Thanks very much for the careful reporting. The fossil fuel industry is a clear threat to all life on the planet. They have managed to infiltrate our political institutions and even entities like the IPCC. The last climate COP in Egypt had a huge number of delegates from the fossil fuel industry. Some of the folks who attended that COP said it was more like a trade fair for the fossil fuel industry. The head of the next climate COP, which will meet in the UAE, is a fossil fuel executive!
Very enjoyable piece. Those of us who care about the planet should be mindful to check our assumptions about renewable energy vs. fossil fuels at the door and consult the science when needed. Even if our assumptions prove largely true, it's good to be able to elaborate as to why.
"While it may look invitingly like Earth from 64 light-years away, up close this planet has ferocious winds that blow up to seven times the speed of sound.
The blue color comes from clouds of silicate particles, which could possibly rain glass sideways in the 5,400 mph (2 km/s) winds."
I appreciate your thorough reporting that’s easy to understand. Climate change is so vast and complicated it’s nice to have reporting that’s served in digestible amounts; a balanced diet that helps me maintain my goals of electrifying my life.
I simply don’t understand our society’s rejection of technological progress regarding climate change. I’m a Gen-Xer, so maybe I just experience it more, but their rejection (it can no longer be denied) still stuns me. I’ll keep trying, though.
This is the type of reporting we rarely see from the larger outlets, a nuanced examination of pros and cons for debates we often see. The challenge is always separating those kernels of truth from the hyperbole, so thank you.
And, no matter what the science tells us, we have very real challenges to face on the practical implementation of some of these things. In a recent interview, an energy sector expert (I forget who, but didn’t sound like a fossil fuel plant - just someone who is a realist) stated we can maybe get 80-90% of the way to our goals with current renewable tech which is still a huge undertaking. The remaining part is due to the intermittency of renewables. We don’t talk enough about that remaining part and how to get there.
Having had a home burn to the ground in a wildfire predicted by climate scientists, I've been a climate refugee. I am a purist: further burning of carbon is not an option. My litmus test is 'is carbon being burned'. After 4 years of transition, our sixty-year-old replacement home was net positive last year.
We have to stop burning carbon. If CCS gets economical consider using it to clean up the mess we have already caused.
Thank you for this! Makes me so glad to be a subscriber!! As I read the first part, a voice kept screaming in my head - WHAT ABOUT ALL THE METHANE?!?!?! Thanks for including that. To your excellent writing here I just want to add that the US is choked by literally millions of miles of methane pipes - all of which have joints and valves, many of which leak methane. Add to that the up to 200-year-old infrastructures in cities like mine (Baltimore has 7,500 miles of methane pipes), AND add to that all the fracking sites with their leaking pump valves and storage tanks, etc., and it’s no wonder methane emissions went up last year. Methane - up to 100x potent as a GHG than CO2 in the near term - will NEVER be part of a clean energy energy transition.
This was very good. It’s a shame nuance doesn’t sell well, because I’d kill for even a handful of politicians who could read an article like this and have rational thoughts about it without their heads exploding.
Thanks once again for your thorough analysis with links for those of us who want to go even deeper down the wormhole! This also provides a safe venue for thoughtful discussion, which is also a real treat. With those in mind, and with my bias being advocating 100% renewables, I do have a question: At one point you say: "The fact is, in every single pathway to 1.5°C laid out by the IPCC, the use of natural gas is significantly reduced." So I went to your IPCC link that you provided, and looked at what they said, and found the following in the "Future Emissions in 1.5°C Pathways" section:
"Properties of Energy and Land Transitions in 1.5°C Pathways
The share of primary energy from renewables increases while
coal usage decreases across pathways limiting warming to
1.5°C with no or limited overshoot (high confidence)....
Natural gas changes by −13% to −62% (interquartile range), but
some pathways show a marked increase albeit with widespread
deployment of CCS..."
To my reading, it sounds like they do acknowledge that there is a scenario in which extracted methane ("natural gas") can increase if there is a massive deployment of CCS technologies. In fact I think that is precisely what the methane marketers are pushing: massive investment in CCS coupled with methane extraction.
Thanks for the little updates at the end, including last year's emissions of over 36 GT. I like to hearken back to the Copenhagen Diagnosis document put out in 2009, which had a telling graph which is still relevant, that shows that in order to have a fighting chance to remain at 1.5, the longer we wait, the harder it becomes. The 36 GT point puts us firmly on the needing to decrease 9%/year (nearly impossible) track: https://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/Copenhagen_Diagnosis_LOW.pdf (look at the last graph at the end of the report).
