In 2023, the Climate Policy Initiative’s Global Landscape of Climate Finance 2023 report, annual climate finance flows surpassed USD 1 trillion for the first time in 2021, reaching almost USD 1.3 trillion in 2021/2022. This represents a doubling compared to 2019/2020 levels.
Paris Accords came into effect in 2016. U.S. CO2 emissions fell 14% between 2005 and 2016. This was before the Paris Accords. Coal-to-gas switching in the power sector was the largest driver, accounting for 33% of the emissions reduction in 2016. China is in the accords and China’s power, coal and emissions increased. The accords are voluntary promises with no enforcement failing to meet self created goals. Countries decide what they want to promise and almost all are not on track to meet promises they got to make. Trillions of dollars. Already over $6 trillion but global emissions are still increasing.
It appears to be mostly to move money from one country to another or to extract money from governments.
If nuclear power plants were made at the cost of nuclear power in South Korea or China or France in the 1980s then it would be about $3-5 billion per gigawatt. 200 Gigawatts per year of nuclear power could be made at a cost of $1 trillion per year. This would be 750 million tons of CO2 reduced each year and accumulating. After 10 years at pace, it would be 7.5 billion tons per year. This is costly but the powerplants would also pay for themselves with electricity generated.
The high costs associated with many climate change mitigation strategies contrast sharply with more cost-effective biological solutions:
Urban tree planting projects can cost between $15-30 per ton of CO2 removed, with some estimates as low as $10 per ton.
Natural forest regeneration and plantations offer even more cost-effective solutions. A recent study found that reforestation provides 10.3 times more carbon abatement below US$20 per tCO2 than previous IPCC estimates.
Nature – Cost-effectiveness of natural forest regeneration and plantations for climate mitigation
Using the more cost-effective method at each location, the 30 year, time-discounted abatement potential of reforestation below US$50 per tCO2 is 31 billion tons of CO2. In a hypothetical case in which all this land was reforested using the more cost-effective method, the total gross cost would be US$4.00 trillion, of which US$1.67 trillion would be implementation cost while US$2.33 trillion would be opportunity cost. This cost would be offset by US$3.29 trillion revenue from the harvest and sale of wood products from plantations, resulting in a net cost of US$711 billion (−US$670–US$914 billion below US$20–100 per tCO2). It is actually profitable to grow more wood. The opportunity cost is something that needs to consider. There can be plans to reduce implementation costs and locations with lower opportunity costs.
There are biological projects where the cost of CO2 removal is positive (people can make money) or less than $1 per ton of CO2.
The median abatement cost for natural regeneration is US$23.80 per tCO2, while for plantations it’s US$23.00 per tCO2.
Biological projects, particularly large-scale tree planting and forest regeneration, offer significantly more cost-effective carbon removal:
A new study indicates there is up to 10 times more low-cost carbon removal potential from well-planned reforestation projects than previous official estimates.
Plantations would be profitable even without carbon payments across 28.3% of suitable areas.
The 30-year, time-discounted abatement potential of reforestation below US$50 per tCO2 is 31.4 GtCO2, which is 44% more than natural regeneration alone or 39% more than plantations alone. $1.3 trillion per year should be able to reduce 20-40 billion tons of CO2 per year but it has not because it is going to scams and waste.
Most of the trillion dollars per year is for regular building, energy projects that would usually be built and then they get some climate subsidy. There is also $200+ billion/year for project studies and things which are mainly of no real value.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Over millions of years the primary climate norm has been ice age. We are in a warm period that over cycles of millions of years has usually not lasted much longer than it has been warmer right now. I don’t know what to make of it but there is evidence that there are magnetic shifts in between changes from hot to cold and cold to hot and unfortunately the magnetic pole has been scooting all over the place at an increasing speed. People may find that warming is the least of our problems.
No, earth magnetism is generated by fluid motions in the liquid iron outer core, the hot, swirling iron-rich fluid conducts electricity and creates magnetic fields.
However, the system is chaotic, and small changes in flow can lead to significant, long-term changes in field direction and intensity. This has nothing to do with climate.
Ice ages are due to changes in the earth’s orbital shape (narrower or broader ellipses) that move the point of perihelion (minimum distance from the sun) probably combined with long solar cycles. These fluctuations are gradual, occur over tens of thousands of years, and occur periodically over millions of years.
