Category: The environment

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

Peak oil and climate change

Given the multiple lines of evidence demonstrating that humanity is causing the climate to change in potentially dangerous ways, climate change has to be part of medium- to long-term planning for almost everybody, and part of the policy development processes of government. At the same time, there is a plausible case that global production of oil will peak at some point in the relatively near future, with potentially important economic, political, and geopolitical effects.

How will these two phenomena interact? I can think of lots of possibilities. These are not ranked in any way, and are not equally plausible.

1) Worries about peak oil prove premature or overblown. Liquid fuels stay cheap for the foreseable future, causing more climate change than there would have been in a scenario where they became more costly.

2) Natural reserves of petroleum cannot keep pace with rising demand, initially driving liquid fuel prices through the roof. Some combination of biofuels and coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology counteracts that, also worsening climate change. (Coal-to-liquids and fuels like palm oil grown in rainforest have huge climate impact per unit of energy)

3) Peak oil proves serious, and biofuel and CTL alternatives prove very costly. This has potentially large social and economic consequences, but makes climate change mitigation easier. For many people, the world gets a whole lot smaller.

4) Climate change occurs much more quickly than expected, perhaps because of major positive feedbacks like melting permafrost or burning rainforest. Governments sense their increased vulnerability and abandon attempts to cooperate internationally, seeking to make themselves as robust as possible in the face of the chaos ahead.

5) Climate change occurs much more quickly than expected, perhaps because of major positive feedbacks like melting permafrost or burning rainforest. Governments finally get the picture and introduce harsh policies restricting fossil fuel production domestically. Powerful states now profoundly concerned about climate change (the US, EU, China, Japan, etc) force petrostates like Canada and Kuwait to shut down production.

6) Not only does oil production peak, but so does gas and coal production. Dealing with climate change becomes much easier politically, given that there is no longer any real alternatives to switching to renewables and nuclear as principal sources of energy.

7) Peak oil proves serious, but cellulosic and algae-based biofuels finally emerge as commercially viable alternatives.

Personally, I think peak oil is a much less serious problem than climate change. For one thing, it is just the sort of phenomenon that markets deal with relatively automatically – something gets scarce and people find ways to use less, while developing alternatives. For another, it doesn’t include the same dangerous lag times. It is quite possible that we could emit enough to cause catastrophic warming, but only see concrete proof of that decades later. Peak oil, by contrast, seems likely to unfold with fewer surprises. Finally, there aren’t really any positive natural feedbacks that would further constrain the availability of oil, as it began to get scarce (though falling energy return on investment (EROI) is an issue). By contrast, warming is likely to beget more warming as ice vanishes, forests dry out an burn, permafrost and methane clathrates melt, etc.

Surely there are many other possibilities, aside from those listed above. Please post some below, and comment on those listed above. How do the different possible scenarios effect how we ought to be hedging our bets, both climatically and in terms of energy sources?

Psychology and hard choices

Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works makes reference to some interesting research with public policy implications. P.E. Tetlock and others published a study entitled “The psychology of the unthinkable: Taboo trade-offs, forbidden base rates, and heretical counterfactuals” in a 2000 issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Among other experiments, they presented subjects with a story about a hospital administrator deciding whether or not to spend $1 million to save the life of one child. They found that the experimental subjects disapproved of the administrator, regardless of which choice they made.

This seems to mesh well with the inappropriate rage in the United States about health care ‘rationing.’ As Peter Singer very effectively explained, rationing is inevitable in health care, as well as in all other areas of government spending where demand is potentially unlimited. What varies is the mechanism by which the rationing occurs: by severity of illness, by the wealth of sick people, etc.

Does the knowledge that people dislike the makers of tough decisions have any other social or political relevance? Perhaps. Tough choices certainly abound when it comes to environmental issues. Where a fishery is being exploited at an unsustainale rate, do we limit it to protect access to fish in the future, at the cost of a lot of fishing jobs today? Do we force people to pay for expensive wind, solar, or nuclear power so as to reduce the effects of climate change in the future? To what extent can the general public mitigate their intuitive disapproval, in recognition of the fact that politics requires hard choices? Also, to what extent should such cognitive biases reduce the extent to which public opinion is a valid source of guidance in policy-making?

