This routine by George Carlin is certain proof of the old adage that “many a true word is said in jest.”
Tag Archives: climate change
Timescales
Thought I might share this passage from page 393 of Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth.
On a scale of 500 years the planet is warming after the Little Ice Age 500 years ago.
On a scale of 5,000 years there have been many periods of warming and cooling.
On a scale of 5,000,000 years there have been numerous periods of intense cold and many short periods of warmth.
The average global temperature over the past 2.67 million years is less than the current global temperature. Why? Because we are living in the Pleistocene glaciation which has not yet run its full course.
This logic is sound.
Plimer’s cogent argument is that on geological timeframes the climate has been both hotter and significantly cooler than at present and that to really understand climate change, it is geological time that provides the best context and insight.
The earth is, after all, very old leaving plenty of time and opportunity for a range of climate conditions everywhere. It is hard to imagine that not so long ago in geological terms the current continents were in a very different configuration, that in an epoch mountains can form and erode away, and all the time sediments form and are consumed into the mantle of the earth at plate margins.
It is the rare the talent of the geologist to think on the time scales that matter to the formation of sediment, rocks and ore bodies.
What is interesting is to map global human population size onto the points in time that Pilmer quotes to illustrate his understanding of climate change.
For this purpose ‘human’ means both the species Homo sapiens that first appeared around 250,000 years ago and the genus Homo that the fossil record suggests has been present as various species since around 2.3 million years ago.
- 500 years ago after the Little Ice Age at 1500 AD there were 500 million humans. This is roughly the present day population of the United States and Indonesia combined, 7% of the current global total.
- 5,000 years ago there were just 5 million humans, or roughly the population of present day Finland and today there are over 100 countries with more people than Finland. At the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago there were perhaps 1 million H. sapiens.
- Around 70,000 years ago there is genetic evidence that H. sapiens went through a population bottleneck when for some reason, perhaps the eruption of the supervolcano Toba in Indonesia, numbers went as low as 15,000 individuals.
- 5,000,000 years ago there were no recognizable humans.
Calculations suggest that there may have been 110 billion humans that have ever lived and a full 6% of them are alive today. Human population growth is an explosion in comparison to geological time.
So when discussion stalls on the causes of climate change or even on its existence, it is worth remembering that the real challenge for humans is to handle the resource needs of 7 billion souls alive today, the 6% of those that have ever lived, without destroying the resource use opportunity for the descendents of this 7 billion.
This is, of course, the standard definition of sustainable development.
It would be a shame if we forgot about sustainable development to focus on the latest fad that, if we think about it on the time scale of the geologists, we can do little about.
No valentine
If you are an environmentalist it is a scary thing to call anything natural an asset. This is because assets create wealth given the right investment, and, historically at least, investment meant exploitation.
In one way or another environmental assets are converted in order to realise their value.
- Trees become railway sleepers, pit props, roof trusses, furniture and firewood.
- Flower filled meadows become livestock factories.
- Ore bodies and coal seams become giant holes in the ground upstream of depleted and polluted waterways.
The environmentalist paradigm has been about saving the last remaining patches of unspoilt nature from this type of asset (resource) exploitation.
Preservation and conservation of nature has required extraordinary commitment, tenacity and sacrifice. Either from those who pushed for and created the legislation for environmental protection that helped knock back pollution and create national parks or from the more radical individuals who had to hug trees.
The arrival of global warming as the next serious threat to the environment has proven more difficult to fight. The only acceptable solution has been to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and this should have created another route for environmentalism, a partnership with the investment community to trade carbon.
An unlikely alliance parodied in green has moved on
Only she hasn’t.
So far the financiers have not joined in the unholy alliance. Perhaps they have been distracted by more immediate economic woes or simply got cold feet.
Market mechanisms for trading carbon are in place, accounting rules have been tested and projects in forestry, agriculture and energy are ready. Environmentalists have relented but still nothing.
Are we losing faith in markets just when we thought they might help solve environmental problems?
That would be quite an irony.
Forest loss
There is a curious twist in the ongoing debate over the protection of tropical forest.
In the west we say that we are worried by the rate of deforestation that is equivalent to an area twice the size of Tasmania every year or an area the size of Sydney every two days. And we are becoming more concerned when we hear that this deforestation, the cutting and burning of carbon stores, makes up around 13% of global greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.
No matter that many of the trees end up providing us with furniture or paper and the cleared land grows cows for our wrapped up burgers.
