The environment – Page 78 – a sibilant intake of breath

Are high speed trains good for the climate?

High speed rail is often held up as a model transport option for a carbon constrained world. By offering speed and convenience, the idea is that such trains will displace flights and thus lead to lower emissions. Of course, running a train at high speed requires using more energy to get up to speed and to combat air resistance. In a recent column, George Monbiot points out this and other issues with high speed trains as a cimate change solution:

Throughout the recent government documents there’s an assumption that the new railway will be sustainable because it will draw people out of planes. But buried on page 162 of the report on which the department has based its case, published in March 2010, are the figures which derail this assumption. Of the passengers expected to use the new railway, 57% would otherwise have travelled by conventional train, 27% wouldn’t have travelled at all, 8% would have gone by car and 8% by air. In other words, 92% of its customers are expected to switch to high speed rail from less polluting alternatives. Yet the same report contains a table (page 179) suggesting that the savings from flights not taken outweigh the entire carbon costs of the railway. It provides neither source nor justification.

The 2007 report shows that even if everyone flying between London and Manchester switched to the train, the savings wouldn’t compensate for the extra emissions a new line would cause. “There is no potential carbon benefit in building a new line on the London to Manchester route over the 60 year appraisal period.” A switch from plane to train could even increase emissions. Unless the landing slots currently used by domestic flights are withdrawn by the government, they are likely to be used instead for international flights. The government has no plan for reducing total airport space.

I do think there are situations where high speed rail could provide environmental benefits. In particular, it could be good to connecting major urban centres that are not too far apart, and where zero carbon forms of electricity are available. Many such connections could be made between cities on the east and west coasts of North America.

GDP growth versus emissions growth in Canada

The blog of the Pembina Insitute has a very interesting post on how annual greenhouse gas emissions are changing in different Canadian provinces. Since 1990, they are way up in Alberta, up a good bit in B.C. and Saskatchewan, up a little in Ontario and Manitoba, and flat in Quebec. Alberta alone contributed more than 50% of Canada’s GHG emissions growth.

These graphs – comparing contributions to GHG emissions growth, GDP growth, and population growth between 1990 and 2008 – are rather interesting:

The biggest story that jumps out at me from this is how Ontario and Quebec show that it is possible to achieve economic growth with moderate or non-existent growth in GHG emissions.Quebec added as much to Canadian GDP as Alberta did, at the same time as their emissions fell slightly.

Displaying carbon footprints

Environmental activist organizations are always dreaming up new pranks to try to get media attention. Here’s one that occurred to me.

You could build some pedal-powered vehicles, a bit like bicycles. They would differ because they would be geared to allow someone to slowly pull a heavy load, rather than to move just themselves relatively quickly. Behind them, representatives from different countries could tow weights equivalent to the mean amount of carbon dioxide equivalent emitted each year by their fellow nationals.

You could have a little procession, arranged from the countries with the lowest per-capita emissions to those with the most. The representative for Bangladesh would only need to tow 900kg. That would be equivalent to a cube of water 97cm to a side, which would weigh about as much as a small car.

Following could be a representative from Sweden towing a 7.5 tonne cube, approximately two metres to a side. It would weigh about as much as three small cars, plus a Hummer H1.

Then, you could have an American towing a 22.9 tonne cube of 2.84 metres to a side. That’s akin to about two Greyhound buses.

The unfortunate Canadian and Australian would be hauling 24.3 and 25.9 tonnes, respectively. Those are cubes of 2.9 and 3.0 metres, each equivalent to about a 20-foot shipping container. That is akin to towing a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Those people would not be moving quickly.

Another way to look at this is to say that it would take the entire payload capacity of the Space Shuttle to carry the average Canadian’s average annual emissions into space.

Sustainability as an intergenerational project

I think this quotation from Richard Feynman is rather wonderful:

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

It would be a splendid thing for humanity to have tens of thousands more years of history. In order to accomplish that, however, we need to find ways to keep from snuffing ourselves out, or pushing ourselves back down below the level of ‘civilization.’

Accomplishing that seems to require a process similar to the one Feynman outlines for scientific advancement. We must learn what we can about truly sustainable human societies, implement that knowledge, and then pass along that combination of learning and physical achievements to be carried forward by those who will come after.

I can’t help feeling that if Feynman was still alive, our societal discussion about climate change would be a bit more sophisticated and productive.

Satirizing environmentalism

While effective climate change policies have yet to be implemented in most places, there do seem to be signs that environmental consciousness has established itself in the popular discourse. No doubt, this owes a lot to how serious people – both scientists and policy-makers – have continued to stress what a major issue climate change is, and how vital it is to address it.

One sign of that high level of visibility comes from this week’s posts on The Onion, a satirical newspaper:

No doubt, this level of prominence owes something to the ongoing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Nonetheless, maybe this kind of deep cultural penetration actually bodes well for environmental policy in the long run.

John Kerry on the new senate climate bill

Over on Grist, there is an article written by Senator John Kerry about the new climate legislation being introduced in the U.S. Senate. His message has a sobering but pragmatic tone:

A comprehensive climate bill written purely for you and me — true believers — can’t pass the Senate no matter how hard or passionately I fight on it. No, it’s got to be an effort that makes my colleagues — and that has to include Republicans so we can get to 60 — comfortable about the jobs we’re going to create and the protection for consumers and the national security benefits — and it has to address those pieces on their terms. The good news: I think we got that balance right.

