We’re excited to welcome back Mark Z. Jacobson, who joined us last year to talk about a study he co-authored called “Low-Cost Solutions to Global Warming, Air Pollution, and Energy Insecurity for 145 Countries”. He is a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Atmosphere/Energy program at Stanford University, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Precourt Institute for energy, and also the Co-Founder of The Solutions Project, 100.org and the 100% Clean, Renewable Energy movement.
We've asked Mark back to see what progress the country has made with his prediction that the US and the world can change to clean energy and meet CO2 goals by only using WWS (wind, water and solar) i.e. clean non burning energy without using coal, gas, nuclear, and carbon capture. Mark released a book in February of this year, entitled No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air. His book brings up more questions about the government and the some climate experts are promoting, such as carbon capture, instead of considering the potential of just using WWS.
Topics covered include:
Visit us at climatemoneywatchdog.org!
We’re excited to welcome back Mark Z. Jacobson, who joined us last year to talk about a study he co-authored called “Low-Cost Solutions to Global Warming, Air Pollution, and Energy Insecurity for 145 Countries”. He is a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Director of the Atmosphere/Energy program at Stanford University, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Precourt Institute for energy, and also the Co-Founder of The Solutions Project, 100.org and the 100% Clean, Renewable Energy movement.
We've asked Mark back to see what progress the country has made with his prediction that the US and the world can change to clean energy and meet CO2 goals by only using WWS (wind, water and solar) i.e. clean non burning energy without using coal, gas, nuclear, and carbon capture. Mark released a book in February of this year, entitled No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air. His book brings up more questions about the government and the some climate experts are promoting, such as carbon capture, instead of considering the potential of just using WWS.
Topics covered include:
Visit us at climatemoneywatchdog.org!
Thanks for joining us for another episode of climate money watchdog where we investigate and report on how federal dollars are being spent on mitigating climate change and protecting the environment. We are a private, nonpartisan nonprofit organization that does not accept advertisers or sponsors. So we can only do this work with your support. Please visit us at climate money watchdog.org To learn more about us and consider making a donation. My name is Greg Williams and I learned to investigate and report on waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending while working at the project on government oversight, or Pogo. 30 years ago, I learned to do independent research as well as to work with confidential informants or what's whistleblowers to uncover things like overpriced spare parts, like the infamous $435 hammers, and expensive military weapons systems that didn't work as advertised. I was taught by my co host Dino resore, who founded Pogo in 1981, and founded climate money watchdog with me last year, Dina has spent 40 years investigating and sometimes recovering millions of dollars wasted by the Defense Department and other branches of government at Pogo, as an independent journalist, as an author, and as a professional investigator. Tonight, we're excited to welcome back Mark Z. Jacobson, who joined us last year to talk about a study he co authored called low cost solutions to global warming, air pollution and energy insecurity for 145 countries. He is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and director at the atmosphere and energy program at Stanford University, as well as a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, and Precourt Institute for Energy, and also co founder of the solutions project. One hundred.org. And the Wonder percent clean, renewable energy movement. Data would you'd like to say a few words?
Dina Rasor:Yes, I would. Thanks for coming back. Mark. It was July of last year, and we were and I listened to the podcast it yesterday and we hadn't even passed the IRA. We're still talking about build back better. And the money hadn't flown and a lot has changed. So anyway, we wanted we're glad that he can come back if you if you listers remain remember, if you want to read listen to his first one he was talking about, you know, the ability to come to the numbers that we need to have to slow down or stabilize the climate problem he in cold and but he says he can do it. And you'll hear this a lot in this program. So I'll say it right now, WW s when water and for in that sort of shorthand for everything. Everything that doesn't burn is really the best way to put it back because people get confused. But fossil fuel, nuclear, biofuel, and get gas and oil fun thing from fossil fuel is he says we don't know Oh, and carbon capture, which is very important to capture the carbon out of the smokestacks, and whatever. None of that is needed. And the the infrastructure behind that is horrendous, that solar and wind are advancing so quickly, and so cheaply that it's making it definitely have an economic advantage. Mark released a book in February this year called no miracles needed, how today's technology can save our climate and clean our air. So this book brings up more questions about the government and some of the climate effects. Experts are promoting such as carbon capture, instead of using the potential of WW es winds, wind,
Gregory A. Williams:wind, water and solar, wind, water
Dina Rasor:and solar. I don't know why I put WSS on my thing without wind, water and solar. So anyway, that's the word we're going to be talking a lot about. And anybody who's been looking at our podcasts know, there's a lot of money and a lot of effort going into carbon capture. Or we can burn you know, we can burn natural gas instead of coal. We have to have these transition things which take a lot longer to build the actual clean energy. So that's what we're gonna be talking about today. So welcome, Mark. Is there anything else you'd like to add to the introduction?
