Guest Post by Thomas Fuller
The choices we make about energy, the environment and climate will be limited by The Three Chinas.
The Real China
1. One of the Chinas is very real and familiar. It has a population of 1.4 billion.
2. China is developing quickly, trying to do in 50 years what America did in 100. As a result, they have doubled their energy use since 2000, becoming the largest energy user in the world.
3. China’s energy use may well double again by 2020. (The figures in the report did not match reality, but their estimate of 7.5% annual growth looks fairly okay).
4. Coal currently provides 70% of China’s energy. That may drop to 65% by 2020. It may not.
5. If China doubles its energy use (to 200 quads) and 65% of it comes from coal, that will be 130 quadrillion BTUs generated from burning coal, in China, in 2020.
6. China’s coal plants are much dirtier than those used in the developed world.
The Second China
This very real China will be replicated by the natural growth of the human population to 8.5 billion by 2035, and 9.1 billion at its peak later this century. That’s more than the entire population of China. As many of them will actually be born in China, and many more will form part of our third ‘imaginary’ China, it is appropriate to limit the Second China to the size of the real one.
7. Most of these new humans will be born into developing countries.
8. But these developing countries are, in fact, developing now. Their energy use is increasing dramatically–if not as dramatically as China’s. The Second China will spring forth from countries whose energy use is growing by 3.3% per year.
9. And although their use of coal is not as intense as China’s, their reliance on fossil fuels is fairly close (Fig. 2)
The Third China
While China is developing quickly, so is the rest of the developing world. As countries develop, the people living in them get richer. They buy cars, appliances, computers, and begin to use more energy. Again, to avoid double counting (China will be one of the countries talked about, and many of the new middle class will consist of people not yet born), it is correct to think of this as about the size of the current China.
10. Two billion people may join the middle class by 2030.
11. By 2050, countries which are now developing quickly will be called ‘middle-income’ and may account for 60% of GDP.
12. Goldman Sachs believes that China’s per capita income will be $50,000 in 2050 (p.5), and that their per capita GDP will be $70,000. But they also project that Turkey and Mexico will have higher incomes per capita, and that Brazil will almost match China.
13. Mexico currently consumes 69 million BTUs per person per year (Table 1.8). Their average income is $14,000. If their incomes triple, so will their energy usage. The same is true for Indonesia, Turkey, the Philippines, China, India and more.
Discussion
I have written here frequently that I believe current estimates of future energy consumption are flawed. I hope the information provided above shows why. As I have written before, extending current consumption and development trends over a short period of time shows a doubling and perhaps a tripling of energy use over the medium term. That could see global demand for energy reaching 2,000 quads per year by 2035.
I do not know what the sensitivity of the atmosphere is to a doubling of concentrations of CO2 is, and despite pronouncements from partisans on either side of that argument, I don’t think anybody else knows, either.
I do not know what cycles of earth, moon, sun and stars will combine to push or pull global temperatures one way or another, and despite pronouncements from partisans on either side, I don’t think anybody else knows, either.
Recent human history makes it fairly easy to contemplate economic growth and energy usage for the very near future. It is an order of magnitude easier than trying to analyse the factors that influence the climate.
We do not have to guess about the effects of massive coal consumption by developing countries–we have our own history to guide us, from London in 1952 to Manchester a century before, from burning rivers in Ohio to dead lakes nearby.
Commenters to my recent pieces asked why I characterise our situation as an energy crisis. I have tried to provide an answer here. I’m happy to discuss this with any and all. Because I think this is a conversation we can have without referring to magical numbers and thinking, pixie dust or moonbeams.
I personally think that this level of intense development will indeed have an effect on our climate, due not only to CO2, but also deforestation, aquifer depletion and other factors described ably by Roger Pielke Sr. But I don’t know how much and I don’t know what percentages to assign to each.
So let’s talk about energy and why what is described above signals a crisis–or not.
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azcIII – October 17, 2010 at 4:53 pm:
“The population growth in China will likely reverse so they have a declining population in coming years. This is due to their one-child policy, lack of marriageable women for the number of young men, massive environmental damages from pollution/toxins and water and food contamination, among other reasons.”
