Article by Eric Worrell
“Much cheaper than you think”
The energy transition will be much cheaper than you think
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However, this bit of consensus among climate activists and carbon addicts is actually wrong. The cost of a green world economy will be much lower than either group imagines. … Such estimates often form the basis for decisions. They range from about $3 trillion per year ($4.6 trillion) to nearly $12 trillion per year, which is a really big number. But these numbers are exaggerated in four important ways.
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The incremental cost of abatement could be less than $1 trillion per year, or less than 1% of global GDP—not trivial, but not an unaffordable pipe dream either. …
…The IEA's modeling found that achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 would require an annual investment of $5 trillion in clean energy by 2030. two-thirds of clean energy investment. …
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Learn more: https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/the-energy-transition-will-be-much-cheaper-than-you-think-20241119-p5krqa
AFR is Australia's premier financial newspaper.
I'm not sure which model they used to come up with these numbers, but one area where these types of models often fail is in the fallacy of thinking that renewable energy is a one-to-one exchange of conventional energy. One thousand megawatts of nuclear reactor capacity is not the same as one thousand megawatts of solar or wind power installations. Nuclear power is reliable and can continue to work at night.
As for the “affordable” amount being discussed, the unit of measure I’ve recently chosen for proposed climate investments is the cost of building a starship.
As early as the 1950s, scientists in Manhattan launched a series of projects to investigate the peaceful uses of nuclear explosives. Building instant seaports, greening the Sahara desert and novel ways of generating energy are among the ideas being considered. But the most interesting idea to me is that they found a feasible way to build a manned starship using 1950s technology – the Orion program (search “momentum limited” in the link to see starship).
We're not talking about StarCraft here, it would be a very slow trip – it would take about 120 years to reach the nearest star. But it's much better than decades or thousands of years, which is the best that other currently available technologies can offer.
The cost was estimated at 0.1 (10%) of the U.S. gross national product—$367 billion at the time. If we stick to this percentage, in today's dollars, the cost of building a manned spacecraft is about 0.1% x US GDP $27 trillion = $2.7 trillion. GNP is a slightly different measure of revenue than GDP, but I think $2.7 trillion per Starship is a reasonable ballpark figure, especially if you're planning to build a production line.
For $3-12 trillion per year, you could build up to four starships per year. Within a few centuries, with such expenditures, we could colonize the asteroid belt and some of the nearest star systems, and send human explorers (or their descendants) on grand tours of our corner of the galaxy.
$3-12 trillion per year could buy us a United Federation of Planets, the starting point for a Kardashov Type 3 civilization.
Proposed climate investments for the Energy Transition would, at best, deliver an energy infrastructure comparable to what we already have, but when the cost is measured in starship units, it seems “much cheaper than you think”.
Correction (EW): Corrected byline citation.
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