Heard on the Floor at ABLC

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) “We’re out of time”. ... The subject was deployment vs development, whether we should go with what we have as opposed to waiting for better technology to come along. The context was the new report out from IPCC, the 2023 update on climate science. You can read it here, I suggest wearing a diaper while doing so. A couple diagrams tell the tale; I was focused not on the rising sea levels but the falling crop productivity.

Here’s how one expert at ABLC described the report to me: “1.5 degrees is gone, 2 degrees is gone, 2.5 degrees is a maybe, and at 2.5 degrees the coral dies.” The latter was not offered merely in sympathy with the lovely coral, but as a sign that the impacts could be terrible and ocean wide. I remember how Paul Giamatti as Ben Bernancke said in the film Too Big to Fail, “Credit has the ability to build a modern economy, but lack of credit has the ability to destroy it, swiftly and absolutely.” You could substitute food production for the word credit and I think it applies well.

Most Hollywood portrayals of climate change refer to rising seas or bad storms, I suspect the real impact will be in agriculture, and soon.

Looking at the map, I estimated that in a bad-case scenario — which is what you get, more or less, from talk-about-how-no-one-wil-pay-a-green-premium and other calls to inaction — that drought will take away about half the food supply and the wars that would inevitably result from food shortages will reduce the yields eighty percent or so of what’s left.

There’s a betting chance some people will be too busy putting a fist through the last window to steal the last loaf of bread, to care whether Exxon made the (2050) goal or not.

If the IPCC report is true and stopping down use of fossil fuels in 2030 is the cure, the bioeconomy is going to be the only source of whatever goods, based on our ideas of business as usual, that we are going to be able to use. That is, no fuels, no shirts, no pants, no pesticides, no fertilizers, no containers, no chairs, no deliveries, no reliable power. Petroleum and gas are everywhere in our society — long before we are overwhelmed by the rising waters, we are going to be choked by the weeds.

All of this depends on whether we believe in this report. Not everyone will, some will have good reasons for skepticism. But then, we might ask ourselves, if we believe some other report and not this one, if we cherry-pick amongst the scientific reports and simply celebrate those that agree with our priors, are we not drawing facts from conclusions instead of conclusions from facts? We might as well join the Kari Lake movement and stand with a charismatic candidate with a clear message and a lack of fealty to hard data.

It is possible that the report is wrong; science is a process of falsification, and maybe this report’s conclusions will be falsified by new data, new options, new tech. I sure hope so. I wouldn’t bet my life on it. But let us not simply swallow the science, even if we might follow it. As Eric McAfee observed in his Global Bioeconomy Leadership Award remarks, people thought that we we running out of SAF feedstock until pandemic pushed the price of plant oils to 70 cents per pound and all kinds of new supply emerged. At ABLC he observed that changing times brought out new solutions — and we might remember that Peak Oil was addressed by fracking, Peak Whale by electric lighting. Changing time brings fresh data — and in this context we salute the upcoming 2023 Billion Ton update tipped by DOE for later this year. At the end of the day, climate change analysis is driven by modeling, and if models made by smart people were always right, we’d never have excessive inflation or unemployment.

At ABLC, we heard hopefully of the Biden Administration’s bold new goals for the bioeconomy, the SAF Grand Challenge, and a lot of references to the helpful provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. We heard skepticism from airlines about Low Carbon Fuel Standards, that we should count all the carbon (and yet resist carbon tunnel vision as Topsoe’s Milica Folic warned us against). We heard from AgCertain CEO Dan Oh that we have to de-commoditize biobased ingredients, we heard that airlines have hesitation about book & claim. Plenty of intelligent discussion of urgent issues. There was a lot to hear on the floor with 842 leaders of the bioeconomy on hand.

But for those of you who suspect that the IPCC science is right, it’s time for a change in thinking. Deploy not because of mandates or incentives or hopes for a better 2100, deploy to build capacity for a planet that will be absent capacity except at the price of starvation. In a world of blind men, the one-eyed man is king, and that is what I heard on the floor at ABLC from the leaders of the bioeconomy, deploy now, deploy with what we’ve got. If we have to get off petroleum and gas faster than we think, the bioeconomy is not about building affordable substitutes for a long, long transition out of oil & gas — if we can’t make fossil plastic, fertilizer, paints, car parts and fabrics, all there will be is the bioplastic, biofertilizer, biopaint, bio car parts and biofabric. READ MORE