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Fridays for Future

One day, it won’t be individuals, tribes or countries fighting for more power, more rights or more resources - it will be children fighting to be able to continue living a life within a stable nature, without the constant fear of new catastrophes to occur and parents, fighting for everything to stay the way it is to be able to continue a lifestyle they are accustomed to not dealing with problems that won’t affect them anymore. A lifestyle which they and their parents have significantly shaped and made possible with the achievements of their generations. A lifestyle which is truly worth fighting for, even with just a remotely dangerous threat of change appearing on the horizon - sometimes in the form of a wind turbine. What sounds as the plot of a third-class Hollywood-movie has actually become reality: people living now in their 30′s and above hardly will suffer severely from climate change and therefore have no incentive to change their behavior while people under 20 will almost surely suffer from the consequences of climate change and will be required to find solutions and implement them rather now than later. And the youngsters do not only see the horror coming - they have started to protest - and presumably won’t stop until the course has been set to change.

Picture: Markus Distelrath / pixabay.com

Some students have now realized that their future is in danger - and request a drastic reduction of CO₂ emissions, which are causal for the climate change according to prevailing scientific opinion. [1]

Critique towards the activist students reaches from trivial 

“Staying away from school is helping nobody - if the discussion was only about the climate change and not an excuse for not going to school they would have Saturdays for future!”

over practical 

“How do they expect us to change something?”

to more substantial

“Who says we as humans have an influence at all?”

But what to do about it? Are the current measures sufficient? What is there, we can do more? And should we do more at all?

We know, that CO₂ facilitates the greenhouse-effect in our atmosphere. We also know, that our climate is changing and that this change will affect how we live dramatically in a negative manner. Already now we can observe the consequences of changing climate: We are exposed to increasingly more and more natural catastrophes. We measure rising ocean levels. We see the shrinkage of permafrost. But given our lifestyle - how realistic is it, that we drastically change our behavior? What exactly would need to change and how practical or unpractical are the different possibilities we have at hand right now? What consequences would the changes impose?

The discussion to what degree mankind has an influence on world climate by emission of CO₂ is surely interesting. But not only that the scientific community has answered this question already quite clearly, it is not a discussion we as the civilization have the time to have in depth. The fact, that there is an effect is not negligible. So the question is rather what effective measures would be and not if we have to take measures at all. Whenever we see that something is degrading, whenever we see, that things are falling apart, whenever we see that something is not working as it should be - it is our obligation to act. Not just for society, not for our neighbor, not people on different continents but simply for ourselves. Our grandchildren will ask us: What did you do against climate change? I am sure, most of us will not leave the discussion satisfied is we have to answer “Nothing”. Only very little people have the courage to face the truth and sacrificing comfort in the present in favor of someone else’s future. It is a lot to ask for. Who would be willing to sacrifice the very tangible comfort of a car ride to work, the beauty of exploring different cultures on different continents by using an intercontinental flight or the pleasure consuming a juicy steak for an abstract thing such as the world climate? Not many people will be willing to do it no matter what the consequence might be - at least until the climate change also becomes less abstract and more tangible yet more impairing to our lifestyle. But then it probably is already too late, the die is cast. On the other hand side there are people reacting with negligence and doubt when confronted with the consequences of not changing behavior might have. Facing the truth and acting egoistically is equally simple as just hiding from the truth, acting as if it wouldn’t make a difference anyway or simply neglecting the problem entirely. It is a nihilistic approach, not contributing any good at all and leading to nothing but destruction and chaos. And even if you do not contribute any good actively through action - which I could not even blame you for - you might want to try to not contribute in any bad. Being informed, building an opinion and participating in discussions is probably the most important indirect contribution we as individuals can provide. At scale, it probably even will have a far larger effect, than giving up steak or using the bike (while I’m not saying that this wouldn’t contribute, too). But just sitting there, casting doubt without providing any answers or suggestions is not helping anyone. It is the bad contribution that sets us behind in discussion, wasting energy and time dealing with questions that might not even are important. It a nihilistic path, denying the truth while putting obstacles in the way of people looking for actual solutions. 

