50% by 2030
In a somewhat recent Guardian article on the the topic of rapid oil pipeline expansion worldwide, it was reported that “Global carbon emissions must drop by 50% by 2030 to keep on track with internationally agreed targets for limiting global heating.” This article was published in September of last year, and the evidence shows there hasn’t been any slowing down of oil pipeline construction in the world. Nor has there been any downturn in the burning of fossil fuels or the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere. While so-called “renewable energy” infrastructure has increased, none of this increase has resulted in a lowering of global greenhouse gas emissions—, partly because those emissions are increasing more rapidly than “renewable” energy is. In fact, mining for, smelting for, manufacturing, distributing and installing of “renewable energy” devices and infrastructure have been adding to, rather than reducing, greenhouse gas emissions. And the only plausible, voluntary and deliberate way this trend could change would be if the world adopted rapid and dramatic voluntary energy descent1 — whether as government policies or some kind of non-governmental rebellion from a fossil fuel dependent economy.2
What stood out for me in that particular Guardian article wasn’t what it said about pipeline expansion, but the words I directly quoted above. The words were like cold water splashed on the face of the reader, and so they became the title of an article I published then: Global emissions must drop by 50% by 2030.
According to economists like Nate Hagens, and thousand of others like him, energy and GDP / GWP (measures of economic growth or decline3), when plotted together on graphs, follow the same graph curves pretty precisely. We use more energy when the economy is growing. We use less energy when the economy is shrinking. When energy supplies enter into “shortages” the rate of the movements of currency drops off (the economy gets smaller). The same is true with materials, which is no surprise, since producing and moving materials requires energy. And my point here must be obvious. If we were to cut fossil fuels as dramatically as 50% by 2030, we’d almost certainly be shrinking “the economy” by at least that much. And it’s worth pointing out that nothing like this has ever happened before — not even during the Great Depression.
There is no way that our current mode of globalized capitalist-industrial technological economy could shrink its gross world product (GWP) by 50% in such a time frame without resulting in a what most of us would understand as a worldwide “great depression”. For comparison’s sake, at the most severe point of the USA’s Great Depression, around 1933, the U.S. GDP had declined by approximately 30% in real terms. This sent economic shock waves throughout the global economy of that day, a time in which the current wave of economic globalization hadn’t even begun to set in.
During the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the United States experienced a significant economic downturn. The exact percentage by which the U.S. economy shrank can vary depending on the measurement and time frame used. However, at the most severe point of the crisis, which was in the fourth quarter of 2008, the U.S. real GDP contracted by approximately 8.4%.
For the global economy, the financial crisis had a widespread impact, leading to a global recession. The percentage by which the world economy shrank during this period also varies based on measurement and data sources, but it’s estimated that global GDP contracted by around 0.5% to 1.1% in 2009, which was the year when the global recession was most pronounced.
84%
Eighty-four percent of the technological energy4 (a.k.a, techno-energy) we use in the word today is fossil fuel sourced energy. And, if reason and history are our guides, this can’t be dramatically altered — in the very near term, as a percentage of world energy usage — by simply replacing fossil fuels with so-called “renewables” (that is, with energy from sun, wind, tides, geothermal and hydro).
But let’s say we can replace a great deal of techno-energy with “renewables”. If 84% of the energy we use today is fossil energy, replacing fossil tech with “renewable” tech will have an energy cost coming from mostly fossil energy-tech sources. That is, it will require energy to mine for, smelt for, manufacture, distribute and emplace all of this new infrastructure and devices.
That is, a rapid increase in “renewable” energy production can only occur at the cost of a what Richard Heinberg has called a “pulse”5 of increased fossil fuel use in the near term. Some have argued that a temporary increase — a ‘pulse’ — of greenhouse gases now is a reasonable price to pay for “clean energy” a decade or two from now. But there is a rather enormous problem with this premise. The problem is that we’ve already used up our carbon budget.
0% (zero)
By what percentage can we safely raise greenhouse gas concentrations in Earth’s atmosphere? Recent events in the world clearly indicate that this number is zero. And this means, of course, that the amount of energy we can afford (“safely”) to use in building “renewable” devices and infrastructure, so long as the energy used in doing so is fossil energy, is also zero.
