Optimizing For 2050
A Marshmallow Test for the Planet
You’ve presumably heard this adage:
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
Clearly, the sustainable solution is preferable to a temporary band-aid. However, there’s a lack of ambition here. If that poor man is walking around hungry, others are probably hungry as well. We can do more:
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Open a fishing academy, and you address the village’s persistent food insecurity.
But this may be a regional problem; we can’t stop here:
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Open a fishing academy, and you address the village’s persistent food insecurity. Lobby for the government to provide free fishing courses in every community college, and you alleviate malnutrition across an entire region.
Unfortunately, as we scale up our program, the quality of education may vary. Also, hiring all those fishing instructors is expensive. Our program is in danger of failing to meet its goals, and budget cuts are looming. We’re still not done!
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Open a fishing academy, and you address the village’s persistent food insecurity. Lobby for the government to provide free fishing courses in every community college, and you alleviate malnutrition across an entire region. Fund research into improved fishing pedagogy and fishery management, and you create a culture of sustainable aquaculture that can last for generations.
Wonderful! We’ve initiated a wave of innovation that will eventually help to feed millions. Now let’s check in on that hungry man who inspired all this work:
Hmm. Maybe we should have started out by giving him a fish.
Timing Is Everything
The tradeoff here is between a project that offers immediate, modest benefits (a fish), vs. large, delayed benefits (nationwide fishing schools). Large benefits are generally better, but if you have to wait too long for the payoff, bad things might happen in the meantime.
The battle against climate change offers endless examples. Adding solar panels to your roof will likely reduce fossil fuel usage today. Research into improved agricultural techniques could yield large benefits a couple of decades down the line. Practical fusion power could revolutionize everything, but I’m not convinced that line of research can pay off in time to help get the world to net zero emissions.
If you ever played Plants vs. Zombies, you learned how to manage short-term and long-term payoffs. You need to start out by planting Sunflowers; these take time to grow, eventually yielding the Sun points you’ll need to survive the peak zombie onslaught. But just as plans for improved fishing pedagogy won’t feed a starving man, those Sunflowers won’t prevent the zombies from eating your brains. Pretty soon you’ll need to switch to planting Pea Shooters for immediate protection.
Conceptually, given a goal – say, zero net emissions by 2050 – here’s one way to optimize our approach. First, make a list of every possible initiative – every conceivable research program, subsidy package, regulation, etc. – and order them in terms of their impact efficiency (ton of CO2 per dollar) in 2050. We’d work our way down the list, fully funding each program until the aggregate impact adds up to the 50 Gt/year needed to zero out emissions. If there’s money left over, we can spend it to reduce emissions sooner, by shifting some of our spending into programs that are less efficient but pay off sooner.
In practice, of course, this assumes an unachievable level of both knowledge and coordination. There’s no explicit “planetary budget” for climate change. But I’d like to see more systematic analysis that attempts to rate programs in terms of carbon-removed-per-dollar-in-2050.
To Get A Lot Of Something Later, We Need A Little Bit Now
Companies like Microsoft and Google have been making aggressive pledges to eliminate their carbon footprint. Carbon-free electricity plays a big part.
There are at least two approaches a company can take to carbon-free electricity. In November, David Roberts of the (highly recommended) Volts podcast wrote a great three part analysis. To quote from the introduction:
When a company or city claims to be “100 percent powered by clean energy,” what it typically means is that it has tallied up its electricity consumption, purchased an equal amount of carbon-free energy (CFE), and called it even.
That’s fine, as far as it goes. But now, the next horizon of voluntary climate action has come into view: a brave few companies and cities aspire, not just to offset their consumption with CFE on a yearly basis, but to match their consumption with CFE production every hour of every day, all year long. Running on clean energy 24/7 — that’s new hotness.
In the former approach, a company like Google might use some coal-fired electricity to run its data centers at night, but make up for it by paying for more solar power than they need during the day.
In the newer “24/7” approach, 100% of the company’s power comes from carbon-free sources. At night, that means batteries, wind power, etc.
Both approaches yield zero net carbon emissions. The immediate impact on the environment is the same. And the 24/7 approach is more expensive. Yet some organizations are pledging to adopt 24/7 clean energy:
Peninsula Clean Energy (a community choice aggregator in California) has committed to it by 2025; Google, Microsoft, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District have targeted 2030; the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and, somewhat anomalously for this California-heavy list, the city of Des Moines, Iowa, have targeted 2035. Ithaca, New York, is rumored to be contemplating something similar.
