How to Cook? Sunday December 2nd 2035
Posted: October 31, 2022 Filed under: Climate, Energy | Tags: 2035, Pollution, Rain Leave a commentfrom Pam Brown’s 2035 diary
Power cut just as I was cooking dinner in the electric oven, transferred everything to the top of the wood stove as it’s awkward connecting the generator to the cooker. I’d like one of the multi-fuel cookers but can’t help worrying about air quality. The government can’t ensure continuous electricity, rejects gas and oil, but has prohibited so many wood and coal heaters and stoves that it’s a real dilemma – to keep to the regulations and be unable to cook or keep warm, or burn what we have available and suffer polluted air? Life is about impossible questions these days.
Mar e Lago Under Water: Saturday December 15th 2035
Mar e Lago at Palm Beach, the glitzy Florida country club residence of former US President and near-nonagenarian Donald Trump, is under water, so it’s not glitzy, gaudy or even functioning anymore. Florida is changing shape, shrinking, and people with money are moving to where they think they may be safer. Donald Trump was a climate-change denier, maybe still is, I don’t know, but denying that such a serious problem exists, when there is a mountain of evidence to the contrary, is like wandering onto a battlefield wearing a blindfold and ear defenders.
Rainy Christmas: Tuesday December 25th 2035
Christmas Day, warm, wet and quiet. When I was at school we were taught that Mediterranean climates had warm wet winters and hot dry summers. The heat is Mediterranean but we have a deal more rain, often so heavy that the drainage network is overloaded and the force of the flow lifts manhole covers. People walking in flooded streets have drowned after falling into open drains. That’s a sad comment for today, but there you are, climate disruption is not a happy story. You can’t plan for the future when conditions are so unstable, and you can’t keep on repairing damaged infrastructure. It’s throwing money down the flooded manholes.
I had a microwave dinner – microwaves are frugal users of energy, at least – and video calls with Rose, Wil and Seren, and elder grandson Jac. I enjoyed those.
Independent Scotland, United Ireland
Posted: October 20, 2022 Filed under: Climate, Politics Leave a commentTuesday September 4th 2035
Daughter Rose was 53 on the 2nd. I booked a ride to Llandew on the community minibus last Friday, and returned yesterday on the weekly post van. We talked about the break-up of the union into which we were born. Cracks were widening before the beginning of the end in the early 2020s. Then it was about the initial repercussions of Brexit, the UK’s dumb decision to leave the European Union. Northern Ireland remained in the European Single Market alongside Ireland, to avoid a new border that could jeopardise the 1998 peace agreement, while England, Scotland and Wales exited completely, despite Scotland’s population having voted in favour of staying. Of course, Scotland’s independence referendum in 2014 had shown a majority for staying in the union, 55% to 45% I think it was, but Westminster’s hostility and belittling did nothing to build on that majority. Wales had an independence movement too, a slow burn because the majority English-speaking population tended to link independence with a wish for secession by the 10% able to speak Welsh with any degree of fluency. Even if all of that 10% voted for the independence party Plaid Cymru it would make very little difference overall. I remember that when English-speaker Leanne Wood was leader for the six years 2012 to 2018, she took the party towards eco-socialism, which turned off many in the very conservative but Welsh-speaking rural population but attracted young English speakers. Adam Price, a Welsh-language enthusiast and former high-profile MP from the Amman Valley in Carmarthenshire, challenged her for the leadership and, backed by the language devotees, won. But for a time his victory made the party less attractive to eco-socialists and to the 90% of mainly English speakers. So the party began to be labelled a ‘pressure group’, and some disillusioned members drifted towards the Greens, but then young people enthused by both eco-socialism and Welsh culture completed the circle. Adam Price signed a co-operation agreement with Labour’s First Minister then, Mark Drakeford, and the two parties resisted efforts from Westminster to back-track on devolution. Wales is behind Scotland, which gained independence in 2030, the same year in which Ireland became one country, but change is coming to Wales because the centre cannot hold.
Yet political alterations mean less than we expected, because the heating planet has forced different priorities on us. A decade ago most of us didn’t really understand what climate change would mean. The term sounds neutral, but the changes have often been terrifying, and each year we have fewer resources to rebuild homes, roads, railways, all the infrastructure of a modern state. We are less connected than in the early 2020s, but that also means we are freer because authorities cannot track us all the time like they used to do. Two cheers anyway.
So humid today. Hard to think clearly.
Crop Stealers
Posted: October 18, 2022 Filed under: Agriculture, Climate Leave a commentSunday August 19th 2035
Have been busy making tomato chutney, which I like with cider vinegar but that is hard to get hold of. My nephew Alun over near Aberdan planted an orchard of apple trees a dozen years ago, and they are starting to crop well now, so I will ask him if he can spare me some for a batch of cider vinegar. I can give him broad beans in return, definitely my favourite vegetable, and a legume too, good for the soil. Even small children now learn that legumes and soil bacteria called rhizobia have a symbiotic relationship – within nodules on the roots, the rhizobia convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into nitrogen available for plant nutrition. Twenty years ago the public didn’t think about soil fertility that much. Manufactured fertilisers were still affordable, just about, but we need to grow differently now, and it demands much more skill. I am not sufficiently skilful. We have just enough food to survive. I always over-plant because you never know what will grow and what will be destroyed, by weather that has forgotten seasonal good behaviour, and by our competitors like slugs. Crops are stolen, too, have been for the past five years or so. Lyn and Sian down the lane give meals to a rota of village children in return for crop watching. Even five years ago we still used security cameras but the electricity supply became less and less reliable and also more expensive. We had a camera powered by rechargeable lithium batteries but when they eventually gave out we didn’t replace them because we have more urgent uses for our scarce electricity. Maybe I’ll try a solar-powered camera, but it’s bound to be intermittent.
There was talk of a village hydro-electric plant, powered from the Crychydd river, but it dries up every summer now. It would be OK in winter, perhaps we could resurrect the plan, but people are so tired. I wonder how many of today’s children will live as long as me? I was born just before the foundation of the old National Health Service, but that’s all been privatised and you only receive treatment if you have the money to pay, or have the luck to be accepted as a charity case. Here in Wales there is a long tradition of self-medication, just think of the Physicians of Myddfai, and the Herbalists of Cwrt y Cadno, and yes I do grow herbs with medicinal value, but as an amateur. Evening primroses and great mullein would take over the garden if I Iet them, above a carpet of wild strawberries. I make mullein tea for coughs and evening primrose oil for dry skin and eczema. Looking back as I can to the 1960s I wonder at the optimism then, at the confidence of eternal progress. I’ve still got some tomes from university days, one of which is Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth[1]…. I’ve just fetched it from the walnut Regency bookcase that grandad Henry gave me when I was about seven. (Stupidly I took off and lost its glass door, because I didn’t want the books hidden behind it.) There are 1,194 pages in this 1956 volume, published by University of Chicago Press. Chapters include ‘Possible limits of raw-material consumption’ and ‘Limitations to energy use’. I have turned to ‘Limitations to energy use’, by Charles A Scarlott, who was enthusiastic about nuclear power, about “the possibility that the nuclear-fusion reaction can be made a controlled energy source. The amounts of energy such a reaction would make possible are almost incomprehensible”. Mr Scarlott, then a technical information manager in the public relations department at Stanford Research Institute in California, admitted some concerns – “The facts about our energy resources are sobering. The rapidity with which we are finding ways of spending that energy, often without realizing it, is shocking” – but was not worried because of his “infinite confidence, supported by a long record of the past, that man’s ingenuity is equal to the task”. In terms of techniques of exploiting energy sources, that may have been true, but he did not even mention climate change.
The preceding chapter, ‘Possible limits of raw-material consumption’ by Samuel H Ordway Jr, a leading conservationist in the mid 20th century, was more cautious. Mr Ordway wrote that if industries carry on expanding, there would come “an enforced, unexpected reversal of a faith”. He advised using the next 60 years – 1956 to 2016 – “to face up to the problem of how to save prosperity”. He thought that in an increasingly prosperous society, people would work less and have more time to devote to saving civilisation, but that did not happen on anything like the scale required. Instead of spreading prosperity, the big bosses kept more and more for themselves and kept wages too low for the nose-to-grindstone masses to have time to save the world.
