Gradually adjusting

Less focus on what's bad

When I started this Substack last August I thought that 1.5°C would be unlikely, but I did think that we might be able to stop before reaching 2°. As I noted in my last post, I think we are on a path to somewhere between 3° and 4°. This will be a bad place. I will be more specific in a future post, but here I want to state the reasons for my outlook. I’m sorry that I can’t offer a ‘but if rich countries move more quickly…’ option because I don’t think rich countries are able to take the steps needed to reduce global GHG emissions by governmental action. And we cannot depend on the private sector to stop doing what benefits the shareholders: extracting and selling fossil fuels. Whether the shareholders are individuals or sovereign wealth funds, the fossil fuel companies are going to extract and sell oil and gas as long as the market rewards those efforts.

But we cannot put all of the blame on the FF companies. Rich world economies are driven by consumption. And consumption pretty much means fossil fuels. Stopping GHG increases, or even slowing down the increases, would require significant changes in rich world behavior. And developing countries need a lot of energy to reach a small fraction of the rich world living standard.

I am going to pay less attention to what the CEO of ExxonMobil says. I may not comment on COP29 in Baku. I might not read about COP29 at all.

I will comment on positive ideas and developments. For example:

Back in November The Guardian reported that less than $5 billion would provide stable electric power to health facilities that would serve a billion people. Salvatore Vinci, an advisor on sustainable energy at the World Health Organization, offered this estimate at COP28. Solar panels and batteries. The health facilities would not have to wait for centralized electric power generation plants, transmission lines and distribution systems to be built. How does this sound? Instead of selling forest-based carbon credits to rich world companies, how about credits to build these simple systems?

And speaking of non-forest-based carbon credits, The Washington Post reported a few days ago on a program that the Rockefeller Foundation is working on. The shares would fund the early closure of a large coal-fired electric power generation plant in the Philippines. The plant is currently scheduled to close in 2040. Earlier closure could avoid as much as 19 million tons of CO2. The Singapore central bank is a partner in the project. Renewable power would replace the coal plant and funding would include training power plant employees to maintain the renewable energy systems.

Bloomberg Green reported on the development of lighter-weight electric power transmission cable. Traditional cable consists of a steel core wrapped with aluminum conductor. The new cable has a carbon fiber core wrapped with aluminum conductor. Since the core weight is much less, more conductor can be added, allowing the cable to carry as much as three times the power that the steel-core cable can handle. Hanging new cable on existing transmission towers would shave many years off the process of creating new transmission corridors.

I’ve also read about a sensing device that has been developed to measure the temperature of transmission cables in real time. These devices - about the size of a soccer ball - would allow transmission system managers to optimize power flow in existing cable.

Reuters reported that CO2 emissions regulated under the EU emission trading system decreased by 15.5% in 2023. Renewable electric power generation accounted for much of the decrease. If we had an ETS in the U.S. we would probably see a similar decrease. This is all good. Just not fast enough.

That’s all for now. I wanted to post so you know that I’m still thinking thoughts. I’ll try to shorten the gaps between posts.