Mark Jacobson:Yeah, let's Thank you very much, Dana. And, Greg, I really appreciate you having me back on, you're so happy to talk about these issues.
Dina Rasor:Okay. All right. Well, let's just jump right into it. I want to have your book open right now. But I, I assume I don't have to give you the page numbers. In Chapter Eight of your book, what what doesn't work was called what doesn't work. You compare a building fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, the time it takes to build wind and solar facilities. How does that affect the success of each type of energy in light of the short timetable on lowering co2 and other greenhouse gases pollution?
Mark Jacobson:Well, I just start by saying that our technologies as you mentioned, and cleared for energy generation only onshore and offshore wind, solar photovoltaics on rooftops and power plants, concentrated solar power, geothermal electricity and heat, and also hydropower, and tidal wave power. But we also need storage or electricity storage, heat storage, cold storage and hydrogen hydrogen storage. So that's part of wind, water and solar, as our electric appliances and machines like electric vehicles, electric heat pumps, electric industrial appliances. So if we want to transition all energy to clean renewable energy, for the purposes of eliminating global warming, eliminating air pollution from energy, and providing energy security for the future, we need, first of all, to avoid 1.5 degrees global warming, we're already at 1.1 to two degrees, since the late 1800s. And to avoid that, we need to implement 80% of these technologies by 2030. That's seven years away. And so to do that, we cannot have technologies that take years to decades to implement. For example, just in the next few weeks, the Vogel nuclear plant in Georgia may or may not actually turn on there. These are two new reactors, the only two reactors being built in the United States today, the only two conventional reactors. And they've been in the planning operation phase for on the order of 18 years. So there, it took many years to plan and do site permits and everything else that it took a while to get construction permits, and then to do the actual construction. So we're talking on the order of 18 years, versus one to three years for new wind and solar. So that's on the order of 15 years or more time to put that up. And in addition, it costs now $34 billion for these two reactors. And that works out that's about two point a little over 2.2 gigawatts of peak power total, that's almost that's 15 and a half dollars per watt, in comparison with $1 per watt for new wind or solar. Or if we looked at if we looked at the average energy price at six, seven to eight times the energy costs for new nuclear versus wind and solar. So these are both opportunity costs. The fact that it's taken 15 years before a single kilowatt hour has been gypped, sorry, 18 years for a single kilowatt hour has been generated. That means the background fossil grid has been running for 18 years emitting huge amounts of pollution and co2 into the atmosphere. And by spending $34 billion on nuclear instead of wind and solar, we prevented that wind and solar from being put up a lot earlier. And then therefore, this these new nuclear plants will never pay back their carbon debt to the atmosphere, there will always have caused more carbon to be admitted, than if we had invested instead in wind and solar.
Gregory A. Williams:So one of the things that I often struggle with is comparing the cost of energy generation to the cost of storage. And you've written about a lot of different storage options, whether it's hydrogen, gravity storage, storing things, and boreholes or batteries. What's a good way to think about the cost of storage? And how much that how much is that? How much should we think of that as adding to a W ws solution when comparing it to something like nuclear or gas, which at least theoretically isn't, you know, instant or always on solution that doesn't require the same kind of storage?
Mark Jacobson:But yeah, I should first point out that nuclear does require storage every minute of every day, because it nuclear is a flat supply of energy, whatever when it's on, it's only supplying a flat supply. The demand for energy is variable. It varies every second of every minute. So you need backup or storage to get to provide the difference between the supply which is flat and the bet and the demand, which is completely variable. So that's why we use right now natural gas peaker plants to backup nuclear we use hydropower plants to backup nuclear. On top of that, in the US nuclear plants are down 10% of the year. And so there's a whole 10% of the year where you need backup for them in France last year. All 56 nuclear reactors on average were down 48% of the Year. In fact, there was a wind farm offshore wind farm that's been up offshore of in Ireland. That's been five years, it has a more it was more reliable over a five year period than the nuclear all the nuclear reactors in France last year, because it had a capacity factor of 56% versus only 52% for all the French nuclear reactors. So the first thing is, it's a myth that nuclear doesn't need backup, or coal doesn't need backup, they all need backup. Now granted, wind and solar probably need more backup. But so we've actually analyzed in every world region, looking at 145 countries broken into 24 world regions, we've looked at the grid stability and the cost of keeping the grid stable with just wind, water solar plus storage, and compare that with the cost of fossil fuels. And the extra storage you need is does not make it more expensive than using fossil fuels, it's still much much cheaper, primarily because if we electrified all energy, and provide the energy with wind, water solar, we reduce our power requirements by about 56%. That's because for five reasons. One, as we eliminate all the energy, you need to mind transport and refined fossil fuels in Earth uranium, so that's about 11 to 12% of all energy worldwide is used for that purpose. So we eliminate the need for that energy. And therefore we reduce the cost that the annual cost of obtaining that energy. In addition, electric vehicles are much more efficient and gasoline or diesel vehicles. electric heat pumps are much more efficient than gas, natural gas heaters for