Why go the 24/7 approach, when you can eliminate the same amount of emissions for less money using dirty nighttime power plus an excess of daytime clean power?
It’s all about the road to 2050. Purchasing 24/7 clean energy stimulates the kind of work we’ll need to get the entire economy to zero emissions. Offsetting your nighttime emissions with extra clean power during the day only works when other customers are using dirty power during the day. Otherwise you have nothing to offset. Or more directly: if you’re sending carbon into the atmosphere at night, then you’re sending carbon into the atmosphere. That’s incompatible with a zero-carbon world. (Unless you’re willing to offset by capturing CO2 from the atmosphere, but that’s not an efficient solution for generating electricity.)
Eventually, everyone will need to be clean 24/7, meaning someone needs to get there first. Those early adopters will pay a premium, but they’ll also stimulate the market for important technologies such as long-term storage and “clean firm” generation (e.g. geothermal and nuclear power). I wrote about the importance of early adopters in The Flywheel. It’s an approach that’s less cost-efficient in the short term, but has a very high environmental payoff in the long run. Thank you Google, Microsoft, and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District!
It’s Easy To Overlook Acorns
“Mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow.” There are many, many things we could be doing today that would have a huge impact before 2050. Plenty of unaddressed emission sources, lots of room for improved technologies. However, by their very nature, these activities have low visibility. Giant reforestation projects are visible and appealing. It’s easy to see the point of installing solar panels. It’s a lot less obvious that the world needs better approaches to managing cattle manure, or improved enzymes for low-temperature synthesis of industrial chemicals.
We should be investing much more in R&D and early stage ventures, across a wide variety of technologies. If you can find the right opportunities, a dollar in this kind of work will do much more good than a dollar spent planting trees. But make sure that the idea can pay off by 2050!
If It Doesn’t Get Us to 2050, It’s a Dead End
There’s a movement afoot to stop connecting new buildings to the natural gas system. For a carbon-free world, we need to abandon gas-fired furnaces, stoves, and other appliances.
When I first heard this anti-natural-gas message, I had a bit of whiplash. For decades, the story was that natural gas was the good, efficient solution. Indeed, it used to be true: a gas power plant has lower emissions than a coal-fired plant; it’s more efficient to heat your home using a gas-fired furnace than to burn gas (or coal) in a power plant and generate electricity to power an electric heater.
However, these are dead ends. To get to net zero, we need to stop replacing coal with natural gas, and start replacing natural gas with solar, wind, etc. Depending on the local electric grid, a gas furnace or stove may still yield a short-term win for the environment, but in the long run, heat pumps and induction “burners” are better.
We’re going to have a lot of dead ends to watch out for. For instance, Bill McKibben reports:
…big gas companies like pipeline giant Enbridge are taking about ‘blending’ hydrogen into the gas they send to your cooktop and your furnace in order to ‘cut emissions.’ But as Julia Levin points out, the most hydrogen they can blend in is about 20%, and that will cut emissions six percent.
A dead end isn’t a dead end if it can act as a stepping stone to a real net-zero solution. Tesla was never going to eliminate the internal combustion engine by selling luxury roadsters with six-figure prices, but those early sales allowed them to start down the path that led to the Model 3. I read about a carbon capture company that plans to earn some early revenue by selling CO2 to the beverage industry; you can’t save the planet that way, but you can work out the kinks in your carbon capture technology. When your flywheel is just starting to turn, you’ll take any push you can get.
A Marshmallow Test for the Planet
You’ve probably heard about that experiment that tested whether preschoolers could stare down a marshmallow for 15 minutes without eating it, in return for an extra marshmallow. The specific conclusions of that study have been more or less debunked, but it still serves as a symbol of delayed gratification: giving up something today in order to get something more tomorrow.
When it comes to saving the planet, there is important work we can do today, but the most important work lies in paving the path for tomorrow. In order to succeed, we’re going to need to focus on the projects that have the biggest long-term impact. 2050 will come up fast, but it’s still far enough away that we can – and must – innovate along the way. So remember:
Seek out acorns – obscure projects that can lead to big payoffs by 2050
A young oak doesn’t look like much – don’t get discouraged if emissions aren’t plummeting yet
A quick start could be a dead end – “improvements” like natural gas aren’t helpful if they don’t lead all the way to zero emissions
Do the math – always optimize for carbon-removed-per-dollar-in-2050
