@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green Further, we’ve never faced a climate crisis before, and we may not get our act together, but we should and I hope we will. If we do, those actions will be unprecedented and rapid, and that will make many things possible that weren’t possible before.
jgkoomey
joined 2 years ago
@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green My own view is that just because it’s never happened before doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. Also, as we shift from combustion based electricity generation (which has 50-60% combustion losses) to renewables we will simply eliminate half of the primary energy associated with fossil electricity generation, which will substantially accelerate the reduction in PE/GDP. The Roser tweet also gives more data, so it’s worth looking more.
@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green There are people who are skeptical about ABSOLUTE decoupling, which means they think relative decoupling will not be enough to meet climate goals or even to reduce absolute energy consumption. I personally think there’s no reason why absolute decoupling isn’t possible, but those arguing for this point of view point to history and find very few examples of it.
@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green What the graph shows is that there was rough constancy in energy/GDP for the US from 1949 through about 1970, then the ratio of PE to GDP dropped substantially almost continuously for the next almost five decades.
@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green It’s important to distinguish “relative decoupling” from “absolute decoupling”. To state that there’s a 1 to 1 relationship between GDP and primary energy use is a statement about relative decoupling, and the evidence disproving such a statement is very strong. Here’s a graph from our 2015 article updated to 2019 (working on an update through 2022 now).
@nebulousmenace @urlyman @ajsadauskas @green Saul Griffith has been really great at explaining this issue. We don’t need to replace fossil primary energy completely, because so much of it is just waste from combustion losses that simply go away when you switch to non combustion electricity generation like renewables. Saul Griffith. 2021. Electrify: An optimist’s playbook for our clean energy future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://amzn.to/31naqTU
@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green There is not a one to one correlation between energy and GDP, and there hasn’t been such a relationship for decades. Richard F. Hirsh & Jonathan G. Koomey. 2015. Electricity Consumption and Economic Growth: A New Relationship with Significant Consequences?. The Electricity Journal 28: 72-84. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tej.2015.10.002. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040619015002067
@urlyman @ajsadauskas @green We talk about this more here: Koomey, Jonathan, Zachary Schmidt, Karl Hausker, and Dan Lashof. 2023. "Abandon the idea of an “optimal economic path” for climate policy." Invited Commentary for WIREs Climate Change. vol. e850, July 2. [http://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.850 ]