Will war ever be carbon neutral?

Ideally, the next few decades will see all the world’s economies begin the difficult transition towards carbon neutrality, so as to stop anthropogenic climate change. Fossil fuels will represent a progressively smaller share of what drives vehicles and power plants, and complimentary measures will enhance carbon sinks.

If all that happens in the civilian sphere, is there any chance we will see it in the military? Military vehicles are definitely fuel hogs: whether it is supersonic fighter jets or main battle tanks driven by gas turbines.

It seems plausible that armies will be the last hold-out, when it comes to achieving carbon neutrality. National security has almost always been given priority over civilian needs, especially in non-democratic states. Furthermore, if weapons that produce large amounts of greenhouse gases are more effective than those that do not, any state with current or possible future enemies will find their military strategists unwilling to abandon them. It is also plausible that climate change itself will produce a more dangerous world, in which politicians and the public are even more supportive of developing military strength than they are now.

Perhaps the armed forces are such a small share of total emissions that this isn’t really a problem. Indeed, it does seem plausible that we can cut down the level of emissions to the point where the risk of climate change is much diminished, without having to tinker with them at all. Still, the question of how to move to a carbon-neutral world entirely unthreatened by climate change will eventually involve the question of how to get generals to give up their carbon-intensive habits, perhaps after titans of business and ordinary citizens have eventually done so.

The Economist mentions runaway climate change

For the first time, I found a reference to the possibility of runaway climate change in an article in The Economist. Oddly enough, it is not in an article on climate change, but rather in a survey on water from last month:

Few people have dwelt on the worst possibility, even if it is highly unlikely to come about: that the extra water vapour held by a warmer atmosphere might set in train a runaway greenhouse effect in which temperatures rose ever faster and tipping-points for, say, the melting of ice sheets were reached. This possibility has received little consideration outside academia, perhaps because less improbable consequences of climate change provide enough to be gloomy about. The wise conclusion to be drawn may be that all planning should allow for greater uncertainty, and probably also greater variability, so every plan will need to have a greater degree of resilience built into it than in the past.

This account doesn’t even mention the most shocking possible form of runaway climate change, where the oceans boil away and the Earth becomes permanently uninhabitable for life as we know it.

I wonder how long it will be before the main opinion pieces in The Economist take this risk into consideration. So far, they seem to remain convinced that climate change is a rather secondary problem – certainly less important than maintaining global GDP growth – and that it will eventually be efficiently dealt with through carbon pricing schemes.

As I have said countless times before, the major risk with climate change is that the lags between emissions and effects will conceal just how gigantic a problem climate change could be until it has become too late to prevent the worst effects.

Canada’s climate plans a flop

As discussed in a post of the Pembina Institute’s blog Canada’s record of failure in dealing with climate change continues to worsen. While the government once promised that Canadian emissions would peak forever sometime between 2010 and 2012, they now expect them to rise all across that span.

Policies the government expected to reduce emissions by 52 million tonnes (megatonnes) of CO2 in 2010 are now expected to produce reductions of just 5 megatonnes. Furthermore, the $1.5 billion Clean Air and Climate Change Trust Fund, distributed to provinces in 2007, did not produce the expected 16 megatonne reduction. Now, the government claims it cut emissions by just 0.34 megatonnes, with 3 more to follow by 2015.

These lackluster results, coupled with ever-rising emissions (especially from the oil and gas sector) demonstrate convincingly that Canada just isn’t doing its part on climate change mitigation. Future generations are likely to see this quite correctly as evidence of short-sightedness and irresponsibility.

Friends of Gin & Tonic

Friends of Gin & Tonic is an amusing website that sets out to mock climate change deniers. They describe their mission as: “Self Interest and Climate Change Denial” and elaborate by explaining:

We seek to inform the public of the findings of a handful of amateurs of unrivalled capability (but almost no ‘formal’ climatological expertise) that utterly undermine the so-called ‘scientific consensus’ that the planet is warming and that people are causing it. This ‘consensus’, the biggest scientific fraud in history, has been foisted on a gullible public by a politico-scientific elite intent on a single world government with themselves, via control of the United Nations, at its head. Exercising merciless control of the scientific literature by requiring that published work be consistent with such piffle as observations, physical principles, and mathematical models, this evil clique tries to suppress the promulgation of any alternative view. Small fringe groups like our sister organization the Friends of Science are thus reduced to using right-wing blogs, opinion columns of like-minded newspapers, and guerrilla publicity stunts at international meetings to promote their message.

