Author: Bryan Walker

Whole Earth Discipline

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

When James Lovelock, Edward O. Wilson and Ian McEwan jostle to praise a book I assume it will be worth attention.  Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto doesn’t disappoint. The title echoes the Whole Earth Catalogue which he founded over forty years ago as an ambitious reference aid for skills, tools and products useful to a self-sustainable lifestyle.

Times have changed and Brand has changed with them. Climate change has become a clear and present danger. He has become more of a pragmatist, though no less of an environmentalist. His pragmatism leads him to regard with favour three factors which put him to some extent at odds with others in the environmental movement. The three are urbanisation, nuclear power and genetic engineering, and part of the purpose of the book is to urge the Green-inclined to consider how the three may now be considered significant contributions to facing up to climate change.

There’s no questioning the seriousness of climate change. James Lovelock is frequently Brand’s point of reference in this regard. He hopes that things won’t get as bad as Lovelock’s prediction that we are in the process of moving to a stable hot state 5 degrees warmer than now, but recognises that even the 2 degree rise which politicians seem to be regarding as an acceptable limit will mean large species loss, more severe storms, floods and droughts, refugees from sea level rise, and other expensive and inhumane consequences. It’s against the background of this concern that he sets his case.

Urbanisation is proceeding apace, and is to be welcomed. Brand takes a positive view of what cities mean for the people who are now flooding into them, even if they begin in the squatter settlements which can look so dismal to outside observers. He points to on-the-spot slum researcher reports which observe that cities are very successful in promoting new forms of income generation, that it is much cheaper to provide services in urban areas and that getting people to move to the city may be the most realistic poverty reduction strategy. From the environmental perspective, natural systems in the countryside fare better with fewer inhabitants. Subsistence farming on marginal land can give way to more concentrated cash-crop agriculture on prime land. Aquifers recover. Forests recover. Birth rates drop when people move to cities. Women play a more powerful role in city society. Urban societies become greener in their sensibilities, which can lead to increasing protection for the countryside.

This is only a sample of the wide-ranging survey Brand offers of the positives in growing urbanisation. He acknowledges the negative actualities as well. Cities are far from an unmitigated good. But he is firm that the prospect of 80 percent of humanity living on 3 percent of the land will be a net good for the planet. Infrastructure efficiency, energy use reduction, less pressure on rural natural systems, and the like, are adduced to support this conclusion.

Brand’s section on nuclear power is prefaced with a variously attributed quote: “With climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened. With nuclear power, those who know the most are the least frightened.” His own stance on nuclear power has flipped from anti to pro for two reasons. First, he gradually realised that nuclear waste disposal no longer looked like a cosmic-level problem. Second, nuclear power looked like a major solution in the light of growing worries about climate change. Coal is the enemy. He endorses Hansen’s statement in his open letter to President Obama, “Coal plants are factories of death”, and the accompanying observation “One of the greatest dangers the world faces is the possibility that a vocal minority of anti-nuclear activists could prevent phase-out of coal emissions.”

Brand is all for energy efficiency and for renewables, but impressed by the claim that renewables cannot be relied on for the baseload electricity currently provided by coal in many countries. The dangers supposed attendant on nuclear power generation are not now serious.  Much work has gone into minimizing the risk of accidents. The accumulated effects of low-dose radiation are no longer thought significant for human health. Waste storage arrangements are not as hazardous as once thought. There is every reason for it to be part of the energy portfolio we will need to replace fossil fuel sources.

Brand reserves his strongest accusation of the environmental movement for its opposition to genetic engineering (GE). “We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.”  Noting the lack of alarm about genetic engineering among biologists he comments that “they know what a minor event it is amid the standard chaos of evolution and the just-barely-organised chaos of agricultural breeding.” Taking the example of GE herbicide-tolerant crops he points to the great ecological win they represent in that they encourage no-till agriculture. This offers major climate benefits along with improvements to soil structure because tillage releases carbon from the soil, which holds more carbon than all the living vegetation and the atmosphere put together. He regrets that organic farmers, whose work he values highly, can’t use GE but must continue to plough. Some of those farmers also regret it.

There is a great deal more than this example in the chapters which proclaim the green possibilities of GE and his hope that the organic farming and food industries will come to terms with the technologies of “ecology in the seed”.