“If men recognize today the danger ahead from continuing overconsumption of resources and basic lack of human sympathy with nature, they will seek remedies”, wrote Mr Ordway (it was all men, men, men in those days). By and large men did not seek remedies with anything like the urgency required. So Mr Scarlott was over-confident in the power of technology, and Mr Ordway was over-confident about the capacity of people to act in the long-term interests of the planet and therefore of themselves too.
Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth reflects male and predominately American culture. Only one of over 70 authors was a woman, Dr Edavaleth K Janaki Ammal, from India, writing about subsistence agriculture in the recently independent former British colony. In the middle of the 20th century women’s voices became louder. I think of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Vandana Shiva’s campaigns for seed sovereignty and regenerative farming, Elinor Ostrom’s work on polycentric decision making in and between communities, Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics – keep inside the doughnut for sustainability and avoid the dangerous black space of excess growth – and of course the climate activist Greta Thunberg. They are all from ‘democracies’ which no matter how flawed allow greater freedom of expression and dissent than in autocratic states with tight central control.
It’s true that autocratic states were in the ascendant until the exorbitant costs of climate breakdown led to the fraying of control systems, first at the margins then accelerating towards the centres. Technologies of control still exist, but it’s too costly to have them everywhere.
[1] Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, edited by William L Thomas Jr, University of Chicago Press, 1956. Published for the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the National Science Foundation.
Neighbours from the Maldives
Posted: October 14, 2022 Filed under: Climate, Society Leave a commentSunday August 5th 2035
Azaan Hassan, his wife Zeena and their two girls Ainy and Niha, were settled in our village exactly a year ago by the local authority, in a house requisitioned from an absentee landlord, in the same street as me. They lived in the Maldives until the islands were lost to rising waters. Their journey here involved boats, lorries, and selling the few possessions they had left, chiefly Zeena’s jewellery and Azaan’s gold watch, a family heirloom. The government did not want to let any of them in, but they had no home, no country to be sent back to. The London government, which long opposed all attempts to devolve foreign policy to the UK’s nations, just said ‘No Entry’ but the Wales Government set up a resettlement scheme for 5,000 families and one of them came to our village. They have lost touch with so many of their relatives and friends, who may or may not be alive. Azaan is a make-do and mend mechanic and keeps our petrol and diesel vehicles operating, important because we don’t have timetabled public transport anymore, and there was a backlash against electric cars when it became clear just how polluting they are to make, how difficult to recycle, and how they propelled demand for electricity way above the capacity of the National Grid. So we plan journeys with great care and travel as little as possible. It limits our world view, but we do have an electric community minibus (reluctantly, because it’s not cheap to keep it on the road), and we have learnt a lot from the Hassans. Zeena makes clothes from recycled materials, Ainy does this too, and Niha grows vegetables on the school playing field. The school was closed in 2015, when the local authority decided to bus the children to town 10 miles away, at huge cost, on the basis that large schools are better. The education authority let a not-for-profit group have the school on a 30-year lease, I joined in and we opened a local history centre. Then the buses stopped three years ago and we opened a little general shop, a craft skills centre – and once again, a school.
The largest building on the school site is stone with high ceilings and a slate roof, so it is bearable in our hot summers, but heavy rains test the roof too much. We can’t afford to replace it completely so it’s buckets and patch-ups. Earlier this century the costs of constantly rebuilding weather-damaged homes, roads, railways, power lines, whole villages and towns, were ignored, partly because the reconstruction works counted towards the economic growth that our government, most governments, still desired. It looked as though we had a supercharged economy, but all we were doing was to use up resources quicker and quicker and pump more carbon dioxide and noxious gases into the heating atmosphere. People were still reluctant to say ‘Stop’. They didn’t think their lifestyles would change so dramatically, so fast. I think it’s called ‘optimism bias’. The Hassans are not optimistic any longer, I’m not, my late cousin Pat was not, but I still meet people who think the worst has already happened and that this is just a temporary blip.
Canute Can’t Stop the Tide
Posted: October 13, 2022 Filed under: Climate Leave a commentSaturday July 28th 2035
Our house is 400 feet above sea level, and over 20 miles from the sea, a location unlikely to be affected by sea level rise in the near future. So far, the main issues for coastal communities have been tidal surges when land has been deluged by heavy rains, like last year down the east coast of England all the way from East Yorkshire to Essex. My friend Sally’s house on the shore at Wilton-on-Sea was under water to the first-floor windows. Sally and her husband Matt were evacuated by lifeboat from the RNLI station at the end of the road. They haven’t been back to live, they know that extreme events will be more frequent. They can’t find anyone willing to insure their home, and neither can they find anyone to buy it. They cannot afford to buy another house – Matt is 80 now and no one will sell him a mortgage, especially as he has no equity to release. He and Sally are in a caravan ten miles inland, in their son Philip’s garden. Even around here in inland Wales, there are caravans and tents dotted all over the countryside, their occupants seeking refuge from dangerous situations, and somewhere where they can at least think about providing their own food. The county council object, but they don’t have the resources to move the squatters on. And where could they go? Thinking back, in 2020 a book called A Small Farm Future, by Chris Smaje, I think, argued for a back to the land movement, for new small farms and smallholdings and for the countryside to be repopulated. I thought it a great idea, but most landowners did not. Round here the landowners exert a lot of pressure on the county council and they tried to keep out interlopers, as they saw them, but their King Canute attitude was defeated by sheer pressure of numbers. I’m pleased about that.
UK Cop Out: The Kleptogarchy part 18
Posted: August 29, 2022 Filed under: Climate, Energy | Tags: Boris Johnson, Bradwell B, Carbon capture and storage, Energy Security Strategy, Galileo Galilei, JPMorgan Chase, Peter Kalmus, Sizewell C Leave a commentUK Cop Out
On April 6th 2022, forty-one days after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the UK Government released an ‘Energy Security Strategy’[1] focusing on new nuclear power stations, offshore wind, and renewed efforts to extract fossil oil and gas from the North Sea. And on-shore fracking, probably. Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote in the Foreword:
“And as even the most evangelistic environmentalist would concede that we can’t simply pull the plug on all fossil fuels overnight without the lights going out all over Europe, we’re going to make better use of the oil and gas in our own backyard by giving the energy fields of the North Sea a new lease of life.”
This language frames anyone who objects to fossil fuel extraction as beyond extreme, as on the lunatic fringe of environmentalism, if there could be such a place. The Prime Minister’s statement normalises the message that ‘of course we must continue using fossil fuels’. Yet at the same time as the ‘strategy’ appeared, climate scientists all over the world were demonstrating and getting arrested for warning about the planet’s profit-driven forced march to a wasteland.
Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and three colleagues locked themselves to the doors of a JPMorgan Chase Bank building in Los Angeles. JPMorgan Chase continues to finance fossil fuel extraction and between 2016 and 2020 was the world’s largest funder of oil, gas and coal companies, providing them with $268 billion[2] (£209 billion at the average exchange rate for 2020). In comparison, the USA plans to put about $45 billion of public funds into the development of renewable energy in 2023, only two-thirds of JPMorgan Chase’s annual average ‘investment’ into fossil fuels.[3] Dr Peter Kalmus, educated at Harvard and Columbia, wrote on Twitter on April 10th 2022:
“The LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] showed up with at least 100 riot police. They pushed press and supporters out of camera range before the arrest. Handcuffed in the police van, we passed about 50 squad cars and 2 fire trucks. All for 3 nonviolent scientists and 1 engineer pleading for a livable Earth.”
Peter Kalmus knows the data. He is willing to be arrested for warning humanity. This is a modern-day rerun of the then heretical notion that the Earth is not the centre of the universe, that it circuits our sun, as do all the planets in our solar system. Wind back to Galileo Galilei, the visionary mathematician, philosopher and physicist born in 1564 in the Duchy of Florence. Galileo developed the work of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), who theorised that Earth rotates around the Sun. This conflicted with Christian doctrine and angered the Pope, Urban VIII. Galileo was imprisoned, forced to recant, and for the final decade of his life until he died in 1642, was under house arrest. New knowledge is subject to vicious repression when it threatens existing power hierarchies.
