Holes in COP 28
If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging — The First Law of Holes
The most significant hole we have dug is fossil fuels. The world’s governments subsidize those to the combined tune of $7.2 trillion per year or $228,310.50 per second. We take the money from other sources—health care, education, small business loans, public housing—and give golden parachutes, homes in the Hamptons or Hempstead Heath, and four-story yachts or a seat in Congress or the House of Lords, to oil and coal executives. Sorry, we really wanted to get orthodontic care for our child but this year we had to give $5000 to our neighbor, the oil company shareholder.
Check out this short video: https://twitter.com/think_or_swim/status/1729523299577631064
Another hole is consumer culture—that misplaced notion that humans are somehow different than all the rest of nature and rules of reciprocity or fair share do not apply. We are, after all, exceptional, and endless expansion is our destiny, right?
It doesn’t do much good to climb out of one hole only to fall into another, but maybe it is a step in the right direction if we backfill the first hole so we don’t fall into that one again while we construct ladders to get out of the next. If COP28 does nothing else it could end fossil subsidies.
A recent tee-up of the COP28 debate by David Gelles for The New York Times runs:
There’s no shortage of reasons to be alarmed by climate change these days. This year is almost certain to be the hottest in recorded history. Extreme weather is wreaking havoc around the globe. Fossil fuel production and emissions are still rising, and world leaders are not moving fast enough.
But take a moment to imagine: What if we actually succeed in addressing the climate crisis, and emerge into a new, more bountiful, more prosperous future?
Okay, lets pause there. I agree with Gelles up to this point but what he is imagining as a more bountiful, prosperous future is probably not how I imagine it. He likely foresees an extension of 20th-century techno-utopianism—a machine-based consumer culture made all the more prosperous by AI. I think of it more like Howard and Elizabeth Odom did in their classic curtain call, The Prosperous Way Down, which described how we could yet live better by merely living less large.
That said, the easy way down as it appeared to the Odums in 2006 has been made more difficult by procrastination. A paper released by six leading scientists to pre-print last week spelled out that cost:
There is little evidence supporting assertions that:
current greenhouse gas emissions reduction and removal methods can and will be ramped up in time to prevent dangerous climate change;
overshoot of Paris Agreement targets will be temporary;
net zero emissions will produce a safe, stable climate;
the impacts of overshoot can be managed and reversed;
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models and assessments capture the full scope of prospective disastrous impacts; and
the risks of climate interventions are greater than the risks of inaction.
These largely unsupported presumptions distort risk assessments and discount the urgent need to develop a viable mitigation strategy. Due to political pressures, many critical scientific concerns are ignored or preemptively dismissed in international negotiations. As a result, the present and growing crisis and the level of effort and time that will be required to control and rebalance the climate are severely underestimated.
Electrifying News
The Times continues:
While there’s plenty of bad news to go around, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that enduring progress is within reach. Practically every day, there are encouraging new signs that after decades of dithering, the world is finally getting more serious about tackling climate change.
Wind and solar power are cheaper than ever and are being built at record rates around the globe. Advances in critical new technologies, from carbon capture to fusion power, are occurring with startling speed. Sales of electric vehicles are booming, and badly needed charging stations are being built.
Yes, wind and solar power are following a Moore’s Law of scale, which is to say, the more we deploy, the cheaper and better each generation becomes. This was widely predicted in the 1970s (see, eg: Amory Lovins’ Soft Energy Paths (1977), Vince Taylor’s Energy: The Easy Path (1979), or my own Honicker v. Hendrie: A Lawsuit to End Atomic Power (1978).
That sound logic was thwarted for half a century by invested fossil and nuclear interests that I have elsewhere labeled “Edward Teller’s Ghost” (see: Jennifer Granholm was Pwned) but truthfully, are just technophilic contagion. Advances in critical new technologies, from carbon capture to fusion power, viewed through a more discerning lens, are shown to be patented snake oil. The US Department of Energy has committed billions of taxpayer subsidies to accelerate Direct Air Capture (artificial trees) with nothing remotely approaching that allocated to natural carbon sequestration (real trees, for instance) and a blind eye to the impossible energy and materials requirements of DAC at scale. They seem to imagine DAC will be powered by limitless, too-cheap-to-meter fusion reactors, yet another Tellerian ruse to garner money for the national laboratory eunuchs.
