The environment – Page 102 – a sibilant intake of breath

Dark days for climate change policy

These are depressing times for those seized with the seriousness of the climate change problem. When it comes to legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the signs from around the world are not encouraging.

On Wednesday, the Australian Senate rejected the Labour government’s cap-and-trade plan: the legislative consequence of Kevin Rudd’s victory and ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. This is despite how the plan included significant giveaways of permits for heavily affected industries, primarily Australia’s massive coal sector. In three months, the government can try re-introducing the plan. If it fails again, they can request an election and seek a renewed mandate. As I noted before, Australia’s hugely high per-capita emissions, major coal exports, and lack of effective legislative action are especially startling when you realize that Australia is probably the rich country with the most to lose from climate change. Their agricultural system is under enough strain from water scarcity already, not to mention when climate change increases temperatures, changes patterns of precipitation, boosts evaporation rates, and depletes summer snowcap.

International efforts are also looking shaky. Game theorists and foreign affairs commenters are projecting failure. India continues to play an obstructionist role. While it’s not impossible that the UNFCCC negotiations will eventually produce an improved successor to the Kyoto Protocol, it seems less and less likely that they will be able to do so at this year’s negotiations in Copenhagen.

Of course, things remain stalled in North America. The compromise (some say compromised) Waxman-Markey bill faces a tough fight in the US Senate. If it makes it through at all, there is a good chance that it will be in an even more distorted and less effective form, with more goodies for destructive but influential industries like coal and corn ethanol. Meanwhile, Canada’s cap-and-trade regulations remain in limbo, with details unannounced. Even if they do get announced and implemented, the plan is so weak and offers so many avenues for avoiding emission reductions that it is unlikely to have a significant effect for at least a few years. By allowing firms to invest in a technology fund (which gets recycled back to them) rather than reduce emissions or buy permits from those who do, the system strips a lot of the effectiveness out of a carbon price. Given the heavy slant of the technology fund towards carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, this represents yet another big gamble that such systems will prove cheap, safe, and effective. If not, a lot of time will have been lost for implementing safer strategies like improving energy efficiency and deploying renewables.

Even with significant improvements over present efforts, the world is not on track to avoid catastrophic climate change. As Stephen Chu and others have highlighted, there are powerful positive feedback effects that will kick in after some degree of human-induced warming. If that happens, it will be too late to prevent further warming by reducing our emissions. To avoid such a catastrophic outcome, both strong domestic actions and international cooperation are required. So far, there is no sign that the world as a whole is taking the issue seriously enough for those to be plausible possibilities.

Climate change art

Do we need climate change art?

I would say we do. Art inspires people to think beyond their experience and grasp the implications of trends. It also motivates people emotionally in a way that scientific analysis can be hard-pressed to do. (Indeed, does only by accident, since scientific reports are not written to evoke emotional responses.)

Has any important climate change art emerged? (Weird sculpture outside 111 Sussex aside) Is there a danger that art that plays upon the worst fears evoked by climate science will be counterproductive? Can art help us to really grasp the danger, without the need for costly disasters to prove the link from greenhouse gasses to climate change to danger to humanity?

Electricity from evaporation

Previously, I tried to categorize all possible basic mechanisms for producing electricity. While I don’t think a recent invention by scientists working at Berkeley, MIT, and the University of Michigan uses any new principles, it is certainly a novel combination. Their artificial glass ‘leaves’ use ambient heat to move water, then exploit that to generate small amounts of electricity:

The leaf is transformed into a source of power by periodically interrupting the water flowing into the leaf with air bubbles. Thanks to the different electrical properties of air and water, every time a bubble passes between the plates the capacitance of the device changes and a small electric current is generated, which passes to an external circuit where it’s used to pump up the voltage on a storage capacitor.

While their prototypes produce minute amounts of energy (2 to 5 microvolts per bubble), the inventors hope that large trees made of these materials could generate electricity on the basis of changing humidity: something that could nicely counterbalance some of the variable output from wind or solar farms.

