The environment – Page 76 – a sibilant intake of breath

How good is gas?

Per unit of electricity generated, natural gas is the lowest-carbon fossil fuel. Producing a kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity using oil, and especially coal, generates significantly more emissions. While bituminous coal produces about 370g of CO2 per kWh, oil produces about 260g, and natural gas produces about 230g.

A recent MIT report focuses on switching American electricity production to gas, as a way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions:

In the results of a two-year study, released today, the researchers said electric utilities and other sectors of the American economy will use more gas through 2050. Under a scenario that envisions a federal policy aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2050, researchers found a substantial role for natural gas.

“Because national energy use is substantially reduced, the share represented by gas is projected to rise from about 20 percent of the current national total to around 40 percent in 2040,” said the MIT researchers. When used to fire a power plant, gas emits about half of the carbon dioxide emissions as conventional coal plants.

They claim that nuclear power, renewable energy and carbon capture and sequestration are all more expensive than gas, and thus less viable as low-carbon alternatives. They also claim that by 2050, 15% of the U.S. vehicle fleet will be fueled with natural gas.

I have three big objections to all this:

First, an increasing share of natural gas is coming from unconventional sources, using techniques like hydraulic fracturing. This has associated environmental risks, such as the contamination of groundwater.

Secondly, the amount of climate change humanity will cause depends on the total amount of all fossil fuels burned before society becomes carbon neutral. Burning more gas obviously contributes to this cumulative total, changing the atmosphere and climate in ways that will endure for thousands of years. If humanity ever starts to burn the methane embedded in permafrost of methane clathrates, the total quantity of associated emissions could be very worrisome indeed.

Thirdly, building new gas-fired power plants perpetuates fossil fuel dependence. It keeps us wedded to fuels that are inevitably going to become ever more costly and destructive to access, and which can never form the basis for a truly sustainable society.

None of this is to say that gas has no role to play in dealing with climate change. In the short term, substituting gas for coal may be a promising way to reduce emissions during the transitional period before renewables become dominant. In the long run, however, there is no alternative to moving beyond fossil fuels.

Helpfully, the MIT report does not just take energy demand as constant, or ever-increasing. Rather, they model the economic effect of putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions, and find that doing so would keep demand flat in the next few decades. They project that carbon pricing would raise electricity prices by 30% by 2030 and 45% by 2050 – a small price to pay for reducing the extreme risks associated with climate change.

Government divesting from fossil fuels

One complication related to the BP oil spill is the anticipated harm that cancelling dividends will do to pension funds. It is not ultimately inappropriate for those investors to lose money. They were benefiting before when BP’s lax safety standards generated unjustified profits. Still, there are political difficulties associated with making people bear the burden of even such limited exposure to BP’s new risks.

Right now, there is a significant conflict of interest when government officials have an individual or collective interest in the continued profitability of the fossil fuel sector. Perhaps the appropriate response is a program of divestment, wherein government pension plans and officials scale down and eventually eliminate their holdings of stocks and bonds from fossil fuel companies. That way, they will individually be in a more impartial position from which to make decisions on climate and energy policy.

Five Republican senators on cap-and-trade

In an interesting illustration of how political tactics shift with circumstances, an article on Grist quotes five American Republican lawmakers expressing their support for a cap-and-trade approach to addressing climate change. At the time, they were concerned about so-called ‘command and control’ regulations, which may have given industry fewer options for reducing emissions. For instance, a government decree that all new vehicles meet a certain efficiency standard cannot be circumvented by cutting emissions somewhere else; by contrast, both carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes leave it up to firms and individuals to choose where to cut emissions.

The Grist list includes senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Scott Brown (R-Mass.), and John McCain.

The logic of the changed stances is dispiriting. At one point, Republicans saw command and control regulations as plausible enough to be worried about, and were willing to promote cap-and-trade as a preferable alternative. Now, it seems they think command and control is a complete political non-starter, and they have directed their energies towards fighting the less stringent alternative they once opposed.

There are reasons to worry about whether a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system would produce the emissions reductions we need quickly enough, and it is very plausible that additional measures like fuel taxes and efficiency requirements will be needed in addition. All the more reason, then, to create a carbon price as soon as possible. Only by doing so can we begin to get a sense of how quickly and cheaply that approach can lead to a lower carbon world. If it proves cheaper and easier than expected (as has generally been the case for complying with environmental regulation), then the price of emitting carbon can be raised more quickly, reducing climate risks further. If it does not prove effective, early action will at least provide us with that information in a somewhat timely manner, while there is still an opportunity to try other approaches.

Open thread: campaign finance

Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Reich describes the system of campaign contributions in the United States as “the biggest corruption of our political process,” defining corruption as “actions causing the public to lose confidence that politicians make decisions in the public’s interest rather than in the special interest of those who give them financial support.” He claims that the increasing size and importance of these political donations is primarily a reflection of changing economic circumstances:

Globalization, deregulation, and technological advances — especially computers and the Internet — have been the driving forces. They have shifted almost all industries in almost all rich economies from being organized around stable oligopolies, in which competitive advantage derived mostly from economies of scale, toward far more intense competition in which competitive advantage comes from innovation — and from favorable treatment by government.