I think it’s very unlikely that China’s population will begin to decline any time soon – say in the next fifty years or so. Your environmental reason is not something I’d considered greatly, but seems a slim possibility. The kind of pollution necessary to put a real brake on China’s population growth would be inconceivable, even in Ohio – note that at the worst times for industrial pollution in the US, there was negligible effect on the population.
A quick look at the Chinese age pyramid should show the fallacy of your demographic arguments. The one-child policy has effected a great reduction in the rate of growth of China’s population, but not the the extent that it has become negative – China’s still growing, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Who knows really what China and other places will look like and what they will do when fully ‘developed’? I think people lack imagination and simply assume that development anywhere means turning into a carbon copy of ‘the West’, but there’s so many possibilities. Similarly, we have no idea what Western cultures will be doing in 50/100 years time. Maybe we will have massively downplayed materialism, dematerialised the culture… maybe the automobile will simply go the way of the dodo for instance. Look at a technology as simple as the elevator, and how utterly it transformed society. How many technologies on the scale of the elevator are yet to be discovered and put in place?
To me, development is simply possibility, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will end up in the same place as another culture that ‘developed’ 100 years beforehand. There are many different ways to go.
Tom, the projections of energy use don’t scare me. There certainly is not an energy crisis now. At most, you have shown that energy usage is likely to grow significantly in the coming decades. And if it grows at such a rate, and if all other things remain equal, and if there are not significant new stores of fossil fuel energy discovered, and if other sources of energy do not rise to take the place of some of the current fossil fuel energy, and if this results in scarcity of energy, and if such scarcity is not mitigated by rising prices (supply/demand), and if the scarcity results in disruption of necessary services, and if we are unable to find other ways to re-allocate the available energy and otherwise deal with such disruption, then, yes, perhaps there will be a crisis.
It is a pretty far logical path to tread, with lots of questionable links from point A to point B. So, no, I don’t think there is a current energy crisis and I don’t think there is much need to worry about a possible energy crisis decades in the future.
Should we be cognizant of growing energy demand? Sure. Is there value in freeing innovation and opening up avenues to deal with the anticipated demand? Absolutely. Can it be done in a calm and thoughtful manner without alarmism or language of crisis? I hope so.
If AGW is real, anyone with an ounce of commonsense would immediately realize that unless China agrees to restrict its CO2 emissions to 1980 or 1990 levels there is no prospect of mitigating CO2 emissions on a global scale. Since (and this should be equally obvious) there is no prospect of China (and for that matter other develing countries such as India and Brazil) agreeing to limit its future emissions, the only sensible course of action is for the West/developed industrial nations to do nothing and see what happens being ready to adapt to problems caused by climate change (whatever may have driven those changes) should it be truly necessary.
The West/developed industrial nations should be considering the real implications of your post, namely the shift of power from West to East and what they can do, if anything, to maintain their global influence rather than gradually slipping to the role of bit part player. De-carbonising western economies will only speed the shift in power from West to East and western countries would do well to ponder on the political implications of this game change.
Embarking upon an extensive program of building nuclear power plants would be a very good start for those in the West.
It is awesome to get some fresh perspectives.
Thanks for a well written opinion piece Thomas.
I don’t need to agree with it to know there is truth in every thought.
I am more on the pessimistic side. Population will be restrained by wars and disease, the bigger the populations, the bigger the disasters (squared).
“The best we can do is find ways to lower the amount of energy needed for our lifestyle – because that’s what they want the energy for.”
Which is exactly what’s been happening.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/country/img/charts_png/US_totint_img.png
Graph shows US energy intensity (energy usage/economic production).
No cap ‘n trade. No carbon tax. Just lots of businesses and people using good common sense and economic principles. And a lot of it under neanderthals like Reagan and Bush.
The problem is, for those who believe in CAGW, that’s not good enough. There is no way to meet the “required” cuts without draconian changes in the way people live.
Whether or not you believe those cuts are necessary, the only way they can happen is to force people to live the way they don’t want to live.
The Al Gores of the world are either naive or dishonest.
