Checklist Toward Zero Carbon

Forbes has an interesting little article out, “China seen committing to environmental targets; seeking technology transfer - UN”.

It’s short so here it is:

China will offer to commit to environmental targets in the current round of climate change negotiations, in exchange for technology transfer from developed countries, according to the head of the United Nations secretariat on climate change.

China is seeking technology from developed countries that will help it deal with global warming and reduce carbon emissions, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework on Climate Change, said.

Speaking at a news briefing here, de Boer added that the US wants to obtain commitments from developing countries like China and India to cut carbon emissions in an eventual post-Kyoto settlement.

Seems to me they are setting the table for the next U.S. President to take bold action. As I described in “Reactions speak louder than Bush climate speech” it seemed that China’s reaction in particular indicated a shift in attitude and a hopeful sign. I think this news report builds on that sense. It is encouraging if small news. Little steps can get us moving.

With the global warming induced spreading of beetles set to turn the borreal forest from a carbon sink into a huge net emitter, to the horrific news that the methane train is leaving the station, you’d think, at first blush, this report on increased volcanic activity, is a sign that nature is piling on. Nature is starting to resemble the plagues of Egypt.

Carolina Pagli of the University of Leeds, UK, and Freysteinn Sigmundsson of the University of Iceland have calculated the effects of the melting on the crust and magma underneath.

They say that, as the ice disappears, it relieves the pressure exerted on the rocks deep under the ice sheet, increasing the rate at which it melts into magma. An average of 1.4 cubic kilometres has been produced every century since 1890, a 10% increase on the background rate.

What happens when the pressure is relieved?

He and his team are looking into the effects that rising sea-levels – also a consequence of melting ice caps – will have on volcanoes. “We are going to see a massive increase in volcanic activity globally,” he told New Scientist. “If we look back at previous warm periods, that is what happened.”

But is this really so bad? Beyond the immediate death and destruction - could there be deliverance? A natural phenomenon akin to a parting of the Red Sea?

My illogic goes something like this:
1. global warming causes massive volcanic irruptions,
2. and the irruptions will fill the atmosphere with dust,
3. and the dust will cool the planet bringing us back into balance.
4. and all will have been for the best, in the best of all possible worlds. Candide

(Then we can, do doubt, wreck the place all over again - for we know not what we do…oops wrong book, it’s been very confusing here in NYC this past week.)

Or could the irruptions just be another sign that we’re bringing hell to earth - to us and our children?

Methane: the other green house gas, is 20 to 25 times more potent than CO2 (depending on who you ask).

The good news was that over the last decade methane releases have been largely flat due to reductions in man-made emissions. Unfortunately the good news is old news. NOAA has just released a report today titled “Carbon Dioxide, Methane Rise Sharply in 2007″.

The NOAA report states:

Rapidly growing industrialization in Asia and rising wetland emissions in the Arctic and tropics are the most likely causes of the recent methane increase, said scientist Ed Dlugokencky from NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory.

”We’re on the lookout for the first sign of a methane release from thawing Arctic permafrost,” said Dlugokencky. “It’s too soon to tell whether last year’s spike in emissions includes the start of such a trend.”

As I discussed previously in “The Awakening Great White Whale”, the arctic permafrost is the place to look for the most critical planetary tipping point.

Spiegel Online has a frightening confirmation of what we face with further warming in just the next few years.

What treachery lies in the permafrost?

In the permafrost bottom of the 200-meter-deep sea, enormous stores of gas hydrates lie dormant in mighty frozen layers of sediment. The carbon content of the ice-and-methane mixture here is estimated at 540 billion tons. “This submarine hydrate was considered stable until now,” says the Russian biogeochemist Natalia Shakhova, currently a guest scientist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks who is also a member of the Pacific Institute of Geography at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Vladivostok.

And so our permafrost is now permamelt:

The permafrost has grown porous, says Shakhova, and already the shelf sea has become “a source of methane passing into the atmosphere.” The Russian scientists have estimated what might happen when this Siberian permafrost-seal thaws completely and all the stored gas escapes. They believe the methane content of the planet’s atmosphere would increase twelvefold. “The result would be catastrophic global warming,” say the scientists. The greenhouse-gas potential of methane is 20 times that of carbon dioxide, as measured by the effects of a single molecule.

We warm the earth further at great peril:

Climate change could give an additional push to these trends. “If the Arctic Sea ice continues to recede and the shelf becomes ice-free for extended periods, then the water in these flat areas will get much warmer,” said Overduin. That could lead to a situation in which the temperature of the sea sediment rises above freezing, which would thaw the permafrost.

