The Short List of Climate Actions That Will Work

4/14/22, 11:37 PM The Short List Of Climate Actions That Will Work
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The Short List Of About Us
Climate Actions
That Will Work
By Michael Barnard
Apr 11 2022 · 10 min read
ENERGY VOICES SUSTAINABILITY · CLIMATE CHANGE · RENEWABLES
I spend a lot of time critiquing solutions for low-carbon transformation,

most recently the current hydrogen gold rush Europe is trying to start in
northern Africa, and that leads, inevitably, to people asking me: what
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works? What should we be doing? A couple of years ago that came in the
form of a question that was well enough formed to trigger me to write
down the solution set: “What exactly is the current scientific consensus on
steps to combat climate change?“
Consensus is an interesting word. I tend to prefer consilience, where

multiple lines of investigation lead to the same conclusions. That said, the
following are the solutions or approaches that I see from my investigations
and discussions as gaining consensus and consilience. It’s not the how, but
https://illuminem.com/energyvoices/09ca08ea-3345-4b90-b6f5-8762cd3933da?fbclid=IwAR0sqzWFK7EwRsXyrDBLXfTd6w4jgkvodj2T1CndivoT4m… 1/10
the what. There are many paths that lead to these realities. One way to read
the following is to consider that it describes the world in 2050.
This list doesn’t necessarily map easily to Project Drawdown because its
approach is a cost-benefit analysis of CO2e reductions for dollars, while
this is a more aggressive transformational vision.
The Short List
Electrify everything
Convert all energy services to work directly from electricity instead of
fossil fuels. Transportation, industry, and agriculture. All of it. All gas
appliances must go. All road transport must be electric. Most trains and a
lot of planes must shift to electric. Electricity creating biofuels or
hydrogen for the small subset of transportation that can’t be electrified. All
heat from electricity. The US throws away two-thirds of all primary
energy, mostly in the form of waste heat from fossil fuels used in
inherently inefficient combustion processes. We only have to replace a
third of the actual primary energy we use today to maintain our lifestyle
and economy.
Overbuild renewable generation

All other forms of generation with the exception of nuclear were overbuilt,
so we’ll do the same with wind and solar, and they are really cheap, so that
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is not that expensive. Also a bit of geothermal and some biomass. After
all, only $3 trillion of renewables would provide all primary energy for
everything the US does today.
Build continent-scale electrical grids and markets

And improve existing ones. High-voltage direct current (HVDC) became
much more viable with high-speed hybrid circuit breakers in 2011, and is
an essential technology for long-distance, low-loss electrical transmission.
It can replace some AC transmission during upgrades and be buried along

existing right-of-ways.
Build a fair amount of pumped hydro and other storage

While storage of electricity is an overstated concern given overbuilt
renewables and continent-scale grids, some is still required. Closed-loop,
off-river, pumped hydro resource potential is far greater than the need, is
efficient, and uses stable, known technologies. Shifting existing hydro-
electric dams to be passive, on-demand storage as opposed to baseload is
also key. Fast response grid storage can be provided by existing lithium-
ion technologies, as Tesla has proven in California and Australia. Redox
flow batteries will bridge lithium ion and pumped hydro. By 2050, we’ll
have roughy 20 TWh of batteries on wheels in US cars alone, available
both for demand management to reduce peak demand, soak up excess
generation, and to provide some vehicle-to-grid electricity.
Plant a lot of trees

We have cut down about 50% of the six trillion trees that used to grow on
earth. Planting a trillion trees would buy us a lot of time as they sucked
about a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere per tree over 40 years.
Change agricultural practices

High-tillage agriculture is a process that keeps releasing carbon captured
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by the soil back into the atmosphere. Switching to low-tillage farming

would buy us a lot of time as the CO2 captured by farmland would stay in
the soil a lot longer, and some of it would be permanently sequestered.
Making precision agriculture universal and leveraging agrigenetics to
tweak nitrogen fixing microbes and plants to mostly eliminate CO2e-heavy
nitrogen fertilizers clears up the rest. Eliminate subsistence farming.
Fix concrete, steel and industrial processes
8% of global CO2 emissions come from making Portland cement. It’s

absolutely critical to urban densification and industry, so we won’t stop
making it. But it’s a huge source of CO2, about half from the energy and
half from CO2 that bakes off limestone as it is turned into quicklime.
Electrifying that energy flow helps a lot, but capturing that CO2 is one of
the few places where mechanical carbon capture will make sense. Steel
will mostly be fixed by aggressively turning internal combustion cars,
refineries, pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure into new steel using
electric minimills. 70% of North American steel is already made this way.
And transform high-emitting industrial processes like bicarbonate
manufacturing.
Price carbon aggressively

The simplest way to get a lot of people and industries to shift away from
emitting lots of CO2 is to make it expensive. That’s what carbon taxes do.
Shut down coal and gas generation aggressively

