Category: Science

New discoveries, the scientific method, and all matters relating to the scientific study of the physical world

Overcoming fossil dependence and building the world we want

Don’t you hate it when people who use fossil fuel based products for everything from travel to medicine to telecommunications criticize the fossil fuel industry or say that we shouldn’t build big new fossil fuel projects? We have a civilization that depends so much on fossil fuels, and yet these environmentalists want us to stop investing in them and to move to other forms of energy!

I have seen this general objection many times. Here’s a sample:

  • @rigger1977 — You start the march Milan. Throw away all products made from petroleum.
  • @trevormarr1 — Milan, @JustinTrudeau and @RachelNotley please list 10 things you use daily that exist strictly GREEN & will not require any oil/fossil fuel influence in their existence, we can wait! Try not to look like a hypocrite as you waste Canada’s opportunity! Let’s see how GREEN u live?
  • @glen_lees — If there are all these options one would expect that you use zero fossil fuels
  • @MHallFindlay — Personal insults don’t add to the debate. Just curious: When was the last time you flew somewhere or drove a car? Demand is a key component.
  • @CdnLadybug — And do you drive a car, use a cell phone or any products whereby oil products have been used to produce it? ALL forms of energy necessary.
  • @sinclair_pam — You yourself preaching from a fossil fuel device…how will you keep the hysteria alive without social media…brought to you by fossil fuels
  • @jglapski — You used fossil fuels tweeting this hypocrisy.
  • @aybren — So how will you stay warm this winter when you stop using all fossil fuel products?
  • @brucelabongbong — If you hate oil and it’s products……stop using them….simple…..
  • @lamphieryeg — Tell you what, Milan. When you give up fossil fuels, let us know. Till then, see ya.

Yes, environmentalists do want to end investment in fossil fuels and shift instead to other forms of energy. And your hypocrisy objection is a lot less substantial than it may seem.

There are three parts to the counterargument: climate change makes it necessary to move on from fossil fuels, we have alternatives to them as both sources of energy and feedstocks, and system change happens at the political level and not at the level of individual choice.

Let’s begin.

1. Climate change makes it necessary to replace fossil fuel energy

Whenever we burn coal, oil, or gas we add carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere. That greenhouse gas reduces the amount of infrared (longwave) radiation which the Earth emits to space. This is incontrovertibly well established. We can directly observe the reduced outgoing radiation as well as the resulting temperature increase, since energy that isn’t being lost to space inevitably warms the planet system.

Describing all the consequences of warming so far exceeds the sensible scope for any blog post. The authoritative source is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their fifth assessment report covers impacts from sea level rise to loss of glaciers and snowpack, worse extreme weather, more serious wildfires, the acidification of the oceans from CO2 in the atmosphere, adverse effects on agriculture, and adverse impacts on human health. A report I helped write for the University of Toronto goes through many different forms of harm and the evidence for each of them (p. 25–60). All these impacts worsen as the level of CO2 rises.

The consequences to date are bad, but it’s vital to understand that the harm arising from fossil fuel use is delayed. It takes decades for the greenhouse gasses (GHGs) added to the atmosphere to have their full effect. In this sense it’s a bit like the delayed effects of alcohol. If you drink two bottles of wine in 20 minutes you probably won’t feel too drunk at minute 21, but you have set yourself up to be excessively drunk once the wine has entered your blood and brain. However bad climate change’s effects are today, that’s just a taste of what is already coming, and far far worse will be coming if we don’t stop adding GHGs to the atmosphere.

How bad could it get? Since the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was negotiated in 1992 a consensus has emerged among scientists and policy-makers that warming the planet by more than 2 ˚C above pre-industrial temperatures would be “dangerous”. Some communities face grave risks at much lower levels of warming as even small amounts of sea level rise and other disruption threaten them. Under a “business as usual” scenario, the IPCC expects global CO2 to rise from the present level of about 400 parts per million (ppm) to over 700 ppm by the end of the century, with a corresponding temperature rise of over 4 ˚C. That doesn’t sound like much in the context of the weather outside or where you set your thermostat, but that kind of climate change is massively beyond anything anatomically modern human beings have experienced in the 300,000 years or so that our species has existed in its current form.

All around the world, human systems have been built to function in the climate where they now exist, based on centuries of experience that the sea level is always at more or less the same height, rivers have a certain volume, certain areas are good for growing crops, etc. Causing warming of well over 2 ˚C would invalidate all those assumptions, producing enormous challenges for human beings everywhere, massive new flows of migration, and almost certainly military conflicts as desperate people from one area are forcibly blocked from moving somewhere else. That’s the kind of world we get for people who are young today if we keep using fossil fuels and, because CO2 remains in the atmosphere for long periods of time, that disruption would continue for thousands of years.

