Sizing things up
On finding a common language as the world turns to face the climate crisis
I was reading a blog post last night from Art Berman, an energy consultant who’s worked heavily in the petroleum industry over the past few decades; in the blog, he dives into the myriad of crises plaguing the world today - from carbon emissions and geopolitics, to populism and ecological burden caused by population growth. He provided a nice flywheel here - a yellow circle of neuroses for our world leaders.
The whole point of the blog was to urge people to think about these crises as a web of interacting points. Addressing one without recognizing the cascading impacts on the other was foolish. Instead of just carbon emissions addressed by renewable technology, it’s important to consider the entire sociological phenomena of population growth, and how that might not only affect geopolitical outcomes, but also climate related ones.
Which is a lot to take in. Berman is a climate realist, who’s certain the world is barreling towards a cliff that sits above the Sarlacc pit. Renewables are probably too late ; the world is indebted and angry, divided and choking on the fumes of the 20th century. But his call for intersectional analysis, which is definitely right and needed, also feels a bit overwhelming to the average person like me.
Instead, I think it makes more sense to break things into manageable chunks here. Let’s prioritize climate change and energy here first, then we can move on to the rest. Climate change is cause by carbon emissions, which is emitted by the human need for energy - energy to power our homes, to cook our food, to fuel our transportation, etc.
The reason I’m tackling this topic first is because energy underpins an intersection of issues that drive discourse on a daily basis today - geopolitics, climate change, and security. I’d imagine starting here is at least the best way for me to contextualize everything, and ask a few simple questions:
What is the language shared between constituents when discussing this problem?
What is the scale of the problem?
What is energy and power?
It’s a good a way as any to starting building your base in understanding the next 50 years of our world. Energy, climate - these are big problems that dwarf our imagination. So let’s put it to scale.
Starting from the basics with energy
Energy is the measurement of the ability of something to do work; technically, it’s a unit of work. It’s doesn’t take a concrete form, and it’s never destroyed or created. Instead, it’s constantly transferred from one state to the other. A car is powered by the energy released from fuel; a human gets out of bed, powered by his breakfast. The energy hasn’t been destroyed in either scenario; just transferred from one state (fuel) to another (movement).
A Joule (J) is the energy unit transferred when a force of 1 Newton is applied to an object and moves it a distance of 1 meter. It seems a bit abstract (a Newton is the SI unit of force which gives a mass of 1 kilogram1 an acceleration of 1 meter per second squared), so here are some concrete examples:
A joule is equivalent to:
The amount of electricity needed to run a 1-watt device for one second.
The energy needed to lift a medium-sized tomato is 1 meter (3 foot 3 inches).
The heat required to raise the temperature of water from 0 degrees Celsius to 1 degree, or from 32 degrees Fahrenheit to 33.8.
The amount of energy released as heat by an average person at rest every 1/60 of a second.
The kinetic energy of a 50 kg or 110-pound human moving very slowly.
The food energy in half of a sugar crystal.
Source: “What is a Joule”
Calories, which we eat, are also another unit of energy. The technical definition is a Calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise 1kg of water by 1 degree Celsius, with 1 Calorie = 4,184 joules.
But we’re mostly interested in energy in how much work it can do; the more energy we have as a society, the more things we can get done. Work is defined as:
Where W = Work, F = Force, and x measure the change in distance (can also be represent as “s”, to measure displacement).
Here’s an example I pilfered from Khan Academy: If someone eats 500 Calories of a granola bar - that’s energy infused within them. Since 1 Calorie = 4,184 J, 500 Calories is equivalent to 500 * 4,184 J = 2,092,000 J.
Assuming a force of 400N applied to move a box, to find the distance, or displacement, needed to burn those calories, you divvy up the formula like this:
This gives us 5,230m as the displacement for the box. Thus, energy from the granola bar gives us the ability to use 400N of force to a move 5,230M
Power, watts hours and exajoules
Energy measures how the capacity to do work; power is the rate at the completion of work. Power is measured in watts (W), which is equal to 1 joule per second (And thus, 1 KW is 1000 Joules per second).
Take a TV for example, which has an average watt rating of 100 W. It thus uses 100 J/s every second it’s running.
An apt comparison between power and energy I found online is that power is speed, energy is distance. An ordinary car and a race car can both cover 10 miles (energy), but the race car can cover the distance much quicker because it has more power.