air heating and water heating. And electrified industry is more efficient than combustion industry. And end use energy efficiency improvements can also squeeze additional reduction. So we can get 56% less energy requirements with wind, water solar, on top of that the cost per unit energy of wind and solar, for example, is the lowest it's half the cost of natural gas. So the nuclear is right, as I mentioned, is like right now, anywhere from anywhere from five to eight times the levelized cost of energy. So even though adding let's say you do add storage to wind and solar, yeah, that's going to increase the cost of keeping the grid stable when you storage. But you don't need a five to eight factor five to eight times higher costs to match the cost of nuclear just for baseload not even accounted for the storage you need for for nuclear. Anyway, we did the studies looking at can we keep the grid stable with just wind, water, solar and storage and compare that with the fossil fuel system. And primarily because we reduce energy demand 56%. And on top of that, we reduced the cost per unit energy. It's a 63% Lower annual cost to keep the grid stable every 30 seconds for several years, everywhere in the world, compared with business as usual system. So that is a an argument that people have made that does cost more storage for wind and solar in particular. But I should point out there are actually there are actually nine countries of the world that are 100% renewables and primarily because of the water component of wind, water, solar, like water. Hydropower is a form of storage. It's a big battery, hydropower. Reservoirs are big batteries. And there are actually nine countries that are 100% renewable wind water solar already, and they keep the grid stable without any problem at low cost.
Gregory A. Williams:Do you want to mention some of those country names?
Mark Jacobson:Yeah, off the top? Well, there's Bhutan, Nepal. Namibia is pretty high. Tajikistan is one of the countries but Norway, Costa Rica, Iceland, and Albania, and Paraguay and Uruguay or other other countries that are and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For example, Ethiopia has another one. These are all again dominated by hydro I should say Kenya, Kenya is another one. Kenya actually has their closer like 92% Wind, Water solar, but they're dominated by geothermal. Scotland is also around 91%. Wind, Water solar is dominated by wind. I should point out in the United States. There's one state south dakota that provides 120% of its consumed energy with just wind and hydropower with 77% Wind and the rest hydropower. And it exports the difference along it also produces some fossil fuels that it exports and in terms of its generation, South Dakota produces close to 80% of its generated power from wind, water, solar, but all wind and solar sorry all wind and hydro. And there are other states like Vermont and Washington State are also around 70% Wind water solar in terms of their generation. Iowa is pretty close up there with almost all wind
Dina Rasor:you know this thing on chapter eight your book, you compare the amount of heat waste released by fossil fuel which If I was standing, I shouldn't know anything about drugs and I actually grew up in a science back background. For example, you write about that about 65 to 67% of energy and oil and coal is released is wasting 40 to 60% of natural gas energy is also risky 74% of biomass is waste heat, and 65% of the of the energy in uranium is wasted. So what can you explain this concept of waste heat, which is another area where we're heating up the environment and getting nothing from it, and explain why waste is a part of the climate problem. The other the other part, sorry, the other part is also talk about how clean it is. This was also surprising clean energy, such as wind, water, solar, actually decreases heat, which I thought was very interesting,
Mark Jacobson:right. So there's this concept called anthropogenic heat flux, which there's also another concept anthropogenic water vapor flux. So when you burn coal or oil or gas, just burn it, and you not only produce carbon dioxide, you also produce water vapor, because you have you know, hydrocarbons, which contain hydrogen and carbon, the carbon reacts with oxygen to give you a carbon dioxide, the hydrogen reacts with oxygen to give you water. And so you have both those are the way even with complete combustion, all hydrocarbons will turn into what carbon dioxide and water so you have water. And because it's high temperature, because you're burning it, the water is in a vapor form. So you release water vapor. Now you also release heat, I mean, when you burn something that's your burning gas, you're trying to produce heat for, for some purposes, well, you're trying to produce heat, sometimes just for the heat, and other times you want a high enough temperature heat to produce electricity, because you can then use it for natural gas. For example, when you burn it, or call you burn it, you produce heat that is used to boil water liquid water, in order to create steam to run a straight steam turbine to generate electricity. Okay, but when you're burning coal or natural gas for electricity, the heat is rarely ever captured. And it's about two thirds of all the energy and the bonds of the coal or the gas are released as heat as waste heat that goes to the air. Same thing with nuclear, the nuclear nuclear reaction results in heat release, as well as you get to. I mean, you get radiation that's then that where you have kinetic energy, that kinetic energy slams into water molecules liquid water to boil the water to convert that kinetic energy to heat to boil the water to run a steam turbine to generate electricity. But the point is, is that with nuclear or coal or natural gas, you're creating heat, and you have water vapor emissions in both cases. And that heater water vapor. Actually not they don't cause a lot of real warming compared to carbon dioxide in the air. But they do cause an incremental amount that's equivalent to some of the to like from a nuclear reactor is around five grams of co2 equivalent per kilowatt hour of electricity generated with about half from the heat and half from the water vapor. Now, that's not necessarily a lot, I mean, a coal plant, when it's just unabated co2 emissions is about 900 