The environment – Page 145 – a sibilant intake of breath

Hell and High Water

Joseph Romm’s Hell and High Water: Global Warming – the Solution and the Politics – and What We Should Do might be fairly described as an American version of George Monbiot’s Heat. It describes much less intrusive means for responding to the threat of climate change, as well as being more tailored to American politics. It is also less ambitious that Monbiot’s work, since it aims at the stabilization of atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses (GHGs) below 550 parts per million (ppm) rather than 450.

The book is basically divided into two sections: one of which describes the nature and extent of the threat posed by climate change and one talking about solutions. The book is very explicitly focused on what climate change will do to Americans. Romm argues that too much coverage has focused on effects in poor countries, leading Americans to think the impact of climate change on their lives will be minimal.

Romm talks a great deal about how groups opposed to GHG regulation have created and funded a group of irresponsible ‘experts’ trying to convince the general public that major disagreement still exists about the reality and probable impact of climate change. He is very critical of the media, particularly for giving equal attention to the conclusions of a few oil-funded crackpots, compared with those of the enormous majority of scientists and all major scientific assessments.

I have some quibbles with some of Romm’s technological recommendations. I think he is a bit overconfident about the rapidity with which carbon capture and storage and cellulosic ethanol might be deployed. That said, the vast majority of what he says is correct, well defended, and similar to the thinking of others who have considered the questions seriously.

One notable omission from the book is emissions associated with air travel. At no point are they mentioned, either as a problem or an area where policy could yield improvements. As Monbiot effectively highlights, emissions from air travel are among the toughest to address, not least because lots of well-off people who consider themselves environmentalists and support good environmental policies nonetheless want to be able to jet off to South Africa or New Zealand.

Overall, Romm’s book is informative and accessible. He does a good job of bringing the issue home for Americans – de-emphasizing issues like the preservation of nature and international fairness – and emphasizing why they, personally, should be worried. Certainly, the kind of climatic impacts projected by the IPCC for 2030 or so are enough to make any reasonable person extremely nervous. He is right to say that, in a world where GHG concentrations are 650 ppm or more, climate change will be the issue being dealt with by all governments. Equally, he is right to point out that concentrations of that magnitude have a very serious risk of pushing us into a self-reinforcing cycle producing temperature increases of more than 5˚C globally and sea level increases of 25 metres or more. Hell and high water, indeed.

Here come the jellies

What do you get when you combine overfishing with large-scale nutrient runoff from industrial farms into rivers and the sea? Plagues of jellyfish:

The Namibian coast, for instance, used to be “hugely productive in fish,” [UBC fisheries graduate student Lucas Brotz] says, “and now it is entirely dominated by jellyfish. Things appear to be going that way in the Middle East, South Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean.”

This is what unlimited fishing with ever-better gear inevitably produces – short term profits for a few years followed by severely degraded ecosystems indefinitely.

“The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America”

A book I am reading at present – Joseph Romm‘s Hell and High Water – drew my attention to an essay on climate change written by Frank Luntz, a political consultant who worked to oppose the regulation of greenhouse gasses.

The leaked memo, entitled “The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America,” provides a glimpse into the strategies of climate delayers that is both informative and chilling:

“The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science…

Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly…

Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”

The cynicism of it all is astounding. To see something as vital as climate change treated as a superficial, partisan rhetorical battle is extremely dispiriting.

The actual document is also oddly unavailable online. I had to use the Wayback Machine to find a PDF of the original leaked document. I am hosting it on my own server to aid people in locating it in the future. Clearly, I cannot vouch for its veracity personally. That said, articles in The Guardian and on George Monbiot’s site accept the document as genuine.

New nuclear plants, new nuclear waste

These days, nuclear energy is frequently spoken of as being in the midst of a ‘rebirth’ or renaissance, largely because of high oil prices and concerns about climate change. Those concerned about greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions do need to give the technology some credit as a mechanism for producing large amounts of power with relatively limited climatic effects. That is no reason to ignore the problems with the technology – from water use to nuclear waste to long lead times – but it does compel the formulation of a considered response.

One possibility I came up with would be to require firms building new nuclear plants to build geological sequestration facilities for the nuclear waste the plant will produce over its lifetime before the plant can begin operation. That would probably further delay the deployment of the technology, but it would avoid boondoggles like the ongoing conflicts about Yucca Mountain. It would also be a step away from the “act now and worry about the consequences later” mentality that has infected so much of energy and environmental policy.

The response to such a demand, on the part of industry, might offer a better glimpse into what the true costs of nuclear power really are.

GHG-intensive industries and regulation

As mentioned in a recent Charlemagne column, certain industries produce so much carbon dioxide that it can be more in their interests to relocate than to face an effective national carbon pricing policy. At least, that is what they commonly argue. Examples of such industries include fertilizer, chemicals, steel, aluminium, and cement. Frequently, they have threatened to relocate if they are required to pay carbon taxes or buy permits for their emissions. While there is some reason to doubt how valid the threats are – it would be very expensive to relocate production facilities and personnel just to escape a new carbon regulatory regime – there is good reason to think about how various forms of regulation would affect such firms.

One mechanism through which such threats might be countered is by reaching agreements among major producers in as many states as possible. A Dutch chemical company will be more willing to accept carbon regulation if it knows that its American and Japanese competitors face similar requirements. This is an approach that worked well in dealing with ozone-depleting CFCs and could work similarly well in GHG-intensive industries that (a) involve a relatively small number of firms (b) located in countries with strong regulatory capacity (c) which have some political willingness to take action on climate change.

