The environment – Page 79 – a sibilant intake of breath

Hardtack colony

One of the most common objections I see to the idea that the world needs to move to renewable forms of energy is that renewables just aren’t up to the task. Critics point out how renewables only produce about 2% of our electricity (and less of our total energy use, once you consider things like transport) and how wind, sun, tides, and so on are all variable.

This morning, I dreamed up a metaphor that might serve as a quick partial response:

Imagine a colony founded in a previously uninhabited area, far from the mother country, and with no prospect of future resupply. It is founded with a large stock of non-perishable food: hardtack, flour, lard, biscuits, etc. Good stuff. They also have seeds and the land around them. Imagine now that they are at a juncture in time where 98% of their food comes from the rations they brought along with them. They would not be saying: “Look what wonderful, everlasting sources of sustenance this hardtack is! It is all we will ever need!” Rather, they would be intensely concerned that they were only producing 2% of the food they need for any given year, while drawing down their one-off stock, which would be better saved for emergencies.

Obviously, the colonists need to learn to farm and garden. They also need to learn to cope with seasonal variability. Since the most ancient civilizations, we have had to deal with the fact that food is more abundant at some times than at others. Unlike some mammals that balance it out by storing and drawing down fat (think of whales and penguins that go without eating for months at a time), we use external food storage systems and techniques, from granaries to salting and canning.

Unfortunately, electricity is not so easily stored as food. Nevertheless, we have many options for energy storage. We can balance renewable production between energy sources (wind, solar, geothermal, etc) and between regions. We can store energy in pumped hydroelectric storage and multi-reservoir tidal systems. We can use electric vehicles as a storage and load balancing system, and work to improve batteries, flywheels, and capacitors.

Of course, the metaphor emits much that is relevant to our situation. Fossil fuels are different from stored rations in important ways. For one, we don’t know just how much we have. More importantly, using them causes severe harm – both in terms of toxic pollution and in terms of climate change. Finally, the metaphor takes our energy needs as essentially fixed. When it comes to our society, we could do many of the same things we do now, while using a lot less raw energy.

Those issues aside, I think the metaphor has promise as a quick response to the ‘renewables will never be up to it’ argument. In the long run, we really don’t have a choice.

Meteorologists on climate

Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Charles Homans has a piece on why so many television meteorologists are climate change deniers. He cites the particular case of John Coleman, whose opposition to mainstream climate science was motivated more by personal animosity than by any doubts about their empirical methods:

Coleman wasn’t arguing against the integrity of a particular conclusion based on careful original research — something that would have constituted useful scientific skepticism. Instead, he went after the motives of the scientists themselves. Climate researchers, he wrote, “look askance at the rest of us, certain of their superiority. They respect government and disrespect business, particularly big business. They are environmentalists above all else.”

Coleman’s 2007 essay was picked up by right-wing news sites, with his experience as a weatherman used as a justification for taking his position seriously.

The issue of meteorologists making decrees on climate goes back to the basic question of what constitutes expertise and whose views – if anyone’s – we should pay special attention to when making up our minds. Apparently, the majority of professional meteorologists in the United States reject the mainstream science of climate change:

Twenty-nine percent of the 121 meteorologists who replied agreed with Coleman—not that global warming was unproven, or unlikely, but that it was a scam. Just 24 percent of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century—half were sure this wasn’t true, and another quarter were “neutral” on the issue.

Despite how climate science and meteorology are very different fields, the Yale Project on Climate Change found that 66% of Americans listed television meteorologists as a credible source of information on climate change. It’s not surprising – though it is certainly regrettable – that this helps keep the general public confused about the issue.

Climate change and individual ethics

During today’s earlier discussion of climate change and partisan politics, a distinction was eventually drawn between the key principles that underlie intergenerational justice, the ways in which those principles manifest themselves in individual morality, and the question of how to bring our politics more in line with what those principles demand.

The final question is the topic of the previous discussion, but it seems worth having another about the broad question of what the moral consequences of climate change are for human behaviour. Naturally, this has come up before with reference to specific behaviours (especially voluntary travel). It has also come up in broader discussions, such as on the relative importance of abstaining from emissions, compared with resisting societal structures that perpetuate climate change.

