Author: Bryan Walker

Too Little, Too Late

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The frustrations of a House of Commons backbench politician who takes anthropogenic climate change seriously are well reflected in Colin Challen’s recently published book Too Little, Too Late: The Politics of Climate Change. He opens with a memorable verbatim account (from his notes) of a two hour “ping pong match” at the 2007 Bali conference in which the Chinese finally overcame developed world opposition to a modest proposal about how technology transfer should be discussed in future. It was enough to make one wonder how on earth any significant agreement can come at Copenhagen. But realist though Challen is, he’s not a quitter and his book plugs away at the issue.

He turns to the 1930s and Churchill’s persistent warnings about the threat of fascism as a possible analogue to the climate change situation today. Defining the four phases leading up to the Second World War as denial, appeasement, phoney war and total war, he wonders whether some countries, such as China, are now at the stage of appeasement – trying to ameliorate a problem one is nevertheless decisively doing nothing to stop; others such as the UK and the EU may have begun the phoney war – setting targets which might go some of the way to sorting the problem out but whose performance has yet to be proven.  The wartime theme appears from time to time throughout the book.

His detailed discussions cover many aspects of the political approaches to climate change, particularly in the UK.  Grand global promises he eyes with some suspicion, citing the 1970 commitment from developed countries to devote 0.7% of their GDP to overseas development, a target honoured by only five countries by 2008 and well missed by most.  Carbon markets and emissions trading schemes he is also wary of, pointing to the ease with which they may not actually lead to any reductions in emissions. The markets will need to be ruled with an iron discipline if they are to deliver.  Contraction and convergence frameworks provide the discipline which most appeals to him.

In discussing renewable energy Challen compares the contradictory ways in which the UK has moved (or not moved) towards renewable energy with the focused German approach and its much more successful outcomes both environmentally and industrially.  Photovoltaics may not seem the best bet for German power generation, but it has served to get ahead in R&D, export opportunities and employment growth.  The feed-in tariff, which pays a guaranteed price for every KWh produced from a renewable energy source, decreasing over the 20 year period of the guarantee, has served to finance renewable energy in most EU member states, but the UK has shied away from the government role required for such a system.   Challen has an interesting discussion of the 19th century railroad mania which started in the UK in 1844.  There has been no equivalent in modern times of such a major investment scheme accounting for so much of a country’s economic activity, though there might be a comparison with the allocation of resources to Britain’s defence during the second world war.  Why not a renewable energy “mania” today? asks Challen. He notes with approval the new sense of engagement that has come in recent times from Ed Milliband, with the joining of government responsibilities for energy under the same roof with climate change in the Department of Energy and Climate Change.  (I thought while reading this of our benighted Minister of Energy  in New Zealand who complains that energy policy has been captured by climate change policy and needs to be separated!)  There is also some readiness under Milliband for the UK to look more favourably at feed-in tariffs.

His chapter on nuclear power speaks of “the great nuclear delusion” and is scathing of the claims made for it as an energy solution.  Currently it supplies 18% of the UK’s electricity supply.  There can be no new sources from nuclear building until the existing plants are rebuilt. This would likely be by about 2020, a date well after emissions have to start falling.  Concentration on a nuclear solution takes attention and money away from more significant measures.  He quotes an analysis which claims that keeping nuclear alive means diverting private and public investment from the cheaper market winners – cogeneration, renewables and efficiency – to the costlier market loser.

Challen is a strong advocate of personal carbon allowances. They fit very well with the contraction and convergence framework he favours.  In this context he has an illuminating discussion of whether emissions should belong to the producer or the consumer.  The UK’s emissions may have lowered, but the emissions embedded in their imports have risen quite dramatically.  Not surprising in view of the fact that in 2005 the top 10% of the world’s population was responsible for 59% of its consumption (and the bottom 50% for 7.2% of consumption).  He asks pertinently on whose carbon inventory China’s emissions should appear in view of such figures.  He sees personal carbon allowances as “a concept of brilliant simplicity, a predictable and orderly reduction of GHG emissions year-on-year, with flexibility in an enclosed system, independent of taxation and providing complete transparency between goals and delivery”.  The powers that be go no further than describing the concept as “an interesting thinkpiece” and “ahead of its time”.  Challen grimly notes that rationing was accepted without significant opposition once war was under way in 1939 and 1940.

Challen, a Labour MP,  founded the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group. He discusses failed attempts to get cross-party consensus, though records some successes, including agreement that the UK’s goal should be to take a fair share of the responsibility for keeping the global temperature increase to within two degrees and that the 2050 emissions reduction target should move to 80%.

It can be a dispiriting picture.  Challen comments that the UK has not hesitated to spend nearly 1% of GDP on resuscitation of the consumer binge economy with all that implies for greenhouse gas emissions. Dealing with climate change could be achieved with not much more than that.  He sees the urgent need for us to use less while we still have the choice as a society, but is profoundly aware of the vested interests which sap political will and of the materialist definition of self-esteem which currently holds sway in society.

Nevertheless the battle for change must be joined.  It’s a battle Challen will be fighting outside parliament after the next election – he is leaving to devote his time to climate change matters, and expects to work in Africa and focus on the economics of global warming, with Sir Nicholas Stern.

 

Copenhagen 4: equity issues

cop_logo_1_r_editedThe fourth section of the Copenhagen congress synthesis report is firmly in the realm of policy. Addressing climate change involves ethics.  Unequivocally the report asserts that serious equity issues should inform the fight to restrain global warming and enters into detail in identifying them.  For one thing the climate is not changing uniformly around the world and the human effects are unequal.  Profoundly unequal, for example, in the impacts of climate change on health. The poor, the marginal, the uneducated and the geographically vulnerable are at greatest risk of injury and death. In general, developed countries are most responsible for climate change up to now while developing countries suffer the majority of the impacts. Any lasting and widely accepted solution to the climate change challenge should recognise and account for these equity dimensions in negotiations and agreements.