There is little in the UK’s Energy Security Strategy to threaten powerful interests. Indeed, the press release published the same day refers to “ambitious, quicker expansion of nuclear, wind, solar, hydrogen, oil and gas, including delivering the equivalent to one nuclear reactor a year instead of one a decade”.
One reactor a year? The UK has not achieved one in a decade since the 1990s (Sizewell B in Suffolk) and none at all in the 21st century. The ‘small print’ of nuclear power includes short operating lives, the need for ongoing high-level technical expertise and management, the permanent problem (from a human perspective) of waste disposal, and the risks of flooding due to rising sea levels and catastrophic accidents potentially affecting millions of people. All of the 26 Magnox reactors started up in the UK between 1956 and 1972 have closed. The first, Calder Hall 1, operated for 47 years and shut down in 2003. The last, the two reactors at Wylfa on Anglesey, opened in 1971 and closed in 2012 and 2015. The next generation, Advanced Gas-Cooled (AGR) reactors, comprised 14 switched on between 1976 and 1989. Eleven of the reactors on four sites, all operated by EDF (Electricité de France) were still working in 2022, but all are slated to close before 2030. The sole Pressurised Water reactor, Sizewell B, is scheduled to run until 2035 but EDF is reported to be considering an extension of 20 years to 2055, to cost an additional £500-£700 million. Sizewell B generated about 2.35% of the UK’s electricity use in 2020, but in 2021 was shut for maintenance and repairs for four-and-a-half months. Thermal sleeves in the control rod mechanism proved to be worn and had to be replaced.
The UK Government bears about two-thirds of the cost of decommissioning nuclear power stations, which totals £3.2 billion a year in the early 2020s, but every single working nuclear reactor in the UK is operated by EDF, and EDF is owned by the French state.
Nuclear power has a declining share of the UK’s generating capacity. In the late 1990s nuclear plants produced about 25% of the nation’s electricity, but this had declined to 16% by 2020, and in 2021 there was a further fall to 14%. Given the impending closure of most nuclear power stations that are still operating, and the Government’s reluctance to invest public money in new power stations, it is hard to reconcile the optimism in the Energy Security Report with the reality of ballooning costs and scarce funds. There is only one new nuclear power station under construction in the UK, Hinkley Point C on the Somerset coast near Bridgwater, financed by EDF and China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGNPC). The construction is costing more than £20 billion, perhaps up to £25 billion, which UK electricity users will have to repay through their bills. When it is operational, some time from 2026, the twin reactors might generate about 7% of the UK’s 2021 electricity consumption, but given the planned shift to electric vehicles and therefore expanded electricity use, Hinkley C would be making only a minor contribution.
EDF has a proposal to build, on the eroding Suffolk coast, a twin reactor power station, Sizewell C, also a £20 billion-plus project, in which China General Nuclear Power Corporation was a minority partner. At the only other proposed site, Bradwell B on the low-lying Dengie Peninsula, Essex, CGNPC was to take the lead and construct two Hualong One pressurised water reactors. The UK’s government got cold feet about CGNPC’s involvement, and in March 2022 decided to end it for Sizewell C. EDF and the UK Government would both have a 20% stake, with the rest to come – maybe – from other investors.[4] It is likely to be a hard sell, because Sizewell C will be short of cooling water, and cannot operate without it.
Water supply at Sizewell is the responsibility of Northumbrian Water, which had proposed an 18-mile pipeline from the river Waveney on the Suffolk-Norfolk boundary, to Sizewell. Yet the Environment Agency warned of a significant risk that no fresh water could be supplied to Sizewell C. Suffolk is a dry county, with no large rivers. EDF argued that the Water Industry Act 1991 required the statutory water supplier, in this case Northumbrian Water, to ensure a supply. How this could be done if no water existed was not explored. It emerged later that the statutory responsibility is to supply domestic properties, not commercial ones. There would not even be enough fresh water available during construction of the power station, and a desalination plant would have to be installed, to be powered by diesel generators and with a heavily negative return on energy invested[5].
Both Sizewell C and Bradwell B are long-term projects, if they happen at all. They do nothing to provide clean renewable energy that can be safely managed into the future. As for the Energy Security Strategy’s confident assertion of a new reactor every year, there is no evidence to support it. Rolls Royce has a vision of Small Modular Reactors, each delivering a quarter to a third of the power of Sizewell B, for example, possibly for less than £2 billion each, but they are nowhere near commercial application.
Nuclear power does not stack up commercially because of high construction and decommissioning costs in relation to their short operating life, typically about 40 years. When environmental damage and risks, and the heavy carbon footprints of construction are taken into account, nuclear power stations are even less attractive, or justifiable.
Onshore wind power is not part of the Energy Security Strategy, unless local communities ask for them. Offshore wind is in the mix, despite being more expensive than onshore generation, probably because there are fewer voters to object to them. The Westminster government is going all out for offshore wind power, aiming for 50GW by 2030, “more than enough to power every home in the UK”, but according to two analysts, John Constable and Professor Gordon Hughes:
“The combination of increasing operating and maintenance costs with the decline in yields due to ageing means that at current market prices the expected revenues from electricity generation will be less than expected…”[6]
While wind could generate more electricity, problems of wind strength variability and surplus electricity storage remain. Turbines operate safely at wind speeds between 7-9mph and 50-55mph. Storms in a heating world affect wind velocities, which may be more volatile than in recent history. Effective long-term storage for electricity does not yet exist. The Westminster government launched a £68 million fund in 2020 to find reliable storage methods, but £68 million is a drop in the ocean when between April and October 2022 households in the UK are likely to pay about an average of over £85 a month for electricity, in total around £2.4 billion every month, 35 times more than the storage prize fund.[7] And prices were due to rise by a further 80% in October 2022, with further increases expected in January and April 2023.
The Energy Security Strategy also focuses on heat pumps, but without any public investment except “up to £30 million” to encourage firms to make heat pumps in the UK, and a reduction of tax revenues because heat pumps and solar panels are exempted from VAT between 2022 and 2027. The £30 million public investment would buy about a quarter of a single 100-metre super yacht of the type favoured by oligarchs. Heat pumps are effective only in exceptionally well-insulated homes, and are expensive to install – often £9,000 to £12,000 — because water storage tanks, pipework and radiators often have to be changed too.
Back to oil and gas, which should be left where they are under the sea. For the UK’s government, though, “producing gas in the UK has a lower carbon footprint than imported from abroad”, which is a poor reason in a climate emergency when respected scientists are protesting and risking arrest.
Solar power gets a mention, but no money to speak of, only a consultation on loosening planning restrictions.
The Energy Security Strategy features (1) old climate-damaging technologies, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that we are sliding towards the exit from the Last Chance Saloon, and (2) token investments in cleaner technologies that carry problems of storage, or cost, or both. No mention of a mass insulation programme, or of cutting consumption, both of which would be cheaper and safer than betting on a nuclear future. Cutting back will happen when individuals cannot afford heat, power, fuel, travel, but rationing by price is inequitable and a recipe for civil unrest, regardless of the anti-protest law that Parliament has passed.
People with access to money will be able to respond to escalating energy costs by improving their own insulation, in their homes and to their own clothing, and the Westminster government appears to be relying on this:
“On cost, there are many measures for reducing energy bills including cavity wall insulation, which typically costs between £1,000 and £3,000. Measures that improve the efficiency of our homes, on average, reduce bills by £300.
“On aesthetics, upgrades can retain and enhance building’s character with measures being easy to install and beautiful in design.
“On choice, this is not being imposed on people and is a gradual transition following the grain of behaviour. The British people are no-nonsense pragmatists who can make decisions based on the information.”[8]
The wording “this is not being imposed on people” and “the British people are no-nonsense pragmatists” conveys a transfer of responsibility from government onto individuals, to pay for their own energy efficiency improvements if they wish. There is no clear mention of the need to stop fossil fuel use to try and limit runaway global heating. Indeed, the intent in the strategy to develop hydrogen energy depends in part on continuing to exploit oil and gas.