Gelles’ so-called fusion breakthrough—20-billionths of a second of roughly equal energy out for energy in—drawn from 192 high-powered lasers converging on a small capsule of deuterium–tritium with the intensity of several suns—was not about energy as much as about new ways to design weapons. It just showed that if you put enough lasers together and had enough electricity to power them, you could exceed the heat of the Sun. That’s it. That was the “breakthrough.”
As for the electric car roll-out, gas-guzzling SUVs dominate the new car markets worldwide (51%). Last year the average footprint of a new model reached 4.2 m2 (45.2 ft2). A typical residential bathroom, by comparison, is 3.7 m2 (40 ft2), large enough to enclose a bathtub, sink and toilet.
SUVs became all the rage when the Clinton-Gore Administration gave the nearly bankrupt Big Three car companies safety and emissions waivers for any passenger car built on a truck chassis. Automakers promptly phased out station wagons and muscle cars and started madly building SUVs. While driving a 3-ton Escalade land yacht gave drivers a greater sense of security, the higher center of gravity meant rollovers. The cars had longer stopping distances, reduced visibility and greater bravado. SUVs are twice as likely to kill whatever they hit—Fiats, bikes and pedestrians—and don’t even need to back over them to make sure.
Emissions from the global transportation sector could have fallen by more than 30% between 2010 and 2022 had SUVs never been introduced. Instead, they today account for around 46% of all global car sales, with noticeable growth still coming in the United States, India and Europe. EV new sales are at 14%, and even there, designs are gravitating toward E-SUV.
Check out this video: https://twitter.com/i/status/1729842635320250692
The giant reptiles, with the lowest possible brain-to-body-mass ratio, went extinct. Humans cleverly evolved a very high brain-to-body ratio. So what did we do? We wrapped ourselves in a couple of tons of steel, not counting baby seats and all the useless stuff we carry around in the trunk. That destroyed any brain-to-mass advantage.
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Running on Sunlight
The Times effuses further:
Emissions from China, the world’s largest polluter, will peak within the next couple years, many researchers believe. In the United States, the transition to clean power is happening faster than many realize. Those two countries just agreed to accelerate their efforts to reduce emissions, delivering a much-needed jolt of ambition ahead of climate talks in Dubai this month.
That is true as far as it goes. Transition to clean power is now happening every bit as fast as it should have in 1975, had anyone been listening to Amory Lovins. What changed was not that subsidies were given to solar and wind companies (they weren’t), or even that the multi-trillion-dollar subsidies were taken away from the fossil and nuclear companies (they weren’t), but that some of the barriers that had kept solar and wind off the market were lifted, allowing them to compete on their merits, and they quickly outcompeted everything else. This year China will install more new wind energy than the rest of the world combined. It has already been doing that with solar electric power for several years.
Trust funds and vegetables are fundamentally different.
Still, The Times seems to gloss over an important caveat. Gelles leaves the distinctly erroneous impression that we can replace fossil power with renewables and that nothing else needs to change. But there is one fundamental difference. Fossil energy comes from drawing down a three-hundred-million-year savings account of sunlight falling on Earth, being converted by photosynthesis into carbonaceous plants, and then being entombed in Earth’s outer crust to distill into compact hydrocarbons. Two to three hundred million years in Earth’s geological distillery bequeathed a bounteous trust fund of liquid sunlight.
Renewables are more like a debit card. They have to be recharged every day as the sun passes from horizon to horizon, the wind and tides respond, and that power is banked for this day’s use, or, with batteries and vegetables, a few more days more.
Trust funds and vegetables are fundamentally different. The notion that we are going to run high-entropy systems like mega-metropolises, transoceanic air travel, AI data centers, factory robots and billion-ton-per-year Direct Air Carbon Capture devices on sunlight is ludicrous. There will be a reckoning. The graceful path is cutting waste in the system while gradually scaling back—the Prosperous Way Down formula. The messy way is to build up irresistible expectations of endless economic expansion and then crash when you hit the immovable wall we all know is there.