Arielle - I applaud your desire to find the best scientific analysis to support your writing. But this statement is an example of the risk associated with approaching science with a journalistic mindset.
"More than one scientific study shows that the world can run on 100 percent renewable energy. "
It isn't sufficient to find that that more than one study supports a complex technical position. Those studies might have fundamental issues with either assumptions or computations or they might be biased by ideology or political persuasion.
Key examples of this risk can be found in both the climate change field and in the cancer risk assessment field. More than one study "proves" that climate change is not happening or is happening at a rate that isn't a major concern. More than one study said that cigarettes don't cause cancer.
The overwhelming majority of the studies about our future energy supplies in a decarbonizing era say that nuclear energy will play an important role in the effort to replace fossil fuels. The magnitude of its role varies greatly from study to study, but only outlier studies attempt to prove that we can supply our energy needs without it.
Some of those studies, performed on a country-by-country basis, rest on an assumption that each country needs 40-50% less energy than it uses today, even in countries like India and Bangladesh.
Nuclear energy, unlike carbon capture and storage, is a well-proven emissions reduction technology that has been operating on an enormous scale for 4-5 decades. It might not have improved much in the recent past, but it is poised for major growth and improvement when we succeed in getting costs under control.
If you are referring to my comment I wasn’t surprised or disappointed, and in fact I was trying to explain, not very well because I’m terrible at writing, that the debate I want discussed is actually about hitting that 100% renewable energy target without nuclear, which I don’t believe to be possible. And that the current 100% renewable energy strategy actually enables the use of natural gas, because while all in the climate movement rightly say natural gas even with CCS is not a solution, the models don’t match reality, and natural gas usage only increases. Specifically because there is a lack of serious debate on the global energy transition to clean energy.
That Is why I’m frustrated at the lack of actual debate on this among the wider climate movement. So it wasn’t frustration over “including the use of natural gas in combination with carbon capture and storage”, I don’t think natural gas should play a role at all, but the part of the sentence before the comma, since that debate doesn’t seem to happen. And maybe I’m misreading this article, but you repeat it as well. 100% renewables is taken as such a given in this article, and I think that is a catastrophic mistake.
My point was that those who take the “100% renewable” side of the energy transition debate are also largely the ones, intentionally or not, enabling natural gas because of the shut down of nuclear power plants like Diablo Canyon. And not having any real evidence, other than models that in my view don’t reflect the reality of energy demand and the obstacles with storage, that storage will make up the difference. Which like I said gives natural gas an ability to market itself.
“His administration argued that the plant is still the state’s largest source of power, providing roughly 9% of its energy, and powers the needs of millions of residents. As drought, heat, and a slower-than-hoped transition to renewables threaten resilience of California’s energy system, the administration warned, the closure of the plant might spur shortages or a fallback on fossil fuels.”
Germany’s Energiewende policy illustrates this all too well. Not only their despicable coal phase out timeline, but a key building block of their green transition, was massively importing natural gas from Russia.
I made this point before, but there is a reason why the IPCC says nuclear power needs to increase by 40% by 2030, and more by 2050. And that is WITH natural gas and biomass. So you can imagine how much more nuclear power will be needed if those two things are reduced, which is desirable imo.
Even the linked article that summarizes the 100% renewable energy research points out massive gaps.
“More emphasis is required in 100% RE research on the full transport sector, industrial feedstock, power-to-X technologies, carbon dioxide removal options, and sector coupling. Major regions and countries in the world are not yet well covered by 100% RE research, such as South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Eurasia, Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia and India/South Asia, which may be a substantial bottleneck for effective policy-making.”
It is also why I said I hope HEATED agrees it is sink or swim time for renewables. What I meant by that was renewables + storage needs to meet the needs of society TODAY. Climate people and policymakers need to orient their thinking and planning of a world without using fossil fuels, and if nuclear is excluded, it isn’t acceptable to rest hope on some battery breakthrough in the future.
So if a nuclear power plant shuts down, and I think it is still ridiculous to put it mildly that we are replacing clean energy with clean energy instead of removing emissions, that needs to be met with renewables and storage NOW, not 15 years in the future if ever.
But nothing I have seen comes close, and that is the problem. And yes it seems like a lot in the climate movement point to just models, when the reality on the ground shows the strategy isn’t working, so the problem remains unsolved.