No matter that all oil and gas burned from now on will work against clean energy measures already in place, the Johnson government insisted that it makes the UK more ‘secure’, but an unliveable world has security for nobody. The strategy says:
“Gas is currently the glue that holds our electricity system together and it will be an important transition fuel. We are taking a balanced approach to this unique subterranean asset. There is no contradiction between our commitment to net zero and our commitment to a strong and evolving North Sea industry. Indeed, one depends on the other.
“On decarbonisation, the flexibility of gas has underpinned our world-leading rollout of offshore wind and UK gas has a lower carbon footprint well under half that of most imported gas.
“On longevity, estimates suggest 7.9 billion barrels of oil reserves and resources remain under our seas, and 560 billion cubic metres of gas.
“On profits, the industry is set to invest billions in the development of nascent clean technologies such as hydrogen and carbon capture.”[9]
Theoretically the stated reserves are equivalent to 18 years of oil consumption in the UK at 2020 levels, and fewer than eight years of gas. Government appears to view oil and gas extraction as an opportunity to develop carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) technologies, stating that it wants “a new lease of life for the North Sea in low-carbon technologies”. Easier said than done:
“There is no doubt the main challenge to CCS [carbon capture and storage] deployment is commercial. CCS requires investment in capital-intensive long-lived assets. In addition to the capture plant, those assets include CO2 transport pipelines and geological storage resources which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to appraise, build, and develop. The service CCS provides, emissions abatement, has no or low value in most markets. Whilst capture technologies are well developed and proven, their application in most industries has been very limited which increases perceived risk. In most jurisdictions, regulations covering the geological storage of CO2 are absent, creating compliance risk. Long term liability for stored CO2 in those jurisdictions generally rests with the operator in perpetuity which can disqualify investment.”[10]
Oil giant Chevron (see ‘Jailing Steven Donziger’, The Kleptogarchy part 6) has the US$2 billion ‘Gorgon’ carbon capture and storage installation, the world’s largest, sited at the liquified natural gas plant on Barrow Island, Western Australia. Sonali Paul, reporting for Reuters, wrote that Chevron Australia had to buy carbon credits to make up the difference between its targets and the actual performance. The plan was for four million tonnes of CO2 to be buried annually, but in 2021 only 2.1 million tonnes was achieved. Scaling up is proving a problem.[11]
Storing carbon dioxide in practice is a lot harder than theory may suggest. Could a switch to hydrogen ease the global heating problem?
NEXT TIME – THE HYDROGEN RAINBOW
[1] British Energy Security Strategy policy paper from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Prime Minister’s Office, April 6th 2022. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/british-energy-security-strategy/british-energy-security-strategy, accesses April 7th 2022.
[2] Forbes.com reporting on Banking on Climate Change 2020 from Rainforest Action Network, Banktrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, Oilchange, Reclaim Finance and the Sierra Club. http://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2020/03/Banking_on_Climate_Change_2020.pdf, accessed April 11th 2022.
[3]‘ Quantifying Risks to the Federal Budget from Climate Change’, The White House, April 4th 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/briefing-room/2022/04/04/quantifying-risks-to-the-federal-budget-from-climate-change/, accessed April 11th 2022.
[4]‘ UK Seeks Investors for Nuclear Plant as it Eases Out China’s CGN’ by Jim Pickard and Nathalie Thomas, Financial Times, March 3rd 2022. https://www.ft.com/content/95524dfc-6503-48c7-85ad-a116bdf2c9ed, accessed May 17th 2022.
[5] See William Atkins’ absorbing article ‘On Sizewell C’ in Granta No.159, April 28th 2022. https://granta.com/on-sizewell-c/, accessed May 17th 2022.
[6] ‘The Costs of Offshore Wind Power: Blindness and Insight’ by John Constable and Professor Gordon Hughes, September 21st 2020. https://www.briefingsforbritain.co.uk/the-costs-offshore-wind-power-blindness-and-insight/, accessed April 12th 2022. Professor Hughes is in the School of Economics, University of Edinburgh, and Dr John Constable is energy Editor, Global Warming policy Forum.
[7] About 28.1 million households, typical annual electricity usage 2,900 kWh, at 28p per kWh plus standing change and VAT.
[8] Energy efficiency section in the Energy Security Strategy. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/british-energy-security-strategy/british-energy-security-strategy, accessed April 12th 2022.
[9] Energy Security Strategy, under Oil and Gas.
[10] ‘Carbon Capture and Storage: Challenges, Enablers and Opportunities for Deployment’, July 30th 2020, Global CCS Institute. https://www.globalccsinstitute.com/news-media/insights/carbon-capture-and-storage-challenges-enablers-and-opportunities-for-deployment/, accessed April 13th 2022.
[11] ‘Chevron Says World’s Largest Carbon Capture Project has ‘A Ways to Go’ to Meet Goals’, https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/chevron-says-worlds-largest-carbon-capture-project-has-a-ways-go-meet-goals-2022-05-16/, accessed May 17th 2022.
Whole Earth Disaster Movie: The Kleptogarchy part 13
Posted: August 23, 2022 Filed under: Climate, Ecology, Insurance | Tags: Climate Change 2022, Insurance availability, IPCC, Russia, Ukraine Leave a commentWhole Earth Disaster Movie
The Day After Tomorrow was a typical disaster film, premised on a sudden deep freeze forcing survivors to flee south from the USA to an apparently unaffected Mexico, where American refugees were made welcome. It did not seem to cross their minds that Mexicans might send them right back! This 2004 film was about indomitable humans surviving against the odds, the message being that even nature’s worst calamities are survivable, at least for some resourceful humans. The Day After Tomorrow presented a disaster on a national scale, unlike many predecessors like The Towering Inferno (a skyscraper on fire) or The Poseidon Adventure (capsized, doomed liner). Humans rather like watching mock disasters, especially if some characters are allowed a happy ending. Real disasters without happy endings are less palatable. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, which started on February 24th 2022, was immediately a lethal, resource-destroying, emission-spewing hell. Three days later, on February 27th, the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, from Working Group II, warned about the potentially catastrophic impacts of failing to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The report, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability highlights multiple interacting risks.
“Complex risks result from multiple climate hazards occurring concurrently, and from multiple risks interacting, compounding overall risk and resulting in risks transmitting through interconnected systems and across regions.”[1]
The authors amplify the warning:
“Widespread deterioration of ecosystem structure and function, resilience and natural adaptive capacity, as well as shifts in seasonal timing have occurred due to climate change (high confidence), with adverse socioeconomic consequences (high confidence). Approximately half of the species assessed globally have shifted polewards or, on land, also to higher elevations (very high confidence). Hundreds of local losses of species have been driven by increases in the magnitude of heat extremes (high confidence) as well as mass mortality events on land and in the ocean (very high confidence) and loss of kelp forests (high confidence).”[2]
It gets worse. According to the report, about 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in areas that are highly vulnerable to climate change, the physical and mental health of people around the world has been adversely affected, and humanitarian crises grow where climate hazards interact with high vulnerability in communities.
Not just climate hazards. When people are competing for depleted resources, peace is rarely the outcome. One of the reasons for Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, apart from a hubristic attempt at empire rebuilding, appeared to be strangulation of the Ukrainian economy, by occupying the major Black Sea ports including Odesa, Kherson and Mariupol, and so preventing exports, and the same time bombing factories and farmland to reduce the products that can be exported. All-out warfare counteracts efforts at emissions reductions for multiple reasons: consumption of fossil fuels by troops and fleeing civilians, carbon-intensive manufacture of weapons, destruction of buildings and infrastructure that must probably be replaced at some stage. Competition leading to conflict accelerates climate change, a multiplication of tragedies. Yet world leaders tend to treat climate change as separate from other policies, when the risk of an uninhabitable world should be a critical factor in all policies.