In an attempt to slow the rates of both legal and illegal logging, the west is talking up various financial incentives to reduce the rates of deforestation in the tropics. There have been stewardship payments before but this time we are proposing making payments for the carbon that stays in the forest if trees are not cut, an avoided emission.
Several labels have been used to describe this incentive for forest protection. It started as RED, reduced emissions from deforestation. Then a second ‘D’ was added to capture situations when forests are degraded but not felled. And now a ‘+’ has been included to cover the social and economic implications of both deforestation and the incentive mechanism.
So we now have the inclusive REDD+.
The idea is simple enough. An estimate is made of the carbon emissions that would happen if a forest were cut down completely and/or degraded as a result of timber harvest. A detailed set of carbon accounting rules and information on the forest is used to determine the amount of avoided emissions that would accrue from keeping the forest intact. Once the amount of avoided emissions is verified carbon credits can be issued and sold on international carbon markets for areas where the forest is protected. Those with a need for carbon credits and pay the market price for each ton of carbon dioxide to whomever is responsible for keeping the forest intact.
At first glance it seems like a great deal. Local peoples get paid to keep their forests standing and greenhouse gas emitters get to pay to offset their negative effects on the atmosphere.
And where these payments flow and are equal to or greater than the value that would accrue from clearing and cultivating their land, it will seem like a good deal for everyone.
Carbon emitters in the west pay real dollars to resource owners in developing countries to keep the trees standing.
Recall, however, what happened in the industrialised countries where just about everywhere land was cleared of forest for agriculture. Less than 3% of Western Europe still has natural forest, down from over 80% before agriculture. In the US where there are large tracts of inaccessible land unsuitable for agriculture where forests are still intact, some 40% of the forests in southern and northern states were cut down during the 1800’s.
Agriculture in these places was hugely successful. Crops were grown and sold each and every year that created wealth and with it innovation, industry and more wealth. Then that wealth created finance that generated even more wealth with lifestyles to match.
So with REDD+ actually we are asking that for modest payments spread out over a few decades and spurning the opportunities of the repeat revenue from agriculture, owners of tropical forests will forego the route to opportunity and wealth that, so far, is the only one we know works.
I wonder how many of us who already live in affluence would take that deal?
Not many is my guess. And yet conservative management of tropical forest remains is a critically important task. It is just that we must find an alternative development pathway to mobile phones, plasma TVs, education and health care that is both equitable and reliable.
At some point we must understand that we cannot be so numerous and still try to solve problems on the cheap.
Preparation for change
There were times during the recent debate in the Australian parliament on the clean energy futures legislation when leader of the opposition Tony Abbot was sounding forth his hip pocket rhetoric to an empty lower house. The green leather on the government benches was unmoved.
“This is a toxic tax,” he kept saying, “that on the governments own figures will cost the average Australian a years salary by 2020.”
As the benches were unable to respond, his words echoed round the chamber and into the television cameras.
Why would anyone vote for losing 5% of his or her salary? There has to be a good reason. So what is it? Why should there be a surcharge on a gas that is plant food?
As John Mathews puts it in an online article
“The $25 billion charge on the major carbon polluters is really no more than a signal that they represent the old, brown economy, and will have to start to upgrade their activities if they wish to join the green future. The rest of the world, notably China, Japan, Germany, Spain are all putting huge investments into such a green future. It is long overdue that Australia joins them.”
There it is. The answer is that there will be a green future.
In fact it will not be called green, but normal. Future goods and services will be made possible from what are currently alternative fuels, resource conservation will be the norm, and production efficiency will be an industry mantra because consumers will demand it. The Marks & Spencer Plan A will be copied by everyone.
The chatter about the clean energy futures legislation is about the cost of the tax and the slugging of industry with an emissions obligation but the real guts of the policy is preparation for change that is as inevitable as the weather but not about the weather. It is preparation for an economy that runs without fossil fuels.
Again quoting Mathews,
“Everyone knows that what goes into the atmosphere over the next 20 years will be the result of investment decisions taken in Beijing and New Delhi, not in Canberra.”
But also the decisions made in the US, Europe, and yes Australia too, on the speed of the transition away from our fossil fuel dependency. Remember folks, this is really what it is all about.
So it was a great shame that those leather benches weren’t warmed by government MPs countering the toxic tax rhetoric with passionate explanation of how this legislation is a historic step on the road to changing the way things are done… to avoid being left behind.
