Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

Egypt and oil

FiveThirtyEight has some interesting analysis posted on Egypt, Tunisia, and (lack of) oil supplies:

Egypt does have some oil: it produces about 600,000 barrels a day, with a retail value of about $18 billion annually. Still, because of Egypt’s large population, this would translate to only about $220 per capita. And most of Egypt’s oil stays in its domestic market: it exports only 89,000 barrels a day, which would produce $2.6 billion a year at a price of $80 per barrel, or just $32 per person. This is much less than the aggregate figure for the Middle East, which is $1,605 per person.

All told, countries are probably better off when they don’t have oil. Most of the ones that have it are at least partly corrupted because of it, and even the ones who avoid that get hooked on oil revenues despite the better angels of their environmental consciousness.

Whaling and sustainability

I have been reading Andrew Darby’s Harpoon: Into the Heart of Whaling and, while it tells an interesting story in and of itself, it also seems to say a lot about the relationship between humanity and the natural world. The story of whaling is a common one: people developed technology that allowed them to make big short-term gains at the expense of long-term sustainability. Even while it was happening, there were those who pointed out how senseless it was to do things like kill the most successful breeding females and leave their calves to die. And yet, the impetus for short-term gain overwhelmed the case for conservation, and whale populations around the world were brutally cut back.

Now, despite the lack of need for whale meat, and everything we know about the rarity and intelligence of the creatures, states led by Japan continue to allow their special interests to operate at the expense of humanity and the natural world at large, continuing commercial whaling under the guise of scientific research.

All this seems to relate to a common theme: human beings are smart in an abstract sense, but frequently behave in ways that are profoundly dumb and unethical. While, in a certain sense, climate change is a narrow technical problem subject to technical solutions, it is arguable that in order to build up the energy and motivation necessary to make those changes, humanity needs its mindset to evolve. With a few local exceptions, like urban air quality rules, we are burning through the biosphere like there’s no tomorrow. As soon as an environmental problem gets large enough, the will to deal with it becomes terribly weak. Then, only the most technical and minimal problems – those that can be addressed with little or no real societal change – can actually be addressed. Arguably, ozone depleting substances and persistent organic pollutants are evidence of this hypothesis.

Greenhouse gas ’emissions’ or ‘pollution’

The phrase ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ or ‘carbon emissions’ doesn’t cary much emotional weight. It sounds like some nerdy, probably unimportant thing.

In reality, our emissions will determine how much the planet warms, which will have a huge effect on humanity. While it’s true that the Earth is better off with some CO2 than it would be with none at all, it is also true that all the additional greenhouse gases being added to the atmosphere now are harmful. As climate scientist Gavin A. Schmidt argues: “If you ask a scientist how much more CO2 do you think we should add to the atmosphere, the answer is going to be none. All the rest is economics.”

Given all of that, I think it makes more sense to use the phrases ‘greenhouse gas pollution’ or ‘carbon pollution’. It accurately reflects the harmful role these emissions play, and it ties them to ideas like the ‘polluter pays principle‘.

Obama’s 2011 State of the Union

While it did say a fair bit about cleaner forms of energy, climate change wasn’t mentioned at all in yesterday’s State of the Union address.

The absence of any reference was almost certainly politically driven, and based at least partly on an awareness of official Republican hostility to pretty much any government policy that would restrict greenhouse gas pollution. When people read this speech in retrospect – twenty or thirty years from now – perhaps they will reflect on how broken the politics of the time were, and how incapable they were of identifying and acting upon the biggest issue of the day. We are far too distracted by day-to-day and week-to-week blips; as a consequence, we are failing to properly recognize how we are making choices that will establish the conditions in which a huge number of future humans will live.

The segment on green energy does feature some specific proposals. Obama suggests that America could have one million electric vehicles deployed by 2015; he calls for 80% of American’s electricity to come from ‘clean’ sources (including natural gas) by 2035. While these objectives may be laudable, it would be a stretch to call them commitments. The last few years have amply demonstrated President Obama’s limited power, when it comes to determining what course the U.S. government will actually take.

We have to hope that a quick change will somehow take place in American politics and that climate change – this terrifically important fact about the world – ceases to be a hyper-partisan matter to which minimal real effort is devoted. How such a change could be accomplished, in a world where people seem to choose their facts to fit their ideologies, I cannot really say. I cannot help but thinking that my general optimism about humanity’s potential for making the transition to carbon neutrality in time might be excessive. Perhaps the real future we face is one filled with geoengineering, massive chaos, and suffering.

P.S. Kudos to the BBC, incidentally, for setting up a really excellent internet-embedded version of the speech. They have it divided by subject, and clicking at any point in the written transcript makes the quick-loading video jump to the section in question.

Roberta Johnson and Erin Gustafson

This week’s episode of This American Life features a discussion between Roberta Johnson, the Executive Director of the National Earth Science Teachers Association, and Erin Gustafson, a high school age climate change denier and appreciator of Glenn Beck.

The pattern of the discussion is a familiar one to me. Dr. Johnson lays out the evidence that humans are changing the climate dangerously, based on things like ice core samples and isotopic ratios. Ms. Gustafson brings up some common denier talking points, like the Medieval Warm Period and the leaked climate science emails. Dr. Johnson responds to these criticisms, but Ms. Gustafson remains unconvinced.

The host then asks Dr. Johnson if there is any hope of getting through to people with evidence, once they become skeptical. Her answer is not terribly satisfying, and the whole interview is testimony to the difficulty of the task.