Lack of resilience may be more immediately obvious among ‘vulnerable communities’ but the relatively affluent world is affected more and more. The insurance and reinsurance industries are a case in point. How many disasters can insurance companies withstand?
“Because only a small number of policyholders are likely to suffer an insured harm in a given period, the money from the lucky policyholders covers the claims of the unlucky. However, this system breaks down when large portions of the population suffer harms at the same time, as is the case with many climate-related events,” wrote Bridget Pals and Michael Panfil about the USA in 2021. “Consider a wildfire, which can affect an entire region. In response, insurers may either raise premiums beyond what most Americans can afford or pull out of a high-risk market altogether, leaving gaps in coverage and reducing accessibility (an alarmingly common trend for homeowners in wildfire-prone areas of California).”[3]
This article was written for an American audience, but commercial insurance faces the same squeeze all over the world: more disasters, bigger payouts, higher premiums that become unaffordable. A vicious spiral.
People without enough food are not going to prioritise insurance premiums. The Sixth IPCC report points out that:
“Climate change will increasingly put pressure on food production and access, especially in vulnerable regions, undermining food security and nutrition (high confidence). Increases in frequency, intensity and severity of droughts, floods and heatwaves, and continued sea level rise will increase risks to food security (high confidence) in vulnerable regions from moderate to high between 1.5 deg C and 2 deg C global warming level, with no or low levels of adaptation (medium confidence).”[4]
Soils will suffer, pollination will suffer, pests and diseases will become more prevalent. The negative impacts will be multiplied when separate crises interact.
“Multiple climate hazards will occur simultaneously, and multiple climatic and non-climatic risks will interact, resulting in compounding overall risk and risks cascading across sectors and regions. Some responses to climate change result in new impacts and risks (high confidence).”[5]
The IPCC has scant confidence in adaptation measures so far, commenting that there is “increased evidence of maladaptation across many sectors and regions” since the previous report. We are running out of time:
“Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence).”
It was against this background of the last-chance saloon that Russia invaded Ukraine, a series of destructive actions that took a wrecking ball to human lives in the path of the advancing troops, and counteracted efforts to keep fossil fuels in the ground and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, thereby threatening billions of lives in the future.
[1] ‘Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’, IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, February 2022, Summary for Policymakers, SPM 7 (B).
[2] Ibid, SPM 8 (B.1.1)
[3] ‘Climate Change Comes to Insurance’ by Bridget Pals and Michael Panfil, in The Hill, December 30th 2021, https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/584240-climate-change-comes-to-insurance, accessed March 8th 2022.
[4] IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, February 2022, Summary for Policymakers, SPM 14 (B.4.3).
[5] Ibid, SPM 18 (B.5).
Tipping Over: The Kleptogarchy part 12
Posted: August 22, 2022 Filed under: Climate, Environment | Tags: Climate refugees, Jason Smerdon, Roger Revelle, Svante Arrhenius Leave a commentTipping Over
The heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide have been understood for decades. Swedish physicist and chemist Svante August Arrhenius (1859-1927), who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, was a pioneer of applying principles of physical chemistry to estimate the extent to which the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is responsible for the Earth’s increasing surface temperature. Climate campaigner Greta Thunberg adopted the legacy of her fellow Swede, who had tried to alert the world to the likely repercussions of burning fossil carbon.
Roger Revelle (1909-1991), director of the USA’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography between 1950 and 1964, and fellow scientist Hans Suess (1909-1993) studied the rate at which CO2 has accumulated in the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and although they concluded that most of the additional CO2 had been absorbed by the oceans rather than accumulating in the upper atmosphere, they warned that “human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future”[1]
Reasons for the link between carbon dioxide and global warming emerge from this explanation by Sarah Fecht of the Columbia Climate School[2], quoting climate scientist Jason Smerdon[3]:
“When sunlight reaches Earth, the surface absorbs some of the light’s energy and reradiates it as infrared waves, which we feel as heat. (Hold your hand over a dark rock on a warm sunny day and you can feel this phenomenon for yourself.) These infrared waves travel up into the atmosphere and will escape back into space if unimpeded.
“Oxygen and nitrogen don’t interfere with infrared waves in the atmosphere. That’s because molecules are picky about the range of wavelengths that they interact with, Smerdon explained. For example, oxygen and nitrogen absorb energy that has tightly packed wavelengths of around 200 nanometers or less, whereas infrared energy travels at wider and lazier wavelengths of 700 to 1,000,000 nanometers. Those ranges don’t overlap, so to oxygen and nitrogen, it’s as if the infrared waves don’t even exist; they let the waves (and heat) pass freely through the atmosphere.
“With CO2 and other greenhouse gases, it’s different. Carbon dioxide, for example, absorbs energy at a variety of wavelengths between 2,000 and 15,000 nanometers — a range that overlaps with that of infrared energy. As CO2 soaks up this infrared energy, it vibrates and re-emits the infrared energy back in all directions. About half of that energy goes out into space, and about half of it returns to Earth as heat, contributing to the ‘greenhouse effect’.”
Over the 50 years from 1972 (average for the year) to 2022 (April), atmospheric carbon dioxide increased from 327.46 ppm (parts per million) to 420.23 ppm, a rise of 28.3%, according to data published by the USA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from the observatory in Mauna Loa, Hawaii. The rate of increase peaked in the 1990s, surging to 373.21 ppm in 2001 from 358.13 ppm in 1991, a growth of 8.95% in one decade. Between 2001 and 2011 atmospheric CO2 increased more slowly, by 5.50%, but from 2011 to 2021 the expansion was 6.40%, showing that international efforts to control global warming were failing to make an impact, and setting the scene for a stark tragedy, a tragedy that politicians are pretending not to see: the tragedy of climate refugees.
Heat melts ice and expands water, and as a result of both processes, sea invades land, and people can no longer live there. Heat dries out forests and makes them much more likely to ignite. Winds spread fires, and the burning timber sends CO2 into the atmosphere, even if emissions from humans have been cut back. We have truly been playing with fire. There will be more and more climate refugees, but national governments have not figured out an ethical way of coping with humanity on the move. The moral vacuity of ‘solutions’ includes letting migrants drown at sea, a consequence of the policy plan expressed in 2021 by Priti Patel, the United Kingdom’s Home Secretary, to criminalise the rescue of migrants in trouble on the sea. In 2022 she hit upon a new plan, to fly refugees to Rwanda, a small African country just over twice the size of the English county Yorkshire and with two-and-a-half times the population, 13.3 million against 5.4 million. Rwanda, encircled by Uganda (from whence Patel’s parents migrated to the United Kingdom), Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Tanzania, suffered a genocide in 1994 when Hutu people slaughtered ethnic Tutsis.
The ethical emptiness of world leaders’ aggressively hostile responses to migrations – ex-President Trump’s determination to stop Central American migrants from entering the USA is a prime example – is explored by author Omar El Akkad in ‘The Climate Refugees are Coming. Countries and International Law aren’t Ready for Them’, in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, on July 31st 2021.[4]
Omar El Akkad wrote that “It is almost certain that, in the coming few decades, the world will see a mass displacement of human beings almost unmatched in modern history.” But there is no agreement on what to do:
“There is, in international law, almost no mechanism for dealing with this kind of forced migration. And unless one is developed and implemented quickly, the defining crisis of the coming decades will play out the way so many prior refugee crises have played out before – first with indifference, then rejection, and finally bloodshed.”
There are no safe places, but some are less immediately in danger than others. The United Kingdom is one of those places, but it is the fossil-fuel powered industrial processes foisted onto the world by the UK and other colonial powers that have accelerated the rising seas, the fires and the droughts that force people from their homes. What will happen to the people of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean when their islands, in the main just a metre above sea level, are under water? The aeroplanes which carried tourists to ‘dream holidays’ brought a false prosperity and contributed to the heating world that is raising the waters.
Tipping points. They are no joke. Passing an irreversible tipping point would mean a system would not revert to its original state even if the forcing lessened or reversed, explained Dr Richard Wood, who leads the Climate, Cryosphere and Oceans group in the Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre. He told Carbon Brief: [5]
“In some cases, there is evidence that once the system has jumped to a different state, then if you remove the climate forcing, the climate system doesn’t just jump back to the original state – it stays in its changed state for some considerable time, or possibly even permanently.”
