Steven Chu on the oil sands

Canada Goose goslings (Branta canadensis) - Beside the Ottawa River

Apparently, Energy Secretary Steven Chu thinks that technology will somehow make oil sands extraction compatible with climatic stability. While the The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers was quick to praise his statement, it is wrong for a series of reasons. When it comes to emissions from the extraction and upgrading of bitumen, many are to dispersed to be compatible with carbon capture and storage (CCS), even if it does emerge as a safe, effective, and affordable technology. More importantly, about 85% of the emissions associated with oil derived from the Athabasca oil sands are generated when the fuels are burned. On one hand, that means that oil from that source isn’t enormously dirtier than oil from other sources (when considering only greenhouse gas emissions). On the other, it isn’t really the relative dirtiness of fuels that will determine how much warming we experience, but rather the cumulative quantity of greenhouse gasses added to the atmosphere. Climatic stability depends on keeping most of the carbon in coal and unconventional oil buried: not putting it into fuels that will be burned in the atmosphere, with waste products emerging to warm the planet.

Chu is a good enough scientist to realize that we cannot square the circle of unrestrained hydrocarbon usage and climatic stability. Unfortunately, it seems that politics still haven’t advanced to the point where not using fossil fuel resources is seriously contemplated. That is short-sighted and a shame, not least because it perpetuates the development and emergence of techological and economic systems that are fundamentally unsustainable. Rather than coveting the hydrocarbon resources of western Canada, North American leaders need to get serious about harnessing the renewable resources of the continent, while cutting total energy consumption towards the point where it can be renewably provided.

Anthony Cary on climate change and the recession

Earlier today, I saw a presentation by Anthony Cary, the British High Commissioner to Canada. He was talking about why this recession has involved less of a diminished interest in environmental protection than previous ones, as well as about the upcoming climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.

Detailed notes from the presentation are on my wiki, along with notes from other presentations on climate change.

Carnot efficiency

Twist 1.5, Major's Hill Park, Ottawa

For a bit of light entertainment, I have been reading Tom Rogers’ book Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics, which basically covers the same terrain as his entertaining website, though at greater length and with more detail. Of course, one can never entirely escape climate change related information, and the book includes a discussion of Carnot efficiency: the maximum theoretical efficiency with which heat engines can convert thermal energy into useful power.

The efficiency depends on two factors: the high temperature produced using combustion, solar energy, geothermal energy, etc, and the cold temperature where the heat is expended into the surrounding environment:

Efficiency = ( 1 – Cold temperature / Hot temperature ) * 100

This has implications for technologies like the co-generation of heat and power. If the heat source for a power plant is 375°C (648°K) and it is dumping waste heat into 10°C (283°K) outdoor weather, the Carnot efficiency is about 56.3% (the actual efficiency is lower, for various reasons). If, instead, it is dumping the heat into buildings at 25°C (198°K), the Carnot efficiency falls to 54.0%. In a case where the heat source is just 200°C (473°K), the difference between a 10°C cold area and a 25°C cold area cuts the Carnot efficiency from 40.2% to 37.0%. In many cases, cogeneration is still worthwhile, despite the loss of useful electrical or kinetic energy, but it should be appreciated that the redirection is not without cost.

Carnot efficiency also helps explain why waste heat is not always worth capturing. If the temperature difference between the source and an available destination for the thermal energy is not large, there isn’t much useful power that can be produced.

[Update: 4:47pm] Remember to express the temperatures in Degrees Kelvin, by adding 273.15 to the figure in Degrees Celsius.

Human rights and climate change

Rabbit near Mud Lake

Over at Grist, there is a discussion about whether human rights are a useful perspective for thinking about climate change, as well as how they might be applied at the legal or institutional level to improve climate change outcomes. For instance, future generations could be appointed guardians within the legal system, in the same way in which children have legal guardians appointed to represent them in court.

The idea is a nice one, but it overlooks the degree to which legal and political decisions largely emerge as the products of political and economic influence, neither of which is possessed by future generations, within today’s political system. As such, these guardians would likely end up unpopular (for trying to block projects that would benefit those living and influential now) and powerless (for the lack of a real constituency to back them).

My general position on human rights is that they do not have moral force in and of themselves – they are just a shorthand way of encouraging good outcomes. For instance, it is the consequences of protecting free speech that make it a moral imperative to do so, not some metaphysical characteristic embedded in human beings. As with other areas of ethical thinking, human rights can be a useful heuristic when dealing with climate change, but what really matters is developing the mechanisms of thinking and action that will prevent the worst possible outcomes, while also seeking to secure the complimentary benefits that could accompany a global transition to carbon neutrality.