This discussion is meant to be broader than those: what are the moral consequences of climate change, when it comes to individuals?

Climate: integrated left or post-partisan?

In a recent article, British journalist George Monbiot argues that climate change mitigation advocates must join forces with a broader progressive coalition in order to see their ideas implemented. Alongside environmental concerns, this coalition ought to be “against the [public spending] cuts, against the banks, against BP, unemployment, the lack of social housing, the endless war in Afghanistan.” It should have the same kind of dynamism as the American Tea Party movement, and the same sort of enthusiasm for demanding policy changes.

While I certainly recognize the current impotence of the climate change mitigation movement (backsliding from the United States to Australia to UNFCCC negotiations), I don’t think Monbiot is right. Climate change mitigation is something we must undertake because of the physical realities associated with the climate system and the consequences of emitting greenhouse gases. It is not fundamentally a partisan issue, and dealing with it is not fundamentally tied to political views on issues like housing or Afghanistan.

Furthermore, the world cannot afford climate change mitigation to be a policy only of the political left. Inevitably, left-wing and right-wing governments alternate in power, as voters become disgusted by the excesses of each subsequent administration. Dealing with climate change requires a long descent towards zero net global emissions, over a span of decades. It’s not something that can be vigorously taken up for four, five, or eight years and then abandoned in favour of aggressive exploitation campaigns for unconventional fossil fuels and loosened environmental planning regulations.

Climate and the right

Besides, climate change is something that can be integrated into the political traditions of the right in several ways. Conservatives should love carbon taxes, since they are a mechanism to keep one person’s behaviour from impacting unduly on the freedom of others, while also allowing the maximum range of possible means for stopping the harm. Such taxes demonstrate faith in markets, innovation, and the capability of people to respond rationally and effectively to appropriate incentives. Further, there is a long tradition in conservative political philosophy of seeing the current generation of human beings as trustees of the planet, with a duty to pass it along in an improved or at least preserved state.

That being said, climate change is a major challenge to the libertarian view that people are essentially autonomous and should be free to do as they like. Laissez faire policies that ignore ever-rising greenhouse gas concentrations are likely to create the need for a far harsher eventual clampdown, once the harms associated with climate change become entirely undeniable. Also, given the lag time between emissions and their consequences, those concerned for the future state of the world cannot continue to tolerate ethical systems that include an unlimited right to pollute. Political thinkers across the political spectrum need to come to grips with what climate science has taught us, and think deeply about how that affects both the factual inputs to their moral reasoning and the moral precepts that serve as the foundation of their political philosophy.

Blocking opportunism

Broad political consensus on dealing with climate change would also have another important role, as protection against populist opportunists. Once serious carbon prices have become common, making things like travel significantly more expensive, it seems inevitable that political parties will crop us that campaign to eradicate the fetters people have put upon themselves and return to the happy free-wheeling days of unlimited greenhouse gas emissions. In order to head off such short-sighted but potentially popular responses, it is necessary for serious politicians and parties of all stripes to continue to publicly express their appreciation for how cutting global emissions to zero is a practical necessity, and a project that cannot be abandoned because of the impracticalities it imposes on people.

Eventually, climate change denial must become entirely discredited among all serious politically active people, and the political conversation about climate change must shift to being about the mechanisms through which deep cuts can be rapidly achieved, rather than about whether such cuts are necessary, or whether we should condemn future generations to a harsh and unstable world for the sake of short-term economic benefits for us.

Obama on oil dependence

In a recent speech, Barack Obama finally made the argument that the correct response to the BP oil spill is to lessen American dependence on fossil fuels:

Beyond the risks inherent in drilling four miles beneath the surface of the Earth, our dependence on oil means that we will continue to send billions of dollars of our hard-earned wealth to other countries every month – including many in dangerous and unstable regions.

In other words, our continued dependence on fossil fuels will jeopardise our national security. It will smother our planet. And it will continue to put our economy and our environment at risk.