Maybe they just didn’t believe it.
Size of the task
It is desirable to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that the greenhouse effect doesn’t get out of hand and warm the world by amounts not seen for millions of years.
And should this warming happen too fast for our production systems to adjust, then desire must become an imperative.
Fair enough.
Now let’s consider the size of the task.
If we convert the current global energy use into oil equivalents – that is combine all the coal, oil, gas, hydroelectricity, nuclear and alternative sources and convert the energy we gain from them into the energy we get from a barrel of oil – we use the equivalent of 10 million barrels of oil an hour.
Or, if you prefer, 1,590 million litres an hour.
That’s enough to liquid to fill over 15,000 Olympic sized swimming pools every 24 hours or in less than two weeks fill Sydney Harbour, onE of the largest natural harbours in the world.
Plus this number is, believe it or not, getting larger by the day thanks to more people and rapid growth in demand from emerging economies.
10 million barrels an hour is colossal demand. No wonder superannuation funds invest in fossil fuel energy.
Perhaps the next time you lounge with a G&T by a swimming pool, imagine the pool, and a few thousand more, full of oil, and you may glimpse the size of the task.
Our energy demand is simply vast. And thanks to availability, some legacy issues and economics, most of this demand comes from fossil fuels. Partly because of the volume and locked in infrastructure for generation and delivery energy generation is a tough thing to shift, requiring huge investment in alternative sources, a clunky transition period, and unbridled commitment to change.
And because it will take time, any shift will require great tenacity.
It is a big ask and very unlikely that we will take on this transition voluntarily. It will be both difficult and costly. The engineering task alone is staggering: reworking energy grids, distributed generation, engine conversions and replacement. Even the decision to keep the grid or move to a distributed model is a big one.
Then there is the economics. New monies must be found to develop alternatives at scale and monies found to support uptake of what will initially be more expensive energy sources. Then those who have already invested heavily in fossil fuel power risk lost dividends, losing out to new investors. And more of us have invested than we might realize. Superannuation funds that will pay out for many a retirement, like the low risk of traditional energy investments.
The US and Europe are oil and coal dependent because their entrepreneurs and investors backed fossil fuels. New wealth in China, India and South America can be more flexible. They will invest for the far side of the transition, in the new technologies, not the status quo. In 100 years time it is unlikely that the old west will hold the purse strings, which is actually ok, if a little scary for those who have already invested.
So the size of the task is huge, not just because we gobble 10 million barrels an hour, but also because we are not nimble enough economically to act swiftly.
So when the debate on a carbon price uses hip pocket rhetoric, remember the size of the task and know that change to something this big it is not going to be cheap
.
It finally happened
After back stabbing, vacuous argument and dithering for long enough for us to have been in and out of the next ice age, and despite (or perhaps because of) a hung parliament, yesterday Australian politicians passed a carbon pricing bill through the lower house by a couple of votes.
Champagne all round for the warmers, gnashing of teeth for the deniers and plenty of “why did they do that?” from the majority of the populace more concerned with their own stuff.
And a wry smile from the historians, for this is truly a moment for them to record.
It is the point at which a conservative country in a remote corner of the western world, bound to a colonial past that created significant wealth by exploiting natural resources, made a tentative, but hugely symbolic step towards accounting for externalities.
A brown economy allowed its politicians to introduce a policy that starts to capture the hidden environmental costs of doing business. Those costs that never make it onto the company accounts, the externalities, or what the policy people prefer to call spillover effects.
On the balance sheets of 500 companies and organisations with the largest greenhouse gas emissions there will now be a line item that will show they have made payments for an environmental impact. Not from a point of pollution into the creek that runs by their factory, or for installing mufflers to counteract machine noise, or the filters and scrubbers to remove particulates from the smoke stack, but for an invisible and diffuse environmental effect.
Truly this is historic.
And what history will record is that on 12th October 2011 Australia made its move down the road of major economic reform. It started the process of converting from a fossil fuel based economy with centralized energy infrastructure built with entrenched investment structures; to a fluid, entrepreneurial, environment friendly era of economic development.
And this happened because it realized that even though a capitalist system fits the human psyche like a glove, capitalism is not sustainable unless profit is real. It cannot be profit declared by hiding costs in the environment. For, in the end, the environment stops absorbing those costs and closes down, cutting off production.