Having dealt with the three developments which he considers need to be embraced, not rejected, by the environmental movement, Brand moves on to some general considerations as to how not to repeat the mistakes made in those areas. Greens need to be less romantic and more scientific.  “Environmentalists do best when they follow where the science leads, as they did with climate change. They do worst when they get nervous about where science leads, as they did with genetic engineering.”

Ecosystem engineering and niche construction are part of what humans have always done. Brand makes an emphatic case for tending the wild, for people being densely involved with nature. “It’s all gardening” is the chapter heading. Restoration is part of it, but so is agriculture which merges with the practices of tending the wild.

Humanity is now stuck with a planet stewardship role. The trend of the changes we have made lately indicates we are doing a poor job of it.  “We are forced to learn planet craft – in both sense of the word: craft as skill and craft as cunning.” For that we need a better knowledge of how the Earth system works. “We are model-rich and data poor.”

Brand writes with clarity and verve. He grips reader attention. Whatever one thinks of the positions he holds there is high interest in his explanations of them and no denying their importance in relation to the seriousness of the challenge of climate change. How in fact the balance between nuclear power and renewables will be worked out remains to be seen, and the whole question of non-fossil fuel energy sources seems still very open. Some who have no objection to nuclear power on principle still consider it unlikely to play a major role. But Brand’s concern is to establish that there is no reason to exclude it from consideration, or indeed to exclude anything else which science affirms as useful to ecological balance.

The power of the ocean

The following column was published in the Waikato Times on 19 January

Silent, invisible, predictable, sustainable. Those are the four words Crest Energy uses to describe its planned marine turbine power generation project in the Kaipara Harbour. Capturing the power of the tidal movement of the up to 8,000 million cubic metres of water which pass in and out of the harbour each day, the project may eventually contribute as much as 3% of New Zealand’s electricity supply. Assuming it gets under way, that is. However, that has just become more likely with the news that the Environment Court has delivered an interim decision in favour of consent, subject to a fine-tuning of consent conditions. Mainly the Court wants further monitoring work to satisfy concerns about possible interference with Maui’s dolphin and snappper fisheries.

Like wind, the ocean around New Zealand offers many promising sites of renewable electricity generation. None of us who have stood on a beach can doubt the power of the ocean.  Harnessing a little of it for our human purposes is now technically feasible and, if we ever face up to the real cost of fossil fuels, no doubt feasible economically as well. Ultimately in New Zealand wave power is the larger potential source, since our tidal range is not great.  But tidal flow offers significant opportunities in some places, as the Kaipara project makes apparent.  Cook Strait is one, and Neptune Power has consent to trial a turbine there, probably in the near future. They comment that the mass flow in Cook Strait makes it the most concentrated energy resource in New Zealand. Foveaux Strait is another site where tidal flow is very large and it is not fanciful to imagine the Bluff aluminium smelter powered from it.

The advantage of tidal power over wave is its predictability. Waves vary according to the weather. Nevertheless there are plenty of waves around New Zealand, and trials are under way to test their electricity generating capacity.  Last year the government made a grant of $760,000 to Wellington company Power Projects Ltd to enable deployment of a 20 kw device, building on their successful trialling of a smaller model. Surveys indicate that the potential from wave power is high in relation to New Zealand’s total electricity requirements.  A plus is that wave energy tends to peak in the winter season when power demand is at its greatest.

There are currently no fewer than 26 wave and tidal energy projects at various stages of development in New Zealand. That doesn’t mean that generation is imminent, but we should not be surprised if very rapid growth occurs as the technologies mature.  I’m in no position to predict how the various renewable energy options presented by New Zealand’s geography will sort themselves out, but between wind, marine and geothermal power there appears to be a wealth of resources. That could soon see us no longer reliant on the burning of fossil fuels which currently provides 34% of our electricity. Renewables should be well able to include supplying electrically-powered plug-in vehicles.

It would be nice to report that the government is enthusiastically driving the change to renewable energy.  In the case of marine energy it has, admittedly, provided $8 million over a period of four years to support selected projects. But it committed $20 million over three years to gather seismic data in support of oil and gas exploration, and has extended tax exemptions for offshore exploration.  The Minister of Energy reserves his greatest enthusiasm for when he speaks of the prospects for fossil fuel extraction and export over coming decades. In a rational world we’d be more interested in finding ways of leaving it in the ground, knowing, as we now do, the fearful prospects ahead if we keep burning the stuff. There’s still some priority-sorting needed at government level.