Thank you for the article, and I like that these pieces will end with pictures of planets.
I subscribed but I don’t want to vacation in HD 189733b. Can I just stay here on Earth which, despite all the greed and insanity, is my home? Please don’t enroll me in the drawing for a killer vacation. I still love the sound of waves, the thin crescent of our moon, and the smell of deciduous forests.
I also appreciate the even-handedness of this report on the possible future of gas in a clean energy future. It is exactly that fairness that, in the end, leads me to trust your conclusion—that is, that CCS is not currently up to the task of mitigating the world’s GHG emissions, and we CANNOT trust the fossil fuel industries trying to persuade us that they can be our saviors.
A decade ago I thought the methane "bridge fuel" argument made sense. Mostly in the context of using gas in backup power plants with a rapidly increasing share of wind and solar power. But it was twisted over the decade by building gas baseload power plants and much less wind and solar than could have otherwise been the case. Methane producers sold gas dirt cheap to the power plant owners, allowing them to look cheap compared to renewables in the "market" and in front of PUCs. Also undercounted GHG effects of methane leaks and venting.
IMHO, in the next decade or two or three, methane as a fuel in backup power plants still makes sense, as long as they are really operated as backup/peakers. Meaning reducing fossil fuels from 60% of generation to 20% to 10%... And at the same time, de-fossilizing heat and transportation. And stoves! OY!
Key to distinguish between zero emissions and net zero, which by definition makes room for emissions. I read a great NREL article about eh 4 phases of energy storage deployment to support a fully renewable electric grid (given intermittent power issues). We are in phase 1, supply some peak-shaving support and rapid discharge type support, next steps are to cover all peak demand, then support all daily fluctuations (night time etc), then weather variability (a week of bad storms), then seasonal variability (shifting solar energy from summer to winter). The energy storage infrastructure is woeful at present. NG will continue to play that emergency backup role for many years (maybe to be supported by hydrogen - but that is also mostly NG and "green" hydrogen is being defined presently in the EU and US by policy with far reaching impacts).
Thanks very much for the careful reporting. The fossil fuel industry is a clear threat to all life on the planet. They have managed to infiltrate our political institutions and even entities like the IPCC. The last climate COP in Egypt had a huge number of delegates from the fossil fuel industry. Some of the folks who attended that COP said it was more like a trade fair for the fossil fuel industry. The head of the next climate COP, which will meet in the UAE, is a fossil fuel executive!
Very enjoyable piece. Those of us who care about the planet should be mindful to check our assumptions about renewable energy vs. fossil fuels at the door and consult the science when needed. Even if our assumptions prove largely true, it's good to be able to elaborate as to why.
"While it may look invitingly like Earth from 64 light-years away, up close this planet has ferocious winds that blow up to seven times the speed of sound.
The blue color comes from clouds of silicate particles, which could possibly rain glass sideways in the 5,400 mph (2 km/s) winds."
Or, as we Canadians call it, "January". ;-)
I appreciate your thorough reporting that’s easy to understand. Climate change is so vast and complicated it’s nice to have reporting that’s served in digestible amounts; a balanced diet that helps me maintain my goals of electrifying my life.
I simply don’t understand our society’s rejection of technological progress regarding climate change. I’m a Gen-Xer, so maybe I just experience it more, but their rejection (it can no longer be denied) still stuns me. I’ll keep trying, though.
This is the type of reporting we rarely see from the larger outlets, a nuanced examination of pros and cons for debates we often see. The challenge is always separating those kernels of truth from the hyperbole, so thank you.
And, no matter what the science tells us, we have very real challenges to face on the practical implementation of some of these things. In a recent interview, an energy sector expert (I forget who, but didn’t sound like a fossil fuel plant - just someone who is a realist) stated we can maybe get 80-90% of the way to our goals with current renewable tech which is still a huge undertaking. The remaining part is due to the intermittency of renewables. We don’t talk enough about that remaining part and how to get there.
Having had a home burn to the ground in a wildfire predicted by climate scientists, I've been a climate refugee. I am a purist: further burning of carbon is not an option. My litmus test is 'is carbon being burned'. After 4 years of transition, our sixty-year-old replacement home was net positive last year.
We have to stop burning carbon. If CCS gets economical consider using it to clean up the mess we have already caused.
