Concluding Thoughts on COP28

COP28 Travelogue

I made it home. My body thinks it’s still in Dubai. I’ve never been a talented sleeper, but traveling through nine time zones takes this difficulty to a new level. It’s 5:30am, and I’ve already been up a few hours. Seems like a fine time to conclude and reflect.

I’ve seen a lot of news about the COP these last few days. There seems to be some consensus that what was achieved at COP28 was good, and that it wasn’t good enough to solidify the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Still calling this “good” comes from the historic agreement for all countries to “transition away from fossil fuels.” Never before had something like that been agreed to. And the official line is that it “keeps 1.5 in reach.” In other words, it could have been worse. So, let’s be thankful for that.

But the stronger action needed is to “phase out” fossil fuels. This year 127 countries came to COP28 supporting the phasing out language, which is up from just 80 countries a year ago (and that was only with regard to electricity production). And it should be noted that most favor a “just” transition away from fossil fuels. The difficulty here is that most places in the world can’t just stop using fossil fuels (to heat their homes and provide electricity, for example), because there would be greater suffering that results from that than if the world gets 1.5 degrees warmer — at least in the short term there would be greater suffering.

Another issue I haven’t brought up here is the debate among the parties between production and emissions. The petrostates mostly took the position that the problem is not in the production (mining and refining) of fossil fuels, but it is the burning of them. That’s really funny in one sense, but points to a deeper issue of supply and demand. You might think of it kind of like the drug wars: is the problem with the people who are producing and selling drugs, or with the people who are buying and using them? And here, your political ideology might come to the surface.

People who are on the side of individual freedom and want government to “keep their hands off my social security” (remember when someone actually said that during a presidential campaign?!), might say: let’s not regulate the oil producers; it’s up to us whether we use it or not. And those who think government is most properly a nanny state might say: we can’t really do what’s good for us, so government needs to do it for us. Most of us are probably somewhere between those two extremes.

More good news on that front: renewable energy is getting cheaper and cheaper. It very well could be that governments don’t have to regulate the production of fossil fuels, because no one will want them when there are cheaper alternatives available. The question is how long will it take to achieve that state? Part of the answer to that (sorry Libertarians) is that governments need to do things like update the power grid first.

Speaking of technological innovations that will save the day (and the world), lots of people (and all the petrostates) think the solution to our problems should be found in carbon capture technology. That is the (pipe) dream that we can keep using energy how we have been, and that we’ll just invent big machines that will suck the carbon dioxide out of the air. It really is possible that this could form part of the solution; but I’m afraid it’s not remotely close to being the solution.

A couple of years ago I wrote over on Medium (is that still a thing?) about the latest carbon capture technology that just started. It is called the Orca project and is based in Iceland where you can use geothermal energy to power it (because having to use electricity from coal-burning power plants to power your carbon capture machines, can’t even keep up with the new emissions you’re using!). It sucks CO2 out of the air, and does some fancy stuff with it, then buries it deep in the ground where (supposedly) it doesn’t harm anything. This plant can pull 4,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere every year.

That sounds great… unless you’re up on the current amount of CO2 we’re putting into the atmosphere, which is about 4,000 every 4 seconds! So if my math is correct, we need 7,883,999 of these plants just to keep up with our current emissions. At at the price tag of $10M per plant, that cost would be $79 trillion (unless they start selling them at Costco in bulk).

The last development I’ll bring up is the plan by most countries to ramp up oil fossil fuel mining (I’m guessing I already lost the readers of this newsletter who were only here for the stories about riding camels). Again, this is the supply side, and you might not think this is the real problem. But if I remember economics class from high school correctly, the more supply there is, the cheaper prices become. So when governments allow more and more drilling for oil, they are saying, “we want energy prices to be cheaper for our people”. And that is probably a way to win elections, because most people tend to vote for their own self-interest, rather than the common good of all people.

Seems like a good way to end these reflections. Thanks for reading. I write in order to make sense of things in my own mind, but I suspect I wouldn’t do it if there weren’t people out there reading. It’s almost like, when left to my own, I don’t always do what’s good for me, and so I need a larger system that helps to keep me accountable… but I digress back into ideology.

I’m going to take a couple of weeks off from writing here (and by implication, from making sense of things). But after the first of the year, I might start up a new series about my book that comes out this spring. It’s available for pre-order now. What better Christmas present could you give than a hand-written note that says, “I’ve pre-ordered you a copy of Jim’s new book, which you should receive in April”?!