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How to Avoid a Climate Disaster Audiolibro Por Bill Gates arte de portada

Decarbonization - Challenges and Opportunities

Total
5 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
4 out of 5 stars
Historia
5 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 01-28-23

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is an excellent book for outsiders like me to get a sense of decarbonization. It is important because before everyone knows HOW to achieve carbon neutrality, we need to understand WHY it matters.

The book gives a clear overview of the status quo of current climate challenges, explains key concepts for achieving carbon natural carbon neutrality, and shows the potential road map for achieving ZERO emissions. Nevertheless, it also answered some tricky questions that most people would ask - e.g. how dare the richest people (like Gates) took private jets while asking others (like me) to consume less, why developing countries should participate in decarbonization, etc.

It is worth reading for anyone interested in decarbonization topics. I also recommend investors to grab this book as LPs nowadays emphasis a lot on ESG, let alone there are also tremendous investment opportunities in the climate-related value chain.

The Key Facts of Status Quo

It is astonishing to know that the world emits 51 billion tons per year of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere - which equals 2.2 trillion pounds. That is equivalent to 10,000 fully-loaded U.S. aircraft carriers multiplied 51 times. There are the emission distributions

Electricity generation: 27%
Production: 31%
Planting and Breeding: 19%
Transportation: 16%
Cooling and Heating: 7%

Even though electricity is only 27% of total emissions, it could represent much more than 27% of the solution (you will find out below). To achieve or get closer to the goal of ZERO by 2050, we need to use fewer fossil fuels and more renewable energy. However, as you can imagine, it is a damn hard job.

We live with fossil fuels without even noticing them. Fossil fuels are like water to fish. Virtually all of these items, from the toothbrush to the building materials, were transported from someplace else on trucks, airplanes, trains, and ships, all of which were themselves powered by fossil fuels and made using fossil fuels

At the same time, oil is cheaper than a soft drink - a barrel of oil contains 42 gallons - $1 per gallon at the average price in the second half of 2020. Meanwhile, Costco sells 8 liters of soda for $6, a price that amounts to $2.85 a gallon.

Though we saw that the renewable energy transition has started, sadly Moore’s Law doesn't work in the energy transition, and technology is not the only reason that the energy industry can’t change as quickly as the computer industry. The energy industry is at around $5 trillion a year, one of the biggest businesses on the planet. Guess what APPLE "cannot" innovate Next-Generation Products now? One simple answer would be "it is the Biggest Company in the world by market cap".

Without any doubt, the way to ZERO emission will be hard. Not one or two single measures nor unilateral action from developed countries, the decarbonization should be a systematic and global mission to save the world from climate disaster

Why Green Premium matters?

Quoted from Gates' blog, it was an intuitive explanation for green premium

Here’s an example of a Green Premium: The average retail price for a gallon of jet fuel in the United States over the past few years has been around $2.22, while advanced biofuels for jets cost around $5.35 per gallon. The Green Premium is the difference between the two, which is $3.13, or an increase of more than 140 percent
Green Premium gives us a concept to quantify how shall we work on decarbonization economically and that's the key concept that leads to ZERO emission solutions. Lower the Green Premium can be the target to guide innovation/ implementation - just like using inflation targeting to guide monetary policies

Electricity generation: the Green Premium is the additional cost of getting all our power from non-emitting sources, including wind, solar, nuclear power, and coal and natural gas-fired plants equipped with devices that capture the carbon they produce. It’s amazing how much the costs of solar and wind power have dropped in the past decade: solar cells, for example, got almost 10x cheaper between 2010 and 2020, and the price of a full solar system went down by 11% in 2019 alone. However, the intermittency of renewable energy is the main force that pushes the cost up as we get closer to all zero-carbon electricity. To further reduce the Green Premium, we could crisscross the country with thousands of miles of special long-distance power lines carrying what’s called high-voltage current but luckily the technology is there. At the same time, offshore wind, geothermal and nuclear power are other options to provide stable renewable energies. Better electricity storage would be crucial for lowering Green Premium as well - Grid-scale Batteries, Pumped hydro and Thermal storage are a few innovations mentioned in the book. However, Gates doesn't think capturing carbon when generating electricity would be the dominate direction to ZERO.
Production: the Green Premium came from three stages - 1) use fossil fuels to generate the electricity that factories need to run their operations (mentioned above), 2) generating heat without burning fossil fuels (when you’re looking for temperatures in the thousands of degrees, electricity isn’t an economical option—at least not with today’s technology), 3 the processes that inherently produce greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the green premium was c.75%-140% for making cement and 16%-29% for producing steel. However, there is no easy way we can do today to reduce the green premium. The path to ZERO emission in manufacturing looks like this: 1) Electrify every process possible. This is going to take a lot of innovation. 2) Get that electricity from a power grid that’s been decarbonized. This also will take a lot of innovation. 3) Use carbon capture to absorb the remaining emissions. And so will this. 3) Use materials more efficiently. However, it is still the hardest part in achieving ZERO emmission.
Planting and Breeding: around the world, there are roughly a billion cattle raised for beef and dairy. The methane they burp and fart out every year has the same warming effect as 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, accounting for about 4% of all global emissions. Researchers have tried all sorts of ideas for dealing with enteric fermentation. They’ve tried using vaccines to cut down on the methanogenic microbes living in the cattle’s gut, breeding cattle to naturally produce fewer emissions, and adding special feeds or drugs to their diets. However, these efforts have mostly been unsuccessful. Alternatively, if we can spread the improved breeds and best practices more broadly—especially crossbreeding African cows to be more productive and making higher-quality feed available and affordable, it will cut down on emissions without a significant Green Premium. Artificial meats might be another innovation to reduce the emission with no/affordable Green Premium (as the sales go up, the price for artificial meats might be cheaper than animal meats)
Transportation: due to the fast development of electric automobiles, in some parts of Europe, gas prices are so high that the Green Premium for EVs has already reached zero. Even in the United States, as battery prices continue to drop, Gates predicts that the premium for most cars will be zero by 2030. Gates also mentioned the true drawbacks of EVs but I doubt it might be because of his beef with Musk (lol just kidding). Furthermore, advanced alternative fuels which Gates mentioned in the book could also help in reducing emissions.
Cooling and Heating: The fact that air-conditioning relies so much on electricity makes it easy to calculate the Green Premium. To decarbonize our air conditioners, we need to decarbonize our power grids (again as mentioned above). Furthermore, the path to zero carbon for heating looks a lot like the path for passenger cars:1) electrify what we can, getting rid of natural gas water heaters and furnaces, and 2) develop clean fuels to do everything else. This is another reason why we need breakthroughs in generating and storing electricity as mentioned above.