As James Gustave Speth explains:

How serious is the threat to the environment? Here is one measure of the problem: all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and biota and leave a ruined world for our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy.

Sticking with fossil fuels is an option, but it’s an option with almost unimaginably horrible consequences. If we care at all about the welfare of those who will live on the Earth after us, we need to do our utmost to stop choking the atmosphere with CO2.

2. We have alternatives for both energy and raw materials

There is actually far more renewable energy available than there is in fossil fuels. That can be worked out intuitively as follows. Even if we used 100% of global fossil fuel production to try to heat the oceans, if the sun stopped warming the Earth they would nonetheless cool and eventually freeze to the bottom. My MIT Physics of Energy reference card says that the solar power incident on Earth is 174 petawatts (million billion watts). A large nuclear reactor has about one gigawatt of output, so the sun constantly striking the planet has energy akin to about 200 million large nuclear reactors (whereas we have actually built about 400 of them). The same card shows that complete fission of 1 kg of uranium 235 would produce 77 terajoules of energy, whereas monthly US electricity consumption is about 1 million terajoules. We can’t actually capture and use all the energy in either of those cases, but those figures can give us some initial hope about energy options aside from fossil fuels.

Cambridge physicist David MacKay released a free book that goes through all of our energy generation options, including fossil fuels with carbon capture, and the end result is that it’s entirely possible to have a global civilization where everyone alive gets as much energy as the average European today without altering the climate. It requires a vast new global energy infrastructure based on some combination of climate-safe options, but we need to keep massively investing in energy regardless of what form we choose. Keeping the global fossil fuel industry going will cost tens of trillions of dollars per decade according to the International Energy Agency. Is it smarter to invest that money in fossil fuel energy which has volatile prices, is unevenly distributed, and which theatens to wreck the habitability of the planet or is it smarter to invest in a post-fossi-fuel decarbonized global economy which can support human prosperity indefinitely?

In addition to pointing out how 85% of global energy use comes from fossil fuels, people who advocate continued investment in the industry point to the importance of fossil fuels as a feedstock, often pointing out how electronics or medical equipment are made using fossil fuels. The main response to that is that we use fossil fuels as feedstocks because the technology to do so is broadly distributed, and fossil fuels are cheap because we ignore most of the costs their use imposes on others. Fossil fuels aren’t made of anything special chemically. We can get carbon and hydrogen from all sorts of carbon-neutral sources. It’s just a question of investing in the right capabilities and breaking our dependence on old feedstocks and processes. We need new ways to make agricultural fertilizer without natural gas, run farming equipment without diesel, manufacture steel without coke, and make low-carbon concrete or concrete substitutes. That doesn’t need to happen all at once, and some fossil fuel uses will be much harder to displace than others, but the sensible thing to do is to start with the cheapest and easiest substitutions and work from there toward the harder ones. That’s a big part of what carbon prices of various sorts are meant to achieve.

3. How change happens

If your town is dumping untreated sewage into a river which then flows past other towns where people use the water for drinking, you might rightly object to the choice your community is making. Is the solution to build a home sewage treatment plant so that your share of the problem goes away? Or is it perhaps to stop urinating and defecating altogether?

In this case, it’s obvious that the only way to meaningfully change the situation is to convince the general public and decision makers to change the system for everyone. Exactly the same dynamic applies to climate change. It may be laudable when individuals work to reduce their personal CO2 footprint, but we all live in a society where fossil fuels are dominant. A slight reduction in demand arising from the voluntary choices of a few concerned people won’t resolve that.

If we want to prevent a global catastrophe arising from fossil fuel use we need to go way beyond what voluntary consumer choice and the operation of markets will do alone. We need top level political change and the replacement of today’s leaders, parties, and policies with new ones that appreciate the seriousness of our problem and who share the determination to overcome it. That’s part of what tweets opposing new fossil fuel projects are meant to achieve, and that’s why it’s rather missing the point to call out the people making them for not having zero personal emissions.

There are huge opportunities to be captured in the transition to global decarbonization. To begin with, we can overcome all the problems caused by fossil fuels. That includes climate change, of course, but there is also the way fossil fuel profits fund unsavoury regimes (another favourite weak twitter argument is that opposing new fossil fuel infrastructure in Canada is akin to professing love for Russia and Saudi Arabia), the air and water pollution, the habitat destruction, and all the problems that arise from fossil fuel price volatility. We can also build a dramatically more equal global energy system, replacing the one where a privileged subset fly constantly and live in massive poorly insulated houses with one where everyone on Earth has what they need to live a safe, dignified, and prosperous life. Getting there might require deep changes in our political and economic systems, and it will likely put an end to activities that are only possible with wasteful and intense fossil fuel use, but moving to an equitable arrangement is surely better for most of those alive today as well as for most of those who will follow us in the future.

