The jagged edges of the Keeling Curve

This time it made the headlines.  Something as vague and intangible as an invisible, odorless gas is encapsulated in a concrete number.  400 parts per million, a level of carbon dioxide not seen for the past three to five million years.

The number is in fact not intangible.  It is very real, real because sea levels are rising millimeter by millimeter, submerging island nations such as the Maldives and heavily populated coastlines.  The number is real because the summer of 2012 was the hottest summer on record in the United States.  The number is real because of the acidification of oceans and coral bleaching; because of drier forests fueling larger fires; because of the ever-shrinking amount of polar ice; because entire villages in Alaska are needing to be moved because of thawing land, to the tune of $380,000 per person.  

In spite of all of this very real evidence of the effects of climate change, nothing new is being said that can wash away the line that have been drawn in the sand that divides the "believers" from the "skeptics".  (If you don't "believe" in climate science, perhaps you might question your beliefs in most any science that you rely on in your daily life.)  Perhaps it is time for a new story about climate change, a new story that connects old facts.  Perhaps our sole focus on the emission of greenhouse gases as a technological deficiency is distracting us from the real issues; framing climate change as a “carbon” problem is “possibly the greatest and most dangerous reductionism of all time: a 150 year history of complex geologic, political, economic, and military security issues all reduced to one element.” [1]

As a postdoctoral researcher, I wonder if Charles Keeling thought about the symbolism of his scientific endeavors in the thin air of Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawai'i.  The jagged edges of the Keeling Curve are symbolic of the sharp divides and fractures in our politics, and under our feet in the fracked Marcellus Shale.  The jagged edges show how cruelly we continue to cut and lacerate this earth, just as is being done in the forests of Canada to access tar sands.  The curve is symbolic because not only does it show that carbon dioxide levels are rising, but that also our hubris is, too--the hubris of thinking that we may be able to engineer ourselves out of this problem.

From The Scripps Institution of Oceanography

 

[1] Thomas Princen, “Leave It in the Ground: The Politics and Ethics of Fossil Fuels and Global Disruption” prepared for the International Studies Association International Conference, Montréal, March 16-19, 2011; to appear in State of the World 2013.  

Numbers to obfuscate

(I'm still alive; I've just been working on my dissertation, which is due in two and a half weeks.)

If you are familiar with climate change regimes such as the Kyoto Protocol, or even the tenuous Copenhagen Accords, you'll know that there is a differentiation between the countries of the world. (We do this anyway, calling parts of the world "New" and others "Old", "developing" and "developed", "North" and "South", "capitalist" and "communist".) In the Kyoto Protocol, countries are either Annex I (industrialised, OECD countries) or non-Annex I (industrialising) countries. The responsibility of a country to scale back its greenhouse gas emissions depends on what bin the country is placed in--Annex I countries tend to have greater responsibilities than non-Annex I countries. There has been great debates about some of the countries placed in the non-Annex I bin--countries like India, China, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa--because these countries, while spewing tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases and pollutants into the atmosphere, will have fewer responsibilities. Countries like the US, Canada, and Australia fight tooth and nail to have such countries assume greater burdens, while at the same time not really wanting to do much themselves.

As you can tell, it matters what you are binned as and called. Being called a "small employer" allows you tax incentives and loopholes. Being called an engineer allows you to do engineering things that non-engineering people, who may be fully experienced and qualified, cannot do. Calling oneself an "individual" is the first step to throwing your hands up in the face of systemic problems. So people will go to considerable lengths to come up with ways to obfuscate responsibility. Divide the population of the country with some non-sense economic statistic, multiply that number by some other made up metric, and raise that to the power of some voodoo polynomial, and WALA! Your country is no longer responsible for its actions. The number says it, not me!