It is hard to know whether he is right about that, and I felt similarly ambivalent about the previous Waxman-Markey climate bill. That said, Kerry’s argument does highlight the trade-off the frequently exists in policy-making between how well designed a policy is, to reach its objectives, and how well crafted it is from the perspective of political possibility. It’s a shame that what is necessary in the real world can be impossible in the political world, but that is a reality that must be incorporated into our strategies.

Given the series of blows against good climate policy recently, having some sort of legislative success in the United States could be very important. It could help drive Canada towards finally doing something about climate change, and it could help revive the moribund UN process internationally. Also, like many other weak pieces of domestic climate legislation passed before, it could always be strengthened after the fact.

For what it’s worth, here’s hoping the US manages to do something, if only so as to stop providing the rest of the world with such a convenient justification for doing nothing.

On Holocaust deniers

Given the previous discussions here about conspiracy theorists and climate change deniers, I thought this article on American Holocaust deniers might be of interest.

The case study of Holocaust deniers reveals weird and unsettling things about human psychology, such as how otherwise ordinary-seeming people can believe such appalling and offensive things, despite massive historical evidence. That being said, while Holocaust deniers do a grave injury to the accurate understanding of modern history, they probably have a limited ability to contribute to future debacles. Climate change deniers, alas, are far more dangerous.

No alternative to oil?

A recent article in The Economist took on a rather insufferable tone when talking about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and offshore drilling more generally:

The accident seems likely to strengthen the hands of environmentalists keen to turn America away from oil and towards some unconvincingly specified alternative mixture of noble abstinence, natural gas, electricity and ethanol.

Oh, those crazy environmentalists with their half baked plans! Why can’t they just recognize that oil is the way to go? It’s not like continued dependence on it ties our prosperity to a fundamentally non-renewable resource, from which many of the profits flow into the coffers of vile regimes. And it’s not like the climatic dangers of the continued heedless burning of fossil fuels threaten to undermine everything good humanity is trying to build for the future…

Renewables may be four or five times more costly than fossil fuels, per unit of output. That being said, energy costs are a small part of our economy. We can afford to pay more for safe and reliable alternatives that will carry on working indefinitely At the same time, fossil fuels are only ‘cheap’ when you ignore most of the costs associated with them. You would think that a newspaper ostensibly committed to: “tak[ing] part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress” might have figured some of this out by now.

As for ‘convincingly specified alternatives,’ David MacKay’s book is one of several that provide a suite of such options for public consideration.

Electricity in China

Due to its large population and growing wealth and international importance, the way China gets its energy has considerable relevance for the rest of the world. From a climate change perspective, the story is not a very encouraging one. Firstly, China gets abour 75% of its power from coal. Secondly, its economy is arranged such that the energy use per dollar of GDP is extremely high – about four times more than in the United States, and about eight times more than Britain. Partly, that is the consequence of how electricity in China is kept artificially cheap, with a price per megawatt-hour of just $0.59, compared with $0.89 in the United States and $1.86 in Britain.

Quite possibly, the low energy efficiency of China is partly a consequence of how rich states have exported a great deal of their highly polluting industry to places like China. They can pat themselves on the back for keeping domestic emissions relatively flat, while importing all the carbon-intensive goods they want from places like China. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Steven Davis and Ken Caldiera quantify these flows:

We find that, in 2004, 23% of global CO2 emissions, or 6.2 gigatonnes CO2, were traded internationally, primarily as exports from China and other emerging markets to consumers in developed countries. In some wealthy countries, including Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, the United Kingdom, and France, >30% of consumption-based emissions were imported, with net imports to many Europeans of >4 tons CO2 per person in 2004. Net import of emissions to the United States in the same year was somewhat less: 10.8% of total consumption-based emissions and 2.4 tons CO2 per person.

This map, showing the magnitude of these flows, is rather telling.

Given the importance of having global emissions of greenhouse gases peak soon, then fall rapidly towards zero, the direction China is taking is worrisome:

The use of power derived from coal will continue to grow in absolute terms (although new coal-fired plants are to be more efficient and cleaner), but its share of total Chinese output will fall from 75% to 65%, estimates Credit Suisse’s Mr Chen. Hydropower will expand by more than half, but its share of the total will drop a bit, from 21% to 20%. Wind power will see a big expansion, taking its share from 3% to 7%, as will nuclear, up from 1% to 5%. The rest will come from such niches as solar panels and incinerators.

It is good that China is deploying renewables on such a scale, and promising (though also worrisome) that they are leading the world in construction of nuclear reactors, with 21 on the way. At the same time, China is going to have to accept that ever-rising absolute emissions from coal-fired power stations is not an approach that is compatible with climatic stability. Ultimately, those facilities are going to need to be shut down.

The oil sands and accumulating CO2

Over at DeSmogBlog, there is a good post about Canada’s oil sands, and why their cumulative greenhouse gas emissions are their most significant environmental consequence.

The most worrisome thing about the oil sands is that they do most of their damage when they are operating properly – not when they are killing ducks, or when toxic liquids are leaking out of tailings ponds. What makes them really harmful is the extraction, processing, and (especially) use of the oil they contain. As such, efforts to make them more environmentally friendly are ultimately doomed to be limited in scope.