The ‘Energy Realist’ Approach to Climate Change
In part one of our interview, Mark P. Mills, the Executive Director of the National Center for Energy Analytics and the author of numerous books, dove into his twenty-year-old – yet timeless – treatise on energy, The Bottomless Well, (co-authored with Peter Huber) and explored the tenets of “energy realism.” In this second and final part, we again look back on the book, and I asked Mark about how an energy realist would deal with climate change.
RP: Do you think that carbon emissions and climate change should be a limit on extracting oil and natural gas?
MM: No. And no more than I did then. We wrote a chapter in the book, “Saving the planet with coal and uranium.” We haven’t learned anything substantially new about climate science in two decades. If we learned anything, it’s that the curve has been bent down – the models that are meaningful at the IPCC have pushed down, not up, the predicted consequences of what might occur in the future.
It’s not helpful to go down the climate rabbit hole now for the same reason we didn’t then. What we did is lay down the facts with respect to the magnitude of carbon dioxide fluxes. Climate science is an entirely separate magisteria from energy and energy physics. What we meant by “saving the planet with coal and uranium” is that you aren’t going to change how society can produce power that it can afford. It’s locked in to the physics of energy and into the engineering that we can do. What that meant was that we would use more coal. In fact, we’ve been proven to be right. China is building a coal plant a week, and India will shortly follow that trend. The point is that we can’t bend the curve of CO2 emissions with magic aspirations once you understand how the physics of energy works. We’re going to burn more hydrocarbons for the conceivable future. So if one is concerned about the consequences at a future date, then what you want is adaptation and resilience, because you’re not going to stop it. Even Bill Gates recently said that even if we do all the stuff we’re trying to do, the absolute change in predicted temperature will be a tiny fraction of a degree.
What’s unfortunate is that the way to address climate change – adaptation and resilience – which requires money and technology, is being squandered to do things that won’t make a difference as opposed to spending money on things that will. Because coal is cheap, it unlocks wealth, and because it unlocks wealth, you have a shot at doing the things that really matter.
RP: How have we grown more climate-friendly at providing energy since 2005?
MM: How you supply energy – nothing’s really changed in twenty years. It is true that wind and solar machines got cheaper. They were earlier in their development curve so that makes sense. But what most people don’t know is that if you look at the footprint and the thermodynamic efficiency of a Caterpillar diesel combustion generator, they’re a third the size of what they were 25 years ago. They’re 30 to 50% more thermodynamically efficient and they run longer with more reliability… We get better at all these material conversion processes. You can’t beat physics limits, but you get closer to it. Until you get to that asymptote, one can and should predict that things will get better. But when you hit the asymptote, you have to change the machines entirely. Once you hit the physics limits of the machines, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on it, it’s not going to get better. You might get some linear improvements, but you don’t get the 2x, the 5x changes.
The LED light was our poster child for a new phenomenology. Incandescent lights use incandescence. You just heat it up and it pukes out light photons. It’s brute force, and it works, and it’s cheap. The LED is a physics phenomena that’s really different – more subtle, more difficult to build. LEDs were wicked expensive when we wrote the book, but you knew it was semiconductor technology. It’s going to drop down the curve, and it did. People said that solar cells would do the same. Yes, they did. They’re now on the asymptote. You can make them a little better, but now what you have is a machine whose dominant cost is the materials needed to build it – not the labor and not the idea. Once machines are in that modality, you have to change phenomenology.
RP: One of the tenets of ecomodernism is that we can decouple growth from environmental harms. Do you think this is possible?
MM: Sure, but not the way that ecomodernists think. The decoupling metric has to have boundary conditions to describe it. There are five things you can track that account for all human consumption: food, biomass, fuel, construction materials, and metals. You can put all human consumption in tons. If you look at the total tons of stuff we extract, harvest, and handle, there’s no bending in the curve. We’re up to one hundred gigaton of materials. We’ve gone from 25 gigaton fifty years ago to 100 gigaton a year. All the environmental impacts are associated with that fact. We haven’t decoupled that.
The only decoupling is seen in the artifice of measuring a decoupling of the increased quantity of material per net new real dollars. That curve has bent down, but it’s silly to call that decoupling, at least in terms of our real materials requirements. The environmental impacts aren’t decoupling from economic growth; it’s decoupling from absolute growth of material use. We aren’t decoupling. We’re expanding the use of essentially everything. It’ll keep going up until we hit peak people and peak wealth per person. We can moderate the growth of tonnage with efficiency, but if you accelerate the efficiency, it makes it cheaper, and will actually push the curve faster. It won’t bend down the curve. So the measures that people are using are not true measures of fundamental disconnect from nature.
Everything we harvest and move has an impact of some kind, so how do we decouple? We decouple with technology. We moderate or even eliminate what we identify as the harm. So if we’re harvesting water, what we don’t want to do is pollute the water. That’s a technology issue, but we’re still going to use more water. If we could actually make cheap graphene as a conductor, we would have an alternative to copper for the first time in human history. That would be a really big deal, but my bet is that it will be more expensive for a very long time than copper, but it will moderate the demand for copper to build buildings. I think we will, and we are, decoupling our harms on nature through technology and money, but we’re not decoupling from absolute consumption of stuff.
RP: What do you say to people who are concerned about climate change and are concerned about human effects on Earth, ourselves, and ecosystems? What is the optimism you can provide them from an ‘energy realist’ perspective?
MM: The right answer to the question is back to realistic optimism. Once you understand what’s possible in energy systems, you know that there is not going to be a decoupling from hydrocarbons. It’s not going to happen. There’s nothing in the physics of energy systems that suggests in the timeframes we’re talking about that we have affordable options at scale. They don’t exist.
The realistic optimism is this: human beings have had to keep nature from killing us for all of history. Nature is always trying to kill people, through pestilence, through viruses, through earthquakes, through heatwaves, floods, droughts, over all of history. The reason that we’ve survived and flourished is because of our brains, because of our technology. Deploying materials in new ways because of innovation and because of wealth. Technology creates wealth. Wealth allows us to get new technologies that create resilience and adaptation.
We do not have a magic thermostat. There’s no mechanism to have a magic thermostat through adjusting our energy systems. The future will be different than the present. It could be much worse – I don’t know, nobody knows. I think we’re at a technology confluence now equal to the 1920s. The prospects for having economic growth at the velocity we had in the early 20th century are now back in play. The prospects for having fundamental engineered changes in many things from biological to transportation are also in play. If we’re worried about extreme weather in the future, or floods, or sea level rise, it’s all solvable with money and technology. I’m more optimistic now than ever that the infinite energy sources we have can be tapped affordably in a sustainable way.
RP: Will economics actually properly value the external costs of those energy sources before it’s “too late”?
MM: Yes. The problem with this externality argument is that it presumes that people don’t implicitly and explicitly value the externalities. They do. Markets recognize them. They’re hard to price overtly and when we try to do it we do it incorrectly. Human beings are exquisitely good at this over time, but in the short term we misprice things. We’re better at it than we’ve ever been and we’re always better at it in free markets, because the free markets allow the mistakes to be rectified. We will price externalities properly and we will react to them and have the tools for them. Will we react perfectly? No. But you can guarantee you will be perfectly wrong if we try to guess it today. So we have a choice between imperfectly right, or imperfectly wrong.