The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
by Brett Christophers · 12 Mar 2024 · 557pp · 154,324 words
category to prioritize analytically. The better, more meaningful, yardstick is profit. This is what we should be focusing on. The main economic reason why the decarbonization of electricity is progressing so much slower than we need it to, I argue, is that most governments worldwide have effectively outsourced responsibility for developing
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. It is essential that we clear away any potential misconceptions on this score right at the outset. For, while our ongoing failure on power decarbonization may strike some readers as obvious, others may yet need convincing. Are we not installing more renewable generating capacity around the world than ever before
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But our focus will be elsewhere: on the large, commercially oriented, ‘utility-scale’ renewables developments that, ultimately, will make or break most countries’ attempts to decarbonize electricity. Second, neither is the book about the business of designing, developing or manufacturing the technologies that renewable generating facilities use, such as solar cells
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present threat to ongoing investment in new renewable generating capacity should not be interpreted as a refutation of the significance of other obstacles to the decarbonization of electricity. Scholars and other commentators have persuasively documented any number of other factors that, to one degree or another, clearly also stand in
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electricity sector is so pivotal to the project of climate change mitigation. We need, above all else, to wean the world off fossil fuels, and decarbonizing electricity generation is necessarily the lynchpin of that enterprise. Figure 1.1 Global anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions by type and source, 2019 Source: IEA,
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that this logic is not necessarily ironclad in all cases – and it is certainly not a proposition of this book that it is. Perhaps the decarbonization of passenger vehicle transport, for example, could be better achieved through transitioning not to electric vehicles but to hydrogen internal combustion engine vehicles? No
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18 By that stage, in any event, electrification had been increasingly institutionalized by (and in) government policy as the pre-eminent broadly based strategy for decarbonization. The UK, for example, is explicitly relying principally on electrification to reduce emissions not just in road transport but also in the buildings sector. The
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assumed. The only variance tends to be in the degree of electrification: optimistic scenarios assume deep and broadly based electrification, combined with considerable success in decarbonizing electricity generation itself; less optimistic scenarios assume that electrification achieves lower levels of penetration. As an illuminating example, consider the IEA’s influential ‘Net Zero
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of our explanation for the centrality of electricity to the mitigation of climate change, then, can be simply stated as follows: we need urgently to decarbonize electricity generation, not just because today’s electricity sector emits so much CO2, but because, in future – and precisely in the cause of mitigation –
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governments have announced interim targets for emissions cuts (say, halving emissions from electricity by 2030) only adds to the incentive to prioritize faster means of decarbonization. Second, there is a question of scope. Although significant hydropower potential clearly remains in many parts of the world, and especially sub-Saharan Africa,
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also, because that intensification both compromises and exceeds existing generating infrastructures, to adapt to it. VI On the face of it, the shift to a decarbonized global infrastructure of electricity generation is simple to get our heads around, albeit – as we shall see – maddeningly difficult to achieve in practice. Shut
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growth in electricity demand, and will hence face challenges on vastly different scales. Some regions are already a considerable way along the path of successfully decarbonizing; some have barely begun. To contextualize what follows in the remainder of this book, it is therefore helpful to foreground the question of where different
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power with public ownership. Particularly in the Global South, the governments to which the world is looking to increase the scale and pace of decarbonization remain directly and disproportionately invested economically in the business of continuing to burn fossil fuels to keep the lights on. V Neoliberal wisdom says that
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increasingly often applies, and which therefore needs examining briefly here. That aspect is resource adequacy. It will be remembered from Chapter 1 that, as countries decarbonize their electricity sectors, they need, given constraints in energy storage capabilities, to consider where electricity will come from when solar and wind facilities fail to
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course, is another strong argument in favour of large-scale plants (over small-scale distributed-energy units) when it comes to the challenge of rapid decarbonization of global energy infrastructures. The aforementioned data for offshore installations hinted at this feature, but the relationship between scale and cost is more firmly established
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of power plants actually varies in several critical respects that are essential to understand when one is grappling with the complex political economy of the decarbonization of the electricity sector. All electrons are identical, certainly, but they come ‘packaged’ very differently. The clearest axis of variance is quantity. Some facilities
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the prevailing emphasis on the price mechanism in understandings of environmental issues were not in itself enough to nudge thinking about the challenge of electricity decarbonization towards a price framework, superimposed on top of this orthodoxy was a second discourse that leant strongly in the same direction. This was concerned
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Through their influence on policy-makers, this argument has it, companies in and around the coal and natural gas sectors are succeeding in forestalling the decarbonization of electricity, against both ecological and economic logics. Whatever the actual argument, however, the key point for our purposes is that the problem – the
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established’, the report confidently asserted, ‘that technical and economic barriers have been crossed by falling costs.’ In other words, the economic (and technical) challenges to decarbonization have been met. The logical implication? It can only be something else that is standing in the way. ‘It follows’, the authors comfortably concluded, ‘that
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geographical mismatch between the location of renewables plants, with their hunger for cheap land, and the location of demand. Notably, this includes countries whose future decarbonization trajectories will play disproportionately significant roles in shaping planetary outcomes. In China, for instance, solar and wind plants are heavily concentrated in Ningxia, Qinghai, Heilongjiang
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revenues and profits under the two different scenarios intimated, however, not retiring those coal plants was, arguably, the very point. ‘Wind Prime is not about decarbonization,’ one consultant concluded. ‘Wind Prime’s purpose is to maximize revenues for MidAmerican.’25 Sunk costs, then, take us from questions of space to questions
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feature very low levels of electricity access and usage (which are anticipated to rise dramatically), or very carbon-intensive power generation sectors (which need to decarbonize dramatically), or both of those things – namely China, India and Nigeria. Certainly, some commentators remain sceptical of the extent to which these countries will
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principal source of investment bankability for renewables, such contractual instruments are, advocates infer, proof positive that a fundamental transformation of society’s approach to infrastructure decarbonization – such as decommodification of the means of energy generation and distribution – is not needed. This, essentially, is the wider wager that market ideologues and
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– and especially corporate PPA markets – properly to flourish. VI On numerous grounds, such positivity around the present and future role of corporate PPAs in electricity decarbonization seems deeply misplaced. Let us consider some of the main reasons for scepticism. Partly, there is an obvious political concern. To many, relying on markets
