Politics – Page 187 – a sibilant intake of breath

John McCain’s carbon targets

In a speech delivered in Oregon, John McCain laid out some targets for reducing American greenhouse gas emissions:

2012: Return emissions to 2005 levels (18 percent above 1990 levels)
2020: Return emissions to 1990 levels (15 percent below 2005 levels)
2030: 22 percent below 1990 levels (34 percent below 2005 levels)
2050: 60 percent below 1990 levels (66 percent below 2005 levels)

These targets look pretty similar to the ones adopted by the present Canadian government: a peak in emissions by 2012, a reduction to 20% below 2006 levels by 2020, and a 60-70% reduction below 2006 levels by 2050.

Stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations below 550ppm probably requires more aggressive action. That being said, this is not a terrible place from which to begin negotiations: both between presidential candidates in the United States and between the United States and other countries. If the US was willing to commit to those targets unilaterally (and do so with a credible plan for actually achieving them), it might become a lot easier to get countries like China and India to begin making a more substantial contribution to the mitigation effort.

In exchange, the United States could adopt the kind of targets (and supplemental actions, like aid in preventing tropical deforestation) that are actually required to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at a level around 450ppm, thus keeping total global temperature change in the realm of two degrees Celsius.

Electric vehicles in Canada

Dynasty is a Canadian company that builds light, low speed, battery powered cars. Their Dynasty IT vehicle has a range of 50km and a top speed of 40 km/h. Because Transport Canada refused to follow the lead of 44 American states and authorize the vehicles for non-highway use on roads, the company has decided to relocate to Pakistan. There, they will manufacture cars for the American market. The ZENN is in a similar predicament.

There is a real trade-off between producing light vehicles and producing ones that do well in crash tests. That said, we do permit people to ride absurdly unsafe motorbikes – even on the highway. It is incoherent to ban one and permit the other.

Perhaps it would make sense to create a special legal category for small, light vehicles of limited range, intended primarily for urban use. By all means, those purchasing them should be informed that they will not fare as well in a crash with a huge truck as someone in a larger, steel-framed car. That said, the economic and environmental advantages may justify the risk in the eyes of many.

Vehicle efficiency

My friend Mark sent me a link to a book in progress about sustainable energy. One of the more interesting sections is on vehicle efficiency. The author stresses that, while some kinds of efficiency gains are physically possible, others are not:

Could we make a new car that consumes 100 times less energy and still goes at 70mph? No. Not if the car has the same shape. The energy is going mainly into making air swirl. Changing the materials the car is made from makes no difference to that. A miraculous improvement to the engine could perhaps boost its efficiency from 25% to 50%. But the energy consumption of a car is still going to be roughly 40 kWh per 100 km.

The story is a familiar one: efficiency can get you a long way, but there are no free rides. Another interesting comment from this chapter is the major design differences between an efficient city car and an efficient highway car. Since the former is always stopping and starting, low weight is really important. Brakes that regenerate energy also make a big difference. For a highway car that avoids major acceleration and deceleration, the most important thing is reducing drag. Weight is comparatively trivial.

One other interesting assertion is that the energy involved in making a car is actually pretty trivial compared to the amount used in driving it around:

The energy cost of making the raw materials for a one tonne car is thus equivalent to about 3000 km of driving; an appreciable cost, but probably only 1% of the lifetime energy-cost of the car’s fuel.

If correct, that makes it seem a lot more reasonable to upgrade from an old and inefficient vehicle to a newer and less gas-thirsty model. It also suggests that government programs to replace inefficient cars with better ones might have strong justification, in terms of climate change mitigation potential.

In order to move to a low carbon society, we need to do a slew of things. We definitely need to increase the energy efficiency of accomplishing most tasks. We definitely need to reduce the quantity of greenhouse gas produced in the process of generating a unit of energy. We probably need to significantly reduce total energy consumption. Finally, we need to take actions that manage the greenhouse gasses that will inevitably be produced by some actions. The protection and enhancement of carbon sinks (mostly forests and soils) are essential for this.