The psychological and sociological factor in this discussion around climate change is often underrated. Not only is it a conflict of generations - it is a conflict of societies, too. While in western civilizations one could argue with people of older generations that they probably do not want their children to suffer - the discussion is far more complicated looking towards emerging countries. People living there usually have other priorities than the world climate. Everyone who thinks that they just should stop burning so much fossil fuel should ask their self if they would be so interested in climate change if the question whether there is food on tomorrow’s table is not answered today. The higher a nation’s GDP - the more it’s population is interested in the effects of climate change. While western civilizations already began to release CO₂ in vast amounts more than 100 years ago, emerging countries only started 30-40 years ago to do so. They request their other 60 years - or at least they request the right to emit CO₂ until the living standard has adjusted to a western level. It is easy to discredit this request as narrow minded and short sighted. But without question we will have to deal with these opinions - and if we are proposing an effective solution, emerging countries need to be an integral part of it and a solution must not be to their disadvantage. 

In summary a solution is practicable, if it has little effect on our societies. It is practicable if no or only little contribution of each individual is required. People might find this view appalling and rather tend to try to force people to change - but force will not work for this matter. Applying force is already hard in one country. How are we supposed to apply force globally? Are we going to start a war for climate? What good would that be? It is not something we are wanting to engage in. Reasonable change comes through dialogue. We will have to accept the fact, that change happens slower than we would desire. We will have to accept the fact, that we will emit CO₂ many many more years and that this behavior is only changing very slowly. But we also will have a plan for the future. Changing things slowly with reasonable and little adjustments is not the same thing as having no plan and just accepting destiny. In the same way, flipping things over and starting from scratch not only often requires utilization of force in the very form of violence when it comes to geopolitical questions - it also leads to chaos. As bad as the status quo might seem - wanting it to change right now and without looking at the consequences will surely lead to an even less desirable state. Having said this - the main question remains - what can we do to emit less CO₂ while maintaining our lifestyle and allowing emerging countries to grow just as western civilizations were allowed to grow? Where do we actually produce the most CO₂ ?

The drivers of CO₂ level

Looking at the data, the largest part of man-made CO₂ emissions seems to be caused by transportation and energy production (56.9%) followed by agriculture, deforestation and land use (23.55%). [2]

While it is very unlikely that we will be able to convince the majority of people to switch to a vegetarian lifestyle in favor of less CO₂ emissions, it is worth looking at the technological possibilities we have in reduction of CO₂ in energy production and transportation.

Ways out of misery - A pragmatic approach 

Whenever we talk about climate change, the topic of renewable energy sources rapidly is brought forward. And how we could benefit if there only was a source of energy, which is easy to access, available anywhere in the right amount at the right time! Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. Obviously the sun only shines at day, in different regions of the world in different intensities and is heavily dependent on weather conditions. Wind on the other hand is dependent on weather conditions, too but not so much on the day/night cycle. But wind unfortunately is not available anywhere in the same intensity. Most renewable energy resources have one property in common, they are intermittent, meaning, they are simply not available all the time. But even if they can be regulated relatively precisely, for example in a dam, dams are usually located in comparably remote locations. Partially we are trying to solve the geographical component by using modern transportation methods such as high voltage direct current power lines, but for the timing issue, the answer is yet to find. 

But not only changing and often also not very predictable supply is an issue with renewable sources. In addition, there are high changes in demand during one day. While fossil power plants can be regulated very precisely depending on the very demand in a certain period and nuclear power plants do a good job in constantly providing the required energy to serve basic demand, the same is a lot harder with renewable energy sources, which are mainly regulated by nature and therefore often only can be throttled and not powered up. In consequence, providing solutions with renewable energy is often more costly and less economically efficient than just using fossil fuel because complex energy storage technology is required - or - as some scientists now suggest - heavy bricks [11].

Even if we would be able to solve the timing issue with storage systems - the geographical component not automatically is solved easily. It is not done by only installing a few more power lines or install distributed systems. Using the surroundings of our power consumption hot spots is also no real solution, mostly because there simply is not enough space or - like in many countries in Europe and the US - the land is needed farmland. Also solar power often simply is not as efficient as it would be under ideal circumstances with high radiation. The World Bank’s Global Solar Atlas (https://globalsolaratlas.info/) shows us, that most radiation is available in areas which are less densely populated. In Europe for example, we reach around 1,500 kWh/m² p.a. (southern Spain ~2,200 kWh/m² p.a., central Germany ~1,200 kWh/m² p.a. northern Scotland ~950 kWh/m² p.a.). This is significantly less than the reachable ~ 2,600 kWh/m² p.a. in southern Libya. Moreover Libya (4.42 inhabitants per km²) is far from being as densely populated as for example Germany (229.13 inhabitants per km²)  [3]. Meaning that Libya simply has a lot more unused land which could be used purely for solar production. 

