The environment – Page 78 – a sibilant intake of breath

The historical parallels of climate change

Dealing with climate change requires abandoning fossil fuels – a big challenge, given how integral they are to the functioning of our society.

What historical parallels are there for such societal re-organizations? Obviously, there isn’t anything that perfectly matches this situation. That being said, it seems plausible that there are historical incidents and periods worth studying, in order to help develop better strategies for going forward.

The obvious example is the abolishment of slavery, which was also an important part of the economic basis for societies at one point. Relevant environmental examples include ozone depletion, acid rain, and persistent organic pollutants.

What other examples are there?

David Mitchell on climate change

A couple of years ago, the issue of the consequences of climate change being very depressing came up here, given how dealing with the problem means giving up some excellent things, like being able to visit China or Hawaii on a whim and being able to concentrate our scientific efforts on neat things like space travel.

More recently, David Mitchell (of Mitchell and Webb) produced a funny video with a similar message:

David discusses why tackling climate change is always presented to us by people who either tell us off or patronisingly try to convince us that tackling it is “cool” or “fun”, when actually it’s just something we have to do, because of facts.

I don’t entirely agree with him – since I do see moving to renewable forms of energy as an opportunity. That said, I do like the delivery of his message.

Liability caps

Often, states choose to cap the liabilities of companies operating dangerous facilities like oil rigs or nuclear power stations. They recognize that companies are hesitant to build or own such things, as long as they might be called upon to pay the full cost associated with any accidents.

Of course, providing these caps is a deeply anti-market thing to do. There are very good reasons to worry about oil spills and nuclear disasters, and heavy costs are borne by many people when they occur. Those risks should be foremost in the minds of people who choose to invest in these facilities.

When governments grant companies ‘protection’ against massive claims in the event of disasters, they are saying that building these facilities is so important that it should be done even if there may ultimately be serious uncompensated harm imposed on the general public. This takes the illusory profits associated with environmentally harmful economic activities to a new level, by saying that even in cases where companies can be proven to have directly caused harm to third parties, in the pursuit of their own profits, those profits will be protected by the wealth and authority of the states.

How cynical should Obama make us?

As the Bush administration was coming to a close, Barack Obama looked like an almost ideal leader for the United States: internationalist, concerned with the constitution and rule of law, apparently concerned about the environment, and so on.

Now, a year and a half after Obama was inaugurated, there are a lot of disappointments to deal with. Guantanamo Bay remains open, the United States maintains an active policy of assassinations in Pakistan, the war in Afghanistan has been a failure in relation to our original aims, and nothing significant has been done on climate change. Instead, the administration can point to its response to the economic crisis and health care as its accomplishments.

As I have said before, I think the credit crisis was a real waste of this administration. It seems like they could have devoted their energy in so much more productive ways, if the banks hadn’t terrified politicians into pulling out all the stops to save them. The unpopularity of doing so has revitalized the Republican Party and sapped public support for the Obama administration. Furthermore, very little has been done to prevent the occurrence of such crises in the future.

What should we take from all of this? Is Obama really as promising a figure as we thought, blocked in his efforts by the political system? Do we need to give the administration more time to effect its policies? Or was the kind of optimism that fueled the Obama campaign misplaced? Perhaps the world simply doesn’t permit the success of idealists.

In fairness, Obama did make an effort to stress how difficult real change would be, while he was campaigning and after he was elected. There is a huge amount of momentum bound up in the status quo, and changing the direction of things in meaningful ways is always difficult. Hopefully, there has been more happening in the background than has been immediately observable to outsiders and the years Obama has left will be filled with meaningful accomplishments.

Palm oil

Depending on exactly where it comes from, the oil extracted from the oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) may be the worst fuel on Earth, insofar as it affects the climate. Once this oil is pressed from the fruit of the trees, it can be conversed into a form of biodiesel for use in internal combustion engines.

Nominally, biofuels are carbon neutral, as long as the same amount of biomass is being grown per unit time as fuel is being burned. The big problem with palm oil is that the plantations where it is produced (overwhelmingly in Indonesia and Malaysia) take the place of rainforests and peatlands that previously held massive amounts of carbon dioxide. As such, there is one gigantic burp of greenhouse gas when an area of forest becomes a palm oil plantation. This has been happening on an enormous scale, with the area under cultivation in Indonesia expanding from under 2,000 square kilometres in 1967 to over 30,000 square kilometres in 2000.

In addition to the climatic consequences, palm oil is a prime example of the food versus fuel debate. When food products are converted into vehicle fuels, they raise the price of those crops and increase the cost of food for those who depend on them. That effect is especially acute for the very poor, who spend a large proportion of their income on food. Palm oil is also found in 50% of all packaged supermarket products.

Quite probably, one appropriate approach would be for developed countries concerned about climate change to ban palm oil from former rainforest as an acceptable fuel. It is even worse than the very poor option of ethanol from corn, even before you take into account issues of international equity.

How good is gas?

Per unit of electricity generated, natural gas is the lowest-carbon fossil fuel. Producing a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity using oil, and especially coal, generates significantly more emissions. While bituminous coal produces about 370g of CO2 per kWh, oil produces about 260g, and natural gas produces about 230g.

A recent MIT report focuses on switching American electricity production to gas, as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions:

In the results of a two-year study, released today, the researchers said electric utilities and other sectors of the American economy will use more gas through 2050. Under a scenario that envisions a federal policy aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2050, researchers found a substantial role for natural gas.

“Because national energy use is substantially reduced, the share represented by gas is projected to rise from about 20 percent of the current national total to around 40 percent in 2040,” said the MIT researchers. When used to fire a power plant, gas emits about half of the carbon dioxide emissions as conventional coal plants.

