How much does it cost to become Carbon Neutral? Is it feasible? Or is it too radical? I think that many people paint a grimmer picture than necessary. In fact I would go so far as to say we can solve climate change in our lunch break. Let me explain…
I already argued why certificates are the right tool to limit climate change. In this post I explained how certificates guarantee the cheapest transition. But we still do not know how much “cheapest” costs, right? True, but since we know certificates will result in the cheapest transition, any possible transition we can imagine will be more expensive.
So if we just calculate the cost of a transition and use certificates to actually achieve it, then we will basically be guaranteed costs below that hypothetical calculation.
An Upper Bound
So lets think of a transition where we can calculate the cost. The more intelligent the transition, the cheaper it would be. But a more intelligent transition is probably also very complex and would take way too much effort for my lazy self. So I am not going to think of a clever way to transition to carbon neutrality. Instead I am going to assume the following:
- nobody changes their consumption behaviour
- no build-out of renewable energy (the same energy mix)
- all the CO2 emitted will be recaptured from the air
In a sense this is the dumbest strategy one could use. Virtually any other strategy would be cheaper. Renewable energy prices are already competitive with fossil fuels, so transitioning at least old factories is a no-brainer, capturing CO2 directly from the exhaust would be cheaper than capturing it from the air, etc.
There are lots of ways to make this cheaper. But all of these ways introduce complexity. And I don’t want complexity. I want a quick and dirty estimation.
So how can we estimate the cost of this? Well according to a study called A Process for Capturing CO2 from the Atmosphere by Keith et al. in 2018, costs might range from 94$ to 232$ per ton. So lets say 200$ for good measure. How much CO2 do we emit? According to the world bank Germany emitted less than 9 tons/year in 2016 with a downward trend. So that works out to be 1800$ per year and capita to recapture everything.
Let us put that into perspective: In 2019 Germany’s GDP per capita was approximately 46k$. This means Germany would have to spend 4% of their GDP to become climate neutral if we do it in probably the dumbest, most expensive way imagineable.
Climate Neutrality is Easy
To put that into perspective, 4% of an 8 hour workday, is 20 minutes. Which happens to be shorter than our mandatory 30 minute lunch break. So there you have it, if we used the dumbest strategy ever and did not change a single thing about our energy generation, consumption behaviour, etc. we would only have to work 20 minutes longer and this would already work out.
In Q2 2020 the German GDP fell by more than 9% due to Coronavirus induced lockdowns. People claiming that Climate Change would be worse than the Coronavirus are kind of off the mark.
I think it is a bad idea, to tell stories of impending doom and blow the amount of effort needed to avoid climate change out of proportions. If your message is that people need to stop using airplanes and sail across the atlantic instead, then you should not be suprised that people will push back against measures poised to reduce emissions to zero. You taught them to expect these measures to demand great sacrifice. They do not.
The pandemic has demonstrated that we can adapt extremely quickly to a new situation. The production of face masks spun up within months to meet global demand, we transitioned to remote work at breakneck speed. If we would set proper incentives (like a price on CO2), transitioning to carbon neutrality would feel like a breeze.
The ingenuity of people will probably make the drag these certificates have on the economy hardly discernable from the natural fluctuations of our GDP.
So please, please stop fear mongering and simply vote for certificates! Sure we can probably terraform earth back to its previous temperature by scrubbing CO2 from the air later, but this will be much more expensive than what we can have right now.