The Climate Crisis

The Climate Crisis: An Introductory Guide to Climate Change

David Archer and Stefan Rahmstorf are notable climate scientists. They are also excellent communicators of the science to the general reader, as is apparent in their new book The Climate Crisis: An Introductory Guide to Climate Change. My review of Archer’s previous book The Long Thaw remarked on his ability to illuminate topics for the non-scientist. In this book the authors seek to provide an accessible and readable account of the “treasure trove” of the IPCC reports. They distinguish their work sharply from the Summaries for Policy Makers officially provided by the IPCC, which are negotiated between government representatives and exclude much of what scientists think and write in the full report. But while they draw heavily on the latest IPCC report and feature many of its informative graphs and tables, they also refer to new findings since the 2006 cut-off date for the report, and draw attention to weaknesses they sometimes see in the report.

Most of the book deals with global climate science, the focus of IPCC Working Group I, with subsequent brief attention given to the impacts of climate change (Working Group II) and to mitigation (Working Group III).

After looking back over the development of the science from its slow beginnings in the 19th century with the discoveries of Fourier, Tyndall and Arrhenius to the explosion of research in more recent years, the authors carefully explain the way in which the global temperature responds to the forcings of the various agents, warming in the case of the greenhouse gases, offset by some cooling through the effect of aerosols. There are no natural forcings, such as solar irradiance, that can explain the warming of the past five decades.

The global average warming of 0.8 degrees since the late nineteenth century and 0.6 degrees since the 1970s is unequivocally shown by measurements.  Other observed changes include significant changes in rainfall, both increases and decreases, and some changes in atmospheric circulation patterns.

A chapter on ice and snow acknowledges the uncertain scientific understanding of the behaviour of melting ice on the ice sheets of Greenland and the West Antarctic and the unpredictability of ice sheet flow. The faster than expected sea ice melting in the Arctic carries profound climatic implications.  Overall observations of snow and ice provide powerful support for the warming trend.

The oceans receive attention as a major player in the climate pattern. We know that they are heating up, to some degree lessening the warmth in the atmosphere – the authors calculate a temporary effect of 0.4 degrees.  Salinity is being affected – increasing in sub-tropical regions and declining in higher latitudes.  Sea level is rising steadily, albeit with regional natural oscillations. The speed with which the ocean is taking up large amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere is making the water more acidic, a worrying trend likely to cause a severe threat to marine life if it continues.

Paleoclimatology studies support a key role for CO2 in regulating climate. They also tell us that Earth’s climate has the potential to flip abruptly from one mode of operation to another. They serve as a reality check for the climate models used to forecast Earth’s response to our CO2 release. The past strengthens the forecast.

The forecast is for warming somewhere between 2 degrees and 7 degrees depending on the IPCC scenario.  The authors regard it as unfortunate that all the IPCC scenarios are non-mitigation scenarios, intended to tell us what might happen if we do not take action to reduce emissions. They consider it a serious shortcoming that mitigation scenarios have not also been systematically assessed, though they are likely to be part of the next IPCC report. Other forecasts include changes in precipitation, which they note will probably have a bigger impact on human society and ecosystems than temperature changes. Sea level rise is likely to be higher than the limited forecast of the IPCC report, and the authors don’t rule out a rise by over one metre by the end of the century, noting that Hansen fears two metres by that date. Changes in ocean currents are uncertain and the authors at this point comment on the limitations of the use of climate models, also apparent in relation to ice sheet behaviour.  The low probability-high impact risks are difficult to assess. There may be a less than 10% risk of a shut-down of the Atlantic overturning circulation, but it would result in a massive change in the operation of the planet’s climate system. Ocean acidification will continue and worsen.

Against the accusation that the outlooks are alarmist they point to earlier IPCC projections which have turned out to be correct in the subsequent 18 years. In fact the faster than expected sea level rise and arctic sea-ice shrinking suggests that the IPCC in the past may have underestimated rather than exaggerated climate change, though they advance that possibility with caution.

In the last third of the book the authors move to discuss the impacts of climate change and how we might avoid it.  The expected impact on the world’s ecosystems is dire. Human society will suffer from water stress, from food insecurity, from coastal zone hazards due to rising sea level and from threats to health.  Adaptation will be necessary and can be very effective, but has no hope of coping with all the projected effects, especially over the long term. Mitigation is essential.  The book runs through some of the mitigation options offered by Working Group III.  However, noting that the consensus view the IPCC represents is regarded by some energy experts and engineers as too limited and conservative, the authors depart from the IPCC material for a time to provide a somewhat more visionary perspective, based on renewables, cogeneration, smart grids, heat pumps and electromobility. They refer to the surprise success story of wind power and look to a time later in the century when solar power could easily provide most of our energy needs.

