Where the climate disaster sits

The last few years have given the appearance of progress, but it's mostly an illusion. The underlying dynamic remains selfish, short-sighted governments, corporations, and individuals failing to accept the science and make a serious plan to cut carbon emissions dramatically.

Source

The rate of CO2 growth has slowed over the past few years, but that's misleading. The slowdown is not originating from the replacement of fossil fuels with clean energy sources, rather, it is primarily the result of substituting one fossil fuel for another -- less coal, more methane. China has been the primary source of rising coal consumption for some years now, so their shift is illustrative:

US consumption in recent years tells a similar story:

This is a lot of numbers and graphs for what is essentially an old man shaking a cane in blog form, but this is important. Coal has lost 6% of total electricity generation. But 2/3 of that, 4%, went straight to the burning of methane. Renewables snagged another 2% of the total, but half of those gains were lost when nuclear bleed away 1% of the total.

The additional 1% in clean energy sources likely made less of an impact on our total emissions than the 4% shift from coal to methane.

But, you may ask, who cares? Flat emissions growth is flat emissions growth. Which is true in a sense. Less CO2 is better than more. But if you are looking for a sign humanity is starting to wake up to the danger it is in, if you are looking for "peak madness," then this plateau misleads.

There was always going to be a transition between coal and natural gas, due to the immediate health effects of coal smog, and the discovery of fraking techniques that make methane easier, and even cheaper in many cases, to extract than coal. That this transition is happening does the world some good, but it does not say that we will continue to phase out coal when natural gas is not plentiful and cheap, or that we will make serious efforts to eliminate natural gas and all other fossils fuels from our energy mix, as we must eventually do.

The picture looks even bleaker if we include not only electricity but transportation fuels, which constitute 22% of CO2 emissions today (up from 14% in 2004.) Oil dominates the transportation sector, and despite some promising signs of a beginning of a mass market in electric cars, they remain an almost infinitesimal fraction of the motor vehicles on the road today.

The Paris Agreement has inspired a lot of optimism, but as far as I can see, it's fairly small potatoes. The emissions cuts promised…well, there aren't any specific emissions cuts promised, as a matter of fact:

The contribution that each individual country should make in order to achieve the worldwide goal are determined by all countries individually and called "nationally determined contributions" (NDCs).^[13] Article 3 requires them to be "ambitious," "represent a progression over time" and set "with the view to achieving the purpose of this Agreement" (Source: Wikipedia.)

The entire agreement could be summed up as "Global warming is bad, we'd better cut GHG emissions -- everybody do their best with that, OK?"

Having spent so many hundreds of hours on climate deniers, I am by no means scornful of the accomplishment of getting most of the world's nations to agree that there's a problem and we need to do something about it. But seriously, this agreement fails in every way to resemble the global agreement we need to stabilize the climate. Such an agreement needs the following features:

1. Binding emissions reductions.
2. Independent agency with secure funding to calculate emissions.
3. Strong penalties for those that violate the agreement or refuse to participate (i.e., a total trade embargo.)
4. Agreed upon scoring for grey areas like land use changes, reforestation, shorter-lived GHGs, and CCS schemes.
5. Some agreed-upon financial support for countries, like India, who will be asked to forgo things like burning coal which facilitated others' industrialization. (This might take the form of grants towards disaster management and adaptation projects, for example -- trillions of dollars in adaptation spending is now inevitable.)

The Paris Agreement lacks all of these things -- which is likely why so many countries have signed it and ratified it. It's the cotton candy of climate accords. Even the poor much-maligned Kyoto protocol did better.

Physically, the world keeps getting warming, the seas keep rising and the ice keeps melting. The arctic is having an anomalous winter, the antarctic an even weirder summer:

What a difference a year makes. Now climate scientists no longer have to explain why the Antarctic sea ice isn't doing the same thing as its northern cousin. They're twins! Of course, this is one more piece of evidence that the Antarctic is preparing to shed several meters of global SLR from its ice sheets, but every silver lining has its cloud, as they say.

