The IPCC 1.5° C Report and the Ten-Hour Week
I read the IPCC summary for policy makers so you don’t have to. You may have heard that CO2 emissions have to fall by 45% by 2030 to avoid the possibility of overshooting 1.5°C global warming. Actually emissions must decline by 45% from 2010 levels, which are already substantially lower than 2018 levels. The strategies for reducing emissions by that amount are quite complex and depend on hundreds of governments adopting scores of policies that they have no intention of adopting.
So, burn in climate catastrophe Hell, grandchildren!
But wait! Didn’t Keynes write something long ago about the economic possibilities for our (their) grandchildren? “What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence?” Keynes asked that in 1930 — which just happens to be a hundred years before the IPCC 2030 target date! What about the ecological survival possibilities for our grandchildren?
I have translated the IPCC report into terms compatible with Keynes’s prognostications. Remember his prediction of a 15-hour week being “quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us”? How rapidly and how steeply would we have to reduce workweeks to achieve the 45% reduction in emissions by 2030, assuming no other changes in technology (or population)?
I’ve taken quite a few short-cuts to calculate these estimates. For starters, I only look at the twenty top emitters of CO2 from 2015. I assumed that emissions reductions targets for each country should be allocated on the basis of convergence toward a uniform emissions per capita standard, which would be 45% below average emissions per capita in 2010 (for the 20 countries).
Several countries among the top twenty currently emit fewer tons per capita of carbon dioxide than the hypothetical 2030 standard. These include Brazil, India and Indonesia. Mexico is currently emitting close to what its 2030 quota would be. So my estimates are concerned only with the remaining 16 countries.
To achieve emissions reduction through hours and population limitations alone would require annual reductions in working time of between one percent for Turkey and twelve percent for Saudi Arabia. Also near the top end are the U.S., Canada and Australia at around an eleven percent per annum reduction. With considerable rounding and a generous allowance for holidays and vacations, these reductions in annual hours would indicate a workweek in 2030 of around ten hours.
In the middle range, France and the U.K. could look forward to workweeks of around 20 hours a week. China, currently the world’s largest emitter of CO2 would see its workweek cut to somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 hours per week.
Of course some of these reductions in working time could be reversed by de-industrialization — that is the substitution of less energy intensive but more labor intensive methods of production. Hours reduction could also be moderated by transition to solar and wind energy, by energy conserving technological advances and by the introduction of carbon-capture technologies, including large-scale reforestation.
This hours reduction exercise is only meant to give a simplified view of the scale of transition required. But it also alludes to an earlier transition that consolidated the central place of fossil fuels in an expanding industrial economy.
In 1847, after decades of struggle by factory workers, the U.K. parliament passed the Ten Hours Bill. In response, manufacturers turned to the high-pressure steam engines to compensate for the loss of factory working time with faster, more powerful, more fuel efficient machinery that could do more work in less time. By the end of the 1850s, steam power had decisively eclipsed water power and high-pressure steam had surpassed the low-pressure Watt steam engine.
It was not the intention of the ten-hour legislation in the mid-19th century to deliver the “coup de grâce,” to water power, as Andreas Malm termed it, but that was its effect. Might not a working time policy designed and intended to enforce a transition away from fossil fuels be worthy of serious consideration?
The closing working-time question answers itself, even were it possible to design a working-time policy to achieve such a specialized end without massive side-effects, which seems unlikely. No sane person in Europe, the USA, Japan, or even China will want to go back to living as many unfortunately still must in, especially, “India and Indonesia”. The prospect is simply too awful to contemplate.
So Germany will be mining lignite a while longer, even if the Hambach forest is closed off. USA silicon-valley elites and AGW preachers will continue to fly private, here, there, and everywhere, to deliver 20-minute speeches at “conventions”, empty speeches which could as well be Skyped in or not given at all. Voters will avoid politicians who promise to adopt the “policies they have no intentions of adopting”, which would, among many other things, imprison said voters within walking distance of their homes, homes which would be rendered dead and non-functional.
Be practical, then. Prepare to adapt. And whatever happens, don’t buy swampland in Florida, which has after all been a sick joke for many decades. Don’t buy it in the Rockaways either.
Oh, and don’t get too overwrought over disaster porn from jet-setting IPCCers, born of frustration over the failure of politicians to “act” on their silly prescriptions. Getting overwrought will simply be futile.
Thanks for confirming my expectation that cynics will trot out their well-worn prejudices without so much as a nod of consideration of novel interpretations. Keep swallowing that propaganda, sucker.
Nothing funnier than when economists write about energy issues when they have no concept of such basics as EROI and just how reliant all forms of alternative energy are on having a fossil fuel platform to sustain them.
A 45% reduction in emissions means worldwide depression, with all the wars, mass starvation and genocide that entails. No world “leader,” no matter their political inclination, wants to be responsible for initiating such a calamity, which is why they will continue blowing hot air, hoping to be long dead when the real bill comes due.
Yes, a 45% reduction in emissions will mean worldwide depression and a 45% INCREASE in emissions will bring us paradise on earth. Here’s the deal: the alternative is not between a 45% reduction in emissions and business as usual. Whatever happens over the next 10 years will be nothing like what has been happening for the last 10 years. The next crash will not have a rinse-and-repeat 2008 bank bailout. The Poonzi of all Ponzis will give us wars, mass starvation and genocide that will make a worldwide depression look like a Sunday picnic.
IPCC have been covering up how bad the warming has been for 30 years. They deserve to be ignored by the “real” climate truthers.
Karl, materialists like you are the problem. Read Al Gore and the Unabomber for realism.
“just how reliant all forms of alternative energy are on having a fossil fuel platform to sustain them. ”
Nothing compared to how reliant fossil fuel platforms are on fossil fuels.
Smarter trolls, please.
Joel:
I believe this is your bailiwick if I remember your prior comments correctly. You could certainly add to Sandwichman’s words here.
Smarter trolls? An oxymoron.
The 40 hour workweek is much like the minimum wage in that it is a government imposed interference in the free market. Everyone who opposes the minimum wage should also oppose the 40 hour workweek.
But you never see any of them opposing the 40 hour work week I’ve long wondered why.
@run,
It is certainly true that, these days, manufacture of solar panels, windmills, geothermal piping and other renewable energy infrastructure does require energy from carbon. This is a sophistry. Until most energy comes from renewables, it will come from carbon, Just like all coal, oil and natural gas energy generation infrastructure was built with carbon. But the energy generated by solar panels, windmills, geothermal et al. does not consume carbon. Can you spot the difference?
Our rooftop solar (22 panels) is insured for 20 years. Each year, we generate ca. $600 of electricity from our panels, in a state where 80% of electricity comes from coal. I’m confident that over the life cycle of our solar panels, the carbon offset will more than repay the carbon debt of their manufacture.
Joel:
Too late for me as we have at most two more years in this house and then relocate closer to family as I retire. Thought about the solar panels atop our two story house and get them to swivel with the movement of the sun east to west.