Category: Daily updates

While eating vegetarian Pho the other day, I had an idea relevant to our running series of discussions on air travel. Specifically, this: if we are basically certain to consume all the world’s accessible oil eventually and, if the long atmospheric life of carbon dioxide means that it matters little whether emissions occur in one year or another, might it not be sensible to fly about without guilt. After all, the atmosphere is doomed to absorb all the CO2 from oil anyhow. You could compare it to keeping warm beside a fire you didn’t start, and which is naturally going to carry on burning until there is no fuel left.

For a brief moment, this seemed like a good justification. Unfortunately, it suffers from at least two critical problems.

Timing matters

Firstly, it inappropriately downplays the importance of timing. This is true both environmentally and economically. Environmentally, we might compare CO2 emissions from oil to drinking vodka at a party. You have the option of taking one shot an hour, until the bottle is gone, or guzzling it all in a few minutes. In theory, both approaches produce a similar amount of intoxication. In one case, it is just bunched up at the beginning. The trouble lies with non-linear responses to such external forcings. Your liver and kidneys can probably handle one shot an hour. They may well be unable to handle twenty shots an hour. They might fail, and you might die. Something similar could be true of the climate system. It might be possible to avoid catastrophic tipping points if emissions rise and then fall back in a long smooth arc. It’s not an ideal option (global emissions should already be falling, if we really want to avoid catastrophe), but it is a safer option than guzzling.

Economically, it also makes sense to portion out our remaining fuel. Essentially, that is because we need to make a transition to a low-oil, low-carbon global economy. In the future, oil will be used in fewer ways and will be used more efficiently in all of them. To take an example, it would seem like folly to burn gasoline to travel 10km to work. Because oil will be both more costly and more efficiently used in the future, it is essentially worth more there and should be saved. There are also areas in which ready replacements for oil do not exist: air travel being a critical one. Saving our oil for the future cases where nothing else will do makes sense.

Worse stuff than petroleum

Secondly, there is the enormous problem of fuel substitution. Kerosene made from petroleum is a high-emission option, but nowhere near the worst option out there. Fuels made from oil sands or (shudder) shale oil could be much more emissions intensive. The same is true of palm oil – a biofuel largely grown in areas of former rainforest. Finally, there is the danger that the coal-to-liquids technology used in oil-starved WWII Germany and Japan could become widespread. Eventually, it is likely that at least some commercial jet fuel (and perhaps more military jet fuel) will come from such horrid sources. That is a big problem.

While there is some chance we can burn all the world’s oil without wrecking the climate, that is enormously less likely if we are going to burn all the coal as well. Avoiding the switch to suicide fuels is a critical task, and one that can be aided by limiting air travel.

A recent Nature article highlights the vulnerability of Greenland, in the face of climate change, as well as the realities of asymmetric situations in the climate:

But there’s a disturbing sense in which Greenland shouldn’t be here in the first place. It is a holdover of the most recent ice age, a creature of conditions that no longer apply. No ice sheet would grow in Greenland if the current one were to vanish — even without human-induced warming, the climate would not allow it. The ice is a relic, stranded out of time. And relics are fragile.

The view that the Earth is uniquely and permanently well suited to human life is a dangerous fallacy. Indeed, the most recent geological epoch (The Holocene) has been a period of unusual stability. We have no reason to count on the Earth remaining so accommodating, even in the absence of climatic forcings caused by human activities.

The complexity of this whole issue makes it a subject of confusion for many, and an opportunity for some to be maliciously disingenuous. It is absolutely right to say that the climate has natural cycles. It is also vital to recognize that human greenhouse gas emissions are producing major climatic changes, that those changes endanger us, and that action must be taken to stabilize emissions. That will not guarantee us a stable climate over the course of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, but it would keep us from inducing massive climatic changes through our own doings, over the span of decades or centuries.

The article also highlights the importance of The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE): a two-satellite instrument that tracks gravitational changes. The two satellites fly 220 kilometres apart and closely track their exact distance from one another. Along with data from accelerometers and celestial navigation, this lets them track gravitational anomalies. Data from GRACE corroborates other forms of measurement to suggest that Greenland is losing something in the vicinity of 154 to 211 billion tonnes of ice per year. Last year’s exceptional summer may have involved a loss of 500 billion tonnes.

The article itself has lots more interesting detail that I will not replicate here. Instead, I encourage those who are interested to have a look for themselves.

In this Economist article, species conservation is compared with deciding what to save from a burning house. The comparison has some virtues of explanation, insofar as it strikes at the need to prioritize in the face of urgency. What the article fails to adequately consider is the way in which the ‘burning house’ analogy is deeply troubling. If we are really ‘burning down the house’ of the global biosphere, why are we making the ongoing credit crunch the major topic of issue after issue?

As a long-time and devoted reader, I have the sense that there is an unusual amount of turbulence about environmental questions within the staff of The Economist. While no articles are attributed to specific authors, one can nevertheless distinguish between different tones and voices, at least a few of which mock environmental concern as some hysterical distraction from the business of economic growth and technological development.

The possibility of serious global environmental collapse is only beginning to percolate into the thinking of even the most serious classical liberal and conservative thinkers. The fact that, in a world with ever more billions, it will not remain some shiny side-issue for the soft-hearted has yet to really be accepted. It is only when that begins to change that we will see how new vulnerability and old ideologies will bump along during the next few decades.

I got a new pack today: a MEC Brio 40, intended to serve as an intermediate option between my day pack and my 60L+ expedition pack. To test it out, I filled it with gear and several litres of water (meant to serve as a simulation for camping gear still in Vancouver) and walked up through Gatineau Park, around the Lac des Fees, and back home.

Walking through several feet of snow (as I was for most of the northward leg) is certainly quite tiring. So far, I am pleased with the pack. It is much less awkward than my big pack, but a lot more capacious than my day pack. Two people with Brio 40s could probably carry a small tent, light sleeping bags, clothes, a stove and enough food for a weekend. It should also be good for urban travel, though it is too small to carry a daypack inside and a bit too large to use as a convenient daypack in and of itself.

An article on Slate.com argues that firms should sometimes tolerate or encourage the unauthorized copying of intellectual property like music or software. The article argues that piracy can be a form of promotion and that, when it comes to expensive software, it can help a particular product remain well known and widely used in the workforce.

This is definitely true of Adobe’s Photoshop – the world’s premier software for image editing. Buying a copy in a store costs nearly $1000. As such, if everyone using Photoshop actually had to buy a copy, it would rapidly cease to be the industry standard. In order to be a graphical artist these days, you need to know Photoshop. Very few people will buy the software in order to learn enough to get such a job. That said, when amateurs who have developed their skills with pirated versions of Photoshop progress into professional artistic or graphical careers, they will bring both skills and a preference for that specific piece of software along with them.

By creating and maintaining a pool of Photoshop-savvy individuals, Adobe protects its market share among the corporations that actually do buy copies of the software they use. No wonder they have never gone out of their way to make Photoshop difficult to copy and distribute over the web. Adobe seems to be fairly savvy about such decisions, in general. Another example is Acrobat. If you actually had to buy software to open PDF files, it would never have become the industry standard for document distribution. In many cases, those making PDF files are willing to pay Abobe for software that lets them do so easily and well. Once again, giving with one hand allows Adobe to take with the other.