Comparing the energy consumption of middle Europe to the energy consumption to north Africa, it becomes quite obvious, that Europe requires far more energy than Libya, Algeria, or Egypt. Looking at the energy the sun provides in this region per square meter in this region compared to Europe it becomes obvious, that using solar power would be far more effective in north Africa than it is in middle Europe. Moreover, north Africa is by far less densely populated than Europe and has a lot less farmland or even potential farmland which could be used for agriculture. So why not use this space? We easily could provide the technology and infrastructure for this. And surely the northern African countries would also have an economical interest in this: just like oil producing states heavily profit from their natural resources, northern African could benefit from their natural resource: the high intensity of solar radiation. This procedure could be repeated in many parts of the world. And who knows - maybe the solution for climate change is eventually also one for the many conflicts we have in our world.

Solar power plants need to be placed  where it is economically sensible while consuming power wherever it is needed needs to be possible. This requires a storage mechanism, which is reliable, safe and cheap. While batteries are reliable and comparably safe - they are far from being cheap. And energy transportation with batteries would be very costly it itself, since the energy density of batteries is around 100 times lower than the density of fossil fuel [4]. Moreover batteries take their time to get loaded. This might be no issue in large scale energy production but surely is an issue if you want to use batteries for transportation. It is the reason why electric cars can only serve a niche. They are only a solution for people who are driving short distances and are able to recharge their car over night. The latter will hardly become available for people living in the city rapidly. And even if - how is the energy wandering transferred into the car’s battery at night, when the owner is sleeping and the sun is not shining going to be produced? For a long time, the answer will probably be “from a nuclear power plant” or “from a coal power plant”. 

Economy and Moral

It is often assumed - and I did assume this as well several times in this article already - that a solution for our energy problem lies only in a economically sensible solution. This though, surely is not obvious or self-evident. I don’t even claim it to be the truth. But if a solution is possible that also is an economically preferable option - this makes things a lot easier. Because then we as society are not required to find consensus about what our values are. We don’t need to find compromises for all the different stakeholders. And we don’t loose a lot of time doing so. Having the discussion leads to the ultimate question of prioritization. What is more important for us - having relatively cheap and comfortable transportation? Or preventing the sea levels to rise? Is it more important to be able to afford at least the food you like - even if the times are tough - or is it more important that people in other regions of the world don’t die from starvation due to the horrible effects of climate change for their agriculture? Is it more important to lead a good life now or is it more important to make a good life four your children and grandchildren possible?

Tax systems are not only very complex in itself, they also have direct impact on people’s lives. Applying change by force, for example by increasing the tax for CO₂ emissions, comes always with the risk of not only decreasing comfort but changing society disruptively. A single action, such as raising CO₂ emission tax is no solution – and also not very popular due to increasing consumer prices. While it is no problem for people in well-paid jobs to spend 2% more on consumer goods, this is a very significant increase for a middle class family. Therefore, to keep the tax system in balance, it would be necessary, do adjust other taxes. 

An argument pro- CO₂ taxes often raised by activists is, that Sweden is raising a CO₂ emission tax since 1991 and their economy grew since then. In this discussion it is often overseen, that Sweden introduced a large-scale tax reform at the same time, reducing or terminating property taxes, capital taxes and income taxes [12]. Since then, the tax structure in Sweden changed significantly: people with lower incomes were taxed inadequately high and people and corporations with high incomes inadequately low. As consequence, despite Sweden being still one of the most equal OECD countries, the surge of income inequality since the early 1990′s was the largest among all OECD countries [14]. It could be concluded, that the reform was just a camouflage for neo-liberalist ideas. Whether this is true or not, seeing the result of the reform, the conclusion cannot be, that a general GDP increase always leads to a proportional increase in wealth of the majority of the population. This leads to the question, whether GDP is actually a proper indicator of wealth for a country. But this question I want to reserve for another article. Countries are very different in their economies so that only because a CO₂ worked for Sweden, this doesn’t mean, that this model is applicable for any other country - especially since countries such as Germany already have implemented the neo-liberal ideas in the early 2000’s [16] and there is not so much room for creating even more inequality without raising social problems. 

