Nothing comes for free. the world energy system from fossil fuels, Renewable sources will also produce carbon emissionssince its construction Wind turbines, solar panels and other new infrastructure consume energy, some of which necessarily comes from fossil fuels.
The secret is to go fast to reduce this perverse trend as much as possible. According to research published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” the good news is that If this infrastructure is implemented quickly, these emissions will be greatly reduced., as more renewable energy from the start will mean far less fossil fuels will be needed to drive change. For the first time, this study calculated the cost of an ecological transition in terms of greenhouse gases, not dollars.
“The message is that energy will be needed to rebuild the global energy system, and we need to take that into account,” said lead author Corey Lesk, who led the research as a doctoral student at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Columbia Climate School (United States)– “No matter how you do it, it can’t be ignored. But the more renewable energy sources can be included in the beginning, the longer you can make the transition with them.”
The researchers calculated the potential emissions produced by the use of energy in mining, manufacturing, transportation, construction and other activities needed to build large farms of solar panels and wind turbines.along with more limited infrastructure for geothermal and other energy sources.
Previous research had estimated the cost of new energy infrastructure in dollars: $3.5 trillion per year by 2050 to reach net zero emissions according to one study, or nearly $14 trillion for the US alone in the same period according to another. The new study appears to be the first to estimate the cost in greenhouse gases.
At the current rate of production of renewable infrastructure (predicted to cause 2.7 degrees C warming by the end of the century), the researchers calculate: These activities will produce 185 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2100.. This is equivalent to five or six years of current global emissions putting a strong additional load on the atmosphere.
Halve the effect
Again, if the world builds the same infrastructure fast enough limit heating to 2 degrees -The current international agreement aims to be below this figure-, these emissions would be cut in half, to 95,000 million tons. And if a truly ambitious course of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is pursued, the cost will be just 20 billion tonnes of current global emissions in 2100, just six months’ worth.
The researchers point out that all their estimates are probably quite low. On the one hand, they do not consider the materials and construction required for new electrical transmission lines, nor the batteries for storage, both of which consume a lot of energy and resources.
They do not include the cost Replace gasoline and diesel vehicles with electric vehiclesnor to make existing buildings more energy efficient. Also, the study only takes into account carbon dioxide emissions, which currently cause about 60% of current warming, and does not account for other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide.
Other effects of the transition to renewable energy are difficult to quantify, but can be important. All of these new hi-tech hardware It will require not only large quantities of base metals such as copper, iron and nickel, but also rare elements. previously less used as lithium, cobalt, yttrium and neodymium.
Extraction of raw materials
Many raw materials would probably have to come from hitherto unspoiled places. with fragile environments such as the deep sea, the African rainforest and the rapidly melting Greenland. Solar panels and wind turbines will directly consume large tracts of land with potential impacts on ecosystems and the people who live there. “We set the lower bound. The upper bound could be much higher, but the result is encouraging,” Lesk said of the study’s estimates.
Lesk believes that in the coming years, given the recent price drops in renewable technologies, 80-90% of what the world needs can be establishedespecially if existing subsidies for fossil fuel production are diverted to renewable energy sources.
If we follow a more ambitious path, all this problem will disappear,” he says. If we don’t start investing in the next 5 to 10 years, that’s just bad news.As part of the study, Lesk and colleagues also looked at carbon emissions from adaptation to sea level rise and found that building levees and moving cities inland, if needed, would produce 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2100 by 2100 in the degree 2 scenario.
This is again will be only part of the adaptation cost.. They did not consider infrastructure to contain inland flooding, irrigate areas that might be drier, adapt buildings to higher temperatures, or other necessary projects.
“Despite these limitations, we came to the conclusion that: Including CO2 emissions The authors write that they have geophysical and political significance in the wider climate transition. If decarbonization is accelerated, emissions from the transition could be greatly reduced, giving new urgency to political advances in the rapid deployment of renewable energy sources.”