Carbon Brief continued:
“This phenomenon is known as ‘hysteresis’. It occurs when a system undergoes a ‘bifurcation’ – which means to divide or fork into two branches – and it is subsequently difficult, if not impossible, for the system to revert to its previous state. For example, part of the reason that Greenland has an ice sheet today is that it has had that ice sheet for hundreds of thousands of years. If the Greenland ice sheet were to pass a tipping point that led to its disintegration, simply reducing emissions and lowering global temperatures to pre-industrial levels would not bring it back again. It would probably require another ice age to achieve that.”
Tipping points have been too scary a topic for mass media. Instead, there has been a drive to keep populations quiescent, by plying them with entertainment and seeking to criminalise protest, so they do not threaten economic power networks and their political executive arms. There is a third, equally sinister mechanism of control – tracking by technology. Geographical positioning systems? Your phone provider knows exactly where you are. Smart speakers? You are contributing to a dossier of information about you, and not for your benefit. Social media? The algorithms build up detailed personal profiles that are sold for tight targeting. If you are a left-leaning peace-and-justice type, you are unlikely to receive messages promoting far right, or even Conservative, political viewpoints. You are in an insulated bubble, and you don’t know what people in other bubbles are being told. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism [6] and be alarmed. She explains:
“Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvements, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’ and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behaviour predictions that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behaviour.”[7]
Replacement of paper money and coinage with programmable cryptocurrency would take surveillance a stage further, dictating how much, where, and on what a person can spend money allocated to them for work done or as benefits. It could happen.
If powerful interests want to exert greater control over populations, the technology exists for them to do so. To transmit the message that climate change is not a major problem, for example, you mine the data to identify climate sceptics and stream propaganda at them, propaganda that climate change worriers may never see and therefore cannot directly oppose. It is a classic example of the ploy to divide and rule.
Scientist Dr James Lovelock (1919-2022), who developed the Gaia Theory, of the Earth as a complex living system, commented in his 2006 book The Revenge of Gaia that “in spite of the expertise and the powerful computing machinery, our forecasts are provisional and do not include all surprises. Some, like the threshold of irreversible change, we think exist, and we wonder if the circulation of warm and cold water in the North Atlantic may be poised for sudden change. But we are not much better at dealing with the unexpected than were Columbus and his sailors when they set sail westwards for the East Indies. Their model of a round earth was good, but the real planet had a huge and unexpected surprise, the existence of the North American continent. We could be wise to expect that instead of temperature and sea level rising smoothly as the years go by, as in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s predictions, there will be sudden and wholly unpredicted discontinuities”.[8]
The circulation of warm water in the North Atlantic, the flow that we call the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), or colloquially the Gulf Stream, has weakened substantially.
Dr David Thornalley, of University College, London (UCL), said in 2021:[9]
“Whilst climate modelling has long predicted a slowdown of the AMOC as a result of human-induced warming, this study shows the increasing evidence in support of the modern Atlantic Ocean undergoing unprecedented changes in comparison to the last millennium, and in some cases longer. Alongside other human pressures on the marine environment, the changes we are observing in ocean circulation are impacting marine ecosystems in both the surface and deep ocean. We will need to take account of these ongoing changes in our efforts to conserve and manage marine resources.”
The UCL article pointed out that AMOC is vital for heat redistribution, is crucial to Earth’s climate as we know it, and that abrupt slowdown “could trigger disruptions around the globe – including a sudden rise in regional sea levels, changes in the position of major rainfall and arid climate zones”. Winter weather in Europe could become “more extreme and intense” and the east coast of the USA would be at greater risk of flood events.
Higher temperatures, lower temperatures and wild oscillations, spell discomfort and stress at best, the disappearance of numerous species at worst. For humans, high temperatures and humidity together can be lethal. The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance already happens, but it could become much more prevalent. We are talking about wet bulb temperatures (TW):
“A normal internal human body temperature of 36.8° ± 0.5°C requires skin temperatures of around 35°C to maintain a gradient directing heat outward from the core. Once the air (dry-bulb) temperature (T) rises above this threshold, metabolic heat can only be shed via sweat-based latent cooling, and at TW exceeding about 35°C, this cooling mechanism loses its effectiveness altogether. Because the ideal physiological and behavioural assumptions are almost never met, severe mortality and morbidity impacts typically occur at much lower values”, reported Colin Raymond, Tom Matthews and Radley M Horton in ‘The Emergence of Heat and Humidity Too Severe for Human Tolerance’, published in Science Advances in May 2020.[10]
Switch on the air conditioner? That may be a temporary solution for a few people, but the heat does not disappear, it is pumped into the atmosphere making it even hotter. Air conditioners run on electricity. There will not be enough generating capacity or potential, or distribution infrastructure, for renewable electricity to power the world as it is in 2021, and the infrastructure that exists will be at greater risk of destruction than in the relatively benign past. We take so much for granted, for example that we will always be able to battle wildfires with water-carrying aircraft. But what if aeroplanes are not there? BBC News’ Gareth Evans asked on November 17 2019 ‘How do you fight extreme wildfires?’[11]. Australian firefighter Kirsten Langmaid said of the first attack on a wildfire that “We always send a rapid response team out during this first attack. These are crews who are fully kitted out with firefighting gear and water-carrying vehicles. If the location is a little more remote, then we’ll send a plane or a small helicopter up straight away. This is usually just to check it out and they’ll give us a rough estimate of how big the fire is.” If a fire is not contained, Kirsten said, “In a worst-case scenario we would have hundreds of people on the ground, multiple different agencies involved and multiple aircraft in the skies.”
What happens when all that kit is no longer there?
Aircraft cannot fly in very hot air, typically above 52 deg C / 126 deg F for Airbus and Boeing jets[12]. The hotter the air, the less dense it is, and this means there is insufficient lift to allow take-off and to keep planes in the air. Temperatures exceeding 50 deg C were recorded in June 2021 in Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Oman, and other Middle Eastern locations.[13] Europe’s highest temperature recorded up to August 11th 2021 was in Siracusa, Sicily, on August 11th: an alarming 48.8 deg C / 119.8 deg F. The trend is upwards.
Extreme heat damages roads, rails, bridges, power lines; drought restricts water for cooling at power stations and other energy-intensive industrial sites. Repairs boost GDP[14] figures, but for how long will it be affordable to keep patching? Before long, the kleptogarchy will run out of victims to fleece, and extractive capitalism should fail. At this point, though, even dedicated anti-capitalists would hardly be celebrating.
[1] ‘Carbon dioxide exchange between atmosphere and ocean and the question of an increase of atmospheric CO2 during past decades’ by Roger Revelle and Hans E Suess, 1957, in Tellus Vol.9 No.1 pps. 18-27.
[2] February 25 2021, https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/02/25/carbon-dioxide-cause-global-warming/, accessed August 2 2021.
[3] Jason Smerdon is a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
[4] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-climate-refugees-are-coming-countries-and-international-law-arent/, accessed August 2 2021.
[5] ‘Nine tipping points that could be triggered by climate change’, in Carbon Brief, February 10 2020, https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-nine-tipping-points-that-could-be-triggered-by-climate-change, accessed August 4 2021.
[6] The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power was published in the USA in 2019 by Public Affairs, Hachette Book Group, and in the UK by Profile Books Ltd.
[7] The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, p.8.
[8] The Revenge of Gaia, published by Allen Lane, chapter 4 p.50.
[9] ‘Earth’s Gulf Stream System at its weakest in over a millennium’, news from University College London, February 25 2021, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/feb/earths-gulf-stream-system-its-weakest-over-millennium, accessed August 5 2021. The article refers to ‘Current Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation weakest in last millennium’ in Nature Geoscience, by L. Caesar, G. D. McCarthy, D. J. R. Thornalley, N. Cahill & S. Rahmstorf, 2021, Vol.14, pps.118–120.