When it comes to reducing total energy usage, the chapter does make one excellent suggestion: “a cyclist at 21 km/h consumes about 30 times less energy per kilometre than a lone car-driver on the motorway: about 2.4 kWh per 100 km.” Those who cycle more slowly are likely to be even more efficient, since doubling the time it takes to travel somewhere apparently reduces energy usage by three quarters.

Improvised explosive devices

The Washington Post has an interesting special feature on improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the overall themes are quite common – Western forces are much less effective against insurgents than armies, low cost and low tech weapons can neutralize huge advantages in funds and technology – the specific details provided are quite interesting.

IEDs are apparently the single biggest killer of coalition troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Partly, that is the result of not having large enough forces to monitor important routes continuously. Partly, it is the product of the sheer volume of explosives available in both states. Partly, it is the result of assistance provided by other states or sub-state groups, such as Iranian assistance being provided to some Shiite groups. Explosively formed penetrators – capable of firing six or seven pounds of copper at 2000 metres per second – are an excellent example of a relatively low cost, low-tech technology that seriously threatens a force that is far better trained, supported, and equipped overall.

Seeing how total air superiority, expensive armoured vehicles, and sophisticated electronic countermeasures can be no match for some guys with rusty old artillery shells and some wire is a humbling reminder of the limited utility of military force. Ingenuity, practicality, and humility will probably prove to be essential qualities as the US tries to find the least bad path out of Iraq, and while NATO tries to salvage the situation in Afghanistan.

Greenpeace on carbon capture and storage

On Monday, Greenpeace released a report entitled: False Hope: Why carbon capture and storage won’t save the climate (PDF). The points made are fairly familiar, though it is good to see them considered in combination:

CCS cannot deliver in time to avoid dangerous climate change.
CCS wastes energy and resources
Storing carbon underground is risky
CCS is expensive and undermines real solutions to climate change
CCS and liability: risky business
The alternative to CCS: renewables and energy efficiency

Joseph Romm probably has the most sensible overall view of CCS. He argues that it can serve as one of the fourteen ‘wedges’ that are required to stabilize global concentrations of greenhouse gasses, acknowledging that even that role will require pumping infrastructure equivalent to all that presently being used to extract oil. Think about the total expenditures of the world’s oil companies on equipment, construction, and labour and you begin to appreciate the costs that are likely to be associated with widespread use of CCS. That being said, it is only fair to say that the cost projections are approximations based on huge assumptions. It is like being in the era of the Wright brothers and trying to project what the finances of a major airline will resemble, in terms of thinks like capital use and equipment life cycles.

CCS needs to be thought about in the context of an overall strategic push to stabilize greenhouse gas levels. It is possible that it will have a modest effect at an acceptable cost. It is also possible that it will be unfeasible at a commercial scale, or simply too costly. The most dangerous possibility is that the very idea of CCS gives people the false sense that the problem can be solved, particularly that we can keep burning coal while waiting for a low-cost technological solution to magically appear. As one strategy among many, CCS might have a future. One future that CCS cannot permit is one where the nature of the world’s energy use remains similar to today, with the awkward greenhouse gasses simply swept under the rug.

One more reason to support American gas taxes

One reason for which cutting gasoline taxes in the United States is especially unjustifiable is that the taxes don’t go into general revenue. Rather, they go into a Highway Trust Fund that pays for road construction and maintenance. Not only would cutting gasoline taxes encoruage people to use fuel inefficiently at a time of ever-greater scarcity: it would also shift the burden of paying for roads from those who use them most heavily towards the population as a whole.

Collier on biofuels

Paul Collier’s comment on this Financial Times article is one of the best examples I have seen of the value of letting members of the public contribute in that way. As is generally the case with him, the comment is engaging and very candid. He argues that the most important way to keep the poor from suffering because of the drive towards biofuels is to encourage more large-scale industrial agriculture in the developing world:

We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result, Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is generally not well-suited to innovation and investment: the result has been that African agriculture has fallen further and further behind the advancing productivity frontier of the globalized commercial model.

