Kindle Ebook

978-1-63730-267-5 Ebook

This book is dedicated to my wife, Ashley, whose love and support made the entire project possible.

Table of Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Foundation

Part I. Infrastructure

Chapter 2. The Fire

Chapter 3. The Sun

Chapter 4. The Wind

Chapter 5. The Water

Chapter 6. The Earth

Chapter 7. The Moon

Chapter 8. The Winter

Part II. Drawdown

Chapter 9. The Sea

Chapter 10. The Land

Chapter 11. The Stone

Chapter 12. The Sky

Part III. Society

Chapter 13. The Market

Chapter 14. The Legislature

Chapter 15. The Executive

Chapter 16. You

The Compiled Strategy

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Bibliography

Author’s Note

As of the publication of this book, we are in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic that is raging across the world. This disaster will profoundly impact society for years to come beyond the short-term impacts to human health and the lives lost. With millions out of work, facing eviction, or experiencing a rapid decline in their material conditions, it is extremely likely that we are facing an economic situation unrivaled in severity since the Great Depression. The recovery will need to take the same form now as it did then: massive investments to put people back to work.

The programs of yesteryear built infrastructure across the country, leading us out of the Depression and providing a foundation for future prosperity. We can and should do the same now for climate change. Doing so would mitigate both crises, making the country more stable after the pandemic and ensuring stability by safeguarding the future. In addition to those benefits, making climate change-mitigating investments will provide a renewed sense of shared purpose. Achieving a successful energy transition will inject trillions of dollars into the economy and put millions back to work, for there is certainly much work to be done. We need only make the decision to begin.

Introduction

The world burned in 2019. First, there was Brazil, where tens of thousands of human-made fires spread out of control in the usually nonflammable Amazon Rainforest, pushing it closer to an irreversible collapse.¹ Australia then ignited from June into the next year. Bushfires ravaged a cumulative area larger than Missouri and spread smoke halfway across the world.² California also joined the scene that summer, settling into the new normal of wildfire seasons destroying large swaths of the state.³ And each year forward is likely to get worse. Siberia started burning in 2020, releasing greenhouse gasses from the permafrost in addition to smoke and ash from the fires.⁴

Each of these conflagrations started with a different spark, but the cause was the same. The world is burning because of climate change. Australia was in the middle of a historic drought that made the landscape a tinderbox.⁵ The same conditions happened throughout Brazil. An ongoing heatwave in Siberia made conditions possible for forest fires.⁶ Periodic burning in California is normal, but every degree of warming makes the conflagrations more intense, more widespread, and more difficult to control.⁷ In each case, the root cause was the same: rising heat, drought, and changing weather patterns.

Climate change causes more disruptions than just drought- and heat-driven fires. Nonetheless, at least these devastating fires drew massive attention while they were ongoing. People will only ignore scientific truths for so long, and personal experience with deadly heatwaves and watching your home ignite tends to burn away the blinders of denial so much quicker.⁸ With daily images across the media, perhaps, finally, some correction would happen.

And then, nothing happened.

Denialism remains strong. The global response to climate change was basically unchanged, and the justification for inaction followed familiar patterns. Brazil’s government doesn’t publicly recognize the contributions of climate change at all, labeling it an insidious plot from a left-wing cabal.⁹ Russia now acknowledges climate change exists and is a threat but claims its underlying causes are still mysterious.¹⁰ The Australian government, elected before the fires on a climate change-skeptical platform, has downplayed links between their fires and greenhouse gas emissions.¹¹ If the first step toward solving a problem is admitting one exists, too many still haven’t started the journey.

Even acknowledging a problem exists does not guarantee a solution. Instead, we move into a more abstract realm to justify inaction: cost. Those who wish to preserve the status quo on climate policy, regardless of their incentives, have largely turned to a monetary argument. A substantial portion of the proposed Green New Deal response was centered on the predicted cost.¹² While sometimes conceding the reality of climate change, this framework buries the absolute imperative of the crisis. The implication is that there are scenarios in which the costs outweigh the probable or even possible benefits of taking action.

Once the discussion turns to loans, taxes, and spreadsheets, it is easy for people to lose focus and disengage from the issue. It also provides a smokescreen so those in power can provide the illusion they are reasonable about the problem but only dedicated to common-sense solutions. The result is no different than denying climate change whole cloth—nothing happens. Most frustratingly, inaction is wholly unjustified when considering a fair cost-benefit analysis of our predicament. Nature does not care about markets. Physics does not care about financial institutions. If you truly want an accurate cost-benefit analysis, here is the bottom line: you either reverse climate change or you lose everything.

The Cost of Inaction

Please, say these words out loud: I am dead; my children are dead; my grandchildren are dead; everyone I have ever known or have yet to meet is dead. We are dead because of climate change.