Speaking about Germany: another thing they tried were subsidies. If you would build a wind turbine, you’d get a guaranteed energy price, high above the market level. But there is one caveat: The subsidy expires for many facility in 2021. But the great subsidies lead to not only enormous costs for network operators, who are forced to connect every plant as fast as possible, also customers have to pay an additional price in form of an energy tax. Plants were built in places, where it is economically complete nonsense: the maintenance cost is often higher than the regular (non-subsidized) market price could cover. This leads to the situation that fully functioning turbines are facing their end in 2021 - torn down only after a few years of operation. This is a perfect example of how such a thing as subsidies can go sideways if nobody properly things through it - or people who think through it only think about themselves. Subsides are no bad thing per se - but they require a lot of foresight and precaution to be established in a way they do any good at all. If established without precaution, they in fact do a lot more harm than good.

Societies are complex things you don’t want to change disruptively without completely understanding what implications it might have. Pulling one string and hoping the best, watching what happens seems to be not the cleverest idea given, that the system that is played with holds people who try to live within it. Changes must be applied with caution and slowly enough for society to adopt to them and also to watch for side-effects and possibly required course-corrections. Lowering the living standard drastically can only be the last-resort option since it would destabilize society and probably do more harm than good. However, if no economically sensible solution can be found and technological options turn out to be exhausted something like a significant CO₂ emission tax, which exceeds the positive effect of lowered other taxes, is on the table - but not without thoroughly looking at the side-effects this might have.

LOHC, Cyanobacteria and solar-thermal plants - The Future?

A few years ago one technology seemed to make the race: Hydrogen. Hydrogen has an enormous energy density of 120 MJ/Kg, which is around 2.5 times as much as gasoline [4][5], is easy to produce and burning it just emits vaporized water. What a solution! Unfortunately Hydrogen is also terribly hard to store. It can only be stored under very high pressure or under very low temperature, while tank insulation needs to be as good as possible and permanent cooling is required, consuming energy constantly just for storage. While the effect of vaporization of liquid Hydrogen can be used in Hydrogen transportation, for example in vessels carrying the Hydrogen while using the vaporizing Hydrogen as fuel, this behavior is rather undesirable in semi-permanent or buffer storage.  Also storing compressed Hydrogen comes with its own flaws: producing the high pressure required for storage requires a lot of energy in itself. Compressed Hydrogen requires around 2.1% of the energy content [6]. In addition, the energy of Hydrogen density by volume is a lot lower than the density of gasoline.

Another argument against Hydrogen is often its explosiveness. And indeed, Hydrogen and Oxygen are a very explosive mixture. But assuming, that a Hydrogen tank leaks (for whatever reason) or is ruptured, for example in an accident, and the leaking gas ignites, a hydrogen flame would burn out relatively quickly and also, very contrary from ignition of fossil fuel, relatively far from the tank itself. Car manufacturers as Toyota have exercised several tests and extensive studies, coming to the conclusion, that Hydrogen is not more or less dangerous than any other power source (this also includes Lithium batteries, which impose a risk, too, since they are highly flammable and ignite in contact with Oxygen). In addition, the U.S. National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration have performed their own studies and find: 

Hydrogen-fueled vehicles (HFVs) offer the promise of providing safe, clean, and efficient transportation in a setting of rising fuel prices and tightening environmental regulations. 

Analysis of Published Hydrogen Vehicle Safety Research, U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration,  DOT HS 811 267,  February 2010

But despite the fact, that Hydrogen in itself and with traditional technology is already a promising solution, scientists were able to improve it significantly. Not only did they solve the storage issue, they also managed to make Hydrogen hardly inflammable. This is done by storing the Hydrogen in some kind of chemical “carrier” liquid. Among other solutions, this technique, called Liquid Organic Hydrogen Carriers (LOHC), seems to be one of the most promising currently researched solutions. Another solution, which is in very early development state and rather costly could be a nano material. This is especially interesting for aviation, because airplanes rely on being a lot lighter at landing than at departure - where LOHC would be a problem, since it would not change it’s weight significantly while Hydrogen is extracted and consumed.

Not only is solar cell technology advancing rapidly, with increasingly higher efficiency and lower production cost [7], there also are other promising other approaches on the rise, which include using bacteria [8] or thermo-solar power plants [9] to produce Hydrogen directly.