There will, of course, be u-turns and moments of doubt about this historic decision. There will also be kick back from the old ways that claim emissions are just hot air. And those claims may turn out to be true.
Only this path is as inevitable as peak oil, because even if it’s not about emissions, it is about knowing and accounting the true environmental costs of doing business.
Only then we can live well and live within our means.
Buying up the land
Land has always been an asset. If you control land you can live on it, grow food, exploit other natural resources on or under it, and even charge people for passing through. Land makes money. We didn’t call the old money upper classes ‘the landed gentry’ for nothing.
What we choose to do with land depends on its potential and the owner’s ability to realise that potential. Assuming, of course, the owner recognises the opportunity. In turn opportunity is about where the land is and what other people want either from it or from what it can produce.
A hectare that overlooks Sydney harbour to the opera house might have been used to raise sheep 200 years ago before there was such an iconic view. Not even the most recalcitrant planning officer could block development of dwellings on such land today. It simply has orders of magnitude more value as a place for dwellings than as a paddock.
Sheep production will not suffer for a few hectares given up to buildings. Grazing properties in Australia cover more than 4 million km2, more land area than India and seven times the size of France.
Nevertheless the Sydney Morning Herald recently printed a story with the following opening line: “FARMERS fear a new rush of environmental plantings for biodiversity and carbon offsets will accelerate the loss of land for food production”.
The story was about mining companies, energy utilities and investment banks buying up land, often through carbon trading companies, to plant trees that will become biodiversity and carbon offsets under the Australian governments Carbon Farming Initiative.
Much of the land purchased is degraded or marginal with limited production potential – a gentle way of saying uneconomic. The new owners have trees planted and account the carbon that these plants pull out of the atmosphere as they grow. This they can register as credits to offset their obligations to purchase emission permits.
Under the carbon accounting rules the new plantings are expected to be “permanent”. That is they must persist long enough to count as emission reductions on the greenhouse gas balance sheet.
An offset planting is not a plantation or production forest. There is no mechanism to allow for later use of the timber resource. They are carbon sinks, soaking up CO2 from the atmosphere, and providing habitat for any number of creatures that were under pressure as a result of land clearing.
The green end of town is happy indeed. A good thing you would think.
Farmers and their advocates are less enamoured. The prospect of losing large tracts of agricultural land sends a disturbing message to a community already worried by drought, flood, pests, a strong currency and uncertain terms of trade. Then there is also the buy up of productive land by foreign entities, both companies and sovereign states, looking for food security at home. More land going out of our control.
With this kind of reporting it is a small psychological step to thinking that the land is being appropriated from under our feet creating a threat to a 200 year old way of life.
This will not happen. Even at their maximum extent offsets will be a tiny percentage of the total land area. After all it takes a lot of plantings to cover an area the size of India. However, the reality is that there will be questions asked of land use in the coming decades. We will need more efficient production, regrow vegetation for its carbon value, pay more attention to conservation efforts and be smarter about water use. There will be changes. And this is what the reporters latch onto. Tradition will not be enough to guarantee persistence of the current use everywhere. We will find new ways of making the land productive. Like the plot of land across from the Opera House values will change in ways that make alternate so attractive that change is inevitable.
And in the shakedown, who owns the land may be less important than what is done with it.
Who’s behaviour are we trying to change?
The Australian government has just released its clean energy future legislation, a long awaited climate change policy framework.
In line with other jurisdictions the focus is emission reduction by putting a price on carbon to change behaviours away from dirty, fossil fuel based energy and industry to a cleaner, more efficient economic system. Clean energy futures is an elaborate, and in many ways clever, market based system for the commercial exchange of what amount to licenses to pollute, is transitioned in through a tax on the 500 heaviest emitters.
Hit commercial entities with a cost and, on the assumption that the hit hurts, they will do their upmost to avoid it. They are expected to be rational after all. Some will cop the cost and simply pass it on to their customers. But this will benefit their competitors who choose to become more efficient and change to less carbon intensive activities. So the market will sift the options and favour the cleaner ones. Exactly what is wanted.
In this case $25 billion over 5 years is the hit – evened out it is $1 million a year per entity – and that sounds like it should hurt enough to prompt a change. Some entities will become more efficient, trade to get the best price for what they must pay for and, eventually, transition to clean practices.
So we have a system to change the behaviour of… the 500 heaviest emitters.
Only why do these companies emit? For the majority it is because they supply energy or goods to the market at a profit. In other words they have customers, ultimately us.