The research was published in Applied Physics Letters: Charge-pumping in a synthetic leaf for harvesting energy from evaporation-driven flows, Appl. Phys. Lett. 95, 013705 (2009); doi:10.1063/1.3157144, Published 7 July 2009.

Would god allow climate change?

Giving testimony before a Congressional committee, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey argued that climate change cannot be a threat because god would not allow human beings to destroy the Earth:

Let me say I take it as an article of faith if the lord God almighty made the heavens and the Earth, and he made them to his satisfaction and it is quite pretentious of we little weaklings here on earth to think that we are going to destroy God’s creation.

By comparison, some religious individuals and organizations (including the Vatican and Archbishop of Canterbury) have argued that dealing with climate change is a religious duty.

Ignoring for the moment the question of whether any kind of supernatural beings exist, it does seem plausible to me that a fair number of people have a deep psychological assumption that something inherent to the universe would prevent the wholesale transformation of the Earth by human beings, at least if that transformation was a highly destructive one. For some, the balancing mechanism is a deity, for others ‘laws’ of technology or economics, and for others the (flawed) notion that natural systems are self-correcting. I recall a short story in which a man had the false belief that the fact that trains passing each other are drawn closer by the low pressure zone between them. He believed that the same phenomenon would help him stick to the train as he advanced up the outside of it. When it comes to environmental thinking, many people might be falsely comforted by similar misconceptions.

Dealing with climate change probably requires us to collectively appreciate that we have the power to totally unbalance the natural world, to an extent that our ecological niche could be threatened. Furthermore, we are actually actively doing so. As the proverb says, if we don’t change course, we might end up where we’re headed.

Incidentally, if there were an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent god, it would be rather difficult to understand what it could have had in mind in setting up the relationship between fossil fuels, greenhouse gasses, and climate change. It’s a bit like leaving poisoned cupcakes out where your children will find them. Providing such a potent and easily accessible form of energy, but with dire long-term consequences that people took a while to figure out, seems like cruel game-playing. Of course, it is very hard to look at what happens in the world and believe that there is an omnipotent being out there looking out for us.

Funds for nuclear plant decommissioning depleted

Apparently, the variability of the stock market is having an impact on the dismantling of American nuclear power plants, by driving down the value of the investments set aside to pay for it:

During the past two years, estimates of dismantling costs have soared by more than $4.6 billion because rising energy and labor costs, while the investment funds that are supposed to pay for shutting plants down have lost $4.4 billion in the battered stock market.

The process of decommissioning involves moving millions of pounds of radioactive waste, much of it concrete. Maine Yankee, a plant that is currently being decommissioned, has over 100,000 tonnes of material being carted off one trainload at a time. The American Nuclear Regulatory Commission has polled 18 nuclear power plants on how the downturn is affecting their decommissioning plans. In some cases, plans for decommissioning are being delayed for as long as sixty years: during which time, the plants are simply expected to sit idle.

Having inadequate private funds for decommissioning is a major cause of environmental problems, for instance with facilities like mines. They also cause situations in which profits accrue to investors and costs are shunted off onto future taxpayers. The possibility is one that deserves to be borne in mind when developing national energy policies.

Wind farm and Kenya’s electrical supply

This article on a 300 megawatt (MW) windfarm in Kenya caught my eye, less because of the size of the wind farm and more because of the statement that it would “supply a quarter of Kenya’s current installed power.” Kenya has a population of about 38 million, so it is startling to see it suggested that their entire electrical supply could be as small as 1,200 MW. That’s about 1/3 of the energy produced by Ontario’s Darlington Nuclear Generating Station alone.

What this demonstrates is how absurdly wide a gap there is between energy availability in different states. With a per-capita GDP of $857 at market exchange rates ($1,713 at purchasing power parity), Kenya is a reminder of how energy, climate, and development policies interrelate in a very unequal world.