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‘because it is a marked departure from the old paradigm, where renewable deployment was driven by government intervention. This revolution brings a new paradigm, where decarbonisation can be brought about by sheer market force.’3 The motive power of such ‘sheer market force’ is, of course, precisely what the protagonists of
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incomplete: the invisible hand was still unduly fettered, in short. Thus the answer – including, notably, to the still-burning question of how best to hasten decarbonization – was not backtracking, but, instead, further market-led reforms. ‘It takes effective market mechanisms to ensure that each power generating and related technology, in particular
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sufficient once built. There is no fuel, and hence no potential dependency on unpredictable fuel suppliers. ‘In the past, the big driver for renewables was decarbonisation,’ Edurne Zoco, executive director for clean energy technology at the financial analysis firm S&P Global, remarked in early 2023. ‘What has changed since 2022
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sectors? Is a method of pricing in which the price of natural gas ordinarily determines system-wide electricity prices the right one for a decarbonizing world? How can decarbonization and energy security best be reconciled in the long term? Whatever the territorial scope, the ‘meta-questions’ effectively being asked in all
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, these expected territorial focal points of future global growth in electricity consumption are both heavily reliant on fossil fuels for existing power generation and are decarbonizing such generation at an extremely slow pace – if at all. It is a toxic combination, illustrated with striking clarity in Figure 11.2. Figure
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greenhouse gases currently lodged in the atmosphere, for which Europe and the US are overwhelmingly responsible. Neither should we forget that such countries’ efforts to decarbonize – efforts that, as this book has shown, are always and everywhere as much about financial wherewithal as about political ambition and technical capability – are
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support should be a crucial consideration when thinking through arguments about how electricity sectors around the world might best be reconfigured to accelerate processes of decarbonization while keeping – or making – power affordable to users. The fact that governments have generally been unable safely to remove mechanisms of support for renewables,
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its own competitiveness away’ – commentators now actively highlighted the spur that relatively high electricity prices, underpinned by the existing market designs, could theoretically provide to decarbonization.31 Writing in August 2022, for example, Sam Fleming and Valentina Pop of the Financial Times observed that Europe’s existing system of electricity pricing
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in recent years. They have also, notably, been growing in range. If the proposition that markets and the private sector will not themselves successfully decarbonize global electricity within a reasonable time frame was once the preserve of political-economic radicals, that is clearly no longer the case. Said proposition has
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it is fanciful to imagine that it can ever be the main answer to the challenge, especially given the speed and scale at which electricity decarbonization is required. Beyond capital (indeed, arguably even if one includes capital), only the state, by which I mean national governments considered collectively, potentially has
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relevant infrastructure (including, but not only, renewable electricity infrastructure) generally are not the argument that this book has made about capital’s difficulty with electricity decarbonization – an argument that is fundamentally about profit. This does not mean that I disagree with those arguments (I do not), nor that they are incompatible
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be very different from the one propounded by the UK Labour Party. Its core logic would presumably be that the state needs to drive electricity decarbonization more actively, directly and proprietorially than it currently does because the anticipated profits available from renewable energy generation are in fact not sufficiently attractive to
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incentivize the private sector to pursue decarbonization quickly and comprehensively. It was, therefore, a particularly noteworthy political development that took place in the US state of New York in 2021. That
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, a slightly fuller and more precise synopsis of this book might read as follows: if private capital, circulating in markets, is still failing to decarbonize global electricity generation sufficiently rapidly even with all the support it has gotten and is getting from governments, and even with technology costs having fallen
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34 IEA, ‘Net Zero by 2050’, p. 115. 35 IPCC, Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change, p. 28. 36 See the excellent discussion in ‘Decarbonisation of Electric Grids Reliant on Renewables Requires Long-Duration Energy Storage’, Economist, 23 June 2022. See also M. Angwin, Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility
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of Our Electric Grid (Wilder, VT: Carnot Communications, 2020), pp. 213–20. 37 Cited in ‘Decarbonisation of Electric Grids Reliant on Renewables Requires Long-Duration Energy Storage’. 38 Bullard, ‘Net Zero Will Radically Change How We Use and Generate Electricity’. 39
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Regulatory, and Financial Reform’, February 2013, worldbank. org, p. 69. 9 A. B. Klass, ‘Expanding the US Electric Transmission and Distribution Grid to Meet Deep Decarbonization Goals’, Environmental Law Reporter News and Analysis 47 (2017), p. 10749. 10 As indicated, there are not always two levels. Sweden’s grid, for example
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222–8 renewable power ix–xi state intervention 61 and technology adoption ix–xii temporal variation 157–9, 158 electricity sector aggregation and consolidation 44 decarbonization 11, 31–4 expansion 13 fragmentation 43–4 major role 2 obstacles to transformation 2–3 restructuring of 353–64 structure of 38–9
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268 solar power 31, 66, 72, 104 spot markets, electricity 168–9 unbundling of electricity sector 46–7 vertical integration 45n wind power 66 indirect decarbonization 10 Industrial Revolution 112–13, 135, 137–8 industrial sector, electricity consumption 4 industrialization 29, 30, 346 industry entry barriers to 202–3, 211 ease
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6 competition in renewables 202–3 competition in electricity generation 51 competition in electricity retail 50 Consolidated Appropriations Act 281 corporate PPAs 236–7, 239 decarbonization failure xi–xii disinvestment 280 electricity grid 43 electrification 345–6 emission factor 5 Energy Policy Act 281 financing of renewables 94 generating plants 41
Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
by Henry Sanderson · 12 Sep 2022 · 292pp · 87,720 words
540 million euros. ‘This has caught some EV manufacturers off guard,’ Alex Grant, a lithium expert, said. ‘Their end customers are paying a premium for decarbonized cars, but EV manufacturers typically have minimal insight into the way the chemicals used in their batteries are made, with minimal resolution of the CO2
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to exit Glencore, fed up with the company’s ties to Gertler and its promotion of coal. ‘Not only do Glencore perpetuate the slowing of decarbonisation of thermal coal they actively lobby against coal regulation in emerging markets,’ one London fund manager said. ‘Clearly, Glencore faces a tough dilemma. Either it
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inequality of globalisation and trade. Benjamin Sovacool, an academic at Sussex University who had written a study on artisanal miners of Kolwezi, called it the ‘decarbonisation divide’.22 As demand for electric cars rose, miners in Kolwezi responded by digging more cobalt out of the ground, in basic conditions. They responded
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. At the same time sales of electric cars were taking off, and the mining industry was beginning to focus on the raw materials needed to decarbonise the world economy. Coal mines were out and lithium was in. In February 2016 Wrathall was walking to work in the City when he remembered