Mockery is certainly part of the set of things richly deserved by climate change deniers, though it is not an adequate mechanism for countering their efforts in and of itself.

They came to my attention via DeSmogBlog.

2010 Arctic sea ice

The extent of Arctic sea ice has dipped below where it was at this time of year in 2007, the worst year recorded for sea ice. Within the next few months, we will see whether it goes on to set a new record low. If so, perhaps it could be the sort of dramatic event that drives people to take climate change more seriously.

It is important to understand that the maximum extent of sea ice during the winter is a less important climatic indicator than the minimum extent in summer. The Arctic is always going to be cold and dark in the winter, when it is hardly receiving any sunlight. As a result, at least a thin layer of ice will form, establishing a large extent of frozen ocean. What is vanishing is the multi-year ice, which endures from year to year. Climate deniers trumpeted how the maximum extent of ice this year was close to the 1979 to 2000 average, yet the major trend in ice extent and volume is ever downwards.

If the Arctic ends up ice-free in the summer, there will be numerous consequences. Species that depend on sea ice – including narwhals, seals, and polar bears – will be threatened. Also, migration between the Pacific and Atlantic will likely allow the emergence of invasive species. Because losing summer sea ice means losing a big white sheet that reflects sunlight back into space, it would also cause further warming.

Consequences of coal in China

The issue of how much China is really doing to fight climate change has arisen here before. One section from Barbara Freese’s book on coal provides some information pertinent to that discussion. She argues that the Chinese government has made great efforts to improve energy efficiency. Between 1996 and 1999, the Chinese economy grew by a startling 36%, while total energy use fell by 17% and greenhouse gas emissions fell by 14%.

One motivation for an official shift towards reduced coal usage is the sheer number of deaths from air pollution. While coal-fired power plants in the United States probably kill a few tens of thousands of people per year, those in China likely kill around one million. Indeed, it is estimated that one in eight deaths in China is the consequence of coal use – whether from particulate emissions, sulfur dioxide, reduced indoor air quality, mercury toxicity, or other factors.

That said, Freese acknowledges that continued economic growth is likely to reverse that trend, unless China commits itself aggressively to a low-carbon approach to development. That choice is very important to human welfare around the world and needs to be made soon. There are coal plants in the United States that have been operating since the 1920s. The world cannot afford for China to continue to deploy coal-fired power plants that cause such climatic damage, and which may prove equally enduring.

Emissions standards for trucks

In a piece of good news, the Canadian and American governments are rolling out new emissions standards for heavy vehicles, “including full-sized pickup trucks, delivery vehicles, buses, freight vehicles, service trucks, garbage trucks, dump trucks and tractor trailers.”

Trucking is one of the fastest growing causes of greenhouse gas emissions in North America:

The emissions from heavy trucks represent 6 per cent of Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions. They have been increasing more rapidly than emissions from any other source and grew by 63 per cent from 1990 to 2007 as compared to 26 per cent growth in overall Canadian emissions for the same period.

While regulating efficiency sector by sector risks being more costly than driving economy-wide reductions with a carbon tax, it is nonetheless a welcome measure. Hopefully, the efficiency improvements driven by these new regulations will actually reduce emissions, and not increase them via the rebound effect, by reducing the cost of trucking.

Call for action from American scientific organizations

Four American national scientific academies have just released three reports on climate change, and called for a price to be put on emissions through either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme: the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council. There is one report on climate science, one on mitigation, and one on adaptation. The reports were requested by Congress and is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They endorsed emissions reductions in the range of 57% to 83% by 2050, for the United States.

Hopefully, this will restore a bit of life to the wheezing efforts ongoing in the US Congress to produce climate legislation.