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| Illustration: Anja Suter |
The New Year is a time for resolutions and pledges to do better in the future. But even in the new year, climate change will remain with us, with all its complex and often frustrating challenges.
Without complex graphs, figures, and models, we will try to develop a a qualitative intuition for what are the most effective levers towards carbon neutrality.
Which means, we are looking for simple recommendations which in most cases would unconditionally have a positive impact on the climate:
“Electrify everything, eat more plants, and stay mostly on the ground.”
If there is anything like silver bullet in the fight against climate change, then electrification with renewable power might come close.
Electric alternatives to burning fossil fuels exist for many key energy services from transportation, heating/cooling of buildings to powering industrial and commercial processes. They are typically not only several times more efficient, but often also of higher quality and, in many cases, already cheaper.
Electric motors achieve efficiencies of over 90%, in contrast to the theoretical limit for heat engines, including all car engines, which is around 20-50%. A heat pump uses With the help of ambient heat, heat pumps can generate three to five units of usable heat from one unit of electricity.
Renewable electricity based on solar, wind, water, and batteries is already the cheapest form of new electricity generation in most parts of the world and is being expanded on a massive scale.
We should on one hand electrify whatever we can, where it is technically possible and financially viable. On the other hand we should ensure that any new electricity production is going to be mostly based on renewable sources. In many cases, this is already a perfectly reasonable and feasible requirement today.
The extent of what can be electrified technically and economically continues to grow. By consistently electrifying our energy consumption with renewable electricity, we could avoid around 50% of today's CO2 emissions (source: e.g. Speed & Scale) – and all this without any significant losses or perhaps even with a gain in quality of life.
The next biggest lever in terms of the CO2 balance might be land use and the tension between agriculture and nature conservation. High-quality land for biomass production is limited on this planet. More intensive use for agriculture – e.g., deforestation or drainage of wetlands – reduces the role of this land as an efficient natural CO2 sink.
Depending on what we eat, the demand for land and water and thus the resulting CO2 balance differs by several orders of magnitude. In Switzerland, for example, more than half of the highest-quality arable land is used for growing animal feed. A recent study has shown that if we were to grow food for humans instead of animal feed, the degree of self-sufficiency would almost double.
The consensus among nutritionists for a balanced and healthy diet points towards a predominantly plant-based diet (which does not mean exclusively plant-based). So we should listen more to our doctors for a healthier diet – also for the sake of the climate.
Through improved land use with a better balance between agriculture and nature conservation, we could probably reduce the CO2 budget by another quarter.
The last point is, on the one hand, a call for being more pragmatic, calm, and down to earth. Let's try to avoid absolutism and ideological debates and instead consistently do what is feasible and sensible. On the other hand, “staying mostly on the ground” is also a reference to the impact of frequent flying. Aviation is an important example of the last part of CO2 emissions, which are difficult to avoid by technical means. Every flight that we can avoid or replace with alternative means of transport by land or water is a significant improvement in our carbon footprint.
As with all simple rules, reality is always a little bit more complicated and details do matter. On this website, we have tried to illustrate many of these details on the path to decarbonization in as simple terms as as possible with the help of graphs and mathematical models.
However, anyone who is looking for a simple, high-impact maxim to follow, could take “electrify everything, eat more plants, and most stay on the ground ” to heart with a clear conscience. Whether as an individual, society, or political community. For the next year or the next quarter-century until 2050.
With this in mind, we wish everyone a happy and more carbon-free New Year!
Originally published in German on https://co2nettonull.com/blog/