The environment – Page 110 – a sibilant intake of breath

The Bridge at the Edge of the World

The basic contention of James Gustave Speth’s The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability is that dealing with climate change – and environmental crises more generally – requires a major project of societal reform. This includes rejecting economic growth as a major objective, and focusing instead on improving the non-material factors that determine happiness. It also involves major economic and political reforms: severely curtailing the autonomy of corporations and sharply altering the relationships between business and government. While Speth’s vision is a coherent one, I don’t think he makes the case convincingly that it is the only alternative to ecological collapse. Indeed, implementing elements of his broader social program may well involve political battles that delay effective action on climate change.

One basic idea that Speth expresses well is a two-phased understanding of human civilization. In the first stage, exponential growth occurs and the proper mentality is that of the frontier or entrepreneurship. The second phase, basically the death of libertarianism, is when population and ecological strain become so significant that society and world level planning become necessary. It is clear that we are moving from the first to the second, as a civilization, though it remains unclear whether we will be able to manage that transition well, and avoid most of the damage and suffering that would result from getting it wrong.

Speth’s chapters on government and corporations seem like they were taken directly from AdBusters or Naomi Klein. That is not to say their analysis is wholly incorrect, but I do think it seriously overstates the power of corporations. Ultimately, they are subject to the will of governments. Of course, they have a strong ability to influence governments: both directly and by manipulating voters. Nonetheless, the authority and capability necessary to solve the world’s most pressing environmental problems lies with governments, and the process of achieving that will be all about altering their internal thinking and incentives. Speth’s analysis is also almost entirely focused on political and economic reform, in the sense of corporate governance. He pays relatively little attention to technological development and deployment, or to the economic instruments through which both can be advanced.

Speth is clearly well-read on the subject of the environmental movement. Indeed, his book is so riddled with quotations that his own voice and perspective are sometimes obscured. It isn’t always clear whether he is wholeheartedly endorsing someone’s idea, or introducing it as a partial contrast to his own point. Despite that, Speth’s writing is concise, clear, and often compelling. While readers may not find themselves in total agreement at all points, Speth at least provides some solid concepts and arguments to respond to.

Ultimately, the approach described in The Bridge at the Edge of the World comes across as somewhat unfocused. The author presents a package of reforms as through each is integral to all the others, but doesn’t make a strong enough case for why that is so. Indeed, the book also fails to present a coherent path from the present forward into a reformed world, indicating which elements are better primed to emerge soon. It may be sensible to argue for more progressive taxation, banning advertising to children, supporting sports and hobbies, providing free child care, etc, but some of these things are clearly secondary to the process of reconciling human civilization with the physical and biological limits of the planet.

Indeed, a strong case can be made that climate change will only be truly solved when it becomes post-ideological: when all the major political ideologies in states with serious greenhouse gas emissions come to accept the fact that they must be reduced and ultimately eliminated. Without that consensus, it seems unreasonable to expect the process of mitigation to continue for decade after decade. By tying the need to mitigate into an overly specific political framework, Speth puts forward a proposal that could obstruct that process, or lead to it sputtering out with the political ascendacy of a group with different perspectives and priorities.

David MacKay’s sustainable energy calculations

For all the readers on this site interesting in climate change, policy, and technology, David MacKay’s book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air is a text that could be very profitably incorporated into our discussions. It seeks to evaluate whether (and how) society could operate without fossil fuels. It does so systematically, with all work shown, allowing you to question the methods and perform your own calculations for different circumstances. Another nice feature is that it is available online for free, though you may find it worthwhile to buy a professionally printed and bound copy.

The book is all about what is physically possible, rather than what is economical. As such, it sets a kind of base standard for sustainability. It evaluates whether something can be done at any cost, a pre-requisite to it being possible at a reasonable one.

To begin with, here is the methodology (p. 22 -28). It explains the exercise being undertaken and explains the key units to be used. The main unit of power selected is the somewhat unusual kilowatt-hour per day (kWh/d) per person (/p). While watts are more conventional, this unit does have some virtues in making things easily comparable and comprehensible. After all, if a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity costs me about five cents, it is easy to start thinking about the economics of an activity that requires 30 or 40 kWh/d.

Here are a few chapters that touch directly on debates that have occurred (sometimes raged) on this site:

All the other chapters are relevant, as well, but these seem especially likely to inject some new information and thinking into long-running discussions.