Thank you for this! Makes me so glad to be a subscriber!! As I read the first part, a voice kept screaming in my head - WHAT ABOUT ALL THE METHANE?!?!?! Thanks for including that. To your excellent writing here I just want to add that the US is choked by literally millions of miles of methane pipes - all of which have joints and valves, many of which leak methane. Add to that the up to 200-year-old infrastructures in cities like mine (Baltimore has 7,500 miles of methane pipes), AND add to that all the fracking sites with their leaking pump valves and storage tanks, etc., and it’s no wonder methane emissions went up last year. Methane - up to 100x potent as a GHG than CO2 in the near term - will NEVER be part of a clean energy energy transition.
This was very good. It’s a shame nuance doesn’t sell well, because I’d kill for even a handful of politicians who could read an article like this and have rational thoughts about it without their heads exploding.
Thanks once again for your thorough analysis with links for those of us who want to go even deeper down the wormhole! This also provides a safe venue for thoughtful discussion, which is also a real treat. With those in mind, and with my bias being advocating 100% renewables, I do have a question: At one point you say: "The fact is, in every single pathway to 1.5°C laid out by the IPCC, the use of natural gas is significantly reduced." So I went to your IPCC link that you provided, and looked at what they said, and found the following in the "Future Emissions in 1.5°C Pathways" section:
"Properties of Energy and Land Transitions in 1.5°C Pathways
The share of primary energy from renewables increases while
coal usage decreases across pathways limiting warming to
1.5°C with no or limited overshoot (high confidence)....
Natural gas changes by −13% to −62% (interquartile range), but
some pathways show a marked increase albeit with widespread
deployment of CCS..."
To my reading, it sounds like they do acknowledge that there is a scenario in which extracted methane ("natural gas") can increase if there is a massive deployment of CCS technologies. In fact I think that is precisely what the methane marketers are pushing: massive investment in CCS coupled with methane extraction.
Thanks for the little updates at the end, including last year's emissions of over 36 GT. I like to hearken back to the Copenhagen Diagnosis document put out in 2009, which had a telling graph which is still relevant, that shows that in order to have a fighting chance to remain at 1.5, the longer we wait, the harder it becomes. The 36 GT point puts us firmly on the needing to decrease 9%/year (nearly impossible) track: https://www.ccrc.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/Copenhagen_Diagnosis_LOW.pdf (look at the last graph at the end of the report).
We should stop calling it "natural gas" and start calling it what it is: methane. And, language is important. Scientific American had a great article on how we should use language when discussing climate disruption. Here is the link: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-right-words-are-crucial-to-solving-climate-change/
Arielle - I applaud your desire to find the best scientific analysis to support your writing. But this statement is an example of the risk associated with approaching science with a journalistic mindset.
"More than one scientific study shows that the world can run on 100 percent renewable energy. "
It isn't sufficient to find that that more than one study supports a complex technical position. Those studies might have fundamental issues with either assumptions or computations or they might be biased by ideology or political persuasion.
Key examples of this risk can be found in both the climate change field and in the cancer risk assessment field. More than one study "proves" that climate change is not happening or is happening at a rate that isn't a major concern. More than one study said that cigarettes don't cause cancer.
The overwhelming majority of the studies about our future energy supplies in a decarbonizing era say that nuclear energy will play an important role in the effort to replace fossil fuels. The magnitude of its role varies greatly from study to study, but only outlier studies attempt to prove that we can supply our energy needs without it.
Some of those studies, performed on a country-by-country basis, rest on an assumption that each country needs 40-50% less energy than it uses today, even in countries like India and Bangladesh.
Nuclear energy, unlike carbon capture and storage, is a well-proven emissions reduction technology that has been operating on an enormous scale for 4-5 decades. It might not have improved much in the recent past, but it is poised for major growth and improvement when we succeed in getting costs under control.
If you are referring to my comment I wasn’t surprised or disappointed, and in fact I was trying to explain, not very well because I’m terrible at writing, that the debate I want discussed is actually about hitting that 100% renewable energy target without nuclear, which I don’t believe to be possible. And that the current 100% renewable energy strategy actually enables the use of natural gas, because while all in the climate movement rightly say natural gas even with CCS is not a solution, the models don’t match reality, and natural gas usage only increases. Specifically because there is a lack of serious debate on the global energy transition to clean energy.
That Is why I’m frustrated at the lack of actual debate on this among the wider climate movement. So it wasn’t frustration over “including the use of natural gas in combination with carbon capture and storage”, I don’t think natural gas should play a role at all, but the part of the sentence before the comma, since that debate doesn’t seem to happen. And maybe I’m misreading this article, but you repeat it as well. 100% renewables is taken as such a given in this article, and I think that is a catastrophic mistake.
