Next Generation Energy is managed and written entirely by Seed editors and expert guest bloggers. Read more about them Two weeks ago during our discussion of energy diversification, Joe Romm wrote that "the country that may be the biggest obstacle to the clean energy transition is likely to be Russia."
The world's largest nation also holds the world's largest natural gas reserves, second largest coal reserves, and eighth largest oil reserves. Its economy is largely dependent on exports of these fuels—and a huge amount of them are imported by neighboring China, where demand for energy already far exceeds available resources and will continue to multiply with increasing industrialization.
At the G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, July 8, the presidents of China, India, and several other developing nations with rising energy needs expressed a shared concern that the burden of energy transition would fall disproportionately on their shoulders. As Mexican president Felipe Calderon stated, "Responsibility shouldn't fall on developing countries for what is an unavoidable responsibility of developed nations."
These nations have as much to lose as the rest of the world if they choose to ignore the responsibility, but their economic motivations to continue using carbon-based fuels for energy are undeniably strong. Until alternative technologies become cheaper and more efficient than those in place, it will continue to be difficult to minimize their demand, and countries like Russia with a large stake in trading fossil fuels will also have little immediate incentive to make a change. As Joe Romm says, "Russia will need to be convinced that some combination of nuclear, wind, and natural gas can provide all the power it needs—but the even harder task will be convincing them not to use all that oil and coal they have."
So, how will they be convinced? What steps toward cooperation do the world's leaders need to make, and what kind of economic incentives do we need to offer developing nations in the meantime to compensate for the risks it may impose on their progress? How do we devise a global plan for energy transition?
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Comments
Don't convince them - compete with them. It seems obvious that if the US can produce a fuel from renewables that competes with oil on price then we can sell that commodity (or technology) and thereby make oil less attractive economically. Therefore, other countries will stop using oil simply because our alternative fuel is cheaper. Then perhaps the world will be sending us money rather than the current direction.
...darth
Posted by: darth | August 6, 2008 5:02 PM
The comment above is correct but has a basic problem: it is dependent on the clause if the US can produce a fuel from renewables that competes with oil on price.
We can't. We're not even very close. If we could, there wouldn't be a debate in the first place, businesses would be lining up to convert. The hard political problem is how to convince countries to spend money to reduce their pollution.
That's a hard problem; it's the Tragedy of the Commons on a global scale. The traditional solutions all involve creating a governing body that can regulate everyone's usage, and that requires nations to agree to firm and binding restrictions on their activities, and often also requires some actual enforcement powers to crack down on entities that ignore the governing body.
That's a hard sell. In the current world climate, I doubt it's even a possible sell. However, one thing can be said for certain: the cheaper it is for nations to comply, the easier it will be to get them to comply.
Posted by: Anthony | August 6, 2008 5:54 PM
darth's comment is interesting.
If the developed world was to suddenly accept higher product prices and take back manufacturing and services operations they would be back in control, though maybe not for long.
Anthony's observations about making it cost effective for nations no 'comply' suggests another route though what sort of world organisation would enforce 'compliance' raises a few questions.
Perhaps one might start by making the point that the developed countries may indeed have used resources during their R&D phase but that was necessary at the time to be able to move forward to a reduced natural resource usage ecomony AND that 'catching up is not a realistic argument since core R&D is already done and those catching up will not need to expend 100 years or more of effort to obtain the benefits.
Either way I think Anthony is likely right - it would be a hard sell - and the potential for resolution of the argument and solution of the problems by population reduction, probably through a combination of catastrophic events, must be considered likely.
But then it things are really right on the knife edge any solution would do since it would be turning out badly either way.
Humanity is likely to follow the path of easiest understanding and least resistance no matter what the consequences of any conflicts that might arise.
Posted by: Grant | August 6, 2008 7:29 PM
It's hard to get too concerned about getting Russia (or some other foreigners) to comply, when we are having such a hard time getting ourselves to take it seriously. If we worry too much about eventually getting others to comply, we are likely to lose the incentive to do so ourselves.