The United Kingdom seems to be spoiled with people who are willing to perform comprehensive analyses of how their whole societal energy system could be rendered comparable with a stable climate (George Monbiot’s book is another example). It almost seems worth going through this entire text and re-performing the calculations with Canadian figures as inputs.

Somewhat short of that, would anyone be interested in going through the book chapter by chapter?

Soft rules for the oil sands means harder targets for others

Environmental Defence has put out a new report on the oil sands that speaks well to both a general and a specific issue. Climate change policy is often about deciding on a total permissible quantity, then haggling over how it gets divided, with everyone asserting that their special circumstances justify lenient treatment. For instance, Canada argues that it should be able to cut its emissions by less than other states because it is large, cold, an energy exporter, etc. By contrast, other states argue for more generous targets on the basis of past action, ongoing extreme poverty, and many other reasons.

Of course, for everyone who gets lenient treatment, someone else needs to pick up the slack, if you are going to meet your targets. What the Environmental Defence report highlights is how giving an easy ride to the oil sands will mean higher costs for everyone else, if Canada is to hit its 2020 and 2050 mitigation targets.* The report – entitled Divided We Fall: The Tar Sands vs. The Rest of Canada – highlights how placing a disproportionate reduction burden on Ontario and Quebec could be harmful for their economic prospects, especially given how greater opportunities for mitigation exist in the fossil-fuel intensive western industries. Also, given the degree to which resource windfalls (in terms of both tax revenues and jobs) tend to accrue provincially, Ontario and Quebec have an even stronger case against allowing a weaker carbon pricing system for hydrocarbon production in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Domestically, this is just one of the innumerable issues of Canadian federalism. Regional interests generate tensions that can sap the ability of Canada as a whole to achieve good outcomes. Certainly, some provinces will find it much easier than others to recognize and accept the fact that the fossil fuel industry has no long-term future. It’s a one-off bonanza that our legal and moral obligations on climate change will not permit us to fully realize. Instead of continuing to invest in a dead end, Canada needs to get serious about building an economy that can thrive in a low- and ultimately zero-carbon future.

The report is also available in French (PDF).

* It is worth remembering that, while the 2020 and 2050 targets have received much more media attention recently, the original announcement of the current government’s Turning the Corner climate change plan promised that total Canadian emissions would peak no later than 2012. Most people seem to have forgotten about the third promise.

New fuel efficiency standards in the US

Obama’s decision to extend California-style fuel efficiency standards across the US is a very welcome one, not least because it seems likely that Canada’s government will copy them. The US rules take effect in 2012 and create a federal fuel efficiency standard. The aim is to push the efficiency of the US car and light truck fleet to 35.5 miles per gallon (6.63 L/100km) by 2016: 40% better than now. Such a move is long overdue, given the poor efficiency of the US vehicle fleet, the huge amounts of oil imported by the United States in order to keep them running, climate change concerns, and reasonable doubts about the availability of low-cost hydrocarbons in the near to medium future.

While the new standards are a marked improvement, it is worth thinking about them in context. They will not bring the US up to speed with Australia, China, the European Union, or Japan. Indeed, even in 2020, the planned American standards lag behind where the EU and Japan were in 2002. Given the degree to which North American taxpayers now own the big car companies, it may well have been possible to demand more progressive action from them.

Toughening standards may seem even more prescient if the end of the economic slump brings back high oil prices, as some are predicting. As reported in The Economist, the Saudi oil minister is concerned that a sharp increase in oil prices could slow or stop an economic recovery, while attendees at an OPEC summit apparently expect oil to return to $150-per-barrel territory:

The explanation is simple. Oilmen are worried because they believe that many of the factors behind the record-breaking ascent last year remain in place. Much of the world’s “easy” oil has already been extracted, or is in the hands of nationalist governments that will not allow foreigners to exploit it. That leaves firms to hunt for new reserves in ever more inhospitable and inaccessible places, such as the deep waters off Africa or the frozen oceans of the Arctic. Such fields take a long time and a lot of expensive technology to develop. Worse, new discoveries tend to be smaller than in the past and to run dry faster.

More efficient vehicles make sense as a near-term mechanism for dealing with the linked problems of climate change and energy security, but they are only an incremental step. Rather than being able to rely on increasing the efficiency of an unsustainable practice, we need to alter the basis on which that practice occurs, so as to make it both efficient and sustainable. By all means, we need to increase the efficiency with which vehicles of all kinds transport people and freight, but we must remember that we will only have attained our basic goals when those efficient vehicles operate using zero-carbon, sustainable electricity or sustainably grown, carbon-neutral biofuels as their fuel sources.

