Keeling Curve 1957 to 2018
The Chinese Bet
An authoritarian government bets against democracy
Summary:
In 2001, after witnessing the American election of a climate change denying President, the Chinese government made a bet that the democratic process, as practiced in the US, would give China an opportunity to overtake the US dominance of world markets by going “all-in” on the minerals and technologies that the world would need to address the coming change to a carbon neutral future.
History:
In 1939, Guy Callendar, a British steam engineer and spectroscopist, put forward an essay arguing that human activity had raised the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere by about 10% since the beginning of the 20th century. This began a debate in the scientific community about the effects of human activity on the atmosphere and oceans.
In the International Geophysical Year 1957-1959, a postdoctoral scientist named Charles Keeling was assigned to monitor the CO2 content of the atmosphere from the top of Mauna Loa in Hawaii. The location was selected because it wasn't downwind from any local industrial activity. Keeling took 4 samples a day for 18 months and the results of his study were unexpected. First, his data showed the yearly cycle produced when CO2 is taken up as the vegetation in the northern hemisphere leafs out and then is expelled when the leaves fall and decompose. Second, it confirmed Callendar's assertion about the 10% increase since the beginning of the century. Lastly, and most surprisingly, it showed that, even during the short 18 month study, an obvious increase was in progress. The graphic figure produced by this increase has since been known as the Keeling curve.
Keeling Curve 1957 to 2018
Over the next several years, other scientists confirmed Keeling's findings and also demonstrated that the same increase could be observed in other green house gases (GHG) such as methane, ozone and chlorofluorocarbons. By the 1970s, the scientific debate about the increase in these gases was over and the research shifted to trying to figure out what the result of these increases would be.
Politics:
About the time the scientific debate ended, the political debate began. From the very beginning, it has been obvious to everyone that a solution to the GHG problem would have to involve major changes in the way the modern world operates. Economically, there would be big shifts in every sector of human activity. Large business interests would be losers and others would be winners.
This was not unprecedented. Scientific studies about the health effects of smoking, of sulfur emissions from power plants and about the release of Freon from refrigeration systems had all resulted in government action that had major effects on industry and on the public. The only difference here was the scale which would be much larger for GHG.
The Response from Industry:
The typical response from the affected industries to all of these situations was to mount a disinformation campaign to discredit the scientific information and even the scientists themselves. They paid semi-scientific shills to publish conflicting information. They threw huge amounts of money to politicians that would support their false narratives. It is important to understand that time has shown that all of these campaigns intentionally and knowingly falsified the information they distributed to protect their profits.
The Response from the UN:
Because the response to global atmospheric emissions can't be handled by any one country, the United Nations got involved. In order to combat the disinformation that was being distributed about the GHG problem and to overcome the scientific tendency to be equivocal (if there's a 50% chance of rain, do I wear half a raincoat?), the UN appointed an international group of scientists that would provide non-controversial information that was solid enough for politicians to use as a basis for actual policy.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 to provide policymakers with regular scientific assessments on the current state of knowledge about climate change. UN member governments were asked to nominate members. The group releases its reports based on a consensus of the scientists involved so they tend to be very conservative.
The first IPCC report, released in 1990 and amended in 1992 was a bit of a disappointment to the environmental community. It made no predictions about tipping points or other drastic scenarios. Its major conclusions were simply that climate change was real and measurable and that it was being driven by human activity.
As minimal as these conclusions were, they had major political and social implications. It became an unavoidable fact that major changes to modern society would have to occur in a relatively short period of time if some very serious impacts were to be avoided. New technologies would have to be developed and some old technologies would have to be abandoned.
The World Begins to Respond:
A second IPCC report was generated in 1995 outlining some of the sources of GHG production that would need to be addressed. A gathering at Kyoto, Japan was convened to divide responsibilities to the various nations. Obviously, the biggest GHG producing nations would be required to make the largest cut-backs while developing nations would need to shift their efforts going forward so as to avoid adopting the GHG producing practices of the past. And we had to define which were “developing nations”.
In 1997, the Kyoto protocols were adopted and they became the world's first international attempt to address the problem of human caused climate change. The environmental community was not impressed and referred to the newly adopted protocols as being way too little to address the problem with no enforcement mechanism to compel compliance. Still, the Kyoto protocols represented the world's first unified attempt at solving the largest environmental issue mankind has ever faced.