The value of private cars in cities

Squirrel near Mud Lake, Ottawa

In the midst of the discussion about the ethics of traveling to Vancouver, the issue of how cars have benefited and harmed people living in urban areas came up. It is undeniable that they have been a major transformative force, when it comes to the shape and character of cities.

To me, it seems that private cars in cities do more harm than good, for a slew of reasons:

  1. They kill a lot of people: both drivers and pedestrians.
  2. They take up a lot of space and alter urban design in negative ways, contributing to sprawl and vast areas of just residential or just commercial zoning.
  3. Sprawl reduces natural and agricultural space. It also leads to people commuting, which is a major waste of their time.
  4. They pollute and emit greenhouse gasses.
  5. They are loud.
  6. They cause neighbours to know one another less than they otherwise would.
  7. They help make many states dependent on oil exports, and frequently involve them militarily in Middle Eastern conflicts.
  8. They have made roads into hostile spaces for everything but automobiles, whereas previously they were more versatile public spaces.
  9. The roads they require are built with public money, though they do not provide value to everyone, and contribute to serious negative externalities.
  10. They use energy quite inefficiently, since they move faster than is sensible, and the mass of the vehicle itself far exceeds that of passengers and cargo.

If it were possible to re-design cities, I think it would be better if they excluded cars entirely within their cores and had a lot of dedicated transit and bicycle routes. Stores could be permitted to have delivery vehicles for large items, and taxis could continue to exist, but the use of private cars within city limits would ideally be eliminated.

What points would people offer to defend private cars in cities? Also, are there and indictments against them I missed?

Balancing the environment and economy

Two mechanical diggers

When dealing with climate change, politicians often talk about the need to ‘balance the economy and the environment.’ I think this is a misleading categorization for two reasons.

Firstly, the balance has always been tilted virtually 100% towards the economy, in Canada at least. When the government talks about the need to scale back climate mitigation programs for economic reasons, they are talking about scaling back a handful of ineffectual programs that are not proving effective at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The ‘balance’ dial between environment and economy is already twisted sharply towards the latter.

Secondly, even if we completely ignore the natural environment, the need to mitigate emissions remains. The Canadian economy could not survive the consequences of unrestrained emissions and climate change, with a temperature increase of 5.5°C to 7.1°C by 2100. If we care at all about the state of the economy 20, 50, and 80 years out, we need to avoid catastrophic climate change.

The economic analyses of mitigation that have been undertaken in the UK, Australia, and elsewhere have painted the same broad picture: it is possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly at a modest cost, provided you start early. The costs associated with inaction are much higher than those associated with this mitigation programme. To succeed, the whole economy needs to be pushed in the direction of decarbonization – a fact that remains true regardless of what balance you care to strike between economic health across the long term and environmental protection.

Endless Canadian delay on climate change mitigation

Fiddlehead ferns

Jim Prentice, Canada’s Minister of the Environment has said that Canada might not impose limits on greenhouse gas emissions until 2016. This is simply preposterous. It makes a mockery of this government’s pledge to cut emissions to 20% below 2005 levels by 2020. It is also hypocritical. This government argued that they could not meet their Kyoto Protocol targets due to the inaction of their predecessors. They argued that the short time left before the deadline would require them to simply shut down Canadian industry and services to homes (See: The Cost of Bill C-288 to Canadian Families and Business) Of course, dallying until 2016 would put whatever government was in charge then in an even tighter bind.

In order to meet this government’s 2020 target, Canadian emissions will need to fall by about 170 million tonnes over the next eleven years: a task equivalent to making the entire province of Alberta carbon neutral. Obviously, waiting until 2016 to begin dooms the project to failure. That ignores the fact that even the 20% target is insufficiently ambitious, when you consider the risks associated with different global emissions pathways and the fact that rich, developed states must lead the way on the transition to low- and zero-carbon sources of energy.

The idea that we could do nothing substantial for another seven years is an affront to ethics, good sense, Canada’s international obligations, and our reputation as good global citizens. If Canada cannot show the leadership or vision necessary to appreciate the risks of unconstrained climate change, as well as the opportunities in moving the energy basis of our society to a sustainable basis, our best hope is that we will be made into a pariah state by our most important trading partners. For Canada to maintain growing emissions for another decade would be shameful, but not a global crisis in itself. For the United States, European Union, China, and Japan to do so would quite probably doom future generations to a world very different from ours. If those states do show the fortitude required to begin the transition to carbon neutrality, they will be quite justified in imposing stiff carbon tariffs against a Canada too blind or selfish to see upon or act as must be done.