Cutting emissions with rail upgrades, or, stuff white people like

Source

A lot of the discussion about carbon emissions is pretty one dimensional -- more low carbon energy means less emissions. Efficiency, when it enters the discussion, is often conflated with conservation -- which, at least to Americans, carries connotations of making do, of cutting back, of low-flow toilets, brief lukewarm showers, and long bus rides to work listening to homeless people ranting about the CIA's implants in their teeth. Somehow, this has not caught on.

It is a mistake to confuse conservation and efficiency. Efficiency can be big, bold, and transformative. For example: doubling and electrifying America's railway system.

About 39.5% of US freight is transported by rail. The vast majority of the American rail system is powered by onboard diesel engines. This is an inefficient, wasteful technology with large associated carbon emissions. Electrified rail has been around for decades, and not only allows you to power your train with zero-carbon energy from whatever source, but also decreases the energy requirement as the train doesn't have to haul a diesel engine with it. Power can be recaptured via regenerative braking, just like a hybrid or electric car.

The second major problem with the American rail system is congestion. In many areas, traffic slows to a crawl, averaging 4mph or less. The Chicago area is a particular offender:

A recent trainload of sulfur took some 27 hours to pass through Chicago — an average speed of 1.13 miles per hour, or about a quarter the pace of many electric wheelchairs.

Obviously the comparably slow speed of rail transport, due to congestion, is one of the reasons the rail system, passenger and freight, have continued to lose market share to the roads. The solution is simple: double the tracks. Most railroads in America are single-track, meaning there's no passing lane. Every mechanical problem, every delay ripples back through the rest of the system. With doubled lines everywhere a slowed or stopped train can simply be bypassed.

So what would be the cost of that? Obviously there would have to be a costly study to determine the cost, but as a back-of the envelope calculation, a recent project in Spain doubled and electrified the tracks of an existing railway at a cost of €2.125million/km. Apply that to the US railway system (ignoring the economies of scale inherent in a far larger project, and cost differences due to terrain, etc.) the cost to double and electrify the entire US rail system would be about $500 billion.

That's a steep bill, but infrastructure spending returns a lot of money to the economy with new jobs and business growth. As a comparison, the Fed's Quantitative Easing program, in which the government essentially prints money and gives it to the banks, has printed up $3.8 trillion so far, a total that continues to rise by $85 billion per month. Yes, really.

We need to think bigger. A zero-emissions future is not going to look like today. Our economy needs to be fundamentally restructured, beyond adding bike lanes and wind farms (as good and helpful as those things are.) And in the political sphere, climate hawks have been caricatured as anti-consumer, anti-growth, neo-Puritan hippies (and some are; not that there's anything wrong with that).

The people buying into this messaging and off-put by it are the white, conservative, hierarchist males. And you can resent 'em if you want, but there are a lot of them and they have a lot of power. Maybe nothing will get them on the right side of history, but if anything can, it will have to start with showing them that our dreams for our country are big, bold, and ambitious, and that the world after fossil fuels is one of abundance and hard-driving industry.

Yes, Virgina, there are simple villains in climate change

Andrew Revkin, in his continuing efforts to be the bard of inactivism, wants us to know the climate change is everyone's (and thereby no one's) fault:

We grew up in the twentieth century when everything about the environment was either “woe is me” or “shame on you.” It’s all coming undone, and it’s your fault. That is so antiquated when you look at a problem like climate change, where there’s no whodunit. It’s, ‘We all dunit.’ We’re all using energy. You can punish Exxon, but I still have to fill up my Prius once in awhile and my mini van, which I need because we have two dogs, is not the most efficient vehicle in the world. So whodunit? Me. But the old model was that it had to be someone else’s fault and the other part of the old model was we had to pass a law, which basically means the solution is someone else’s solution. It’s government, a treaty, a law that’ll solve it. Things like climate change are just so much more wicked than the kind of problem you would solve that way. We have to get comfortable with the story when there is no simple villain….