This is exactly what two researchers, Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle, at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and  Sustainable Worldwide Transportation have just done in the widely circulated and read American Scientist magazine. Their piece, titled Accounting for Climate in Countries' Carbon Dioxide Emissions (which also appalled my advisor) is exactly the kind of work that will continue to allow people, institutions, and organisations to get away with ecological degradation and environmental injustices. They found a way to use the number of days people in various countries have to use heating and cooling to live comfortably. These, they claim, are a sort of sunk cost. (Fair enough, I might be able to agree only to a certain degree with that.) But the key to their findings is the following figure:

The rankings for countries by their carbon dioxide emissions can shift considerably when the variable of climate is incorporated. The first column above shows the 15 lowest (top) and highest (bottom) emitters in a set of 157 countries based on emissions per capita. The second column shows the rankings that result when each country’s emissions per capita are divided by that country’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita; countries that move into the top or bottom 15 under this index are shown in yellow. The rankings for the third column are calculated by dividing the results found for the second column by the average number of heating and cooling degree days each country experiences, a measure of how much typical temperatures vary from a set point. Countries that move into the far ends of the spectrum when all three factors are included are shown in purple. Under this measure, Jordan (which has a relatively mild climate) joins the heaviest emitters, and Sweden (which has a relatively cold climate) joins the countries with the lowest emissions. The numbers in parentheses show each country’s relative emissions, normalized to the lowest emitter. For instance, when population, GDP and climate are included, South Africa, the highest emitter, produces 60.8 times more emissions than does Chad, the lowest emitter. From here.

As you move from left to right, you see that the countries that are initially the highest polluters slowly disappear. You start with the Canada, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Luxembourg (all countries that the United States has close ties to) and the United States, and you end up with Libya, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and South Africa. These are the countries that must be held accountable! Not the US or its cronies! And it is toward the end of the article where the authors make their crowning remark:

Our results suggest that taking climate into account makes a significant difference in how countries fare in carbon dioxide emissions rankings. Because people respond to the climate they live in by heating and cooling indoor spaces, an index that incorporates climate provides a fairer yardstick than an index that does not. We hope that our approach will stimulate others to further refine this index to reflect even better the complexities involved in ranking countries on emissions (emphases added by me...of course).

Let's feel good about living the lifestyles we do! The Earth and its oppressed peoples be damned!

Guest blog #25: Ashwin Salvi on greenhouse gases and reforestation

Here are some thoughts from Ashwin, a previous guest blogger, on reforestation. I appreciate the post, particularly because its nature is different than what is typically written about on the blog.

Over the past few years, there has been a lot of talk about carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration to combat climate change. Sequestration is, in a nutshell, the capturing of airborne CO2, which has a warming effect on the climate, and storing it in liquid or solid form, either underground or on the surface. Darshan has written about such geo-engineering approaches and the ethical and procedural justice issues surrounding them previously. Today, I want to focus a bit more on the technical aspects of sequestration.

A recent Michigan Energy Club lecture got me thinking about CO2 sequestration via reforestation to reduce the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere. While replanting trees is a good idea, the issues are a bit more complicated once they are unpacked a bit.

Firstly, it is important to note that growing trees does absorb a considerable amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. It is estimated that that global forests absorb ~20% of CO2 emitted from fossil fuel combustion. However, all living things respire; trees also emit CO2 via respiration! While the amount of CO2 released through respiration is less than the CO2 absorbed for their growth, the point is that we cannot forget that the CO2 and trees is not a one-way operation. In addition and possibly more significant, trees also emit a variety of hydrocarbons (HC) that can lead to increased tropospheric ozone levels. Of course, these biogenic emissions are completely natural. (Click here to read about an interesting study comparing HC emissions from different trees.) It is what is anthropogenic that is of deeper concern.

Furthermore, it also matters where reforestation takes place. Trees growing in tropical climates are more effective at absorbing CO2 than those growing in higher latitude forests. Higher latitude forests have actually been seen to produce a net warming effect on the climate. The darker leaves of these trees absorb more heat and outweigh the cooling effect CO2 absorption and evapotranspiration. This is because the albedo, or reflectivity, of the earth’s surface changes from a higher value (with snow), to a lower value (darker leaves), making less of the incident solar radiation reflect back into space. In addition, higher latitude forests experience seasonal effects, reducing their ability to absorb CO2 due to tree hibernation.

