The environment – Page 142 – a sibilant intake of breath

Polar bears ‘threatened’

As of today, the American Department of the Interior has listed the polar bear as a ‘threatened’ species, on account of the ongoing disappearance of the Arctic ice cap. In making the announcement, Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne stressed that the decision is not meant to compel the regulation of greenhouse gasses:

Listing the polar bear as threatened can reduce avoidable losses of polar bears. But it should not open the door to use of the ESA [Endangered Species Act] to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, power plants, and other sources. That would be a wholly inappropriate use of the ESA law. The ESA is not the right tool to set U.S. climate policy.

In a sense, that is fair enough. Creating something as comprehensive as a greenhouse gas mitigation strategy in response to concern about a single species is definitely a backwards-seeming way to go about it. At the same time, one is reminded of how somewhat awkward justifications have sometimes been used in the past to secure legal outcomes: for instance, the use of the ‘interstate commerce’ clause in the US Constitution to assert federal jurisdiction, or even the indictment of Al Capone on tax evasion charges, rather than those directly associated with organized crime.

The point here is less whether concern about polar bears does or does not create a legal obligation to act on climate change. Rather, this is another demonstration of how virtually all conservation planning now requires the consideration of climate change effects. This is just one of a thousand cuts through which federal reluctance to effectively regulate greenhouse gasses will need to be eliminated.

John McCain’s carbon targets

In a speech delivered in Oregon, John McCain laid out some targets for reducing American greenhouse gas emissions:

2012: Return emissions to 2005 levels (18 percent above 1990 levels)
2020: Return emissions to 1990 levels (15 percent below 2005 levels)
2030: 22 percent below 1990 levels (34 percent below 2005 levels)
2050: 60 percent below 1990 levels (66 percent below 2005 levels)

These targets look pretty similar to the ones adopted by the present Canadian government: a peak in emissions by 2012, a reduction to 20% below 2006 levels by 2020, and a 60-70% reduction below 2006 levels by 2050.

Stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations below 550ppm probably requires more aggressive action. That being said, this is not a terrible place from which to begin negotiations: both between presidential candidates in the United States and between the United States and other countries. If the US was willing to commit to those targets unilaterally (and do so with a credible plan for actually achieving them), it might become a lot easier to get countries like China and India to begin making a more substantial contribution to the mitigation effort.

In exchange, the United States could adopt the kind of targets (and supplemental actions, like aid in preventing tropical deforestation) that are actually required to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at a level around 450ppm, thus keeping total global temperature change in the realm of two degrees Celsius.

Electric vehicles in Canada

Dynasty is a Canadian company that builds light, low speed, battery powered cars. Their Dynasty IT vehicle has a range of 50km and a top speed of 40 km/h. Because Transport Canada refused to follow the lead of 44 American states and authorize the vehicles for non-highway use on roads, the company has decided to relocate to Pakistan. There, they will manufacture cars for the American market. The ZENN is in a similar predicament.

There is a real trade-off between producing light vehicles and producing ones that do well in crash tests. That said, we do permit people to ride absurdly unsafe motorbikes – even on the highway. It is incoherent to ban one and permit the other.

Perhaps it would make sense to create a special legal category for small, light vehicles of limited range, intended primarily for urban use. By all means, those purchasing them should be informed that they will not fare as well in a crash with a huge truck as someone in a larger, steel-framed car. That said, the economic and environmental advantages may justify the risk in the eyes of many.

Vehicle efficiency

My friend Mark sent me a link to a book in progress about sustainable energy. One of the more interesting sections is on vehicle efficiency. The author stresses that, while some kinds of efficiency gains are physically possible, others are not:

Could we make a new car that consumes 100 times less energy and still goes at 70mph? No. Not if the car has the same shape. The energy is going mainly into making air swirl. Changing the materials the car is made from makes no difference to that. A miraculous improvement to the engine could perhaps boost its efficiency from 25% to 50%. But the energy consumption of a car is still going to be roughly 40 kWh per 100 km.

The story is a familiar one: efficiency can get you a long way, but there are no free rides. Another interesting comment from this chapter is the major design differences between an efficient city car and an efficient highway car. Since the former is always stopping and starting, low weight is really important. Brakes that regenerate energy also make a big difference. For a highway car that avoids major acceleration and deceleration, the most important thing is reducing drag. Weight is comparatively trivial.

