Dear Greta (if I may):
I’m the kind of old fart you like to stare at with that killer look. The kind you whose ears you like to box with your brick bats of righteous indignation. I’ve earned your disdain. In my 73 years, I have used more than my fair share of a CO2 allotment, driving my Volvo, heating my home with oil or gas, flitting around the world on planes without a pressing reason, even burning wood in my fireplace. I’ll be long dead and gone before the piper needs to be paid for this intemperance and you will be left to pick up the pieces.
You are right to be angry Greta. We have really fucked things up. “Do something!” you yell. “You’re the adults and supposed to be in charge! I’m just a child.”
But Greta, you just turned 18. You are not a child anymore; you are one of us. And it is time to hold yourself to the same demand you make of us. So it is time for you to do something. And people are much more likely to pay attention to what you do than they ever will to me. So, Greta, what will you do to hand over a better world to your children?
Maybe we can put our heads together. Whether by preference or genetics, I see you are not a sentimentalist. Me neither — by profession, I am a philosopher. Imagine you and I ruled the world. What might we do to stop the looming crisis today with just one proviso? We can’t rely on magic. We can’t wave our wands and have all the clean energy we want instantaneously.
Suppose we just ban all use of fossil fuel. That will mean an 80% drop in available energy. We can mandate growth of renewable energy to make up the difference over time. How long will that take?
Another old fart, Vaclav Smil, says energy transitions take about 50 years. But if we drop all other priorities and order all of the factories building useless junk to build windmills and solar panels, we can surely do better than that. How much better? If we are not using magic, it is hard to know, but based on what I have been reading, 35–40 years seems plausible.
If that is right, for most of your life Greta, you are going to live in an energy poor world. How poor? I did a calculation for us. Global energy consumption is 1,900 kg of oil equivalent (kgoe) per person per year. If we only use renewable energy, then it falls to 380 kgoe. But that is before we take into account population growth over the next 50 years. With a world of 10 billion people, our fair share falls to about 300 kgoe per year.
Would that be so bad? Maybe not for you, but for me, for sure. We, energy hogs in the United States, use 23 times that much. But even the modest Danes use 10 times that much. Who uses 300 kgoe? The citizens of the Congo do.
But the problem, Greta, is that these people in the Congo want to live on more energy — they too want a refrigerator, a washing machine and even an (electric) motor bike.
Too bad you and I might say since we are in charge. And while we are at it, we better tell them they should not aspire to eat meat either to stop the methane emissions cows produce. And we better tell them to stop having so many babies.
You are looking queasy Greta. We need to be tough. “Let we, the rich of the world, just live on 300 kgoe and give what we save to them, the poor of the world” you say. “After all we are 17% of the world population but consume 70% of global energy. We have had our turn. Now it is their turn. As we convert to more renewable energy, give it all to them.”
But the problem is that there are a lot of them compared to us — about 6 of them to each of us. Suppose we aspire that everyone have a chance to live in a world the way the perfect Danes do: on 3,000 kgoe per person per year. In a world of 10 billion people that is 30 trillion kgoe a year which is more than three times current global energy consumption.
Here is the problem in a nutshell: to date only 20% of current global energy demand is satisfied with renewables. We don’t just need grow that to 100% of current energy demand. We also need to grow it to satisfy prospective Developing world demand. That is going to be hard to do in a timely fashion.
And so Greta, I fear that whatever you and I may wish, at least for the rest of this century, whatever else we do, we will need to learn to remove carbon dioxide and methane from the atmosphere.
Sincerely, Martin Bunzl