The environment – Page 102 – a sibilant intake of breath

Pine beetles spreading into the US

According to the BBC, the climate-linked mountain pine beetle epidemic in British Columbia is threatening to spread south and west, into the United States. Forests with a mixture of species and small regular fires would be more resilient, overall.

In addition to mentioning the importance of warm winters in aiding the spread of the insects, the article describes how past fire suppression policies have produced huge areas of mature lodgepole pine, which are especially susceptible to the beetles.

The continuing spread represents not only an economic and environmental cost linked to climate change, but also a potentially serious positive feedback effect. It is estimated that Canada’s boreal forests alone contain about 186 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent: an amount equivalent to about 25 years of global emissions at the present level.

G8 insufficiently wary of climate change

Writing in The Toronto Star Christopher Hume has produced a short but trenchant criticism of this government’s position on climate change: Political expediency trumps fate of planet.

As Hume explains:

In the face of overwhelming evidence that global warming is happening, and faster than the most pessimistic climatologists had expected, how can such extraordinary stupidity be justified?

Inaction of this sort goes well beyond ordinary human idiocy; it represents a collective rush to self-destruction on an unprecedented scale. And through it all, our leaders smile and assure us they won’t let our standard of living be threatened.

The G8 leaders would do well to read Jared Diamond’s work on civilizational collapse, so as to better understand the extent to which civilizational success depends absolutely on maintaining agricultural productivity, which in turn depends on avoiding massive environmental degradation and responding intelligently to the problems that arise.

As I have pointed out before, it is a false to suggest that we can continue to enjoy economic and social prosperity without dealing with the problem of climate change. Runaway climate change could literally kill everyone, and even increases of as little as 2°C “stands a strong chance of provoking drought and storm responses that could challenge civilized society” according to the scientists at RealClimate.

This government needs to realize that climate change isn’t some minor political issue to be managed, but rather a major civilizational challenge for humanity. So far, Canada has influenced this process primarily be serving as an anchor, holding back those with greater vision and determination.

Who is vulnerable to climate change?

Yesterday, I attended a meeting on climate change, security, and human rights (mentioned before). One thing about it disturbed me: namely, that the entire perspective offered was a north-south narrative of industrialized states causing harm to vulnerable populations around the world. The discussion was largely about how that harm could be reduced, and whether any legal mechanism exist through which states could be called to account, for the damage they do to the prospects of vulnerable groups.

Sadly, this perspective is over-optimistic, given the world’s track record so far. While highly vulnerable groups and poor states may be hit first and hardest by climate change, the idea that they will be the only people profoundly affected is misleading and potentially dangerous. It feeds into the flawed notion that rich states can basically keep behaving as they have in the past, with the worst possible outcome being a lot of suffering for poor people elsewhere.

The reality is that business-as-usual emissions would probably produce a mean global temperature increase of 5.5°C to 7.1°C by 2100. That is a massive enough change to raise doubts about the future of even some rich societies. Could Australian agriculture cope with that much of an increase? Could cities in the southern United States continue to provide the minimum level of water required to sustain their populations? (US Energy Secretary Stephen Chu suggested perhaps not.)

My fear is that people who expect that only the poor and vulnerable will suffer from climate change will not be sufficiently motivated to deal with the problem. Such a belief strikes me as a serious misunderstanding of both the best scientific and political assessments. It would be hard to read the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC and not conclude that people in rich countries face acute vulnerability to unchecked climate change. Similarly, the basic message of economic analyses like those performed by Nicholas Stern is that the costs of inaction are very high, especially when compared with the real but comparatively modest price of dealing with the problem.

Greenpeace’s Mount Rushmore protest

In one of the best Greenpeace publicity stunts I have seen, a trio of climbers hung a banner on Mount Rushmore for the American Independence Day. It read: “America honors leaders, not politicians: Stop Global Warming,” highlighting the difference between being a poll-driven populist and someone with the vision and strength to help drive your nation towards a better future.

The next six months will be extremely important for the future of the world’s climate. In the best-case scenario, the US Senate will strengthen and pass the Waxman-Markey bill, and the US and China will cooperate and help to create an effective new international regime in Copenhagen. If Obama kicks things off in that direction and then helps to sustain the drive towards decarbonization, people might decide to chip his head into that South Dakotan granite in a hundred years time.

Ethanol damaging to internal combustion engines?

The many problems with ethanol as a fuel have been mentioned here before: the climate and energy security benefits are dubious on a life cycle basis, making it from food crops harms the poor, the economics of cellulosic ethanol remain unknown, it has less energy content than gasoline, it is corrosive, it mixes with water, etc. For these reasons and others, most informed environmentalists completely reject corn-based ethanol as a climate change solution, though many remain hopeful that better feedstocks will be found. Ed Wallace raises yet another objection to its use in motor vehicles, namely that it can damage their engines.