In a final brief section the authors leave the IPCC to discuss policy matters.  In the course of the discussion they comment on the persistence of arguments against anthropogenic global warming which float around the internet and are repeated by gullible newspaper editors and systematically promoted by lobbyist organisations.

“We would personally be very relieved if anthropogenic global warming were to be disproven by some new scientific findings – we certainly do not “like” global warming. But at this point, the body of scientific evidence is so strong that the hope that this problem will go away by itself looks exceedingly remote…The good news is: we have the technological and economic capacity to meet this challenge.”

My background is teaching English and I appreciated seeing the book end with a lengthy quote from novelist Ian McEwan, known for his concern over climate change. He concludes:

“Are we at the beginning of an unprecedented sera of international cooperation, or are we living in an Edwardian summer of reckless denial? Is this the beginning, or the beginning of the end?”

One hopes for a wide readership for this measured book which clearly and thoughtfully sets out the results of the work of a great many scientists. I’m not sure that rationality stands much of a chance in a world which gives high popularity ranking to the denialism of authors like Booker and Plimer and Singer, but for those readers who retain a desire to understand real science Archer and Rahmstorf are reliable and helpful guides.

Seven feet high and rising

Plan for two metres sea level rise this century. That’s the message from Rob Young and Orrin Pilkey in a Yale Environment article published today.

“This number is not a prediction. But we believe that seven feet is the most prudent, conservative long-term planning guideline for coastal cities and communities, especially for the siting of major infrastructure; a number of academic studies examining recent ice sheet dynamics have suggested that an increase of seven feet or more is not only possible, but likely. Certainly, no one should be expecting less than a three-foot rise in sea level this century.”

Continue reading “Seven feet high and rising”

Friedman: China beating US on low carbon energy

Thomas Friedman is now doubtful that China will follow an American lead towards a greener economy, as he suggested in his book Hot, Flat and Crowded reviewed here. He considers rather that it is more likely to pull ahead of the US. He writes from China in his recent column in the New York Timesthat he’s been astonished to learn of how many projects have got under way in China in just the last year –- wind, solar, nuclear, mass transit and more efficient coal burning.

He quotes Bill Gross, head of a solar-thermal Californian company, eSolar, announcing the biggest solar deal ever, a 2 gigawatt, $5 billion deal to build solar thermal plants in China using California-based technology. Gross comments that China is being more aggressive than the US. His company applied for a US Department of Energy loan for a 92 megawatt project in New Mexico. In less time than it took them to do stage 1 of the application review “China signs, approves, and is ready to begin construction this year on a 20 times bigger project!”

Friedman goes on to instance other developments. Solar panels are one. He says so many new solar panel makers emerged in China in the last year alone that the price of solar power has fallen from roughly 59 cents a kilowatt hour to 16 cents. 50 new nuclear reactors are expected to be built by 2020, while the rest of the world may manage 15. High speed trains are breaking world records. A high speed rail link from Shanghai to Beijing means trains will cover the 700 miles in just five hours, compared with 12 hours today (and 18 hours for a similar distance from New York to Chicago in the US).

China is on the way to making green power technologies cheaper for itself and for everyone else.

“But even Chinese experts will tell you that it will all happen faster and more effectively if China and America work together — with the U.S. specializing in energy research and innovation, at which China is still weak, as well as in venture investing and servicing of new clean technologies, and with China specializing in mass production.”

Friedman concludes with a call to America to put in place a long-term carbon price that stimulates and rewards clean power innovation. “We can’t afford to be asleep with an invigorated China wide awake.”

Meanwhile India has plans to be a world leader in solar power, as announced by the Prime Minister a couple of days ago. He launched the National Solar Mission with a target of 20,000 megawatts of solar generating capacity by 2022. It will be helped along by a regulatory and incentive framework. Manmohan Singh hoped the new laws and incentives will “lead to a rapid scale up of capacity. This will encourage technological innovation and generate economies of scale, thereby leading to a steady lowering of costs. Once parity with conventional power tariff is achieved, there will be no technological or economic constraint to the rapid and large-scale expansion of solar power thereafter”.

He said he was “convinced that solar energy can also be the next scientific and technological frontier in India after atomic energy, space and information technology”. The scheme has pride of place in India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change.