The $64,000 question is what’s the rate of acceleration of the permafrost melt?

“We don’t have any data on that — those are just suspicions,” the Canadian scientist said. Natalia Shakhova also passed on the question of whether to expect a gradual gas emission or an abrupt burst of large quantities of methane. “No one can say right now whether that will take years, decades or hundreds of years,” she said. But one cannot rule out sudden methane emissions. They could happen at “any time.”

One thing is clear, though: The thawing of the Arctic sea floor will create “new potential sources for methane … which no one had reckoned with until now,” said Laurence Smith, a professor for geography at the University of California in Los Angeles. Smith is researching North Pole frost zones and expects that a thawing of the permafrost will “supply fuel for methane engines.”

If we don’t slam on the CO2 brakes hard and now, this war for survival could be over before we’ve even started to fight.

James Hansen sent off another wonderful letter today - this time addressed to Governor Jim Gibbons of Nevada.

The money quote - toward the bottom of the second page - to get us rolling:

Utilities and the fossil fuel industry must reckon with the fact that the laws of Nature and the human instinct for survival will overrule any paper agreements that may exist now or be wrangled in the near-term. “Grandfathering” of fossil fuel plants and any ineffectual “cap and trade” scheme, should it be initiated, will necessarily be replaced by “cap and bulldoze”. Uncaptured CO2 emissions from coal must be eliminated.

He goes on, as only Hansen can:

Is it possible that I am wrong, that the governments are so larded with fossil fuel special interests that they will allow us to destroy the planet that we leave for our children and grandchildren? Sure - just as there was a chance that the United States andn the Soviet Union could have blown each other off the face of the planet with nuclear weapons - but it is much more likely that we will come to our senses soon, as the scientific story and emperical evidence overwhelm the deceit of short-term special interests.

One of the “Fossil Fuel Facts” is that a substantial fraction of fossil fuel CO2 emissions stays in the air for what is, for all practical purposes “an eternity”, more than 1000 years. That is a well-established scientific fact - there is no debate. A direct implication is that we cannot be aiming for a 50, 80 or 90 percent reduction of emissions. We must transition over the next several decades to practically zero net CO2 emissions. Thus our energy focus must be to develop renewable energies and energy efficiency.

Again, like with Mr. Rogers, he lowers the boom:

Governor Gibbons, I understand that you have also supported proposals for new coal-fired power plants, in Ely, Mesquite and White Pine. These coal-fired power plants would expose ratepayers and Nevada to grave financial risk. Steeply rising construction costs and coal prices are themselves ratcheting up the cost of coal-fired electricity, and sure-to-appear federal legislation that demands elimination of CO2 emissions will drive costs much higher. Given that Nevada’s geology is not very well-suited for storing CO2 , any assumption about retrofitting a coal-fired plant for CO2 capture is a dubious and financially risky proposition.

As for the insidious sponsors of the presidential debates:

A major additional disadvantage of coal is the pollution associated with it. There is no such thing as “clean coal”.

With another whack at coal he clears a path through Nevada to the promised land:

Although the fossil fuel industry pedals misinformation, claiming that renewable energies can only be a niche contribution to energy needs, that contention defies common sense. As proof of the contrary, consider just one of the renewable energies, solar power. The technology for solar thermal power stations already exists, power stations can be built rapidly, and as the market for them increases their unit costs will fall steadily, as the cost of coal power continues to rise. There is enough solar energy in a small fraction of our desert Southwest to provide all of the electrical needs of the United States. Nevada has the potential to be a leader in this field, providing power for itself and for distant location as a low-loss grid is developed. Leadership would provide great economic benefit to Nevada and provide a large number of high-pay jobs and new businesses.

Let’s recap (with minor elaboration):

1. We must reduce to practically zero CO2 emissions.
2. Solar thermal is a significant part of the answer.
3. Nevada has the sun exposure to power practically the whole country.
4. With next generation low-loss transmission lines the power can be distributed.
5. Keep coal in the ground.

While the world is awakening to the horrific ramifications of climate change, our progress in combating it is dangerously slow - retarded by an inertia composed of mighty fossil fuel interests, our wanton personal habits, an indifferent press and short sighted political leadership. We await the promise of a new American administration but precious days are passing. What can be done before November, to stack the deck so that the new administration can’t just do “the right thing” wink, wink - but is compelled to do everything that needs to be done? It is as they say, a defining moment.

