6 Claims About Climate Change

We're not running out of oil, global warming is real, and fossil fuels can remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

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Are we running out of oil? No.

The idea that we are running out of oil is a myth. People discover new reserves of oil faster than we use them, so even though we burn a lot of oil, the total quantity of proven oil reserves actually grows over time. Last year, proven oil reserves in the United States increased 9% and US oil production increased 6%. Worldwide proven oil reserves are currently over 1.5 trillion barrels. Unproven reserves are estimated around 3 trillion barrels and more oil is being discovered all the time. When you hear that “we only have X years of oil left,” X is just the total amount of proven reserves divided by current consumption. It does not account for the fact that oil reserves increase because we find more oil.

We sometimes hear the slogan “we live on a finite planet” which is true in the sense that Earth’s size is not literally infinite. But remember, finite numbers can be enormous. It is true that there is technically some maximum amount of oil available on Earth, but we are nowhere near that limit. At current rates of consumption, we could continue to burn oil for centuries¹ if we wanted to.

Do volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than humans? No.

A common misconception is that large volcanoes emit more carbon dioxide than all human activities combined. It is true that a large volcanic eruption releases an enormous amount of CO2 while it is erupting. But the eruption lasts only a few hours and then the volcano lies dormant for many years. Human activities release carbon dioxide 24/7, 365. In total, annual human CO2 emissions are many times greater than the total annual CO2 emissions from all volcanoes on Earth.

Do human activities substantially contribute to global warming? Yes.

Most people who claim to base their views directly on the scientific evidence are lying. Very few people actually read climate science papers. As with most scientific questions, we need to ask people who have looked at the evidence to summarize it for us.

Some people “trust the experts” in a quasi-religious fashion and they believe in human-caused global warming on that basis. Some other people disbelieve the anthropogenic global warming thesis because they are reflexively skeptical of the Regime’s official experts.

I believe that human activities substantially contribute to global warming. Most of the smartest people who I have met believe it. Unlike race and IQ or economic heterodoxy, I have not found any smart thinkers who have made the case that the conventional account of human-caused global warming is false.

Smart heterodox thinkers such as the George Mason University economics faculty are open to unconventional views, but as far as I know none of them deny human-caused global warming.

This issue is clouded by the fact that there is a fanatical and dishonest green lobby which promotes false claims about a wide range of environmental topics. For example, many wild predictions of enormous sea level changes have failed to come to pass. However, the other side of the debate also has a dishonest lobby funded lavishly by the fossil fuel industry.

Do we need to stop burning fossil fuels in order to stop global warming? No.

Geoengineering

Greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide increase the degree to which the Earth absorbs solar energy because greenhouse gasses reflect heat back to Earth. There are also anti-greenhouse gasses such as sulfur dioxide which decrease the degree to which Earth absorbs solar energy because they reflect sunlight away into space.

Projects have been proposed to spray sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere in order to increase the albedo and stop global warming. This is called geoengineering. The cost of such a project would be only about $5 billion per year, which is a tiny amount compared to the global economy. For comparison, even if it were politically possible to stop all carbon emissions, the cost of abandoning fossil fuels would run in the tens of trillions of dollars per year, which would be an enormous reduction in living standards for everyone on Earth.

You might worry that spraying chemicals in the atmosphere would have negative effects, but large quantities of sulfur dioxide are already emitted every year by volcanoes. The amount from volcanoes tends to stay in the lower atmosphere where it is less effective at cooling the planet. We could take a smaller amount of sulfur dioxide, spray it high in the stratosphere, and get a much greater cooling effect.

Even if all CO2 emissions stopped tomorrow, the planet would continue to warm up because of the CO2 already in the atmosphere. Geoengineering with sulfur dioxide gives us the ability to end global warming immediately.

Carbon Capture and Sequestration

Geoengineering with sulfur dioxide is not a perfect solution because it creates an unstable system. The sulfur dioxide breaks down and would have to be replenished every few years. If humanity stopped replenishing it, sunlight would stream into the Earth’s atmosphere, hit the accumulated CO2 and warm the planet very rapidly. The best solution is to use geoengineering with sulfur dioxide in the short term, and in the long term reduce CO2 in the atmosphere by other means.