One feature many of these industries share is that a high proportion of their emissions are what are called ‘process’ emissions. This means that the greenhouse gasses are released not as a side-effect of energy production, but as a side-effect of the production of whatever it is the industry makes. As discussed before, cement has high process emissions and limited prospects for carbon capture. The situation is similar for at least some of the processes employed in the other listed industries.

One slightly counterintuitive aspect of ‘intensity-based’ cap-and-trade systems (in which firms are obliged to reduce the quantity of emissions they produce per unit of output, rather than in absolute terms) is that they are absolutely brutal for firms with predominantly process related emissions. If a cement company actually cannot do anything to reduce GHG emissions per tonne of cement, the only option under an intensity-based system is to buy 100% of its obligations from firms that have done better than their target or close down. Under a cap-and-trade system with 100% auctioning, or a carbon tax regime, such firms would basically be encouraged to contract while the economy finds less GHG intensive alternatives to what it produces. While that is a very politically difficult thing to call for, it must be remembered that all the years of unregulated emissions were, in effect, an undeserved gift from the general public in this and future generations to those firms. Discontinuing such unearned benefits is a necessary part of curbing climate change.

If we are serious about dealing with climate change, it needs to be acknowledged that not all industries are likely to find technological fixes during an acceptable timeframe. Some will simply need to shut down or be sharply scaled back. Looking across the past 100 years, it is clear that the fates of whole industries have risen and fallen in response to societal forces. The impetus for them to do so now is enormously greater, as nothing less than the future habitability of the planet is potentially at stake.

Climate change and the gom jabbar

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, the protagonist is tested using a machine that “only kills animals.” His hand is placed in a box that simulates the appearance and sensation of having it horribly burned. He is told that he will be killed if he pulls the hand out. The test is to see whether he can overcome his primal reaction: whether he can exercise will over instinct and live. At least according to those who administer it, this is what distinguishes ‘humans’ from ‘animals.’

In some ways, climate change is like a Gom jabbar for all humanity. We are now aware of the needle threatening our collective lives. We know that continuing to act on the basis of instinct will lead to our doom. The question is whether we possess the fortitude to endure what is difficult, in order to avoid what is lethal.

Trouble with aquaculture

Recently, Manitoba banned new hog farms in a wide swathe of the province due to environmental concerns. Now, British Columbia has suspended the issuing of new licenses for salmon farms. The ecological impact of these facilities has been mentioned here before.

Generally, the idea that open-pen aquaculture makes ecological sense for carnivorous species like salmon is fallacious. All it does is displace pressure from fishing activity from wild salmon themselves to the kind of fish they eat. Inevitably, an unconstrained fishery will destroy those stocks as well. Meanwhile, the salmon farms leach lice, excrement, and antibiotics into the waters around them.

Airsick

This short video on climate change, produced by Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk, is very elegant. It doesn’t have a great deal of substantive content, but it includes a lot of striking visual images. Rather than being shot continuously, it consists of 20,000 black and white still images.

The video, and some of the claims made in it, are being discussed on Metafilter.

The Game Plan

The Game Plan : A solution framework for climate change and energy is a slick, Creative Commons licensed slide presentation covering issues of energy and climate change. It’s like a more numerically focused, more technical, open-source version of An Inconvenient Truth. Clearly, it is aimed at a very different audience. Still, it is interesting and potentially useful as a source of graphics and information.

A seven megabyte PDF version is also available. A PDF of the speaking notes, likewise.

Carbon trading, windfalls, and consumers

This background note on carbon trading from the Sightline Institute does a good job of explaining the relevance of different modes of permit allocation to consumers. That sounds terribly dull, I’m sure, but it’s simple and important. The basic idea of carbon trading is that you set some level of allowable emissions for a facility, firm, sector, or economy. Say you want to reduce total national emissions by 2% over the next year. You multiply current national emissions by 0.98 and create permits for that quantity of emissions. What you do next is very important. You can either auction these credits to the highest bidder, requiring firms that produce greenhouse gasses to purchase them, or you give some or all of them away for free to such firms.

The critical point here is that these credits are money. Auctioning them does two things: it requires polluters to pay for their emissions and it raises funds. These can be invested in research, used to subsidize low-carbon technologies, or just used to fund general tax cuts. When these credits are given away for free, they give firms the option of either continuing to pollute for free or selling the right to pollute to someone else.

The point made in this document is that consumers end up bearing the cost from either approach. This is because unless firms are tightly regulated or in competition with other firms that don’t face emissions restrictions, they will both profit from any permits they are allocated for free and pass along the cost of permits to consumers. The analogy used in this document is a good one:

Try buying World Series tickets from a scalper. Would he charge you any less if he found the tickets on the ground? Of course he wouldn’t. Like energy, the street price of World Series tickets is based on supply and demand. The supply and demand for tickets is the same no matter how much the scalper paid for them, and so the price he charges you will also be the same no matter how he got them.

Of course, the scalper would much rather get his tickets for free – and that’s precisely the point. Polluters are financially much better off if permits are given away instead of auctioned, but the cost of cutting emissions and the resulting effect on energy prices will be the same no matter how the permits are delivered.

As such, the superiority of an auction system is further reinforced. Not only does it implement the Polluter Pays principle, but it also provides a mechanism through which governments can compensate consumers for the manipulative behaviour of firms.