The Economist’s latest Technology Quarterly contains a number of articles with climatic significance:
- On foldable shipping containers
- Tyres made with fewer fossil fuels, and which boost vehicle efficiency
- LIDAR for wind turbines (mentioned here before)
- Technologies for deep sea oil and gas extraction (worrisome, given that we need to leave most fossil fuels underground)
- Quantum dots for efficient screens and lighting
- And technologies for putting waste heat to use, including some rather exotic ones
These sorts of innovations (aside from the oil and gas extraction story) would surely be driven forward if carbon pricing made people care more about the consequences of their greenhouse gas emissions.
Would folding shipping containers help (by making it more efficient to ship X quantity of goods) or would they hurt the climate (by inducing yet more shipping, since it is now more affordable)?
It’s the same problem that exists generally with increasing efficiency in situations where you wish to decrease consumption.
It will probably increase emissions, actually.
There is basically an unlimited amount of stuff that could be shipped, if doing so were cheap enough. Anything that reduces shipping cost seems likely to lead to more shipping volume, and ultimately to higher emissions.