He argues that the issues that now occupy the bulk of Congressional time are those that affect competition between firms within an industry, as well as those that affect competing industries.

Climatologist James Hansen also identifies campaign finance reform as one of the most necessary steps for producing effective climate change policies in the United States, by reducing the influence of status quo entities like big coal companies.

What do readers think about the claim that political advertising ought to be a form of protected free speech? How much does it matter whether it is funded by the candidate themselves, campaign donors, or some other mechanism? Would we be better off if all candidates got a set amount of free advertising, and were barred from using other means to promote themselves in mass media? Would such a policy just drive them to use different approaches to achieve the same end, such as cooking up forms of advertising that can be reported as news? Does the current situation in Canada differ in important ways from that in the United States?

People with good intentions might unintentionally do harm

In the third chapter of Merchants of Doubt, Oreskes and Conway identify an important transition within the environmental movement: from ‘preservationist’ environmentalism to pollution prevention. The former was basically the non-partisan drive to preserve especially beautiful places, like national parks. The latter grew out of the recognition that:

Pollution was not simply a matter of evil industries dumping toxic sludge in the night; people with good intentions might unintentionally do harm. Economic activity yielded collateral damage. Recognizing this meant acknowledging that the role of the government might need to change in ways that would inevitably affect economic activity.

This is initially discussed in the context of acid rain, but it applies just as much to ozone depletion, climate change, and other environmental issues.

I think we are stil waiting for the pollution prevention view to become post-partisan.

Hardtack colony

One of the most common objections I see to the idea that the world needs to move to renewable forms of energy is that renewables just aren’t up to the task. Critics point out how renewables only produce about 2% of our electricity (and less of our total energy use, once you consider things like transport) and how wind, sun, tides, and so on are all variable.

This morning, I dreamed up a metaphor that might serve as a quick partial response:

Imagine a colony founded in a previously uninhabited area, far from the mother country, and with no prospect of future resupply. It is founded with a large stock of non-perishable food: hardtack, flour, lard, biscuits, etc. Good stuff. They also have seeds and the land around them. Imagine now that they are at a juncture in time where 98% of their food comes from the rations they brought along with them. They would not be saying: “Look what wonderful, everlasting sources of sustenance this hardtack is! It is all we will ever need!” Rather, they would be intensely concerned that they were only producing 2% of the food they need for any given year, while drawing down their one-off stock, which would be better saved for emergencies.

Obviously, the colonists need to learn to farm and garden. They also need to learn to cope with seasonal variability. Since the most ancient civilizations, we have had to deal with the fact that food is more abundant at some times than at others. Unlike some mammals that balance it out by storing and drawing down fat (think of whales and penguins that go without eating for months at a time), we use external food storage systems and techniques, from granaries to salting and canning.

Unfortunately, electricity is not so easily stored as food. Nevertheless, we have many options for energy storage. We can balance renewable production between energy sources (wind, solar, geothermal, etc) and between regions. We can store energy in pumped hydroelectric storage and multi-reservoir tidal systems. We can use electric vehicles as a storage and load balancing system, and work to improve batteries, flywheels, and capacitors.

Of course, the metaphor emits much that is relevant to our situation. Fossil fuels are different from stored rations in important ways. For one, we don’t know just how much we have. More importantly, using them causes severe harm – both in terms of toxic pollution and in terms of climate change. Finally, the metaphor takes our energy needs as essentially fixed. When it comes to our society, we could do many of the same things we do now, while using a lot less raw energy.

Those issues aside, I think the metaphor has promise as a quick response to the ‘renewables will never be up to it’ argument. In the long run, we really don’t have a choice.

Meteorologists on climate

Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Charles Homans has a piece on why so many television meteorologists are climate change deniers. He cites the particular case of John Coleman, whose opposition to mainstream climate science was motivated more by personal animosity than by any doubts about their empirical methods:

Coleman wasn’t arguing against the integrity of a particular conclusion based on careful original research — something that would have constituted useful scientific skepticism. Instead, he went after the motives of the scientists themselves. Climate researchers, he wrote, “look askance at the rest of us, certain of their superiority. They respect government and disrespect business, particularly big business. They are environmentalists above all else.”

Coleman’s 2007 essay was picked up by right-wing news sites, with his experience as a weatherman used as a justification for taking his position seriously.

The issue of meteorologists making decrees on climate goes back to the basic question of what constitutes expertise and whose views – if anyone’s – we should pay special attention to when making up our minds. Apparently, the majority of professional meteorologists in the United States reject the mainstream science of climate change:

Twenty-nine percent of the 121 meteorologists who replied agreed with Coleman—not that global warming was unproven, or unlikely, but that it was a scam. Just 24 percent of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the change in climate over the past half century—half were sure this wasn’t true, and another quarter were “neutral” on the issue.

