The environment – Page 81 – a sibilant intake of breath

John Kerry on the new senate climate bill

Over on Grist, there is an article written by Senator John Kerry about the new climate legislation being introduced in the U.S. Senate. His message has a sobering but pragmatic tone:

A comprehensive climate bill written purely for you and me — true believers — can’t pass the Senate no matter how hard or passionately I fight on it. No, it’s got to be an effort that makes my colleagues — and that has to include Republicans so we can get to 60 — comfortable about the jobs we’re going to create and the protection for consumers and the national security benefits — and it has to address those pieces on their terms. The good news: I think we got that balance right.

It is hard to know whether he is right about that, and I felt similarly ambivalent about the previous Waxman-Markey climate bill. That said, Kerry’s argument does highlight the trade-off the frequently exists in policy-making between how well designed a policy is, to reach its objectives, and how well crafted it is from the perspective of political possibility. It’s a shame that what is necessary in the real world can be impossible in the political world, but that is a reality that must be incorporated into our strategies.

Given the series of blows against good climate policy recently, having some sort of legislative success in the United States could be very important. It could help drive Canada towards finally doing something about climate change, and it could help revive the moribund UN process internationally. Also, like many other weak pieces of domestic climate legislation passed before, it could always be strengthened after the fact.

For what it’s worth, here’s hoping the US manages to do something, if only so as to stop providing the rest of the world with such a convenient justification for doing nothing.

On Holocaust deniers

Given the previous discussions here about conspiracy theorists and climate change deniers, I thought this article on American Holocaust deniers might be of interest.

The case study of Holocaust deniers reveals weird and unsettling things about human psychology, such as how otherwise ordinary-seeming people can believe such appalling and offensive things, despite massive historical evidence. That being said, while Holocaust deniers do a grave injury to the accurate understanding of modern history, they probably have a limited ability to contribute to future debacles. Climate change deniers, alas, are far more dangerous.

No alternative to oil?

A recent article in The Economist took on a rather insufferable tone when talking about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and offshore drilling more generally:

The accident seems likely to strengthen the hands of environmentalists keen to turn America away from oil and towards some unconvincingly specified alternative mixture of noble abstinence, natural gas, electricity and ethanol.

Oh, those crazy environmentalists with their half baked plans! Why can’t they just recognize that oil is the way to go? It’s not like continued dependence on it ties our prosperity to a fundamentally non-renewable resource, from which many of the profits flow into the coffers of vile regimes. And it’s not like the climatic dangers of the continued heedless burning of fossil fuels threaten to undermine everything good humanity is trying to build for the future…

Renewables may be four or five times more costly than fossil fuels, per unit of output. That being said, energy costs are a small part of our economy. We can afford to pay more for safe and reliable alternatives that will carry on working indefinitely At the same time, fossil fuels are only ‘cheap’ when you ignore most of the costs associated with them. You would think that a newspaper ostensibly committed to: “tak[ing] part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress” might have figured some of this out by now.

As for ‘convincingly specified alternatives,’ David MacKay’s book is one of several that provide a suite of such options for public consideration.

Electricity in China

Due to its large population and growing wealth and international importance, the way China gets its energy has considerable relevance for the rest of the world. From a climate change perspective, the story is not a very encouraging one. Firstly, China gets abour 75% of its power from coal. Secondly, its economy is arranged such that the energy use per dollar of GDP is extremely high – about four times more than in the United States, and about eight times more than Britain. Partly, that is the consequence of how electricity in China is kept artificially cheap, with a price per megawatt-hour of just $0.59, compared with $0.89 in the United States and $1.86 in Britain.

Quite possibly, the low energy efficiency of China is partly a consequence of how rich states have exported a great deal of their highly polluting industry to places like China. They can pat themselves on the back for keeping domestic emissions relatively flat, while importing all the carbon-intensive goods they want from places like China. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Steven Davis and Ken Caldiera quantify these flows:

We find that, in 2004, 23% of global CO2 emissions, or 6.2 gigatonnes CO2, were traded internationally, primarily as exports from China and other emerging markets to consumers in developed countries. In some wealthy countries, including Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, the United Kingdom, and France, >30% of consumption-based emissions were imported, with net imports to many Europeans of >4 tons CO2 per person in 2004. Net import of emissions to the United States in the same year was somewhat less: 10.8% of total consumption-based emissions and 2.4 tons CO2 per person.

This map, showing the magnitude of these flows, is rather telling.

Given the importance of having global emissions of greenhouse gases peak soon, then fall rapidly towards zero, the direction China is taking is worrisome:

The use of power derived from coal will continue to grow in absolute terms (although new coal-fired plants are to be more efficient and cleaner), but its share of total Chinese output will fall from 75% to 65%, estimates Credit Suisse’s Mr Chen. Hydropower will expand by more than half, but its share of the total will drop a bit, from 21% to 20%. Wind power will see a big expansion, taking its share from 3% to 7%, as will nuclear, up from 1% to 5%. The rest will come from such niches as solar panels and incinerators.

It is good that China is deploying renewables on such a scale, and promising (though also worrisome) that they are leading the world in construction of nuclear reactors, with 21 on the way. At the same time, China is going to have to accept that ever-rising absolute emissions from coal-fired power stations is not an approach that is compatible with climatic stability. Ultimately, those facilities are going to need to be shut down.