That is the cost of inaction. Our bodies may still be moving, but we are presently dead because nothing we do carries any meaning so long as climate change is allowed to drive us toward the abyss. We can take pride in our homes and the objects we’ve filled them with, but they will be swept away. The wildfires that are already commonplace on continent-wide scales will only become more frequent and devastating, consuming our possessions and driving people from their property.¹³ In a morbidly comical balance, the seas will rise elsewhere and drag homes and livelihoods beneath the waves.¹⁴ Nowhere will be safe from more frequent and more dangerous weather. Storms and floods will inundate the interior, while what’s left of the coasts will be increasingly ravaged by hurricanes and storm surge.¹⁵ The years spent being fiscally responsible will have been made pointless, as any gains are wiped from existence in mere moments.

As a people, we can extol the virtues of the things we’ve built, feats we’ve achieved, and the secrets of the universe we’ve unlocked. When civilization collapses, it will be as if these accomplishments never happened. It won’t matter that we’ve landed on the moon if only a scramble for survival occupies our thoughts. Curing diseases won’t do any lasting good if the entire system falls under the weight of resource shortages and long-forgotten pathogens emerging from the permafrost.¹⁶ The monuments we’ve built for ourselves will crumble once there’s no one who can maintain them.¹⁷ It will be as though climate change has erased our entire history.

You may seek joy in raising your family, finding comfort knowing a part of you will live on after you are gone. However, your descendants are unlikely to survive for long. A changing climate means more drought and famine, more crop-eating insects during longer and hotter summers, and floods that wipe away plantings.¹⁸ It means acidified oceans that no longer yield enough fish.¹⁹ The future created by climate change is one where access to basic necessities are precious and fought over, whether on a personal scale or through wars to control what resources remain.²⁰ A world subject to climate change is a hostile place that cannot support eight billion people.

Climate change will wipe away all traces of our existence, and we must internalize this realization before any progress can happen. That is the only way we can truly make reversing it our overriding priority. It won’t matter if we reform any other part of our society in the meantime. If we don’t solve climate change, literally nothing else will matter. This understanding is neither natural nor comfortable to confront, but it must be if we are to reverse the inaction, apathy, and deception that have plagued our response for decades. Our only hope of reclaiming our lives is to do something about climate change.

Hope

Climate change is a vast, all-encompassing threat that humans innately lack the ability to grapple with it. Our lack of comprehension is one of the reasons why we have not yet been able to mount a response in proportion to the threat. Consider the amount of carbon dioxide, the primary driver of climate change, humans add to the atmosphere. We emit around thirty-seven billion tons every year.²¹ That amount of gas collected together occupies the volume of a cube seventeen miles wide, seventeen miles long, and seventeen miles tall.²² We can do the math and measurements, but those numbers are not fully intelligible, not to an individual.

One of my guiding purposes for going to graduate school was to contribute to solving climate change. I thought, as a scientist, I would be able to make some single-handed advancement that would make the difference. It’s what guided my decision-making when choosing a program, an advisor, and a research project. However, if my time in the laboratory taught me anything, it is that such thinking is counterproductive. One person confronted with 4,965 cubic miles of carbon dioxide is ultimately powerless, no matter how intelligent, resourceful, or compassionate they might be.

No amount of individual action, recycling, or cutting back will make a dent in climate change. That is a depressing thought for an individualistic society. We are raised to believe that we are solely in control of our own destiny, but that is not true in this instance. It is bigger than any one person, be they a scientist or senator. We must make peace with the fact we are, each of us, very small pieces in an enormous system that requires an overhaul. Yet, it is not bigger than all of us. There is still time to keep the door from closing on our future.

The impetus behind this book is to prove that statement is correct. It was partially born of frustration, as I have seen the same dead-end ideas endlessly repeating themselves within the discourse. If you have been watching progress on climate change, I am willing to bet you are similarly frustrated at the lack of concrete action. If you are new to the arena, it can be overwhelming to navigate a treacherous sea of technical information, half-truths, and inertia. The rest of the book aims to find solid ground and yield a comprehensive and actionable approach, a strategy. Its assembly shows how we can use the tools available to us now to fix climate change. The discussion is centered around the United States, but conditions elsewhere will be variations on the same themes.

This book is structured to answer the overarching question of climate change in three movements. The first covers how we can stop the problem from getting worse by cutting our emissions through a rapid shift to renewable power sources. Our ultimate objective needs to be to return the climate to its stable preindustrial condition, which is the subject of the second part. However, neither of those objectives will happen unless we marshal societal institutions—business, the government, and the people—to accomplish them, as is laid out in part three. Each is dependent on the others, and isolated success in one area will not yield the results we need. We must pursue them all simultaneously.

