The War on Waste
A strategy to combat climate change and conflict
Fears of Cold War II appeared to temper this week as President Xi and President Biden met on the United States’ Pacific coast and announced resumed cooperation to combat the climate crisis and military-to-military communications. But the competition for resources that lies as a root cause of both climate change and conflict looms large. At the heart of it is competition for fossil fuels. And it is time to do something about it.
Both superpowers stayed away from statements about fossil fuels. Transitioning away from them will be a central, if difficult, issue for the upcoming COP28 summit in Dubai in a fortnight. Competition for fossil fuels, which the world still runs and depends on, has stoked hot wars, let alone cold ones. Natural gas has played a leading role in the theatre of war in Ukraine and lurks beneath current tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.
Until February 2022, Ukraine was the conduit for Russian gas to Europe. Russia invaded Ukraine within days of the mothballing of Nord Stream 2, an $11 billion project to bypass Ukraine. The war ended Russian exports of natural gas to Europe, which had depended on Russia for 40% of its supply. Europe’s need to diversify sources of supply, immediately, boosted exports from the United States. So too, Europe looked to the Middle East. A deal was agreed with Israel to export natural gas from its fields offshore of Gaza to Europe via Egypt in the months following the Russia-Ukraine war. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran looked on with a dim view.
Meeting this week at APEC and soon at COP, the United States and China are in very different places on the energy map. The United States has enjoyed energy independence since 2019 and is the world’s largest producer of oil and gas. China is not. China is Iran’s biggest customer for oil, and Russia’s for natural gas. The United States’ great energy transition has been from coal to gas. China remains 60% coal, and only 6% natural gas, a relationship that it wants to turn upside down.
China is a global leader in renewable energy generation and dominates the global supply chain for manufacturing from solar, wind and batteries to electric vehicles, as well as critical resource processing. The United States is one of the largest consumers of clean energy technologies but drags behind on equipment and component production. But both countries still depend, like the rest of the world, on fossil fuels for 80% of energy supply, and particularly for industry and transport. So far renewables have added to the energy system, but $6 trillion invested has achieved little if anything to displace fossil fuels or to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Before their Presidents met, on 14th November, the United States and China put out a joint statement “on enhancing cooperation to address the climate crisis”. The statement planned to curb methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 in the short term. It also restated the G20 Leader’s pledge to triple renewable energy capacity globally by 2030. Both commitments could make a difference to greenhouse gas emissions and the rate of global warming by the end of the decade, whether or not the same can be said of the target that each country set to advance 5 large-scale carbon capture projects at the same time.
However, the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, and therefore of emissions reductions, is waste. Over 70% of primary energy is lost in the process of extraction, conversion, generation, transmission, and distribution, and more still at the point of use. (Around half of food and a third of water, which also depend on energy, is also wasted). That this is rarely discussed in polite politics or society is a big problem. The focus remains on adding new capacity, not on reducing losses. The problem, as it is most often framed, is that we don’t have enough generation of this or that – enough utility scale wind, solar, nuclear, hydrogen etc. This lower carbon generation will all take time, money, and resources to make. In the meantime, at least as big a problem is that we are wasting most of the world’s valuable energy, and most of all fossil fuels, the competition for which is inflaming conflict as well as climate change.
Some media outlets have started to refer to ‘global heating’ rather than ‘global warming’. This refers to the concern raised by scientists that the Earth is not ‘just’ warming but that the energy balance of the planet is changing, with threats to life. Semantically, this brushes against one of the key symptoms of excess greenhouse gas emissions. Energy represents up to 80% of human-made emissions. Heat losses associated with energy generation can, on their own, represent 50% plus of primary energy consumption. The other 20% of losses come from getting primary energy to centralised generators (which tend to be inefficient because they can’t or don’t use the heat), and from getting it from there to the point of use, which is often a large distance away. Adding more to this system perpetuates the problem.
Solutions to the problem involve wasting less. On-site energy generation – that is to say, making energy close to where you need it, using and storing electricity and heat – and reducing demand for energy at the point of use by using better equipment (lighting, heating, air conditioning, ventilation, insulation, motors, and controls) represent large parts of the solution. Electrifying transport and manufacturing lower carbon fuels is another way of wasting less. Joining the dots to create green ammonia, efficiently (preferably using renewable energy) and recycling waste may help to bring the food industry into modernity and to reduce its unsustainable impact on the climate and the environment.
Using energy more efficiently, doing the same or more with less and, crucially, wasting less, is key to any serious hope of sufficiently rapid decarbonisation as to slow the rate of global warming fast enough within the limited time available. As well as being the fastest, it is also the largest and cheapest source of greenhouse gas emission reductions. And so too with regards to energy security. The European Commission noted in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, that every unit of gas saved was 2.6 units that EU member states didn’t need to buy from Russia. By 2022, it didn’t have a choice. EU policy has been articulated as simply “energy efficiency first”. The European Commission has taken real steps to implement policy, from immediate mandatory gas and electricity reductions in 2022, to making available billions in market incentives. As European industry struggles under the weight of the cost of energy, efficiency is key to productivity, competitiveness, and sometimes survival.
But combating climate change and conflict are global problems and require global solutions. We might hope for progress at COP28, based on international cooperation, but we will need to see more than the greening of most of the electricity system (only 20% of energy) and the creation of one or two hands full of carbon capture machines. It is not ok to waste scarce and critical resources. We can’t afford the cost, carbon or security consequences. National and local government should start with an efficiency drive for their own buildings and transport assets first. Public sector (health, education, defence, transport etc) represents 15% plus of energy use in most economies and tends to be a larger user of energy than any private sector player. Then governments should regulate the private sector. They should set ambitious targets for energy productivity, reducing the amount of energy used per unit of GDP output.
We - individuals, companies, and governments - need to precision target waste in the metaphorical war to combat climate change. And by wasting less, we will use and spend less. And we will need less of the stuff that we are competing and fighting for in the real wars, hot or cold, that it fuels.
Climate change and conflict are often both built on foundations of overconsumption of, and competition for, coveted resources. To the extent that these problems are built on waste, rather we remove the foundations under them and prosecute war on waste.
And pray for peace.
Jonathan Maxwell
Sustainable Development Capital LLP