How will the green transition affect the climate and environment?

How will the green transition affect the climate and environment?

No one disagrees with the general rule that “nothing is free,” which will certainly apply to the process of transforming the global energy system away from fossil fuels to renewable sources, not only from the economic aspect as some might think, but also from the various environmental aspects.

The process Green transition will itself generate huge carbon emissions. Building wind turbines, solar panels and other new infrastructure are all energy-intensive, much of which will necessarily come from the fossil fuels we are seeking to get rid of. But the good news is that if this new renewables infrastructure can be put to work quickly, these emissions will fall dramatically; Because more renewable energy early will mean far less fossil fuels to complete the transition.

To shed light on this issue, a study was published last November in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, discussing the environmental impacts of the green transition process.

Highlighting the Forgotten Side

“The message is that rebuilding the global energy system will itself need energy, and we need to account for that,” said the study’s principal investigator and student at the Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Corey Lisk, who conducted the research as a doctoral student.

The researchers involved in the study calculated the potential emissions resulting from energy use in mining, manufacturing, transportation, construction, and other activities needed to create massive farms of solar panels and wind turbines, along with more limited geothermal infrastructure and other energy sources.

Previous research expected the cost of renewable energy infrastructure to be $3.5 trillion annually until 2050 to reach net zero emissions, or up to about $14 trillion for the United States alone in the same period. However, these studies focused on the financial cost of the green transition, but what about the environmental cost? It seems that the new study we are talking about is the first to shed light on the expected amounts of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) that will result from this according to the current slow pace of development of renewable energy infrastructure.

Researchers estimate that the process of Green Transition will produce “185 billion” tons of carbon dioxide by 2100. This alone is equivalent to five or six years of current global emissions, a very heavy burden on the atmosphere.

However, if the world builds infrastructure fast enough to limit temperature rise; These emissions will decrease by approximately half, or 95 billion tons. If a truly ambitious path is followed; To limit global warming to 1.5 degrees; The cost would be just 20 billion tons by 2100 to complete the green transition infrastructure, equivalent to just six months or so of current global emissions.

How will the green transformation process affect the environment?

The researchers point out that all of their estimates may be too low; This is because they do not take into account the raw materials needed, nor the construction mechanisms required to make new electricity transmission lines, nor the batteries that will be used for storage, both of which are energy and resource-intensive products. The study also does not include the cost of replacing gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles with electric ones, or making existing buildings more energy efficient. The study also looks at carbon dioxide emissions only, which currently cause about 60 percent of ongoing global warming.

It is difficult to determine the other impacts of the transition to renewable energy sources, but they may be significant, as the transition to renewable energy resources requires a large number of new high-tech equipment and devices, which in turn will require huge quantities of basic metals, including copper, iron, and nickel, and will also require rare elements that were less used previously, such as lithium, cobalt, yttrium, and neodymium.

Many of these aforementioned raw materials likely come from places with fragile environments not yet reached by human hands, including the deep sea, African forests, and the rapidly dissolving region of Greenland. Solar panels and wind turbines will directly consume vast areas of land, with potential impacts on ecosystems and the people who live there.

As part of the study, Lisk and his colleagues also looked at carbon emissions from adapting to sea level rise, finding that building seawalls and moving cities inland where necessary could generate 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2100 under the two-degree scenario, which, again, would be only part of the cost of adapting to climate change.

The study concluded that the process of Green transformation may not be green in itself, despite the necessity of resorting to green transformation; To reduce emissions and limit global warming, but the slow transition process will have a significant impact on the emissions generated during the different stages of the transition. Therefore, it is very important to adopt policies that accelerate the green transformation process, and to study the environmental impacts in depth. To reduce any harm to the environment.