grams of co2 per kilowatt hour, a natural gas plant, an efficient natural gas plant might be 440. But you know, that's not even for the five grams of heat and water vapor emissions that have caused warming from nuclear. That's not the main contributor to warming from nuclear that the main contributor is, is actually the fact that it takes so long to build a nuclear reactor that you're you're emitting while you're waiting around, you're emitting carbon dioxide from the regular background electric grid, and that's around 60 to 110 grams of co2 per kilowatt hour. And we're just to summarize, there is some small amount of heat from fossil fuels and nuclear and water vapor. But when you have wind turbines, wind turbines actually reduce water vapor and they actually then cause cooling on their own solar panels. And by the way, and wind turbines, because because they reduce water vapor they also the end up reducing global warming just with this, in addition to the fact that they eliminate co2 emissions. And solar panels also reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the ground and also cool the climate as well. So solar panels and water and wind turbines, cooler climate, and whereas combustion fuels in uranium, warm the climate, just due to their impacts on the atmosphere.
Gregory A. Williams:You want to say a few a few words about the production of concrete and how that's involved in nuclear power plant construction.
Mark Jacobson:Oh, yeah, so So it takes a lot of concrete to build a nuclear plant. And just to give an example, the two reactors that are being built in Georgia, the only two in the United States are being built and conventional reactors. They've there's enough cement been poured for a sidewalk from Miami to Seattle. And all this, the co2 from the cement production, and the actual construction of the plant. This has all been emitted already, and not a single kilowatt hour of nuclear electricity has been generated. So for the last 18 years, basically, there have been emissions, they most of them in the last nine years during the construction, but some before that, there's been a huge amount of emissions. And this will never be recovered this these emissions will never be recovered. Because of the high cost of the nuclear, you might think, Okay, well, going over even if like nuclear ran 100% of the time for the next 18 years, the emissions will still average over the 36 years of planning operation plus 18 years of operation, you would have still had basically half the emissions of a coal plant for that high that whole time. But in fact, you'll never recover all of those co2, because the high cost of the nuclear prevented a lot more wind and solar from being implemented, starting, you know, 15 years ago. And that is resulting that means that we could have had a lot more co2 reduced already. And in the future, since we would have had a lot more wind and solar built than nuclear in terms of its its average energy output. We'll never catch up with this new nuclear plant. And so the point is, we should never build a new nuclear plant, because it just takes too long. And it costs way too much in comparison with clean renewable energy.
Dina Rasor:Also, in your book, beyond the climate effectiveness, you write, by 2021, the cost of when the system consisting of wind, solar and batteries was already less than that consisting of natural gas, for example, even in 2019, the Florida utility replaced two natural gas plants with a combined solar battery system because of the lower cost of the ladder. In other words, the link has the economics of lower WW has been a major factor, your research shows that you don't need oil gas and for a transition phase.
Mark Jacobson:Well, yes, I mean, while we started these plans, we first developed energy plans to transition to wind water, solar, or double AWS back in 2009. And at the time, the cost of wind and solar were, were more expensive, much more expensive than they are today. And we felt well, we need these technologies to solve the problem. So hopefully the costs will come down. And especially due to economies of scale, when we start implementing wind and solar in particular, on a large scale, hopefully their costs will come down. It has turned out that costs have come down dramatically. And storage costs have also come down electric vehicle costs have come down heat pump costs have come down. And so it is becoming easier and easier to implement 100% Wind water solar system. And this is really actually helped it to cause a big growth of wind, water solar, I mean, right now worldwide over the last couple of years about 70% of all new energy has been Wind, Water solar, and electric vehicles are taking off heat pumps are taking off. So these they are the low costs. And you can see this like in that example you gave actually, utilities and grid, people working on the grid are investing in combined wind and storage or solar and storage or wind and solar and storage plants where the storage is usually batteries these days. And these are saving huge amounts of money. I mean, a big battery solar battery system in Australia saved like $30 million over a year or two compared because you know a battery can feed electricity into the grid within within milliseconds, then like 30 milliseconds, whereas it takes a combined cycle natural gas plant which is used for the same purpose, it can take five minutes to ramp it up to 100% electricity production. So batteries are just much more efficient and faster than that can save utilities a lot of money and actually has and you don't sometimes you don't need a lot of batteries to complement a wind water solar system. Because first of all, wind and solar are complementary in nature. So when the wind isn't blowing during the day, the sun is often shining and vice versa. And water can already fill in the gaps in a lot of cases. So you already have by combining wind and solar Learn also combining wind over large geographic regions or solar over large geographic regions, where sometimes the wind isn't blowing in one place, but it is somewhere else. You can smoothen out the overall supply of electricity just by combining wind and solar over large geographic regions, and then use some batteries, some hydro to fill in the gaps. And then you've got a more reliable resilient system then with the fossil system.
