Is Decarbonization today’s Malthusian crunch?
Some reasons to be incredibly optimistic about our ability to confront climate change — and why the battle might have already been won!
In 1798, Thomas Malthus’ book An Essay on the Principle of Population was published and very famously warned of an impending apocalypse. The problem he foresaw was that the world’s population was growing exponentially (doubling every 25 years) while food production was only increasing increasing linearly. Given a few more population doublings and the inability of food production to keep up, he warned of global famine and misery. And so for the two hundred years since Malthus published this work, the world has worried and waited for this unavoidable collapse.
Fast forward to today with the global population around 8 billion (compared to about 1 billion in Malthus’ time), and as we know the “Malthusian Crunch” still has not materialized*.
*(to be sure we still suffer from localized food shortages and famines, and inequity is a huge problem, but today our civilization is capable of producing generally enough food to feed everyone if only we had the will and incentives to distribute it to all who needed it).
What did Malthus’ prediction of doom and gloom get so wrong? Well for one his population growth model was too aggressive (we’ve had only three doublings in the last 200 years). But more importantly for this post, he missed that there was another exponential trend lurking in the background, and it was one who’s effects would come to dominate the whole system. He missed the fact that the technology of food production was itself on an exponential.
The key observation is that food production has grown exponentially along side of population because production depends not only on land but also critically…on technology. With advances in seed breeding (starting with hybrids and more recently genetic engineering), fertilizers (The Haber-Bosch process which led to low cost nitrogen fertilizers was invented 1913 might be responsible for feeding more people than any other technical breakthrough in history), irrigation, mechanization and more (steam engines, fossil fuels, and everything else that drove the industrial revolution also accelerated food production), the food supply can stay well ahead of the population curve. Even more generally, advances in tech across society — water use, manufacturing, disease control, information management, transport, communications — can keep production rising ahead of population.
That brings us to the apocalypse our time: climate change. Or maybe not? Taking a lesson from where Malthus got things wrong, let’s check in on the status of one candidate technology that might be able to decarbonize our entire civilization and deliver us from climate catastrophe. Let’s focus on a leading candidate for global scale zero carbon electricity production: solar + battery storage.
2019 was the year that solar became the cheapest source of electricity on the planet
A candidate for the most under appreciated fact of 2019-2020: since 1976 the price of solar panels have dropped by 99.6%!
And so when constructing a new utility-scale power plant, in most geographies, solar is now today the cheapest type of plant to build.
Solar is — TODAY — the cheapest form of new power on the planet. This is a big underreported accomplishment.
Is the last decade, solar has gone from a pipe dream to just about the cheapest source of energy available. The implications for this are really big for people thinking about decarbonization. For sectors (like, say, real estate which is responsible for 40% of GHG emissions) where electricity use is a primary driver of GHG emissions, the grid might deliver a carbon free future without the need for radical change.
It really looks like within this decade, solar is on pace to deliver electricity “too cheap to meter” that is also carbon free.
Storage
Of course you also need batteries in order to store solar energy during the day to power things at night. And we see a similar phenomena here, every single electricity storage technology is diving in cost as its installed base scales up.
Something that feels like a Moore’s Law at work: Each doubling of installed electrical storage capacity is associated with the same relative reduction in price.
Here’s a simpler view of just lithium-ion prices and the amazing improvements in just the last ten years:
We’ve gotten used to these kinds of price/performance gains in much of our day-to-day technology like phones and TV’s. But the amazing thing is that these same kinds of gains are accruing in areas (solar + batteries) that will directly confront our GHG problems.
Conclusions
Today with the historical GHG emissions that are already in the atmosphere, climate change is happening. And there is lots of important and necessary work being done here, from sequestration to mitigation and making sure that the most vulnerable aren’t disproportionately affected.
BUT, the part of the work in front of us that is focused on limiting further GHG emissions, this looks like a problem that might be solved sooner and more effectively than we might have imagined.
In the same way that a few key technologies (like seed hybridization and the Haber-Bosch process) got us out of the Malthusian Crunch, I believe that photovoltaics + batteries will similarly deliver us from the Climate Crisis, and will do so within the decade.
This is not to say that there isn’t work to do, companies to build, technology to engineer, projects to finance, regulations to pass, etc. It’s just that from a longer view, I think you can make a pretty safe bet today that our children and grandchildren will not be focused on the decarbonization problem (of course they will undoubtably have other problems to solve!).
Predictions
Thanks to solar, within this decade:
- We again begin to think of a world where electricity is too cheap to meter,
- We focus our climate change prevention efforts on sequestering historical emissions and mitigating the worst effects of a changing climate, instead of on reducing future emissions,
- Most decarbonization efforts will entail a strong push to electrify everything — any tech that today uses natural gas, petroleum, coal, or any fossil fuel will be replaced by one that does so via electricity. Lots of great climate tech investments to be made here…