The climate changes we see now are orders of magnitude faster and are due to industrialization and utilization of fossil fuels, and we know that because we see that they correlate with the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere started with the Industrial Revolution and the use of massive amounts of coal first, followed by all the other fossil fuels.
Regards
Worth bearing in mind that adding RE to electric power systems is less effective than modeled.
In real life, coal and gas plants have to run at low power levels in order to back up wind and solar. These plants are less efficient at low power levels.
Per grok
At 90% of Full Power: NGCC plants are known to operate very efficiently at high loads. Typical heat rates at around 90% of full power can range from approximately 6,500 to 7,500 Btu/kWh. This range reflects the efficiency gains from operating near full capacity, where both the gas turbine and the heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) with the steam turbine operate at high efficiency.
At Minimum Generation Level: When NGCC plants operate at minimum load, their efficiency decreases, leading to higher heat rates. The heat rate at minimum generation can exceed 10,000 Btu/kWh. This increase is due to the fact that at lower loads, the gas turbine and steam turbine cycles are not as efficient, and auxiliary loads like house loads do not scale down proportionally with power output, thus reducing overall efficiency.
“How Does $1.3 Trillion/Year Disappear Without Really Fixing Anything?”
Well, the answer is quite simple and quite well documented: climate change is a runaway process (like a rope breaking under an increasing load; as soon as a given amount of fibers in the rope break, it is not enough to stop increasing the load as the rope has been weakened, and you have to decrease the load significantly or the fibers will continue breaking, requiring further reductions in the load)
Instead of tackling the issue in a timely manner, specific interest groups and political parties delayed the intervention and are now complaining that it is too expensive.
Well, many aspects of the climate change runaway problem have been known for decades, and the guys complaining that it is so expensive are the same that considered it a “watermelon issue,” a leftist trick against big oil, and so on.
It is like curing a disease, if you act at the early sumptomps your success rate is higher and the therapy is usually less expensive than trying to save you while you are on life support.
Climatologists publicly discussed the risks of a runaway process and were ignored.
-They explained that once the temperature starts to rise, permafrost will thaw releasing decomposition gasses (CO2 and methane) and therefore increasing the greenhouse effect even if we stopped our manmade emissions completely.
-They explained that once the ice starts to melt, earth’s reflectivity will decrease, therefore increasing the amount of sunlight absorbed… increasing the temperature even without any emission.
-While clouds reflect sunlight away, an increase in temperature causes an increase in the amount of water vapor that can be in the atmosphere before reaching saturation (and cloud formation), and water vapor is a greenhouse gas, so this also increases the runaway effect.
All this stuff has been known.
The people who ridiculed the experts who denied the validity of what they were saying are now the same people who somehow imply dishonesty and wastefulness when EVERYBODY IN THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY told us that the more we dragged our feet, the more it would become expensive and less effective.
I know, Brian, that your post is meant to show the big wastefulness of the US federal government and that the new leadership will clean the house; well, the new leadership is an expression of the groups that made it so expensive and less expensive in the first place.
So the answer to “How Does $1.3 Trillion/Year Disappear Without Really Fixing Anything?” is just delay meaningful action until you need 13 trillions, or 130 trillions just to make a dent in the issue.
Regards
Sorry I don’t get your point.
I personally believe that Climate Change is Real but is basically a ‘non-issue’ that in no way should stop us from living the life we want, generally. An easy technological mitigation if not an outright solution over the coming years, decades, and generations. And there are many benefits such as viable CO2 levels that assist certain crucial plant types to flourish quicker. Most worthwhile technological paths, through various industries, have options that reduce emissions, etc., at a minimal ‘premium’. Fair enough.
All that you say may be reasonable and true and well-studied. But so what?
You are not presenting ‘real consequences’ to any of the mechanisms listed.
You could tell me that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth, guaranteed in 10 years, unless I give up red meat, smoking ,and drinking – well, geez, guess what, we’re losing the Earth, because I am not doing that. That’s the Point.
You are not presenting an effective risk analysis that people can judge for themselves – a sky-is-falling attitude is the best indication of political and cultural extreme bias.