To bring this to the final point - another measure of distance, and thus, energy, is watt-hours (Wh). Going back to the 100 watt TV - if it ran for an hour, it would use up 100 watt-hours of energy2, or 100*60*60= 360,000 joules.3
This is the common language I wanted to lay out when putting to scale the climate and energy crisis. When discussing everything from electricity bills to renewable energy capacity, watt-hours are one of the common units of measurements between stakeholders.
Source: Youtube
The watt-hours units scale up as well. One thousand watt-hours is in a kilowatt hour (kWh); one thousand kilowatt-hours are in a megawatt-hour (mWH); one thousand megawatt-hours are in a gigawatt-hour (GWh); one thousand gigawatt-hours. I’ll put this in a more visually appealing form:
For reference, the average US household consumes about 10,500 kWH of electricity per year. Total world energy consumption in 2023 was roughly 180,000 TWh.
Finally, I also wanted to bring up the exajoule, which is 10^18 joules. Like watt-hours, it is also a measure of energy (j/s is for power, j is for energy), and is another common unit of measurement when discussing global energy consumption.
Source: Metric Pioneer
The conversion from TWh to exajoules is 1 EJ = 277.78 TWh. Using the the 180,000 TWh from above, we’re able to back into roughly 648 EJ consumed by the world last year. This figure isn’t exact; some estimates peg the consumption in 2023 to be around 620 EJ.
The task at hand
The north star of the climate fight are the Paris Climate Accords, signed in 2015, that mandated the countries that signed to keep the earth’s temperature below a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase over pre-industrial periods. The 1.5 seems oddly specific, but some context here:
The treaty was informed by a fact-finding report which concluded that, even global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average, over an extended, decades-long period, would lead to high risks for “some regions and vulnerable ecosystems.” The recommendation then, was to set the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit as a “defense line” — if the world can keep below this line, it potentially could avoid the more extreme and irreversible climate effects that would occur with a 2 degrees Celsius increase, and for some places, an even smaller increase than that.
Source: MIT news
To be clear, the 1.5 figure is not an ironclad prescription. The lower, the better. The number itself is aspirational, and hitting it doesn’t guarantee salvation. Still, it’s a known quantity that has been referenced when considered the task at hand.
To get to the figure requires a net zero carbon emission system by 2050; any carbon emitted has to be balanced by a removal of the same amount of carbon. There are certainly strategies to remove carbon already in the air (carbon capture, sequestration), but to keep it strict, what would it take to ensure all our energy production generated no carbon emissions in the first place?
Since energy demand consumption is roughly 18% renewables, 82% is carbon emitting. It’s represented by this chart on energy consumption below, which is the same as the one that provided the 2023 figure of 180,000 TWh (~650 exajoules) above; interactive version here…..
…and also by this article, which stated a global primary energy consumption of 604 exajoules for 2022:
Going back to the 2023 figure, 82% of the 650 exajoules is 533 exajoules that needs to be converted to a renewables source. Of course, as population grows, demand for energy is projected to increase at a minimum of 10-15% by 2050 (as sourced from Vaclav Smil’s excellent paper on the shortcomings of current renewable progression), though it will also probably be muted by increasing energy efficiency per production unit. For simplicity, we’ll call it a net wash.
It’s certainly not a perfect figure, but a 500 exajoule figure for renewable replacement of carbon energy sources by 2050 is something floated by Vaclav in the above paper, so the backing into of 533 exajoules isn’t nothing. At the very least, I’ve set out to do what I wanted to do. We’ve broken the problem down into a range, that is measurable by the physics of our world, and gives us a proper scale of the magnitude of the problem.
Further Notes
I’m sure I glossed over quite a bit here; this is the basics of basics, but it’s something I felt compelled to put on paper as I also consider it a learning experience for me. I’m a serial drafter, reluctant poster, so I’m glad to get something posted.
Moving forward, I’m going to continue writing on anything that interests me in the energy and climate space, as I think it sits at that perfect intersection of scientific wonder, geopolitics, narrative, and philosophy that I’m trying to find in my career. Some things I’ve read that’s caught my eye recently, and are jumping off points for me:
This thread on climate financing (Link) by Nick van Osdol
On the climate realist, Vaclav Smil (Link) by David Owen
On this generational solar opportunity (Link) by Casey Handmer
As an American, I don’t use the metric system, so the kilogram can also be a bit abstract. Here are some things that weight roughly a kilogram: a pineapple, a liter of water, a cabbage, a small laptop, and a bundle of apples,
And if the TV ran for 2 hours, it would be 200 Wh, since we got that from 100 W * 2 hours.
For my own posterity, the calculation is broken out by 100 joules/s * 60 seconds * 60 minutes to calculate how many joules are being used in 100 Watt-Hours.
Well done