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Grant put it, ‘geothermal lithium projects could kill two birds with one stone: producing low CO2 intensity lithium chemicals for lithium-ion battery manufacturing and decarbonizing electricity grids simultaneously.’6 * The next day we drove out from Falmouth along narrow roads bordered with tightly trimmed hedges towards the drilling site, where
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Collins, 2017), p. 210. 20 Ibid., p. 213. 21 Ibid., p. 213. 22 Sovacool, B.K., Hook, A., Martiskainen, M., Brock, A., Turnheim, B., ‘The decarbonisation divide: Contextualizing landscapes of low-carbon exploitation and toxicity in Africa’, Global Environmental Change, 60 (2020), 102028. 23 Xing, X., ‘A video allegedly staged by
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&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-4f69ad29e5-43565849. 12 Mulvaney, D., Richards, R.M., Bazilian, M.D. et al., ‘Progress towards a circular economy in materials to decarbonize electricity and mobility’, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 137 (2021), 110604, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2020.110604. 13 Owen, D., ‘The efficiency
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://projects.exeter.ac.uk/cornishlatin/Creating%20the%20Cult%20of%20Cousin%20Jack.pdf. 6 Pell, R., Grant, A., Deak, D., ‘Geothermal lithium: the final frontier of decarbonization’, Jade Cove Partners, May 2020. 7 See UK Environment Agency report, ‘Wheal Jane, a clear improvement’, https://consult.environment-agency.gov.uk/psc/tr3-6ee
Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet
by Varun Sivaram · 2 Mar 2018 · 469pp · 132,438 words
purchase agreements (PPAs) around the world 2.8 Projections for global solar deployment Chapter 3 3.1 Current global electricity mix and one proposal to decarbonize it 3.2 Solar PV value deflation 3.3 Exponential and logistic growth for renewable energy 3.4 California’s duck curve 3.5 Historical
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And renewable solar and wind power are the most promising options to do most of the heavy lifting, taking into account economic and political considerations. Decarbonizing the electricity sector first makes sense for other reasons as well. For one, economical sources of clean electricity exist already, whereas it is wickedly difficult
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commercially viable. The tiny but growing electric vehicle fleet suggests that electricity might be a viable alternative fuel for transportation sector. So, not only is decarbonizing electricity the least difficult way to start reducing global emissions from energy, it may also be a way to reduce emissions from other sectors that
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have not traditionally used electricity. Another reason to decarbonize electricity is that demand for it is expected to grow rapidly. Economies around the world are starting to use electricity for activities that historically have
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how technology costs will evolve—and under the assumption that nuclear power and carbon capture cannot be meaningfully scaled up—the most economical way to decarbonize the power sector is for solar power to contribute at least one-third (and, under some assumptions, over one-half) of global electricity by
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plan for a future that could require multiplying global solar capacity thirtyfold or more. Wouldn’t just tripling nuclear capacity be an easier route to decarbonization? Quite possibly, from a technical perspective. But solar power has two advantages that argue strongly in its favor. One, its cost continues to decline substantially
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If countries, especially in the developing world, experience a slowdown in solar growth similar to that in Europe, then the world’s slim window to decarbonize the power sector will slam shut. If It Quacks Like a Duck … Oversupplying electricity markets is just one way that a surfeit of solar could
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-Term Energy Outlook,” U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), 2017, https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/query. 11. Jesse D. Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom, “Deep Decarbonization of the Electric Power Sector: Insights from Recent Literature,” Energy Innovation Reform Project (EIRP), March 2017, http://innovationreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/EIRP
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Times, March 29, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/business/westinghouse-toshiba-nuclear-bankruptcy.html. 18. Ana Mileva, “Power System Balancing for Deep Decarbonization of the Electricity Sector,” Applied Energy 162 (January 15, 2016): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261915014300. 19. Arnulf Grubler, “The Costs of the
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percent of total vehicle sales in 2016. The market challenges faced by EVs point to an even bigger challenge. If the planet is going to decarbonize, the task will not be accomplished solely by eliminating fossil fuels from electricity generation and powering on-road vehicles with electricity instead of oil derivatives
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.powermag.com/crescent-dunes-24-hours-on-the-sun/?pagenum=1. 48. Robert Pietzcker, Daniel Stetter, Daniel Manger, and Gunnar Luderer, “Using the Sun to Decarbonize the Power Sector: The Economic Potential of Photovoltaics and Concentrating Solar Power,” Applied Energy 135 (2014): 704–720, doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2014.08
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-chinas-massive-infrastructure-projects. 19. Ying Li, Zofia Lukszo, and Margot Weijnen, “The Impact of Inter-Regional Transmission Grid Expansion on China’s Power Sector Decarbonization,” Applied Energy 183 (2016): 853–873, doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2016.09.006. 20. Dmitrii Bogdanov and Christian Breyer, “North-East Asian Super Grid
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that could add further flexibility. Truly transforming the world’s energy systems this century will require taking advantage of all of them. Getting to Deep Decarbonization I recently learned that such a logical conclusion can run afoul of politics and preferences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United
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, economics, and policy. We thought that the Jacobson paper created a dangerous illusion that today’s renewable energy and energy storage technologies could cost-effectively decarbonize the world’s energy systems. On top of this, the paper excluded viable options like nuclear power—effectively tying one arm behind the back. The
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emissions is politically fraught, even in the supposedly apolitical realm of academia. Politics aside, getting to near-zero emissions—or as insiders call it, “deep decarbonization”—in the power sector is a crucial prerequisite to limiting climate change, and it will be an uphill battle even with all options on the
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up the power sector is that many other uses of energy—including aviation, shipping, heavy-duty trucking, and fertilizer production—are tougher or impossible to decarbonize.25 So it is crucial to apply existing and emerging technologies to slash emissions in the power sector, while electrifying as many other uses of
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could skyrocket.35 With a strong foundation of flexible-base power in place, the quantities of solar power and energy storage required to achieve deep decarbonization become much more tractable. Continued cost declines for both solar and storage will nonetheless be important to make their deployment cost-effective. Storage can improve
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storage prices, the most cost-effective power mix included a 43 percent share of supply from flexible base.37 The lesson here is that deep decarbonization of the power sector—a prerequisite for limiting climate change—will require a diverse cast of characters. Both flexible-base power and fast-acting resources
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, including those that store energy, are jointly needed to enable solar power to shine. Alas, deep decarbonization is not one of the goals of the free market. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult for all three categories of zero-carbon
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plants (whose emissions, ultimately, need to be captured and stored), for investors to want to build more. This state of affairs is untenable if deep decarbonization is to be achieved. Some jurisdictions have tried to fill the missing money gap; their efforts fall into three categories. First, California (among others) obligates
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heating sectors. Aware of such possibilities, just before President Barack Obama left office, his administration released an ambitious “United States Mid-Century Strategy for Deep Decarbonization” road map. It projects that for the United States to reduce its economywide carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050, 60 percent of the miles