In his new slide show Al Gore speaks passionately to the predicament and possibilities of this extraordinary time. Along with his smart and well funded “we” branding strategy – Al Gore for many Americans is the face of global warming. History will treat Al Gore well, yet at this moment he’s unjustly trapped in the warped prism of Bush/Cheney World – and so his message is lost on too many fence sitting Americans.

But there is another leader right now: the conservative, mid-westerner James Hansen. Level-headed and firm, he has embarked on what seems to be a one man quest from another era; to stop the construction of new coal power plants. Hansen rightly defines the issue in terms of security – our existential security. He’s written letters to the heads of Britain and Australia, testified at public hearings and harangued energy officials in his effort to stop new plants.

Hansen sees the politicians as intractably beholden to fossil fuel interests and is increasingly stating that the only way to break the log jam is through the courts. He may be right.

Yet his clear insistence that coal plant construction be halted and that all existing coal plants be shut down - last year by 2050 and now ominously he says by by 2030. Hansen calls for a moratorium on coal as do others, including leading Democrats. A moratorium is the result we require. Yet the mechanism for getting such a moratorium at the requisite global scale remains nebulous and consequently ineffectual. A strong and clear mechanism to achieve a global moratorium on coal power plants is absolutely required. I believe the clear mechanism missing is a Coal Power Non-Proliferation Treaty.

As the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty unambiguously defined humanity’s primary existential threat, this new treaty would unambiguously define humanity’s current threat. And as the pillars of nuclear non-proliferation do, the coal power treaty should not only halt the construction of new coal power plants but create the framework for disarmament - the dismantling of existing plants by 2030.

Ireland proposed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968 – might they brush it off and put it to adaptive reuse in 2008? Could a “great power” do it? Germany? Britain? Japan?

If* done right, such a treaty would afford many unique opportunities and qualities:

1. It links the climate fight to the most popular vestige of the Cold War - a treaty whose clear military, national security and humanitarian interests were paramount, and by association, conveying to the climate crisis struggle those same attributes into today’s popular imagination.
2. By rhetorically linking to the Cold War era treaty, it can reach outside party politics and traditional international alignments – allowing for the possibility of entirely new and positive dynamics.
3. It kick-starts a national and international debate focused at the heart of the problem while decoupling it from the highly complex and esoteric negotiations of Kyoto and Bali.
4. It provides a clear and powerful mechanism to pressure all countries - most importantly the US, China and India to get on board.
5. It provides a concrete reference point, easy for all to understand and then work from. Because if you agree you can’t build another coal plant – what are you going to do?

What are we going to do? There’s a multitude of actions that must accelerate like an avalanche if we are to save ourselves. It’s my thought that such a “simple” act as this treaty might do a bit toward uncorking the bottle on our way to the next inauguration.

Come’on Ireland, the world again awaits your leadership!

* a big if.

Below is a reposting of the Foreword to this checklist. It is in some way a brief explanation of why I embarked on it and this subsequent blog. I hope you find this site useful.

0.1 Foreword -

In 2005 the eminent climate scientist Dr. James Hansen said, “We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption.” Just three years later, we are now crossing some of those tipping points. It’s time to stop talking. We must reduce now. Read the checklist. Download it, edit it, make it your own and distribute it.

Melting polar ice will soon disintegrate, raising oceans to threaten the existence of Miami, New York, Shanghai, Jakarta, Calcutta, Lagos, London and other cities. The polar bears are going to die. And 20 to 40% of animal species will be extinct by mid-century. The tropics are turning to desert. Monsoon rains will cease. There will be drought, famine, and millions of refugees. We could be among them. Hundreds of millions of lives will be at risk, quite possibly billions. Yes, billions.

We face these consequences not in 1,000 or 100 years, but in our lifetime. We face an emergency, the likes of which civilization has never seen. What is to be our legacy?

The tipping point for atmospheric CO2 concentration is approximately 350 parts per million (ppm). Past it we are on the road to catastrophe. It’s now 383ppm and rising 2ppm per year.

We need to take immediate action. We must halt the building of new coal and gas power plants that don’t capture the CO2 they produce, and require the conversion of all existing coal power plants to capture CO2. If the power plants cannot be converted, let’s shut them down.

There’s no “silver bullet” to fix the problem - we must also massively invest in clean energy sources, forest restoration, public transportation, and in building a carbon neutral society. We need to elect leaders who are serious about this emergency to every level of government and educate the ones who are not.