Apparently, gasoline with more than 15% ethanol blended in can damage plastic fuel intakes, corrode surfaces even within special ethanol-tolerant ‘flex fuel’ vehicles, and can attract moisture in a way that can generate acids during storage. I don’t know enough about motor vehicle engines to comment personally, but perhaps some readers will be able to assess the probable severity of these issues.

None of this is to say that ethanol certainly has no role whatsoever in our future mix of transportation fuels. Rather, it suggests that the shift may not be as trouble-free as ethanol’s most enthusiastic promoters suggest. For a whole slate of reasons, the idea that we can easily move from fossil fuel dependence to reliance on domestic crops and ethanol-fuelled vehicles is a falsehood. The process of overcoming fossil fuel dependence will require both more intelligent lifecycle considerations of the total impacts of fuel production and, probably, a greater willingness to alter our overall transportation infrastructure.

Personally, I think hydrogen is a pipe dream and ethanol and biodiesel may find niche roles, but electric vehicles are likely to become the dominant form of ground transport over short-to-moderate distances.

The credit crunch and Canada’s national debt

Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Office recently projected that Canada will remain in deficit until 2014, with a total deficit of $156 billion to be accumulated. Those are figures that should be worrisome to everyone, even if you accept the argument that the consequences of being more fiscally prudent would have been even worse, because they would have caused a deep recession and exploding unemployment.

What seems most regrettable to me about this is that we have basically failed to use the opportunity to make necessary investments in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In exchange for the support given to carmakers, for instance, we could have demanded a lot more movement on efficiency and the deployment of hybrid and electric vehicles. More of our infrastructure spending could have been directed at the energy sources of the future (renewables) and less at perpetuating activities that climate change and dwindling fossil fuels have rendered unsustainable. We need to realize that many aspects of how we now live simply need to change – particularly dependence on fossil fuels for both wealth and our energy needs.

Canada has too many future liabilities to be unconcerned about our degraded financial position. Inevitably, the money we are borrowing is going to need to be paid back with interest and, when we are not using it to invest in productive future assets and capabilities, the cost of that will inevitably be borne in future service cuts and tax rises. As a general pattern, it is awfully frustrating how Conservatives everywhere like to cut taxes without decreasing spending, wreck the financial balance of countries, lose power, and then leave it to the next government to repair. They can then win power again and restart the cycle.

The Globe and Mail has more on the announcement.

Grouse Mountain’s 1.5MW wind turbine

According to the Megawatt blog and The Vancouver Sun, the Grouse Mountain ski resort is going to put a highly visible 1.5MW wind turbine near the mountain’s highest point.

While the move is more symbolic than substantive, the turbine is expected to provide about 20% of the power requirements of the resort. It will also be a tourist attraction in and of itself, with a viewing platform 58m up. The turbine is meant to go up in August or September, and produce power in early 2010, in time for the Vancouver Olympics.

The most important impact may be making people gradually more tolerant of visible renewable energy facilities. If we are going to escape our harmful dependence on fossil fuels, we are going to need a lot of them.

In Mortal Hands

Stephanie Cooke’s In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age is a four hundred page account of the major problems with the global nuclear industry, both civilian and military. It argues that the costs associated with both nuclear weapons and nuclear energy have been hidden by self-interested governments and organizations, and that nuclear energy should not be part of our future energy mix, despite concerns about climate change and energy security. The book’s unceasingly critical position leaves one longing for a more comprehensive account, where arguments in favour of nuclear energy would at least be more comprehensively rebutted. Nonetheless, Cooke’s book does a good job of reminding the reader of the many special dangers associated with nuclear energy, and the risks associated with re-embracing it, due to our concerns about fossil fuels.

In Mortal Hands argues convincingly that most of the costs associated with nuclear energy are hidden, and not borne by the utilities that provide it or the people that use it. These costs include wastes, contaminated sites, decommissioning of plants and related facilities, risks of accident, nuclear proliferation, providing targets to enemies and terrorists, routine radioactive emissions, the redirection of capital and expertise from potentially more positive uses, and the further entrenching of secrecy and self-serving pro-nuclear entities within government and industry. Certainly, the issue of secrecy is an important one. Along with concealing costs and subsidies, it is demonstrated that the nuclear industry has misled policy-makers and the public about the risks associated with the technologies, timelines and costs associated with the emergence of new technologies like reprocessing and ‘breeder’ reactors, and the number and severity of nuclear accidents. The industry knows that another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island could undue their anticipated ‘renaissance,’ so they are arguably less likely than ever to disclose accurate information on dangers, or on incidents which do occur. Governments that authorize, encourage, and fund new nuclear facilities will be in a similar situation, in terms of the harm awareness of risks and accidents could do to them politically.