Getting rid of coal is already happening, but it’s still by far the biggest
single source of CO2 emissions. Aggressive actions to eliminate burning
coal are needed. For gas, the question is how few gas plants can we build,
how many of them can we run on biologically sourced methane and how
fast can we shut them down.
Stop financing and subsidies for fossil fuel

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Exploration, extraction and use, just cut it out. The US alone spends tens
of billions of dollars annually on subsidies of various kinds for the fossil
fuel industry, and hasn’t done a thing about it since committing to
eliminate them in 2009. The G7 and G20 have committed to eliminating
subsidies, but progress has been very slow. The World Bank continues to
finance coal, oil, and gas projects, despite commitments to end them.
Eliminate HFCs in refrigeration

The Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that

Deplete the Ozone Layer targets the unforeseen side effects of displacing
ozone-depleting CFCs with high global warming potential HFCs. Project
Drawdown puts this at #1 on its ranked list of solutions by cost vs benefit.
The US has still not ratified this Amendment, although 131 other countries
including China and India have.
There are some mildly controversial things left

out of this list
Nuclear power is too slow to build and too expensive

That’s empirical reality, not an advocacy statement. The conditions for
rapid build that existed in a couple of places and times in the past don’t
exist today. And we need a lot of clean electricity very quickly. Nuclear
need not apply. Keep existing nuclear running until it needs major
upgrades, don’t stop new nuclear buildout in China — pretty much the
only place building new generation capacity — but don’t expect it to be
more than a rounding error in a few decades. New nuclear technologies
including SMRs are decades from commercial deployment at any scale,
and we have technologies that are reliable, predictable, cheap, and fast to
build, so there will be nothing for new nuclear to do once it actually makes
it out of R&D.
Mechanical carbon capture and sequestration is a

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mostly dead end

This is an overhyped fig leaf for the fossil fuel industry. Virtually every
CCS site is actually an enhanced oil recovery site which recovers oil that
couldn’t be pumped out before, typically enough that 2–3 times more CO2
is generated from the oil than was put underground. Exceptions are natural
gas wells with too high a concentration of CO2, leading to 25 times the
emissions once the natural gas is burned. Expensive, unscalable, and
wasteful. As stated, flue carbon capture might be useful for concrete.
Air-to-fuel technologies are dead ends

Solutions such as Carbon Engineering’s direct-air-capture with hydrogen
electrolysis to create synthetic fuels is a broken model. It’s vastly more
expensive and higher CO2 emitting than electrification or biological
pathway fuel synthesis. Any money spent on this would have vastly better
results if spent on renewables instead. It’s not an either-or, but in this case
policy makers should ignore this and governments shouldn’t fund it.
Hydrogen as a store of energy

Hydrogen hype is high in the 2020s, but the molecule is better understood
as a climate change problem, not a climate change solution. We use about
120 million tons of black hydrogen annually, with CO2e emissions about a
billion tons per year. The biggest user is in oil refineries to reduce sulphur
in gas, diesel, kerosene and other petroleum products, and that’s going
away. The second biggest use is in nitrogen fertilizers, and that has to
diminish radically as well. The remainder must be served by green
hydrogen, and there is little room for wasting energy by turning renewable
electricity into an inefficient and ineffective fuel. Long-duration grid
storage is best served by much more efficient and effective closed-loop,
off-river pumped hydro and redox flow batteries.
The military is a hard problem

The military requires vast amounts of high energy fuel in places with no
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electrical supply chain, often for months at a time. The US military is

considered by many to be the single largest CO2 emitting organization in
the world. However, eliminating global fossil fuel strategic military
actions — which describes virtually everything done in the Middle East
for the last 100 years — will diminish the need for the US military
substantially. A great deal of its emissions, which hopefully will start
coming to light as the US has re-entered the Paris Accord, were related to
the Middle Eastern deployments. There’s only so much we can do for
biofuels, but to be clear, the world has been in a period of diminishing
military conflict since the end of WWII. Globalization may have

downsides, but the ties of trade and treaties which bind countries together
have been highly effective in allowing diplomacy pathways to work, and
making the military option increasingly difficult to consider.
Where approaches or recommendations from people or groups diverge

from the above, question what lobbying groups are involved, where
revenue will be lost or gained and in general what the motivations of the
people or organizations involved are. This is all empirically grounded
analysis. It’s not rocket science.
We have the solutions. We just need the will to execute, which is being
sapped by the losers in this necessary transformation, predominantly the
fossil fuel industry.
Readings:
7 Reasons The Future Is Electric
Future of electricity transmission is HVDC
The seven reasons renewables are dominant today
Wind & Solar In China Generating 2× Nuclear Today, Will Be 4× By 2030
Some Good News For The US Nuclear Fleet & Renewables
US Could Achieve 3X As Much CO2 Savings With Renewables Instead Of

Nuclear For Less Money
Chevron’s Fig Leaf Part 1: Carbon Engineering Burns Natural Gas To

