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Cambridge University Press
Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change by Simon Sharpe
Published in June 2023
The older I get, the more I rely on heuristics: Always put family before work. Time is our most precious asset. Be aware of cognitive blind spots (especially my own).
After reading Five Times Faster, I wonder if universities should adopt this heuristic to guide campus climate policies.
What would it mean for every college president to say, “We are going to decarbonize our university five times faster”?
I’ve not done all the math across the U.S. university ecosystem. Still, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that if higher education wants to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, we must move away from fossil fuels and toward renewables five times faster. This means accelerating our campus investments in technologies such as geoexchange and solar.
Geoexchange is an especially promising technology for universities, as open space on our campuses can be utilized to drill the bore fields (850-foot-deep wells) to enable heat exchange.
As explained on the Swarthmore geoexchange FAQ site, “As liquid travels through the pipes, it is either depositing thermal energy into the earth (summer) or extracting thermal energy from the earth (winter). With the help of the central geoexchange plant, this heated or cooled liquid is then sent to individual buildings across campus, where the HVAC systems transform that thermal energy into heating and cooling for our buildings.”
Of course, Five Times Faster is not about universities. We have Bryan Alexander’s must-read 2023 book, Universities on Fire, which persuades us of the risks of climate change to higher education.
What Five Times Faster does effectively is unpack how academics (especially economists) have systematically underestimated the risks of climate change to our society. By focusing on known costs instead of potential risks, academic economists have often been too often equivocated in recommending the rapid and large-scale investments necessary to reduce carbon emissions.
Climate change accelerates not so much consistent and knowable environmental levels as the frequency of high-risk/low-probability events. Outside of a narrow time window, a hurricane is impossible to predict. Nor can the frequency, location or severity of hurricanes be known in advance. What is abundantly clear from the past couple of months is that hurricanes, when they arrive, can devastate entire communities.
How much should we, as a society, spend to reduce the likelihood of extreme weather events such as hurricanes in the future?
What are the low-probability/high-impact risks to our universities that climate change will make more likely? And what should be our response once we enumerate these climate-driven low-probability/high-impact risks to our campuses?
In Five Times Faster, Sharpe points to successful examples where countries used targeted incentives to hugely accelerate carbon-to-renewable transitions in specific sectors. Norway has moved to a place where eight in 10 new cars sold in the country are electric through a combination of tax incentives and investments in public charging. The U.K. moved rapidly from fossil fuels to renewables in electricity generation, primarily through investments that resulted in the cost of wind power generation moving below that of burning coal.
Five Times Faster is a good guide for anyone considering making country-scale policy arguments for investing in decarbonization. I also found the book helpful in making campuswide arguments for accelerating the energy transition.
What are you reading?