[10] ‘The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance’, Science Advances, May 8 2020, Vol.6, No.19. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838, accessed August 5 2021.
[11] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-50410481, accessed August 11 2021.
[12] https://monroeaerospace.com/blog/why-airplanes-cant-take-off-or-fly-in-extreme-heat/, accessed August 11 2021.
[13] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/1/interactive-mapping-hottest-temperatures-around-world, accessed August 11 2021.
[14] GDP is the Gross Domestic Product measure of the financial worth of national economic activity.
Humans Like It Cool: The Kleptogarchy part 11
Posted: August 21, 2022 Filed under: Climate, Energy | Tags: Solar power, Wet bulb temperature Leave a commentHumans Like It Cool
Maximising Profit Means Minimising Life
Hot weather now is to be feared more than enjoyed. The old newspaper headline ‘Phew! What a Scorcher’ used to conjure images of crowded sandy beaches, the gentle swoosh of waves, and picnics in shady parks. Prolonged heat is now sinister, dangerous. Ask the people who used to live in Lytton, British Columbia, where on June 29th 2021 the temperature shot to 49.6 degrees C (121.3 deg F) and in short order wild fires burned the town to the ground.
Who would have thought that British Columbia, the state on Canada’s Pacific coast, could roast in a heat dome? Climate scientists probably did, but their warnings have fallen on the deaf ears of politicians, and of politicians’ funders (who often prefer to stay out of the headlines, beyond the public’s gaze).
The only way to reign in scary temperature rises even a little is for humans to STOP greenhouse gas emissions, and it takes a brave politician to proclaim a return to pre-industrial lifestyles, a reversal of more than 200 years of technological progress. In 1800, the world’s population may have been about one billion people.[1] The 2021 estimates were nearing eight billion, all needing water, food, and protection from the elements.[2]
Climate change sceptics may refer to periods in the distant past when Earth was hotter than today. This is correct.
Yet when the Earth was hotter than today, humans were not around. Early Homo sapiens emerged in Africa around 300,000[3] years ago, a mere blink in geological time. Earth may be 4,543,000,000 years old. Homo sapiens has been on the Earth for 0.0066% of that time, or if the Earth were 24 hours old, less than six seconds. For all the time that man has been roaming the Earth, the planet has been colder than average. Humans have occupied a climate niche, a very narrow niche, in which they have been able to thrive. I prefer cool to warm, and am fairly comfortable between the freezing point of water, 0 deg C/ 32 deg F, and 27 deg C/ 80 deg F, so in the tropics, at over 80 deg, I am already uncomfortable. There have been millions of years in the past when the planet’s average temperature was above 80 deg F. But humans were not there.
Humans are particularly at home in a narrow climate range, broadly 11 deg C to 15 deg C (52 deg F to 59 deg F), according to ‘Future of the Human Climate Niche’, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, published in May 2020.[4] The article demonstrates that “for millennia, human populations have resided in the same narrow part of the climatic envelope available on the globe”, adding that “current production of crops and livestock is largely limited to the same conditions, and the same optimum has been found for agricultural and non-agricultural economic output of countries through analyses of year-to-year variation.” Alarmingly, “in a business-as-usual climate change scenario, the geographical position of this temperature niche is projected to shift more over the coming 50 years than it has moved since 6000 BP” (before the present). Mass migrations are an expected response, from parts of the globe that become uninhabitable or disappear below the waves. This is already happening, and the portents are not good. Drought and soil loss in Central America drives migrants to the USA, where former President Trump found plentiful support for his plan to build a wall to keep them out. Drought in Syria sent climate migrants west to Europe, where they were often not welcome. Large-scale migration “inevitably causes tension”, says the article, with academic understatement, suggesting that considering “the benefits of climate mitigation in terms of avoided potential displacements may be a useful complement to estimates in terms of economic gains and losses”.
Scientific papers do now show increased anxiety about humans’ capacity to endure extreme heat. Also in May 2020, a paper called ‘The Emergence of Heat and Humidity Too Severe for Human Tolerance’, by Colin Raymond, Tom Matthews and Radley M Horton, appeared in the Science Advances journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[5] This is the abstract:
“Humans’ ability to efficiently shed heat has enabled us to range over every continent, but a wet-bulb temperature (TW) of 35°C marks our upper physiological limit, and much lower values have serious health and productivity impacts. Climate models project the first 35°C TW occurrences by the mid-21st century. However, a comprehensive evaluation of weather station data shows that some coastal subtropical locations have already reported a TW of 35°C and that extreme humid heat overall has more than doubled in frequency since 1979. Recent exceedances of 35°C in global maximum sea surface temperature provide further support for the validity of these dangerously high TW values. We find the most extreme humid heat is highly localized in both space and time and is correspondingly substantially underestimated in reanalysis products. Our findings thus underscore the serious challenge posed by humid heat that is more intense than previously reported and increasingly severe.”
Use of more air conditioning indoors as a countermeasure is unlikely to be feasible on a global scale, because air conditioning needs electricity, and we cannot generate sufficient electricity from renewable sources to maintain current Western lifestyles – at least, not without accelerating planetary heating.[6] The huge numbers of photovoltaic solar panels that would be needed would themselves affect the climate, both through their manufacture and transport, and their use.
Axion Power, using figures from the International Energy Agency, calculated that the world used 64.92 terrawatt[7] hours of electricity a day in 2017. Using solar power to generate this much would require 51.428 billion solar panels, occupying 115,625 square miles. That’s more than 14 times the whole land area of Wales, to use a common comparison.
A solar panel has a lifespan of 25 to possibly 50 years, but becomes less efficient year after year, and has a substantial carbon footprint of its own. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ journal IEEEE Spectrum reported in 2014:
“While solar energy can be generated using a variety of technologies, at over 80 degrees, the vast majority of solar cells today start as quartz, the most common form of silica (silicon dioxide), which is refined into elemental silicon. There’s the first problem: The quartz is extracted from mines, putting the miners at risk of one of civilization’s oldest occupational hazards, the lung disease silicosis.
“The initial refining turns quartz into metallurgical-grade silicon, a substance used mostly to harden steel and other metals. That happens in giant furnaces, and keeping them hot takes a lot of energy……. Fortunately, the levels of the resulting emissions—mostly carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide—can’t do much harm to the people working at silicon refineries or to the immediate environment.
“The next step, however—turning metallurgical-grade silicon into a purer form called polysilicon—creates the very toxic compound silicon tetrachloride. The refinement process involves combining hydrochloric acid with metallurgical-grade silicon to turn it into what are called trichlorosilanes. The trichlorosilanes then react with added hydrogen, producing polysilicon along with liquid silicon tetrachloride—three or four tons of silicon tetrachloride for every ton of polysilicon.”[8]
Manufacture of billions of solar panels, needing complete replacement every 25 to 30 years, creates toxic wastes and carries a carbon footprint that is far from insignificant, between 3% and 13% of its energy output over 30 years, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory of the USA’s Department of Energy. That is not the main worry, though. Zhengyao Lu of Lund University, Sweden, and Benjamin Smith of Western Sydney University, Australia, looked into the climate impacts and say:
“While the black surfaces of solar panels absorb most of the sunlight that reaches them, only a fraction (around 15%) of that incoming energy gets converted to electricity. The rest is returned to the environment as heat. The panels are usually much darker than the ground they cover, so a vast expanse of solar cells will absorb a lot of additional energy and emit it as heat, affecting the climate.
“If these effects were only local, they might not matter in a sparsely populated and barren desert. But the scale of the installations that would be needed to make a dent in the world’s fossil energy demand would be vast, covering thousands of square kilometres. Heat re-emitted from an area this size will be redistributed by the flow of air in the atmosphere, having regional and even global effects on the climate.”[9]
Hot air is more unstable air, unstable air translates to unpredictable and wild weather, which can strike anywhere, damaging and destroying roads, railways, communications, homes, crops, animals and people. Homo sapiens may be clever, but wise?