Of course, the word ‘skeptical’ is being misused here. To continue to disagree with a claim, regardless of how weak your arguments are or how strong those backing it have become, is not skepticism. Rather, it is a kind of dogmatism. There are many genuine difficulties in making sense of our complex world, but it seems to me that the modes of thinking about thinking are what are really broken in climate change deniers. They will cling to any scrap of evidence that supports what they want to believe, while subscribing to conspiracy theories that discredit those who argue otherwise.

As I have mentioned before, I was a lot less concerned about climate change a few years ago. I bought the argument from The Economist that we didn’t know whether it would be cheaper to stop or to simply adapt to. Since then, virtually all the new evidence and analysis has given us greater cause for concern. Unfortunately, the last few years have seen a kind of exhaustion among both advocates of action on climate change and society at large. The deniers are winning, at least insofar as they are giving politicians more than enough cover to continue to do far too little about what is probably the world’s most important problem.

People who are concerned about climate change might be wrong. There could be something about the planet we have overlooked, which means humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions don’t need to be curbed. That being said, it seems decreasingly likely that this is the case. More and more lines of evidence demonstrate what is happening and why. There is also the question of risk management. If we believe the deniers and they are wrong, the world is in a lot of trouble. If we believe the activists, move to a zero carbon economy, and then discover the threat was overblown, we will have accomplished a lot of useful things. We will have lost out on a bit of the prosperity that continued use of fossil fuels would have given us, but we would have built a cleaner and sustainable global society. At worst, we would create a better world ‘for nothing.’

* One important exception to this argument concerns extreme poverty. If there is any area where we should let another moral objective trump climate change mitigation, it is in improving the lot of those who are desperately impoverished. Since their emissions are a tiny part of the global total anyhow, this goal can be sought at the same time as the excessive emissions of those in rich countries are aggressively reduced.

Taking one action

Talking with my friend Meaghan, the question arose: what is the single most useful thing individuals can do easily to help address climate change? Almost certainly, it is taking some action to influence the politics in their country. For those living in democracies, there is probably nothing more useful they can do than nudging their elected representatives a bit toward understanding climate change, wanting to curb it, and being aware of how to do so.

As BuryCoal argues, the key to dealing with climate change is to stop burning fossil fuels. The more coal, oil, and gas stay underground, the less the climate will change. At the moment, I think that is probably the most important message people can convey to their representatives.

Of course, anyone who you tell that to is likely to come back at you with various objections. Fossil fuels power the world economy, for instance. It may be unrealistic to expect the average citizen to prepare counter-arguments for the major objections they will hear – which range from the realistic to the completely deluded. This major counter-argument, however, seems to have two responses. First, we do have alternatives. The total amount of renewable energy out there is huge, and we have many different ways to capture it. Second, nothing about the universe guarantees our current level of energy use. It may well be that future generations experience leaner times. That is far preferable to a world where they are trying to deal with catastrophic or runaway climate change.

The degree to which members of the general public need to understand climate change and its solutions is debatable. It may well be that the problem can be solved by stealth, without much input from the average individual. My fantasy climate change policy doesn’t call for much in the way of voluntary action. For those individuals who are concerned, I would say that first and foremost they should be expressing their deep concern to their elected representatives, highlighting how climate change is the challenge facing humanity and the most important current force that will determine how future generations live.

Once you have done that, you can go on to take actions that reduce your personal contribution to the problem, like improving the efficiency of your home, going vegetarian, reducing travel, etc. Ultimately, the emergence of society-wide mandatory solutions seems to have a much greater chance of addressing the problem than hoping for bottom-up voluntary actions to do the job.

One North American group focused on encouraging ordinary citizens to lobby their representatives for action on climate change is the Citizens Climate Lobby.

Batteries for large-scale energy storage

One challenge associated with renewable forms of energy like wind and solar power is that power stations of these types cannot usually produce energy all the time, and may not generate it at the time when it is needed most.

Energy storage is one mechanism for dealing with that, and can rely on various mechanisms like compressed air, pumped hydroelectric storage, and multi-lagoon tidal systems.

It is also encouraging that battery technology is improving. A company called Corvus now makes lithium ion batteries that consist of assemblies of 6.2 kilowatt-hour modules. These can be charged in 30 minutes and discharged in 6. They could be joined together in large arrays of up to 40 megawatt-hours and may eventually be cost-effective in some energy storage and load balancing roles.

Small nuclear reactors (SMRs)

Climate change definitely strengthens the case for nuclear power, but it is very hard to determine just how strong that case really is, particularly on economic grounds. Climate change does nothing to lessen the risks associated with accidents or nuclear proliferation, but it does represent some of the most significant risks associated with fossil fuel based forms of electricity generation.

Some of the major barriers to the deployment of new nuclear power plants are cost and long lead-in times. Construction can easily take a decade or more. One means by which both of those issues could potentially be addressed is through the use of small modular nuclear reactors. This is an approach being experimented with by a number of groups, including Russia’s state nuclear energy company (which is building a floating, towable nuclear power station) and firms like TerraPower, which has been enthusiastically endorsed by Bill Gates.

One of the most interesting possible uses for small nuclear reactors is as ‘drop-in’ replacements for the coal-burning parts of old power plants. Potentially, the heat source in a power plant could be switched from the combustion of coal to the fission of uranium, keeping most of the rest of the plant’s infrastructure in place. In particular, such converted plants could make use of existing transmission capacity.

I can’t say whether small nuclear reactors really are a more economical or appealing option overall, but it seems like a technology to watch as the world struggles to find ways to achieve carbon neutrality.