Cooke raises a number of important points about regulation, both nationally and internationally, and the conflicts that exist between commercial pressures to get reactors sold and keep them running and concerns about safety and proliferation. None of the big nuclear states has a good record on preventing sales to states secretly working on nuclear weapons. Lack of toughness on the part of international and national regulators is a major reason why countries like Israel, South Africa, and North Korea have been able to use the cover of civilian nuclear programs to get themselves nuclear weapons. Lack of rigour is also clearly evident in nuclear programs, in terms of making sure facilities have been built and operated properly, bombs are secure, and the massive contamination is avoided.

The book is arguably weakest in its discussion of technical matters, which are not discussed at great length or in a way that seems entirely credible and convincing. Opportunities to elaborate and justify claims made about technical matters are often missed, and the book includes at least a few claims that seem likely to be erroneous. For instance, Cooke misrepresents where most of the energy in a thermonuclear explosion comes from, and fails to point out that the START-II agreement never went into effect. More than a discussion about the physics and engineering of nuclear technology, this book focuses more on the regulatory, political, and economic aspects. While that might annoy those with more technical inclinations, it is probably the right approach for a volume with the ultimate intention of informing public policy choices about whether to use nuclear energy for electricity production.

Cooke’s response to the question of how the energy currently being provided by nuclear plants could be replaced is especially unsatisfying. Essentially, it is: “Wind energy is growing very quickly, and perhaps distributed microgeneration could be the solution.” Some consideration of scale, such as that provided by David MacKay, is essential here. Small wind turbines on the roofs of houses as not a viable alternative to gigawatts worth of reactors. At the very least, those who advocate using renewables in place of nuclear need to recognize the enormous scale of deployment that would require, and the various associated costs. While Cooke’s book does not provide a sufficiently broad-minded basis for reaching a final judgment on nuclear energy, it is a convenient antidote to some of the current industry messaging that new plants will be safe and cheap, proliferation isn’t much of a concern, and even Chernobyl wasn’t so bad.

The cost of America’s nuclear programs

I have complained before about how opaque costs are one of the biggest problems with the nuclear industry. There are subsidies and guarantees, both implicit and explicit, there are health and cleanup costs associated with radionucleotide releases and site contamination, and there are the opportunity costs associated with directing capital, skill, and research towards nuclear energy rather than other projects. There are also the intimate linkages between civilian nuclear power and the military, which further muddy the picture when it comes to financial, environmental, and health costs.

In her 2009 book, Stephanie Cooke includes some cost estimates of note. She estimates that the United States spent about $5.5 trillion on their nuclear weapons program between 1940 and 1996: about 11% of total federal spending. By contrast, health, education, and transport were each about 3% of spending. She estimates that the Pantex plant, where the United States assembles its bombs, involved a capital investment of nearly $9 billion by the mid-1950s. By comparison, that was greater than the capital investment in General Motors, U.S. Steel, DuPont, Bethlehem Steel, Alcoa, and Goodyear.

Cooke also cites a 2008 Department of Energy estimate that the Yucca Mountain waste dump would cost $96 billion. Now that the plan has been killed by the Obama administration, it is not clear where the wastes will go, or how much it will cost. The Hanford Site, in Washington, which produced plutonium for American weapons is probably the most contaminated site in North America, with unknown eventual cleanup costs (both in lives and dollars). Other sites with serious contamination include the Savannah River site, which produced fissile materials, Rocky Flats, the Nevada Test Site, and the Marshall Islands.

All these costs are matters that need to be considered when making the decision to extend the lives of nuclear power plants, or construct more. While many of the worst abuses were military, there are plenty of costs associated purely with civilian production, and the intimate intertwining of the two areas of practice make it impossible to decisively associate other costs with one or the other activity. Nuclear energy is certainly a power source with a great many serious costs and risks to consider, over and above the basic expenses of building and operating plants and producing fuel for them.

Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air

David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air is a remarkably engaging book; it has certainly kicked off and contributed to some very energetic discussions here. The book, which was written by a physics professor at Cambridge and is available for free online, is essentially a detailed numerical consideration of renewable forms of power generation, as well as technologies to support it, and to reduce total power demand. MacKay concludes that the effort required to produce sustainable energy systems is enormous, and that one of the most viable options is to build huge solar facilities in the world’s deserts, and use that to provide an acceptable amount of energy to everyone.

The book has a physics and engineering perspective, rather than one focused on politics or business. MacKay considers the limits of what is physically possible, given the character of the world and the physical laws that govern it. Given that he does not take economics into consideration much, his conclusions demonstrate the high water mark of what is possible, with unlimited funds. In the real world, renewable deployment will be even more challenging than it is in his physics-only model.

Here are some of the posts in which the book has already been discussed:

I have added relevant information from the book to the comment sections of a great many other posts, on everything from wind power to biofuels.

Even if you don’t agree with MacKay’s analysis, reading his book will provide some useful figures, graphs, and equations, as well as prompt a lot of thought. It is certainly one of the books that I would recommend most forcefully to policy makers, analysts, politicians, and those interested in deepening their understanding of what a sustainable energy future would involve.