So, provide consequences and timelines: 3 foot sea rise in 50 years? who cares? 10C temp change in southern England due to flow patterns – so what? 60C summers in the mediterranean – get an AC; people live in -10C ‘uncomfortable’ conditions half the Year – take that Al Gore. I am the First One to rally to worthwhile causes and pursue technological and economic solutions, but please — bring us a real problem.
The question in the title was: “How Does $1.3 Trillion/Year Disappear Without Really Fixing Anything?”.
My initial comment was not about a solution; my comment tried to answer the question in the title, and given a certain political view here on NBF, I assume that such a question was more intended to cause outrage and suggest that a lot of money was wasted without producing results (maybe I am wrong). I just wanted to point out that all those potentially outraged by such waste are the same ones who made the process more costly and inefficient.
As a rule of thumb, I strongly suggest following the recommendations of the experts in a given field (especially if their predictions turn out to be true) as they are the ones who know the most about a given subject, but in recent years, especially in the current administration, this is not considered a value.
You said:
“You could tell me that an asteroid is going to hit the Earth, guaranteed in 10 years, unless I give up red meat, smoking ,and drinking – well, geez, guess what, we’re losing the Earth, because I am not doing that. That’s the Point.”
And you have the right to say and believe whatever you want, but realistically speaking, it is not going to go that way, because it is not an asteroid.
People think that it is about “saving the planet”, but it is about “saving us from a planet becoming more hostile.” Climate change will impact our agriculture and farming, so yeah, we might all end up losing access to tobacco and steaks.
Regarding possible solutions:
I am Italian, and I lived in Italy, Switzerland,the U.S., and Sweden. I was astonished by the level of wastefulness of U.S. living standards (and I do not come from a rural area in the third world). Here on NBF we talk about big plans like geoengineering, but there are high-impact solutions that are very low-tech (so not so fancy):
-enforce building codes that promote high energy efficiency houses (and high insulation windows!) in the US. I have been in more than one multi-million dollar house so poorly insulated that you burn or freeze as soon as you turn off the AC or heating.
-Same thing for cars and freight transport, U.S: are mostly flat and railways were part of its history, yet railways now are horrible, and cars are oversized for their use (probably 1/5 of the pickups are used by people that really need them) make significant tax deduction for those who need pickups and disincentivize everyone else (yes, I mean with TAXES on big and heavy cars).
-Promote the development of public transport! Aside from a few cities, in the US, public transport is seen as something only poor people use or wasteful. Real public transport (not that demented thing that the Vegas hyperloop is) is enormously efficient.
-Garbage management in U.S. is horrible (and in Italy too), and there is very little garbage sorting and recycling compared to Europe, this is solved through education: I learned to sort garbage and recycle when I was in primary school, and it was a sort of civic duty because in Italy the illegal disposal of trash was handled by the mafia (unfortunately in some regions it is still a problem so I do not consider the issue solved in Italy).
All the solutions above have the same common theme: you do not need to invent fusion or geoengineering Earth. You probably can, but it will probably take decades to truly understand geoengineering, or how to alter the ecosystem in the way we want without side effects; we know now how to sort glass and garbage, we know now that most people do not need a 3-tons pickup, and so on.
Nobody can force you to give up your steaks and cigarettes, but maybe you can consider that if you (and us collectively) cut a bit on them, we might be able to enjoy them for the years to come, even if fusion reactors will never be a thing, if it will still take decades to build a fission power plan, and there will be no easy out of the box solution to the problem.
And sure there will always be those who do not give a s…t but, again, it is also a matter of education. Most people now do not listen to experts, because they have been told not to do so, they have been told that freedom of speech implies that every opinion is the same and that on the subject of the shape of the earth the opinion of the president of flat earth society should be considered as valid as the one of the NASA director. This is simply not true, and people for centuries knew that it was not true.
So maybe also working on education and understanding the issue might help.
regards
Ocean seeding is banned by international law and yet wildfire gas and particulate reabsorbtion studies have proven the mt to gt scale and effect that ocean seeding can have on CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Economically we don’t really have a desire to truly reduce CO2 levels and the vast majority of schemes are just basic economics and geopolitics completely separate to true climate considerations on their own. There is a vast climate showboat floating around that is quite detached from real strategies to combat climate change. We can pretend or actually do what is needed.