Renewable Energy and the Long Term Trend

The many critics of Bjorn Lomborg tend to focus on specifics where educated opinions differ. However, not much attention is paid to his grand theme, which is that a market-driven economy will solve the problem of fossil fuel depletion by advancing the technology, and afterwards the production, of renewable energy.

This is the fact that makes Lomborg tend toward the lower estimates of global warming's impact over the next century. Estimating such a complex outcome over such a long period is less science then clairvoyance anyway, but the that doesn't seem to prevent the media from reporting someone's estimate that we're going to be, say, 1.7 to 4.8 degrees warmer and the seas will be 11 to 26 inches higher, and so forth. When actually, anything on the temperature past 10 years is based on murky assumptions and ocean levels are more problematic yet.

I'm completely in agreement with Lomborg on technology. So much so that I probably wouldn't have devoted as much effort to debunking the catastrophic costs imputed to global warming. He has done some service by pointing out the exaggerations involved, but I'm feel pretty strongly that, forget the economics, the climate scenario is hard to believe.

First off, the atmosphere recycles CO2. Mechanisms such as photosynthesis and absorption by the oceans operate at increasing rates as the concentration rises, so a long term increase along the historical straight line requires not just a continued high consumption of fossil fuels but a steadily increasing usage.

This is extraordinarily unlikely for two reasons. Although we are nowhere near running out of fossil fuels, we are running short on cheap sources that are easy to convert with acceptable environmental costs. High prices are bringing new sources online, such as tar sands in Alberta, but these are going to put a very high floor under future prices. Prices are going to affect consumption patterns, perhaps not over the space of a month, but over years for sure.

That floor is also going to change the alternative energy equation in a big way. In the past, R&D on alternative sources required government subsidies. The payoff looked way too distant. Now the big energy companies, who used to be big oil companies, see the economics in a new light and are beginning to push hard. The worldwide pool of available engineering graduates is enormous. Put a few hundred thousand of them on this problem and you'll see results in a hurry.

Which will tip the balance between fossil and renewable energy sources, which will rapidly curtail and then reverse the rate of release of CO2, which will stop global warming. QED.