Despite how climate science and meteorology are very different fields, the Yale Project on Climate Change found that 66% of Americans listed television meteorologists as a credible source of information on climate change. It’s not surprising – though it is certainly regrettable – that this helps keep the general public confused about the issue.

Climate change and individual ethics

During today’s earlier discussion of climate change and partisan politics, a distinction was eventually drawn between the key principles that underlie intergenerational justice, the ways in which those principles manifest themselves in individual morality, and the question of how to bring our politics more in line with what those principles demand.

The final question is the topic of the previous discussion, but it seems worth having another about the broad question of what the moral consequences of climate change are for human behaviour. Naturally, this has come up before with reference to specific behaviours (especially voluntary travel). It has also come up in broader discussions, such as on the relative importance of abstaining from emissions, compared with resisting societal structures that perpetuate climate change.

This discussion is meant to be broader than those: what are the moral consequences of climate change, when it comes to individuals?

Climate: integrated left or post-partisan?

In a recent article, British journalist George Monbiot argues that climate change mitigation advocates must join forces with a broader progressive coalition in order to see their ideas implemented. Alongside environmental concerns, this coalition ought to be “against the [public spending] cuts, against the banks, against BP, unemployment, the lack of social housing, the endless war in Afghanistan.” It should have the same kind of dynamism as the American Tea Party movement, and the same sort of enthusiasm for demanding policy changes.

While I certainly recognize the current impotence of the climate change mitigation movement (backsliding from the United States to Australia to UNFCCC negotiations), I don’t think Monbiot is right. Climate change mitigation is something we must undertake because of the physical realities associated with the climate system and the consequences of emitting greenhouse gases. It is not fundamentally a partisan issue, and dealing with it is not fundamentally tied to political views on issues like housing or Afghanistan.

Furthermore, the world cannot afford climate change mitigation to be a policy only of the political left. Inevitably, left-wing and right-wing governments alternate in power, as voters become disgusted by the excesses of each subsequent administration. Dealing with climate change requires a long descent towards zero net global emissions, over a span of decades. It’s not something that can be vigorously taken up for four, five, or eight years and then abandoned in favour of aggressive exploitation campaigns for unconventional fossil fuels and loosened environmental planning regulations.

Climate and the right

Besides, climate change is something that can be integrated into the political traditions of the right in several ways. Conservatives should love carbon taxes, since they are a mechanism to keep one person’s behaviour from impacting unduly on the freedom of others, while also allowing the maximum range of possible means for stopping the harm. Such taxes demonstrate faith in markets, innovation, and the capability of people to respond rationally and effectively to appropriate incentives. Further, there is a long tradition in conservative political philosophy of seeing the current generation of human beings as trustees of the planet, with a duty to pass it along in an improved or at least preserved state.

That being said, climate change is a major challenge to the libertarian view that people are essentially autonomous and should be free to do as they like. Laissez faire policies that ignore ever-rising greenhouse gas concentrations are likely to create the need for a far harsher eventual clampdown, once the harms associated with climate change become entirely undeniable. Also, given the lag time between emissions and their consequences, those concerned for the future state of the world cannot continue to tolerate ethical systems that include an unlimited right to pollute. Political thinkers across the political spectrum need to come to grips with what climate science has taught us, and think deeply about how that affects both the factual inputs to their moral reasoning and the moral precepts that serve as the foundation of their political philosophy.

Blocking opportunism

Broad political consensus on dealing with climate change would also have another important role, as protection against populist opportunists. Once serious carbon prices have become common, making things like travel significantly more expensive, it seems inevitable that political parties will crop us that campaign to eradicate the fetters people have put upon themselves and return to the happy free-wheeling days of unlimited greenhouse gas emissions. In order to head off such short-sighted but potentially popular responses, it is necessary for serious politicians and parties of all stripes to continue to publicly express their appreciation for how cutting global emissions to zero is a practical necessity, and a project that cannot be abandoned because of the impracticalities it imposes on people.

Eventually, climate change denial must become entirely discredited among all serious politically active people, and the political conversation about climate change must shift to being about the mechanisms through which deep cuts can be rapidly achieved, rather than about whether such cuts are necessary, or whether we should condemn future generations to a harsh and unstable world for the sake of short-term economic benefits for us.

Obama on oil dependence

In a recent speech, Barack Obama finally made the argument that the correct response to the BP oil spill is to lessen American dependence on fossil fuels:

Beyond the risks inherent in drilling four miles beneath the surface of the Earth, our dependence on oil means that we will continue to send billions of dollars of our hard-earned wealth to other countries every month – including many in dangerous and unstable regions.

In other words, our continued dependence on fossil fuels will jeopardise our national security. It will smother our planet. And it will continue to put our economy and our environment at risk.

Of course, almost every President going back to at least the 1970s has argued that the United States should move in such a direction. Hopefully, this time the message will be backed up by some strong policy actions.

If the Obama administration doesn’t manage to pass a climate bill before the mid-term elections, and if those elections then go badly for the Democrats, the chances for any meaningful climate change policy reform during Obama’s first term may be slim.