The world’s 7 largest polluters generate more than half of all greenhouse gasses. These emissions
have made our planet 1 degree Celsius hotter - on
average - than it was at the start of the industrial revolution 150 years ago.
It can be complicated to weigh the warming effects of these different chemicals,
which vary substantially in their potency compared to CO2, and in their prevalence in the atmosphere.
To solve this, scientists devised a universal unit of measurement that quantifies the total impact of
any greenhouse gas in terms of its carbon dioxide equivalent, CO2e. This is one metric ton of CO2e.
One million metric tons is called a megaton, and one billion tons is a gigaton.
Human activity now produces over 50 gigatons of CO2e a year, but to understand exactly where
these emissions come from we can sort them by the economic sector that produced them.
As you can see, the electricity and heating sector produces
by-far the most CO2e, responsible for 30% of all emissions.
What’s far more interesting is to drill down to the countries emitting the most
within each sector, geographical categorizations I call “geosectors.”
The top 10 emitting geosectors are distributed across five countries, with half in china alone.
China creates the most agriculture emissions in the world. Overall, agriculture emissions
account for 11% of all CO2e globally, with China’s farmers and ranchers accounting for 13%
of this sector. These emissions have hardly increased though over the last 20 years,
and its population growth rate has slowed down--it is now only one-fifth of what it
was in the early 1970’s. These are positive signs, but there could be trouble on the horizon.
Because of how carbon-intensive meat production is, it is vital that the Chinese limit consumption
of beef and pork as protein sources. This will show up in the emissions-per-capita data. If
this number starts to climb, we are all in trouble as it is multiplied by 1.4 billion souls. Over the
last 30 years, as incomes have risen in China, so has meat consumption, nearly tripling to 60 kg per
person, per year. Making matters worse, the rising global demand for beef is being met by Brazil,
which has been rapidly deforesting the carbon-rich Amazon rainforest to make room for cattle ranches.
But there’s also reason to be optimistic. Meat substitutes that look and taste just like the
real thing will inevitably spread from America to the grocery stores and restaurants of China.
And, with more countries moving to tax the sources of emissions, the price of beef
and pork seems likely to rise to reflect the damage big livestock does to our environment.
Russia’s electricity and heating sector is the world’s ninth-largest source of emissions,
although it’s far less than the 1.3 gigatons it was in the early 1990’s.
This reduction is due to its strategic embrace over the last thirty years of methane - also
known as “natural gas” - which burns cleaner than coal and is more profitable to extract and export.
But there are hidden dangers to Russia’s embrace of methane natural gas. As I outlined
in the fugitive emissions geosector, far too much of the methane produced by Russia leaks.
And a molecule of methane warms the planet much more than a molecule of carbon dioxide.
The other danger is how disproportionately reliant
the Russian economy is on its energy sector compared to other countries of similar size.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Moscow could be using the profits from its lucrative energy sector
to better position itself for the future by developing its vast renewable energy resources.
Russia should be a clean energy superpower. It has the world’s largest potential energy generation
from both hydro and wind power. Its technical potential of wind
energy - the amount reasonably capturable using the latest equipment - is 50,000 TWh per year.
That staggering figure is more than 25 times
the electricity the entire Russian Federation is projected to consume ten years from now, in 2030.
Of course, the reason Russia isn’t racing to become a clean energy superpower is its current
leadership only cares about maintaining the status quo so they can continue to enrich themselves.
President Vladimir Putin and his associates have pocketed hundreds of billions of dollars
from Russian companies, mainly in the energy sector--squirreling
these vast fortunes away in hidden offshore bank accounts and foreign real estate holdings.
Highlighting the absurdity of his pro-fossil fuel stance, last year President Putin questioned wind
power by saying the movement of turbines causes “worms to come out of the soil.”
He also expressed concern for the damage being done to local birds. Now if that sounds
familiar it's because President Trump said just about the exact same thing five months later.
With an economy crippled by corruption and disproportionately reliant on fossil fuels,
how quickly the Russian people can modernize their country
will be a major factor in determining the fate of the planet.
China’s transportation sector is the eighth-largest emitter of CO2e gasses.
It would be much more were it not for the rise of affordable electric vehicles and cheap batteries,
which have already avoided hundreds of megatons of pollution already.
