The Geopolitics of the Global Energy Transition Lecture Notes in Energy
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Lecture Notes in Energy 73 Manfred Hafner Simone Tagliapietra Editors The Geopolitics of the Global Energy Transition Lecture Notes in Energy Volume 73 Lecture Notes in Energy (LNE) is a series that reports on new developments in the study of energy: from science and engineering to the analysis of energy policy. The series’ scope includes but is not limited to, renewable and green energy, nuclear, fossil fuels and carbon capture, energy systems, energy storage and harvesting, batteries and fuel cells, power systems, energy efficiency, energy in buildings, energy policy, as well as energy-related topics in economics, management and transportation. Books published in LNE are original and timely and bridge between advanced textbooks and the forefront of research. 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Please get in touch with the series via Anthony Doyle, Executive Editor, Springer ([email protected]) More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8874 Manfred Hafner • Simone Tagliapietra Editors The Geopolitics of the Global Energy Transition Editors Manfred Hafner Simone Tagliapietra Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei Milan, Italy Milan, Italy ISSN 2195-1284 ISSN 2195-1292 (electronic) Lecture Notes in Energy ISBN 978-3-030-39065-5 ISBN 978-3-030-39066-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39066-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adap- tation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publi- cation does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Foreword In physics, power is the rate of work per unit time. In geopolitics, it is the ability of one nation to influence the behaviour of other nations. It’s not surprising that the same word, with its root in the Latin posse (to be able), refers to both concepts. A nation’s command of physical power, notably through its control over primary energy resources such as oil, not only shapes its economic development but also its national security and military strength. As such, the international relations of nations are profoundly influenced by the distributions of energy resources and the technologies for their utilization. Every great transition in energy technology entails a shift in geopolitics as well. Our generation’s energy transition to zero-carbon energy, or decarbonization, will reshape geopolitics of the twenty-first century. This superb volume offers a deeply informed tour d’horizon of the geopolitics of global energy decarbonization, and the ways that geopolitics may stymie or support the transition to climate safety. Energy transitions have defined several key epochs of human history. Early man’s harnessing of fire changed the genetic and cultural trajectory of humanity itself. The harnessing of wind power for sailing ships enabled sea-based trade and migrations over vast distances. The harnessing of horse power gave rise to empires. And without doubt, it was James Watt’s coal-fired steam engine (building on precursors of Savery and Newcomen) that gave rise to industrialization, and with it, to Britain’s remarkable global hegemony in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Watt’s invention, commercialized around 1776, ushered in the Fossil-Fuel Age, a period of more than two centuries in which global economic growth has been powered by solar energy of tens of millions of years ago stored in fossilized remains of plant and animal life. By gaining the ability to harness the fossil fuels—coal, oil and natural gas—humanity tapped into a seemingly limitless reserve of power. Watt’s coal-fired steam engine was followed by Daimler and Benz’s internal combustion engine for automobiles, and Parsons’ and Curtis’s gas turbines for transport and mechanical power. v vi Foreword The global distribution of fossil fuel is highly unequal, with some countries blessed with massive reserves and others bereft of fossil fuels that are exploitable on an economical basis. Ownership of plentiful fossil fuels, not surprisingly, has tended to give a huge boost to economic development, military might and geopolitical influence. Britain’s highly accessible coal reserves were essential to turn Watt’s new steam engine from a mere curiosity to the source of Britain’s imperial might. Other countries with accessible coal reserves generally found an earlier path to industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the early twentieth century, oil joined coal as a new key currency of geopolitics, especially after Winston Churchill ordered Britain’s navy to convert from coal-burning steam engines to oil-burning steam engines, to be followed later by the navy’s conversion from steam power to diesel engines. The control of oil became key to military and geopolitical power. Like coal, oil was very unequally distributed around the world. Oil-rich regions like the US and Russia gained vast geopolitical and economic advantages, or alternatively fell victim to military con- quests by Britain, the US, Russia and other major powers that acted militarily to secure their oil supplies. But for the climate crisis, the fossil-fuel era would surely be continuing today and into the future with the exploitation of new fossil-fuel reserves through fracking, deep-sea drilling and other advances in exploration, development and utilization. Despite claims to the contrary, the world has enough coal, oil and natural gas to last for centuries. The fossil-fuel era is ending not by running out of fossil fuels but for a wholly different reason, indeed a quirk of quantum physics. As great nineteenth- century scientists including Fourier, Tyndall and Arrhenius came to realize that fossil fuels have a pesky side effect. When they are combusted, they release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, and CO2 has the quantum physical property of absorbing electromagnetic radiation at infrared wavelengths. The implication? Atmospheric CO2 warms Earth by trapping infrared radiation that would otherwise radiate from Earth to outer space. CO2 is, in modern parlance, a greenhouse gas. To an extent, this is life-saving good news. Without atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, Earth would be as cold and lifeless as the moon. Yet with too much atmospheric CO2, the Earth’s temperature will rise to dangerous levels. Such is our current predicament and the backstory of this important volume. Humanity has already raised the atmospheric concentration of CO2 from 280 parts per million (ppm) to around 415 ppm in May 2019, mostly through fossil-fuel use but also through deforestation and other economic activities. The result is that the planet is now around 1.2 °C warmer than when Watt unveiled his world-changing steam engine. 1.2 °C might not seem like much, but it is enough to make Earth warmer than at any time since the start of civilization itself some 10,000 years ago. It is enough to be disrupting societies, economies and ecosystems around the world. We are already in an era of intense storms, rising sea levels, droughts, floods, emerging infectious diseases, massive forest fires and other climate-related disas- ters. We are already suffering worldwide losses amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars per year, and mass displacements of populations, including losses of life. Foreword vii And the prospects of further warming are even more dangerous. The Earth is already at, or soon will be at, temperatures high enough to result in a multi-metre rise of ocean levels, with the consequence of disrupting lives for hundreds of millions or billions or people around the world. Moreover, the Earth’s climate system is characterized by multiple ‘positive feedbacks’ that amplify the human-induced warming, such as the loss of sea ice (which reduces the Earth’s albedo and accelerates warming), the melting of the permafrost (which releases methane and carbon dioxide) and the drying of rainforests (turning them from carbon sinks to carbon sources).