Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

Plastic without fossil fuels

Alongside the staggering challenge of replacing the 85% of global energy that currently comes from fossil fuels, humanity must also reckon with how the critical systems which we depend on rely on fossil fuels as inputs. We need to learn to make steel without coal and fertilizer without natural gas.

We also need something aside from fossil fuels as a feedstock for plastics, which are now indispensable in every area of human endeavour from spaceflight to surgery. Research of the sort is taking place. For example, Professor Shu-Hong Yu’s team at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has produced non-petroleum based plastics which are twice as strong and tough as engineering plastics.

Climate advocates should call for fossil fuel abolition, not “net zero”

The concept of “net zero” has become a major mechanism for industries and politicians who are unwilling to move past the fossil fuel economy to pretend that somehow that will not be necessary, since some future technology or tree planting will cancel out the emissions.

I’ve written before about how you would need a carbon capture industry far greater than today’s oil industry to bury our current emissions, and this CO2 burial industry would not produce anything of value to sell, meaning it would need to be paid for in a way not envisioned in any of the net zero promises I have seen. Tree planting is perhaps even more hopeless, since temporary sequestration of CO2 in biomass is not comparable to the permanent addition of CO2 to the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. When climate plans rely heavily on tree planting it’s a strong indication that they are intended for public relations purposes and do not have a sound scientific basis.

“Net zero” is also profoundly ambiguous about what kind of action needs to take place, since it suggests that we *can* persist indefinitely with fossil fuel use, just so long as some other people undertake compensatory activities to cancel it out. That’s not the right message or set of incentives to present to individuals and firms when we desperately need them to stop investing in long-lived fossil fuel infrastructure.

Being clear that our intent is to abolish fossil fuels accomplishes several useful things. It reinforces how fossil fuel firms and infrastructure are poor long-term investments, making it all the clearer that Canada should not be allowing new bitumen pipelines or LNG facilities. It stresses how stabilizing the climate can only be achieved through the effective abandonment of fossil fuels, and in so doing elevates the importance of building up all other forms of energy.

Maintaining a climate comparable to what humanity has experienced for its entire history requires a true zero, the effective abandonment of fossil fuels as sources of energy. Talking about “net zero” is chiefly emerging as a way to sound visionary and ambitious, while actually retreating into the hope that somehow new developments will eliminate the need for a difficult choice. We shouldn’t trust business or political leaders who talk that way.

Media attention to the case for divestment

I was heartened yesterday to see the CBC publishing an article about one of the scholars behind the case for divestment which was made successfully at Cambridge: Academic from Saskatoon plays key role in Cambridge University divesting from fossil fuels.

The report they link — Divestment: Advantages and Disadvantages for the University of Cambridge by Ellen Quigley, Emily Bugden, and Anthony Odgers — is particularly notable for its inclusion of a broad range of scholarly work on divestment from a range of fields.

Belliveau on the CFFD movement

Having missed its importance after putting it on a to do list back in May 2019, I have printed off Emilia Belliveau’s 2018 master’s thesis from UVic about the fossil fuel divestment movement in Canada, and particularly how it has affected the movement’s organizers.

That’s my main research question as well, making it surprising that I didn’t see the extent of this document’s overlap until I rediscovered it.

I will have a few different responses in my dissertation once it is published, but it’s a relief to say that this document hasn’t called attention to anything massive which I have missed. Incorporating it, therefore, it mostly a matter of adding additional references in the lit review and footnotes.

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Shue on intergenerational climate responsibility and vulnerability

“Doing nothing” about climate change in the sense of simply continuing business as usual is — far from actually doing nothing — continuing to change the environmental conditions that future generations will face for the worst. To persist in the activities that make climate change worse, and thereby make living conditions for future generations worse, is not merely to decline to provide protection. It is to inflict danger, and to inflict it on people who are vulnerable to us and to whom we are invulnerable. The relationship is entirely asymmetric: they are at our mercy, but we are out of their reach. Causation runs through time in only one direction. Lucky for us.

Shue, Henry. “Deadly Delays, Saving Opportunities” in Pachauri, Rajendra Kumar, Stephen Gardiner, Simon Caney, Dale Jamieson, and Henry Shue. Climate Ethics: Essential Readings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. p. 151

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Strident progressivism versus incrementalist centrism

The debate on the left about what lessons to take from the 2020 US election has the same contours as the main debate within climate change activism, with one side arguing that the success of the right demonstrates that Democrats have compromised too much with Republicans while a strongly progressive candidate and platform would have done better with voters while the other argues that since most of the available votes are to the right of progressives the Democrats’ promotion of policies which appeal to their most fervent base turns off centrist voters while energizing the conservative base.

This is a lot like the debate between climate justice advocates who favour a broadly intersectional progressive agenda including economic redistribution and the endorsement of a broad range of social justice causes and climate-energy or CO2-energy advocates who think the most plausible path to success is to remain focused narrowly on climate in ways calculated to not offend or challenge those with more conservative political views.

Since both arguments rely on counterfactuals (if only we had done this or that) the debate is hard to resolve. Either can be reconciled with the political outcomes we have observed, though each has contradictory implications for what the best approach moving forward is.

On climate specifically, I think one crucial element is the ability of decarbonization policies to endure between changes of government and party. If decarbonization is integrated into a progressive left agenda there is both the risk that the elements with more immediate political benefits will be given priority over the more painful changes needed to deal with climate change and the danger that the next right-wing government will dismantle the whole assembly.

To function, democracies need a consensus that the decisions of past governments were legitimate and that society as a whole needs predictability in what laws and regulations will be in force so that they can make appropriate long-term decisions. The historical pattern so far in climate change policies has been to see comparatively ambitious but still dreadfully inadequate proposals from left-wing governments and then their dismantling and contradiction by succeeding right-wing governments. Breaking out of that pattern somehow seems like our only path to the durable consensus on decarbonization which will need to hold for decades if we’re to avoid catastrophic climate change.

British Columbia’s 2020 election

I’m not celebrating NDP premier John Horgan’s successful gamble on an election to secure a majority government. For one thing, I think minority governments which sometimes seek support from the Greens are likely to enact more responsible climate change policies. For another, I have been consistently frustrated by the NDP’s inconsistent and inadequate positions on climate change.

Both federally and provincially I think it would be desirable for the left-wing parties (Liberals, NDP, and Greens) to adopt a Pact for Humanity in which they pledge to at least keep in place their predecessors’ climate change mitigation policies. That would help give some certainty to industries, municipalities, and individuals who are deciding whether to invest in fossil fuel infrastructure or alternatives. Of course, there would still be uncertainty from possible future Conservative governments which will roll everything back, but it’s better than having the left remain split on what approach to take and left-wing parties competing with each other about whether to support industry at the expense of the environment, keep tightening carbon restrictions in line with the best scientific and economic advice, or keep jumping unproductively between one approach to GHG regulation and another.

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