World 2
Part One of the Series About the Climate Crisis
What are the biggest problems of our time and how do we overcome them? World 2 is a deep dive into the climate crisis. This first storyline focuses on the complex problems around energy creation and consumption.
Although this styoryline is not fiction at all, it's anyway about the future and it's dystopian, as you could imagine.
What do we have to do to actually have a future? How can we save our planet? Do we have to re-invent the world? Is it a re-birth, the second incarnation of world, World 2, so to say? Or is it actually not that complicated at all?
So it's all about the Seldon'esque crisis we're facing at the moment, the climate catastrophe. I'd especially like to spread into three different streams:
Transport: Even besides its damage potential to the world climate (and this includes traditional cars and EVs), owning and driving so many cars harms us in many other ways. So it's worth a look on its own.
Diet and agriculture: Food and food production are one of the big reasons for the climate crisis. Everyone knows that, almost nobody accepts it, because it's also the hardest to give up.
Energy production: Did I assume it might be simple? Not really. This is yet another topic with hundreds of side effects. We wage wars and fraternize with despots to get resources for energy production. And we're ahead of another round of exploitation on the African continent.
For transport and agriculture, I have created separate articles. The pure basics of energy production, consumption and management is the part that this article will focus on. So let's crunch some numbers.
Energy, on the one hand, is by far the biggest driver of the climate crisis. On the other hand, the region of Central Europe faces another crisis fired by heat and drought and by the war in Ukraine and our dependency on Russian gas and oil.
Our energy demand spreads into four more or less distinct sectors:
More detailed numbers with sources will follow. The whole climate crisis is much more complex than only turning energy management into its green alternatives. It entails other more efficient greenhouse gases than CO₂, deals with deforestation and tipping points.
The creation of this article in the form of a series of postings spread over half a year. During this time, I had the feeling that the headlines around the climate complex were oveertaking each other. War, pipelines, natural catastrophes, political changes, protests, science reports - the topics piled up almost on an hourly basis.
Even if you touch the surface of those building blocks, you already see that any of these fields is utterly complex and never black and white. So before I go into more detail on some of them, let's go back to the problem itself.
Earth thankfully has a greenhouse effect. It would be a cold dead place of -18°C if it wasn't there. This effect is caused by gases in the atmosphere that are transparent in visual light and opaque in infrared light. The gases with the strongest effects are water vapour (with short term effects) and CO₂ (with complex long-term lifecycles).
We have increased the amount of CO₂ dramatically in the last 100 years - from 320 to 420 ppm (by 30%) in the last 60 years alone. We have seen that the Earth is significantly heating up. The CO₂ pollution is caused by burning fossil fuels - like coal (C) or gas (CH4).
We use the energy coming from there for global wealth, so we can't just stop it without losing this wealth.
A problem that I have with the climate catastrophe lies in the magnitudes of numbers. When someone says "this emits 5 kg of CO₂ equivalent", what does that mean? It's totally abstract. And that might be the reason why we don't care in a way we should.
So I think, we should make it more concrete and comparable. When the IPCC, the main organisation that tracks climate change, released their first reports, they came up with a budget that we have left if we want to stay below the 1.5°C. It's 420 billion tons. This is the amount we can emit until the wold heats up by 1.5 degrees. We want to spread this budget until 2050.
That was the catchy and easy to remember claim on the Paris climate agreement (closed on December 12th, 2015). 1.5 degrees until 2050. This also means zero - carbon neutral - after 2050.
Divided by 30 and the average expected population of 8,73 billion people, this makes 1,6 tons per year for every one of us. This is my new reference.
Source: (atmosfair.de)
Now this is a value we can work with. We have a budget and we can put everything in relation to the budget. So I've decided to create a small calculator that spits out memes with chart graphics. Here we go.
Here are some reference numbers for the CO₂ emissions of the different regions of the world.
Source: (ourworldindata.org)
So we're emitting five times as much as we are allowed to. In this scenario of thirty years from 2020 to 2050, the overall budget is already used up by 2026 for Europeans. It even is about to exceeded already right now for Americans. For me, this fact was mindblowing as it showed that we must act now, not just in 2030. As a side note, it might be worth mentioning, that China is the only candidate in this list, who's emissions are rising.
To get used to this metric, let's do some more comparisons.
The single coal plant Niederaußem contributes 36% to the budget of a german citizen but only 0.7% of the overall energy. Additinally, I've added coal as a whole and gas for comparison.
Source: Umweltbundesamt
You see that coal has a huge impact on our emissions, which is completely out of proportion compared the the energy it is producing.
The primary energy consumption in 2020 was 143 GJ/Person*a. The coal power plant Niederaußem contributed about 0,7% to that energy but it uses up 22,2% of our annual CO₂ Budget.
In comparison, an average gas turbine emits 670 g/kWh. In Germany, we consume 65 TWh/a through gas, which is 12,6%. The whole gas sector uses up 32,7% of our budget.