Beijing has made historic investments in electrified transit, with electric cars,
e-bikes, half a million e-buses, and a high speed rail network that now reaches 80% of big cities,
collectively replacing what would have been tens of billions of oil-fueled passenger trips. With
the electrification of its domestic transportation sector well underway, China’s companies are in
position to dominate the global electric vehicle and battery markets for decades. As we will see in
the upcoming episode on transportation sector solutions, China-made e-buses are already on
the streets of California. The latest models are even capable of rapid wireless charging.
(Macy Neshati) "So when the bus pulls into the transit center for its normal 10 minute
layover while customers get on and off it's actually picking up a brief charge too,
and by doing that seven or eight times a day we add 100-120 miles of range."
One of the sectors with the fastest rising emissions is electricity generation in India.
With a massive, young population primed to achieve better living standards over the next two decades,
India’s ability to deploy renewable energy and efficient appliances at scale will go a long way
toward determining whether we can hold warming below 1.5 degrees C. As we will see throughout
this series, there are reasons to be hopeful about India. Exemplifying how simple, individual actions
can make a huge collective impact is India’s embrace of energy-efficient LED light bulbs.
These became wildly popular just as hundreds of millions of Indians gained access to electricity
for the first time. The scale of saving tens of billions of watts of electricity every day
has prevented arguably more emissions than any other solution anywhere in the world.
China’s extremely prolific infrastructure buildout over the last 15 years has used a prodigious
amount of cement, the glue material in concrete, the world’s primary construction material.
Cement production is extremely energy intensive and is the dominant emissions source in the
Industrial Processes sector, within which now sends over 1.1 billion tons of CO2e per year into
the atmosphere, eleven times what it generated at the dawn of its economic boom thirty years ago.
With large parts of Southeast Asia and Africa looking to emulate the Chinese growth model, it
is vital that we develop a lower emission method of producing concrete. An even better solution
would be to engineer super-strong sustainable materials that can replace concrete completely,
something we will explore in detail in future episodes. The thriving petrochemical and
pharmaceutical industries also require innovations to make their production more sustainable.
The fifth-largest source of emissions is from land use changes in Indonesia.
The coastal lowlands of Southeast Asia hosts one-third of all tropical peatlands,
but since the 1980s this ecosystem in Indonesia has suffered extensive losses.
To make room for palm and pulpwood plantations, farmers set fires to thick mangrove wetlands,
or lowered the groundwater level to expose root zones, drying plants out and killing them.
(David Gaveau) "Peatlands in their natural state are covered in lush tropical forests.
They’re bogs, they’re essentially waterlogged all year ‘round. But when you drain them,
when you remove the forest, the peat itself - the soil - becomes exposed
to sunlight and it dries out because of the drainage--and that’s what burns.”
This practice is now the single largest source of atmospheric methane.
This highlights how vital the land use change and forestry sector is in our battle to stop
climate change. We can either expand forests and peatlands to sequester carbon or we can continue
to slash and burn them to make products and raise livestock that none of us actually need.
Brazil’s land use and forestry emissions deserve an honorable mention here.
They will almost certainly climb back into the top 20 sources when the data comes in
for the last two years. Since President Bolsonaro took office, he has empowered
ranchers and loggers to ramp up destruction of the Amazon rainforest, which they’ve done with gusto.
Transportation in the United States is the fourth-most polluting sector.
We are addicted to driving here in America, mainly due to our low population density and advanced
highway system that makes travelling significant distances by car necessary, easy, and fun.
The rise of electric vehicles should - eventually - lead to an annual savings of more than a gigaton
of CO2e emissions in the US transport sector alone. In a future video we’ll look at the
impressive new electric cars hitting showrooms, although the toughest segment of the sector to
electrify will be the hundreds of thousands of long-haul trucks that continuously move
shipping containers full of goods throughout the country. Another tough to decarbonize segment is
large consumer SUVs and pickup trucks that are the best-selling vehicles in America
because of all the stuff they can haul and how cheap fuel is. President Trump’s administration
has also slowed efforts to make cleaner vehicles by gutting fuel efficiency standards,
despite these improvements saving 17 gigatons of CO2 over the past four decades.
To decarbonize our economies, we should electrify every process we can. But this
electrify everything strategy is predicated on renewably generated electricity overtaking coal,
oil, and natural gas. Luckily, this is finally happening in the United States,
whose electricity sector is the world’s third-largest source of emissions.
Wind and solar energy is now cost-competitive with fossil-fuel generated power in a growing
majority of states (Table A1a). But there are a lot of existing power plants to replace.
Americans are the leading sources of energy pollution,
generating 6.6 tons of CO2e per person per year, or more than 2 billion tons as a whole.