If we go to darths comment, I think his mistake is the use of the word fuel. We are at the early stages of converting ground transportation to electric. We will likely soon rediscover wind for water borne transport as well. Air transport is more difficult, but I think a combination of using it less, and eventually using a slower fleet (half the speed of sound instead of 80-85% would save a lot of fuel), should keep even this reasonably within bounds. The commonality of all these replacements, is that they use a lot less energy per unit of utility than current systems. But none of this is likely to be a direct substitution of one liquid fuel for another. And hydrogen doesn't look like any sort of a solution either.
Posted by: bigTom | August 6, 2008 11:59 PM
Why doesn't the Russian government print up counterfeit Euros and US dollars while having a government department that makes money exporting crystal meth? Possibly because they don't want to become an international pariah. They know that going into the counterfeiting and illegal drug trade would be bad for business. If not reducing carbon emissions is bad for business then they will be likely to reduce carbon emissions. If a majority of countries go through the trouble of reducing their emissions it won't be difficult to apply economic sanctions on nations that fail to take reasonable steps to do so.
Having said that, carbon emissions from exported oil and gas are the responsibility of the country that uses them, not the country they are bought from. Also note that Russia's per capita CO2 emissions are half that of the United States.
Posted by: Me | August 7, 2008 12:49 AM
No, the harder task is convincing us not to use all that oil, coal, and especially gas that they have. If we stop buying, they'll stop selling.
Posted by: Dunc | August 7, 2008 5:23 AM
Dunc,
"If we stop buying, they'll stop selling."
That's an interesting theory of economics.
Would they not simply sell to someone else? More of their output to China for example?
Or if oil, coal and gas become low demand commodities they would have two other options.
- Use them themselves but at a slower rate than had they been exporting.
- Sit on the supplies until they became more valuable again - much as the USA has been doing for recent decades.
Now, what would you do to stop them?
It will be interesting to see what the European experiment, in particular the sudden reduction in available electricity that the UK looks likely to experience in about 10 years from now, results in that other economies can learn from.
I would imaging that a partial population reduction of the area will result, if only because people will be trying to find more comfortable places to live. That should give the Russians new market opportunites.
Posted by: Grant | August 7, 2008 9:33 AM
Anthony is correct - we don't have an alt. fuel ready to go in this country yet. But I think we are getting close to having some alternatives: plug-in-hybrid for cars (with 40 mile elect. range, eg the Volt), the stranded wind group wants to produce ammonia in Iowa and sell it for fertilizer and fuel for farm equipment, Brazil has their ethanol program, MIT has their improved electrolysis technique, etc.
We cannot determine what the rest of the world does, but we in the US can choose to transition away from fossils fuels and in the process develop technologies that we can export to other places who want to do the same. Let's compete for Russia's customers.
Posted by: darth | August 7, 2008 9:41 AM
Posted by: df | August 7, 2008 9:51 AM
df - my understanding is that because the cars are plugged in mostly at night, the grid has the capacity for alot of them since night is when the lowest loads normally are. Less AC, appliances, lights being used esp. late at night when people are sleeping.
Posted by: darth | August 7, 2008 9:50 PM
Currently, the transportation sector has a total energy usage of about 27 quads. US electricity production is 38 quads. Thus, without efficiency improvements, converting the transportation sector to electricity would increase electric power consumption by 70-75%, which would almost certainly overwhelm the capabilities of the grid, even if done at night. In addition, increasing electricity load over baseline almost always involves fossil fuel power plants, so it's not like you gain that much in CO2 terms anyway (you get some, because cars aren't as efficient as power plants).
Posted by: Anthony | August 7, 2008 10:09 PM
Cars that run off electricity produced from burning coal produce less CO2 emissions than gasoline cars. This is because the efficiency of an electric motor is about 85-90% compared to less than 20% for a typical gasoline powered car. If coal is burned in a 35% efficient power plant and there are 7% transmission losses, 7% conversion losses,1% charge discharge losses from a lithium-ion battery or equivelant and a 90% efficient efficient electric motor then the toal efficiency is about 29%, which is roughly 50% more efficient that gasoline powered cars.
The high efficieny of electric motors also means that increasing electricity production by about a third would be enough to electrify transport. If the US increased its generating capacity by the same percentage it did in the 60's it would take about 4 years to increase it by that much. Not that tranportation is likely to be electrified over a four year period.
Posted by: Ronald Brak | August 9, 2008 7:46 AM