Climate sensitivity roulette

As discussed several times previously, two of the key uncertainties relating to climate change is (a) how much temperature would increase in response to any particular change in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses and (b) what humanity will actually emit between now and the achievement of global carbon neutrality. One way to express those uncertainties colourfully is with the Roulette wheels the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change has created.

The wheels are based on results from the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model and have shaded areas proportional in size to different possible levels of temperature increase. The projections were recently updated, and the new ones contain significantly higher estimates of the risks of high levels of warming:

The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees. This can be compared to a median projected increase in the 2003 study of just 2.4 degrees. The difference is caused by several factors rather than any single big change. Among these are improved economic modeling and newer economic data showing less chance of low emissions than had been projected in the earlier scenarios. Other changes include accounting for the past masking of underlying warming by the cooling induced by 20th century volcanoes, and for emissions of soot, which can add to the warming effect. In addition, measurements of deep ocean temperature rises, which enable estimates of how fast heat and carbon dioxide are removed from the atmosphere and transferred to the ocean depths, imply lower transfer rates than previously estimated.

Full article

The ‘policy’ wheel assumes aggressive mitigation action, while the ‘no policy’ wheel assumes a business-as-usual course. It is notable that the chances of keeping warming below 2°C are infinitesimal, on that wheel. Even with aggressive action, our changes of keeping below 2°C of increase are looking increasingly distant, with effects that may be severe for both human and natural systems.

In addition to being a good visual image, I like the conceptual linkage between climate change and gambling. We are certainly taking a chance, whatever we do, but science can help us to assess the odds we face and make choices that reduce the risks of unacceptable outcomes.

Coal cancellations in the US

The Economist has been bold enough to suggest that ‘the writing is on the wall’ for coal-fired power plants in the United States, unless they can be converted to run on biomass or incorporated into other ‘green’ compromises. While there have apparently been 97 coal plants cancelled since 2001 (and nine so far this year), those that are operating now are long lived; their contribution to US emissions will barely fall between now and 2030. Unusually, the article makes no mention of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which many supporters of fossil-fuel based power hope will soon emerge as a cheap, safe, and effective mechanism for preventing greenhouse gas emissions. The omission is actually a welcome one, given how tempted industry groups, governments, and commenters in general have been to see CCS as a simple silver-bullet mechanism for maintaining the status quo.

Worldwide, there must be an ever-increasing determination to prevent the construction of new coal capacity, except where it incorporates safe and effective CCS technology (if that proves possible). Meeting climate change mitigation targets (including avoiding a temperature increase of more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels) probably also means a fair bit of existing coal capacity will need to be converted to biomass or brought offline before the end of its economical lifetime. That will provoke the fierce opposition of those who have invested in such projects, though that may be a necessary signal to the market at large that coal-fired power is no longer acceptable – the carbon in the world’s coal beds needs to remain there, rather than being added to an atmospheric stock that is already dangerously high.

States like Canada and the US should be working to rebuild the basis of their energy system on the basis of non-emitting and renewable options. In so doing, they will establish the prerequisites for their own prosperity in the future, as well as help develop the technologies and approaches that will make the same transition possible in rapidly growing developing states.

Cloud cover and climate change

According to research published back in April, the biggest climate changes in the 21st century may occur more due to changes in high altitude cloud cover, in response to increased temperatures from rising greenhouse gas concentrations, rather than due to the initial temperature increases themselves: Global warming due to increasing absorbed solar radiation, published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Reduced cloud cover would reduce the amount of sunlight that gets reflected back into space, rather than striking the surface of the Earth. As such, it would produce further warming. Based on evaluation of simulations used in preparing the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, this effect may be of greater magnitude than the initial warming due to increased absorption of outgoing long-wave radiation by greenhouse gasses.

While the result certainly cannot be considered definitive now, it underscores the importance of improving climate models and incorporating the key feedback effects into them. Only when that has been done can more precise estimates of the climatic sensitivity of the planet be produced, as well as more accurate regional projections.

The AECL and new nuclear plants in Ontario

It seems that the province of Ontario is leaning towards having Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) build their new nuclear reactors, provided the federal government provides some additional support. The recent history of the company isn’t very impressive, given their failure to get two comparatively simple isotope reactors to work, and giving the contract to a Canadian company makes it even more likely that Canadian taxpayers and ratepayers will end up subsidizing them.