My final words to Thomas Fuller,
I get the feeling that you are making the same mistake as the AGWers – making projections and ignoring other factors. What factors you might ask. Human ingenuity, inventions, accidental discoveries, 1 brilliant mind, change in public policy focus (e.g. CHP, compulsory soot filters in coal fired power plants), global pandemic etc. I just get the funny feeling that you might be seeing things like the climate computer models.
Be optimistic Mr. Fuller, that’s what America used to be about and it sent men to the Moon.
Correction:
What factors you might ask[?]
Nick Stokes says:
“Yes, indeed. That’s why there is a worry about AGW. People say, it’s only been a fraction of a degree. But there’s plenty more to come, whatever the sensitivity.”
Nick, where exactly is this “plenty more [degrees of warming] to come” supposed to be coming from?
There is zero evidence of any unusual or significant warming on the horizon. What we are observing is simply natural variability. If you’ve finally discovered that mysterious heat hidden in the pipeline, could you please point it out for us? Thanks.
Also, I dispute Tom Fuller’s pessimistic outlook. It must be genetic or something, because all we have to do is look at the astronomical progress the human race has achieved over only the past century.
A hundred years ago people were packed into small houses and apartments with no indoor plumbing; an infection or a sore throat could easily result in death; dentistry was barbaric; most people either rode horses or walked; cholera was a neighborhood disease, malaria was still extant in the U.S.; 40% of the average person’s income was spent on food; the moon was as far out of reach as the Andromeda galaxy; wind powered most ships; the telegraph and Morse code were high-tech communications, faster even than carrier pigeons; almost half the population was living on farms, and arose with the sunrise and went to bed at sunset; the whale population was still being decimated; starvation and famine in most countries was absolutely routine, etc., etc., etc.
Look at the progress we have made in that short time. But listening to the pessimists, you would think we’re living in a hell on Earth, and things are bound to get worse.
A hundred years from now all the wild-eyed hand-wringing by the CAGW crowd will be seen to be as trivial as last century’s problems are to us now.
The ancestors of today’s anti-fossil fuel zealots were the Luddites, who smashed spinning jennies because they feared unemployment. But just the opposite happened: higher paid workers filled the need for loom builders and repairmen, cloth became much cheaper for everyone, and thus more in demand, farmers were paid more for growing cotton, and the world in general became more prosperous; a mirror image of Bastiat’s Broken Window fallacy.
The things people fear in the future are not big problems. They will be solved. Only truly unexpected events cause serious problems. Anyone seen an asteroid lately?
Better worry about 2012. We’ve been on the plateau of peak oil production for 6 yrs. now. In 2012 we fall off. 2013, it gets worse. After that? You really don’t want to know.
Although the energy predictions may not be far off, and with peak oil a certainty, competition for scarce resources will be fierce, don’t for that several BILLION people will die off during the 2020’2 and 2030’s due to crop failure from global cooling.
This works two ways. Crop conditions are expected to be similar to the bottom of the little ice age, and cooling, as we denialists understand it, will lead to less atmospheric humidity, and widespread drought.
In any case I am afraid that mankind, alone, is not smart enough to make a preventative adjustment.
Smokey says:
October 17, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Smokey, you just don’t get it. Those things were all good, because they minimized man’s impact on Gaia.
Just think, if we’d had computer models back then, we could have had a bunch of government scientists telling us how harmful improvements in lifestyle were going to be.
Kum Dollison,
I couldn’t have planned your comment better if I had written it myself.☺
U.S. oil reserves.
“The choices we make about energy, the environment and climate will be limited by The Three Chinas.”
=============
Only if we submit.
Roger Carr – Exactly. I have been feeling the same way and I’m glad others have noticed. I got even more uneasy reading (or attempting to read) Ravetz’ essays quite some time ago. I feel we are subtly being nudged into a softer more ‘lukewarm’ stance on AGW.
Thomas, all of this is speculation, or more formally – probability estimates. You’ve said you are not a scientist, but you should be aware of the dangers of placing too much faith in probability. A very smart guy named Bruno DeFinetti, once commented that “Probabilities do not exist”. There is a great deal of wisdom in that seemingly simple phrase. I’d urge you and others to give it due consideration, especially when predicting the future.