This reminds me of nothing so much as Megyn Kelly's recent rant against evil historical revisionists who question the unquestionable reality that "Santa Claus is just white": 



Prompting Jon Stewart and friends to respond along the lines of "Uh, Megyn? Santa Claus isn't real."

Similarly, it's time the internet had a talk with Mr Revkin and explained to him another of the hard truths of adulthood: simple villains aren't real. Truly, they aren't any more real than Santa Claus. Climate change is no exception to the general rule of life that most big problems implicate a large number of people to a lesser or greater degree.

Whilst the civil rights movement was making simple villains out of Bull Connor and Strom Thurmond, there was endemic racism throughout both South and North. Whites everywhere benefited from employment and housing opportunities denied to blacks and other minorities. To this day Americans continue to benefit from centuries of unpaid labor by black slaves which contributed to our economy, for which reparations have never been made, or even attempted.

You are all me!

Stories of simple villainy exist for the same reason stories about Santa Claus exist: they make people happy. Specifically, they make people happier in undertaking just what Revkin wants them to undertake; reform of a social ill to which many people are a party, which will require short-term sacrifices from a lot of people.

The campaign against Jim Crow is one example of how this can be successful. The campaign against smoking is a still more recent example. Smoking has been steadily losing its grip on the American people over the past fifty years:

Smoking rates in the US over time

The simple villains of the tobacco wars were not the individual smokers (of course) but the tobacco companies who concealed evidence of the health risks of smoking, and waged an aggressive campaign of disinformation to cast doubt on the strong scientific evidence of harm (sound familiar?)

The tobacco companies ended up paying out hundreds of billions of dollars in settlements. But were they the only, or even the primary source of the harm caused by smoking? Certainly not. Farmers had to grow the foul stuff. The government subsidized that growth with taxpayer dollars, which makes it pretty rich, one might argue, for the government to go after the tobacco companies.

Hundreds of thousands of supermarkets, corner stores, bars, smoking shops and other businesses sold (and continue to sell) these death-dealing products, to make money.

Tens of millions of Americans chose to smoke this unhealthy product, to expose other people (most damagingly, their own children) to the smoke, and continued to do so, in many cases, long after their own health had been destroyed.

Did the campaign against tobacco target these people? No it did not. Should it have? Obviously not. As targets they are too numerous, too diffuse, too varied in their level of responsibility, too weak individually to alter the course of the epidemic.

Were the tobacco companies unfairly targeted? No! They lied to the public, lied about the science, and did tremendous damage to the public health in the service of their own bottom lines. Nevertheless, making them the simple villains of the tobacco wars was a political decision by those activists working on the problem -- a very successful one. While waging a rhetorical and later legal war on the tobacco companies, they very successfully encouraged a large portion of Big Tobacco's customers to divest themselves from its product. They convinced legislators to heavily tax cigarettes and heavily restrict where you could smoke them. They did this without making the individual smokers targets. They used their simple villains, the tobacco companies, to cast them as victims.

Revkin speaks dismissively of targeting Exxon as a villain of climate change, or using the kind of legislation used against tobacco companies to restrict the activities of big polluters. But he doesn't actually give any real reason why this won't work. Yes, everyone is implicated in the release of GHGs to some extent. Just as everyone is implicated in structural racism to some extent, or in the labor conditions that produce the cheap plastic products Americans so love, or as tens millions of Americans willing participated (many still do) in the tobacco epidemic. But that is no reason why we cannot identify big, destructive actors profiting hugely and deceiving the public and go after them.

Simple villains are a story, a rhetorical choice. In real life nothing is perfectly simple. But identifying bad guys and going after them can be a spoonful of sugar to help social change go down. Action is easier when there is a villain to target; that is why the government has taken vast amounts of action (much of it ill-considered) against the threat of terrorism, and virtually none against the far more dire threat of climate change. And in the complex tale of our fossil fuel addiction, there's no shortage of serious bad guys begging to be highlighted.

