Path to full climate protection must involve science and tech, not just politics and finance

The ominous threat of climate change has spawned much pessimism, which has been tempered lately by optimism that the problem can be easily solved. This optimism has bred a kind of massive cheering section that urges us to the task, using various meme phrases such as “environmental, social and corporate governance” or ESG, “sustainability” and “net zero”.

This cheering is helpful, even if the memes often evoke more passion than practicality, and is raising consciousness everywhere and causing corporations and entrepreneurs to turn to the task of what they can do to help solve the problem.

But both pessimism and optimism can be unhelpful if they go to extremes. The dismay too often gives way to hyper-pessimism in the form of organizations like Extinction Rebellion, which is founded on the mistaken notion that climate change will put an end to the human race and perhaps the entire biosphere.

However, even hyper-optimism can be unhelpful if it fosters mistaken ideas about how easy it will be to solve the problem.

It is common for optimistic media articles to say that the solution to climate change is available to us now and less costly than the climate-unfriendly path we are on. All we need is the political will to implement it.

The problem is that the cost of renewable energy is often compared with that of other forms of energy, such as coal and nuclear, using the “levelized cost of energy”. But this is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Suppose you live in the United States and, for some reason, you have been offered rooftop solar panels for your household completely free, including installation and maintenance. Happy to take up the offer, you disconnect from the carbon-emitting grid and accept, for free, more than enough solar panels to power all your household needs. Now your solar electricity is not just cheap — in the “levelized cost of energy” sense — but free.

However, it will not provide electricity when the sun is not shining — at night or during overcast days or hours. Therefore, to ensure that you can access electricity at the times to which you have become accustomed, you buy a battery to store the electricity.

A battery storing 20 kilowatt-hours will power you for a night followed by a cloudy day. This is far from the near-100 percent reliability of grid access but you deem it the best cost-benefit trade-off. 

Such a battery may cost $20,000 to install and have a 10-year life. Spreading the cost over 10 years and ignoring the cost of money, and assuming your average use is one kilowatt-hour per hour (typical of a US resident), your cost is 22.8 US cents per kilowatt-hour.

If you live in 45 of the 50 US states, that is more than you are paying for your electricity now. And it will not provide anywhere near the reliability you currently enjoy. To match the current reliability would require batteries costing five to 10 times as much.

Of course, this is a simplistic example. Households that buy solar panels and are still connected to the grid experience the same reliability that non-solar users do because, in the US and Europe, the utility typically burns gas in power plants to provide electricity when the sun is not shining.

But this cannot be the case when the energy transition reaches net-zero carbon emissions, because burning gas emits carbon dioxide. More complex systems and solutions will have to be implemented. But the costs of those complex solutions are still high, unlike what the hyper-optimists say. Much technological development will be necessary to reduce them. This will take time.

Another example of hyper-optimism is a result of the “net-zero” pledges made by many countries and corporations.

It is generally conceded that because some industrial processes are exceedingly challenging to decarbonize to achieve net zero (for example, the manufacturing of solar panels itself requires a high level of heat), it will be necessary to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The cost of doing this is currently very high, but it is not only the cost that is a problem. 

Technologies to extract carbon from the atmosphere are estimated to require at least 2,000 kilowatt-hours of energy per metric ton, which is approximately the same amount of energy that a coal-fired power plant produces as it emits a ton of CO2. Therefore, if coal were used to provide the energy for “direct air capture”, this would extract from the atmosphere the same amount of CO2 as it emits.

Of course, coal will not be used. But this illustrates how much additional energy must be generated to implement “direct air capture”. As if it were not enough to replace enormous quantities of carbon-emitting energy that is currently used, with zero-carbon electricity, much more will have to be generated to extract CO2 from the atmosphere. And that does not even include the vastly increased electricity demand likely to materialize as emerging economies grow.

In short, we are not ready to solve the climate change problem by merely exerting political will, even backed by financing. Much technological development and scientific research will be needed over the coming years to make it happen.

Furthermore, mass financing will not materialize if the technologies are not ready. The path to full climate protection must involve science and technology, not just politics and finance.

The author is an adjunct associate professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. 

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.