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30, 2016, http://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/advanced-cars/2017-is-the-makeorbreak-year-for-teslas-gigafactory. 7. Jesse D. Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom, “Deep Decarbonization of the Electric Power Sector: Insights from Recent Literature,” Energy Innovation Reform Project (EIRP), March 2017, http://innovationreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/EIRP
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.com/sites/thelabbench/2015/04/30/ensuring-tesla-doesnt-crowd-out-the-batteries-of-the-future/#43936cde4543. 17. Stephen Brick and Samuel Thernstrom, “Renewables and Decarbonization: Studies of California, Wisconsin and Germany,” The Electricity Journal 29, no. 3 (2016): 6–12, doi: 10.1016/j.tej.2016.03.001. 18. Mathew
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2005 Levels—Today in Energy,” May 9, 2016, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=26152. 27. Jesse D. Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom, “Deep Decarbonization of The Electric Power Sector: Insights from Recent Literature,” Energy Innovation Reform Project (EIRP), March 2017, http://innovationreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/EIRP
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-Deep-Decarb-Lit-Review-Jenkins-Thernstrom-March-2017.pdf. 28. James H. Williams et al., Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States (San Francisco: Energy and Environmental Economics, Inc., 2016), https://usddpp.org/downloads/2014-technical-report.pdf. 29. Gang He et
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al., “SWITCH-China: A Systems Approach to Decarbonizing China’s Power System,” Environmental Science & Technology 50, no. 11 (2016): 5467–5473, doi:10.1021/acs.est.6b01345. 30. M. M. Hand et
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(NREL), 2016, http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/66595.pdf. 37. Ana Mileva, Josiah Johnston, James Nelson, and Daniel Kammen, “Power System Balancing for Deep Decarbonization of the Electricity Sector,” Applied Energy 162 (2016): 1001–1009, doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2015.10.180. 38. Whitney Herndon and John Larson, “Nukes
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2015, 78-87, doi: 10.1109/MPE.2015.2462311. 47. M. Gottstein and S. A. Skillings, “Beyond Capacity Markets—Delivering Capability Resources to Europe’s Decarbonised Power System,” 9th International Conference on the European Energy Market, 2012, doi:10.1109/eem.2012.6254783. 48. “Using Renewables to Operate a Low-Carbon
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,” Applied Energy 145 (May 2015): 139-154, doi: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2015.01.075. 58. White House, “United States Mid-Century Strategy for Deep Decarbonization,” 2016, https://unfccc.int/files/focus/long-term_strategies/application/pdf/us_mid_century_strategy.pdf. 59. Glada Lahn, Paul Stevens, and Felix Preston, “Saving
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fossil plants with carbon capture and storage. This discrimination runs counter to the goal of building a diverse mix of power resources to enable deep decarbonization. So, in California, although the share of wind and solar is rocketing upward, the last remaining nuclear plant is slated to close, in a
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of oil or serving as a raw material input for the production of plastics or cement—and it can be permanently stored in geological formations. Decarbonization The elimination of emissions of greenhouse gases (of which carbon dioxide is the most prevalent) from the global economy. Demand response The modification of customer
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Management and Power Quality,” December 14, 2011, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=4310. 9.3 Jesse D. Jenkins and Samuel Thernstrom, “Deep Decarbonization of The Electric Power Sector: Insights From Recent Literature,” Energy Innovation Reform Project (EIRP), March 2017, http://innovationreform.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/EIRP
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installations in, 19 value deflation of solar in, 68–71 China ancient, solar technology in, 29–30 compensation for unused solar power in, 76 deep decarbonization plans in, 236 electric vehicles in, 169, 170 government funding for innovation in, 251, 252 greenhouse gas emissions by, 15 HVDC transmission lines in, 204
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Zone (CREZ), 269 Compressed air, 231–232 COMSTAT, 40 Concentrated solar power (CSP), 183–190 commercial success for, 24 cost of, 32, 173, 189 deep decarbonization with, 61 defined, 281g for desalination plants, 246 exporting power from, 205 in future of solar energy, 8 growth of, 183–184 hybrid approaches using
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expanding central grid vs. building, 193 in Reforming the Energy Vision program, 208–210 solar power in, 215 systemic innovation to accommodate, 199–200 Deep decarbonization global electricity mix for, 60–63, 62f power sources for, 232–239 U.S. roadmap for, 245 Deep learning, 241 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
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from solar power, 1, 30, 56, 57, 60 from solar PV panels, 12–13 supply of, 69–70, 200, 201 Electricity generation mix for deep decarbonization, 61–63, 62f, 225 in Japan, 17f nuclear power in, 21 and renewable portfolio standards, 268 Electricity grids (power grids), 195–219. See also Supergrids
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–15, 14f Electric power companies, 91–92, 106–110. See also Utilities Electric vehicles (EVs). See also specific models batteries for, 22, 229 and deep decarbonization, 60 defined, 284g energy storage in, 169–173, 226 and future of solar power, 5 linking transportation and power systems with, 224, 243–244 systemic
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Energy storage, 142, 169–191 in batteries, 193, 221–226 characteristics of technologies for, 224–225, 227f in concentrated solar power, 183–190 and deep decarbonization, 225, 238 defined, 285g for electricity grids, 82–83 in electric vehicles, 169–173, 226 global technologies for, 226–232 and grid size, 198 in
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securitization for, 98–105 and SunEdison collapse, 87–89 Firm Spread, 243 First Solar, 38, 40, 94, 155, 164, 242 Flexible-base resources for deep decarbonization, 234–236, 238 defined, 285g in power market, 239, 242–243 and state incentives for solar deployment, 269 Flexible tandem solar cells, 153 Flow batteries
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public-sector promotion of, 135–139 Office of Scientific Research and Development, 254 Offshore oil rigs, 34 Offtaker risk, 111 Offtakers, 68, 104–105 Oil, decarbonization and, 171 Oil and gas industry, 91, 106 Oil companies applied R&D in energy by, 257 capitalization of solar vs., 89 and carbon prices
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innovations in, 239–243 wholesale, 69, 243–244, 287g Power plants. See also Coal-fired power plants baseload, 75 combined cycle, 188, 189 in deep decarbonization efforts, 225 derisking of, 105 effects of solar PV on non-solar, 75–76 in electricity grid, 82 inertia of, 77 natural gas-fueled, 75
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282g and power markets, 240 prices for solar in, 50, 51f with regulated utilities, 108 and value deflation, 68–69, 71 Power sources, for deep decarbonization, 232–239 Power supply volatility, 55–56, 82 Power tower CSP designs, 186–188, 187f Powerwall, 222, 225 Priority dispatch, 76–77 Private equity funds
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, 286g. See also specific types and carbon intensity targets, 106 creating separate market for, 242–243 in cross-national grids, 201–202, 206 for deep decarbonization, 225, 235 effect on power markets of, 56–57, 70 grid reliability issues with, 77 institutional investments in, 67 logistic growth for, 73–74,
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48b–49b, 48f, 79, 80 in cross-national grids, 201–202 in decentralized grids, 211–212 and decline in nuclear power, 239, 240 for deep decarbonization, 61–63, 234, 236, 238 with demand response strategies, 215–216 early use of, 31 electricity supplied by, 56, 57 technical potential of, 63 technological
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/transportation sectors with power sector, 243–245 overcoming solar deployment challenges with, 57, 58b, 59 in power markets, 239–243 and power sources for deep decarbonization, 232–239 preserving economic appeal of solar with, 80f, 81–83 public policies to encourage, 194 for supergrids or decentralized grids, 199–200 technological vs
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UHVDC transmission lines in, 196 unregulated power companies in, 108 utilities in, 91 YieldCos in, 93–94, 97 “United States Mid-Century Strategy for Deep Decarbonization” road map, 245 Universal Studios, 222 University of California, 67 University of Dar es Salaam, 115 University of New South Wales, 40 University of Oxford
Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar · 6 Sep 2021 · 447pp · 111,991 words
evolve in fresh directions. One good example of the power of combinatorial invention comes from the work of Bill Gross. He is trying to help decarbonise the economy by building new systems of energy storage – his attempt to solve the storage problems facing renewable energy that we encountered earlier. His company
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issues of our time can only be solved with exponential technology. Tackling climate change, for example, requires more radical tech, not less. In order to decarbonise our economies, we will need to rapidly shift to renewable sources of energy, develop alternatives to animal proteins for food, and scale building materials that
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three issues. The first is that an abundance of stuff – energy, materials, healthcare, whatever – doesn’t mean an absence of waste. Sure, some countries have decarbonised their electricity supply and broken the link between carbon output and GDP. But that doesn’t eliminate resource use altogether. Solar panels and chips need
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October 2010 <http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2023689_2023703_2023613,00.html> [accessed 21 February 2021]. 28 ‘The Drive to Decarbonize: Ramez Naam in Conversation with Azeem Azhar’, Exponential View with Azeem Azhar [podcast], 15 April 2020 <https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/04/the-drive-to
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-decarbonize> [accessed 21 February 2021]. 29 Marcelo Gustavo Molina and Pedro Enrique Mercado, ‘Modelling and Control Design of Pitch-Controlled Variable Speed Wind Turbines’, in Ibrahim
The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton · 26 Sep 2015 · 469pp · 142,230 words
a half. That is all before starting on replacing the gas and the oil, the cars, the furnaces and the ships. And the challenge of decarbonization is not just a matter of replacing today’s extraordinary planet-spanning energy infrastructure; you have to replace the yet larger system it is quickly
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buyer. That means a renewable-energy transition will need significant pushing. As with Grübler’s observations about the time transitions take, this points merely to decarbonization being unprecedented, not impossible. But the best example in recent history of an energy transition that governments tried to push through, rather than simply letting
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at the world as it is. But most importantly, they have a deep-seated belief that renewables cannot on their own produce the sort of decarbonization that reductions in climate risk require, especially when the needs of the as-yet-undeveloped world are fully taken into account. Renewables have constraints that
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nuclear power as well as copious renewables, Germany is aiming for a higher target with one arm tied behind its back. But the challenge of decarbonization would not be met just by a few environmentally conscious economies cutting their emissions by 60 per cent, or 80 per cent, even if they
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slow a problem to solve in time’. The costs of action and the lack of an international mechanism do not mean there will be no decarbonization in the decades to come; but I suspect it will be more like that seen in China than on the scale imagined in Germany or
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, a lot less than today’s 10 gigatonnes and a great deal less than the mid-century peak. Processes that could be decarbonized over a few generations have been decarbonized; that includes essentially all electricity production. Hydrocarbons are still used for some recalcitrant industrial processes and some forms of transport where alternatives
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climate regime capable of curbing emissions, see Victor (2011). For Arnulf Grübler’s thoughts on energy transitions as cited, see Grübler (2012). The estimates of decarbonisation rates come from Anderson and Bows (2009). The pre-1980 history of nuclear power in America is discussed in Walker (2006), and in France in
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Palm Coast conference. The interlinked growth of carbon-dioxide politics and climate-change science are traced in Weart (2008) and Howe (2014). The lack of decarbonisation in British consumption, as opposed to production, is discussed in Helm (2012). The best account of why international progress on climate change is hard is
How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by Rowan Hooper · 15 Jan 2020 · 285pp · 86,858 words
emissions of the fossil fuel. The report finds that this clean hydrogen could cut 34 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, including from hard-to-decarbonise industrial sectors such as steel-making and shipping. Economics is already driving this transition; it won’t need a huge investment from us to speed
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on- and offshore. Then there are electric cars, and heat pumps for buildings (for both warming and cooling). Industrial energy needs are particularly hard to decarbonise. We need to replace fossil fuel-powered furnaces with electric arc or induction furnaces, or hydrogen alternatives. We need to provide better heat, cold and
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scale kick in. A big order here for 20 or 30 reactors could overcome this hurdle. Timing is still a problem, as we need to decarbonise more quickly than nuclear reactors can be built and come on line, but a big sum here will speed the process. $ $ $ SMRS AND CONVENTIONAL NUCLEAR
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greenhouse gas emissions. We rely on fossil fuels and greenhouse gases for a huge range of other things, and all of these need to be decarbonised, too. The biggest single sector that we could change for the greatest reduction in greenhouse gas emission is refrigeration. In the past, air-conditioning units
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yet make carbon-neutral fuel at scale, not at a price that is competitive.39 We should invest in this area as another route to decarbonising the aviation and shipping industries, and because a recent projection has synthetic fuels as being ultimately more competitive than batteries for cars driving long ranges
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.40 The authors recommend developing various forms of synthetic fuels in a Darwinian manner, to discover the best route to scaling up production and achieving decarbonisation. Eventually, shipping, which comprises 3 per cent of total global emissions, will be powered by synthetic fuels, or hydrogen, or perhaps by solar. ‘Slow steaming
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. Jeff Bezos has talked of moving heavy industry off-planet, and you can see why. While we wait for that to happen, we need to decarbonise production on Earth. Concrete is made from sand, rock, water and cement in a desperately carbon-heavy process. Cement is made by heating limestone in
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for electric vehicles: $5 billion Development of nuclear fusion: $5 billion Development of modular nuclear power: $30 billion Incentives for carbon zero buildings: $10 billion Decarbonisation of industrial processes: $20 billion TOTAL: $1 trillion * Analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company suggested that to get to carbon zero by 2050 China would
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remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere such that we eventually return to a safer concentration of 350 parts per million. To buy us time to decarbonise the global economy and keep global heating to less-than-catastrophic levels. I USED TO THINK THAT THE SCREAM by Edvard Munch represented a person
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if we can get the price down, we can and should use carbon scrubbers to offset those parts of the economy that take time to decarbonise. So, we should fund the start-ups developing this technology, and stimulate the competition to improve it by creating incredibly lucrative competitions. We will give
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of the land we might grow extra forests on will be needed for agriculture. Plus, as we’ve seen, some industries will be hard to decarbonise and we’ll need to capture the polluting carbon. All that said, a mass programme of tree planting and managed forest regrowth in key regions
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money. Achieved A greener planet, literally: one with vastly more photosynthesising biomass. We have developed the means to capture carbon emissions so that hard-to-decarbonise industries have the time to get to net zero. We have an insurance policy: the understanding of what we’d be doing if the worst