Dina Rasor:What do you suggest is the best and quickest energy source for commercial and military planes with cargo ships, those solutions fit into your W, W, W s area
Mark Jacobson:of well, for short distance flights less than 1500 kilometers, via electric planes will probably dominate for transport longer for aircraft longer than 1500 Kilometer flight distance, hydrogen fuel cell will likely dominate. And so a combination of the two and it could be some you said have some planes that have both batteries and fuel cells. But it's we want to batteries are usually better for most purposes, except for the longer distance you go, the more that fuel cells become advantageous, just because otherwise you're you're especially with an aeroplane, you're just carrying around batteries using a lot of energy carrying around batteries. And as a result you're dropping. Yeah, the efficiency drops off when you get to longer longer distances with electric planes. That's why hydrogen fuel cell are good for long distances.
Dina Rasor:So you're what you're saying is that is that you know, like a cargo ship that's gonna go, you know, from Japan to the Middle East, or something would probably need some kind of hydrogen fuel cells, rather than just batteries.
Mark Jacobson:Yes, although, I know, Elon Musk was talking about having just electric ships where he would have hubs in different parts of the ocean to recharge them. So that's one possibility. It can't be discounted. But I mean, having hydrogen for long distance shipping, in particular, hydrogen fuel cell shipping is a little, maybe more tractable. I mean, maybe it's too early to say it's gonna be a combination of both. And but I would bet that hydrogen fuel cell shipping will be pretty efficient for long distances.
Gregory A. Williams:Hydrogen, direct hydrogen fuel or something like ammonia.
Mark Jacobson:Now, it'd be direct hydrogen fuel running in a fuel cell. So ammonia, the issue is you need hydrogen to produce the ammonia. So that's another step. So you're taking a lot of energy just to produce the ammonia from hydrogen. So we do want ammonia for fertilizers. So we're producing a lot of ammonia today, for fertilizers mostly. And the hydrogen that it's produced from comes from natural gas. So we want to switch ammonia production from natural gas to what we call electrolytic. Hydrogen, which comes from electricity powered by wind, water, solar. But using that ammonia, then as a fuel, we read that usually they want to burn it. So then you have combustion and you have pollution, you have leaks of ammonia, ammonia is a really toxic pollutant. It's so in Los Angeles, for example, most of the visibility reduction in Los Angeles, which is the most polluted city in the US, historically, and even today, is due to what's called ammonium nitrate, which is a combination of ammonia and nitric acid. And so any, so not only cause visibility, degradation, but it has huge health effects as well. So we don't want to burn ammonia, which is the plan of using ammonia and chips. And so I would just stick to using it for fertilizers, just using hydrogen and fuel cells for ships.
Dina Rasor:When I talked to various people who are still kind of hanging on to the transition thing, the idea that we have to transition we we can't do we have to keep gas around and and all these various other fossil fuels, and we need carbon capture, so we can keep using gas. One of the things they point to is the problem was going 100%. Electric, electric, electric and clean production of that electricity is that the US electric grid isn't up to the task. And I've heard that from a lot of people. And it seems to me that I look at it a lot. It's either federal, or the federal government in the utilities up to meeting those goals. And is there enough money to make it work? The electric grid if not upgraded, could be an Achilles heel. For 100%? Who Yes, like for example, what happened in Texas in the very cold in the very hot seasons? And how can that be avoided? Well,
Mark Jacobson:so with 100% Wind water solar system, certainly the more transmission you have, the better. However, the alternative if it's hard to put up more transmission then more storage helps to so you can either have local storage of electricity or transmit the electricity over long distances, so we do have a choice. So if you're in a coastal area like the east coast or west coast, I mean, there's a huge untapped resource that's going to be implemented the next few years, which is offshore wind, and that there's enough offshore wind along the coast to power the whole United States. And the transmission distances there a pretty small. So that's fortunately, and most people live along the coast. So for most of us, actually, transmission is not such an issue in the Great Plains. It is it isn't, is not I mean, there's not as many so many people living in the Great Plains. And there's a lot of source of renewable energy, the idea, we need more transmission if you want to take some of that renewable energy and wield it to the coast. So for example, California sometimes needs extra electricity that it imports. So having like Wyoming wind be imported is a good idea. And so transmission, there are slowdowns in growth and transmission, however, we're seeing that a lot of renewables are still going up, there's a lot of low hanging fruit where we don't need long transmit distance transmission. Texas is a special problem, because it's its own grid, and it just refuses to be interconnected to other other grids that are right nearby. And so that's its own issue. However, we found that during studies of Texas that we can make Texas 100%, Wind, Water solar, on its own, Texas actually promotes transmission lines for wind, or at least it has in the past. Right now it's maybe doing some less, but it has promoted a lot of transmission for wind. Because it's benefited a lot from the growth of wind in particular, and now the growth of solar. So the problem when there was a grid out outage in Texas a couple of years ago, that was due to primarily freezing of coal plants, freezing of natural gas pipes and plants. And even nuclear outages, in addition to freezing have a certain percentage of the wind turbines. But the wind turbines that were frozen, there are wind turbines in Iceland and their wind turbines in Norway and Sweden that don't get frozen because they have an anti freezing technology. So that's just a simple technological fix. And so that should not be an issue with the growth of wind and solar in Texas. And either sort of the grid because Texas has a big has had a big push of renewal of of transmission growth the other states actually haven't had.
