I’ll leave the light on for you

Hi there,

Two things to note off the bat. I’m going to keep this one a bit shorter as I don’t think I’ll need to go to extreme lengths to illustrate my point. Secondly, apologies for the late send-time, though my tardiness in getting this one out offers a meta-parallel for the content of the communication itself.

As 2024 draws to a close, here’s a reflection on what the year felt like with respect to energy transition and “climate” work.

OPINION

My argument today is simple. I’ve intimated it over the course of many thousands of words this year, but it doesn’t require that many more to reiterate.

The energy transition is going to take a long time.

That statement isn’t really a prediction anymore as much as it’s an observation of fact. Nor is it a statement that would have been invalidated by, say, a different outcome in the U.S. presidential election, or some other specific mitigating factor in an alternate universe. 

Here are a few thoughts on what has crystallized this idea for me recently, though.

A case study in catch-22s

The deeper into energy and energy transition dynamics you look, the more ludicrous are some of the “catch-22s” you find. They deserve more attention insofar as they perfectly encapsulate how hard energy transition work can be.

The ‘catch-22’ concept comes from Joseph Heller’s book Catch-22. I haven’t read it in some time, but it speaks to paradoxical situations (the catch-22s) in which people, organizations, or other entities find themselves trapped by contradictory rules, conditions, or prerogatives that make it hard to claim any semblance of “success” or “victory” while navigating a specific problem or challenge.

Germany, a country of which I’m a passport holder, finds itself in a variety of energy-related Catch-22s. I won’t belabor points that have been beaten to death elsewhere, such as the fact that Germany would be a lot better off had it not decommissioned 23 GW of nuclear energy capacity due to overblown concerns about their safety and how to manage nuclear waste. What I’ll focus on instead is how much natural gas Germany—and many other European countries—still imports from Russia.

Mind you, Germany and Europe import Russian gas via pipelines that run through Ukraine even as Germany and the European Union fund Ukraine’s war effort against Russia. Effectively, they’re funding both sides, subsidizing the Russian war effort by importing gas while supporting Ukraine with weapons and cash. And while they won’t collaborate on much else, Russia and Ukraine do collaborate to keep gas pipelines flowing.

In a sense, all bets are off, except that the gas—and by way of it, energy—must flow.

If that strikes you as strange, well, I agree. European exports of oil and gas from Russia have dropped since Russia deepened its invasion into Ukraine in 2021 (the invasion really started much earlier with Crimea in 2014). But imports actually rose again in 2024 (as visualized above), which I find particularly ludicrous considering how much other geopolitical posturing these importers get up to on global stages.

More importantly, the catch-22 here hammers home the difficulty of decarbonization and how energy transitions don’t happen overnight. For decades now, and much more so than other countries, Germany has tried to reduce its dependence on coal and gas. It pours billions annually into renewable energy development ($40 billion or so in 2023). And yet, even in a situation where it ostensibly has the utmost prerogative to nix its natural gas imports from Russia (i.e., there’s a geopolitical prerogative and an overarching climate prerogative), it can’t.

What this illustrates is how, more than in perhaps any other economic or technological category, energy interdependencies can be extremely difficult to untangle, at least quickly. Sure, sometimes infrastructure gets built quickly, especially when driven by absolute necessity (like a war!) Germany built a new LNG import terminal in just 7 months in 2022, which was a marked success. But that’s just infrastructure to import gas from elsewhere. Not to, you know, wean off gas altogether.

The more you (don’t) know

Energy, whether or not you choose to think about it much, touches every little nook and cranny of the modern world. It’s one foundational base layer of society, which, like Earth’s climate system, is an incredibly complex system. Extending that analogy, what we don’t know about the complexities of Earth’s climate system outweighs what we do concretely know. This year has been replete with climate scientists expressing surprise (often with a degree of alarm) at things ranging from how quickly the Arctic is turning from a net sink of greenhouse gas emissions to a potential net emitter of them to rapid hurricane intensification and the role trees play in the methane absorption cycle. Many climate scientists readily admit we are not yet particularly good at understanding, let alone forecasting, the complex, interwoven dynamics behind how various components of the climate system impact one another. All that gets even more complex when we consider the extent to which we actively influence these systems at significant scales.

We can say the same of the global energy landscape and energy transition dynamics. Attempting to overhaul the systems by which energy is generated, delivered, stored, and used worldwide is invariably a lot more complex than any intellectual exercise or even sophisticated computer model can predict. In retrospect, targets and treaties like the 2015 Paris Accords were far too optimistic about what was possible and underestimated the extent to which complexity and interdependence invariably complicate even the best-laid plans of mice and men. Often, when push comes to shove, targets and net-zero timelines that sound good on paper and in press releases are a lot less tenable once you start trying to put a sufficient amount of steel (itself a carbon-intensive product) in the ground.

Frankly, starting from scratch would be much easier. Building a DC microgrid with solar and batteries for a small community of fully electrified, modular homes in a desert somewhere wouldn’t be all that expensive or take that long. It’s when you have longstanding dependencies, large energy demands, existing intercontinental infrastructure, and power grids and supply chains you can’t disrupt easily, even for minutes or seconds, that things get complicated.

Said succinctly, the complexity of the Earth’s climate system and how little we know about it mirrors the complexity of modern society and how little we know about the challenges a comprehensive and global energy transition will introduce.

Yes, we know what we need to do at a high level. No, we don’t know all the complications that will crop up as we continue down this path. We will indubitably uncover many more energy-driven catch-22s as we keep up the work.

The net-net

So, what’s the way forward? In some ways, the answer becomes more simple when we acknowledge the scope, scale, and timeframes inherent to everything we’re talking about. The way to move forward is to, well, keep moving, even and perhaps especially when progress feels painfully incremental, slow, or impossible to ‘see’ at times altogether.

I understand that the world could be working harder to mitigate climate change. I also understand the impulse and potential benefits of setting ambitious targets and attempting to inspire action. But as the ship sails on holding global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, perhaps we should question to what extent past climate conversations and communications privileged a sort of ‘all-or-nothing’ approach and left little room for the incrementalism that has actually moved the energy transition needle in some cases.

Increasingly, I appreciate the incremental improvements–like improving a flare’s combustion efficiency from 95% to 99.9%–which, multiplied many times over and across the globe, do make a difference. Perhaps those incremental efforts matter as much, if not more so, than big breakthroughs or category-defining companies like Tesla did and do. I don’t know the answer. But I don’t think I would have even mused that out loud a year ago.

So yes, this will take time. It’ll take many more years. But I’ll be here. And I’ll leave the light on for you.

Bye,

— Nick