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boundaries have been broken, and how the extinction crisis is threatening the collapse of global ecosystems. Thankfully, there is a way to make time to decarbonise our civilisation and to safeguard biodiversity: buy up and protect areas of key importance for biodiversity, for CARBON STORAGE, and for CARBON DRAWDOWN. There are
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, simply letting forests grow is a powerful method for capturing carbon and increasing biodiversity and giving us time to get the rest of our society decarbonised. We do, of course, have to make sure the forests are not cleared as soon as they’ve grown – perhaps payments for ecosystem services could
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Energy 4, 216–222. DOI: 10.1038/s41560-019-0326-1 26 BloombergNEF (2020) ‘“Hydrogen economy” offers promising path to decarbonization’. https://about.bnef.com/blog/hydrogen-economy-offers-promising-path-to-decarbonization/ 27 E&E News (2019) ‘Details emerge about DOE “super-grid” renewable study’. www.eenews.net/stories/1061403455 28
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. DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.8b05243 40 Ilkka Hannula and David M. Reiner (2019) ‘Near-term potential of biofuels, electrofuels, and battery electric vehicles in decarbonizing road transport. Joule 3(10), 2390–2402. DOI: 10.1016/j. joule.2019.08.013 41 GL Reynolds (2019) ‘The multi-issue mitigation potential of
Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future
by Robert Bryce · 26 Apr 2011 · 520pp · 129,887 words
for turbines, and that it would lead to ‘energy sprawl.’ For all the intuitive appeal of renewable energy, Power Hungry makes a convincing case that decarbonizing the world’s primary energy use will mean letting the sun shine and the wind blow while embracing natural gas as a bridge to nuclear
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this century will be dominated by ‘N2N’ energy—natural gas to nuclear—and that the consequence of the rise of both will be continuing steady decarbonisation of the economy. This is the best book on energy I have read. It confirms my optimism—and my rejection of the renewable myth.” —Matt
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gas provides the most attractive option. Together, natural gas and nuclear are essential to the ongoing decarbonization of the world’s primary energy use, a trend that has been ongoing for about two hundred years. Decarbonization, the trend favoring fuels with lower carbon content, is occurring because energy consumers are always seeking
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energy that allow them to do work cleaner, faster, and more precisely. Embracing N2N offers a no-regrets energy policy that will lead to further decarbonization while providing multiple benefits to the United States and the rest of the world. The structure of this book follows the basic outline contained in
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of the Four Imperatives while capitalizing on a number of megatrends. And those megatrends provide another set of reasons to embrace natural gas and nuclear: decarbonization, increasing use and availability of gaseous fuels, concerns about peak oil and peak coal, and increasing urbanization of the global population. The other key megatrend
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oil.14 The surging use of natural gas and nuclear power demonstrates and reinforces one of the most important energy megatrends of the modern era: decarbonization. Decarbonization is the ongoing global trend toward consumption of fuels that contain less carbon. This megatrend was first identified by a group of scientists that included
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Nebosa Nakicenovic, Arnulf Grübler, Jesse Ausubel, and Cesare Marchetti,15 who found that over the past two centuries, the process of decarbonization has been taking place in nearly every country around the world. Because consumers always want the cleanest, densest forms of energy and power that they
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Tanaka, the executive director of the IEA, averred that “preventing irreversible damage to the global climate ultimately requires a major decarbonization of world energy sources.”17 Of course, not all countries are decarbonizing at the same rate. And some countries, including China and India, are increasing, rather than decreasing, their coal consumption
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. But the long-term decarbonization of the global economy is continuing, and given concerns about climate change, that trend is likely to accelerate as countries around the world build more
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nuclear reactors and increase their consumption of natural gas. Decarbonization favors natural gas and nuclear power at the same time that environmentalists and some politicians are working to impose countryby-country limits on carbon dioxide
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responsibility for the leaders for the future of humanity, even for the future of planet Earth.”19 The efforts to impose carbon dioxide limits and decarbonize the world’s energy sources are occurring at the same time that countries around the world are working to improve air quality. And air quality
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coal-fired power plants.20 Those federal requirements will, in the coming years, favor natural gas and nuclear power over the use of coal. The decarbonization trend is closely connected to another megatrend as well: the increasing use and availability of gaseous fuels. The hydrogen economy remains decades away. But the
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are on our way towards a methane economy that could pave the way to a hydrogen economy.”21 The trend toward gaseous fuels and the decarbonization trend are companions. About 95 percent of the hydrogen now being produced is derived from natural gas.22 Thus, the long-anticipated and much-hyped
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need as well as the electricity they use to turn on their lights and keep their computers, entertainment centers, and appliances running. Given these megatrends—decarbonization, increased use and availability of gaseous fuels, concerns about peak oil and peak coal, increasing urbanization, and continuing worries about carbon dioxide emissions—it makes
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: Realities and Options for Averting the Looming Global Energy Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press), prepublication copy, 188. 15 See, for example, Cesare Marchetti, “On Decarbonization: Historically and Perspectively,” International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, January 2005, http://www.iiasa.ac.at/Admin/PUB/Documents/IR-05-005.pdf. 16 Ibid
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for Political Studies (CEPOS) Danish Energy Agency Darley, Julian Darwin, Charles de Merode, Emmanuel De Nysschen, Johan de Soto, Hernando Death rates, energy poverty and Decarbonization trend Deffeyes, Kenneth deForest Ralph, H. Deforestation DeGette, Diana Democrats view of, toward nuclear power See also names of specific politicians Deng Xiaoping Denmark and
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Power Geothermal energy(fig.) (fig.) Germany(fig.)(table) Getty, J. Paul Glass-Steagall Act Global Catastrophes and Trends (Smil) Global climate change adaptation to and decarbonization fears about, feeding on major contributor to media campaign against positions on public opinion toward See also Carbon dioxide emissions Global coal production Global commercial
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Engineers Integrated energy parks Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) International Energy Agency (IEA) on carbon capture and sequestration on decarbonization on demand in the oil market on emissions on estimated global gas resources on gas-fired capacity on global gas resources on global liquified natural
Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
by Rebecca Henderson · 27 Apr 2020 · 330pp · 99,044 words
moves. This is the key to understanding CLP’s strategy. The flip side of risk is opportunity. If Asia’s power sector was going to decarbonize—and CLP believed that it was—moving to carbon-free energy ahead of the competition was potentially an exceedingly attractive business opportunity. Fifteen years later
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an active role in supporting them. BOTH ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION and inequality are systemic problems that cannot be solved without government action. Arresting climate change requires decarbonizing the world’s energy supply, radically upgrading the world’s buildings, changing the way we build cities, remaking the world’s transportation networks, and completely
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next fifty years.2 Stopping global warming means ensuring that every new plant that’s built is carbon-free. It also means shutting down or decarbonizing the world’s existing fossil fuel infrastructure. These are tasks that only government action—whether it’s in the form of a carbon tax or