The transition in the US and around the world would be turbo-charged by building
national networks of high voltage transmission lines so that renewable electricity generated
in rural areas where land is cheap could be efficiently transmitted to our cities.
An unlikely leader has emerged on this front: oil and gas rich
Texas. They’ve invested billions of dollars to connect their windy, sun-drenched west,
to the heavily populated Dallas-Houston-San Antonio triangle in the east. This network of
high voltage power lines has transformed the lonestar state into one of America’s
clean energy leaders, presenting a persuasive case for the rest of the country to follow.
It can be easy to forget that the US has spent three trillion dollars
mired in the oil rich Middle East since 2003.
Imagine if those resources had been spent building the clean energy economy of the future, instead.
Over the last 30 years China’s strategy to become the world’s manufacturing superpower
has resulted in a four-fold increase in these emissions. Manufacturing is one of the most
difficult areas of the global economy to decarbonize. Just think of all the energy and
material to operate all the machinery, factories, and equipment used to make all of our things;
all of the containers and warehouses to store all of these objects; and all of the buildings where
they are kept alongside us as we live. It is the roads and bridges and sidewalks and runways and
light poles and internet cables—the foundation of our hyper-connected, two-day shipping paradise.
Elements of most of these things are now partially, if not completely, made in China.
And now, Beijing is reconfiguring its supply chains to produce more lucrative goods
like vehicles, robots, appliances, and batteries.
So, China’s flattening manufacturing emissions curve is a positive sign,
it is also deceptive. While China is cutting emissions and making its processes more efficient,
other countries in Southeast Asia are ramping up manufacturing, happy to fill in the gaps in
the production of cheaper goods vacated by the Chinese. This is the difficulty of trying to
tackle climate change in the age of globalization: the market will always find the cheapest producer.
As wages rise in China, production of lower end goods shifts to India,
Indonesia, and Vietnam. Emissions follow. As the cycle continues, low-wage Africa will be next.
But wherever manufacturing takes place, producers must employ the most sustainable processes
going forward. An example of how they can do this, as we will see later in this series,
is through innovations in variable speed motors, poised to drive significant energy savings.
The largest source of emissions is China’s electricity and heating sector. Historically this
energy has been generated by coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. But lately, China has been using
coal-generated electricity to manufacture devices that make electricity from renewable sources.
Basically, it has been burning billions of tons of coal so it will not need to in the future. When a
country that big focuses on remaking its entire energy sector, it can do more to fight climate
change than anyone else, something I explored a few years ago in my Megaprojects of China series.
Even though China is now far and away the world’s leading emitter, its per-person emissions have
already peaked. This is an extremely promising sign, particularly considering that income
and electricity consumption levels continue to rise. This is directly attributable to Beijing’s
unprecedented investment in zero-emission electricity over the last decade-and-a-half.
But there is a long way to go before its energy transition is complete.
As it’s massive infrastructure spending has wound down, China’s central government recently
loosened restrictions on approving new coal power plants. To boost their economies and create jobs,
provincial governments immediately took advantage, leading to around 210 projects
with a total capacity of 169GW being greenlit in less than a year. But just because there
are more coal power plants being built does not guarantee that more coal will be burned.
As this chart shows, China continues to add several dozen gigawatts of coal generated
electricity capacity a year, but the average coal power plant there now operates less than
half the time, a utilization rate 20 percent lower than just 8 years ago. Coal just can’t
compete against renewably-generate electricity whose kilowatt hour prices continue to fall.
So if coal is losing on price, and it’s filthy, why are so many provinces still choosing to build
them? Why aren’t they building photovoltaic, wind turbine, and lithium ion factories instead? The
answer is complicated, but boils down to China’s top-down, one-party system that rewards provincial
leaders for prioritizing immediate economic growth above other considerations, like the environment.
With the engineering know-how, infrastructure, funding, and blueprints for hundreds of coal
power projects in place for years just waiting on approval from Beijing, it is no surprise that so
many local party bosses embraced these shovel ready projects. Still, it is remarkable that a
country pursuing renewable energy as aggressively as China is building hundreds of new coal plants.
It’s an alarming sign of just how hard the fossil fuel industry will fight to stay alive.
I hope this episode of the Climate Change Solutions show clarified where most of our
emissions are coming from and where we need to focus our efforts. To recap, the top 10
emitting geosectors are distributed across just 5 countries, with half in China alone. For the
extended episode profiling the top 20 geosectors, check out my new premium video site TDC.video
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