Let me explain. The notion of a “carbon budget” was first developed in order to assess the question of how much we can “safely” increase atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. At that time, it was as yet pretty unclear how much GHG concentrations would push the climate system from a “safe” level to a “dangerous” one … and beyond merely dangerous to “catastrophic.” What we’ve been learning recently is that we’re well past the safe zone and well into the dangerous-to-catastrophic zone already. So it no longer makes sense to speak in such a way as to suggest we’re still in the safe zone. But the world does go on pretending that we’ve not already spent our “carbon budget”. What gradually happened over the decades is that the notion of “carbon budget” got transformed from its original emphasis on safety / danger / catastrophe, to be redefined in such a way that it came more to speak in terms of “limiting global warming to a given level with a given probability”.6 Somehow we just stopped talking about “carbon budgets” in such a way as to indicate where safety ends and danger (and catastrophe) begin. And I suspect this is because we had crossed that line already, but collectively we’ve decided not to acknowledge this crossing.
One way of understanding that we’re no longer in a “safe” climate, and thus have no more carbon budget to spend, is to look at what’s happening already with regard to climate tipping points.
A recent article in Nature Communications warns of a forthcoming collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), with a transition most likely to occur between 2025-2095. Other scientists, though, say it is questionable whether a collapse could occur this century. However, if a collapse were to happen to the AMOC, there could be global ramifications, including abrupt cooling across large parts of the northern hemisphere, changes in tropical rainfall, and non-linear changes in sea-level rise in the North Atlantic Ocean. – from What’s happening with AMOC?
A careful look at what is known about climate tipping point risks (and facts) makes it plain that we’ve already crossed some of these, and/or we’re about to cross them. That means we’re well past safe and fully into a dangerous and potentially catastrophic climate situation.
[As an aside, I do not believe that greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations are the only cause of anthropogenic climate disruption. I simply believe these are among the most potent of multiple causes, among which are factors of causation described and explained by Charles Eisenstein in his book, Climate: A New Story.]
Zero – zilch, nada …
No one (zip) responded to my call for collaborators in the project of putting numbers to “the energy cost of energy transition” in my recent article titled 2023 – 2033, The Decisive Decade.
In the back of my mind, while writing the above, was a paragraph from Chris Smaje in the comments (dialogue) following one of his blog posts.
Regarding the energy demands of ruralization, I daresay this would present genuine problems in some or many places – but it will unquestionably be less than the energy demands of ongoing urbanism. Putting figures to it is nigh on impossible, and I haven’t seen anyone try. I’d be interested if anyone could point me to any studies that have tried. But only moderately interested – it’s one of those areas where the obsession with quantification easily turns pathological.7
We were discussing re-ruralization of much of our population, as a sensible response to an inevitably shrinking future economy, in which access to land will mean access to livelihood in a low energy economy. And my ears perked up when Smaje said that an obsession with quantification can easily turn pathological. I wondered whether my near obsession with putting a figure on “the energy costs of energy transition” was bordering on pathology. It’s a good thing to wonder about, for sure. But I think it’s quantification we’re going to require if we’re to persuade enough of the right people to take seriously the fact (okay, it’s not yet an established fact, is it?) that renewable energy won’t — can’t possibly — enable a smooth passage to livelihood in a low carbon future.
Access to land will be necessary — for people who cannot presently afford to buy land. But there is also the need for time … time to learn how to grow food, and teach these skills to others. Time to build the minimal infrastructure of ecovillages in support of homesteads of various sorts. Time to nurture the soil back to life. And labor. There’s work to be done to build a bridge to a low carbon future rooted in the knowledge that only energy descent can enable a truly viable energy transition.
And there is the social, educational, cultural and political work ahead … leading to the renewal which Dougald Hine (and, if I remember right, Ivan Illich) have called “regrowing a living culture.” A living culture, I’m sure Dougald would insist, isn’t one grounded in quantification so much as in careful attention to the real world right before our eyes, ears, nose… and heart. A living culture wouldn’t — doesn’t — refuse abstractions. It simply provides abstractions, like numbers, with a proper and limited focus and scope.
Request
I’m asking now, yet again. Please. Let’s collaborate to provide some quantification of the energy costs of energy transition — if only to help close off the disastrous pathway too many of us are following … a path away from a living culture and into a deathly realm without access to livelihood or a thriving biosphere. So many of us understand that the story of “energy transition” which would simply replace current energy use with “renewables” is a dead end. Let’s show those who doubt us why it is so.
