Cut Carbon Emissions 90% by 2035 AND Save Money
The disruptive potential of Autonomous Transport, Alternative Food and Energy
Welcome to the web version of
Need to Know: Science & Insight
my personal newsletter that looks at what we
Need-to-Know
at this time of pandemic, existential crisis of climate change and unravelling of nature’s life supports.
Learn more.
I called the late June ‘heat dome’ an extreme, extreme event in a recent article in The Atlantic: “If the Hardiest Species Are Boiled Alive, What Happens to Humans?”. Temperatures neared 50 degrees C (125 degrees F), summer weather in Saudi Arabia. Impossible weather in the cool, wet Pacific Northwest. And yet, for four days, a region better known for damp, cold summers, it happened.
So what else to call such an off-the-scale, impossible weather event but an extreme, extreme?
With weather records broken every single day the term ‘record-breaking weather’ has lost much of its significance. Nor does the term convey how extraordinary some of those events have been — and will be. As the climate contiunes to absorb more heat because of our carbon emisisons, there will be more heat waves, more flooding like those in Europe and China, more destructive cyclones and devestating droughts.
Need-to-Know 1: More extreme, extreme weather events are coming.
The focus of my Atlantic article was on the impacts on wildlife. It was challenging because these largely go unnoticed. However the stench of billions of dead mussels, clams, limpets along thousands of kilometers of shoreline couldn’t be ignored.
If you dig through the scientific literature and you can find records of mass wildlife die-offs:
Heat waves in Australia and South Africa where tens of thousands of birds and bats fall out of the sky and die
A marine heat wave from California to Alaska killed 20% of the entire population of common murres (also known as the guillemot, a medium-sized seabird that looks a bit like a penguin) in 2016
Rivers are full of different species — here’s a description of what happens when they become a raging torrent as rivers in Germany and China recently did:
“If you're watching cows graze a pasture, imagine if you saw an earthquake that churned the pasture up, so the cows were thrown hoof over horns and just ground up, and all the grass was buried.”
— Mary Eleanor Power, Department of Integrative Biology University of California
Droughts might have the biggest impacts on plants and wildlife. What we can’t forget is that our very life support system is comprised of other species. As the marine biologist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence Enric Sala told me once:
“Without them, there is no us.”
Need-to-Know 2: Extreme weather is pulling apart our life support system.
This is just one illustration of the overwhelming need for urgent action on climate.
So here’s a “90% solution” — a way to slash emissions over 90% without carbon taxes, biofuels, carbon capture, big reductions in consumption or lifestyle changes.
“…the new clean energy, food and transportation technologies will empower humanity to make choices allowing societies to meet their needs and prosper, while slashing up to 90 percent of global carbon emissions within just 15 years.”
—- RethinkX, an independent think tank
Need-to-Know 3: We need drastic, and even unimaginable scale of change
RethinkX is a data-driven organization analyzing new technologies for their potential to disrupt the current economy and enable us to cut emissions, preserve nature and for all of us to prosper. I interviewed co-founder Tony Seba a few years ago. His ideas on how electric vehicle (EV) sales would take off and the potential of autonomous vehicles have panned out.
Later Seba, and 40 leading energy experts, published a report on how renewable energy could power the world by 2030. I covered that in a Need to Know issue last Feb.
RethinkX’s ideas are far from mainstream: Many would call them fantasies, others nightmarish (certainly for fossil fuel CEOs). I think they are on to something absolutely necessary but also frightening: System Change. At the failed Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009, activists and tens of thousands of citizens of Denmark marched for climate action chanting: “System change! Not climate change!” .
I’ve documented many times here on NtK our status quo can’t continue. RethinkX agrees, and they document three areas where major transformative changes are already underway with the potential to not only cut emissions 90% but provide the world with green energy, transportation and food that will be 2-10 times cheaper than currently.
Summary of RethinkX’s ideas on systemic change.
Green Energy
This is essentially the same 100% renewable electricy plan from Global 100 per cent RE Strategy Group. It’s endorsed by well-known climate scientists Michael Mann of Penn State University and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. And I wrote about it in detail in the NtK issue titled: Possible and Doable: 100 Per Cent Renewable Energy for the World.
Transport
By the late 2020s, all new vehicles produced will be electric. EVs are far cheaper to make, as well as own and operate. (President Biden just set a target of 50 percent of new sales being EVs by 2030.) Traditional vehicle manufacturing will collapse. The economics of autonomous electric vehicles (A-EVs) will create an entirely new industry: on-demand A-EVs owned by fleet companies. Car ownership will plummet as “transportation-as-a-service” will be far cheaper and more convenient.
Since electric drivetrains can last over a million miles, freight and delivery transport will also be done by EVs soon and A-EVs later.
Food
Precision fermentation and cellular agriculture can produce alternative proteins faster, cheaper, and with little environmental impact. Eventually these will replace all meat, dairy, eggs and other animal-based food products. RethinkX says this will free up some 2.7 billion hectares of land that current supports animal production. That land can be returned back to nature to boost biodiversity, with 20% planted in trees to sequester carbon.
Precision fermentation combines modern biotechnology with fermentation to create “microbial cell factories” that are already beginning to produce specific proteins needed for alternative meat, milk, eggs and much more. One company makes protein powder from the air using renewable energy.
George Monbiot, the British environmental activist and columnist at The Guardian is a huge fan of this way of producing farm-free food.
Bottom Line
Most of the technology to do all this is already here and commercially viable says RethinkX. The rest can be ready to roll by 2025. And by 2035 we could see up to 90% reduction in carbon emissions, and net zero by 2040. And we’d all have more money in our pockets.
So, is this too good to be true or some kind of techno-dystopia?
I can’t say. All I know is we need radical change.
Is this the system change we need? Maybe.
Need-to-Know 4: New technologies can change things very quickly. The transition from horses to automobiles, film cameras to digital, dumb phones to smartphones happened quickly. In fact, these all happened in 10 to 15 years.
RethinkX’s big ideas in the way our society generates energy, moves around and feeds people will be exponentially more difficult than any new product introduction. They rightly worry saying:
We can achieve a net zero future – affordably, on time, and opening up huge opportunities for carbon-free prosperity – if policymakers make smart choices to enable these highest impact technologies and stop supporting legacy industries.
That’s quite a caveat. However they say much of this is inevitable, (better, cheaper tech usually wins out) but it can be delayed.
Need-to-Know 5: Delay is deadly in our increasingly perilous situation.
Read the RethinkX report, let me know what you think. I plan to write more about it.
Until next time, stay safe, and share this with your friends.
Stephen
The RethinkX report makes so much sense! This new tech will disrupt and completely replace the old. But we need to scale up wind, solar and battery power NOW and overcome the dangerous delays being put in place by the dying industries that control virtually all our politicians and the media. How do we deal with their propaganda? I am sick and tired of "I love O&G bumper stickers, t-shirts and hats." I can't wait to get my hands on an "I love wind & solar t-shirt!"