The body electric

Fact of the day:

The ability to move electricity from power plants to end users will also be threatened by climate change, since electrical transmission lines lose 7 to 8 percent of their transmitting capacity in high temperatures--just when demand for power rises.

This from a study on the effects of climate change on California's grid. Another little bit of knowledge to stew over:

The warmer climate will decrease hydropower generation in the summer months when it is needed most, the report said. High-elevation hydropower plants, which supply about 75 percent of the state's hydropower, are especially at risk, since the small size of their reservoirs allows little flexibility to cope with reduced snowpack.
At the same time, higher temperatures alone will require the state to increase its electricity generating capacity 38 percent over current levels by 2100.

 This is apropos of the crisis this week in India, where a massive blackout left 670 million people in the dark. That's roughly ten percent of the population of the world. Most of the power is back on today, but rolling blackouts and "power holidays" will continue to be a fact of life. (Revkin's roundups here and here.)

India's blackout points to a dangerous climate feedback -- the political feedback. Global warming is going to ramp up demand for electricity and threaten supplies. Not just hydropower but any plant that requires water for cooling (nuclear, coal, gas) can potentially be compromised by the heat. The heat ramps up transmission losses (did you know that? I didn't.) Power lines can be compromised by wildfires, floods, or other extreme weather event.

The political feedback comes when the public demands reliable electricity and doesn't care whether the source of that power makes the long-term problem worse. Some of India's electrical problems stem from a shortage of coal, which in turn is partially the result of the world's largest democracy protecting some of its last dense forests. They are wise to do so, but will they maintain their resolve in the face of events like those of last week?

The adaptive capacity of people is often invoked and praised in the climate debate. (Ironically, those that are most apt to profess unlimited faith in the human capacity to adapt and overcome are the most vehement that we should not start the process of adapting and overcoming.) But humans have another, less admirable characteristic; under pressure people frequently give way to emotional and short-term thinking that worsens the very crisis they are responding to.

The trade protectionism that deepened and prolonged the Great Depression is one classic example. Fighting terrorism by invading Iraq could be considered a recent exhibition. Russia's ban of wheat exports in response to its heat wave disaster is another.

It's critical that the world get on a better energy path before our civilization becomes so stressed that people lack the basic security needed to think about the future.

Why Keystone Mattered

Dan Moutal comments:

Frankly this is very over-optimistic. As you noted the Canadian government is working hard to re-write legislation to ensure that opponents to the pipeline don't get in the way.

I would be very surprised if the pipeline is not built before the next election in 2015.

It might be over-optimistic to predict that no new pipeline will ever be built for the tar sands, but I didn't say that. Rather, note is taken of the fact that, contrary to the anguished protests of pro-Keystone folks like Nocera, an alternative route is not automatic, and will only come about by means of further political battles as yet unfought.

Those battles are yet to be won or lost, but without the defeat of Keystone XL, the oil interests would not have had to fight them at all. This is in stark contrast to the arguments of Nocera and others that refusing to approve Keystone XL would cost us jobs and otherwise not affect the development of the tar sands whatsoever.

The benefits of the bare-knuckled fight over Keystone XL are many:

* The pipeline itself is not being built, and hopefully will not be built.
* It is uncertain whether an alternative pipeline will be built. That uncertainty discourages further investment in and development of Canadian dirty oil today, even if an alternative route is built eventually.
* The pipeline has been delayed, which hits oil company profits, provides more time for alternative sources of energy to fall in price, provides more time for an international carbon regime to be put in place, and more time for the government of Canada to change course, as democratic governments are wont to do.

* Alternative pipeline routes are sure to involve further bruising political fights -- hence Harper's attempt to target the charities opposing the pipeline. Even if the oil interests win those fights, they still have to expend time, money and political capital to fight them, and no interest, no matter how powerful, has an infinite supply of those.

It's important that we recognize what was accomplished by the people who demonstrated, who called their representatives, who donated money or spoke out or went to jail, even though it is, of course, a matter of only one possible route of one possible source of dirty-fuel disaster.

