Category: The environment

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

Open thread: the Carbon Bubble

Surprisingly, despite the importance placed on it in the University of Toronto fossil fuel divestment brief and in the divestment movement generally, I don’t have a post on the idea of the carbon bubble. If we start with the temperature targets countries have chosen as the upper limit for tolerable climate change, we can calculate that the world’s total fossil fuel reserves are much bigger than necessary to bring us to that target. Hence, if governments achieve their climate change mitigation goals, most of the world’s fossil fuels will need to be left unburned and the profits firms expect to make from them will be unrealized. Under such a scenario, fossil fuel investments will be stranded.

Back in February, The Economist explained:

Yet amid the clamour is a single, jarring truth. Demand for oil is rising and the energy industry, in America and globally, is planning multi-trillion-dollar investments to satisfy it. No firm embodies this strategy better than ExxonMobil, the giant that rivals admire and green activists love to hate. As our briefing explains, it plans to pump 25% more oil and gas in 2025 than in 2017. If the rest of the industry pursues even modest growth, the consequence for the climate could be disastrous.

ExxonMobil shows that the market cannot solve climate change by itself. Muscular government action is needed. Contrary to the fears of many Republicans (and hopes of some Democrats), that need not involve a bloated role for the state.

…

According to ExxonMobil, global oil and gas demand will rise by 13% by 2030. All of the majors, not just ExxonMobil, are expected to expand their output. Far from mothballing all their gasfields and gushers, the industry is investing in upstream projects from Texan shale to high-tech deep-water wells. Oil companies, directly and through trade groups, lobby against measures that would limit emissions. The trouble is that, according to an assessment by the IPCC, an intergovernmental climate-science body, oil and gas production needs to fall by about 20% by 2030 and by about 55% by 2050, in order to stop the Earth’s temperature rising by more than 1.5°C above its pre-industrial level.

If accepted, this argument torpedoes the idea that sticking with fossil fuels is a path to prosperity while turning away from them to fight climate change is an economic sacrifice. If we’re really going to make the transition, the people who kept investing in fossil fuels until the end will have the most to lose.

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Open thread: decarbonizing fertilizer

As noted here before, getting humanity off fossil fuels requires more than replacing our electricity generation and transport systems with climate-safe alternatives. We also need to decarbonize the process of producing food and raw materials. Since most fertilizer is made from natural gas, engineering plant-fungal symbiosis to fix atmospheric nitrogen could be a promising route forward.

Liquified natural gas (LNG) and climate change

Natural gas is often held up as a solution to climate change, or at least a transition in the right direction, on the basis of producing less CO2 per unit of energy than oil or coal. Other factors are also relevant, however. Natural gas is mostly methane (CH4) which is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2. If just a few percent of the methane extracted is leaking in the form of ‘fugitive emissions’ from production facilities and pipelines that alone can make it a worse energy source than coal. Methane also has a different atmospheric lifetime. It’s actually much much worse than CO2 in the short term, but unlike CO2 which largely endures for centuries methane breaks down comparatively quickly. This may be relevant to global temperature pathways as the frontloaded impact of methane may make the peak of warming worse and raise the risk of positive feedback effects where the warming we cause induces further greenhouse gas emissions and warming which we cannot control.

There are more complicated arguments about long-term infrastructure, with some arguing that gas is substituting for worse alternatives and others saying big new gas investments are locking in our fossil fuel dependence for decades to come. There’s also always the debate about any prospective energy source versus renewables, with some arguing that options like gas or nuclear are not needed because renewables are becoming cheap so quickly, and others arguing that energy sources like gas or nuclear complement renewables. With gas, the argument is that it’s a deployable energy source you can activate only when renewables don’t supply demand (many gas plants are peaker plants that only run at times of peak demand); with nuclear, people say it’s always-on baseload energy that would provide at least something during renewable dips.

All this is highly relevant because gas production is exploding, especially because of North America’s hydraulic fracturing (fracking) boom. A new Global Energy Monitor report describes $1.3 trillion being invested in gas infrastructure around the world. In particular, massive investments are being made in liquified natural gas (LNG) infrastructure, since unlike gas in pipelines it can be exported by ship intercontinentally.

Canada is hosting a very disproportionate amount of this investment: 35% of the global total, despite our much smaller global population and domestic share of world greenhouse gas production.

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Open thread: 2019 federal election

The CBC is reporting on polling results pertinent to this fall’s federal election: CBC News poll takes snapshot of Canadians ahead of fall election.

They say the cost of living was the top concern identified, followed by climate change. This suggests a familiar Canadian dynamic: being notionally concerned about climate change, but rejecting action on the necessary scale because of a perceived threat to short-term economic growth and personal financial well-being.

This integrated nicely with Andrew Scheer’s Conservative climate plan, which follows the traditional formula of expressing concern about climate change, proposing only speculative and painless long-term measures to deal with it while insisting that the fossil fuel industry can keep growing, and vaguely hoping that the rest of the world will solve the problem while Canada changes little and continues to actively make it worse.

There’s so much about this election that is depressing: how Trudeau and his government have done a poor job but remain the only non-abominable party with a chance of winning, how the discussion on the left will largely remain a squabble about blocking each other which the progressive parties cannot overcome, and ultimately Canada being carried forward by inertia and the defenders of the status quo into an unliveable and chaotic future.

