Technological Misdirection

There has been a lot written about how global warming will be solved not by behavior change but by technological improvements. In some circles this is believed so fervently that they argue for no behavioral change, instead, suggesting that policy should be focused entirely on technological innovation and breakthrough change. The support for this comes from both sides of the debate – from those who think that we do not have an obligation to address the culture, which created enormous CO2 emissions, and from those who think we do but have given up on behavior change as ever being sufficient. Consumers like it because it means that they will not have to stop consuming. Environmentalists like it because it means they won’t have to convince consumers to stop consuming.

Technological change clearly has a place in addressing climate change. To say otherwise is both foolish and hopelessly optimistic (naïve) about the extent to which people are willing and able to change their behavior and the speed at which that could occur. People simply do not change their consumption patterns that quickly. The great environmental successes in pollution control of the past have all come when regulation or market pricing was implemented at the same time new technology was entering the market. The regulations forced adoption of the new technology but did not dramatically change behavior or radically shift consumption. Indeed, as one onlooker has pointed out, one of the main requirements of any successful cap-and-trade system is off the shelf technology that will be easily implemented to cut emissions at the time the cap takes effect.

However, to argue that the only response to climate change should be technological is equally foolish. Our technology simply has not, and does not, progress fast enough to allow the current rates of consumption to continue ad infinitum. Some day in the future we may be able to support, through technology, 9 billion people consuming at the rate that Americans do today. But with current the current rate of technological change we will not survive the medium term.

Recognizing that energy efficiency is not an exact proxy for technological change, the following graph projects reductions in global energy usage if the world implemented every recommendation in the IEA’s 2008 report to utilize best available technology to reduce energy intensity over the next twenty years.

So even if every recommendation is acted upon we will be able to maintain our energy consumption at the same level it is today. With adjustments to the mixture, this might be sustainable but it seems highly unlikely, based on this article that we could change that mixture quickly enough to avoid significant problems. Furthermore, I am skeptical of the accuracy of this report. Note that the baseline energy usage (red line) declines slightly after 2015. So the rate at which we are increasing our energy use is going to decline, under the business as usual scenario, relative to 2005-2010 even as global population increases exponentially and the two largest countries of the world grow at near double-digit rates. I find that to be an extremely optimistic and fairly unreasonable assumption. I think that the line should get steeper, not less steep, and because the best-case scenario is calculated in terms of reductions relative to this baseline, even in a best case scenario the global energy usage should probably increase relative to today usage.

The story is the same if advances in vehicle efficiency are examined. The traditional internal combustion engine has a net efficiency of roughly .16 (1 unit of energy input produces .16 units of output). The hydrogen fuel cell technology – which if commercialized, would be a fairly ‘breakthrough’ technology – has a net efficiency of .32. Roughly double. That seems great until you consider the rate of population growth and how great demand for cars will be in twenty-five years. A conservative estimate would be a doubling of the number of cars on the roads globally in the next twenty-five years. So a doubling of efficiency puts us roughly where we are today.

This same story is repeated over and over again. The Rocky Mountain Institute released a report in 2005 called “Winning the Oil Endgame” that documents in exhaustive detail how U.S. oil consumption by vehicles could be reduced by roughly half by 2025 by implementing new technology in vehicle construction. They projected fuel economy of up to 110 mpg. Five years on there is little evidence that this technological change has materialized to any great extent. There has yet to be a breakthrough vehicle released in the U.S. market. Even in the face of gas prices that approach four dollars a gallon.

All this is not to say that technological change is not the answer. It is not the only answer but it is very much part of the answer. To date technological change has been able to deliver non-geometric improvements in energy consumption. That will not be enough. Doubling engine efficiency while vehicle numbers double leave us no better off than we are now. Unless technology materializes that can deliver exponential improvements in the rate energy is consumed behavior changes must be a large part of the solution. And therefore policy has a role to play beyond promoting innovation. Policy must also promote behavior change.

Because we cannot shift to renewable energy sources overnight, energy use must decline in the medium term. Based on efficiency improvements technology is improving quickly enough to account for roughly half of the reduction in energy use that must occur by 2050 but behavior change must account for the rest. There is no magic bullet for solving climate change. Technology will make it possible to combat climate change but to sell it as the only answer dangerously misdirects public discourse.