Dina Rasor:There's enough federal money and enough and my understanding that the permitting process slows things down and the utilities is there enough there in the current Biden budget to really bring the grid up to what needs to be done to and also, quite frankly, him enough, have enough fuel stations for all these electric cars. They're coming down the pike?
Mark Jacobson:Well, I think the issue is not so much the funding, the cost of the electric transmission, it's more of the zoning and getting permits. And that's really been the slowdown. It's just because every depends on how it's done. I mean, each state has certain requirements and the federal government, there's just a lot it takes a lot of years to get permits to go have a transmission line cross state boundaries, for example, or, you know, some some community can hold it up in some cases. So that's been more of the issue rather than the cost. So I'd say yeah, there's enough money in the budget for encouraging reduced transmission lines will pay for themselves over time. So it's not like you need to subsidize them to grow. But you need the subsidies are needed, because of the delays in actually implementing transmission.
Dina Rasor:Okay. So your books been out about three months and what's been the reaction to the AWS solution? Are there climate people who are hostile to the idea of living living alternatives that burn fuel? Where are the criticisms coming from? Is it political funding and industry funding responsible for the emphasis on the so called Bridge technologies such as carbon capture and intermediate solutions that still bring fuel the way?
Mark Jacobson:Yes, I think the biggest the pushback is due to the fact that we only really focus on clean renewable technologies. So we do not include fossil fuels with carbon capture biofuels for any purposes biofuels with carbon capture, direct air capture, where you try to suck out co2, carbon dioxide from the air itself, we do not include blue hydrogen, which is hydrogen from natural gas with carbon capture, we do not include electro fuels, which are fuels from carbon capture carbon dioxide from carbon capture, plus some other chemicals and energy. That to replace gasoline. We don't include small modular nuclear reactors. We don't include geoengineering, which is spraying pollution particles into the stratosphere to block the sun. So we don't include a lot of these things. And but a lot of these technologies are included in the in the inflation Reduction Act, I'd say 40% of the whole inflation Reduction Act is used to to fund or subsidize these useless technologies. And when I say useless, I mean really useless. They increase carbon dioxide, carbon capture, blue hydrogen, direct air capture electro fuels, they all increase carbon dioxide compared with spending that same money on replacing fossil fuel plants with renewables. For example, everything, carbon capture direct air capture require energy, and equipment. And so even if you use renewable energy to run direct air capture, which is to suck carbon dioxide out of the air, you can take that exact same amount of renewable energy and replace, let's say, a coal plant, and with the exact exact same amount of electricity, and you will get more carbon dioxide reduction from the coal plant than from sucking the co2 out of the air. In addition, you'll eliminate the air pollution from the coal eliminate the mining of the coal, you'll eliminate the coal infrastructure, you don't do any of that with direct air capture, or carbon carbon capture. Those coal plants are still there, all you've done is taken some co2 out of the air, then the question is, what do you do with the co2? Well, 75% of all co2 in the world is used for enhanced oil recovery to help dig more carbon, meaning dig more oil out of the ground, that process results in 40% of the carbon dioxide you just captured, going straight back to the air. And so you have no proof that the rest of the rest of that 60% is even captured, it may stay under the ground and may not. But you have more oil now which you burn and have more pollution. This is these constructs are just constructs of the fossil fuel industry, carbon capture direct air capture, blue hydrogen and electric fields. They're all designed to keep the fossil fuel industry in business have no benefit whatsoever for climate definitely worse than air pollution and energy security.