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TV3 needs to take stock

Keisha Castle-HughesTV3 news hit one of its lows last night.  Reporter and presenter Samantha Hayes was in Aitutaki in the Cook Islands for the visit of Greenpeace’s ship the Esmeralda on its Pacific climate impact tour, with Sign On ambassador Keisha Castle Hughes on board [Greenpeace release]. I was watching the news item with interest when I thought I heard the reporter saying “while the science is far from settled…”.  Since my hearing is not reliable I checked on the TV3 news website.  I had heard aright.  Here is the full sentence: “While the science is far from settled, Greenpeace is convinced that Aitutaki is on the front line of climate change.”

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Copenhagen 3: targets and timetables

cop_logo_1_r_editedThe third section of the Copenhagen congress synthesis report considers the global targets and timetables that will be necessary to keep warming to no more than 2 degrees.  The report acknowledges that 2 degrees introduces considerable risk to human society and natural ecosystems. However global average temperature has already risen by 0.7 degrees, and inertia in the climate system makes 1.4 degrees inevitable. So 2 degrees may be the best we can hope for.

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The Carbon Age

The Carbon Age: How Life's Core Element Has Become Civilization's Greatest Threat

Journalist and science writer Eric Roston’s book The Carbon Age, highly praised when it was first published last year, is now available in paperback.  It’s about carbon in the universe and the essential part it plays in life on Earth. It’s also about climate change, as its subtitle suggests: How Life’s Core Element Has Become Civilisation’s Greatest Threat.

Roston begins by offering two basic observations that are explored through the book. The first is that Earth’s temperature and the carbon content of the atmosphere are correlated on every geological time scale. The usual sequence is temperature rise first, then elevated carbon content. The reverse is the case today. The second observation is that humans have accelerated the geological carbon cycle to at least one hundred times faster than usual. Man-made global warming is a geological aberration, nearly meteoric in speed.

The first half of the book explores the origins of carbon and life. On earth carbon is “the ubiquitous architect, builder, and most basic building material of life.” Roston follows it into many of its functions and manifestations in fascinating detail. He discusses how carbon’s ability to bond, unbond, and rebond with the other atoms of life makes it a central element in many of life’s necessary components. He considers how the course of evolution both influenced and was influenced by the global carbon cycle. Living matter since its inception has helped regulate the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and seas and on land, conditions that in turn influence evolution. Roston uses the story of cyanobacteria to illustrate how evolution hit on an innovation – an organism which exchanged atmospheric carbon dioxide for atmospheric oxygen. It threw the carbon cycle as it was then into catastrophic disarray and forced its re-invention.

In a chapter on the ocean carbon cycle Roston includes attention to coccolithophores, microscopic shelled algae that colonised the open ocean for the first time after the Permian extinction 250 million years ago. As their shells passed to the seafloor they left their mark in the world’s chalk formations which accumulated from about 100 million to 65 million years ago, at the rate of a millimetre a century. Today they form a vital part of both the marine food chain and carbon’s transport from the ocean surface to the seafloor. They have been remarkably resilient to shocks, but the threat of ocean acidification this century is large enough to threaten their continuance.

A further chapter describes the part played by trees in storing carbon as cellulose and lignin and the formation of coal and oil deposits as carbon burial in the Carboniferous period. The gingko tree and its powers of survival features here. The author comments in relation to our discovery and use of fossil fuels that we are burning part of the pre-Carboniferous greenhouse back to the skies, where the Earth  – at least our Earth – no longer needs it. We are rebuilding the greenhouse Earth decimated by trees more than 300 million years ago.

A brief but interesting chapter on the human body’s conversion of fuel energy into motion concludes Part I of the book on the natural processes of the play of carbon in the evolution and functions of life. Roston then moves on to cover the last 150 years and explains how scientists, industrialists and consumers created what amounts to an industrial carbon cycle — something he characterises as the flushing of millions of years of geological sediment back into the atmosphere. Here he explores a selection of activities, ranging from the development of cars, through synthetic chemistry, to bullet-proof clothing, all followed through in satisfying detail. For the purposes of this review I’ll pause on the chapter which centres on the hundredfold acceleration of the carbon cycle through industry. The flow of carbon through living things has entwined evolution with the inanimate forces of nature. But there is no evidence before now to suggest biology has ever accelerated the long-term carbon cycle on to a short-term path. Only meteorite impacts can compare with the speed with which our industry has interacted with geology. Roston quotes a paleobotanist: “We are plate tectonics!”

But it’s possible to slow down our impact on the carbon-cycle without sacrificing our industrial fire, if we move fast. Technological investment in new energy and materials industries could remake the way we make things. At this point Roston discerns an obstacle in politicians and economists. “What scientists describe as well beyond their danger zone, economists and politicians treat as the bottom of the potentially achievable.” Chemistry gives way to a discussion on economics with the conclusion that as long as we are pegged to an economic orthodoxy that equates well-being with per capita income we are unlikely to address the fundamental drivers of climate change: materialism, crass commercialism, and waste made easy by cheap, plentiful fossil fuels. He considers that industrialised nations can transfer civilisation on to an energy system that will not scorch the earth, though finds it a big ask for a narcissistic generation. Hope springs eternal.

Roston’s book is packed full of investigations and explanations of the chemistry of carbon. I have selected parts where he makes the connection with global warming explicit and in so doing have not done justice to the scope of the book. But it was what I understood to be the depth of his concern over global warming that attracted me to the book in the first place as worth reviewing on a climate change website.  The illuminating explorations into the chemistry of carbon were a bonus.