Of late I've been re-reading Shelby Foote's epic history of the Civil War; I highly recommend it. One of the things that strikes me, in reading it again, is that the most important and effective commanders were not always the smartest; Grant, for example, was neither a masterful tactician nor a great strategist, he was often caught unprepared, and he was beaten in the field repeatedly. What successful commanders, North and South, Army or Navy, possessed is aptly described by Foote as "[A] hard-driving, bulldog, cut-and-slash aggressiveness, a preference for action at close quarters, and a burning sense of personal insult at the slightest advantage gained by an opponent at [their] expense."

That is the quality that sent Keystone XL down to defeat and left the tar sands developers and the Harper administration with another pipeline fight in the offing, this one in their own backyard. At if their is a similar spirit of action by opponents up there, they may very well lose again. We can only ever fight today's battle, and the reward for winning it -- now and for the foreseeable future -- is tomorrow's battle.

Say not the Struggle Naught availeth

Arthur Hugh Clough. 1819–1861

SAY not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.
If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;	5
It may be, in yon smoke conceal'd,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,	10
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!	15
But westward, look, the land is bright!

Keystone XL: The truth comes out

The purveyors of dirty oil are getting impatient:

LONDON, Ontario — As the United States continues to play political Ping-Pong with the fate of the Keystone XL pipeline, Canadian officials and companies are desperately seeking alternatives to get the country’s nearly 200 billion barrels in oil reserves — almost equal to that of Saudi Arabia — to market from landlocked Alberta.

Oil companies complain that they are losing revenues from pipeline bottlenecks. So Canada is plunging ahead with plans to build more pipelines of its own. 

To hasten development of new export routes, the Conservative government is streamlining permit processes by accelerating scheduled hearings and limiting public comment. The government has also threatened to revoke the charitable status of environmental groups that are challenging the projects.

Wow, they sound a little desperate, don't they?  It's a far cry from the lazy confidence of the "they'll just sell it to China" crowd, well represented by the noxious Joe Nocera:

  “The effort to stop Keystone is part of a broader effort to stop the expansion of the tar sands,” Brune said.  “It is based on choking off the ability to find markets for tar sands oil.”

This is a ludicrous goal.  If it were to succeed, it would be deeply damaging to the national interest of both Canada and the United States.  But it has no chance of succeeding.  Energy is the single most important industry in Canada.  Three-quarters of the Canadian public agree with the Harper government’s diversification strategy.  China’s “thirst” for oil is hardly going to be deterred by the Sierra Club. And the Harper government views the continued development of the tar sands as a national strategic priority.

Thus Joe, in the ironically titled "The Poisoned Politics of Keystone XL." The government of of Canada is still eager, obviously, but its power is not limitless.  The environmentalists opposing the project have obviously shaken the Harper regime rather badly:

And Public Safety Canada, the equivalent of the United States Department of Homeland Security, has classified environmentalists as a potential source of domestic terrorism, adding them to a list that includes white supremacists.

"Sell it to China" turns out to be easier said than done:

Indigenous groups must be consulted if new pipelines cross their land. To gain coastal access, pipeline companies must also navigate the politics of some of the most environmentally conscious Canadian provinces, British Columbia and Quebec, where public opinion tends to be against both pipelines and further fossil fuel development.

Vancouver’s City Council recently passed a motion requiring that pipeline companies take on 100 percent liability for the economic and environmental costs of a worst-case spill. Even though the federal government gives permissions for pipelines, such local maneuvering and lawsuits can cause severe delays.

“It’s poetic justice that Vancouver, the birthplace of Greenpeace, stands between the last big oil deposit on Earth and the expanding markets in Asia,” said Ben West of the Wilderness Committee, a consortium of environmental groups. “I’d anticipate it won’t get built for years.”

By which time we will maybe all be a little wiser, have gained some years to observe and reflect on the damage that has been done so far.

