The environment – Page 79 – a sibilant intake of breath

The economic importance of air travel

Contemplating the volcano-induced disruption in European air travel, The Economist concluded that it had such a small economic impact as to be unmeasurable. Business meetings that people thought were super important were just as successfully held over the phone, and domestic hotels and restaurants gained business from those further afield.

One way of thinking about this is to say that it demonstrates how frivolous most air travel is. The article claims that “globalisation is far more about ships than about planes” and, aside from the potential of a lengthy air travel hiatus to disrupt certain segments of some supply chains, the temporary suspension of air travel has a limited effect.

It would be fine for air travel to be frivolous if it was otherwise benign. Unfortunately, long trips via plane produce unacceptable quantities of greenhouse gases. Giving up long-distance travel is one of the single most effective voluntary steps most people can take to reduce how much harm they are doing to future generations, via greenhouse gases and climate change. Surely, their right to live on a planet that has a stable climate compatible with human flourishing trumps the right of those alive today to spend the weekend in Helsinki or enjoy a quick winter jaunt to Spanish beaches.

Unscrupulous climate graph

This post on A Few Things Ill Considered is a great demonstration of how graphs and statistics can be abused. Show CO2 and temperature data from a short stretch of time, with misleading axes, and you can produce the impression that they are unrelated. Present the information in a fair way, and the correlation between the two looks very plausible.

Combine that with the theoretical framework about greenhouse gases trapping energy (in the form of longwave radiation) within the planet system, and you have a hypothesis that is defensible on both theoretical and empirical grounds.

Disasters and environmental awareness

Every day, I find myself thinking about the huge risks associated with unchecked climate change, as well as the reality of how little humanity is doing overall to counter them. One odd consequence of this is ambiguous feelings about disasters like the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. On the one hand, it is a human and ecological catastrophe. At the same time, part of me hopes that each of these catastrophes gives a bit more of a psychological push to the population as a whole to deal with our major energy and climate problems. We are driving straight towards the edge of a cliff, and perhaps it is bumps like these that will convince the population at large that we would be wise to slow down.

The same goes for things like summer Arctic sea ice minimums. On the one hand, I know that vanishing ice is a positive feedback, and that warming in the Arctic risks causing massive methane release. On the other, every time the decline of sea ice seems to slacken, climate change deniers and delayers make hay from it, and use public confusion to further delay effective climate policies.

The really worrisome thing is that by the time there is massive evidence of just how dangerous climate change is, it will be too late to prevent truly catastrophic outcomes. Having global emissions peak soon is essential, if we are not to pass along an utterly transformed world to those who will come after us. If some moderately sized environmental catastrophes help that outcome to occur, perhaps we should be grateful for them in the final analysis.

I have speculated before that perhaps only perceived crises can generate real change.

State of the climate video

Last night, I gave a short talk outlining my current thinking on climate change.

I am interested to know which things people think I am wrong about. Also, about which things seemed to be effectively expressed, and which poorly expressed.

An improved version may be worthy of being recorded in a more aesthetically appealing manner.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS), always around the corner

One odd thing about following climate change as a scientific, political, and ethical issue is the disparity between different sorts of relevant timelines. There is a rate at which scientific reports come out, a rate at which public opinion about climate change shifts, and a rate at which firms feel the need to change their public images. There are also much slower shifts – slower primarily because they are costly and require massive physical changes to energy systems.

Back in 2008, in a presentation at Cambridge University, the UK Environment Secretary Ed Miliband expressed his view that carbon capture and storage (CCS) was just around the corner. He says that all of the necessary technologies have been tried successfully, and the next step is a demonstration facility. He goes on to quote the European Commission’s hope of: “every new power station in Europe being carbon capture and storage ready by 2010 and using carbon capture and storage by 2020.”

We’re still waiting for that demonstration plant. This is not to say that CCS has no contribution to make to fighting climate change. Indeed, paired with power plants burning biomass, it could remove CO2 from the air in a promising way. Rather, there has been a persistent notion that CCS is just around the corner. We need a demo plant, then we can somehow magically retrofit the world’s coal stations and solve our climate problems without shutting them down or abandoning coal as a source of energy.

I can see why that is appealing, even for those not beholden to coal-dependent utilities or coal mining interests. China has lots of coal, and it is scary to think what will happen if they burn it all. That fear can give people a powerful reason to hope that CCS will mop up the whole problem without much fuss.

In the near term, CCS seems to have more potential to delay action – keeping us clinging to the belief that some wonderful technology will save the day. Meanwhile, the window in which we can take action to avoid catastrophic climate change is shrinking, and the total costs of the transition are rising as the time we have left in which to complete it diminishes.

The cultural significance of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Louie Miller, director of the Mississippi state Sierra Club, had this to say about the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:

Unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle with this oil spill, and I don’t think I’m overstating the case by saying this is America’s Chernobyl.

The incident certainly contains all the psychological triggers that human beings seem to required to get concerned about things. It is happening right now. It is visible. There are specific people to whom the disaster can be attributed.