Gregory A. Williams:Do you want to comment briefly on so you're talking about some of the secondary effects including how much stuff we dig out of the ground. People often raise concerns about rare earth elements and things that are involved in battery production is being environmentally disruptive. But you've commented in other venues about the comparison between that and just the sheer volume of stuff we're digging out of the ground in oil exploration.
Mark Jacobson:Right, so right now we mined for oil, natural gas and coal continuously every day throughout the world. And the mass of material that's mined is mind bogglingly enormous. We eliminate entirely all that mining with 100% Wind water solar system. What's left is the mining for the infrastructure to build the infrastructure, which we also need in the fossil fuel world, we need to we need to mined material for materials and chemicals to build fossil fuel power plants and natural gas power plants, oil, wells, oil rigs, etc. Just like we need to mined for batteries and for wind turbines and solar panels. But we eliminate the mining the continuous everyday mining for the fuels. And that's 99.9% of all the mining in the world is for the continuous daily mining. So in 100%, wind water Solar World the mass of material that we mined is less than point 1% of the total amount mined every year right now. Now in Furthermore, you can there are rare earths or there's others lithium that will need. There's you know the rare earth elements like neodymium for permanent magnets and wind turbine generators. But you know, a lot of this can be recycled. And so lithium for example, Sonnen is a battery company they produce really efficient batteries, they recycle 100% of the components of batteries, no. So you might at once and then you recycle the lithium and you use it again after 20 years of years. Or how long however long the battery lasts, and by the way sign in warranties their batteries for 15 years and 15,000 cycles. And but I know they last longer, I mean I have a electric car that I bought in 2009 and it still has 75% of its charge after 14 years. So it's not as a 2009 batteries batteries today are much more efficient, they're lasts longer. So there's recycling. And there's also for other materials and we we have plenty materials and the amount of mining will be orders of magnitude less than they are today. And that will result in much less air pollution, much less climate damage and much more energy security.
Dina Rasor:When we talk about the how much money in the Biden's budget, the IRA and stuff going towards fossil fuel, things learned and, and carbon capture and all this stuff. There's still this enormous enthusiasm because of course the fossil fuels. The fossil fuel lobby, putting it in is that kind of just considered Blood Money of what you have to do to get to where we want to go on renewable energy is to kind of appease the the, the fossil fuel based while they watch their profit, you know, realize that they're going to be, they're going to be eventually out of existence and work.
Mark Jacobson:Well, I mean, the fossil fuel industry has a lot to lose upon this transition, because we're basically, we went to eliminate the use of coal will eliminate the use of natural gas. You know, in our energy plans, about 90% of oil is used for fuel for energy, whereas 10% is used for materials like plastics and other things. And we're trying to, we're looking for alternatives for those as well. So we're, they're going to fight tooth and nail to stay alive. And in fact, like in Texas, you're trying to draft legislator to outlaw renewable energy basically, or to prevent it from growing any further in other places, as well. But I think it's too late. I mean, people see the benefits of renewables, and it's just so much so low cost. I mean, even in states, where you think there other states where there are no policies for renewables, there's a huge amount of renewables, I mean, nine of the 10 states in the United States with the most, the highest fraction of their electricity generation from wind, are all what we call red states, which are states that tend to vote Republican and not support renewable energy policies. In fact, there aren't any policies. And the reason is because it's so cheap, wind is so cheap in the States, and solar is also becoming cheap. There is also very cheap there too, now. And so. So there is this writing on the wall, I feel because of economics alone, clean, renewable energy is starting to take over however, there's a long legacy, there's a lot of existing infrastructure that it's not just going to shut down. And it's going to take some aggressive policies to get that industry to get those plants to shut down. Because a lot of them have paid off all their debts and are just running a profit, for the most part. And to get those to go out of business, you really need either strong policies or even stronger economics in favor of renewables.
Dina Rasor:I assume you're not their favorite person. Because of what because you're basically saying that we don't need it. Thanks a lot.
Mark Jacobson:I'll just want to make one more point is that we calculate that there are more jobs, if we transition in the US will be three to 4 million more long term full time jobs and loss. So a lot of these people working in the oil and gas and coal industry will have the ability to transition to a job. In addition, a lot of people who are unemployed will have new jobs with this with this new system. So although there will be short term pain for many people, there will be long term gain and more benefits to more people than with the current industry.
Dina Rasor:So you're saying basically, I just wish that we did it from a scientific point of view that we would look at it from a scientific point of view instead of this sort of hysteria that is going on? Because imagine if you could take 40% of that money for fossil fuel, pipe dreams and put it into wind, water and solar. Yeah, make a difference, right?
Mark Jacobson:Yeah, by by subsidizing fossils, like they do, like the inflation reduction act through carbon capture direct air capture blue hydrogen, electric fields, those subsidies are hurting our transition, without causing more deaths and illnesses, causing more climate damage, and war, Energy and Security. So we really need to focus on things we know work, and that can be implemented in the fastest amount of time, and then have the greatest health, climate and security benefits simultaneously.
