Efficient Polluters: what are they doing right?

In the previous post, I talked about distinguishing the "good guy" nations from the "bad guy" nations in terms of who got the best economic result from their polluting activities. Another way to say that is: who produces the least amount of pollution for every $MM of economic production?

Using a stat of GDP/CO2 ($MM of Gross Domestic Product divided by metric tons of CO2 emissions), I got a short list of nations that seemed to be doing things right:

Switzerland
Norway
Sweden
France
Denmark
Ireland
Austria

These were several times better than the global average. And a bunch of other countries belonging to the European Union, while not on this short list, were also looking pretty good. Now, we should ask: WHY? What are they doing right?

So, I tackled the obvious first. Since so much of any economy uses electrical power, I wanted to see how that power was generated. Maybe after that, I'll tackle transportation methods. Anyway, using data from Nationmaster.com on the percentage of energy production by source, I looked for correlations between the GDP/CO2 statistic and the source of energy production. The sources available were:

Fossil Fuel
Nuclear
Hydroelectric
Other (Wind/Solar/Geothermal)

It was interesting to note that correlations were not great for any of the non-fossil fuel sources individually, but when you pair them up, there was a definite correlation. The answer is NOT nuclear. Or wind/solar. Or Hydro. No silver bullets, no magic solutions existed. The real answer appears to be "all of the above". The best correlation was to "NON-fossil-fuel" sources combined. And the answer was very similar for the sum of nuclear and hydro. Wind/solar/geothermal has a positive correlation, but a very small one. It doesn't add much "lift". The real mileage is in a combination of nuclear and hydro.

But...

The benefit doesn't become significant until a country passes about the 70% mark of non-fossil-fuel sources for energy production. It's pretty linear, and nearly flat, prior to that. But once you pass 70%, the benefit goes up exponentially. See the following graph:



For point of reference, the USA has less than 30% of its energy coming from nuclear and hydro combined. That, I think, is what makes us a pretty mediocre "polluter" when it comes to efficiency. And we have a looooong way to go to get into the elite class of countries who "fuel" their economy wisely.

It seems that the best place to put scarce investment resources in the short run, to solve the immediate crisis, is into hydroelectric or nuclear power generation facilities. This should be done with a goal in mind to crank up electrical power as much as possible, make it cheap, and convert to electric vehicles ASAP. Wind and solar may be attractive, but statistically they don't appear to give nearly the lift as do nuclear and hydro power.

The faster we can ramp up nukes and dams to produce it, grid infrastructure to distribute it, and vehicles to use it, the better chance we have of solving the problem. Wind and solar... back burner. The problem with this, of course, is in the developing countries. Nuclear power is interesting to them for other reasons, not all of which are... friendly. :(

But that threshold is already crossed in terms of the biggest "bad boy" countries: Russia, China, India. They all have nuclear weapons. So encouraging them (even economically) to do more nuclear power and hydroelectric power is not a national security issue. No need to wait!

Let's go forward! More dams, more nuke plants, a better grid, more electric cars. That's the ticket.