Let’s examine our own lives and make them as carbon free as possible. This checklist is a simple way to get started.

As the dynamic of climate change feeds on itself, shocks lie ahead. The previously benign Siberian soil, locked for ages in permafrost, is now melting, releasing greenhouse gases (GHG) that exceed the total output of U.S. manmade emissions.

The oceans - now absorbing 2 billion tons of CO2 annually - are becoming acidic dead zones. Eventually if they tip they’ll switch to being massive CO2 emitters, radically raising atmospheric temperature and sea levels.

While the challenges are enormous, let’s start with what we eat and how we live and work. Let’s begin by eliminating our personal carbon footprint.

Please read the lists. Think about it. Let’s all do what we can.

Ken Levenson

Feb 29, 2008

Many here surely know of Mr. Hansen.

Mr. James Hansen is without a doubt the number one climate science authority in the United States government, perhaps in the world right now. His credibility, and ultimately his power is such that even President Bush cannot or will not fire him - even though while director of Goddard, and as a private citizen, Hansen has struck out on a bold course few have dared.

For a primer by all means read “Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Surprising Truth About Global Warming” by Mark Bowen.

But even more importantly go directly to the source. Hansen has a personal website where he posts his recent scientific papers (even in draft form), testimony and letters. It’s an incredible resource. He also emails these items out to a list -

To be added to the list distribution, please e-mail hansencu@gmail.com with “ADD” as the subject of your message.

The reason for my post now is one of his latest posts “Mr. Rogers and Darth Vader”. It’s an astonishing document showing a directness and clarity of action that is demanded of our leadership now - but few are showing. This document deserves wide circulation and more scientists, political leaders and members of the media should follow his example. The times demand it.

Let’s remind ourselves: The man is a conservative mid-westerner - in the best sense surely. But above all he’s a scientist and a citizen of the world.

The document is a letter written by Mr. Hansen to Mr. Rogers, Chairman of Duke Energy - with an overlay of explination to us (the public) as to his intentions and its meaning. Read the whole thing - it’s a quick 4 pages - but here’s some choice quotes.

He starts with a pleasant introduction but before long lowers the guns. A sample:

It appears that energy industry leaders may be choosing a path analogous to that taken by Big Tobacco when it first became clear that smoking caused serious health problems. Tobacco companies manufactured and magnified public doubt about scientific evidence; they masqueraded PR as news and expert opinoin; they emphasized maintaining “balance”in a “controversy”, and they supported doctors and scientists who disputed the evidence, thus proclaiming concern about discovering the truth while actually suppressing it.

Wow, right? But he pulls no punches and gets personal:

Mr. Rogers, as a leader in the Electric Power industry, your decisions will affect not only energy bills faced by your customers, but the future planet that your children and grandchildren inherit. If you insist that new coal plants are essential for near-term power needs, you may submit your company and your customers to grave financial risk, and leave a legacy that you will regret.

If only our political leaders had such balls! (and authority)

He ends the letter requesting:

…a one-day discussion with top experts in the country in energy efficiency, renewable energies, clean coal with carbon capture, and nuclear power…I can arrange a meeting here at Columbia University, and would seek your advise on participants….Would you please call me at….?

After closing the letter Hansen goes on to talk about the “Darth Vader” of his title starting with a description of a very misleading ad produced by ExxonMobil. Hansen says:

The ExxonMobil ad is instructive because it show that, although the voice behind the black hood has changed, a Neanderthal voice replaced by a more mellifluous one, actual policies and strategies have not changed one iota. Their intent is for the public to remain as their slavish addicts, hooked on fossil fuels. They are not investing their huge resources into becoming a (clean) energy company (can you imagine, if they would, that we would be be unable to exploit Nevada sun by 2030?)

His damn appropriate invective goes on, and he closes with this advice:

In the meantime, back on the ranch, the most useful thing that most of the public can do to save the planet is to take actions to block construction of new coal-fired power plants. It is also important to be sure that fossil fuel mining is prevented in national parks, off-shore regions under state influence, any place where the public has influence and can help assure that fossil fuels are left in the ground.

You also might buy a single share of stock in the evil empire an make some noise at a stockholders meeting. Who knows, if Darth Vader is continually whacked on the side of his helmet with a two-by-four, hard enough, he many eventually realize that there are other forms of energy besides fossil fuels.

Jim

He’s da man!

(Update: Just noticed that Mr. Hansen has posted himself over at Gristmill.)