Apparently there are still many people who reason the same way Paul Ehrlich did 40 years ago.
Limited resources spread over an ever increasing demand spells doom, but how limited are those resources?
Much like Paul didn’t foresee the incredible increase in food production Norman Borlaug brought about, so do todays doom sayer don’t grasp the through meaning of E=mc2.
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=2469
There is plenty of potential for new energy generation and conservation by a wide variety of concepts. See, for example, the lists of radical and conventional concepts at the New Energy Congress PESwiki website:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Congress:Top_100_Technologies_–_RD
If any of the major ideas work, such as Eric Lerner’s Focus Fusion, the fundamentals will change. And, if you are skeptical about anything that invokes new science, one can remark that, with a little new engineering one can produce thousands of years of energy from thorium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fuel
The only real problems are political.
TWE says:
“I feel we are subtly being nudged into a softer more ‘lukewarm’ stance on AGW.”
Prescient.
IMHO, in this debate there are only scientific skeptics, and CO2 alarmists. The category “lukewarmers” simply gives cover to the subset of the alarmist crowd that feels more comfortable pretending they understand both sides. But at heart they are part and parcel of the alarmist crowd.
Either one accepts that rigorous skepticism is an essential part of the scientific method, or one is a CO2 alarmist. There is no middle ground.
Personally, I am sick of pundits, politicians and scientists telling me that we’re all doomed unless we start going backwards. I suspect a large proportion of the population is with me on this also. We don’t elect politicians to compound our problems. Nor should the government employ scientists to do so. What we want are solutions. We in the west want more energy, more wealth and a better life. So do our counterparts in the third world and the developing world. And we in the west would be delighted if they could share in our prosperity, too.
So what governments, and the scientists they employ, need to do is get off their backsides, stop saying we’re doomed and it’s all too hard, and work out how that is going to be achieved. I sense that the Chinese and Indian governments are doing their utmost to achieve this. It’s about time our governments started pulling their weight.
Who’s with me on this?
FULLER: JUST WHAT IN THE HELL IS YOUR POINT IN THIS WEIRD POST?
My simple answer to all this is Jesus and the Bible. That is the only real answer to all these worries, as everyone will eventually discover. So, what do you think about that, Mr. Chicken Little?
Smokey says:
“Either one accepts that rigorous skepticism is an essential part of the scientific method, or one is a CO2 alarmist. There is no middle ground.”
Where do you get off in dictating what other people should be thinking? It’s entirely possible for an individual to be skeptical of the idea that CO2 is cause for alarm, whilst also being skeptical that there is absolutely no cause for alarm. It’s just an agnostic position. There is more room here than just atheists and believers, and to acknowledge only the existence of the two extremes while forcefully ignoring a whole range of middleground views is tantamount to shutting down debate, imo.
I line up with the skeptical position much more easily or comfortably than I do the hardcore alarmist position, simply because there is room to move there, the skeptical position is much more flexible, and the skeptical community in general is much more flexible. But not in the way that you’re defining skepticism. In fact, I wouldn’t call skepticism as you are defining it above skepticism at all. Sorry.
Smokey>
“Either one accepts that rigorous skepticism is an essential part of the scientific method, or one is a CO2 alarmist. There is no middle ground.”
I disagree. Rigorous skepticism tells us that we don’t know much, if anything. As such, it’s possible, although entirely unproven at the moment, that CO2 is the cause of warming, and somewhat possible that any resultant warming will be detrimental overall.
Since it’s been raised as a possible risk, I’m perfectly happy to take any mitigating action that is beneficial in its own right for other reasons, and not being over-prioritised as a result of the hypothetical threat.
What’s important, though, is not to think that we know everything and must be correct. We leave that to the warmistas.
Jimbo
‘Hyperion: Hot Tub sized nuelcear reactors’
I’m waiting for a “house size” reactors.
“So let’s talk about energy and why what is described above signals a crisis–or not.”
Please read (reread?) how ALL of the CRAP published by Malthusus, Erlich, Holdren and their moronic satanistic friends has not come to pass, even in a minor sense. That might help you “dig” reality. YOU, sir, are part of the problem!