Germany is worldwide number one in lignite mining - in absolute numbers, not per capita - 10% more than number two, China. A part of it is also exported and consumed by people outside Germany.
This impressively shows that we have a huge structural problem that can't be solved by individuals that take care of their footprints. This is a topic for politicians.
Let's look at another example:
We all know that flying is bad for the environment. But how bad is it really? Let's compare the results to our budget and have a look at different distances including return flights. Hamburg - Sylt (180km) is a typical private jet route, which allows much less people per flight with a devastating impact compared to the distance. I'm assuming 9 tons per flight and six passengers on board.
Sources:
So much for the exercise to get into those numbers. I will surely reuse the calculator on some other pages in the future. One last comparison to round up this section:
Our nearest CO₂ sink, the German forest absorbs 46,4% of our budget.
The budget is gone by 2050 or earlier when we continue to live as we're doing now. At that point, we are not supposed to emit anything anymore. What is left is what the trees, moors and oceans absorb.
Numbers say that about 1,9 Gt go into vegetation and 2,9 Gt are absorbed by the oceans. That's 4,8 Gt or 34% of our current budget from a worldwide perspective. So our simple task is to reduce our emissions from 539% to 34%.
The problem seems to be approached ved in three steps:
Another scenario: An average person needs 47,7 m² of living space in Germany. A 20-year-old house has an average standard of 75 kWh/m²a. If you use gas, this equals an emission of 2,3 t/a or almost 150% of the budget. Gigantic. If you live in a passive house, you can reduce that to 30%.
We seem to have usable solutions for electricity and transport, as it seems. But this third sector, heating our living rooms, seems to be the biggest challenge for carbon neutrality. There are millions of buildings with a lot of inefficient built-in technology. So the problem is highly decentral. At the moment, the share of energy sources is
This contains about 70% of fossil energy sources. The renewable part mainly comes from wood, which also doesn't scale well and also has unwanted short-term emissions. So the structural problem is immense and the costs will have to be paid by the owners of the buildings.
There are alternatives. Geothermal heat pumps will have to be introduced wherever possible, heat exchangers must become standard and controlled district heating must me massively extended.
The current in-house technology is based on water as a carrier, which makes it difficult to exchange with more intelligent air conditioning systems.
The major step here is not the switch of technologies. Especially with our buildings, we can also achieve a lot by saving energy.
Saving energy in heating does not mean, we have to live in the cold from now on and everyone whose living room has more than 19 degrees is a climate change denier. No. Savings come from better insulation.
At the moment, the range is wide. While a typical old building needs 250 kWh/m²a, a passive house usually uses a tenth of it (less than 25 kWh/m²a). Regulations of 1995 still allowed around 200.
But insulation measures have a problem. The physics is pretty fragile. If you insulate only one part (e.g. better windows) or if you do it wrong (e.g. insulate on the inside of the wall), mould is coming. So DIY is usually ruled out and a heavy investment is needed.
There is an obligation to renovate in Germany and these laws are likely to be tightened in the future. But this is another cost item on the shoulders of property owners.
Therefore the whole sector has to be controlled by a sophisticated subsidising program from the state, that distributes the money to the people and projects who need it most, millions of times in the next years. But the sector will remain the slowest, also because cars are switched more often than houses.
Saving the world from the climate crisis is the most pressing and demanding topic of our time. As you have seen, it needs radical restructurings in almost all economic sectors, it even needs restructuring in our society. But I can assure you that it would need even more investment and restructuring if we didn't do anything. Yet it's highly complex.
Well, collecting all the data alone was pretty complex. I've done this in a series of posts in 2022 and early 2023 and I spawned three Storylines to be able to cover every aspect in enough depth. Besides this one about Energy as a whole, as mentioned before, there is another one about traffic and a vegan series, that I can recommend.
I've found out a lot along the way. But it's not enough.
This "not enough" has two sides. What we're doing right now is by far not enough. Humans are short-sighted. The profit of the next quarter is still more important than the loss in ten years. We are so far behind that we can only hope to end with 2 degrees more temperature in 2050.
The second side is knowledge. The problem stays utterly difficult. Tipping points here, synergies there. So a bunch of small posts are not enough to get a grasp on the topic, although everyone should know about this. Knowledge is the key to solving the problem.
I'll try to continue to compress the information that I find into small bits. This series is over, but I will come up with new material.
Let's see if we continue to steer towards the end of the world or if we find a proper navigation device to male the u-turn.
World 2
What are the biggest problems of our time and how do we overcome them? World 2 is a deep dive into the climate crisis. Part number three focuses on traffic, transport, travel and their effects on climate and wellness.
0.7128410554006512
World 2
What are the biggest problems of our time and how do we overcome them? World 2 is a deep dive into the climate crisis. This second part focuses on agriculture, food production and the vegan diet.
0.24497363098602784