There is just one little caveat, that needs to be resolved: Hydrogen cannot be simply produced by the Sun’s radiation. Water is required to extract the Hydrogen molecules from it. And while aforementioned countries are well-known for their nice weather, they surely are not blessed with easily-accessible, limitless amounts of water. This is why a reasonable solution can only include the usage of Ocean-Water - while the facility needs to be designed in a way it can deal with the salt within Ocean Water without the need of desalination. Ideally, engineers would find a way derive Hydrogen directly from salt water. And indeed, researchers of Stanford University seem to have found a way, at least for the traditional way of producing Hydrogen indirectly via electrolysis, tackling the problem of corrosion via  for tackling corrosion [10].

This however does not mean, that LOHC, the Perowskit cell, Cyanobacteria or solar-thermal power plants are the ONLY solutions for the challenges we’re facing. It rather are possible fits for the missing pieces in the puzzle of future energy solutions. While we know pretty well, how we can serve the base level of power demand with renewable sources, the question always was how to deal with peak demand, demand in remote regions or demand in transportation. For all these questions, Hydrogen, possibly in combination with storage technology such as LOHC, is a very promising answer.

Summary & Conclusion

Thinking about the next steps required, the topic becomes a little bit more complex, since it is not only about CO₂ and climate, but rather about which ways we go as societies. But unfortunately, just pulling one string and hoping for the best is not going to work, so significant change (though implemented step-wise and thoroughly thought-through) is necessary to go with sufficient pace in the climate issue. I’m touching very complex topics, where each probably is worth its own article and I might will write some in the future. But I want to end with an overview of the challenges we face – and the opportunity we have.

Countries should...

 Create a sensible (and simple!) system of taxation of CO₂ while lowering other taxes (or rather bringing them back to their original pre-neo-liberalism-level). Preferably this would be consumption taxes such as VAT for consumers and power taxes for companies and ideally this would be done on an international level. In addition, increasing property and capital taxes (or implement the much discussed and always prevented financial transaction tax, which would have even other positive effects) would be necessary to close the tax gap

Invest in

Power grid infrastructure (privatized grid infrastructure should in this step be taken back by the government, since there is simply no way private companies could do this fast enough or without abusing gaps and mistakes in laws intending to incentive them)

Research of future technology

Negotiate with countries with enough natural resources (such as solar radiation) and start working globally together with companies and universities to create a working model of energy production and transportation

Prohibit construction of fossil or nuclear power plants in the future

References

[1] “CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate" -- D. Royer et. al., GSA Today, March 2004 - https://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/14/3/pdf/i1052-5173-14-3-4.pdf

[2] "CO₂ and other Greenhouse Gas Emissions" -- Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, 2019 - https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions

[3] "World Population Growth" -- Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, 2019 - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-density-3?time=1500..2100&country=DEU+LBY

[4] “Has the Battery Bubble Burst?” --  Fred Schlachter, September 2012 - https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201208/backpage.cfm

[5] http://brucelin.ca/scooters/thumb.html

[6] “Prospects for Hydrogen and Fuel Cells” --  International Energy Agency, 2005 -- https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264109582-en

[7] “Water photolysis at 12.3% efficiency via perovskite photovoltaics and Earth-abundant catalysts” -- Luo et. al. Science, 26 Sep 2014 - Vol. 345, Issue 6204, pp. 1593-1596 DOI: 10.1126/science.1258307

[8] “Recombinant cyanobacteria as tools for asymmetric C=C bond reduction fueled by biocatalytic water oxidation“ -- K. Köninger et. al., Angewandte Chemie, 2016 - DOI: 10.1002/anie.201601200R201601201

[9] “ HYDROSOL-PLANT” -- https://www.dlr.de/sf/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-9315/22259_read-51105/

[10] “Researchers create hydrogen fuel from seawater“ -- Stanford University, ScienceDaily, 18 March 2019 - www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190318151726.htm

[11] https://energyvault.ch/

[14] "OECD Income inequality data update: Sweden” -- OECD, January 2015 - https://www.oecd.org/sweden/OECD-Income-Inequality-Sweden.pdf

[16] “Explaining Rising Income Inequality in Germany” --  Kai Schmid and Ulrike Stein, September 2013 - SOEPpaper No. 592. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2339128 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2339128