The 2000 Election:
In the United States, 2000 was a presidential election year. The race featured a contest between an outward looking figure that embraced the Kyoto protocols (Albert Gore) and an inward facing conservative candidate that looked at Kyoto and any international policy as an invasion of domestic independence (George W. Bush).
Strangely, the largest issue in the race was not about our response to climate change or whether the US would continue to engage with the rest of the world but whether Gore should be held responsible for the sexual improprieties of the preceding president that he had served under. The final result of the election was to find that Gore won the majority of votes and even the majority of state electors but lost the election because of a ballot issue in the state of Florida that transferred a few thousand votes from Gore to an insignificant third party candidate, giving Bush the accidental victory.
By the second month of the Bush presidency, the US had turned its back on the Kyoto protocols and reversed its position on several local steps to combat climate change. This signaled to the world that the US, at the time, the biggest GHG emitter, was going to stick its head in the sand and pretend that climate change was not happening.
The Bet:
Meanwhile, China was going through an economic revolution. When China opened up its economy and introduced free market reforms in 1979 its economy represented less than 2% of the world's GDP. Only 40 years later, China's influence on the world economy is second only to that of the U.S. In 2000, when the U.S. walked away from the Kyoto protocols, China saw this as an opportunity to overtake the west by dominating the technologies and materials that would become necessary to fight the climate catastrophe that was looming. Using the power of the central government's ability to direct investment, that government looked to the future to control production of solar panels, wind generators, electric vehicles, batteries, inverters, carbon sequestration equipment and critical materials like deposits of lithium, nickel, cobalt and various rare earth elements used in fuel cells, batteries and magnets.
To accomplish its goals, China was willing to take big loses to gain market share and to expand capacity in manufacturing. It was also willing to steal as much of this technology as was necessary to get started. The Chinese view of intellectual property is very different from that of the west and that aided in its desire to acquire the necessary information. The west sees these as “unfair business practices” and, frankly, China could care less.
Part of the gamble that China was making was that the misinformation campaign being waged in the U.S. would continue to delay the U.S. advance. In fact, almost all these technologies had been invented in the U.S. and, at one point, the U.S. had dominated the world manufacture in all these areas.
As I write this in 2024, China is winning their bet. They currently produce 80% of the world's solar panels and they have developed manufacturing techniques that allow them to make panels with a higher energy density, cheaper and faster than anything that the U.S. can boast. They may have started by stealing some ideas from western companies but they have now surpassed their teachers.
Similarly, China now produces two thirds of the world's electric vehicles (EVs), wind generators and lithium batteries. BYD surpassed Tesla last year to become the largest EV company in the world. And BYD is only one of over a dozen electric car companies in China. China makes 95% of the world's silicon wafers (used for solar panel manufacture) and it is nearly impossible for American manufacturers to buy the necessary materials to build EV batteries without doing business with a Chinese corporation.
Some have criticized China for not reducing its own GHG emissions. China currently emits twice what the U.S. does. But that misses the point of the strategy. Now that China has a stranglehold on climate change technologies, they need the west to come to a sudden realization that it needs to make changes fast and that they need to buy the components of this change from China. The more GHG in the atmosphere, the faster this will come about. They don't want the west to catch up before this big Aha! moment.
The Political Crisis:
The U.S. is now teetering on a knife edge. 30 years after the IPCC delivered its 1992 report The U.S. finally passed the first major climate action initiative. The (poorly named) Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed in August 2022 is a heavy handed attempt to promote green technologies but it also attempts to overcome the Chinese advantage. These two goals are often mutually exclusive. As an example: to combat GHG emissions, the U.S. needs to sell more EVs to the public, but the IRA ended up reducing the number of vehicles that qualify for the incentives made to level the playing field between ICE vehicles and EVs. Even so, after 50 years of inaction, the IRA is the best thing the U.S. federal government has to show in the battle against GHGs.
Once again, this fall, we will have a Presidential election between a candidate that understands the urgency for climate action and one who is willing to, once again, pretend the problem doesn't exist. If the later wins this election or even enough of his supporters win congressional seats, the Chinese will win their bet going away.
Written July 2024 by Paul Kahle