Category: Economics

Matters of money

Heat pumps

David Mackay’s Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air emphasizes heat pumps as a decarbonization tool:

Notice that heat pumps offer a system that can be “better than 100%- efficient.” For example the “best gas” power station, feeding electricity to heat pumps can deliver a combination of 30%-efficient electricity and 80%- efficient heat, a “total efficiency” of 110%. No plain CHP [combined heat and power — where waste heat from energy production is used for heating] system could ever match this performance.

Let me spell this out. Heat pumps are superior in efficiency to condensing boilers, even if the heat pumps are powered by electricity from a power station burning natural gas. If you want to heat lots of buildings using natural gas, you could install condensing boilers, which are “90% efficient,” or you could send the same gas to a new gas power station making electricity and install electricity-powered heat pumps in all the buildings; the second solution’s efficiency would be somewhere between 140% and 185%. It’s not necessary to dig big holes in the garden and install underfloor heating to get the benefits of heat pumps; the best air-source heat pumps (which require just a small external box, like an air-conditioner’s) can deliver hot water to normal radiators with a coefficient of performance above 3.

There is also some evidence now that US house owners are sufficiently mindful about long-term energy costs to see their economic advantages reflected in house prices. In Nature Energy Xingchi Shen et al. conclude: “Residences with an air source heat pump enjoy a 4.3–7.1% (or US$10,400–17,000) price premium on average.” (See also)

Some of the usual impediments to environmental retrofits apply here. You generally need to pay for the system up front and then recoup savings over a long period, which means you need to be able to finance it initially. Also, there can be a lack of coordination between renters, landlords, and building owners. Still, technologically heat pumps are promising and we need non-fossil alternatives for building heating and cooling.

Plastic without fossil fuels

Alongside the staggering challenge of replacing the 85% of global energy that currently comes from fossil fuels, humanity must also reckon with how the critical systems which we depend on rely on fossil fuels as inputs. We need to learn to make steel without coal and fertilizer without natural gas.

We also need something aside from fossil fuels as a feedstock for plastics, which are now indispensable in every area of human endeavour from spaceflight to surgery. Research of the sort is taking place. For example, Professor Shu-Hong Yu’s team at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has produced non-petroleum based plastics which are twice as strong and tough as engineering plastics.

Media attention to the case for divestment

I was heartened yesterday to see the CBC publishing an article about one of the scholars behind the case for divestment which was made successfully at Cambridge: Academic from Saskatoon plays key role in Cambridge University divesting from fossil fuels.

The report they link — Divestment: Advantages and Disadvantages for the University of Cambridge by Ellen Quigley, Emily Bugden, and Anthony Odgers — is particularly notable for its inclusion of a broad range of scholarly work on divestment from a range of fields.

British Columbia’s 2020 election

I’m not celebrating NDP premier John Horgan’s successful gamble on an election to secure a majority government. For one thing, I think minority governments which sometimes seek support from the Greens are likely to enact more responsible climate change policies. For another, I have been consistently frustrated by the NDP’s inconsistent and inadequate positions on climate change.

Both federally and provincially I think it would be desirable for the left-wing parties (Liberals, NDP, and Greens) to adopt a Pact for Humanity in which they pledge to at least keep in place their predecessors’ climate change mitigation policies. That would help give some certainty to industries, municipalities, and individuals who are deciding whether to invest in fossil fuel infrastructure or alternatives. Of course, there would still be uncertainty from possible future Conservative governments which will roll everything back, but it’s better than having the left remain split on what approach to take and left-wing parties competing with each other about whether to support industry at the expense of the environment, keep tightening carbon restrictions in line with the best scientific and economic advice, or keep jumping unproductively between one approach to GHG regulation and another.

Related:

Is plastic recycled?

There’s a story doing the rounds about how plastic recycling has always been a scam. Consumers started to get concerned about the ecological consequences of throwing plastic away and — despite knowing it was infeasible and uneconomical to actually recycle — they slapped little logos on everything implying that they can and will be recycled, thus alleviating the consumer concern without doing anything about the problem.

NPR’s Planet Money did a show on whether recycling is worthwhile at all.

In particular, people argue that recycling as a solution suits the corporate agenda by shifting responsibility from the firms creating the problem to individuals, regardless of whether they are at all positioned to make things better. This can be equated to the ‘carbon footprint’ idea and the approach to climate change mitigation based on individual action, helping the fossil fuel industry avoid regulation and responsibility.

Related:

Morneau’s deficit comments

If finance minister Bill Morneau believes that Canada’s budget deficit “the challenge of our lifetime” he’s either tragically ill-informed, delusional, or disabled by finance-industry-insider blinders. Russia and Argentina, among others, show how states can default on their external debts and suffer relatively little consequence, as investors race back in within years. Even the worst economic outcomes, like interwar hyperinflation in Germany, are nothing compared to what catastrophic climate change would involve — and that’s where we’re on track to end up if the world just keeps doing what it is doing now.

The quote shows how deeply our highest-level leaders are failing to understand what climate change will mean for humanity and life on Earth if we don’t begin a dramatic program of cutting fossil fuel production and use. When you’re facing the plausible risk of extinction as a civilization or a species, having leaders who think a line on a spreadsheet is the greatest challenge is demonstrative of actively harmful leadership and underscores the degree to which existing politicians and institutions are incapable of accepting the most severe consequences of their choices.

Today’s China is not the future we should want

China’s strategy with the Hong Kong ‘security’ law seems intended to send a global message: critics of China will be increasingly punished as the state’s global influence grows.

This is disturbing in many ways, for the welfare of people in China, the region, and around the world. The degree of authoritarian control that technology has granted over citizens’ lives is disturbing in itself, and could permanently inhibit reform or political progress. While it tries to present itself as organized and competent in comparison to chaotic democracies, there is also reason to believe that China is replicating the dysfunctional and corrupt politics of the Soviet Union, with officials at every level incentivized to conceal and misrepresent what is really happening to protect themselves and advance their personal interests. Ethnic and religious nationalism, in India as well as China, are also deeply frightening and drivers of abhorrent humanitarian abuses.

Given the expected trajectory of relative power in global politics — with North America, Europe, and Japan all in relative decline — perhaps the best that can be hoped for is a peaceful revolution within China to remove the Communist Party, potentially along the lines of the establishment of the Sixth Republic in South Korea after 1987.

China hasn’t grown richer out of the brilliance or wisdom of the communist party, but out of that party’s abandonment of communist ideology for a synthesis between export-driven industries making use of inexpensive labour and an unaccountable state willing to smash anyone who gets in the way of the big plans. The idea that there’s an appealing “China model” that other states should consider in the face of American decline is just wrong. It’s a police state rising through cynical diplomatic manipulation and a central role in the global consumerist manufacturing system, not a model for the future that any free people should embrace. Indeed, it is a model we should resist, even when the Chinese government cultivates fear over what the personal costs of doing so will be.