El Nino is coming

Probably:

Red means hot

Solar cycle 24, after a brief dip, is also continuing its gradual escalation:

Obviously these are short-term oscillations that have little or nothing to do with the long-term climate picture. Where they may be important, however, is in the political calculus. The US and Europe have been mired in deep recessions, and the trouble is far from over:

Old chart, but the picture has changed little recently

The American public has allowed climate change to be shunted out of their consciousness by other priorities, especially the recession. That's a shame. What we most need to pull us out of the doldrums is a stiff jolt of Keynesian stimulus, the kind of stimulus that could be achieved by, say:

* Overhauling the power grid with low-loss high-voltage direct current lines (HVDC), cutting transmission losses and creating the infrastructure for a true national market in energy.

* Modernizing our commercial rail network with dual tracks and electrified rail, decreasing our reliance on our diesel-fueled truck fleet to move goods.

* Weatherizing millions of homes and commercial buildings.

 . . . and so on. We could attack the jobs problem and the climate change problem simultaneously -- but at the moment, that is not the political conversation we are having.

My point, with this, is that there are opportunities ahead. This recession will give way to an expansion as they generally do. Sometime in the next few years, maybe as soon as the fall, we will see for the first time what we get from the combination of El Nino conditions, the upper half of the solar cycle, and CO2 concentrations flirting with 400ppm. And that is going to be a new conversation, politically speaking.

The American public has lost interest in climate change -- but this too shall pass. Unlike, say, famine in Africa, or conflict in the Middle East, climate change is going to become more and more intrusive until it is impossible for the public to ignore. For those of us already focused on the need for strong action on greenhouse gases emissions, now is the time to be sharpening a common message and a clear, simple plan.

Pragmatism

The inevitable Revkin headline:

The argument is one we've seen before:

Many of my conservative friends are deeply suspicious of climate change, and they hate carbon taxes and cap and trade. They’re not interested in adapting to a supposedly hypothetical future. Fair enough. Everyone is entitled to an opinion [But not their own . . .] . . . .

Guess what? Many of the things that help reduce the threats of climate change can also be good for our economy and national security, and vice versa. Many of the changes proposed to adapt to climate change are readily justifiable as approaches to shelter our wealth and well-being against the erratic forces of nature such as Hurricane Katrina and the recent floods in Australia. Why not work to boost innovation, the economy, disaster preparedness and national security, and be pleasantly surprised when greenhouse gas emissions and vulnerability to climate change go down, too? Why not approach the debate from another direction, and be happy that we find allies instead of adversaries?

I'd like to think I'm very happy to find allies wherever on the political spectrum they might reside. But this specific approach is fraught, and not just because we have watched for the last three years as our tax- and spending-cutting, moderate-appointing, terrorist-killing president has been universally vilified by the right as the second coming of Lenin. As Revkin says, if you can grab the middle you can marginalize the fringes, and we're going to have to, whatever the game plan.

But is it worth it to dilute and muddy a very clear message -- we are radically change the climate in dangerous ways -- in order to frame action in terms of goals that haven't motivated the public to act by themselves? The benefits of mitigation and adaptation both for national security, the economy, innovation etc. have been extensively discussed and, on the right, dismissed. Fighting climate change has been discursively "coded" as a left-wing thing, and arguing that it advances right-wing and all-wing goals isn't going to change that. It's the different-values fallacy again; the idea that the right wants different things, and by offering them different things you bring them over to your side.

But the right doesn't want different things, and the appeal to the middle is the appeal to our shared values, to our shared interest in fighting climate change. We need to change, subtly, the emotional coding of the fight against climate change, not abandon what we have argued and believe is the central challenge to our 21st century civilization just so we can sell tired, nonspecific election year patter about "innovation" and "national security." The winning angle to not to make people respond to the idea of "national security," but to give them in a form they understand a visceral sense of the literal, specific threat to our nation and our world. It's about our common fate, not issues potpourri. As one master of the revolutionary middle ground put it:

"For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."