It would certainly be nice to see an event that clarifies for people some of the many hidden costs associated with fossil fuel dependence. While fourteen years passed between the Chernobyl disaster and the shutdown of the last reactor at the Chernobyl site, the incident made people around the world acutely aware of the dangers associated with nuclear power.

It is slightly ironic, perhaps, that those environmentalists who joined the movement around the time of Chernobyl seem to be those that maintain a reflexive fear and distrust of nuclear energy. At the same time, environmentalists today who are overwhelmingly concerned with the threat from climate change seem much more likely to view nuclear power as part of the solution to our most pressing environmental problem.

Alternatively, rather than being ironic, perhaps this is just a sign of how our environmental problems are deepening and growing more threatening. What people worried about just twenty or thirty years ago now looks like small potatoes to us.

[Update: 2 May 2010] See also: Obama expands US offshore drilling

Murdoch on climate change

People certainly respond to climate change in odd ways.

Rupert Murdock – owner of the climate denying Fox News channel – now believes that “we can’t afford the risk of inaction” when it comes to climate change, and has decided to make his News Corporation carbon neutral (probably will dubious offsets).

Naturally, Fox News barely reported on their owner’s change of heart, and are unlikely to change their editorial stance. This seems to illustrate how, in many ways, the public discourse on climate change is a sort of self-serving theatre. This seems to indicate just how far away we are from really grasping the magnitude of risk associated.

Climate change and the seal hunt

Over the weekend, I found myself wondering about the relative impact of Canada’s extremely controversial seal hunt and climate change, when it comes to the prospects for Grey Seals and Harp Seals.

Given that it seems highly likely that climate change will eventually eliminate summer sea ice, and given that creatures including seals seem to be critically dependent on sea ice, it does seem possible that climate change will render these seal species extinct, eventually, or will sharply curtail their numbers.

Stage one of a comparative analysis would be developing an estimate of how many seals would have lived between the present and the non-human-induced extinction of the species. They could potentially endure until the end of the carbon cycle, or until the sun expands into a red giant. More plausibly, they might exist in large numbers until the next time natural climate change produces a world too hot to include Arctic sea ice.

If we had an estimate of how far off that probably is, and an estimate of the mean number of seals that would be alive across that span, then we can estimate how many seals would be lost if humanity eliminates summer sea ice and, by extension, wipes out or sharply curtails the number of these animals in the wild.

It is possible to imagine a chart showing seal population year by year, extending far into the future. There could be one shaded segment showing the projected seal population in the absence of human intervention, and others showing possible population crashes resulting from anthropogenic climate change. A third shaded area could show the number of seals taken annually by hunters. The relative area of the shaded regions would show the relative magnitude of hunting and climate change, as causes of seal mortality. If you think of all the seals that would have lived, if we hadn’t locked in the eventual disappearance of summer arctic sea ice, the number killed by hunters is probably quite small.

My suspicion is that hunting would be a tiny blip, compared with climate change. If so, the environmentalist campaign to end seal hunting seems misdirected. Even if protesters are more concerned about animal cruelty than about species sustainability, this argument seems to hold up. Surely it is cruel for the seals to suffer and slowly die off as their habitat loses the capacity to sustain them.

I think it would be well worth some serious organization producing an quantitative version of the argument above. Like ducks, it seems quite possible that seals are distracting us from the environmental issues we should really combating, or at least encouraging us to respond to those issues in a less effective way than we could.

The market knows best, except when it comes to green technology

In another demonstration of how many conservatives are hypocrites when it comes to the environment, we have the sorry example of Canada’s billion dollar green energy fund.

Contrast these two situations:

You oblige people to pay a fee when they emit greenhouse gases, and pay other people a reward if they can remove these gases permanently from the air.
You set up a giant fund of cash, and give it away to some companies because they think they might find a costly way to maintain business as usual (carbon capture and storage) and then give the rest to whoever can get the most political traction.

The former approach demonstrates faith in innovation and market mechanisms. The latter approach suggests that the indefinite combination of government analysis and lobbying can somehow do better.

If we want to address climate change in a fair and effective way, we should be making firms and individuals pay the true costs of what their actions impose on everyone, while banning the most destructive activities. We should not be setting up weird mechanisms for political patronage.

More on Vancouver bike lanes

My father is quoted in a recent Vancouver Sun article about bike lanes: Council considers more bike lanes downtown.

He points out how bike lanes make cyclists feel safer, encouraging the use of bikes in urban areas. He also highlights the two greatest dangers to cyclists: people opening car doors in front of them, and drivers making right hand turns into them. Both have come up here before.

In addition to physical protective measures, I think both educational and legal strategies should be pursued. Both of these types of collisions are caused by people not checking their blind spots for incoming cyclists. Driver training should put more emphasis on the importance of this. In addition, I would advocate making it the legal responsibility of someone making a turn or opening a door to check for cyclists. If they fail to do so and cause a collision, they should have to pay compensation to the cyclist and have a penalty applied to their driving license. In egregious cases, perhaps criminal charges should be pursued.

In any event, I very much hope Vancouver continues to make itself a more appealing city for cyclists, and that other cities follow the lead from places like Vancouver, Portland, or the Netherlands.