Potential Solutions in the Book

Government intervention to support Inventions: we need breakthroughs in how we make things, grow food, and move people and goods. To fund the inventions, we need government policies and financing to close the investment gap, focusing especially on areas where we need to invent new zero-carbon technologies. When an idea is in its earliest stages. Once it becomes clear how a company can make money, the private sector takes over. We also need the government to level the playfield (e.g. tax on fossil fuel to lower the Green Premium), make the carbon data transparency, and use policies specifically designed to get these technology breakthroughs created and into the marketplace.

Create a carbon credit trading market: fossil fuels are so cheap because their prices don’t factor in the true cost of climate change—the economic damage they inflict by making the planet warmer—it’s harder for clean energy sources to compete with them. Put a price on carbon. Whether it’s a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system where companies can buy and sell the right to emit carbon, putting a price on emissions is one of the most important things we can do to eliminate Green Premiums. In this way, we can further stimulate the development of clean energy transition and technology innovation, through which we could actually reduce the Green Premium gap between clean energy and fossil fuels. Lowering the Green Premium is the only way to make it easier for middle- and low-income countries to reduce their emissions and eventually get to zero, and it will happen only if rich countries—especially the United States, Japan, and European nations—take the lead. After all, that’s where much of the world’s innovation happens and developed countries should take more responsibilities as they benefit the most in the past hundred of years in human industrial development.

A few fun QAs

How did Gates explain carbon neutrality for rich people's private jets?

Gates explained that he is an "imperfect messenger" because he lives in large houses and is known to use private jets. But he elaborated: "I am offsetting my carbon emissions by buying clean aviation fuel and funding carbon capture and funding low-cost housing projects to use electricity instead of natural gas and so I have been able to eliminate it and it was amazing to me how expensive that was, that cost to be green... we've got to drive that down."

However, I still doubt its justice due to the huge impact of private jets - A 747 flight from London to New York creates 200 tonnes of CO2, and Gates' private plane habits emit an estimated 7,400 tonnes of CO2 every year. The average carbon footprint for a person in the United States is 16 tons (one of the highest rates in the world). In other words, Gates' private plane emission per year is equal to an average family's lifelong carbon emission. It just reminds me how hard to ask people to step back from a luxury lifestyle and Trump's "famous saying" - perhaps that's been the story of life

Why developing countries should care about carbon neutrality?

Carbon neutrality/ decarbonization could also be beneficial for economic growth. For example, by accelerating its clean energy transition, China can secure major economic, innovation, and employment benefits while helping the world move nearer to achieving shared climate goals. Furthermore, the world's biggest project, in terms of issuing credits, is an Indonesian project called Rimba Raya. The energy transition provides an opportunity for developing countries to be a rule maker

I do share some views mentioned above. However, developing countries are facing great disadvantages in getting to net ZERO in a financeable and affordable way. Rich countries should take more responsibilities for technological innovation. In the Rising U.S.-China tensions, climate topics might be the only few if not only common ground on the table, which makes global coordination still possible

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Out of the Gobi Audiolibro Por Weijian Shan, Janet Yellen - foreword arte de portada

Out of Gobi - A Chinese Dream

Total
4 out of 5 stars
Ejecución
4 out of 5 stars
Historia
5 out of 5 stars

Revisado: 12-12-22

A bright young man in a tumbling society, his life is out of his control. Study is the only thing you can do in the social-form downturn. Shan was extremely lucky to be who he is now but all the efforts he paid help him along the way. I shall not say it’s a Chinese dream story because we all deserve a better living and political environment to succeed. However, it is still a good story to tell and spread, to motivate everyone in the downhill to climb. You shall shine some day in some way.
Neve give up and grab the opportunities wherever you can. Be mercy to other and sticking to your families and lover. All the frustrations shall be gone

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