UBC’s footprint reduction contest

The University of British Columbia is holding a contest where participants will set out plans on how to make the Point Grey campus “net positive” in terms of energy and water, as well as reduce greenhouse gas output. The grand prize is $5,000, second prize is $3,000, and third prize is $1,000. The contest is open to UBC community members (ie: Student, Staff, Faculty, Researcher, Resident or Alumni).

Net positive water output seems like something that could be achieved fairly easily. You would capture and purify rainwater, use it to cover all on-campus activities, and export a bit into the water system beyond. It would require infrastructure spending, but it seems clear that it could be done.

Net energy output (in a zero carbon way) might be trickier, though I presume it isn’t necessary for the campus to be exporting power to the grid all the time. As long as net exports are positive, it seems fair to call the campus “net positive” on energy. Wind and solar are the obvious renewable options, though UBC isn’t really an ideal location for either. My guess is that the best option would be to install wind and solar capacity, while retrofitting buildings to make them much more energy efficient.

Contest guidelines are online. (PDF)

Limits of aquaculture

Common Grackle (Quiscalus quiscula), near Mud Lake, Ottawa

Seen from a simplistic and very selfish human perspective, ecosystems are devices for converting sunlight into human food. Sometimes, this happens fairly directly: sun hits soybean leaves, soybeans grow, and people eat them. In the case of the fish we eat, it is generally much less direct: sun hits phytoplankton, zooplankton eats that, they get eaten by fish that can eaten by successively larger fish, finally the largest fish get caught and eaten by us. In at least one important sense, this pyramid of energy use is quite different from the terrestrial one. In terrestrial agriculture, we manage the initial sun collection and can increase its amount in various ways. We are not, and perhaps never can be, farmers of plankton at the scale necessary to sustain the global marine food web. The effort involved in boosting the global plankton supply significantly would presumably be very large, given the immense biomass involved. Also, since energy is lost in each conversion, the amount of additional high-level species that would result from any increase would be smaller than the amount of additional plankton generated.

We are seriously overfishing the stocks that depend on the energy from existing phytoplankton stocks. If we start growing tuna and salmon in farms, feeding them fish from progressively lower in the marine ecosystem, we will eventually hit the bottom (if we keep having enough fuel for all those fishing boats). It is a fallacy to think that fish farms are like livestock farming on land. In the latter case, we are responsible for providing the inputs. In the former, we are still gathering from natural ecosystems, and doing so at an unsustainable rate.

Two partial solutions seem to exist. Firstly, we can get more fish per person by eating more plentiful species with lower trophic levels (closer to being creatures that eat plankton). That means anchovies for dinner, rather than tuna. Secondly, we could conceivably feed fish in farms using food from the land. That allows us to increase the basic solar energy being collected, and sustain a larger amount of tasty fish as a result. Of course, extending land-based agriculture entails other financial and environmental costs. Not least among these are the marine dead areas produced by pollution and fertilizer runoff.

The sensible way to run global fisheries is to avoid activities that cause disproportionate harm (dynamite fishing, catching juvenile fish) and then eat the sustainable portion of the output from different trophic levels. This means basically accepting a total level of sustainable human fish consumption for different species, then resisting political and financial pressures to exceed that limit. Of course, the record of human societies on doing this is dismal. We basically only fish sustainably when we are physically incapable of fishing more. Partly as a result of that, the general outlook for the world’s marine fisheries is dire.

Increasing renewable capacity is much harder than increasing energy consumption

David MacKay’s book (described here) makes an excellent point about the asymmetry between energy supply and demand, in terms of the difficulty or ease of increasing either:

It’s so simple for me to consume an extra 30 [kilowatt-hours] (kWh) per day. But squeezing an extra 30 kWh per day per person from renewables requires an industrialization of the environment so large it is hard to imagine.

For instance, buying a car and traveling 50 km per day in it means adding 40 kilowatt-hours per day (kWh/d) to your energy consumption. By contrast, surrounding all of the United Kingdom with wind turbines – with 15 per km of coastline, extending 4 km out to sea – would produce 16 kWh/d for every UK resident, if the wind was blowing all the time, and probably about 1/3 of that in actuality.

Statistics like that deepen my suspicion that a world without fossil fuel consumption will be one where there is much less energy consumption going on, overall. While increased efficiency can offset part of that, it also seems extremely likely that some very energy intensive activities will need to cease.