While climate change is effecting every spot on the planet and the most visible effects are the crumbling ice shelves at both poles - perhaps the most important and critical early warning signs are the borreal forests and permafrost stretching like a collar around the top of the earth. There is new evidence of the borreal forests’ warming.

With the latest readings from NOAA (look particularly at the graph showing the biggest temperature rises over the Siberian forest.) it is another concrete Clarion call to action. It seems that the melting permafrost has likely got a one way ticket for the foreseeable future - that is until we can turn our CO2 spewing boat around.

Our future may be defined by the simple calculation of how fast the permafrost is going to melt - and like Hansen’s 350, another number may come to haunt us: 500.

That’s the over 500 billion metric tons of carbon that the permafrost is estimated to hold.

For comparison, we globally, currently emit about 7.4 billion tons of carbon each year - without including deforestation. (Take the 27,245,758,000 CO2 emissions number and divide by 3.67 to get carbon.)

To make matters worse the carbon is generally being released as methane, at an ever increasing rate.

While methane is over 21 times more potent than CO2, the good news is that methane dissipates 10 times faster as CO2. So the BIG question is how fast is the melting accelerating?

It could disastrously add the right push to make this climate crisis a perfect storm - and there’s only one boat. While the Olympics and election are sure to drown out important climate news keep your eyes out for reports on the permafrost melt this summer and what new projections foresee. If such a thing is possible, the data readings this summer could be our most important warning to date.

Time Magazine has a very good article “The Clean Energy Scam” by Michael Grunwald, on the terrifying connection between biofuels and the viability of the Amazon (and other tropical forests for that matter).

A Texan sets the tone:

“It gives me goose bumps,” says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. “It’s like witnessing a rape.”

The perpetrator of this violence? The article answers:

This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.

The Amazon was once protected for it’s biodiversity, but now it’s survival is paramount for one thing: it’s ability to naturally sequester carbon. And the dynamic is explained thusly:

Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.

Unfortunately:

Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group. Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class.

UPDATE:
Just want to add this graph to underline the connection to the power of global commodity markets, which appears to have lifted the Amazon’s destruction to a higher level of magnitude.

More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it’s subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It’s the remorseless economics of commodities markets. “The price of soybeans goes up,” laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, “and the forest comes down.”

Translating into a brutal short-term local logic:

The basic problem is that the Amazon is worth more deforested than it is intact. Carter, who fell in love with the region after marrying a Brazilian and taking over her father’s ranch, says the rate of deforestation closely tracks commodity prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. “It’s just exponential right now because the economics are so good,” he says. “Everything tillable or grazeable is gouged out and cleared.”

Which brings us to the global warming phrase dejour, “tipping point”.

This destructive biofuel dynamic is on vivid display in Brazil, where a Rhode Island–size chunk of the Amazon was deforested in the second half of 2007 and even more was degraded by fire. Some scientists believe fires are now altering the local microclimate and could eventually reduce the Amazon to a savanna or even a desert. “It’s approaching a tipping point,” says ecologist Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center.

Dan Nepstad is not just any talking head scientist - he’s one of a handful of the world’s top earth scientists specializing in global warming dynamics. His recent report “Interactions among Amazon land use, forests and climate: prospects for a near-term forest tipping point” describes a terrifying razors edge the Amazon finds itself on.

If the Amazon tips, it goes from a massive carbon sink to a massive carbon emitter - quite likely leaving much more than itself for dead.

The take away on biofuels is a very cautionary note:

The lesson behind the math is that on a warming planet, land is an incredibly precious commodity, and every acre used to generate fuel is an acre that can’t be used to generate the food needed to feed us or the carbon storage needed to save us. Searchinger acknowledges that biofuels can be a godsend if they don’t use arable land. Possible feedstocks include municipal trash, agricultural waste, algae and even carbon dioxide, although none of the technologies are yet economical on a large scale. Tilman even holds out hope for fuel crops–he’s been experimenting with Midwestern prairie grasses–as long as they’re grown on “degraded lands” that can no longer support food crops or cattle.

A bit of good news to share. The e-waste bill previously stalled in disagreement between the Mayor and City Council has been broken in two - allowing for passage of one part that begins the process of establishing an electronics recycling program with manufacturers. Mandates for manufacturers’ recycling, while ultimately necessary, will have to wait until the second bill is passed. While I’m not holding my breath, every step matters and with new perspective and momentum each new barrier toward lowering our carbon footprints may be more easily breeched. So a small hooray for NYC! May this small step provide momentum for the big fight now underway: CONGESTION PRICING.