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Capture Carbon From The Air
Carbon Capture’s Global Investment Would Have Been Better Spent On

Wind & Solar
Best Carbon Capture Facility In World Emits 25 Times More CO2 Than
Sequestered
Soil Carbon Capture: Great Loamy Hope Or Bandaid?
Farming Carbon Capture Has Potential, But Is Not A Magic Bullet
The Best Trees To Plant For Global Warming Have Three Blades &
Generate Electricity
What Would Planting 100 Million Trees Per Week Do In 5, 50, & 500
Years?
Massive Global Study Just Smashed One of The Last Major Arguments
Against Renewables
Kigali Amendment Enters into Force, Bringing Promise of Reduced Global

Warming | News | SDG Knowledge Hub | IISD
Shrinking Hydrogen Demand & Hydrogen Decarbonization Will Have

Major Climate Benefits
How Aviation Will Decarbonize Decade By Decade Until 2100
Global Shipping Less Of CO2e Problem Today Than Aviation, More By

End Of Century
Longer term grid storage is a massive growth market through 2060
Pumped hydropower storage & redox flow batteries are the untold future of
energy
Small modular nuclear reactors were tried in the 1950s and won’t be better
today
A version of this article is also published in CleanTechnica and The Future

is Electric. Energy Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts
and opinions of leading Energy & Sustainability writers, their opinions do
not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
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Did you enjoy this energy voice? Support us by sharing this article!
About the author

Michael Barnard is Chief Strategist at The Future Is Eletric Strategy (TFIE), Board
Observer & Strategist for Agora Energy Technologies, and co-founder of distnc
technologies. He develops scenarios for decarbonization 40-80 years into the future,
assisting executives, boards and investors.
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Julio Friedmann and more

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4/14/22, 11:37 PM The Short List Of Climate Actions That Will Work

Categories Lenses Tools ESG Alliance

The Short List Of About Us

ENERGY VOICES SUSTAINABILITY · CLIMATE CHANGE · RENEWABLES

I spend a lot of time critiquing solutions for low-carbon transformation,

Consensus is an interesting word. I tend to prefer consilience, where

The Short List

Overbuild renewable generation

Build continent-scale electrical grids and markets

It can replace some AC transmission during upgrades and be buried along

Build a fair amount of pumped hydro and other storage

Plant a lot of trees

Change agricultural practices

by the soil back into the atmosphere. Switching to low-tillage farming

Fix concrete, steel and industrial processes

8% of global CO2 emissions come from making Portland cement. It’s

Price carbon aggressively

Shut down coal and gas generation aggressively

Stop financing and subsidies for fossil fuel

Eliminate HFCs in refrigeration

The Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that

There are some mildly controversial things left

Nuclear power is too slow to build and too expensive

Mechanical carbon capture and sequestration is a

mostly dead end

Air-to-fuel technologies are dead ends

Hydrogen as a store of energy

The military is a hard problem

electrical supply chain, often for months at a time. The US military is

military conflict since the end of WWII. Globalization may have

Where approaches or recommendations from people or groups diverge

Future of electricity transmission is HVDC​

The seven reasons renewables are dominant today

Wind & Solar In China Generating 2× Nuclear Today, Will Be 4× By 2030​

Some Good News For The US Nuclear Fleet & Renewables​

US Could Achieve 3X As Much CO2 Savings With Renewables Instead Of

Chevron’s Fig Leaf Part 1: Carbon Engineering Burns Natural Gas To

Capture Carbon From The Air​

Carbon Capture’s Global Investment Would Have Been Better Spent On

Soil Carbon Capture: Great Loamy Hope Or Bandaid?​

Farming Carbon Capture Has Potential, But Is Not A Magic Bullet​

Kigali Amendment Enters into Force, Bringing Promise of Reduced Global

Shrinking Hydrogen Demand & Hydrogen Decarbonization Will Have

How Aviation Will Decarbonize Decade By Decade Until 2100​

Global Shipping Less Of CO2e Problem Today Than Aviation, More By

Longer term grid storage is a massive growth market through 2060​

A version of this article is also published in CleanTechnica and The Future

About the author

Other Energy Voices

Julio Friedmann and more

You cannot miss it!

You can unsubscribe at any time

(read our privacy policy)

| Your compass to energy & sustainability information

About Us Terms & Conditions Privacy Cookies Contact Us

You might also like

Future of electricity transmission is HVDC

Wind & Solar In China Generating 2× Nuclear Today, Will Be 4× By 2030

Some Good News For The US Nuclear Fleet & Renewables

Capture Carbon From The Air

Soil Carbon Capture: Great Loamy Hope Or Bandaid?

Farming Carbon Capture Has Potential, But Is Not A Magic Bullet

How Aviation Will Decarbonize Decade By Decade Until 2100

Longer term grid storage is a massive growth market through 2060