Beyond all that, we have a chance to move from the energy system that has been built in the 250 years since the industrial revolution — which relies on resources which are non-renewable and located primarily in a few parts of the world, and which is causing climate change that threatens a planetary catastrophe within our lifetime — to an energy system that relies on the energy constantly bombarding the Earth from the sun, the leftover heat deep inside the planet, and fissionable materials. That new energy system could power human civilization indefinitely, allowing for thousands more years of safe and enjoyable human lives; the continued development of art, culture, medicine, and scientific knowledge; and the preservation of the beauty and sheer existence of the countless species now being driven towards extinction by our fossil fuel use.

Resistance to World Health Organization Ebola efforts

Another case of conspiratorial thinking, selfish politicians, and conflict threatening to make a deadly serious threat into a dire global emergency:

Pockets of “reluctance, refusal and resistance” to accept Ebola vaccination were generating many of the new cases, Salama said.

“We also see a very concerning trend. That resistance, driven by quite natural fear of this terrifying disease, is starting to be exploited by local politicians, and we’re very concerned in the run up to elections, projected for December, that that exploitation… will gather momentum and make it very difficult to root out the last cases of Ebola.”

Some people were fleeing into the forest to escape Ebola follow-up treatment and checks, sometimes moving hundreds of kilometers, he said.

There was one such case to the south of Beni, and another to the north, close to the riverbanks of Lake Albert. Both were inaccessible for security reasons.

Neighboring Uganda was now facing an “imminent threat”, and social media posts were conflating Ebola with criticism of the DRC government and the United Nations and “a range of conspiracy theories”, which could put healthworkers at risk.

Ebola was a particular fear of mine in childhood, and it remains very worrisome and uncomfortable where we now live in a world where periodic outbreaks are now treated largely as business as usual.

Bright or invisible rocket exhaust

LOX and RP-1 never burn absolutely clean, and there is always a bit of free carbon in the exhaust, which produces a luminous flame. So when you’re looking at TV and see a liftoff from Cape Kennedy—or from Baikonur for that matter—and the exhaust flame is very bright, you can be sure the propellants are Lox and RP-1 or the equivalent. If the flame is nearly invisible, and you can see the shock diamonds in the exhaust, you’re probably watching a Titan II booster burning N2O4 and 50–50.

Clark, John D. Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants. Rutgers University Press Classics, 2017. p. 96

One-way rocketry

Finally somebody in authority sat down and thought the problem through. The specifications of JP-4 [jet fuel] were as sloppy as they were to insure a large supply of the stuff under all circumstances. But Jupiter and Thor [ballistic missiles] were designed and intended to carry nuclear warheads, and it dawned upon the thinker that you don’t need a large and continuing supply of fuel for an arsenal of such missiles. Each missile is fired, if at all, just once, and after a few dozen of them have been lobbed by the contending parties, the problem of fuel for later salvoes becomes academic, because everybody interested is dead. So the only consideration is that the missile works right the first time—and you can make your fuel specifications just as tight as you like. Your first load of fuel is the only one you’ll ever need.

Clark, John D. Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants. Rutgers University Press Classics, 2017. p. 95–6

Pre-computer rocket propellant chemistry calculations

[Calculating rocket fuel performance mathematically] gets worse exponentially as the number of different elements and the number of possible species [of reaction products] increases. With a system containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, you may have to consider fifteen species or more. And if you toss in boron, say, or aluminum, and perhaps a little chlorine and fluorine—the mind boggles.

But you’re stuck with it (remember, I didn’t ask you to do this!) and proceed—or did in the unhappy days before computers. First, you make a guess at the chamber temperature. (Experience helps a lot here!) You then look up the relevant equilibrium constants for your chosen temperature. Devoted and masochistic savants have spent years in determining and compiling these. Your equations are now before you, waiting to be solved. It is rarely possible to do this directly. So you guess at the partial pressures of what you think will be the major constituents of the mixture (again, experience is a great help) and calculate the others from them. You add them all up, and see if they agree with your predetermined chamber pressure. They don’t, of course, so you go back and readjust your first guess, and try again. And again. And eventually all your species are in equilibrium and you have the right ratio of hydrogen to oxygen and so on, and they add up to the right chamber pressure.

Next, you calculate the amount of heat which would have been evolved in the formation of these species from your propellants, and compare that figure with the heat that would be needed to warm the combustion products up to your chosen chamber temperature. (The same devoted savants have included the necessary heats of formation and heat capacities in their compilations.) And, of course, the two figures disagree, so you’re back to square one to guess another chamber temperature. And so on.

Clark, John D. Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants. Rutgers University Press Classics, 2017. p. 84 (italics in original)

Explaining climate inaction

A couple of days ago the New York Times published a long and controversial article by Nathaniel Rich which purports to explain why, despite decades of strong scientific consensus about the seriousness of climate change and the action needed to keep it under control, we’re still on track for catastrophic warming: Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.

