Posted on 12/30/2019 10:37:52 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Switch to energy-efficient light bulbs, wash your clothes in cold water, eat less meat, recycle more, and buy an electric car: we are being bombarded with instructions from climate campaigners, environmentalists, and the media about the everyday steps we all must take to tackle climate change. Unfortunately, these appeals trivialize the challenge of global warming, and divert our attention from the huge technological and policy changes that are needed to combat it.
For example, the British nature-documentary presenter and environmental campaigner David Attenborough was once asked what he as an individual would do to fight climate change. He promised to unplug his phone charger when it was not in use.
Attenborough’s heart is no doubt in the right place. But even if he consistently unplugs his charger for a year, the resulting reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions will be equivalent to less than one-half of one-thousandth of the average person’s annual CO2 emissions in the United Kingdom. Moreover, charging accounts for less than 1% of a phone’s energy needs; the other 99% is required to manufacture the handset and operate data centers and cell towers. Almost everywhere, these processes are heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
Attenborough is far from alone in believing that small gestures can have a meaningful impact on the climate. In fact, even much larger-sounding commitments deliver only limited reductions in CO2 emissions. For example, environmental activists emphasize the need to give up eating meat and driving fossil-fuel-powered cars. But, although I am a vegetarian and do not own a car, I believe we need to be honest about what such choices can achieve.
Going vegetarian actually is quite difficult: one large US survey indicates that 84% of people fail, most of them in less than a year. But a systematic peer-reviewed study has shown that even if they succeed, a vegetarian diet reduces individual CO2 emissions by the equivalent of 540 kilograms – or just 4.3% of the emissions of the average inhabitant of a developed country. Furthermore, there is a “rebound effect,” as money saved on cheaper vegetarian food is spent on goods and services that cause additional greenhouse-gas emissions. Once we account for this, going entirely vegetarian reduces a person’s total emissions by only 2%.
Likewise, electric cars are branded as environmentally friendly, but generating the electricity they require almost always involves burning fossil fuels. Moreover, producing energy-intensive batteries for these cars invariably generates significant CO2 emissions. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an electric car with a range of 400 kilometers (249 miles) has a huge carbon deficit when it hits the road, and will start saving emissions only after being driven 60,000 kilometers. Yet, almost everywhere, people use an electric car as a second car, and drive it shorter distances than equivalent gasoline vehicles.
Despite subsidies of about $10,000 per car, battery-powered electric cars represent less than one-third of 1% of the world’s one billion vehicles. The IEA estimates that with sustained political pressure and subsidies, electric cars could account for 15% of the much larger global fleet in 2040, but notes that this increase in share will reduce global CO2 emissions by just 1%.
As IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol has said, “If you think you can save the climate with electric cars, you’re completely wrong.” In 2018, electric cars saved 40 million tons of CO2 worldwide, equivalent to reducing global temperatures by just 0.000018°C – or a little more than a hundred-thousandth of a degree Celsius – by the end of the century.
Individual actions to tackle climate change, even when added together, achieve so little because cheap and reliable energy underpins human prosperity. Fossil fuels currently meet 81% of our global energy needs. And even if every promised climate policy in the 2015 Paris climate agreement is achieved by 2040, they will still deliver 74% of the total.
We already spend $129 billion per year subsidizing solar and wind energy to try to entice more people to use today’s inefficient technology, yet these sources meet just 1.1% of our global energy needs. The IEA estimates that by 2040 – after we have spent a whopping $3.5 trillion on additional subsidies – solar and wind will still meet less than 5% of our needs.
That’s pitiful. Significantly cutting CO2 emissions without reducing economic growth will require far more than individual actions. It is absurd for middle-class citizens in advanced economies to tell themselves that eating less steak or commuting in a Toyota Prius will rein in rising temperatures. To tackle global warming, we must make collective changes on an unprecedented scale.
By all means, anyone who wants to go vegetarian or buy an electric car should do so, for sound reasons such as killing fewer animals or reducing household energy bills. But such decisions will not solve the problem of global warming.
The one individual action that citizens could take that would make a difference would be to demand a vast increase in spending on green-energy research and development, so that these energy sources eventually become cheap enough to outcompete fossil fuels. That is the real way to help fight climate change.
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Bjørn Lomborg, a visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business School, is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. His books include “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” “Cool It,” “How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place,” “The Nobel Laureates’ Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World,” and, most recently, “Prioritizing Development.”
I've said the same thing. They wear their hearts on their sleeves and operate by "Feelings, nothing more than feelings" and use no reasoning or logic or history or human characteristics in their view of the World. However, I now believe they gone past "good intentions" to totalitarian power over those who don't agree. The Millenials are the threat. There are many reasons why - we all know what they are.
