Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [102]
This particular aspect of coal use has continued to wind through American history. In the past the best solutions have been a combination of technical advances and new regulations. For example, long-distance electrical transmission allowed the locus of coal burning to move outside central cities. Although this helped the immediate environment and health of urban areas, the shift to out-of-town power production meant that the impacts that did occur became less visible. Smoke was still coming out, but people no longer saw it soiling their linens.
Eventually, emissions caught up with this fix. Sulfur and nitrogen oxide that coal plants pumped out form nitric and sulfuric acids in the atmosphere. Then they fall back to earth with rather nasty consequences for plants, animals, and people alike as acid rain. In the latter half of the twentieth century acid rain began to damage human and natural environments at the continental level. It didn’t matter how far away they put the plants.4 But again, technology and regulation came together to reduce coal’s impacts. Federal legislation in 1990 created a system of tradeable allowances that commoditized emissions. With this price on sulfur emissions, “scrubbers” were installed on manufacturing plants and the problem was mostly fixed. When the cost of the sulfur started to hit companies’ bottom lines instead of America’s, utilities figured out how to cut the emissions, even though it’s taken decades.5
For a long time polluters were willing and able to believe that “the solution to pollution is dilution.”6 Their reasoning was essentially that the earth was big, humans were small, and the globe could take it. Though some scientists tried to call attention to the potential of the carbon dioxide produced in combustion to derange the atmosphere, few industrial types believed that humans could cause the greenhouse effect until well into the 1980s.7 (And of course many still don’t.)
Nonetheless, the mounting evidence of climate change—and its biological impacts—shows that humans truly have reached the global scale with our pollution. Dilution is no longer possible: The nasty effects of coal burning have hit their geographical limit. The world is warming and weirding as the physics of the new earth change longtime patterns in how water and wind flow across our globe.
Unlike previous episodes with coal, there is no natural governmental body to regulate its consumption. Cities can’t do it. Countries can’t do it. The United Nations has been unable to do it. Worse yet, the more that developed countries do to destroy demand for coal, the cheaper they actually make it, encouraging greater consumption in countries that have more pressing concerns like providing basic lighting services to their citizens than mitigating climate change.8
The solution, which Google formalized into a neat equation in late 2007, is pretty simple.
RE < C
Renewable energy (RE) has to become cheaper than coal (C). In Europe and even the United States, it may be possible to make the C more expensive. But in the Indonesias, Chinas, and Indias of the world, the Russias and Ukraines, whether or not that will be possible remains unclear. At the very least the political negotiations are going to be tough. And in the end, what’s necessary is to actually keep the coal in the ground, not reduce the rate at which it’s burned. This is not going to be easy. “It’s hard to win a fight against a cheap BTU,” Macdonald likes to say.9
The RE has to get a lot cheaper. Much of this book is dedicated to the process of how technologies get better: We make more of something and each one gets cheaper; we figure out how to optimize our factories and supply chains so we lower our costs; financial institutions see our