Most importantly, the book is written to push back against despair. That is our true enemy, the idea of surrender in the face of an overwhelming problem. Being a scientist means following the data, and decades of minimal activity does not portend a positive future. At least not without major forcing functions to change the status quo. And this is the moment when that must happen. We have precious little time, less than a decade, to begin work in earnest before we have missed our last opportunity to make a survivable climate for our descendants.²³ Success requires we focus only on the goal ahead, and despair will only slow us down. There is no time to waste, so let’s begin.

1 Borunda, See How Much of the Amazon, August 29, 2019; Woodward, The Amazon Rainforest Is Burning, August 24, 2019; Irfan, The Amazon Rainforest’s Worst-Case Scenario, August 27, 2019.

2 BBC News, Australia Fires, January 31, 2020.

3 Cosgrove, These Are the Largest Wildfires, October 9, 2019.

4 Machemer, The Far-Reaching Consequences, July 9, 2020. A greenhouse gas is any chemical in the atmosphere that traps heat.

5 Hannam, How Bad is this Drought, November 4, 2019; Thompson, Yes, Climate Change Did Influence, March 4, 2020.

6 Stone, A Heat Wave Thawed Siberia’s Tundra, July 6, 2020.

7 Borunda, Climate Change is Contributing, October 25, 2019.

8 Funk and Kennedy, How Americans See Climate Change, April 21, 2020.

9 Tharoor, Bolsonaro, Trump and the Nationalists, August 23, 2019; Reuters Staff, Brazil Foreign Minister Says, September 11, 2019.

10 Isachenkov, Putin Acknowledges Threats, December 19, 2019.

11 Reuters Staff, Australia’s Leaders Unmoved, January 7, 2020.

12 For example: Dorman, House GOP Resolution Blasts, May 22, 2019; Loris, The Green New Dealt, May 29, 2019; Gleckman, The Green New Deal would Cost, February 7, 2019.

13 Lieberman, Wildfires and Climate Change, July 2, 2019; Westerling et al., Briefing: Climate and Wildfire, 2014.

14 To see how your area would fare, see: NOAA, Sea Level Rise Viewer, accessed August 6, 2020; Treat et al., What the World, September 2013.

15 NASEM, Global warming, accessed August 6, 2020.

16 Goudarzi, As Earth Warms, November 1, 2016.

17 The world would start to look like the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone: Allan, Chernobyl, May 28, 2019; Barras, The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, April 22, 2016.

18 Gray, Earth’s Freshwater Future, June 13, 2019; Deutsch, Increase in Crop Losses, 916.

19 NOAA, Ocean Acidification, updated April 2020; Rojas-Rocha, Worsening Ocean, July 29, 2014.

20 Sova, The First, November 30, 2017; Klare, If the US Military, November 12, 2019; Aton, Once Again, June 9, 2017.

21 Harvey, CO2 Emissions, December 6, 2018.

22 See appendix for calculation details.

23 IPCC, Summary for Policymakers, 2018, 13.

Chapter 1

The Foundation

Our hope to reverse climate change rests on acting together, acting decisively, and—most importantly—acting quickly. This cannot be an ad hoc affair if we mean to effectively marshal the necessary resources. We need a coordinated approach that is more than a plan and certainly more than a vision. We need a strategy. Our strategy will need to be actionable and comprehensive, which means we need to start by laying a firm foundation. The cornerstone of a successful strategy is an accurate diagnosis of the problem.²⁴ Without one, you will not solve the core issue. Climate change is a large and complex problem and, to mitigate it, we must begin by understanding its root cause.

Carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere. That much is a fact of physics. Trapped heat raises temperatures, which alters the climate in myriad ways. There are natural fluctuations in carbon dioxide content throughout the year. Plants absorb carbon dioxide to grow and release it as they decompose. More accumulates in winter when fewer plants are absorbing it, which is drawn down when snow melts and spring covers more of the Earth. This is the natural carbon cycle that life depends upon. However, humans are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide to power our homes, cars, and businesses, far beyond the ability of nature to incorporate within the existing system. Since nature cannot absorb what we are emitting, more carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere, trapping more heat. Thus, we are causing climate change.

With such a clear diagnosis, the solution seems like it should be obvious: we just need to stop emitting carbon dioxide. That is, we need to decarbonize. This is easier said than done. There are many ways we could potentially reduce emissions, and not all of them will be equally effective. Since time is of the essence, we need to focus on actions that will create the most benefit. Narrowing down our choices will rely on the next step of strategy building, setting the guiding policies that define our suite of potential solutions.

