Today’s “in the news narrative” is that solutions to cut emissions and global warming are no good and won’t work. Two serious writers in the vanguard are Vaclav Smil and Michael Cembalest. Smil is a veteran big-picture academic with a focus on energy – a favorite of Bill Gates – and Cembalest is ‘chairman of market and investment strategy’ at JP Morgan. In their recent pieces (attached here and here) they contend that on the first-mover elements of the energy transition, renewables replacing fossil fuels to power the electric grid, and EVs replacing the global ICE vehicle fleet, that progress is hopelessly slow. Even if pushed faster, they say, it won’t make a meaningful difference in the first half of the 21st Century. They also point out that progress on decarbonizing buildings is nil and that for most heavy carbon industrial processes like plastic production, steel, cement, and copper we don’t yet have scalable solutions.
They note that growing deployment of solar / wind / batteries and EVs is merely soaking up the incremental energy demand that is being created by global economic growth, increasing prosperity, and big AI data centers. A truly serious effort to win this battle, they say, entails spending ten trillion dollars per year for 30 years (out of a current global GDP of 100 Trillion), not the 4 or 5 trillion that’s been estimated by Goldman Sachs and others.
These guys are not lightweights. Much of their analysis is solid. They correctly point out that even though there was general agreement about the problem as early as 1990, emissions haven’t gone down. Rather, they have doubled, from around 20 billion tons of CO2 emitted each year to close to 40 billion tons today. Pretty depressing.
Here’s the problem: Neither Smil nor Cembalest take their arguments to their logical conclusion, which is: THE ENERGY TRANSITION WILL FAIL. WE’LL BE AT 40 BILLION TONS OF EMISSIONS FOR DECADES TO COME — NOT NET ZERO BY 2050. They don’t leave much wiggle room for a better outcome! And that’s where their analysis ends. They lack the courage to just come out and say we’ll blow past 2 degrees Celsius warming on a nonstop path to 3 to 4 or higher. Atmospheric CO2 concentration will thus jump from today’s 420 ppm to well over 500 ppm.
Remember – the next 25 years is critical to holding back runaway climatic consequences like polar melting, ocean heating, possibly even the slowing or suspension of the Atlantic Gulf Stream, and so on.
Cembalest and Smil offer no words about the economic or human toll 10, 20 or 50 years from now. Nor do they quantify the benefits the world derives from present day fossil fuel security and prosperity versus the costs of global climate devastation 10 and 20 years from now. That analysis is all the more pressing as it turns out the climate scientists were wrong: they were too conservative. The famous climate scientist Jim Hansen this week said we will blow past a 1.5 C rise in 2024, 5 years earlier than previously expected. It’s much easier for Smil / Cembalest to criticize present day reality than to think and write seriously about the future. They probably don’t know how or want to do that, even with their considerable talents and resources. But they could have at least acknowledged that gaping hole in their work, alongside their monologues pissing on the energy transition.
They also fail to acknowledge that we’ve hit 2024 with so little progress partly because the incumbent fossil fuel companies (not just oil / gas but also utilities, car companies, etc.) engaged in large scale misinformation campaigns and bought the support of politicians to do their bidding. The forces they unleashed are still humming along with the Republican Climate Denial Party. Absent those campaigns, an energy transition starting 30 years ago very likely might have succeeded with far less pain than what now lies ahead.
Ultimately, Cembalest and Smil do us a great service by laying their work out for all to see, evaluate and react to. However, at The Climate Capitalist we choose to reject their fatalism and instead place our faith in the millions of good people around the world working to solve this problem. We see dramatic signs of promising climate responses accumulating worldwide. As Nelson Mandela said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
