A Rebuttal of Common Criticisms of the Paris Accord

Since President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, I've seen several people post articles critical of the accord and in defense of the decision.  What I've seen is either hypocritical, factually incorrect, or factually cherry-picked.

1. The accord is toothless and therefore pointless if you want real action on climate change. I hate this argument the most because everybody I've seen come forward to defend the President's decision isn't actually in favor of having a stricter, more aggressive approach to mitigating climate change.  People defending Trump's decision and people who are very concerned about climate change are two mutually exclusive groups.  So to use the argument that what we really want is more aggressive, enforceable action is deeply cynical. The most cynical of all is Trump himself who has called global warming a hoax and tweeted about it 115 times. 

I should point out that the primary reason the accord has no teeth (it is voluntary and non-binding) is because of the United States, in order to get them to the table. We had a stricter treaty before, called the Kyoto protocol. But being a treaty, it had to be ratified by the Senate with a two-thirds majority, and the U.S. never did that. Given the Republican Party's stance on climate change and international diplomacy, there is zero chance of getting a two-thirds majority vote through the Senate now or in the near future.   

I should also point out that the argument that the accord is toothless undermines Trump's argument that our participation will hurt American jobs. If it's voluntary, non-binding, and we can set our own goals, how exactly is this going to hurt Americans?

2. But what about China and India? This is a classic.  We've been hearing this for decades.  Why should we do the right thing when others won't? This is actually an argument that comes up all the time when discussing environmental policy. On moral grounds, it's a bit hollow, as we often don't use these arguments in real life.  Do you hate littering?  Yes. Do others do it? Yes. Well why should you expend extra effort to not litter when others are still doing it?  Because it's the right thing to do and your contribution matters.  Full stop.

But the littering analogy isn't quite right because it ignores the magnitude of the "littering" (carbon emissions) done by the U.S. relative to other nations. It is pointed out that China only committed to starting to decrease their emissions after 2030 and that India didn't commit to reducing emissions at all.  How completely unfair that billions of people can continue to increase emissions while we have to sacrifice to decrease emissions immediately!  To address this, we need a little background information. First of all, people in the United States are far wealthier than people in China and especially India. We have cars, air conditioners, big houses, all requiring lots of energy. Because of that, we emit much more carbon dioxide per person than people in China and India. In the U.S., it's about 16.4 tons of CO2 per person per year.  In China, it's around 8 (so half of that in the U.S.) and in India, the number is 1.6 (one tenth of that of Americans).  India emits only one tenth of the emissions per person that we do!  To get a sense of what that means, imagine if Americans tried to get their per capita emissions down to that level.  They would have to completely get rid of their cars, air conditioners, heaters, and probably hot water heaters too. What's left - lighting and cooking - would probably be equivalent to the average Indian citizen.  

Now, with that context, re-examine the argument that it's unfair that we have to buy solar panels to partially power our air conditioners and cars, when Indians have the audacity to want to purchase some cars or air conditioners at all.  

Three billion people in the developing world (China, India, Brazil, etc. ) are trying to have the quality of life of the average American or European.  And why don't they have the right to?  Just because we got it first, doesn't mean that nobody else has the right to it.  What these countries are committed to, is increasing the efficiency of their economies so that when they do achieve comparable lifestyles and economies to ours, they will still emit far less carbon dioxide per person than we do, even if we do fulfill our obligations in the Paris accord. 

I would also like to point out that the typical carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere lasts for about 100 years before being absorbed (most likely by the ocean).  So, when considering who is responsible for climate change, one has to account for cumulative emissions over the last century or more, not just current emissions. And by this metric, the United States is particularly culpable (by a factor of ~2 more) when comparing only current emissions to India or China, who have only been significant emitters recently.  

So why the Paris Accord then? Because it's our only hope.  It's the strongest thing we could get through that could bring every country together, in unanimity, to recognize that climate change is real, it's our fault, and we have to act quickly if we're going to prevent its worst effects. It's the starting line, a call to arms to all engineers, scientists, politicians, that the entire world will be investing massive amounts of resources to this in the next century.  A call to arms for our current and future generations to think deeply about our actions and how they affect others and the planet. 

It's not perfect, but it was our best hope.  Thankfully, it appears that the rest of the world is reconfirming their commitments. Multiple American states and scores of cities are saying they will go it alone with or with out the federal government's help.  It would be easier with a president and federal government to help but we'll have to do this one ourselves. 

