Thu, Dec 27, 2018 page9

• For climate safety, call in the engineers

  Despite diplomats’ successes at the UN Climate Change Conference in Poland, plans are still lacking to move the world’s energy system to renewable energy before the middle of the century

  • By Jeffrey D. Sachs
  • • 
    • 
    • 

  This month’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP24) in Katowice, Poland, succeeded in producing a rulebook to implement the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Every UN member state signed on, but that is unlikely to be enough to head off a climate catastrophe. It is time to call in the engineers.

  The diplomatic success at COP24 was remarkable, given relentless lobbying and foot-dragging by the fossil-fuel industry. Diplomats have read the science and know the truth: Without a rapid move to a zero-carbon global energy system by mid-century, humanity will be in grave peril.

  In the past few years, millions of people have suffered the hardships of extreme heat waves, droughts, flood surges, powerful hurricanes and devastating forest fires, because the Earth’s temperature is already 1.1° C above the pre-industrial average.

  

  Illustration: Mountain People

  If warming exceeds 1.5°C or 2°C later this century — temperatures never experienced in the entire 10,000-year history of human civilization — the world would become vastly more dangerous.

  The Paris accord commits national governments to keep temperatures “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and [to pursue] efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

  Humanity now has a rulebook for measuring greenhouse gas emissions, sharing know-how and measuring financial transfers from rich to poor countries. Yet it still lacks the plans for shifting the world’s energy system to renewable energy by the middle of the century.

  Diplomats, of course, are not technical experts. The next stage needs the world’s engineering experts on power generation and transmission, electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cells, artificial intelligence for energy systems management, urban design for energy efficiency and public transport, and related specialists.

  Diplomats, rather than engineers, have been at the forefront at UN climate summits for the past 24 years. The time for engineers to take center stage has arrived.

  The Paris accord assumes that each government consults with its own country’s engineers to devise a national energy strategy, with each of the 193 UN member states essentially producing a separate plan. That approach reflects a deep misunderstanding of how the global energy transition must work. Solutions need to be agreed and coordinated at an international scale, not country by country.

  Global engineering systems require global coordination. Consider civil aviation, a triumph of globally coordinated engineering. Last year, there were 41.8 million flights without a single fatal passenger jet accident.

  The civil aviation system works so well because all countries use aircraft manufactured by a few global companies and share standard operating procedures for navigation, air traffic control, airport and airplane security, maintenance and other operations.

  Other global systems are similarly coordinated. Transfers of US dollar bank balances average a staggering US$2.7 trillion per day, yet are routinely settled through the use of standardized banking and communications protocols, while billions of daily Internet activities and mobile phone calls are possible because of shared protocols.

  The scale and reliability of these globally connected high-tech systems are astounding and depend on solutions implemented internationally, not country by country.

  The transition to renewable energy could be greatly accelerated if the world’s governments finally bring engineers to the fore.

  Consider that in May 1961, then-US president John F. Kennedy called on Americans to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the decade.

  NASA quickly mobilized hundreds of thousands of engineers and other experts, and completed the moonshot in July 1969, meeting the president’s remarkably ambitious time line.

  I was recently on a panel with three economists and a senior business-sector engineer. After the economists spoke about carbon prices, internalizing externalities, feed-in tariffs, carbon offsets and the like, the engineer spoke succinctly and wisely.

  “I don’t really understand what you economists were just speaking about, but I do have a suggestion,” he said. “Tell us engineers the desired ‘specs’ and the time line, and we’ll get the job done.”

  This was not bravado.

  Here are the specs. To limit warming to 1.5°C, the world’s energy system must be decarbonized by the middle of the century. This would require the vast mobilization of zero-carbon energy sources, such as wind, solar and hydro power, implying a power system that could handle intermittent energy sources that depend on when the sun shines, how hard the wind blows and how fast rivers flow.

  This zero-carbon electricity would power electric vehicles that replace vehicles with an internal combustion engine. It would also be used to produce zero-carbon fuels, such as hydrogen for ocean shipping and synthetic hydrocarbons for airplanes.

  People would heat their homes and office buildings with zero-carbon electricity rather than with coal, oil or natural gas. Energy-intensive industries, such as steel and aluminum, would also replace fossil fuels with zero-carbon electricity and hydrogen.

  These zero-carbon solutions would extend beyond any country’s borders. The lowest cost and most plentiful renewable energy is often found far from population centers, in deserts and mountains, and offshore for wind. This energy would therefore need to be transmitted long distances, often crossing national boundaries, with the use of special high-voltage transmission lines.

  The advantages of a long-distance, internationally connected transmission system have been powerfully emphasized by the Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization, a worldwide partnership of engineering companies and institutions launched by State Grid Corp of China in 2016.

  In a sensible global decarbonization plan, many of today’s fossil fuel exporting countries and companies would become tomorrow’s exporters of zero-carbon energy. The oil-producing Gulf countries should export solar energy from the vast Arabian desert to Europe and Asia.

  Coal-producing Australia should export solar power from the enormous outback to Southeast Asia via submarine cable. Canada should increase its exports of zero-carbon hydropower to the US market and finally end its efforts to export products from its high-carbon oil sands.

  Energy transformation for climate safety is our 21st century moonshot. When heads of state convene at the UN in September next year, the world’s leading engineers should greet them with a cutting-edge framework for global action.

  Jeffrey D. Sachs, professor of Sustainable Development, and Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development and of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. His books include The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, The Age of Sustainable Development, Building the New American Economy and A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism.

  Copyright: Project Syndicate
• Most Popular

  • 1

    US military declines to fire adopting Marine Mast

  • 2

    CGA expels Chinese vessels from Taiwan waters

  • 3

    Taiwan on alert over Chinese carrier

  • 4

    Most willing to defend Taiwan: survey

  • 5

    Taipei Main Station renovations to begin Nov. 1