Perhaps it would be wiser to give the contract to a French, American, or Japanese firm, and let their citizens help pay for our gigawatts. It seems plausible that using a design that is being implemented elsewhere will have price benefits: both in terms of economies of scale and in terms of learning from the experience of those who began building them earlier. AECL’s Advanced CANDU reactor has not yet been fully designed, and probably never will be unless it wins the competition in Ontario, besting France’s AREVA and Westinghouse, from the US.

New research on the meridional overturning circulation

Recent research undertaken by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Duke University suggests that ocean currents work differently from how they were previously considered to, with implications for climate change. Using a combination of two years worth of observations from underwater sensors and computer models, they determined that “much of the southward flow of cold water from the Labrador Sea moves not along the deep western boundary current, but along a previously unknown path in the interior of the North Atlantic.” If the results of this study are accurate, it could mean that previous attempts to model the climate system incorporated inappropriate behaviour for this current. As a result, they could have generated less accurate projections of how warming due to greenhouse gas concentrations will affect different parts of the climate system.

More information about the study is available in Nature: Interior pathways of the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. For those lacking time or access to Nature, here is the abstract:

To understand how our global climate will change in response to natural and anthropogenic forcing, it is essential to determine how quickly and by what pathways climate change signals are transported throughout the global ocean, a vast reservoir for heat and carbon dioxide. Labrador Sea Water (LSW), formed by open ocean convection in the subpolar North Atlantic, is a particularly sensitive indicator of climate change on interannual to decadal timescales. Hydrographic observations made anywhere along the western boundary of the North Atlantic reveal a core of LSW at intermediate depths advected southward within the Deep Western Boundary Current (DWBC). These observations have led to the widely held view that the DWBC is the dominant pathway for the export of LSW from its formation site in the northern North Atlantic towards the Equator. Here we show that most of the recently ventilated LSW entering the subtropics follows interior, not DWBC, pathways. The interior pathways are revealed by trajectories of subsurface RAFOS floats released during the period 2003–2005 that recorded once-daily temperature, pressure and acoustically determined position for two years, and by model-simulated ‘e-floats’ released in the subpolar DWBC. The evidence points to a few specific locations around the Grand Banks where LSW is most often injected into the interior. These results have implications for deep ocean ventilation and suggest that the interior subtropical gyre should not be ignored when considering the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.

Improving our understanding of ocean currents should help to improve the accuracy of predictions from general circulation climate change models, and may be helpful in producing regionally specific projections of climate change impacts.

Changing Images of Man

First published in 1974, and available for free online, Changing Images of Man is a kind of philosophical reflection on science and how human beings understand themselves. While it does touch on some interesting ideas, the degree to which it is fundamentally lacking in rigour or discipline means that it is also choked with nonsense, impenetrable jargon, and pointless speculation. In short, it does not have the feel of a text whose ideas have been borne out by subsequent history. Rather, it is more like a monument to a kind of faddishness that has long since become dated, though elements endure in the more superstitious aspects of contemporary culture.

Much of the book concerns environmental issues: specifically, how human civilization can cease to be such a destructive force, and how ecology is affecting science in general. Neither discussion is very satisfying. The former discussion focuses on a kind of caricatured extension of the Beatles going to India to lean yoga and discover themselves. While significant transformations in human behaviours and self-understanding may well be necessary to generate a sustainable society, the perspective on those changes offered in this work doesn’t seem either plausible or compelling to me. The latter discussion exaggerates the degree to which the study of complex dynamic systems challenges the practice of science: while they are certainly more challenging to study scientifically than systems that are more easily broken down and understood in terms of constituents, science is nonetheless proving increasingly capable of dealing with complex systems like climate and ecosystems, and is doing so without the kind of radical extension and modification endorsed by this book.

Much of the book is no more comprehensible than a random string of pompous-sounding words strung together in a grammatical way. It seems telling that the chapter on ‘feasibility’ is the least accessible and comprehensible of the lot. The report perceives a crisis in science that I don’t think existed at the time it was written, and I do not think has emerged since. Complex phenomenon are being grappled with using enhanced versions of conventional techniques, while UFOs and psychic phenomena have been effectively rejected as quackery, due to the absence of any good evidence for their existence. Basically, Changing Images of Man is an exhortation to abandon rigorous thought in favour of a kind of wooly inclusiveness, exceedingly open to ideas that are too vague to really engage with. The book has a naive counterculture tone, overly willing to reject what is old and unthinkingly embrace novel concepts that register with a 1960s/1970s mindset. While the questions it considers are generally good and important ones, the answers provided are vague, preachy, and largely useless.