MIT Debate on the Costs of Net-Zero Decarbonization Reveals the Strength of Realism and the Risks of Crisis Thinking

There was a debate at MIT the other day among four energy thinkers regarding the arcane subject of net-zero decarbonization and the costs of doing it. The talkfest was was structured as one of those classic debates where a specific resolution is debated by those who would vote positively and negatively on it.

This was the resolution used to spur discussion at MIT:

RESOLVED: The total cost of global net-zero decarbonization by the latter half of this century is well worth the projected global benefits.

I don't like the phrasing at all and would have preferred something along these lines:

RESOLVED: The total cost of global net-zero decarbonization by the latter half of this century will not produce the projected global benefits of spending all that money.

Regardless, the debate was pretty good once it got into the meat of the subject. The debaters were as follows:

The affirmative team included:

• Kerry Emanuel, MIT Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science and co-founder of MIT’s Lorenz Center, and

• Robert Pindyck, MIT Sloan School Professor of Economics and Finance and past President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.

The negative team consists of:

• Steven Koonin, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and former Under Secretary for Science, and

• Mark Mills, Executive Director of the National Center for Energy Analytics and faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s School of Engineering.

The actual debate, moderated by John Tomasi, President of Heterodox Academy, a “John Tomasi, President of Heterodox Academy, a “Movement to Protect Open Inquiry,” is offered below:

The discussion is very worthwhile and the negative team (with whom, as you might guess, I strongly side) acquitted themselves very well. The cordial nature of the debate was also wonderful and we need a great deal more of this. The discussion focused, from the outset, on risks, which was appropriate.

The one thing missing, though, was the master of assessing risk. Her name is Judith Curry and she wrote an outstanding book on it ("Climate Uncertainty and Risk") that I reviewed here. Virtually every point raised in the debate was already addressed in her book. Koonin and Mills were excellent but Curry would have added so much.

Here are some of my observations on what was said:

• Emanuel didn't impress me that much. I thought his risk arguments were weak at best. He did say this, though:
  
  I believe in the technical approach to mitigating climate change which involves a wholesale full-throated commitment to building out nuclear power supplemented by renewables. We know for sure this would work because several nations notably Sweden and France already decarbonized their electricity production using nuclear and hydro power and did this almost 50 years ago with no perceptible change in their GDP growth.
  
  Look,we can talk about discount rates and all that but the fact is that the experiment has been performed by several advanced nations who decarbonized their electricity at least with no perceptible damage to their economies and nuclear energy is also proven to be the safest technology we've invented so far, yet even my colleagues at the MIT energy initiative while privately concurring that nuclear power must be an important part of decarbonization emphasize renewables in their documents and press releases, perhaps lacking the courage of their actual convictions.
  
  The only part of that I disagree with his suggestion fossil fuels can substitute for fossil fuels. They cannot.

• Koonin was a great debater and vigorously rebutted Emanuel with fact after fact, including these outstanding comments:
  
  The resolution requires that we consider the benefits of 50-year decarbonization the time scale comes from the Paris goal of limiting global average temperature rise to 2 degrees C. Then, we must compare those benefits with the cost of achieving net zero. That comparison is complicated not least because of the uncertainties in the allegedly avoided impacts of human influences on the climate and in the costs of net zero.
  
  There's also the issue of "well worth it” to whom as well as the question of what urgency is there in reducing emissions. I have three points to make: the time scale for reduction is arbitrary, the climate threat is far from dire and the cost benefit calculus very much depends upon who's doing the

  calculation.
  
  Let me start with the parisol itself less than 2 degree rise in the global average surface temperature which has been deemed to require net zero global emissions by the latter half of this Century yet emissions continue to rise and will again be at an all-time high this year. The subtitles of the UN's annual emissions gap report give a flavor of the lack of progress. In 2023 it was “broken record temperatures hit new highs, yet world's fails to cut emissions again” and this year it was ““no more hot air please.
  
  But, even that two degree limit is not a hard one when I asked many years ago Huber, the so-called father of the two degree limit, why two degrees, he responded it's about right and it's an easy number for politicians to remember. So, all manner of chaos will not suddenly break out if we hit two or even three degrees. Next is the climate threat so dire that it requires the precipitous action of transforming the entire world's energy system in a few decades?
  
  Koonin goes on to give a definitive "No” in answer to his own question.

• Pindyck also failed to impress but, nonetheless, made this observation:

  
  I don't think we should be subsidizing electric vehicles. I don't think that's the right way to do it, but that's a separate issue…
  
  Well, that much is correct for sure.

• Mark Mills is always impressive, of course, and made these points:
  
  The German government has roughly doubled the total capacity of its electric grid primarily building solar and wind but necessarily keeping about 80% of the original grid. But, German's electric demand only increased by under 10%. The economic impact of that was to roughly triple Germany's electricity costs.
  
  This not only increased energy poverty in Germany, but makes it energy fragile, setting it up for disastrous consequences with the Ukraine War's loss of discounted Russian gas. If the solution to that problem were more wind and solar Germany would have built that. Instead, they reversed course and built massive LG import capacities and the shift was too late, though, as data shows that Germany is catastrophically de-industrializing largely because of high cost energy.
  
  Mills made many other points, of course, as he always does and explains with beautiful analogies

Watch the whole thing. It's worth your time. Realism wins!

Hat Tip: B.K.

#MIT #MarkMills #EVs #SteveKoonin #ClimateRisks #ClimateCrisis