1 Energy Descent, Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_descent
2 I mention the non-governmental angle on this possibility mainly because governments have never chosen to deliberately curtail or reverse the expansion of their economies, whatever the non-monetary costs may be to continued economic expansion. Indeed, one could make a strong argument that the principle function of any modern government has always been economic expansion at any “externalized” costs. This is why I conceive of governments (“the state”) as having a Siamese twin relationship to business corporations.
3 … albeit rather problematic ones, since they measure all expenditures or movements of money, even when these movements of currency actually result in net losses to ecosystem heath, social well-being, etc.
4 I’m using the phrase “technological energy” to refer to the energy we use to power our machines, heat our houses, manufacture things, etc. I’m distinguishing “technological energy” from the energy we get from our food … and even the energy we get from the sun in heating out homes in a passive solar approach — even though passive solar energy is only possible with plate glass, which is technically a form of “technology”. It’s basically impossible to draw a sharp distinction between “technological energy” and other kinds of energy which we make use of. Go ahead, try it! Is firewood “technological energy” — partly yes, since you likely cut the wood using some kind of technology. But, by “technological energy” in this context, I am referring mainly to what powers our machinery, devices, etc.—, and which heats our buildings.
5 https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-04-05/the-heinberg-pulse/
6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_budget#Definition
7 See “comments” at – https://chrissmaje.com/2023/09/the-wholeness-of-the-word-regenesis-as-myth-part-i/#comments
Comments
We changed commenting systems on September 10, 2026 as part of a site-wide functionality and security upgrade. Your past comments have not disappeared, and you can still log in with your old Disqus account credentials if you wish. Contact us with any questions.
It’s been months, but…
Nuclear is an irrelevant “option” because from the planning stage to the opening and use of a new nuclear plant is 10+ years. It’s what we choose (collectively) to do over the next ten years which will determine whether we can stave off worst case climate scenarios of various kinds.
Carbon capture has NEVER worked at any scale that matters, and most readers of Resilience, I suspect, will argue, with myself, that it NEVER will.
“Nuclear is an irrelevant “option” because from the planning stage to the opening and use of a new nuclear plant is 10+ years.”
That’s what it has generally been in the past. That doesn’t mean it would always have to be that way, even for radically different kinds of nuclear and with reformed regulations–and efforts to reduce the time involved are underway on both those fronts. Also, nuclear has potential beyond just electric power plants.
“It’s what we choose (collectively) to do over the next ten years which will determine whether we can stave off worst case climate scenarios of various kinds.”
That is assuming 1) that our only mechanism for combating warming is to reduce fossil fuel emissions, and 2) that greatly reducing fossil fuel emissions will actually have the desired effect of reducing warming. Hansen has been warning us for nearly two decades that eliminating fossil fuel emissions by itself will actually increase the rate of warming for many decades to come. It is highly likely we are going to need industrial CO2 drawdown on a large scale, and that will undoubtedly be a multi-decade process, requiring large amounts of clean heat energy. Luckily, nuclear can provide large amounts of clean heat energy.
“Carbon capture has NEVER worked at any scale that matters,”
Correct. We’ve shown that it can work, but we haven’t scaled it up. But just because we are only now getting to the scaling part doesn’t mean we cannot now do the scaling part.
“and most readers of Resilience, I suspect, will argue, with myself, that it NEVER will.”
You will “assert” that it never will. Saying that we haven’t done it yet, therefore we will never be able to do it is not actually an argument.
This is what it appears to me this article is saying–sorted into an order that I find easier to follow.
1) We have to reduce our emissions 50% by 2030 to stay on track for some unspecified global heating limitation targets.
2) Such a reduction in that time-frame would would crash our current world economy due to the contraction of fossil energy.
3) Replacing fossil sources with renewables in that time-frame would increase emissions, exceed our budget, and certainly could not achieve a 50% emissions reduction by 2030.
4) The only option this leaves us is rapid, voluntary, large-scale degrowth and energy descent.
5) Quantification of the energy cost (not emissions cost?) to replace current fossil energy with renewables is needed to show people that is a dead end–leaving voluntary degrowth as the only plausible, truly viable path remaining.
If that is the basic framework, I can see a number of reasons why people might not find that convincing.