A Renewable, Electrified Future Just Makes Sense

President Trump just announced that he is beginning the process of withdrawing the United States from the Paris accord to combat climate change, joining only Syria and Nicaragua. Nicaragua did not join because the accord was not aggressive enough and Syria is in the middle of an awful civil war and has more immediate concerns.  So basically, the United States, the largest historical emitter of carbon dioxide, has decided to do nothing about the most important problem the world has ever seen, a problem for which it bears significant blame.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about climate change and the renewable energy technologies that will help us avoid its worst effects. One thing has occurred to me over the last few years.  It started by thinking about internal combustion engines in cars and comparing them to electric motors. But the point is more general, and it is this:  Once you consider the realities of a renewable energy future, you realize the fossil fuel present makes no sense. It is dirty, ugly, loud, and inefficient.

Consider our current situation.  The large majority of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, oil). We use these fuels for a variety of benefits: transportation, electrical energy production, and heating. Generally, this requires us to burn this fuel, often at high pressure and temperature. The resulting high pressure moves pistons and turbines, lot of massive parts moving at high speed and temperature (and therefore requiring a lot of maintenance). The burning requires careful regulation of air and fuel, via valves and pumps. The resulting heat must be managed with coolants and more pumps. The exhaust contains a variety of toxins including particulate matter, heavy elements, nitrogen and sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, and is responsible for secondary pollutants such as ozone. Some of these can be significantly scrubbed from the exhaust, but require additional additives, pumps, electromagnetic scrubbers, etc.

Now step back and take a look at that.  It's an incredibly complex system. Pumps, pistons, turbines, valves, coolants, additives, filters, scrubbers. It's the reason there are so many wires, tubes, belts, lubricants, etc. under the hood of your car. But the same sorts of mechanisms exist on larger scales at coal and natural gas power plants.

Now consider how we harvest and refine the fuels that feed those incredibly complex engines. They're in the ground, but most of the easily accessible stuff is already gone.  Most coal today is done via "surface mining", where we literally remove the ground that sits above the coal seam, dig up the coal and put the ground back. Often, we just dynamite the ground out of the way (mountain top removal). All of this completely destroys the plants, rivers, and animal habitat on the surface. It also dredges up a lot of toxic heavy elements that have been buried for millennia. Natural gas (and some oil) is produced by drilling deep wells, having those drills then drill horizontally in multiple directions, and then pumping in chemical laden water at such high pressure that it literally fractures the shale.  Oil is now often harvested by drilling to extraordinary depth and pressure, often in the ocean, where spills are difficult to contain. Once the petroleum is retrieved, it has to be refined, which requires more energy (heat), more chemicals, and creates more pollution.  And all of these fossil fuels need to be transported thousands of miles via ship, pipeline, or train.

This entire system is totally ridiculous.  It requires countless moving parts and therefore a lot of maintenance (drills, pistons, valves, pumps, turbines, ships and trains), countless chemicals (for fracking, refining, purifying the exhaust), requires a lot of energy itself (for drilling, transporting, refining, and purifying the exhaust), and emits an enormous amount of pollution.

Now juxtapose the current system to the one that I envision for the future. The primary source of energy will be the Sun.  Cheap, durable, solar panels will blanket the roofs of all buildings.  These have no moving parts whatsoever, and they last for decades. These solar panels produce electrical energy without digging up the earth, without noise, without moving parts and costly maintenance, without pollution.  They just sit there, for decades. And if they're producing power when we don't need it, it can be stored in batteries, again, with no mechanical parts. Electrical cars will replace internal combustion engines.  All of those hoses, valves, pumps, coolants, belts, will be replaced with a battery, and wires -- no moving parts, except the one you actually want to move, the axle.

The purely electrical vision of the future is so much simpler, cleaner, quieter. And soon it will be cheaper.  For existing electronic appliances (our phones for example), this simplicity is ingrained, and Nissan pointed this out in a commercial for its all electric car, the Leaf.

For a moment, imagine that our electrical appliances were powered directly by fossil fuels.  It's a preposterous thought, that we would put up with the complexity, the noise, the pollution, the maintenance.  Twenty years from now, we will look back on our current energy infrastructure the same way.

The renewable, electrified future just makes sense. And, by the way, it will save the world from catastrophic climate change.


[Addendum: Yes, I know we're not there yet.  The last piece of the puzzle is the battery.  They need to be much cheaper and more energy dense (and ideally use elements more common than lithium). But the batteries are improving rapidly. As the research on and production of batteries improves over the next decade, we can start by replacing 20% of our energy with renewables and upgrading the electrical grid. After that, we can have wide scale adoption of electrical energy storage and solar power). ]