One other interesting assertion is that the energy involved in making a car is actually pretty trivial compared to the amount used in driving it around:

The energy cost of making the raw materials for a one tonne car is thus equivalent to about 3000 km of driving; an appreciable cost, but probably only 1% of the lifetime energy-cost of the car’s fuel.

If correct, that makes it seem a lot more reasonable to upgrade from an old and inefficient vehicle to a newer and less gas-thirsty model. It also suggests that government programs to replace inefficient cars with better ones might have strong justification, in terms of climate change mitigation potential.

In order to move to a low carbon society, we need to do a slew of things. We definitely need to increase the energy efficiency of accomplishing most tasks. We definitely need to reduce the quantity of greenhouse gas produced in the process of generating a unit of energy. We probably need to significantly reduce total energy consumption. Finally, we need to take actions that manage the greenhouse gasses that will inevitably be produced by some actions. The protection and enhancement of carbon sinks (mostly forests and soils) are essential for this.

When it comes to reducing total energy usage, the chapter does make one excellent suggestion: “a cyclist at 21 km/h consumes about 30 times less energy per kilometre than a lone car-driver on the motorway: about 2.4 kWh per 100 km.” Those who cycle more slowly are likely to be even more efficient, since doubling the time it takes to travel somewhere apparently reduces energy usage by three quarters.

Ducks are distractions

The continuing furor over the 500 ducks that died in a toxic oil sands tailing pond seems like an excellent demonstration of the capacity of people to utterly miss the point. Oil sands extraction has converted a vaste swathe of boreal forest into toxic wasteland, speckled with tailings ponds up to 15 square kilometres. The Pembina Institute has asserted that: “Despite over 40 years of oil sands development, not a single hectare of land has been certified as reclaimed under Government of Alberta guidelines.” In addition to that, there is the water use and the greenhouse gas emissions.

To look at this and have your attention dominated by a few unlucky birds seems like the height of myopia.

Greenpeace on carbon capture and storage

On Monday, Greenpeace released a report entitled: False Hope: Why carbon capture and storage won’t save the climate (PDF). The points made are fairly familiar, though it is good to see them considered in combination:

CCS cannot deliver in time to avoid dangerous climate change.
CCS wastes energy and resources
Storing carbon underground is risky
CCS is expensive and undermines real solutions to climate change
CCS and liability: risky business
The alternative to CCS: renewables and energy efficiency

Joseph Romm probably has the most sensible overall view of CCS. He argues that it can serve as one of the fourteen ‘wedges’ that are required to stabilize global concentrations of greenhouse gasses, acknowledging that even that role will require pumping infrastructure equivalent to all that presently being used to extract oil. Think about the total expenditures of the world’s oil companies on equipment, construction, and labour and you begin to appreciate the costs that are likely to be associated with widespread use of CCS. That being said, it is only fair to say that the cost projections are approximations based on huge assumptions. It is like being in the era of the Wright brothers and trying to project what the finances of a major airline will resemble, in terms of thinks like capital use and equipment life cycles.

CCS needs to be thought about in the context of an overall strategic push to stabilize greenhouse gas levels. It is possible that it will have a modest effect at an acceptable cost. It is also possible that it will be unfeasible at a commercial scale, or simply too costly. The most dangerous possibility is that the very idea of CCS gives people the false sense that the problem can be solved, particularly that we can keep burning coal while waiting for a low-cost technological solution to magically appear. As one strategy among many, CCS might have a future. One future that CCS cannot permit is one where the nature of the world’s energy use remains similar to today, with the awkward greenhouse gasses simply swept under the rug.

One more reason to support American gas taxes

One reason for which cutting gasoline taxes in the United States is especially unjustifiable is that the taxes don’t go into general revenue. Rather, they go into a Highway Trust Fund that pays for road construction and maintenance. Not only would cutting gasoline taxes encoruage people to use fuel inefficiently at a time of ever-greater scarcity: it would also shift the burden of paying for roads from those who use them most heavily towards the population as a whole.