My point was that those who take the “100% renewable” side of the energy transition debate are also largely the ones, intentionally or not, enabling natural gas because of the shut down of nuclear power plants like Diablo Canyon. And not having any real evidence, other than models that in my view don’t reflect the reality of energy demand and the obstacles with storage, that storage will make up the difference. Which like I said gives natural gas an ability to market itself.
“His administration argued that the plant is still the state’s largest source of power, providing roughly 9% of its energy, and powers the needs of millions of residents. As drought, heat, and a slower-than-hoped transition to renewables threaten resilience of California’s energy system, the administration warned, the closure of the plant might spur shortages or a fallback on fossil fuels.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/01/california-last-nuclear-power-plant-keep-open
Germany’s Energiewende policy illustrates this all too well. Not only their despicable coal phase out timeline, but a key building block of their green transition, was massively importing natural gas from Russia.
I made this point before, but there is a reason why the IPCC says nuclear power needs to increase by 40% by 2030, and more by 2050. And that is WITH natural gas and biomass. So you can imagine how much more nuclear power will be needed if those two things are reduced, which is desirable imo.
Even the linked article that summarizes the 100% renewable energy research points out massive gaps.
“More emphasis is required in 100% RE research on the full transport sector, industrial feedstock, power-to-X technologies, carbon dioxide removal options, and sector coupling. Major regions and countries in the world are not yet well covered by 100% RE research, such as South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Eurasia, Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia and India/South Asia, which may be a substantial bottleneck for effective policy-making.”
It is also why I said I hope HEATED agrees it is sink or swim time for renewables. What I meant by that was renewables + storage needs to meet the needs of society TODAY. Climate people and policymakers need to orient their thinking and planning of a world without using fossil fuels, and if nuclear is excluded, it isn’t acceptable to rest hope on some battery breakthrough in the future.
So if a nuclear power plant shuts down, and I think it is still ridiculous to put it mildly that we are replacing clean energy with clean energy instead of removing emissions, that needs to be met with renewables and storage NOW, not 15 years in the future if ever.
But nothing I have seen comes close, and that is the problem. And yes it seems like a lot in the climate movement point to just models, when the reality on the ground shows the strategy isn’t working, so the problem remains unsolved.
Thank you for the article, and I like that these pieces will end with pictures of planets.
I subscribed but I don’t want to vacation in HD 189733b. Can I just stay here on Earth which, despite all the greed and insanity, is my home? Please don’t enroll me in the drawing for a killer vacation. I still love the sound of waves, the thin crescent of our moon, and the smell of deciduous forests.
I also appreciate the even-handedness of this report on the possible future of gas in a clean energy future. It is exactly that fairness that, in the end, leads me to trust your conclusion—that is, that CCS is not currently up to the task of mitigating the world’s GHG emissions, and we CANNOT trust the fossil fuel industries trying to persuade us that they can be our saviors.
A decade ago I thought the methane "bridge fuel" argument made sense. Mostly in the context of using gas in backup power plants with a rapidly increasing share of wind and solar power. But it was twisted over the decade by building gas baseload power plants and much less wind and solar than could have otherwise been the case. Methane producers sold gas dirt cheap to the power plant owners, allowing them to look cheap compared to renewables in the "market" and in front of PUCs. Also undercounted GHG effects of methane leaks and venting.
IMHO, in the next decade or two or three, methane as a fuel in backup power plants still makes sense, as long as they are really operated as backup/peakers. Meaning reducing fossil fuels from 60% of generation to 20% to 10%... And at the same time, de-fossilizing heat and transportation. And stoves! OY!
this is really great practice and shows the level of care and thought that goes into the newsletter! thank you
Key to distinguish between zero emissions and net zero, which by definition makes room for emissions. I read a great NREL article about eh 4 phases of energy storage deployment to support a fully renewable electric grid (given intermittent power issues). We are in phase 1, supply some peak-shaving support and rapid discharge type support, next steps are to cover all peak demand, then support all daily fluctuations (night time etc), then weather variability (a week of bad storms), then seasonal variability (shifting solar energy from summer to winter). The energy storage infrastructure is woeful at present. NG will continue to play that emergency backup role for many years (maybe to be supported by hydrogen - but that is also mostly NG and "green" hydrogen is being defined presently in the EU and US by policy with far reaching impacts).