Code RED - the end maybe nigh!

[Ferdinand]

Back on population control, I was wondering about Iran, where fertility fell from 6.5 births per woman to 2 between 1980 and 2010, largely as a result of free family planning services from the state when Mr Rafsanjani was President. An interesting case. 

 

 

As a result there is now a demographic window whilst there is a large young-old ratio to do things with old age care and their Health Service. It fell by about 60% in 10 years between 1985 and 1995.

 

I remember Peter Day on R4 In Business making a similar point about China around 1995-2000, during a programme about China's future health service.

 

An interesting account of Iran is here:

https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/12/18/iran-in-transition-implications-of-islamic-republic-s-changing-demographics-pub-75042

 

[SteamyTea]

How the fossil fuel era ends – and four possibilities for what follows

Ever cheaper wind and solar power means the decline of coal, oil and gas is unstoppable. The trillion-dollar question is how, and how quickly, their demise comes about

 

ENVIRONMENT 4 August 2021

By Graham Lawton

 

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

When will the fossil fuel era end?

While we don’t know exactly how the energy transition will pan out, the fossil fuel age is ending as it began, as we learn to exploit a vast, cheap, easy-to-use energy resource that is self-evidently superior to the existing options. Now, it is wind and solar power. “The peak of the fossil fuel era is here or hereabouts,” says Kingsmill Bond, a strategist at energy think tank Carbon Tracker. “The plateau is going to last a bit, but then go off a cliff.”

How high the cliff is and what is at the bottom depends on which of the scenarios available to us we choose. For the various fossil fuels, however, it will be first in, first out. “Coal is finished,” says Andreas Goldthau at the University of Erfurt in Germany. Regulatory pressure, changing economies and the competitiveness of renewables are doing for old king coal.

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Even where governments have tried to prop up or revive coal, as in Poland and the US under President Trump, they have failed. “The question is not how coal ends,” says Goldthau. “It’s more about how we manage the transition to give workers and mining communities a smooth landing.” That’s especially relevant in China, India and Indonesia, the biggest remaining coal-burners. According to a road map by the International Energy Agency (IEA), often seen in the past as an apologist for fossil fuels, old-fashioned, dirty coal power should account for 1 per cent of global energy output at most by mid-century if we are to hit net zero.

Oil will stick around for longer. “The reality is, the world is going to need oil for decades to come,” said Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub at the Climate Science and Investment Conference in New York in May. “There’s still going to be an oil market in 2050,” says Goldthau. “But it’s going to be much smaller.” The IEA forecasts a decline from 90 million barrels a day in 2019 to 24 million barrels a day in 2050, mostly driven by a switch to electric transport.

This residual use of oil – to power some trucks, ships, planes and hard-to-decarbonise heavy industries, and to make petrochemicals and plastics – will be compatible with net-zero carbon emissions as long as we use carbon capture technology, says Goldthau. But even these uses will fall into the arms of the sun and air. “Slowly but surely, they are going to find alternatives to fossil fuels, though airplanes are going to be a massive headache and I think the last man standing is the plastics industry,” he says.

 

Natural gas, now used extensively for domestic cooking and heating, electricity generation and in heavy industry, will follow the same declining trajectory as oil, albeit with a timeline that keeps it in the mix for even longer. According to the IEA road map, between now and 2050 gas demand will fall by just 55 per cent to 1750 billion cubic metres a day, replaced either by clean electricity or piped hydrogen gas.

Exactly how and when the last drop of oil or whiff of gas is extracted is unknowable. But Carbon Tracker recently totted up the global potential of solar and wind and found that there is 100 times more renewable energy available than the world actually needs. Some 60 per cent of it can already be exploited economically, with that proportion rising to 100 per cent by 2030.

Even big oil companies accept that their industry is slowly dying: Shell predicts an expiry date around 2070. Bond sees a day when people visit former oil refineries at the weekend, much as we now sip cappuccinos next to the gentrified canals and warehouses of a bygone industrial age. “Even the IEA, the great defender of the fossil fuel incumbency, is saying no new stuff, peak fossil fuel in 2019, decline from here on down,” he says. “If that isn’t the end of the fossil fuel era, I don’t know what is.”

FOUR ENERGY FUTURES

In 2019, Goldthau and his colleagues suggested four ways the energy transition could play out geopolitically – though, as ever, no one can say for certain which way things will go.

1. Big green deal

A global consensus on the need for the energy transition leads to international agreement and close cooperation between nations. Clear policy signals encourage investors to take their money away from fossil fuels and put it in low-carbon technologies.

Green finance deals help lower-income nations and petrostates with the transitions they need to make. This is the only scenario that hits net zero by 2050, the team concludes.

2. Dirty nationalism

National energy security wins out over tackling climate change. Nations develop inward-looking policies that favour renewable energy sources where they are cheaply available, but also exploit whatever fossil-fuel resources there are. Global markets fragment, breaking the momentum towards a global green energy transition. Efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C fail.

3. Technology breakthrough

There is significant progress towards net zero as wind and solar keep getting cheaper, aided by further breakthroughs in battery and grid technologies. But the two tech leaders, China and the US, increasingly vie for global supremacy through green tech. They refuse to share technology and key resources such as rare earth metals, dividing the world into blocs. Europe and Russia become increasingly marginalised.

4. Muddling through

A lack of cooperation and planning mean the world fails to limit warming to 1.5°C. However, renewables do get cheaper and grow fast enough to bankrupt many big fossil fuel companies, causing financial chaos. Different parts of the world, such as the EU, the US and China, increasingly follow their own agendas, with existing economic, geopolitical and energy imbalances reinforced.  

 

Ash from fossil fuel burning seeps into waste water at a thermal power station in Belchatów, Poland

Kacper Kowalski/Panos Pictures

 

EFFICIENCY’S THE WORD

The more that can be done to limit the amount of energy we use, the more feasible the task of converting the world’s energy systems to meet a target of net-zero emissions by 2050 will be.

The International Energy Agency’s recent report on how to reach net zero envisages overall global energy use falling 8 per cent by 2050, despite serving a global economy twice as big and 2 billion more people than today.

Achieving this will require a string of measures to improve efficiency and check demand. This means everything from insulating houses better, to reduce energy requirements during cold winters when there is less solar power available, to making appliances more efficient and encouraging people to drive less even if they have electric cars. The danger is that big increases in energy demand from some sectors, such as video streaming, cryptocurrencies, gaming and private jet flights, could cancel out any gains.

Many companies justify using more energy because they get it from renewable sources. But if increased energy demand is met using existing renewable energy sources that could otherwise be displacing fossil fuel generation, it doesn’t get us any closer to net zero.

To make progress, companies must build additional wind or solar projects. A few, such as Apple, are now doing this.