Hot Air
The Times concludes:
Efforts to crack down on emissions of methane — a potent but often overlooked greenhouse gas — are ramping up. Brazil, Indonesia and other countries are taking serious steps to reduce deforestation. Youth activists are using protests and lawsuits to take on the fossil fuel industry. And in a powerful message that could be a sign of things to come, Ecuador voted this year to leave some oil in the ground.
These are the kinds of developments — large and small, from governments and the private sector — that together will determine just how hot our planet becomes.
Hang on there. Methane emissions are continuing to accelerate and the rate of growth is itself growing. Remote sensing and isotopic analysis reveal it is no longer just wellhead and pipeline “fugitive” methane from fracking, nor is it cattle and rice production, since neither of those has significantly expanded. Nor, surprisingly, can that rise yet be attributed to deglaciation, permafrost melt or clathrate release, as will inevitably arrive as we breach 1.5°C (2023-25) and 2.0°C (~2030-35). Rather, the source of all this deadly methane (methane is 20-80 times more potent in trapping heat than carbon dioxide) has been pinpointed to the Equatorial tropics where the leading suspects are sea level rise flooding estuarial swamps and Biblical deluges killing forests and grasslands, leaving rotting plant material to decompose anaerobically, which generates methane.
Before we pat Brazil and Indonesia on the back for reducing deforestation, we had best look at the latest satellite imagery. Again, had we acted in 1970, when we well understood the problem and it was beginning to be debated at the highest levels of government and intergovernmental fora, we might allow The Times’ claim to stand. Now, not so much. It simply will not hold, well, water.
I agree though, “These are the kinds of developments … that together will determine just how hot our planet becomes.” From where I sit that is likely to be very hot indeed.
This is not to say it is too late to do anything. Every step we take to reduce the harm we are doing will make the going a little easier for our successors. The world will never be as sweet again as it was for us, but it may still be redeemable, even at this late hour. We can mitigate and adapt. That is what ecovillages are showing us. It is our “cool village” meme. The six scientists whose pre-print I mentioned earlier concluded:
…biological sequestration methods, such as the restoration of forests, grasslands, and wetlands and regenerative agriculture, are more effective, resource-efficient, and cheaper ways to achieve large-scale CO2 removal than techno-mechanical methods. Moreover, the co-impacts of biological methods are largely positive, while those of mechanical methods—which use machinery and chemicals to capture CO2—are largely negative. But despite their repeated failures, mechanical CDR methods continue to receive US government subsidies, while biological sequestration is largely ignored.
If the discussion in Dubai gets real, this can be its focus. Not pats on the back.
References
Kolbert, E., The Road to Dubai, The New Yorker, November 25, 2023
Maddow, Rachel, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism (NY: Crown 2023)
Mecklin, John, The Energy Department’s fusion breakthrough: It’s not really about generating electricity, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Dec 2022)
Odum, Howard T., and Elisabeth C. Odum. "The prosperous way down." Energy 31, no. 1 (2006): 21-32.
Ripple, W.J., Wolf, C., Gregg, J.W., Rockström, J., Newsome, T.M., Law, B.E., Marques, L., Lenton, T.M., Xu, C., Huq, S. and Simons, L., The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory (2023).
Romm, Joseph, Why direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) is not scalable, and ‘net zero’ is a dangerous myth (Univ Penn. Car for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, 2023). https://web.sas.upenn.edu/pcssm
Taylor, Graeme MacDonald, Peter Wadhams, Daniele Visioni, Tom Goreau, Leslie Field, and Heri Kuswanto. "Bad science and good intentions prevent effective climate action." (2023). https://doi.org/10.31223/X5DT25
UNEP (2022). UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2022: The Closing Window–Climate crisis calls for rapid transformation of societies. https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2022
Vaillant, John, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (NY: Random House 2023)
Wang, Pinya, Yang Yang, Daokai Xue, Lili Ren, Jianping Tang, L. Ruby Leung, and Hong Liao. "Aerosols overtake greenhouse gases causing a warmer climate and more weather extremes toward carbon neutrality." Nature Communications 14, no. 1 (2023): 7257.
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