In classrooms after the Second World War, less than a miniscule fraction of a blink in geological time, there was a perception that we were in an interglacial period of the Quaternary Glaciation, and that the next epoch was more likely to be a cooler age than runaway warming. This view was attractive to fossil fuel companies, because the warming from the combustion of prehistoric carbon looked, maybe, to be counterbalanced by a cooling trend. Ice ages have many causes, including changes in the tilt of the Earth’s axis and in the shape of our planet’s orbit around the sun, which is not fully circular but elliptical, so the planet’s distance from the sun varies. The polymath Serbian civil engineer, geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milanković (1879-1958) made a huge contribution to our understanding of long-term climatic eras by calculating epochs (now called Milanković cycles) and explaining the science to the public, for example in Canon of Insolation of the Earth and Its Application to the Problem of the Ice Ages, written in 1941. Earth is just an irregular sphere, spinning around quite a small star (diameter 864,000 miles) of moderate temperature (10,000 deg F on the surface), through space in one galaxy of more than 100 billion stars, one galaxy of an unknown but super-large number. The range of temperatures in the universe makes the zone of human tolerance insignificantly tiny. According to NASA in the USA, we have adapted to survive at temperatures between 4 deg C (40 deg F) and 35 deg C (95 deg F), but in the upper range of this scale high humidity detracts from human capabilities. Temperature declines with height, by 6.5 deg C (11.7 deg F) per 1,000 metres (3,250 feet) because the lower troposphere, the atmospheric layer closest to Earth, is heated primarily by radiation from the planet surface and not directly by the sun’s energy passing through the atmosphere, and air pressure declines with height as the pull of gravity reduces, dispersing heated molecules. Less dense air means less oxygen per cubic metre, so while it is cooler on a mountain than on the plain below, it is also harder for humans, and other species dependent on oxygen, to breathe. At 8,000 feet and above, altitude sickness can set in, and above 18,000 feet humans usually need additional oxygen.
NEXT TIME – TIPPING POINTS
[1] World Population Growth – Our World in Datahttps://ourworldindata.org, accessed July 26 2021.
[2] World Population Projections – Worldometerhttps://www.worldometers.info › world-population, accessed July 26 2021. The figure given was 7,874,965,825, rising at over 1% a year. At a 1% annual increase rate, the population would double in just under 70 years.
[3] Introduction to the development of humans, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human, accessed July 27 2021.
[4] ‘Future of the Human Climate Niche’ by Chi Xu, Timothy a Kohler, Timothy M Lenton, Jens-Christian Svenning and Martin Scheffer, https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11350, accessed February 9th 2022.
[5] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/19/eaaw1838, accessed July 27th 2021.
[6] https://theconversation.com/solar-panels-in-sahara-could-boost-renewable-energy-but-damage-the-global-climate-heres-why-153992, accessed July 27 2021.
[7] One terawatt hour equals one billion kilowatt hours.
[8] https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt-always-as-green-as-you-think, accessed July 27 2021. By May 2022 the article was behind a paywall.
[9] https://theconversation.com/solar-panels-in-sahara-could-boost-renewable-energy-but-damage-the-global-climate-heres-why-153992, accessed July 27 2021. Zhengyao Lu is a physical geographer and Benjamin Smith is director of research at the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment. Their article, dated February 11 2021, is titled ‘Solar panels in Sahara could boost renewable energy but damage the global climate – here’s why’.
Changing Investors’ Expectations: The Kleptogarchy part 9
Posted: August 19, 2022 Filed under: Climate, Economics | Tags: Degrowth, Employee ownership, Ernst Schumacher, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen Leave a commentChanging Investors’ Expectations
The struggle for profits means that the bulk of workers are paid less than they should be, and the harmful impacts of extracting resources from land or sea are left for societies to pay, which often they cannot afford to do, one reason being inadequate remuneration for workers in those societies. Co-operative ownership of resources and production can create a fairer system, but the enemy now is time.
The IPCC, to be fair, cannot order governments around. The mitigation measures in the April 2022 report are couched in bland language which detracts from the urgency of the situation. This is an example:
“Economy-wide packages that support mitigation and avoid negative environmental outcomes include: long-term public spending commitments, pricing reform; and investment in education and training, natural capital, R&D and infrastructure (high confidence). They can meet short-term economic goals while reducing emissions and shifting development pathways towards sustainability (medium confidence). Infrastructure investments can be designed to promote low-emissions futures that meet development needs (medium confidence).”[1]
This is a list of useful aims but not a recipe for change resulting in degrowth. The text has to be approved by governments, many of which are reluctant to introduce policies that require people to commit to huge changes in behaviour. The authors are walking on eggshells. Meeting short-term economic goals while reducing emissions? Does this mean combining economic growth with a fall in harmful emissions? In the UK this meant relying on poorer countries to manufacture emission-heavy goods for subsequent import, emissions uncounted in the UK’s emissions data. That is just shifting the problem around the globe. Powerful countries can do more shifting than weak ones. Countries trying en masse to look after their own short-term interests are a problem, because scarcely anyone in power is concentrating primarily on whole-Earth mitigation.
Shareholders are also a problem. Investors in companies look for capital growth as well as for rising income. In a company that is not growing, let alone shrinking, shareholders are likely to be disappointed and may try to sell their stock. Abandonment of growth as a guiding principle would demand change to the structure and funding of companies, and to shareholders’ expectations of dividends. Almost two generations ago, in 1973, Ernst Schumacher’s classic Small in Beautiful was published. Dr Schumacher (1911-1977) has much to say on the dangers of wholly private ownership. He pointed out that:
“Private enterprise claims that its profits are being earned by its own efforts, and that a substantial part of them is then taxed away by public authorities. This is not a correct reflection of the truth – generally speaking. The truth is that a large part of the costs of private enterprise has been borne by the public authorities – because they pay for the infrastructure – and that the profits of private enterprise therefore greatly overstate its achievement.”
Dr Schumacher did not call this kleptocracy, but that’s what it is – to take profits from resources paid for by others. It is just a small step from this assumption to believe that it is fine to use up the natural world in the service of private profit.
To start to correct this inequity, Ernst Schumacher proposed that the public should receive half of the distributed profits of large-scale enterprises, not by taxation but through owning half of the equity in these organisations. The public shares should be managed by ‘Social Councils’ with half the members drawn from the population at large, a quarter from professional associations and a quarter from trades unions. Social Councils did not make much headway, because opposition from company bosses/ investors was so regimented, and in 2022 the number of companies that are substantially employee-owned remained quite modest. The Employee Ownership Association in the UK listed 19 trustee members in June 2022, including the John Lewis Partnership, Mott MacDonald, and Scott Bader Company Ltd. In Small is Beautiful, Ernst Schumacher described the structure of Scott Bader, which was founded by Ernest Bader in 1921 and so is now over 100 years old. Mr Bader transferred the company, which makes adhesives, polymers and other chemical products, to the workers in 1951, and in 1973 Schumacher commented[2] that the company, and “a few others” were “small islands of sanity in a large society ruled by greed and envy”.
Opponents of growth as the default principle have diverged somewhat. Several influenced by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906-1994), have disagreed with supporters of a steady-state economy including Herman Daly (1938- ), emeritus professor at the University of Maryland, although both schools of thought accept that populations in rich countries should cut their use of non-renewable resources including fossil fuels. The steady-staters propose that an economy can persist in a state of dynamic equilibrium, while the de-growthers tend to accept the Georgescu-Roegen view that “even a declining state which does not converge toward annihilation, cannot exist forever in a finite environment”.[3] In theory, consumption should fall to the point at which new carbon emissions are zero, but the distribution of cuts could be anywhere on the continuum from equitable to wholly unequal. In a kleptocratic society, rising inequality is the norm – the exact opposite of a society which could be content with lower material living standards.
[1] Summary for Policymakers, paragraph E.4.5, IPCC AR6 WGIII.
[2] P.237 of the 1974 Abacus edition.
[3] Energy and Economic Myths: Institutional and Analytical Essays, p.23. Differences of opinion between de-growthers and steady-staters are explored in ‘Economic De-Growth Vs. Steady-State Economy’ by Christian Kerschner in Journal of Cleaner Production Vol.18 pps.544-551, 2010.
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