Carbon capture technology is improving. Direct air capture (sucking CO2 directly out of the air) costs about $250 per ton and point capture (removing CO2 at the powerplant where the fossil fuels are burned) costs about $100 per ton. Total carbon dioxide emissions are about 37 billion tons annually, so it is currently prohibitively expensive to capture and sequester all emissions. But if the technology continues to improve, it will become a viable option.

Carbon Capture Can Be Run With Fossil Fuels

Burning one ton of natural gas releases about 2.75 tons of CO2. It takes somewhere between 1 and 10 gigajoules of energy to capture and sequester one ton of CO2 from the air. One ton of natural gas contains about 50 gigajoules of energy. So one ton of natural gas contains more than enough energy to sequester all of its CO2 emissions.

This doesn’t violate the law of conservation of energy because CO2 is not the only substance emitted when natural gas is burned. It also emits water.

Natural gas is mostly methane. When burned it combines with oxygen in the air. The carbon combines with oxygen to produce CO2. The hydrogen combines with oxygen to produce water.

CH4 + 2O2 → CO2 + 2H2O

It is not yet practical to do this because the sequestration equipment is so expensive, but in principle we could use the energy contained in fossil fuels to suck all the CO2 emissions out of the air and have net zero or net negative emissions.

This is already being done in a limited way at many natural gas power plants. Capturing CO2 from power plant exhaust is much easier and cheaper than capturing CO2 directly from the air. Some natural gas powerplants burn some extra natural gas in order to power their carbon sequestration systems. These point capture technologies can remove 90% of CO2.

Do measures to reduce your household’s electricity usage help the environment? Generally No.

We often hear that one ought to be conscientious about one’s personal electricity use. This message is often given to children at a young age.

The US government forces manufacturers of household appliances to build appliances that use less electricity than they really need. By law, appliances like refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, and water heaters must not use more than a certain amount of electricity. These regulations are the reason that dishwashers no longer work as well as they used to. If there were a way to design dishwashers to achieve the same result with less electricity, dishwasher manufacturers would have already done that.

Switching to a dishwasher that uses 25% less electricity is not a real way to fight climate change. The vast majority of energy is used for transportation or industrial uses. Residential use is only 15% of total energy use. Most household energy use is for heating and cooling, not electric appliances like dishwashers. Even if everyone on earth switched to household appliances that use 25% less electricity, the effect on total emissions would be tiny. The exhortations to use less energy-intensive household appliances are best understood as a scam, not a legitimate effort to combat climate change.

Big exception: electric cars. Transportation is a larger share of total energy use than all residential energy use combined. If everyone switched to electric cars, that would have a substantial effect on total carbon emissions.

Will climate change destroy the planet? No.

The idea that climate change will destroy the planet is the stuff of science fiction. The Earth will not become uninhabitable and climate change will not drive humans extinct.

The most well-informed person I have talked to about this is Robin Hanson who told me that with climate change “all the risk is in the tails.” By far the most likely outcome is that the effects of climate change will not be too bad, but there is a small probability that rising temperatures will change the global wind patterns, which would be a disaster.

Such a disaster would not end human civilization, but it would be very bad. Even if the chance is only 1%, it is prudent to take steps to prevent the Earth’s temperature from rising too much.

How to stop global warming

In my view, this is the best approach to climate issues:

1. Spray sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere to reduce the degree to which the Earth absorbs the sun’s light back to the level it was at in 1800. Increase use of fossil fuels.

   1. To address ocean acidification, put basic substances such as lime in the ocean. Especially concentrate on the parts of the oceans that contain coral reefs.

2. With the increased economic output derived from cheap fossil fuel energy, invest heavily in carbon capture technology and set up a carbon cap and trade system.

3. Around 2050, slowly bring down the carbon cap. Increase use of solar panels and electric vehicles.

4. Use improved carbon capture technology to suck huge amounts of CO2 out of the air. Get to net zero global CO2 emissions, and then net negative. Gradually bring CO2 concentrations down to 300 ppm. Air travel and some heavy industries will continue to use fossil fuels, but all the emissions can be removed by carbon sequestration.

1. Two points for those who are skeptical that there is lots of oil left to be found:

1. The rate of new oil discovery has not slowed down and has actually been increasing in recent years, driven by new technologies such as fracking.

2. The deep ocean remains unexplored. All off-shore drilling so far has been done near the coast. Oil is probably just as common under the sea as under land. Two thirds of the Earth’s surface is covered in ocean.