Nuclear papers

Over the years I have written a variety of academic papers on various aspects of nuclear weapons and nuclear power:

1) Written for an undergrad international relations course at UBC and subsequently published in a journal and given an award:

“The Space Race as ‘Primitive’ Warfare.” UBC Journal of International Affairs. 2005. p. 19-28.

2) Written during my M.Phil at Oxford:

“Climate Change, Energy Security, and Nuclear Power.” St. Antony’s International Review. Volume 4, Number 2, February 2009. p. 92-112.

3) Written as part of my PhD coursework at U of T:

Climate change and nuclear power in Ontario (self-published on Academia.edu)

Canada’s mixed nuclear policy experiences.

Open thread: conservative climate hawks

Conservatives have no more reason to want to destabilize the climate than anyone else, though the political right has largely become where those who deny the existence of or need to do anything about climate change can persist unrebuked and win converts.

A central view of mine these days is that it’s hopeless to pursue climate strategies which depend on progressive governments always being in power, since that’s not plausible for the foreseeable future in Canada, the United States, the UK, etc. Climate policies will need to be in place for decades, so in way way or another they need the ability to endure through at least centre-right if not full on right wing populist governments.

It was nice therefore to see former Prime Minister Kim Campbell criticize the lack of seriousness in Andrew Scheer’s no-targets climate plan. Our deliberations need to be as much as possible about the issues instead of party politics, and seeing voices on the right that accept the scientific consensus and are willing to call out inaction as unacceptable is necessary to build a sufficient political coalition to curb the damage we’re imposing on the planet.

Threatening clawback

A central aim of the climate change activist movement is to discourage further investment in fossil fuel projects. This is closely tied to economic analyses showing that the total cost of the transition depends critically on how quickly it starts and how effectively long-term high-carbon projects are avoided. It’s also the inverse of a frequent claim made by pro-fossil proponents: that investor confidence is necessary to keep billions flowing into fossil fuel infrastructure investment. That was the logic that made Canada’s federal government buy the Trans Mountain pipeline, in order to demonstrate to investors that Canada still has a legal and economic climate in which major fossil fuel projects are possible.

A potential strategy that could help avoid further fossil fuel infrastructure investments is the threat that profits earned in the near-term will be clawed back in the longer term to pay for some of the damages arising from climate change. It’s not something that today’s governments in North America are willing to threaten (not least because the longstanding purpose of corporations is to protect investors from personal liability for the actions of the firms they invest in). Nonetheless, it’s something that can be emphasized as a risk in the future in order to increase investor reluctance.

One practical way could be to begin tracking which entities large enough to be worth targeting in the future are profiting from fossil fuels today: fossil fuel corporations directly, but also major stockholders receiving dividends. Having some claim to being able to credibly track the flow of profits is essential to this strategy; otherwise investors will likely believe that they will have spent the profits by the time there is any demand for compensation, or that they will have shifted them through so many other investments as to have ‘cleaned’ them in a sense akin to money laundering.

The threat of clawback could be an argument to use when advocating divestment from the fossil fuel industry, since it would protect the institutional investor from such future claims of compensation, at least as far as future fossil fuel profits go.

It may seem pointless to suggest an idea like this when it is so far outside the political mainstream today, but a central point in the entire stranded assets / carbon bubble argument is that the political possibilities of the future will be different, and governments may grow far less accommodating of fossil fuels as decarbonization proceeds and the impacts of climate change worsen. Putting a little asterisk beside fossil fuel profits (* may be clawed back in the future to pay for climate damages) would both be a fair representation of a reasonable prospect, which can be made more probable through activist effort, and a way to make fossil fuel related returns seem less valuable and more tenuous than returns from alternative investments.

On the cusp of the next Trans Mountain decision

Canadian politics has an unhealthy fixation on the profits associated with fossil fuel production and use. It’s the threat of losing those that is always evoked by pro-fossil interests when they are asserting that this or that piece of new fossil fuel infrastructure (this pipeline, that bitumen mine or in situ extraction project) needs to be built.

This analysis of course misses the climatic impacts on third parties. Oil advocates want to think of the transaction as just a happy buyer and a happy seller, ignoring the people losing their homes, financial security, and even their lives because the climatic stability that we have depended on for millennia is being disrupted and destabilized by fossil fuel use. These risks aren’t notional or set in the future, but happening now as this CBC article illustrates: ‘It’s a problem for society’: Climate change is making some homes uninsurable.

Tomorrow the Trudeau government is expected to announce the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion into B.C. Whether it is later stopped by public protest, the courts, or other means or not, I think it will cement the view that rather than trying to seek a sensible compromise the Trudeau Liberals chose a fundamentally incoherent strategy. It makes no sense to try to gently decrease economy-wide oil demand with a carbon price as a route to decarbonization while simultaneously approving projects that would only have a viable role in a future where we choose to ignore climate change. If we end up with an Andrew Scheer Conservative government it will be even worse, both for a fossil fuel industry which misunderstands the fundamental problem it is facing and to Canada’s economy as a whole, but that’s not necessarily enough to save Trudeau, especially while Canada’s relatively pro-decarbonization left is fragmented into support for Greens, the NDP, and Liberals.

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