They claim that nuclear power, renewable energy and carbon capture and sequestration are all more expensive than gas, and thus less viable as low-carbon alternatives. They also claim that by 2050, 15% of the U.S. vehicle fleet will be fueled with natural gas.

I have three big objections to all this:

First, an increasing share of natural gas is coming from unconventional sources, using techniques like hydraulic fracturing. This has associated environmental risks, such as the contamination of groundwater.

Secondly, the amount of climate change humanity will cause depends on the total amount of all fossil fuels burned before society becomes carbon neutral. Burning more gas obviously contributes to this cumulative total, changing the atmosphere and climate in ways that will endure for thousands of years. If humanity ever starts to burn the methane embedded in permafrost of methane clathrates, the total quantity of associated emissions could be very worrisome indeed.

Thirdly, building new gas-fired power plants perpetuates fossil fuel dependence. It keeps us wedded to fuels that are inevitably going to become ever more costly and destructive to access, and which can never form the basis for a truly sustainable society.

None of this is to say that gas has no role to play in dealing with climate change. In the short term, substituting gas for coal may be a promising way to reduce emissions during the transitional period before renewables become dominant. In the long run, however, there is no alternative to moving beyond fossil fuels.

Helpfully, the MIT report does not just take energy demand as constant, or ever-increasing. Rather, they model the economic effect of putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions, and find that doing so would keep demand flat in the next few decades. They project that carbon pricing would raise electricity prices by 30% by 2030 and 45% by 2050 – a small price to pay for reducing the extreme risks associated with climate change.

Government divesting from fossil fuels

One complication related to the BP oil spill is the anticipated harm that cancelling dividends will do to pension funds. It is not ultimately inappropriate for those investors to lose money. They were benefiting before when BP’s lax safety standards generated unjustified profits. Still, there are political difficulties associated with making people bear the burden of even such limited exposure to BP’s new risks.

Right now, there is a significant conflict of interest when government officials have an individual or collective interest in the continued profitability of the fossil fuel sector. Perhaps the appropriate response is a program of divestment, wherein government pension plans and officials scale down and eventually eliminate their holdings of stocks and bonds from fossil fuel companies. That way, they will individually be in a more impartial position from which to make decisions on climate and energy policy.

Five Republican senators on cap-and-trade

In an interesting illustration of how political tactics shift with circumstances, an article on Grist quotes five American Republican lawmakers expressing their support for a cap-and-trade approach to addressing climate change. At the time, they were concerned about so-called ‘command and control’ regulations, which may have given industry fewer options for reducing emissions. For instance, a government decree that all new vehicles meet a certain efficiency standard cannot be circumvented by cutting emissions somewhere else; by contrast, both carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes leave it up to firms and individuals to choose where to cut emissions.

The Grist list includes senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Scott Brown (R-Mass.), and John McCain.

The logic of the changed stances is dispiriting. At one point, Republicans saw command and control regulations as plausible enough to be worried about, and were willing to promote cap-and-trade as a preferable alternative. Now, it seems they think command and control is a complete political non-starter, and they have directed their energies towards fighting the less stringent alternative they once opposed.

There are reasons to worry about whether a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system would produce the emissions reductions we need quickly enough, and it is very plausible that additional measures like fuel taxes and efficiency requirements will be needed in addition. All the more reason, then, to create a carbon price as soon as possible. Only by doing so can we begin to get a sense of how quickly and cheaply that approach can lead to a lower carbon world. If it proves cheaper and easier than expected (as has generally been the case for complying with environmental regulation), then the price of emitting carbon can be raised more quickly, reducing climate risks further. If it does not prove effective, early action will at least provide us with that information in a somewhat timely manner, while there is still an opportunity to try other approaches.

Open thread: campaign finance

Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Reich describes the system of campaign contributions in the United States as “the biggest corruption of our political process,” defining corruption as “actions causing the public to lose confidence that politicians make decisions in the public’s interest rather than in the special interest of those who give them financial support.” He claims that the increasing size and importance of these political donations is primarily a reflection of changing economic circumstances:

Globalization, deregulation, and technological advances — especially computers and the Internet — have been the driving forces. They have shifted almost all industries in almost all rich economies from being organized around stable oligopolies, in which competitive advantage derived mostly from economies of scale, toward far more intense competition in which competitive advantage comes from innovation — and from favorable treatment by government.

He argues that the issues that now occupy the bulk of Congressional time are those that affect competition between firms within an industry, as well as those that affect competing industries.

Climatologist James Hansen also identifies campaign finance reform as one of the most necessary steps for producing effective climate change policies in the United States, by reducing the influence of status quo entities like big coal companies.

What do readers think about the claim that political advertising ought to be a form of protected free speech? How much does it matter whether it is funded by the candidate themselves, campaign donors, or some other mechanism? Would we be better off if all candidates got a set amount of free advertising, and were barred from using other means to promote themselves in mass media? Would such a policy just drive them to use different approaches to achieve the same end, such as cooking up forms of advertising that can be reported as news? Does the current situation in Canada differ in important ways from that in the United States?

People with good intentions might unintentionally do harm

In the third chapter of Merchants of Doubt, Oreskes and Conway identify an important transition within the environmental movement: from ‘preservationist’ environmentalism to pollution prevention. The former was basically the non-partisan drive to preserve especially beautiful places, like national parks. The latter grew out of the recognition that:

Pollution was not simply a matter of evil industries dumping toxic sludge in the night; people with good intentions might unintentionally do harm. Economic activity yielded collateral damage. Recognizing this meant acknowledging that the role of the government might need to change in ways that would inevitably affect economic activity.

This is initially discussed in the context of acid rain, but it applies just as much to ozone depletion, climate change, and other environmental issues.

I think we are stil waiting for the pollution prevention view to become post-partisan.