The account is disputed, among others by Naomi Klein who questions the idea that ‘human nature’ is to blame: Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature”.

The Economist‘s cover story has a similar theme: The world is losing the war against climate change. I have written before about how inconsistent their coverage is and, in particular, how they have never reconciled their acceptance of the need to confront climate change with the unfaltering priority they accord to continued economic growth.

Open thread: can life be simulated?

Slashdot reports: “Researchers at the Technische Universitat Wein have created a simulation of a simple worm’s neural network, and have been able to replicate its natural behavior to completely mimic the worm’s natural reflexive behavior.”

When it comes to bodies, at least down to the level where quantum uncertainty becomes important, there seems to be no reason why sufficiently powerful computer hardware could not produce an excellent simulation. In the long term, that could allow things like the development and practicing of surgical techniques on simulated bodies; improved testing for safety in diverse applications; and research into animal physiology.

Perhaps brains are different; there may be something about consciousness that keeps it from being modelled by any conventional computer, regardless of its memory and processing capabilities. Still, it’s possible that consciousness can also be simulated, or re-created in a digital form, perhaps with the aid of quantum computers.

Related:

The Fourier transform

Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow includes a great discussion of the scientific uses of the Fourier transform. Most amusingly: “The side-to-side waving of the urine trail on the road was presumably produced by the long [elephant] penis acting as a pendulum (it would be a sine wave if the penis were a perfect, Newtonian pendulum, which it is not) interacting with the more complicated periodicity of the lumbering four-legged gait of the whole animal.” (p. 73)

This video provides an accessible visual explanation of how this mathematical tool breaks down a complicated curve into its constituent sine waves, and some of the useful applications for that transformation:

Canada is still in denial about climate and the bitumen sands

Canada’s bitumen sands continue to be the largest source of growth in Canada’s greenhouse gas pollution, and the biggest barrier to Canada’s fair participation in a global climate change mitigation strategy.

Not only does continued bitumen sands investment perpetuate an industry which undermines Canada’s claim to be serious about Indigenous reconciliation, but giving the industry specially lax environmental treatment would force other sectors to pick up the slack, if that is even possible given the industry’s relentlessly growing pollution.

An article by University of Toronto professor Danny Harvey and Lika Miao now argues that only an oil sands phaseout would allow Canada to meet its (insufficiently ambitious) 2030 emission reduction targets. They see a complete bitumen sands phase out by 2030 as necessary to meet the targets, alongside major action in sectors like energy generation, and emphasize how meeting the more ambitious temperature targets of the Paris Agreement would require much more aggressive action.

All this highlights the chasm between Canadian politics and what would be necessary to curb climate change. Prime Minister Trudeau either doesn’t understand the relationship between fossil fuel use and climatic stability or is choosing to mislead Canadians for political reasons, continuing to assert that Canada’s fossil fuel reserves are usable. That kind of timidity or misdirection serves us all badly, leaving the bulk of Canadians misled into believing that the industry can somehow be compatible with a stable climate.

Ham, the first primate astronaut

Then they led him out again, trying to get him near a mockup of a Mercury capsule, where the television networks had set up cameras and tremendous lights. The reporters and photographers surged forward again, yammering, yelling, exploding more camera lights, shoving, groaning, cursing—the usual yahoo sprawl, in short—and the animal came unglued again, ready to twist the noodle off anybody he could get his hands on. This was interpreted by the Gent [the news media] as a manifestation of Ham‘s natural fear upon laying eyes once again on the capsule, which looked precisely like the one that had propelled him into space and subjected him to such severe physical stresses.

The stresses the ape was reacting to were probably of quite another sort. Here he was, back in the compound where they had zapped him through his drills for a solid month. Just two years ago he had been captured in the jungles of Africa, separated from his mother, shipped in a cage to a goddamned desert in New Mexico, kept prisoner, prodded and shocked by a bunch of humans in white smocks, and here he was, back in a compound where they had been zapping him through their fucking drills for a solid month, and suddenly there was a whole new mob of humans on hand! Even worse than the white smocks! Louder! Crazier! Totally out of their gourds! Yammering, roaring, brawling, exploding lights beside their bug-eyed skulls! Suppose they threw him to these assholes! Fuck this—

At some point in the madhouse scene out back of Hanger S, a photograph was taken in which Ham was either grinning or had on a grimace that looked like a grin in the picture. Naturally, this was the picture that went out over the wire services and was printed in newspapers throughout America. Such was the response of the happy chimpanzee to being the first ape in outer space … A fat happy grin… Such was the perfection with which the Proper Gent observed the proprieties.

Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; New York. 1979. p. 223–4 (italics and ellipses in original)