Of course, almost every President going back to at least the 1970s has argued that the United States should move in such a direction. Hopefully, this time the message will be backed up by some strong policy actions.

If the Obama administration doesn’t manage to pass a climate bill before the mid-term elections, and if those elections then go badly for the Democrats, the chances for any meaningful climate change policy reform during Obama’s first term may be slim.

Peak oil and climate change

Given the multiple lines of evidence demonstrating that humanity is causing the climate to change in potentially dangerous ways, climate change has to be part of medium- to long-term planning for almost everybody, and part of the policy development processes of government. At the same time, there is a plausible case that global production of oil will peak at some point in the relatively near future, with potentially important economic, political, and geopolitical effects.

How will these two phenomena interact? I can think of lots of possibilities. These are not ranked in any way, and are not equally plausible.

1) Worries about peak oil prove premature or overblown. Liquid fuels stay cheap for the foreseable future, causing more climate change than there would have been in a scenario where they became more costly.

2) Natural reserves of petroleum cannot keep pace with rising demand, initially driving liquid fuel prices through the roof. Some combination of biofuels and coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology counteracts that, also worsening climate change. (Coal-to-liquids and fuels like palm oil grown in rainforest have huge climate impact per unit of energy)

3) Peak oil proves serious, and biofuel and CTL alternatives prove very costly. This has potentially large social and economic consequences, but makes climate change mitigation easier. For many people, the world gets a whole lot smaller.

4) Climate change occurs much more quickly than expected, perhaps because of major positive feedbacks like melting permafrost or burning rainforest. Governments sense their increased vulnerability and abandon attempts to cooperate internationally, seeking to make themselves as robust as possible in the face of the chaos ahead.

5) Climate change occurs much more quickly than expected, perhaps because of major positive feedbacks like melting permafrost or burning rainforest. Governments finally get the picture and introduce harsh policies restricting fossil fuel production domestically. Powerful states now profoundly concerned about climate change (the US, EU, China, Japan, etc) force petrostates like Canada and Kuwait to shut down production.

6) Not only does oil production peak, but so does gas and coal production. Dealing with climate change becomes much easier politically, given that there is no longer any real alternatives to switching to renewables and nuclear as principal sources of energy.

7) Peak oil proves serious, but cellulosic and algae-based biofuels finally emerge as commercially viable alternatives.

Personally, I think peak oil is a much less serious problem than climate change. For one thing, it is just the sort of phenomenon that markets deal with relatively automatically – something gets scarce and people find ways to use less, while developing alternatives. For another, it doesn’t include the same dangerous lag times. It is quite possible that we could emit enough to cause catastrophic warming, but only see concrete proof of that decades later. Peak oil, by contrast, seems likely to unfold with fewer surprises. Finally, there aren’t really any positive natural feedbacks that would further constrain the availability of oil, as it began to get scarce (though falling energy return on investment (EROI) is an issue). By contrast, warming is likely to beget more warming as ice vanishes, forests dry out an burn, permafrost and methane clathrates melt, etc.

Surely there are many other possibilities, aside from those listed above. Please post some below, and comment on those listed above. How do the different possible scenarios effect how we ought to be hedging our bets, both climatically and in terms of energy sources?

Psychology and hard choices

Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works makes reference to some interesting research with public policy implications. P.E. Tetlock and others published a study entitled “The psychology of the unthinkable: Taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals” in a 2000 issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Among other experiments, they presented subjects with a story about a hospital administrator deciding whether or not to spend $1 million to save the life of one child. They found that the experimental subjects disapproved of the administrator, regardless of which choice they made.

This seems to mesh well with the inappropriate rage in the United States about health care ‘rationing.’ As Peter Singer very effectively explained, rationing is inevitable in health care, as well as in all other areas of government spending where demand is potentially unlimited. What varies is the mechanism by which the rationing occurs: by severity of illness, by the wealth of sick people, etc.

