Energy is the lifeblood of the economy. Without ample, safe, and low-cost energy, it is impossible to secure the benefits of modern life. For two centuries, fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas — offered the key to America’s and the world’s growing energy needs. Now, because of global warming, we have to shift rapidly to a new low-carbon energy system.
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to resurrect coal, promote gas fracking, and restart the Keystone XL pipeline project to bring Alberta, Canada’s oil sands to market. He won’t get far. Today’s low world prices of oil, coal, and gas reflect the fact that newly installed power generation and vehicles worldwide are shifting decisively to low-carbon energy. While the president-elect and a few self-serving coal and oil executives might still pretend that climate change is overblown, the rest of the world knows better. Last year was the warmest year since record keeping began, in 1880, and 2016 will be warmer than 2015. Around the world, people observe and suffer the consequences.
For this reason, every nation in the world agreed in Paris in 2015 to shift to a low-carbon energy system. The Paris Climate Agreement went into force this month. The global agreement aims to keep human-caused global warming to “well below 2-degrees Celsius’’ (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and to aim for no more than 1.5-degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), all measured relative to the earth’s temperature at the start of the fossil-fuel era (around 1800). The warming of the earth up to 2016 is already around 1.1 degrees Celsius, more than halfway to the globally agreed upper limit.
Climate scientists have come up with a tool called the “carbon budget’’ to guide us back to climate safety. The key is an energy “transplant’’ that replaces coal, oil, and gas, with zero-carbon energy, such as wind and solar power, or that combines the continued use of some fossil fuels with technologies that capture CO2 and store it safely underground (CCS).
Most of the key changes will hardly be noticed by most of us. Instead of driving a Chevy Malibu, with a gasoline-burning internal combustion engine under the hood, we will drive a Chevy Volt, with an electric motor under the hood. Instead of charging the Chevy Volt with the electricity currently generated by a coal-burning power plant, we will charge it with electricity generated by a power plant that uses wind, solar, nuclear, hydroelectric, or some other noncarbon energy technology.
Forward-looking engineers have already given us a pretty good roadmap from fossil fuels to zero-carbon energy. There are three guidelines.
The first is energy efficiency. We need to cut back on excessive energy use by investing in energy-saving technologies; for example, LED lighting rather than incandescent bulbs, smart appliances that do not draw energy when not in use.
The second is zero-carbon electricity. Depending on where you live, your power today is generated by a mix of coal, natural gas, nuclear power, hydroelectric power, and a bit of wind and solar power. By 2050, electricity should be generated entirely by noncarbon sources (wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, tidal, biofuels, and others) or fossil fuels with CCS.
The third is called fuel switching. Instead of burning gasoline in the car, you would use electricity in its place; instead of burning heating oil to warm the house, you would use electric heating. For every current use of fossil fuel, we can find a low-carbon fuel substitute. The main thing we would notice is a slightly higher electricity bill and a vastly safer climate. But even the slightly higher costs are likely to be transitory. As producers slide down the learning curve, the costs of electric vehicles, industrial fuel cells, fourth-generation nuclear power plants, and solar grids are likely to fall significantly.
Many Americans understandably fear the job displacements that would hit today’s coal miners and oil roustabouts. Fortunately, the news on this front is reassuring. At latest count, the total number of coal miners in America is around 16,000, out of a labor force of 150 million. Total extraction workers in coal, oil, and gas combined is around 150,000, around 0.1 percent of the workforce. These workers can easily be compensated and retrained for much healthier work and better wages. Other workers in the fossil-fuel sectors — accountants, managers, programmers, and the rest — will be needed directly in the new-energy sectors and in other parts of the economy.
Recent excellent work by my colleague Dr. Jim Williams and other energy specialists has charted the US energy transition to 2050. Just last week, the White House issued a superb United States Mid-century Strategy for Deep Decarbonization along the same lines. It turns out that renewable energy, nuclear power, and carbon-capture and storage technologies offer a range of possible pathways to decarbonization. North America is blessed with vast stores of renewable energy, including solar power in the Southwest, wind power in the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard, and vast hydroelectric potential in Canada. And if you don’t like nuclear power or CCS, it’s still possible to make the transition to low-carbon energy, but at a higher cost.
The bottom line of these scenarios is reassuring. According to Williams’s study, the cost of decarbonizing the US energy system is less than 1 percent of national income per year, perhaps much less. While 1 percent of GDP is not negligible, it will be a very small price to pay for global climate safety. Similar calculations, and similar bargains, will be the case for the energy transplant operation in other parts of the world.
If the energy challenge is all so clear, why isn’t it happening? First, some part of the energy transformation is already underway, with a rise in deployments of wind and solar energy. Now that the climate risk is finally appreciated worldwide, the entire world is ramping up for energy-transplant surgery.
The second is that powerful vested interests, including the Koch Brothers, ExxonMobil (until recently), and Peabody Coal told the American people lies about climate change for years and, even worse, funded the campaigns of politicians who have been willing to oppose climate legislation in return for campaign dollars.
And third, stunningly, because of the same lobbying pressures, long-term energy thinking has been largely blocked. The first step for Trump and Congress in January should be to call on the National Academy of Engineering to mobilize the great engineers across America to come up with a climate-smart energy strategy that makes sense for all regions of the nation. Then the president’s new infrastructure program would build the right kind of future.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and author of “The Age of Sustainable Development.’’