Dina Rasor:Well, as a final question, I was really intrigued with this at the end of the book, you write about your personal journey, where you guys in the field, this idea what drives you to push the WS ws solution from personal observations and years of years of work? What What triggered you to you know, you're very passionate about this. And I think people like to know, how did you get into this? You really want to do this.
Mark Jacobson:It started over 40 years ago, where when I was a kid, actually, when I was 13 years old. I was down in San Diego, and also it was traveling to San Diego and also went to Los Angeles, around the same time to play tennis and I would observe these, the air pollution at that time in both cities was horrible, and you could hardly see you could hardly breathe. Eyes are scratchy. Some people were some people were even trying to play tennis and vomiting on the court. And I just thought Why should people live like this? This is Like every day for most people, it was a shock to me because I was from Northern California. And it was polluted at the time, but not nearly so polluted. And so coming down to a totally different environment like that was really shocking. And I just thought, this is something I, you know, I want to study when I get older, and hopefully try to solve this problem. and a half years later, I also learned about the climate problem or issues related to climate, and also acid deposition. And I just became interested in these large scale problems. And I set myself a goal, this is what I want to do is to try to solve these understand these problems, and then solve them, because I figured you can't really come up with good solutions unless you understand the problem. So I actually spent, when I became a professor, I spent first 20 years building computer models to study air pollution and climate and also part of my graduate, we're gonna do that as well. And then from that, I was able to discern the differences, like the impacts of different fuel types, like people were proposing in the early 2000s, using biofuels like ethanol. But I was able to compare ethanol with gasoline and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles at the time, and I can see the chemical difference, that the ethanol was just as bad as gasoline for air pollution from an air pollution point of view. And I thought, Well, why are we proposing this where we want to eliminate air pollution and electric vehicles or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, they eliminate air pollution virtually entirely. And so this is not shouldn't be a comparison of ethanol versus gasoline should be comparison of, of gasoline versus electric or ethanol versus electric vehicles. But it required actually modeling that and writing a paper about it to, to really discern these differences, whereas otherwise, people are just hand waving. And that's what they're doing. They're pushing ethanol as a fuel at the federal getting the federal government a lot of subsidies were going to it and they're arguing this is going to improve air quality, where it doesn't actually make air quality worse than three quarters of the United States. And so this was the strength of my conviction that you really need to understand these problems to come up with solutions. But the same applies to carbon capture. I mean, people who look at carbon capture, they ignore entirely the air pollution impacts the fact that you need 30% more energy to run their carbon capture equipment. Where does that come from? Well, mostly it comes from fossil fuels and increasing air pollution, even it comes from renewables, you're preventing the renewables from replacing a fossil fuel plant, increasing air pollution. So unless you're looking at air pollution, climate, and security simultaneously, you're gonna come up with different answers than if you're actually focused on all three.
Dina Rasor:I want to quote the great Bill McKibben, who you had on and he, he actually wrote an article that when when the company in your conversation getting saying this for the audience, and your conversation starts getting complicated, and they people are starting to throw all this transitional technology and what we have to do we need bridges and all this kind of stuff. Here's an article of the title of his article, which I suggested he made a bumper it told him, you should make a bumper sticker out of it, it says, The earth is on fire stop burning thing. And you know that that's WWE, as anybody that just cuts through all of the roundabouts you do on carbon capture? I mean, I'm sure you've been in these discussions, too, you know, the bridge and all this. And I always try to look for those simple. A lot of times we don't do that bumper sticker stuff, you know? And the simple thing is, is that when you get confused about all this technology, is it burning anything, just like you were talking about the ammonia, it has to be burned? Oh, okay, out of anything that has to be burned. And that simplifies it much better. So we're coming into enter a time and I really appreciate you coming in. And is there anything else that you'd like to add?
Mark Jacobson:Oh, well, I agree that we need to stop burning things, that's really the bottom line and stop combustion. We have enough wind, water solar resources to power the world for all purposes many times over. So I would try to focus on that keep our eye on the ball. And just don't don't sweat don't veer from our goal of getting to 100% renewables.
Dina Rasor:And as you said, from your earliest inspirations, we also want to stop burning things because the air pollution kills million people a year. Right.
Gregory A. Williams:I want to thank you for being on our show again, and we look forward to your next publication. And we open your back here and less than another year and keep up the good work. All right, anybody.
Dina Rasor:Anybody else comes up with anything that you think that might the listeners might be interested in, send them our way, because we're trying to air as much as this as we can. Thank you so much on to doing this and have a good rest of the day.
Mark Jacobson:Thank you very much. Appreciate it.