Just as blueprints define the structure of a house, guiding policies shape a strategy. They aren’t solutions to climate change themselves, but they will lead us to the solutions. Our guiding policies will reflect the rules we will use to evaluate different approaches to solving climate change, and they reflect the overall philosophy that will guide our choices. Absent guiding policies, we run the risk of taking actions that work against each other, or we may become so bogged down in the number of available options we lose the ability to act decisively. While careful consideration of each option is necessary, we can’t afford to fall into such traps.

Guiding Policy 1: Finding a Target Sector

Our first task is to narrow our focus to the sectors contributing the most to climate change and whose emissions can be most thoroughly reduced. Looking at the data, we can broadly focus our decarbonization efforts on transportation, buildings, industry, and electricity generation.²⁵ Each would be a fine target on its own, given they all emit millions of tons of carbon dioxide per year. Due to time and resource constraints, it would be better to narrow down the options and find overlap wherever possible.

Let’s start with transportation since there’s been a big push lately for electric vehicles. The thinking goes like this: if we stop using gasoline and diesel fuel to power cars and trucks, we can substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the economy. In total, switching to electric vehicles would prevent about 1.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide, about 30 percent of total US emissions, from entering the atmosphere every year—not a bad start.²⁶ The technology is viable. Otherwise, we wouldn’t see year-over-year growth in this sector. All we need to do is build more electric cars, install more charging stations, and call it a day.

The problem is the power for a vehicle still needs to come from somewhere, whether from the fuel in the engine or a power plant miles away. If you are charging your car in the United States, there’s a good chance the electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels. Unless you’re pulling solely from renewable sources, the amount of transportation emissions savings by switching to electric vehicles would be offset by a similar increase in emissions from electricity generation, so decarbonizing the transportation sector is impossible in isolation.

Buildings are a less obvious but nonetheless important contributor to climate change. You can find several sources of carbon emissions in your own home, like a stove, furnace, or water heater that runs on natural gas. You may not be able to see the emissions, but every time you cook a meal, turn up the heat, or take a shower, more carbon dioxide adds to the atmosphere. The obvious solution is to replace those appliances with electric units, much like replacing existing cars with electric vehicles. However, the problem is the same: electricity has to come from somewhere, and if you’re burning fossil fuels to supply this added electricity demand, you will see little benefit.

Manufacturing is another potent area we could focus on for reducing emissions. Take the chemical industry as an example. It’s one of the largest energy users, where huge quantities of heat are required to drive reactions, run distillation columns, and generate steam. Most of that heat is provided by burning fossil fuels, like your home’s furnace on a much larger scale. The goal here would be to replace those boilers and heating systems with electrical units. Now we’re back to the same issue we had with the cars and buildings: without a decarbonized power grid, electrifying industry won’t fundamentally make a difference.

Analyzing our targets reveals a singular conclusion. Decarbonizing other sectors will not be successful without a renewable power grid. While electrification will be an important piece for complete decarbonization, it is not the current rate-limiting step for our transition.²⁷ Thus, our first guiding policy is this:

(1) Transitioning to renewable electricity generation is the priority for reducing carbon emissions.

Guiding Policy 2: Using Existing Technologies

We need to address the elephant in the room before considering how to best replace the existing power generation capacity. There’s always talk whenever you bring up renewable technologies about the need for research and development.²⁸ A focus on research has been used in proposals like the Green Real Deal (not to be confused with the Green New Deal).²⁹ An innovation-dependent approach implies the technology either doesn’t exist or is currently too expensive to be fully implemented. These claims, however, are excuses for not taking action, and their effects would be to slow the transition to a renewable grid and maintain the fossil fuel status quo.³⁰ That’s why they’re often put forward by those benefiting from the current system.³¹

Let’s start with the idea innovation is the fundamental bottleneck for action. In a recent report, the International Energy Agency rated renewable power generation technologies by their maturity.³² Essentially, they estimated how much more innovation is required to bring each one to its full potential. Only a few were rated as mature and require negligible additional innovation before they can be implemented, including geothermal. Geothermal is extremely useful for a clean energy transition, as we will discuss in chapter six. Yet, with no innovation barrier, we’re presently not investing much in it. That will be the same for every other technology, regardless of how advanced they are, because innovation is not the problem: our will to use them is.

Next, there’s the idea technology needs to be improved before it’s implemented. This is superficially true, as there’s always room for improvement with any technology. The continual improvement in solar cell efficiency since the 1970s is evidence of that. However, research is never truly finished, and you never know when you’re going to achieve a certain breakthrough. If you’re waiting for technology innovation to be complete, you will be waiting forever. To borrow a phrase from President Truman, imperfect action is better than perfect inaction. That is, eventually, good enough must be good enough.

Finally, there is the cost argument. Innovation, it is supposed, will bring down costs and incentivize a renewable transition without further direct action. Another way to bring down the costs of manufacturing is by scaling up production. Making more renewable energy sources