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August 25th, 2022
Via Bloomberg, commentary on how China’s drought has implications for power generation and global climate, along with some nasty feedback loops:
Apocalypses are, by definition, bad. But in popular culture and imagination, they are usually at least understandable, if not manageable. With zombies and plagues, for instance, all you’ve got to do is avoid getting eaten/sick, and you can rebuild society, and you’ll have a much easier time making dinner reservations.
The climate apocalypse kind of felt that way for a while. Sure, we would all get hotter and the seas would rise, but humanity would figure it out, like it always does. Just give everybody solar-powered air-conditioning and build big sea walls around all the cities. Simple!But the climate crisis is turning out to be way more complicated. The US is getting once-every-thousand-year rainstorms weekly now, but the water is coming from places like the Rhine and the Yangtze, which are drier than they’ve been in centuries, revealing ancient statues, dinosaur prints and that pair of sunglasses you dropped in 1998.
Worse, the sudden absence of water will make it harder for China, the world’s biggest CO2 polluter, to de-carbonize. The Yangtze is the fuel supply for thousands of hydroelectric stations, including the world’s biggest, notes David Fickling. The severe drought has China turning to the dirtiest fuel, coal, for power generation, making future droughts even more likely. (Adding insult to injury, coal is expensive and misallocated around the country, David notes in the latest Elements newsletter, which may yet be renamed Apocalypse Now.)
In fact, vast swaths of Asia rely too much on hydro power generated by waters melting from the Himalayan mountains, David warns, and too little on wind and solar. They’ll need a better balance, especially if some of this water is never coming back.