I generally agree, but there’s three challenges with that math -
First, it’s difficult to predict the actual effective useful life or economic value of a piece of infrastructure - let’s just take the most absolutely optimistic case and say that, 10 years from now, we crack nuclear fusion and energy is now totally free (it’s a thought experiment, please don’t throw rocks at this part), and that completely changes the economics of the wind turbine - it’s not even worth the marginal cost of running the turbine and shipping the energy somewhere. Suddenly, all our long term payoff calculations go to hell. Similarly, say a hurricane comes through and rips down the wind farm - same deal. Long-term value prediction is very hard, and modern American society in particular seems to be especially bad at predicting, and then building and maintaining to that prediction.
Second, there’s an assumption that 100Gt of carbon today is cheaper than 10Gt of carbon over 20 years - that assumes a linear response to carbon, that time of emission doesn’t matter, and that our ability to draw down carbon remains constant. If any of those don’t hold true (and I’d at least strongly suspect 1 and probably 2 don’t), the equation changes unfavorably.
Finally, and drawing on the second point, it assumes that we have a carbon budget at all - that the allowable amount of carbon emissions is anything over zero at all at this point. There’s a lot of talk about “lowering” carbon emissions - this is why natural gas keeps getting brought up as an improvement (well, that, and the trillion-dollar industry built on top of hydrocarbons), while it’s pretty clear that can’t be a long term answer because our target emissions rate for the next century effectively needs to be negative. In other words, if this is one of those “horseshoes and hand grenades” situations where close enough doesn’t really cut it, the math on “eat carbon today, save it tomorrow” doesn’t really pen out.
I don’t know how the trade on any particular piece of energy infrastructure works out, and I don’t know what the answers to the above questions are, but I see a lot of people treating this like a minimization problem, where the thing we’re actually doing is perturbing a complex chaotic system, and the math here may not play like our engineering minds want it to.
First, it’s difficult to predict the actual effective useful life or economic value of a piece of infrastructure - let’s just take the most absolutely optimistic case and say that, 10 years from now, we crack nuclear fusion and energy is now totally free (it’s a thought experiment, please don’t throw rocks at this part), and that completely changes the economics of the wind turbine - it’s not even worth the marginal cost of running the turbine and shipping the energy somewhere. Suddenly, all our long term payoff calculations go to hell. Similarly, say a hurricane comes through and rips down the wind farm - same deal. Long-term value prediction is very hard, and modern American society in particular seems to be especially bad at predicting, and then building and maintaining to that prediction.
Second, there’s an assumption that 100Gt of carbon today is cheaper than 10Gt of carbon over 20 years - that assumes a linear response to carbon, that time of emission doesn’t matter, and that our ability to draw down carbon remains constant. If any of those don’t hold true (and I’d at least strongly suspect 1 and probably 2 don’t), the equation changes unfavorably.
Finally, and drawing on the second point, it assumes that we have a carbon budget at all - that the allowable amount of carbon emissions is anything over zero at all at this point. There’s a lot of talk about “lowering” carbon emissions - this is why natural gas keeps getting brought up as an improvement (well, that, and the trillion-dollar industry built on top of hydrocarbons), while it’s pretty clear that can’t be a long term answer because our target emissions rate for the next century effectively needs to be negative. In other words, if this is one of those “horseshoes and hand grenades” situations where close enough doesn’t really cut it, the math on “eat carbon today, save it tomorrow” doesn’t really pen out.
I don’t know how the trade on any particular piece of energy infrastructure works out, and I don’t know what the answers to the above questions are, but I see a lot of people treating this like a minimization problem, where the thing we’re actually doing is perturbing a complex chaotic system, and the math here may not play like our engineering minds want it to.