We Can't Meet the Climate Goals

 We can’t meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement!

Global CO2 emissions is the product of the CO2 emissions of the individual person multiplied by the number of people in the world (more in the post on Undesirable Green Developments from November 2019).

In 2014, the environmental protection organization Ecopop (www.ecopop.ch) launched the popular initiative “Stop Overpopulation - Safeguard our Natural Environment” in Switzerland. The initiative called for government funding worldwide to promote voluntary family planning.

The National Councillor Balthasar Glättli (of the Greens) called Ecopop's aim to prevent population growth with contraceptives abroad a “contemptuous, neocolonialist attitude” (NZZ).

The reader will no doubt have noticed that I am not a fan of parties like the Social Democratic Party and the Greens that spread socialist ideas. But this is not about political exchanges. The aim is to find out how the left and the Greens can remove their ideological blinders so that they too can help lower the world’s population in the next 50 years.

If we enable voluntary family planning around the world, we will achieve two goals:

1. We facilitate the living together of women and men in developing countries and prevent abortions. More in the blog on Self-determined Sexuality in Developing Countries from June 2019.

2. At the same time, we help to reduce global warming.

            We humans have to choose whether we want to stop global warming with ascetic living or take other rational measures.

In industrialized countries, we should  a l s o  promote dropping the number of children per woman to 1.2-1.6. (The population remains stable with 2.1 children per woman). I believe that the number of children should not drop below 1.2, because we need to ensure that old-age provisions are not endangered. The lack of contributors to old-age provisions can only be partially replaced by immigrants, as the willingness and ability of the local populations to accept them should not be overestimated. With the number of children from 1.2 to 1.6, some couples can also have 3 children, because there will be more and more couples who have no children.

7.7 billion people currently live in the world.

1.4 billion live in industrialized countries. China, which is difficult to classify, also has 1.4 billion.

This means that almost 5 billion people live in emerging and developing countries.

CO2 emissions are slowly declining in industrialized countries. China also wants to get there in 10 years.

But the crucial question will be how the CO2 emissions of emerging and developing countries will develop.

There are articles to the point of weariness in the media about global warming, but there are no articles that deal with the issue above. Developing countries are only recorded individually in the statistics.

Let's take India as a “model state” for emerging and developing countries. There are developing countries that are developing faster than India, but there are also many that are developing more slowly.

India emitted 0.61 tons of CO2 per person per year in 1990 (Wikipedia: CO2 emissions per capita). In 2020 the value will rise to around 2.0. So the value has more than tripled in the past 30 years. We can assume that the value will also triple in the next 30 years (by 2050). This means that CO2 emissions in the “model state” of India will amount to 6.0 tons per person in 2050.

India represents 5 billion people in the emerging and developing countries.

5 billion people times 6.0 tons per person gives 30 billion tons of CO2. How much is 30 billion tons of CO2?

Global CO2 emissions in 2017 were 36.2 billion tons (Statista Research Department).

We have to conclude that emerging and developing countries will emit huge amounts of CO2 in 2050, which cannot be compensated for by reducing the values in the industrialized countries.

One can object that India will also partially switch to alternative energy generation by 2050. That may be, but the “model state” of India also stands in for Africa, and the population in Africa will increase to about 2.5 billion by 2050.

The world population is now 7.7 billion. Another 2 billion people will be added by 2050. (The population is declining in industrialized countries, but the population is increasing rapidly in the underdeveloped countries). How much CO2 will these 2 billion people emit in 2050? The experts have apparently never asked themselves this question. Please let me know if you find any reports mentioning the above question.

             If we look at the development of the world’s population, we can hardly assume that CO2 emissions can be significantly reduced by 2050.

But maybe in the next 10 or 20 years new methods for energy generation will be found that make the switch to CO2-free energy generation easier than previously thought.

Photovoltaics:

If solar panels are installed on roofs and exterior facades, electricity can be generated in a very environmentally friendly way with photovoltaics.

However, photovoltaics have one major disadvantage. In Central Europe, solar panels generate 10 times less electricity in January than in July.

But we need a lot of electricity in winter. Solar panels only make sense if we can build storage facilities in which the electricity generated in the summer can be stored for the winter, or we accept that additional electricity must be generated in the winter with gas power plants. I will come back to electricity storage later.

Wind energy:

Eight years ago, I was in western Texas. There are large wind farms with very high towers. I drove under a wind turbine that was surrounded by five others. A constant, strong or very strong wind was blowing. There was an impressive roar. You could feel that huge amounts of energy were being tapped here. It was as loud as if three helicopters were taking off at the same time. But you couldn’t live near there. I was amazed that they wanted to build hundreds of such plants in Switzerland and Germany. There are too many dreamers and too few realists among energy-system planners and journalists.

          Offshore wind farms have a future. However, if too many farms are built in a region (e.g. the North Sea), there is a risk that the power grid will collapse if there is a lull.

The development of floating wind turbines, which can be installed on the Atlantic coasts of Portugal, France, Great Britain and the USA, is promising.

To stop impending climate change, industrialized nations like the USA would have to invest considerably more in basic research on energy supply, says Microsoft founder Bill Gates. This also includes research on new types of nuclear reactors, such as the so-called rotor reactor, the development of which is being co-financed by Gates.

 Bill Gates also said: “All technologies that call themselves renewable are not reliable because they are not available in sufficient quantities in all locations.”

We need high-performance energy storage. The Linth-Limmern pumped storage power plant is the newest and most powerful pumped storage power plant in Switzerland. It has a storage capacity of 33 GWh. The annual consumption of electricity by the city of Zurich is 3000 GWh. The Linth-Limmern pumped storage power plant could only compensate for fluctuations in electricity production for the city of Zurich for a few days. That’s surprisingly little, as the Linth Limmern reservoir holds 23 million m3 of water and the height difference is 600 m. Solar electricity from summer cannot be saved for winter this way. (Recommended article: https://www.bulletin.ch/de/news-detail/wasserkraft-versus-batterien.html

All realistic-thinking natural scientists know that physics sets narrow limits when it comes to building energy and storage facilities. There will be no miracle facilities in the future!

The situation is different in the IT area, where amazing developments can still be expected.

In the long term, one of the biggest problems will be that the CO2 we release is extremely slow to break down. About half of the CO2 released will be absorbed by the sea and land after a few decades, but 15% to 40% of the CO2 will still be in the atmosphere even after 1000 years (IPCC). This will have far-reaching consequences.