1. I think most people won’t understand why crashing the current global economy due to reducing fossil energy (in order to stay on track for emissions targets) is so undesirable that we must instead voluntarily reduce our energy use–which will presumably also mean the end of the current global economy.
2. Showing one path is a dead-end does not automatically mean that a proposed alternative is viable. That has to be shown independently.
3. Asserting that either energy transition to 100% renewables or degrowth and descent are the only two possible paths does not establish that they actually are the only two possible paths. Non-renewable emission-reduction options–like combustion energy with carbon capture and various kinds of nuclear–are being aggressively developed and are much in the news. The complete lack of addressing these prominent alternatives makes it look like those are deliberate omissions in order to push a false dichotomy.
4. This argument is founded on the need to limit warming. But right now, the science is ambiguous about the relative strengths of our forcing factors, about the future rate of warming, and whether halting all emissions will even have the desired effect of halting warming. Hansen and others are saying our rate of warming is currently increasing and will likely increase even faster once we lose the shading/cooling effect from pollution particulate emissions. If that’s the case, then that suggests solar radiation management and CO2 takeback will be needed in the fight to constrain warming, and once those enter the picture, projections about the emissions cost of a transition to fully RE will simply seem irrelevant and inapplicable to a completely different path.
There’s general understanding that it’s mostly too late to stop serious disaster, although there is still room to avoid a worst-case scenario (and this is extraordinarily important). The figure cited (50% decrease in carbon by 2030) was first clearly cited in the IPCC SR15 – The “Doomsday Report” in 2018. Now 5 years later, no deceleration at all in carbon release has occurred. On the other hand, in that 5 years we’ve been treated to a real-time, although relatively minor, preview of Climate Breakdown across the planet – that is, the loss of seasonality – which AOGCMs are not able to predict. The so-called budget was at best an approximation of a minimally-required effort, even though the consequences are far more than dire.
Jag: People find this “unconvincing” because of highly organized and well-funded obfuscation, as well as willful ignorance. This may change when enough deaths of loved-ones occur that are clearly linkable to Climate Breakdown. I know that is a horrific point of view to espouse, yet it is based on recent observation during covid, and is simply the best last-ditch hope that I can come up with in the face of the astounding evil promulgated by those who engage in Climate Breakdown (and science) denialism for personal gain.
Here are some back of the envelope numbers:
The average embodied carbon for monocrystalline PV is 2,560 kg CO2e (CO2 equivalent) per kWp. This is 2.56 tonnes for the manufacturing process. https://circularecology.com/solar-pv-embodied-carbon.html
My estimate of global energy required per year, if all of it is electricity (electricity is about twice as efficient as fossil energy for most uses), is about 66 trillion kWh (three times current usage of electricity).
Average annual production of electricity per kWp is about 1,825 kWh in reasonably good sun conditions. This means the world would need about 36 billion kWp of solar panels (66 trillion kWh divided by 1,825 kWh).
The upfront carbon pulse needed to go entirely solar would then be about 90 billion tonnes of CO2 for just the PV modules from the factory. This is roughly 3 years current CO2e emissions, and does not include additional emissions for transmission system, storage requirements or transitioning all energy using equipment to electricity (replacing all space heating with heat pumps, all cars with electric cars, all trucks with electric trucks, etc.). Those requirements could easily triple or quadruple the CO2e required. And since the PV modules at the factory gate are only about 41% of the cost of a utility scale system, getting the modules from the factory to final installation would increase the module carbon cost by 2.4 times. So, I estimate the carbon cost of 100% renewable energy would be around 30 years of current emissions if all the equipment were produced using the current mix of energy.
But as more and more fossil fuel energy is displaced by renewables (if that actually happens), the overall grid mix would gradually become lower carbon. This means that the overall carbon cost calculated above needs to be divided by two (all carbon at the beginning declining to no carbon at the end of the rollout).
Even so, the carbon pulse of going renewable would be huge, on the order of 15 years of current emissions. Oh, to have made the transition 40 years ago.
PS – the lifetime carbon cost per kWh would be far less than that from fossil fuels, but the drawback for renewables is that most of the carbon cost is front loaded. Subsequent generations of renewable equipment would be produced with energy from a renewable system, so the carbon cost would be very low for the new equipment needed to replace the first generation.