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regulation—something like a carbon tax or a carbon cap—would not only allow the global economy to decarbonize at minimal cost but would also open up billions of dollars in new market opportunities. Decarbonization will be expensive. But unchecked climate change will cost billions of dollars more. Current estimates suggest that
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percent reduction below 2005 levels by 2025. That decrease would put America “within striking distance of the Paris Pledge.” The report closes by claiming that “decarbonization can be led by the bottom-up efforts of real economy actors… but only with deep collaboration and engagement.” In 2017, when Trump declared that
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community made a commitment to moving to carbon-free energy, progress has been much faster than anyone expected—the OECD countries are on track to decarbonizing their grids by 2050, and the new capacity being built in Africa, China, India, and Brazil is overwhelmingly carbon free. Agricultural practices have been transformed
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climate change or because they have a particularly important role to play in mitigating it. 74. https://climateaction100.wordpress.com/. 75. “Power Companies Must Accelerate Decarbonisation and Support Ambitious Climate Policy,” FT.com, Dec. 20, 2018. 76. “Proposal: Strategy Consistent with the Goals of the Paris Agreement,” Ceres, https://ceres.my
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
by Bill Gates · 16 Feb 2021 · 314pp · 75,678 words
to pay them but India, China, Nigeria, and Mexico are not. We need the premiums to be so low that everyone will be able to decarbonize. Admittedly, Green Premiums are a moving target. A lot of assumptions go into estimating them; for this book, I’ve made the assumptions that seem
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our best inventors? Answer: wherever we decide Green Premiums are too high. That’s where the extra cost of going green will keep us from decarbonizing and where there’s an opening for new technologies, companies, and products that make it affordable. Countries that excel at research and development can create
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because producing electricity is a major contributor to climate change, and also because, if we get zero-carbon electricity, we can use it to help decarbonize lots of other activities, like how we get around and how we make things. The energy we give up by not using coal, natural gas
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’s great that America’s Green Premium could be so low. Europe is similarly well situated; one study by a European trade association suggested that decarbonizing its power grid by 90 to 95 percent would cause average rates to go up about 20 percent. (This study used a different methodology from
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can be a lot smaller.) With all the additional electricity we’ll be using, and assuming that wind and solar play a significant role, completely decarbonizing America’s power grid by 2050 will require adding around 75 gigawatts of capacity every year for the next 30 years. Is that a lot
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from nuclear. Remember that by comparison solar and wind together provide about 7 percent worldwide. And it’s hard to foresee a future where we decarbonize our power grid affordably without using more nuclear power. In 2018, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed nearly 1,000 scenarios for getting
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, fishermen, and environmental groups. Offshore wind holds a lot of promise: It’s getting cheaper and can play a key role in helping many countries decarbonize. Geothermal. Deep underground—as close as a few hundred feet, as far down as a mile—are hot rocks that can be used to generate
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in mind that although we need to pursue all these ideas, we probably don’t need all of them to pan out in order to decarbonize our power grid. Some of the ideas overlap each other. If we get a breakthrough in cheap hydrogen, for example, we might not need to
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, a single breakthrough in just one activity that drives climate change, I’d pick making electricity: It’s going to play a big role in decarbonizing other parts of the physical economy. I’ll turn to the first of these—how we make things like steel and cement—in the next
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like this: Electrify every process possible. This is going to take a lot of innovation. Get that electricity from a power grid that’s been decarbonized. This also will take a lot of innovation. Use carbon capture to absorb the remaining emissions. And so will this. Use materials more efficiently. Same
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twin concepts of energy delivered per unit of fuel and per dollar spent are going to matter a lot as we look for ways to decarbonize our transportation system. As you’re no doubt aware, the burning of fuels in our cars, ships, and planes emits carbon dioxide that’s contributing
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them will fail. Unfortunately, research on advanced biofuels is still underfunded, and they’re not ready to be deployed at the scale we need for decarbonizing our transportation system. As a result, using them to replace gasoline would be quite expensive. Experts disagree on the exact cost of these and other
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.05 (electrofuels) Green Premium 103% 234% Ships and planes. Not long ago, my friend Warren Buffett and I were talking about how the world might decarbonize airplanes. Warren asked, “Why can’t we run a jumbo jet on batteries?” He already knew that when a jet takes off, the fuel it
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. The fact that air-conditioning relies so much on electricity makes it easy to calculate the Green Premium for cool air. To decarbonize our air conditioners, we need to decarbonize our power grids. This is another reason why we need breakthroughs in generating and storing electricity like the ones I described in
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on fossil fuels, not electricity. (Whether you use natural gas, heating oil, or propane depends largely on where you live.) This means we can’t decarbonize hot water and air simply by cleaning up our electric grid. We need to get heat from something other than oil and gas. The path
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a different angle, it’s good news. It means we don’t need some additional technological breakthrough to reduce our emissions in this area, beyond decarbonizing our power grid. The electric option already exists, it’s widely available, and it isn’t merely price competitive—it’s actually cheaper. We just
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need to drive down the price of these alternative fuels, as I argued in chapter 7. And there are other steps we can take to decarbonize our heating systems: Electrify as much as we can, getting rid of gas-powered furnaces and water heaters and replacing them with electric heat pumps
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. In some regions, governments will have to update their policies to allow—and encourage—these upgrades. Decarbonize the power grid by deploying today’s clean sources where they make sense and investing in breakthroughs for generating, storing, and transmitting power. Use energy
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along. I also know that when it comes to massive undertakings—whether it’s building a national highway system, vaccinating the world’s children, or decarbonizing the global economy—we need the government to play a huge role in creating the right incentives and making sure the overall system will work
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the big barrier isn’t consumer awareness or markets that are out of whack. Sometimes it’s government policies themselves that make it hard to decarbonize. For example, if you want to use concrete in a building, the building code will spell out in excruciating detail how well that concrete has
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that in order to avoid a climate catastrophe, rich countries should reach net-zero emissions by 2050. You’ve probably heard people say we can decarbonize deeply even sooner—by 2030. Unfortunately, for all the reasons I’ve laid out in this book, 2030 is not realistic. Considering how fundamental fossil
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we can do—and need to do—in the next 10 years is adopt the policies that will put us on a path to deep decarbonization by 2050. This is a crucial distinction, though it’s not one that’s immediately obvious. In fact, it might seem like “reduce by 2030
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Zakia Adam, “Fossil Fuel Consumption Subsidies Bounced Back Strongly in 2018,” IEA commentary, June 13, 2019. Europe is similarly well situated: Data derived from Eurelectric, “Decarbonisation Pathways,” May 2018, cdn.eurelectric.org. But Germany produced: Fraunhofer ISE, www.energy-charts.de. it ends up transmitting: Zeke Turner, “In Central Europe, Germany