CCS plan subverted by local opposition

As mentioned before, the Swedish company Vattenfal has a carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration plant in Germany. The idea was to separate pure oxygen from air, burn coal in it, then ship the resulting carbon dioxide (CO2) to an injection facility 150 miles away by truck. The liquified CO2 was then to be injected 3,000 metres underground in a depleted gas field.

Now, due to local opposition, the CO2 is simply being vented into the atmosphere. The company has been unable to secure a permit to bury the carbon, so plans to begin doing to by March or April of this year have been scrapped.

It is hard not to be of two minds about this. On one hand, it is a justified blow against those who assume CCS will be a cheap and simple way to deal with climate change. There are big economic, safety, and effectiveness questions that need to be answered. At the same time, it will not be possible to answer those questions without the kind of demonstration plant Spremberg could be.

A world in which safe, effective, and affordable CCS technology exists is one where catastrophic and runaway climate change is less likely. This is true for both direct and indirect reasons. Directly, fossil-fuel fired plants with CCS would emit less than their non-CCS counterparts. Also, facilities that burned biomass and buried the carbon could actually be net-CO2-negative. Indirectly, making it possible to keep using fossil fuels a bit longer would lessen the level of opposition to the transition to a low carbon economy, particularly when it comes to poor, large, and rapidly developing states like India and China.

We will have to wait and see how other CCS pilot projects – in Europe and elsewhere – develop over the span of the next few years.

Arguments with climate change deniers

For the sake of organization, here is a list of some of the disagreements that have arisen on this blog between those that accept the scientific consensus that climate change is real, caused by human activity, and dangerous and those who do not. Given that a lot of the deniers seem to flit from blog to blog, leaving misleading comments, cataloging some rebuttals to them seems worthwhile.

This list includes people who believe that climate change is real and a serious problem, but believe for one reason or another that nothing should be done about it.

They are listed here in the order in which they first appeared:

Jack Carradice – September 2008
Vaclav Klaus – December 2008
Antonio Sosa – January 2009
Betula – May 2009
Dan Pangburn – July 2009
Mike Goad – December 2009
Ashley Baker – January 2010
Brad Cocomile – June 2010
Robert Laughlin – July 2010
Dave Graham – February 2011

I will add more as they crop up.

Spy photos of Arctic ice

A number of sources are reporting that the Obama administration has made public spy photos that show the effects of climate change in the Arctic. The photos have a one metre resolution, and were provided through a program called Medea which allows scientists to request intelligence images of environmentally sensitive areas.

With luck, the photos will allow climate models to be further refined: for instance, by better incorporating the positive feedback associated with changed albedo when white ice melts and is replaced by darker water. Other scientific information that could be derived from the photos includes: “the relationship of snow to ice-surface topography, the initiation and development of meltwater ponds in summer, and the relationship of stress and strain and how they are reflected in the pattern of cracks and other features in the ice.” Thorsten Markus – at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre – has said that the key value of the new images lies in their high resolution, compared to those that were previously available.

HFCs and climate change

A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences updates estimates of the amount of warming that will be caused by hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) between now and 2050, in a scenario where specific policies to address them are not implemented. These gasses were created as replacements for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were used as refrigerants and propellants before they were found to destroy stratospheric ozone. The study estimates that without preventative action, HFCs will cause 9-19% as much warming as carbon dioxide (CO2), by 2050. In a scenario where the concentration of CO2 is kept below 450 parts per million (ppm), unmitigated HFC emissions would be the cause of between 28% and 45% of warming.

While CO2 is the most important gas that needs to be managed to produce a stable climate, other powerful gasses like HFCs need to be dealt with, as well. This is being brought about to some extent through the operation of carbon markets, but care must be taken to avoid designing markets that can be exploited, as well as design systems where both CO2 emissions and emissions of powerful trace gasses are effectively discouraged.

One other element illustrated by all of this is how virtually any new technology that gets widely adopted has some sort of negative environmental consequences. This should be borne in mind when hoping that technological progress alone can produce a sustainable world. The technologies of the past always created problems along with new capabilities and benefits. Those of the future will inevitably do likewise.