Climate crisis: It’s time for more drastic solutions

Peter Zeihan is a “geopolitical analyst,” which he describes as “a fancy way of saying I help people understand how the world works.” He’s clear about what he thinks will not work: solving the climate crisis with wind and solar energy.

Zeihan is not a natural optimist. Eleven years ago, he authored a best-selling book titled, “The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization.” One reviewer called him “excessively pessimistic.”

More recently, in a video presentation on YouTube, he acknowledged that wind and solar energy are critical technologies but says he believes geophysical and other limitations on their use mean the world will have to rely on fossil fuels for a long time to come. The limitations go beyond the familiar intermittency issue; they include the lack of adequate sunlight and wind in large parts of the world.

The International Energy Agency (IEA), among others, has ambitious goals for the world to achieve net-zero-carbon energy by mid-century. World solar installations set a record in 2021, but the IEA says they must triple by 2030. Electricity from wind, hydropower and bioenergy needs to double, and geothermal and ocean power must also grow rapidly.

There has been progress. In April, a study of 78 countries found that wind and solar technologies provided 12 percent of the world’s electricity last year, up from 10 percent in 2021. Nearly 40 percent of the world’s electricity comes from sunlight, wind and nuclear power. Without wind and solar growth, carbon dioxide pollution from the world’s power sector would have grown 20 percent last year; instead, growth was only 1.3 percent.

Solar and wind pessimists point to how much land wind and solar systems require. But researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory say that decarbonizing America’s power sector with those options would require only 1 percent of the land in the lower 48 states. That includes as many as 10,000 miles of new high-capacity transmission infrastructure per year — three times today’s capacity.

And as research in the journal Nature Communications points out, “Designing and operating a highly reliable electricity system that is dependent on such large shares of wind and solar generation can be a challenge due to the variable and uncertain nature of solar and wind resources.”

Advanced nuclear power would be one way to back up intermittent wind and solar energy. NREL concludes it might be necessary to decarbonize America’s power production if wind and solar run into siting and land-use barriers. But Zeihan dismisses nuclear power, citing public opposition to the technology and storing its wastes.

And it’s true: Decades of political opposition have kept the U.S. from opening a permanent storage site. As of two years ago, more than 90,000 metric tons of highly radioactive wastes from power and weapons production were sitting in temporary storage facilities around the county, some since the 1940s. Studies reported in Chemical and Engineering News found some underground storage tanks have degraded over time and are leaking.

So, what does all this imply?

First, while wind and solar are the superstars of decarbonization, there are many other options, ranging from green hydrogen to closed-loop bioenergy and ocean waves to produce energy where the superstars can’t. If governments aren’t equally serious about investing in those options, they should be.

Second, pessimism can help identify the barriers to retiring fossil fuels. The work of removing the obstacles and enabling clean energy is as important as the work of improving the technologies themselves.

Third, governments and industry need to recognize the urgency of decarbonization, and work to achieve the full potential of ready-to-go energy efficiency, clean energy technologies and natural carbon sinks.

Fourth, small modular nuclear reactors may have to be an exception to the ready rule. The industry expects them to be much less expensive and easier to build than traditional nuclear power plants while generating less waste, using less cooling water, and distributing power closer to its point of use. (Regulators have approved only one so far; Westinghouse plans to have one running by 2033.) 

But nuclear power is a hard pill for many clean energy and environmental advocates to swallow. The U.S. must finally solve the problem of permanent storage for high-level radioactive waste. Settling on a permanent storage site has been a political nightmare for federal and state officials, but we can’t keep solving our energy problems by creating new ones.   

Some respected scientists tell us we now must swallow an even bigger pill, the geoengineering technology called “solar dimming” or “solar radiation management.”

Dr. Michael MacCracken, the chief scientist at the Climate Institute in Washington, D.C, has been a leader in the climate field for 25 years. He says the danger of catastrophic climate change is much closer than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has told us. Global warming is proceeding so rapidly, MacCracken says, that we must begin dimming sunlight by reducing the amount reaching the Earth’s surface. As environmental champion Bill McKibben writes, the world’s failure to meet critical deadlines for reducing CO2 pollution means “conditions may force a reckoning with the idea of solar geoengineering.”

MacCracken favors depositing sulfates in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space. In one scenario, aircraft would fly 4,000 sorties to deposit sulfates in the first year, increasing to 60,000 flights annually after 15 years.

However, there are deep concerns about solar dimming. Unintended consequences could include damage to the ozone layer, an impact on photosynthesis, international disagreements about when, where and how much to use it, and something called “termination shock” — the sudden relapse into a hot world that’s become even hotter by ongoing greenhouse gas emissions while dimming was in effect.

First, if the IPCC has been too conservative in projecting how close we are to irreversible global warming, it should improve its analysis.

Second, working with other nations, NASA and NOAA should map the Earth’s lands and waters to identify those best suited for wind and solar farms, agriculture, wildlife habitat, industry, human settlement and other uses. This could help avoid land-use conflicts and guide clean energy deployment to where it’s most effective.

Third, nations should establish a process for international collaboration on deploying solar dimming and other geoengineering options. This should be on the agenda of the next Conference of the Parties in November.

And fourth, the U.S. Department of Energy should separate the wheat from the chaff as it prioritizes where to invest its funds and expertise. The Department of Energy and the White House should push back against Congress on funding schemes to greenwash fossil fuels, pacify Big Oil, and take bad risks like carbon capture and sequestration at power plants.

There is much not to like about nuclear power and even the simplest forms of geoengineering. But we will like things even less if we continue doing too little. The impacts of global warming are already severe enough to ask why we didn’t get serious about ending our addiction to fossil fuels while we still had the chance.

William Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project and a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy.