And two, five, ten years from now we'll all be talking about how the Paris agreement failed and how the <insert name of major city> agreement is a major breakthrough and we'll limit warming to 3-4C this time, we swear!
But good news, while the Great Barrier Reef is now 90% bleached, the Seychelles are forming a new underwater ecosystem!
In the United State making financial sense is not sufficient. It used to be, but that is changing.
In 2008, for example, the Republican party platform acknowledged that human activity was increasing atmospheric CO2, and said that it was common sense that the US take measured and reasonable steps to address this. They called for technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions and mitigate the impact of climate change. They said that in the long run we needed to move to zero emission sources, with fossil fuels being a bridge to that emissions free future. It said they would aggressively support technological advances to reduce our dependence on petroleum. It supported raising gas mileage standards for cars and trucks, and was pro electric vehicle.
Eight years later, their platform no longer calls for reducing emissions, calls for forbidding the EPA from regulating CO2, and calls for increasing the use of coal and oil. Most of the candidates who ran for the GOP nomination were firmly in the "climate change is not happening camp", and the few who were not were in the "it may be happening, and we may even be contributing a little, but it is not anything we need to do anything about" camp.
Unless those Republicans who are not anti-science can somehow move the GOP back toward their 2008 position, where they acknowledge the problem and the need to address it and the need to move to clean energy in the future, where the major difference with Democrats was in how to accomplish these goals rather than on their necessity, I don't see how the US is going to do much about climate change.
> In the United State[s] making financial sense is not sufficient
You follow this with three paragraphs, and yet none of them contains one word in support of this claim. What's standing in the way of people who want to do whatever is cheapest?
If a government subsidises the wrong thing, the right thing will no longer make financial sense. If the government bans the right thing, it no longer matters whether it makes financial sense.
However, I am slightly optimistic about these things as many city and state governments as well as private corporations are taking steps to do the right thing, even as parts of the government and society take the opposite side.
Note the report has an important caveat. "The LCOE values for dispatchable and nondispatchable technologies are listed separately in the tables, because caution should be used when comparing them to one another." The reason is that wind and solar are dependent on the weather and the position of the sun. It does not matter how cheap something is if it can't keep the lights on.
Wind and solar might seem close in price to nat gas electricity generation, but in reality they need to be much cheaper because there is not such thing as an electricity grid run on wind and solar alone. There is only wind and solar + natural gas for when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
Also, and you can get to about 50% penetration of non-dispatchable sources before you have to start adding storage[2]. So renewables are currently cheaper than natural gas for half the electricity, then more expensive for the other half. As storage gets cheaper and the likelyhood of a carbon tax increases, the expectation is that renewables + storage will likely get cheaper than natural gas in the next 5 years or sooner[3].
So, the claim is half accurate in theory, but actually fully accurate in practice since by the time we reach 50% renewable penetration, storage will be by far cheap enough to take up the other half.
I don't use Twitter, and I don't have much time for CNN. I was looking for a link to a scientific paper, but Snopes generally makes an effort so I suppose they'll do.
The reef is very badly damaged, and if you'd said that to start with, that would have been fine. Simply stating "the Great Barrier Reef being dead is very much exaggerated" makes it sound as though you're saying everything is just fine with it. Which it clearly isn't.
But we already know that the currently set emission reductions targets are not sufficient to meet the stated 2°C and 1.5°C goals. This is even baked into the Paris agreement itself. They will do reviews every few years and ratchet up the commitments necessary to meet the stated goals.
New agreements may still be needed since the paris accords lacks enforcement mechanisms.
So if we wanted to implement e.g. multi-national CO2 taxes or make some quid-pro-quo deals to get more renewables into developing countries then new deals will need to be made.
What force? It is still fully voluntary and your pretty much on your own in deciding what to do. If anything it really only is payout scheme to appease some smaller nations. The emission goals are NON BINDING.
Its worse than no agreement because countries can point to it and declare they did something whereas they really aren't obligating themselves to more than a small tax. China has what, said their emissions may slow by 2030?
Is it possible to create technology that can suck out the CO2 from the atmosphere? If so, what would the back of the envelope costs for this be like?
If this is a viable option, why continuously try to have these large scale agreements instead of building and selling technology to counter the CO2 emissions?
People are working on that. One option is biochar: burn biomass in a low-oxygen environment, grind up the charcoal and work it into soil. Generally improves fertility and stays in place over a thousand years. A Nature study found that we could absorb about a gigaton carbon (or CO2, I forget) per year before we start doing serious harm to biodiversity. Our annual emissions are 10 GT carbon, or 30 GT CO2.
There are others involving mineral erosion, or machines that take CO2 out of the atmosphere. There's a scheme for fertilizing oceans with iron particles, creating algae blooms that absorb CO2 then die and sink; that one may or may not work.
The problem is, generally this stuff either has large environmental side effects, doesn't scale enough to absorb all emissions, is much more expensive than just reducing emissions, and/or uses a lot of energy, which would have to be produced by carbon-free sources that could have just replaced emissions in the first place.
None of it is really available yet, and we're rapidly running out of time. We're starting to see positive feedbacks where, with higher temperatures, the planet emits CO2 and methane by itself, taking the temperature even higher without further help from us.
So our best strategy is to reduce emissions as quickly as possible now. Given how far along things are, we will probably also need to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels after we've finally stopped increasing them.
Of course, to whatever extent the negative-emissions techniques become available, safe, and affordable in the short term, they could definitely help. Biochar might be the closest to implementation, with no real downside except at very large scale.
As pointed out, there are a few 'low cost' options; biochar, plants, algae, etc but they are still extremely expensive since the opportunity cost is essentially 0.
The ability to fix nitrogen from the air and convert it into liquid or solid form on an industrial scale was one of the most important breakthroughs in human history. We can do the same with CO2 but it's cheaper to dig it out if the ground and there is a lot less of it in the air. N makes up 78% of air by volume. CO2 is only 0.04%. You need to handle a lot more air to get the equivalent amount of carbon as you do nitrogen.
Besides costs, how long it would take to develop, to implement, and what resources it would need are critical. If the polar ice caps and enough glaciers melt before we implement it at scale, we will lose a lot of the potential benefit.
While trees do it, they only restore the CO2 they released when we cut them down. They won't restore what was released from oil brought up from underground. We could in principle plant more trees than we cut down, but people are living and farming in many of those places.
As of now, there is nothing in action and little if anything on the horizon.
In general, since CO2 is released when we get energy, you'd need to put that energy in to get CO2 out, which would take away energy from the economy. So a process that took energy would need us to create all the energy our economies needed plus the energy to remove the CO2 without releasing more CO2.
Your question is basically saying, "why don't we just undo the problem?" Sure, sounds great, why don't we just solve all problems by undoing them? Why don't we just end wars by having the combatants sign peace treaties? Well, creating the agreements to sign is the challenge.
This, competing and similar technologies, are relatively new, but they are scalable and affordable. They will likely be a critical component to Industry 4.0 and circular economies.
Agreements like Paris are important because they provide a roadmap, urgency and awareness.
The short answer is: 1. It is possible. 2. It is really expensive. 3. You have to put the co2 somewhere after you capture it and that is a question mark.
To a first approximation, at least twice the value derived from burning the fossil fuels in the first place. It's always cheaper to not burn it in the first place.
There is no natural market for "building and selling technology to counter the CO2 emissions" unless one is created by .. treaties.
> "The Eiffel Tower in Paris is expected to be lit up in green light on Friday to mark the entry into force of the historic climate pact."
It would be "greener" not to light it for an evening. And to remind people to reduce their consumption of things that pollute overall. Obviously not a total solution, but a start.
Maybe it's one of those things - you have to spend money to make money?
All in all, I don't personally have any issues with lighting up the Eiffel Tower if that means a lot of exposure and information about sick planet reaching more people.
Do you imagine a future where not lighting up the Eiffel Tower has saved us from climate change?
More generally, these "solutions" don't work. Billions of people don't suddenly all agree to reduce their quality of life voluntarily. For every energy efficient lightbulb there's some beef they aren't supposed to eat, or a standby device that uses 2W too much power they have to switch off and on 5 times a day. It's never happened before and it won't happen for this, even if the world goes to crap due to climate change. Maybe stop wasting resources on feeling good about optimising the uncommon case and work on systematic stuff like clean power.
> It's never happened before and it won't happen for this
It has happened that economic growth has untethered itself from fossil fuel growth almost everywhere in the Western world.
I think consumer pressure can do something, apart from anything people just using it as an excuse to save money will do something. I agree that most of it has to be systemic, but there's a combination there. You need for instance cheaper storage and solar, more efficient a.c., better insulation, and so on, but you also need people to want to put in the effort to buy or install it.
Yes, that is saying a different thing. It has been that use of fossil fuels has been correlated to economic growth for 150 years. This is the first period in history when the Western countries have grown their economies while reducing their use of fossil fuels.
Proposing buzzkill measures like this is a large part of why green movements always struggled to get mainstream traction. I call myself a fairly rational actor and still I deeply resent being forced to separate my rubbish - if green politicians had put half the effort they put into forcing this issue at political level, into pushing the disposal industry to come up with better technological solutions to do that for me, they'd be heroes of the people.
This kind of recycling measures are the biggest bit of bullshit imaginable. Work from home one day when the trash is getting collected. Watch your meticulously sorted waste products all get hucked into the same truck bed. Go to the transfer station, and watch all of those laboriously separated waste products be wound into the landfill or incinerator willy-nilly.
Go home, and start burning your household trash in your home woodstove.
> if green politicians had put half the effort they put into forcing this issue at political level, into pushing the disposal industry to come up with better technological solutions to do that for me, they'd be heroes of the people
The disposal industry already has those solutions, because the error rate in individually-sorted trash is too high to work with. The point of having you sort your own trash is to make sure you're committed to the project, not to save effort for the disposal industry.
You presumption only work if you think don't think of the electricity as a cost to reduce other costs, surely the net loss of people notified this way will reduce more than it costs.
I work in cleantech, and it always seems weird how much fatalism I see in the comments sections of climate change threads on HN. Why are we so hopeless? Don't be! Be the entrepreneurs you say you are, because there's so much money to be made here! My favorite joke about climate change: "They say humans won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"
Here's my list of why we'll fix climate change:
1. Wall Street is now on our side. Clean energy technologies are now mature and cheaper without subsidy than fossil alternatives[1], so the clean energy sector is starting to be viewed by the financial sector more like construction rather than a tech R&D.
2. Insurance and Real Estate are now on our side. The effects of climate change are expected to have a $44 trillion economic downside[2], and that loss is starting to creep into the depreciation terms and insuring everything from crops to real estate.
3. Cleantech now has more jobs. Clean energy now employs more workers (including blue collar local workers) than the coal industry and the upstream oil industry[3]. Also, the advanced energy sector (cleantech + energy efficiency + smartgrid) is now at $1.4 trillion, which is bigger than many other industries like airlines and fashion, and will soon pass the entire media industry[4].
4. Developing countries are now pivoting hard away from fossil fuels. China has pledged to peak emissions by 2030, but it may be as early as 2027[5]. Also, Africa is expected to leapfrog fossil-based generation and go straight to renewables (much like how skipped landlines and went straight to wireless)[6].
Given these allies, who do think is going to win in a policy fight? As powerful as Exxon and BP are, they don't hold a candle to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sacs, China, etc.
So if you were wondering when the turning point for humanity to start taking action, now is that time. Rest assured, you won't have to do anything if you don't want. The people making the money will do it for you.
It's really weird to see the HN community (and tech startups in general) totally not want in on any of that action. Now that the hardware tech is here, cleantech is now basically a scaling exercise, which means efficiency, which means software. There are literally trillions of dollars to be made in cleantech software, yet every time there's a post on climate change on HN it's all doom and gloom.
Come on! We have to replace 87% of our global energy sources in less than 30 years[7]. That's faster growth than the Internet, and it's time for tech startups to cash in on it.
Thanks for a practical counterbalance to the pointless snark here. Your comments about software improving efficiency reminded me of Google's datacenter optimizations. https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal... Data driven improvement can make a big difference in many places.
I think people are hopeless because while we are starting to move in the right direction, it's probably too little and too late. Moderation of CO2 emissions might have been enough 20-30 years ago, but now we need immediate radical action to prevent extreme changes in the planet's climate and that's not happening.
Regardless of how much money there is to be made in this market (and you're right, there's a lot), Earth is going to be a very different place to live in 50 years unless we rapidly make dramatic and fundamental changes to the way we produce and use energy.
You're right, Earth will be very different 50 years from now, but it's a matter of degrees (literally).
Here's a good rule of thumb[1]:
* Pull up 25% fossil assets - 2°C - Costly, but livable
* Pull up 33% fossil assets - 3°C - 1 billion fewer people on the planet
* Pull up 50% fossil assets - 4°C - 1 billion people on the planet
* Pull up all fossil assets - 5°C - Mad Max
So it's all a matter of how fast you can stop pulling fossil fuels out of the ground. Luckily, oil prices are getting cheaper which cuts out a large chunk of assets (tar sands, etc.), so we'll likely not hit 5°C. Hopeless ensures 4°C, profit motive makes 3°C possible, smart people working in the field makes 2°C possible.
I'd humbly request that people reading this look into advanced energy software jobs when they plot their next career move.
I think some negativity is helpful. If everything looks peachy it takes away the pressure.
The bleak predictions of acid rain killing forests and the ozone hole making australia uninhabitable may have helped driving policy to avert those scenarios.
So, assuming that average temperatures only go up 2-2.5 C, we'll effectively be out of the Little Ice Age again, and into the temperature ranges that most of the golden ages of human society experienced?
'It's about a society on its way down. And as it falls, it keeps telling itself: "So far so good... So far so good... So far so good." It's not how you fall that matters. It's how you land.' - La Haine
54 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadBut good news, while the Great Barrier Reef is now 90% bleached, the Seychelles are forming a new underwater ecosystem!
IIRC these require government subsidies.
Costs are still dropping by 30 percent a year.
In 2008, for example, the Republican party platform acknowledged that human activity was increasing atmospheric CO2, and said that it was common sense that the US take measured and reasonable steps to address this. They called for technology-driven, market-based solutions that will decrease emissions and mitigate the impact of climate change. They said that in the long run we needed to move to zero emission sources, with fossil fuels being a bridge to that emissions free future. It said they would aggressively support technological advances to reduce our dependence on petroleum. It supported raising gas mileage standards for cars and trucks, and was pro electric vehicle.
Eight years later, their platform no longer calls for reducing emissions, calls for forbidding the EPA from regulating CO2, and calls for increasing the use of coal and oil. Most of the candidates who ran for the GOP nomination were firmly in the "climate change is not happening camp", and the few who were not were in the "it may be happening, and we may even be contributing a little, but it is not anything we need to do anything about" camp.
Unless those Republicans who are not anti-science can somehow move the GOP back toward their 2008 position, where they acknowledge the problem and the need to address it and the need to move to clean energy in the future, where the major difference with Democrats was in how to accomplish these goals rather than on their necessity, I don't see how the US is going to do much about climate change.
You follow this with three paragraphs, and yet none of them contains one word in support of this claim. What's standing in the way of people who want to do whatever is cheapest?
However, I am slightly optimistic about these things as many city and state governments as well as private corporations are taking steps to do the right thing, even as parts of the government and society take the opposite side.
Note the report has an important caveat. "The LCOE values for dispatchable and nondispatchable technologies are listed separately in the tables, because caution should be used when comparing them to one another." The reason is that wind and solar are dependent on the weather and the position of the sun. It does not matter how cheap something is if it can't keep the lights on.
Wind and solar might seem close in price to nat gas electricity generation, but in reality they need to be much cheaper because there is not such thing as an electricity grid run on wind and solar alone. There is only wind and solar + natural gas for when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
The investment firm Lazard has a nice report[1] on comparing U.S. energy costs by source. Here's the costs in the U.S. (without counting subsidies):
Also, and you can get to about 50% penetration of non-dispatchable sources before you have to start adding storage[2]. So renewables are currently cheaper than natural gas for half the electricity, then more expensive for the other half. As storage gets cheaper and the likelyhood of a carbon tax increases, the expectation is that renewables + storage will likely get cheaper than natural gas in the next 5 years or sooner[3].So, the claim is half accurate in theory, but actually fully accurate in practice since by the time we reach 50% renewable penetration, storage will be by far cheap enough to take up the other half.
[1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-...
[2]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vsmith/docs/renewables_sgc...
[3]: http://powerledger.io/energy-disruption-solar-plus-storage-c...
For example,
http://www.snopes.com/scientists-pronounce-great-barrier-ree...
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/14/us/barrier-reef-obit-trnd/
The reef is damaged but far from dead.
The reef is very badly damaged, and if you'd said that to start with, that would have been fine. Simply stating "the Great Barrier Reef being dead is very much exaggerated" makes it sound as though you're saying everything is just fine with it. Which it clearly isn't.
The Maldives are probably a better example to use!
New agreements may still be needed since the paris accords lacks enforcement mechanisms.
So if we wanted to implement e.g. multi-national CO2 taxes or make some quid-pro-quo deals to get more renewables into developing countries then new deals will need to be made.
Its worse than no agreement because countries can point to it and declare they did something whereas they really aren't obligating themselves to more than a small tax. China has what, said their emissions may slow by 2030?
Is it possible to create technology that can suck out the CO2 from the atmosphere? If so, what would the back of the envelope costs for this be like?
If this is a viable option, why continuously try to have these large scale agreements instead of building and selling technology to counter the CO2 emissions?
There are others involving mineral erosion, or machines that take CO2 out of the atmosphere. There's a scheme for fertilizing oceans with iron particles, creating algae blooms that absorb CO2 then die and sink; that one may or may not work.
The problem is, generally this stuff either has large environmental side effects, doesn't scale enough to absorb all emissions, is much more expensive than just reducing emissions, and/or uses a lot of energy, which would have to be produced by carbon-free sources that could have just replaced emissions in the first place.
None of it is really available yet, and we're rapidly running out of time. We're starting to see positive feedbacks where, with higher temperatures, the planet emits CO2 and methane by itself, taking the temperature even higher without further help from us.
So our best strategy is to reduce emissions as quickly as possible now. Given how far along things are, we will probably also need to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels after we've finally stopped increasing them.
Of course, to whatever extent the negative-emissions techniques become available, safe, and affordable in the short term, they could definitely help. Biochar might be the closest to implementation, with no real downside except at very large scale.
The ability to fix nitrogen from the air and convert it into liquid or solid form on an industrial scale was one of the most important breakthroughs in human history. We can do the same with CO2 but it's cheaper to dig it out if the ground and there is a lot less of it in the air. N makes up 78% of air by volume. CO2 is only 0.04%. You need to handle a lot more air to get the equivalent amount of carbon as you do nitrogen.
While trees do it, they only restore the CO2 they released when we cut them down. They won't restore what was released from oil brought up from underground. We could in principle plant more trees than we cut down, but people are living and farming in many of those places.
As of now, there is nothing in action and little if anything on the horizon.
In general, since CO2 is released when we get energy, you'd need to put that energy in to get CO2 out, which would take away energy from the economy. So a process that took energy would need us to create all the energy our economies needed plus the energy to remove the CO2 without releasing more CO2.
Your question is basically saying, "why don't we just undo the problem?" Sure, sounds great, why don't we just solve all problems by undoing them? Why don't we just end wars by having the combatants sign peace treaties? Well, creating the agreements to sign is the challenge.
"AirCarbon™ | Made from carbon capture
AirCarbon™ is a material made by sequestering carbon emissions that would otherwise become part of the air."
https://newlight.com/aircarbon/
This, competing and similar technologies, are relatively new, but they are scalable and affordable. They will likely be a critical component to Industry 4.0 and circular economies.
Agreements like Paris are important because they provide a roadmap, urgency and awareness.
There is no natural market for "building and selling technology to counter the CO2 emissions" unless one is created by .. treaties.
It would be "greener" not to light it for an evening. And to remind people to reduce their consumption of things that pollute overall. Obviously not a total solution, but a start.
All in all, I don't personally have any issues with lighting up the Eiffel Tower if that means a lot of exposure and information about sick planet reaching more people.
More generally, these "solutions" don't work. Billions of people don't suddenly all agree to reduce their quality of life voluntarily. For every energy efficient lightbulb there's some beef they aren't supposed to eat, or a standby device that uses 2W too much power they have to switch off and on 5 times a day. It's never happened before and it won't happen for this, even if the world goes to crap due to climate change. Maybe stop wasting resources on feeling good about optimising the uncommon case and work on systematic stuff like clean power.
It has happened that economic growth has untethered itself from fossil fuel growth almost everywhere in the Western world.
I think consumer pressure can do something, apart from anything people just using it as an excuse to save money will do something. I agree that most of it has to be systemic, but there's a combination there. You need for instance cheaper storage and solar, more efficient a.c., better insulation, and so on, but you also need people to want to put in the effort to buy or install it.
Hmm, then why is 67% of US electricity production is from fossil fuels?[1]
[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3
Go home, and start burning your household trash in your home woodstove.
The disposal industry already has those solutions, because the error rate in individually-sorted trash is too high to work with. The point of having you sort your own trash is to make sure you're committed to the project, not to save effort for the disposal industry.
I hope you're joking, because that would be mind control on a level not seen since the Wall came down.
https://www.earthhour.org/
Here's my list of why we'll fix climate change:
1. Wall Street is now on our side. Clean energy technologies are now mature and cheaper without subsidy than fossil alternatives[1], so the clean energy sector is starting to be viewed by the financial sector more like construction rather than a tech R&D.
2. Insurance and Real Estate are now on our side. The effects of climate change are expected to have a $44 trillion economic downside[2], and that loss is starting to creep into the depreciation terms and insuring everything from crops to real estate.
3. Cleantech now has more jobs. Clean energy now employs more workers (including blue collar local workers) than the coal industry and the upstream oil industry[3]. Also, the advanced energy sector (cleantech + energy efficiency + smartgrid) is now at $1.4 trillion, which is bigger than many other industries like airlines and fashion, and will soon pass the entire media industry[4].
4. Developing countries are now pivoting hard away from fossil fuels. China has pledged to peak emissions by 2030, but it may be as early as 2027[5]. Also, Africa is expected to leapfrog fossil-based generation and go straight to renewables (much like how skipped landlines and went straight to wireless)[6].
Given these allies, who do think is going to win in a policy fight? As powerful as Exxon and BP are, they don't hold a candle to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sacs, China, etc.
So if you were wondering when the turning point for humanity to start taking action, now is that time. Rest assured, you won't have to do anything if you don't want. The people making the money will do it for you.
It's really weird to see the HN community (and tech startups in general) totally not want in on any of that action. Now that the hardware tech is here, cleantech is now basically a scaling exercise, which means efficiency, which means software. There are literally trillions of dollars to be made in cleantech software, yet every time there's a post on climate change on HN it's all doom and gloom.
Come on! We have to replace 87% of our global energy sources in less than 30 years[7]. That's faster growth than the Internet, and it's time for tech startups to cash in on it.
[1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-...
[2]: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/18/cost-of-not-acting-on-climate...
[3]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-25/clean-ene...
[4]: http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/advanced-energy...
[5]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-pledge-puts-china-on-cou...
[6]: http://news.trust.org/item&#x...
Regardless of how much money there is to be made in this market (and you're right, there's a lot), Earth is going to be a very different place to live in 50 years unless we rapidly make dramatic and fundamental changes to the way we produce and use energy.
Here's a good rule of thumb[1]:
So it's all a matter of how fast you can stop pulling fossil fuels out of the ground. Luckily, oil prices are getting cheaper which cuts out a large chunk of assets (tar sands, etc.), so we'll likely not hit 5°C. Hopeless ensures 4°C, profit motive makes 3°C possible, smart people working in the field makes 2°C possible.I'd humbly request that people reading this look into advanced energy software jobs when they plot their next career move.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_bubble
http://peeonatree.blogspot.com/
The bleak predictions of acid rain killing forests and the ozone hole making australia uninhabitable may have helped driving policy to avert those scenarios.
Unfortunately there's no Moore's law for cleantech.