The Fischer-Tropsch process

Those hoping to understand energy politics in the coming decades would be well advised to read up on the Fischer-Tropsch process. This chemical process uses catalysts to convert carbon monoxide and hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbons. Basically, it allows you to make gasoline using any of a large number of inputs as a feedstock. If the input you use is coal, this process is environmentally disastrous. It combines all the carbon emissions associated with coal burnings with extra energy use for synthetic fuel manufacture, not to mention the ecological and human health effects of coal mining. If the feedstock is biomass, it is possible that it could be a relatively benign way to produce liquid fuels for transport.

The process was developed in Germany during the interwar period and used to produce synthetic fuels during WWII. The fact that it can reduce military dependence on imported fuel is appealing to any state that wants to retain or enhance its military capacity, but feels threatened by the need to import hydrocarbons. The US Air Force has shown considerable interest for precisely that reason, though they are hoping to convert domestic coal or natural gas into jet fuel – an approach that has no environmental benefits. By contrast, biomass-to-liquids offers the possibility of carbon neutral fuels. All the carbon emitted by the fuel was absorbed quite recently by the plants from which it was made.

Such fuels are extremely unlikely to ever be as cheap as gasoline and kerosene – even with today’s oil prices. The fact that there are parts of the world where you can just make a hole in the ground and watch oil spray out ensures that. That said, Fisher-Tropsch-generated fuels could play an important part in a low-carbon future, provided three conditions are met: (a) the fuels are produced from biomass, not coal or natural gas (b) the energy used in the production process comes from sustainable low-carbon sources and (c) the process of growing the biomass is not unacceptably harmful in other ways. If land is redirected towards growing biomass in a way that encourages deforestation or starves the poor, we will not be able to legitimately claim that synthetic fuels are a solution.

Collier on biofuels

Paul Collier’s comment on this Financial Times article is one of the best examples I have seen of the value of letting members of the public contribute in that way. As is generally the case with him, the comment is engaging and very candid. He argues that the most important way to keep the poor from suffering because of the drive towards biofuels is to encourage more large-scale industrial agriculture in the developing world:

We laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result, Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is generally not well-suited to innovation and investment: the result has been that African agriculture has fallen further and further behind the advancing productivity frontier of the globalized commercial model.

It is definitely a comment at odds with the new fashion for the local within environmentalism. That being said, there is a strong argument to be made that the rich world is going to press on with biofuels regardless of how much suffering it creates in the poor world. If that is taken as true, an unfashionable but effective counter-strategy might be the most suitable response.

Driving’s declining appeal

While they are generally an urban and environmentally aware bunch, it still seems notable that most of my friends who grew up in cities never chose to get driving licenses. With the notable exception of friends who live in rural areas or distant suburbs, driving seems to have become something that relatively few people find worthwhile. An article from The New York Times suggests that they are less unusual than one might think:

In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third, according to statistics from the Federal Highway Administration.

While it would be better to have data extending up into people in their mid-20s, it does seem safe to guess that numbers there are also falling. I have personally never had a license that permitted me to drive a car alone. Even my learner’s license has been expired since December 2003.

There are a number of causes I would attribute to the trend, at least among those I know:

Graduated licensing schemes make it more and more annoying to get a license. In British Columbia, it now takes more than a year before you can get a license that is useful for anything other than practicing with a fully-licensed adult driver.
Partly due to longer licensing processes, a good number of people now head off to university before they can get through to a license they can use alone. By the time they are at school, they have more pressing uses for their time and reduced access to adults willing to serve as observers.
Cars, gas, and insurance are expensive. Also, people are choosing to spend longer in school and spend more in total on tuition. Twenty or thirty years ago, a fair number of 25 year-olds had probably been on the job and debt free for a while. Among my friends, there is a good chance they will be in grad school and still collecting student debt.
People are more mobile. They don’t stay in one place long enough for it to be worth getting a car or license.
People are more environmentally aware. Whereas once cars were symbols of wealth and freedom, they are increasingly symbols of greed and an anti-social willingness to harm those around you.

What other reasons would people give for the trend away from driving? Personally, I think the trend is a positive one – comparable to the increasing rareness and social unacceptability of smoking.