Does the knowledge that people dislike the makers of tough decisions have any other social or political relevance? Perhaps. Tough choices certainly abound when it comes to environmental issues. Where a fishery is being exploited at an unsustainale rate, do we limit it to protect access to fish in the future, at the cost of a lot of fishing jobs today? Do we force people to pay for expensive wind, solar, or nuclear power so as to reduce the effects of climate change in the future? To what extent can the general public mitigate their intuitive disapproval, in recognition of the fact that politics requires hard choices? Also, to what extent should such cognitive biases reduce the extent to which public opinion is a valid source of guidance in policy-making?

Will war ever be carbon neutral?

Ideally, the next few decades will see all the world’s economies begin the difficult transition towards carbon neutrality, so as to stop anthropogenic climate change. Fossil fuels will represent a progressively smaller share of what drives vehicles and power plants, and complimentary measures will enhance carbon sinks.

If all that happens in the civilian sphere, is there any chance we will see it in the military? Military vehicles are definitely fuel hogs: whether it is supersonic fighter jets or main battle tanks driven by gas turbines.

It seems plausible that armies will be the last hold-out, when it comes to achieving carbon neutrality. National security has almost always been given priority over civilian needs, especially in non-democratic states. Furthermore, if weapons that produce large amounts of greenhouse gases are more effective than those that do not, any state with current or possible future enemies will find their military strategists unwilling to abandon them. It is also plausible that climate change itself will produce a more dangerous world, in which politicians and the public are even more supportive of developing military strength than they are now.

Perhaps the armed forces are such a small share of total emissions that this isn’t really a problem. Indeed, it does seem plausible that we can cut down the level of emissions to the point where the risk of climate change is much diminished, without having to tinker with them at all. Still, the question of how to move to a carbon-neutral world entirely unthreatened by climate change will eventually involve the question of how to get generals to give up their carbon-intensive habits, perhaps after titans of business and ordinary citizens have eventually done so.

The Economist mentions runaway climate change

For the first time, I found a reference to the possibility of runaway climate change in an article in The Economist. Oddly enough, it is not in an article on climate change, but rather in a survey on water from last month:

Few people have dwelt on the worst possibility, even if it is highly unlikely to come about: that the extra water vapour held by a warmer atmosphere might set in train a runaway greenhouse effect in which temperatures rose ever faster and tipping-points for, say, the melting of ice sheets were reached. This possibility has received little consideration outside academia, perhaps because less improbable consequences of climate change provide enough to be gloomy about. The wise conclusion to be drawn may be that all planning should allow for greater uncertainty, and probably also greater variability, so every plan will need to have a greater degree of resilience built into it than in the past.

This account doesn’t even mention the most shocking possible form of runaway climate change, where the oceans boil away and the Earth becomes permanently uninhabitable for life as we know it.

I wonder how long it will be before the main opinion pieces in The Economist take this risk into consideration. So far, they seem to remain convinced that climate change is a rather secondary problem – certainly less important than maintaining global GDP growth – and that it will eventually be efficiently dealt with through carbon pricing schemes.

As I have said countless times before, the major risk with climate change is that the lags between emissions and effects will conceal just how gigantic a problem climate change could be until it has become too late to prevent the worst effects.

Canada’s climate plans a flop

As discussed in a post of the Pembina Institute’s blog Canada’s record of failure in dealing with climate change continues to worsen. While the government once promised that Canadian emissions would peak forever sometime between 2010 and 2012, they now expect them to rise all across that span.

Policies the government expected to reduce emissions by 52 million tonnes (megatonnes) of CO2 in 2010 are now expected to produce reductions of just 5 megatonnes. Furthermore, the $1.5 billion Clean Air and Climate Change Trust Fund, distributed to provinces in 2007, did not produce the expected 16 megatonne reduction. Now, the government claims it cut emissions by just 0.34 megatonnes, with 3 more to follow by 2015.

These lackluster results, coupled with ever-rising emissions (especially from the oil and gas sector) demonstrate convincingly that Canada just isn’t doing its part on climate change mitigation. Future generations are likely to see this quite correctly as evidence of short-sightedness and irresponsibility.