The academic says the solution is to spend a lot more on research.
Oh come on! I am driving my electric car, have solar panels on the roof, use only LED lights in screw in sockets. I recycle as much as possible and reuse my grocery bags. It isn’t pointless virtue signaling. It is extremely pointful virtue signaling. If a liberal starts talking about climate change I have the high ground because I am doing more than they are. I am way holier than thou. And also rebates and tax credits are very nice.
Liberals want to make it clear that they care more than you.
No this guy is actually trying be an honest scientist.
[[[Oh come on! I am driving my electric car, have solar panels on the roof, use only LED lights in screw in sockets. I recycle as much as possible and reuse my grocery bags. It isn’t pointless virtue signaling. It is extremely pointful virtue signaling. If a liberal starts talking about climate change I have the high ground because I am doing more than they are. I am way holier than thou. And also rebates and tax credits are very nice.]]]
Yes, but do you have a “Hate Does Not Have a Home Here” lawn sign? You must virtue signal correctly.
Lithium mining is now largely via extraction of water soluble salts. South America’s “Lithium Triangle” which covers parts of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile and holds more than half the world’s supply of lithium beneath its salt flats. To extract lithium, a hole is drilled in the salt flats and salty, mineral-rich brine is pumped out. It evaporates in the sun for months, first creating a mixture of manganese, potassium, borax and lithium salts which is then filtered and placed into another evaporation pool, and so on. After between 12 and 18 months, the mixture has been filtered enough that lithium carbonate can be extracted.
It’s a relatively cheap and effective process, but it uses a lot of water – approximately 500,000 gallons per tonne of lithium. In Chile’s Salar de Atacama, mining activities consumed 65% of the region’s water. That is having a big impact on local farmers – who grow quinoa and herd llamas – in an area where some communities already have to get water driven in from elsewhere.
Each Tesla uses 12 kg (0.012 tonne) of lithium. So, not only does lithium from hard rock ores require huge amounts of raw ore to be mined, lithium from the desert salt flats uses 2/3 of the water in the desert.
Of course, all rare minerals require huge amounts of raw ore. For example, one ounce of gold requires 2 to 91 tons of raw ore to be mined and processed.
I'm also wondering how much the car, the panels, LED replacements cost you. You do realize that all your efforts use fossil fuels to produce said products?
I like the LED light bulbs for places where changing them is a PITA.
They work great and last practically forever. Well worth the extra $$ to not have to get on a ladder again
The virtue signaling is not pointless. It is the whole point of the activity.
Hmm, maybe this is why Trump tried to buy Greenland. Once that glacier melts, it’s free real estate.
Everybody needs to become trannies, sterilized through gender reassignment surgery so we can’t reproduce. That’s how we fix the earth! That’s why they’re pushing all this tranny crap.
Killing oneself is the only way to really virtue signal about Climategeddon.
have solar panels on the roof, use only LED lights in screw in sockets. I recycle as much as possible and reuse my grocery bags
LED lights tend to be left on longer and so use about the same as filament bulbs;
China no longer takes US recycled stuff and most now goes into the land fill with the rest;
Cloth grocery bags are bacteria and germ infested, unless disinfected and washed after each use.
To tackle global warming, we must make collective changes on an unprecedented scale.
He's the clarion call for the hard core communists.
Sorry, but solar and wind won’t be enough to supply the energy needs of an industrial society. Petroleum products are free, in the ground, for the taking, and have high energy density.
Our solar panels charge a lithium battery bank when the power goes out. We just keep truckin’.
I read on a related thread at this site that about $400 billion are spent annually on Climate Change research, messaging, and other related expenditures. The thread also mentioned that $40 billion annually would take care of world hunger. Nice to know the climate warriors have their priorities straight.
Related - We have satellites orbiting the Moon, Venus, and Mars. Wouldn’t it be cool if we had access to planetary temperature data and have it show that there is a correlation on temperature rise and fall on these planets. Last I heard, man has yet to live on any of these and certainly is not driving an SUV there.
But NASA is busy with diversity outreach rather than real science.
Tell your eco-nitwit acquaintence that Electric cars when you add in their manufacture and their constant battery replacements have a Carbon Footprint LARGER than the modern internal combustion automobile across their operational lifetime.
See their heads explode
.
lithium mining and processing is not environmentally friendly and the kids doing forced labor in the Congo mines must be happy you are so concerned.
The Chinese lithium processors love you too because you help the air become more polluted and that pollution drifts over the US running dogs in their homeland - air which you breathe. Keep on truckin’.
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