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, 50, 212, 213, 215, 237n permafrost, melting of, 35 plant-based burgers, 119, 222 plastics, 100, 104, 107, 110 policies, see government policies power grids, decarbonized, 80, 82n, 97, 111, 151, 156 power lines, 81, 83 power plants, 57, 66, 67, 73, 80, 85, 87, 95, 190, 197, 208 private-public
Abundance
by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson · 18 Mar 2025 · 227pp · 84,566 words
well. But we focus on the left for larger reasons. This book is motivated in no small part by our belief that we need to decarbonize the global economy to head off the threat of climate change. To the extent that the right simply does not believe this—and in America
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heat homes. We cook food. We dry clothes. These activities require millions and millions of machines, most of which now run on fossil fuels. To decarbonize, they all will need to run on electricity. The energy analysts Sam Calisch and Saul Griffith estimate that in the next few years consumers will
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it out of solar panels and wind turbines and storage batteries. Jenkins’s team has modeled that build-out in detail. A plausible path to decarbonization sees wind and solar installations spanning up to 590,000 square kilometers. That is roughly equal to the landmass of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts
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should make us question whether we have yoked the state to a failed theory of legitimacy. Now the government has taken on the task of decarbonization and the responsibility of coordinating a once-in-a-century transformation of America’s built landscape. But it is doing so with laws and agencies
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more invention. In the fight against climate change, the clean energy revolution will require building out the renewable energy that we have already developed. But decarbonization will also require technology that doesn’t exist yet at scale: clean jet fuel, less carbon-intensive ways to manufacture cement, and machines to remove
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be the third-biggest carbon emitter on the planet, the New York Times journalist David Wallace-Wells wrote.79 Cement poses a unique challenge to decarbonization. Cleaning up electricity is conceptually simple: it’s possible to power an electric car battery with wind, or to run air-conditioning with electricity from
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-brimstone/. 79. David Wallace-Wells, @dwallacewells, tweet, January 6, 2020, 11:04 p.m., https://x.com/dwallacewells/status/1221675214259605506. 80. Hannah Ritchie, “How to Decarbonise the World’s Cement,” Sustainability by Numbers (blog), June 30, 2024, https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/low-carbon-cement. 81. Derek Thompson, interview with Ned
A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth
by Chris Smaje · 14 Aug 2020 · 375pp · 105,586 words
Badvertising
by Andrew Simms · 314pp · 81,529 words
Not the End of the World
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The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets
by Peter Oppenheimer · 3 May 2020 · 333pp · 76,990 words
Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change
by Dieter Helm · 2 Sep 2020 · 304pp · 90,084 words
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein · 15 Sep 2014 · 829pp · 229,566 words
What We Need to Do Now: A Green Deal to Ensure a Habitable Earth
by Chris Goodall · 30 Jan 2020 · 154pp · 48,340 words
The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline
by Russell Jones · 15 Jan 2023 · 463pp · 140,499 words
The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron · 14 Jun 2023 · 271pp · 79,355 words
What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View
by William MacAskill · 31 Aug 2022 · 451pp · 125,201 words
Mobility: A New Urban Design and Transport Planning Philosophy for a Sustainable Future
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Climate Change
by Joseph Romm · 3 Dec 2015 · 358pp · 93,969 words
Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future
by Ed Conway · 15 Jun 2023 · 515pp · 152,128 words
Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
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Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
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Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
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Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization
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What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures
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The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth
by Jeremy Rifkin · 9 Sep 2019 · 327pp · 84,627 words
Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future
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The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans
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Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex
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Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference
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Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
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The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions
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Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World
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Smart Grid Standards
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Fully Automated Luxury Communism
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Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
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The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations
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Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made
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City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways
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Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid
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Energy: A Human History
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Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
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Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
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Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence
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The Ministry for the Future: A Novel
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The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth
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Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
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Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made
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Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
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Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth
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Paint Your Town Red
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The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
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Energy and Civilization: A History
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Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy
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The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All
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Ten Technologies to Save the Planet: Energy Options for a Low-Carbon Future
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The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism
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Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth
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The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives
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The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis
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Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
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Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business
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On the Future: Prospects for Humanity
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Carbon: The Book of Life
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Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities
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The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
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The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
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