The oil sands and accumulating CO2

Over at DeSmogBlog, there is a good post about Canada’s oil sands, and why their cumulative greenhouse gas emissions are their most significant environmental consequence.

The most worrisome thing about the oil sands is that they do most of their damage when they are operating properly – not when they are killing ducks, or when toxic liquids are leaking out of tailings ponds. What makes them really harmful is the extraction, processing, and (especially) use of the oil they contain. As such, efforts to make them more environmentally friendly are ultimately doomed to be limited in scope.

The economic importance of air travel

Contemplating the volcano-induced disruption in European air travel, The Economist concluded that it had such a small economic impact as to be unmeasurable. Business meetings that people thought were super important were just as successfully held over the phone, and domestic hotels and restaurants gained business from those further afield.

One way of thinking about this is to say that it demonstrates how frivolous most air travel is. The article claims that “globalisation is far more about ships than about planes” and, aside from the potential of a lengthy air travel hiatus to disrupt certain segments of some supply chains, the temporary suspension of air travel has a limited effect.

It would be fine for air travel to be frivolous if it was otherwise benign. Unfortunately, long trips via plane produce unacceptable quantities of greenhouse gases. Giving up long-distance travel is one of the single most effective voluntary steps most people can take to reduce how much harm they are doing to future generations, via greenhouse gases and climate change. Surely, their right to live on a planet that has a stable climate compatible with human flourishing trumps the right of those alive today to spend the weekend in Helsinki or enjoy a quick winter jaunt to Spanish beaches.

Unscrupulous climate graph

This post on A Few Things Ill Considered is a great demonstration of how graphs and statistics can be abused. Show CO2 and temperature data from a short stretch of time, with misleading axes, and you can produce the impression that they are unrelated. Present the information in a fair way, and the correlation between the two looks very plausible.

Combine that with the theoretical framework about greenhouse gases trapping energy (in the form of longwave radiation) within the planet system, and you have a hypothesis that is defensible on both theoretical and empirical grounds.

Disasters and environmental awareness

Every day, I find myself thinking about the huge risks associated with unchecked climate change, as well as the reality of how little humanity is doing overall to counter them. One odd consequence of this is ambiguous feelings about disasters like the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. On the one hand, it is a human and ecological catastrophe. At the same time, part of me hopes that each of these catastrophes gives a bit more of a psychological push to the population as a whole to deal with our major energy and climate problems. We are driving straight towards the edge of a cliff, and perhaps it is bumps like these that will convince the population at large that we would be wise to slow down.

The same goes for things like summer Arctic sea ice minimums. On the one hand, I know that vanishing ice is a positive feedback, and that warming in the Arctic risks causing massive methane release. On the other, every time the decline of sea ice seems to slacken, climate change deniers and delayers make hay from it, and use public confusion to further delay effective climate policies.

The really worrisome thing is that by the time there is massive evidence of just how dangerous climate change is, it will be too late to prevent truly catastrophic outcomes. Having global emissions peak soon is essential, if we are not to pass along an utterly transformed world to those who will come after us. If some moderately sized environmental catastrophes help that outcome to occur, perhaps we should be grateful for them in the final analysis.

I have speculated before that perhaps only perceived crises can generate real change.

State of the climate video

Last night, I gave a short talk outlining my current thinking on climate change.

I am interested to know which things people think I am wrong about. Also, about which things seemed to be effectively expressed, and which poorly expressed.

An improved version may be worthy of being recorded in a more aesthetically appealing manner.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS), always around the corner

One odd thing about following climate change as a scientific, political, and ethical issue is the disparity between different sorts of relevant timelines. There is a rate at which scientific reports come out, a rate at which public opinion about climate change shifts, and a rate at which firms feel the need to change their public images. There are also much slower shifts – slower primarily because they are costly and require massive physical changes to energy systems.

Back in 2008, in a presentation at Cambridge University, the UK Environment Secretary Ed Miliband expressed his view that carbon capture and storage (CCS) was just around the corner. He says that all of the necessary technologies have been tried successfully, and the next step is a demonstration facility. He goes on to quote the European Commission’s hope of: “every new power station in Europe being carbon capture and storage ready by 2010 and using carbon capture and storage by 2020.”

We’re still waiting for that demonstration plant. This is not to say that CCS has no contribution to make to fighting climate change. Indeed, paired with power plants burning biomass, it could remove CO2 from the air in a promising way. Rather, there has been a persistent notion that CCS is just around the corner. We need a demo plant, then we can somehow magically retrofit the world’s coal stations and solve our climate problems without shutting them down or abandoning coal as a source of energy.

I can see why that is appealing, even for those not beholden to coal-dependent utilities or coal mining interests. China has lots of coal, and it is scary to think what will happen if they burn it all. That fear can give people a powerful reason to hope that CCS will mop up the whole problem without much fuss.

In the near term, CCS seems to have more potential to delay action – keeping us clinging to the belief that some wonderful technology will save the day. Meanwhile, the window in which we can take action to avoid catastrophic climate change is shrinking, and the total costs of the transition are rising as the time we have left in which to complete it diminishes.