It is definitely a comment at odds with the new fashion for the local within environmentalism. That being said, there is a strong argument to be made that the rich world is going to press on with biofuels regardless of how much suffering it creates in the poor world. If that is taken as true, an unfashionable but effective counter-strategy might be the most suitable response.

Keenlyside et al. on the next decade

As reported in the BBC, a Nature article is arguing that computer models suggest that little global warming will occur in the next decade:

[O]ver the next decade, the current Atlantic meridional overturning circulation will weaken to its long-term mean; moreover, North Atlantic SST and European and North American surface temperatures will cool slightly, whereas tropical Pacific SST will remain almost unchanged. Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.

Climate is a naturally variable thing and, as such, it is always undergoing upward and downward oscillations. Anthropogenic greenhouse gasses definitely have a growing warming effect, but that effect is overlaid on top of the existing variations and feedbacks. As such, a natural downward tendency might drown out the human impact for a certain span of time.

Having relatively accurate decade-to-decade forecasts on climate change impacts could be very useful for adaptation planning. By providing guidance on things like weather conditions and extreme events, they could allow for the more intelligent selection of crops, the concentration of effort in the most threatened areas, and the general development of anticipatory policy.

While such studies are clearly important for increasing our understanding of the climate system, there is a big danger of misunderstanding them – whether wilfully or not. Plenty of people would interpret a decade of flat or falling temperatures as strong evidence that the climate change consensus is wrong. It provides new fodder for those intentionally seeking to confuse the issue, as well as new grounds for confusion among those who are genuinely trying to understand the situation. Of course, we cannot ask for science to always emerge in ways that help people deal with it appropriately. It would be pretty tragic if a brief but poorly timed deviation from the warming trend helped to undermine the case for action at the very time when we must begin the long and difficult task of building a low-carbon world.

Building an anti-power plant

You often see glib statements like “The world will need 35% more energy by 2020.” Often, these seem to be based on an approach little more sophisticated than looking at the trend in energy growth over the last few years and extending it out another twelve. Thought about more intelligently, we see that there isn’t some mythical quantity of energy that will be demanded: people will simply make choices in the face of the incentives that are presented to them and their own desires. If those choices and incentives favour a lower energy mode of living, it is entirely possible that we could cut total energy use at the same time as the population and standards of living continue to rise.

Thought about that way, there are many ways in which we can change what the quantity of energy demanded will be. People don’t want X Joules to keep their houses warm and Y Joules to transport groceries. They want warm homes and convenience. These things can be done at a much lesser energy cost than is the case today. Critically, reducing demand for some quantity of energy – say the 1000 MW or so a new nuclear plant could provide – may well be cheaper than actually building the plant. Making buildings, vehicles, and factories more efficient can go a long way towards that. So too can cutting back on terrifically wasteful uses of energy. One critical route to achieving this is to change the incentives for energy producers. As long as their profits rise when they sell more and fall when they help people cut back, they will be a perverse force pushing for less sustainable lifestyles. Regulation can be re-crafted to ensure that halving a home’s energy use is a boon for the owner, the utility, and for the planet.

Thoughtlessly accepting that energy demand must continue growing shows both a lack of adequate concern about climate change and a lack of imagination. Building anti-power plants instead would mean keeping the landscape and air clearer, keeping carbon safely in the ground, and working towards a future where one’s energy use and one’s quality of life aren’t slavishly locked together.

Dangerous anthropogenic interference

The stated objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is to achieve “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” The most problematic aspect of this mandate is the open definition of ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference.’ Given that we have direct ice core evidence that concentrations of carbon dioxide are higher than at any point in the past 650,000 years – along with indirect evidence that this is the peak for the last 20 million years – it is fair to say that we are already interfering dangerously with the climate system.

Of course, one cannot go straight from showing elevated CO2 to ascribing danger. That said, the link between greenhouse gasses and increases in radiative forcing and temperature is incontrovertible. So too, the realities of icecap and glacier melting and ocean acidification. The question is no longer about whether or not we will cause dangerous interference, but how much danger we are willing to tolerate in exchange for less rapid and comprehensive changes to our high-carbon lifestyles.