In the formulation of the clean energy future policy, the $25 billion raised from emitters will go back to consumers through raising the tax threshold at a cost $15 billion and another $10 billion to support exposed jobs. This is so that should the emitters pass the cost of their permits on to the consumer or cut costs in the form of jobs, it is not too painful for those on the receiving end. Us again.
No collective hurt there. And so no change in behaviour.
Propping up the consumer also eases the pain on the emitters and reduces the incentive to change.
At some point it will be necessary to try and change our behaviours too; or even the most intricate of policy formulations will be a waste of effort and opportunity.
Forest for the trees
There is a consensus among climate scientists that the net greenhouse gas emission reductions we must achieve to keep warming below dangerous levels cannot happen without the agricultural sector. They are right, it can’t.
There are three reasons for this assertion.
The first is that emission reductions from energy efficiency, mitigation and renewable projects will struggle to keep pace with ever-growing emissions from global energy demand. Mitigation projects in energy sectors will slow emission rates but leave legacy emissions in the atmosphere.
The second reason follows from a need to deal with this legacy. Smart agricultural and forestry practices can suck back CO2 and store it in vegetation and soil – so-called biosequestration. In Australia the sequestration potential in agriculture alone is 100 million tonnes of CO2 emissions (CO2e) per annum, or a quarter of Australian anthropogenic emissions with the bonus that soil with more carbon in it is far better for production that soil with less.
The third reason, and the big one, is land clearing. Globally we are still cutting down forests to grow food at a rate of 35,000 hectares a day, or an area equivalent to the urban footprint of Sydney every five days. On its own, this source accounts for 18 per cent of global emissions.
The problem is how to reduce land clearing.
We have cleared vegetation ever since we invented agriculture some 10,000 years ago and even the Ancient Greeks knew that clearing altered climate. Yet we can’t stop ourselves, because mechanised agriculture has become the engine of prosperity from Persia to Pennsylvania. It is quite something to tell a government minister that his government should forego the economic opportunity and the social security a robust agricultural sector brings. “Why not develop available land,” he will say, “there are mouths to feed.”
It is much easier to sell the idea of keeping the trees to the indigenous land owner, who is pained when forced to fell his trees to fund his children’s education.
And this is the nub of the matter. For what we have cleared are forests – vast stands of carbon locked up in the timber and in the soil that supports the trees (at least 40 per cent of the carbon even in the tallest rainforest is in the soil as plant roots and organic matter). Even where the logs are taken for product, clearing releases the carbon from the tree branches and roots through fire or decomposition and as exposed soil dries out, so the carbon oxidises to the atmosphere.
Enter a hugely contentious solution called REDD, reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation. The text of the Copenhagen accord describes what it means:
“We recognise the crucial role of reducing emission from deforestation and forest degradation and the need to enhance removals of greenhouse gas emission by forests and agree on the need to provide positive incentives to such actions through the immediate establishment of a mechanism including REDD-plus, to enable the mobilisation of financial resources from developed countries.”
In short, the west pays to avoid deforestation and so help reduce that 18 per cent slice of global emissions.
REDD, and its latest manifestation REDD-plus (same idea but with wider scope), are criticised for two reasons.
REDD projects amount to welfare payments to the developing countries where the projects reside. And welfare is disliked by both giver and recipient.
Then there is a vociferous green argument against the market approach to delivery as in this case there will be cowboys and governments who rip off the funds before they reach the resource owners. So despite the accord, REDD has been slow to start.
Lost somewhat in this debate on clearing is another mechanism for reducing degradation of forests, Improved Forest Management (IFM).
This is where emission reduction comes from projects on lands designated for forestry. Mitigation is achieved through combinations of longer harvest rotations, improvements to silviculture, better harvest practices and a specific category of protecting forests that would otherwise have been logged.
Whatever the specifics IFM is more like a commercial transaction, industry to industry, and is more comfortable to buyers. The outcome is better managed forests that continue to sequester carbon while emissions are avoided. In the developing countries where these projects are most likely, the forests also remain to supply traditional use.
It would be unfortunate if arguments over REDD derailed or slowed the “immediate establishment of a mechanism …to enable the mobilisation of financial resources from developed countries,” as stated in Copenhagen, because IFM already exists as a mechanism that can deliver.
It would be cheeky to call IFM green, but it is definitely not REDD.
This piece first appeared in Climate Spectator in 2010.
Alloporus 