Tropical forests are seen to be more effective at CO2 absorption due to faster growth rates stemming from year round growth, abundant sunlight and rain. In addition, evapotranspiration from the leaves of trees also contribute to a net cooling effect.

Let’s think further down the line, though, toward the end of the tree’s life. The tree spent its entire life absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and now that the tree is dead, where does the carbon go? Well, as the tree decomposes, the carbon goes back into the atmosphere as CO2 and methane, with methane being one hundred times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2. So while, the tree does a great job taking carbon out of the atmosphere while it is alive, the problem of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere really isn't solved, but just kicked down the road; the tree is just an ephemeral holding box. Therefore, trees as a means of CO2 sequestration will help in the shorter term, but a longer term solution (like reduction of emitted CO2) must be what is tackled.

Some thoughts on technology and utopia through invasion

Any critical words on technology, and one is labeled a neo-Luddite. But being constantly surrounded by technology and taking a class titled Knowledge, Power and Practice in Science, Technology and Medicine (pardon the pretentiousness) has kept critical issues of technology at the forefront of my mind. This is not to mention the constant talk of "green" technologies in the news and in magazines.

I understand that we live in a technological society. Today, our every interaction is mediated through technology, and that without technology, we feel empty. I would go so far as to say that we feel alone. We feel alone not because there is no one around us, but, because, as cyborgs, our identity firmly encompasses our relationship with our technogizmos. Many people would not mind spending days away from people, if only they had their trusty computer or slick iPhone with them. Part of me thinks, to each his own. If technology makes someone happy, then, well, that's great...But part of me thinks, instead, that this is an sad indicator of a lack of community, that as fundamentally social beings, we find solace in experiencing what we want to experience, rather than being open to new experiences through the vulnerabilities of being social. Furthermore, what technology represents and how it is brought into this world is in no way neutral or benign. Rather, there are politics embedded in them that serve very certain purposes. (I can write more about this another time.)

I think that this technocraze stretches further than us as individuals. As a collective, we hope that it is our new technologies that will replace older ones, opening up new routes towards cornucopia and utopia. I have been ambivalent about the prospects of large scale every thing, including wind and solar energy, not only because their production raises important geopolitical and pollution issues, but also because they further stabilise a system, an ethic, of reliance on technology, rather than in our non-cyborgian selves, to address the problems we face.

There is something that I hadn't really thought of, though, that Paul Kingsnorth brings up in his fantastic essay, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist in the recent issue of Orion. He writes about how the "green" technologies, those promoted by eco-modernists, will invade some of the only spaces on this Earth that have been relatively untouched by humans.

...This reductive approach to the human-environmental challenge leads to an obvious conclusion: if carbon is the problem, then “zero-carbon” is the solution. Society needs to go about its business without spewing the stuff out. It needs to do this quickly, and by any means necessary. Build enough of the right kind of energy technologies, quickly enough, to generate the power we “need” without producing greenhouse gases, and there will be no need to ever turn the lights off; no need to ever slow down.

To do this will require the large-scale harvesting of the planet’s ambient energy: sunlight, wind, water power. This means that vast new conglomerations of human industry are going to appear in places where this energy is most abundant. Unfortunately, these places coincide with some of the world’s wildest, most beautiful, and most untouched landscapes. The sort of places that environmentalism came into being to protect.

And so the deserts, perhaps the landscape always most resistant to permanent human conquest, are to be colonized by vast “solar arrays,” glass and steel and aluminum, the size of small countries. The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons, and wires. The open oceans, already swimming in our plastic refuse and emptying of marine life, will be home to enormous offshore turbine ranges and hundreds of wave machines strung around the coastlines like Victorian necklaces. The rivers are to see their estuaries severed and silted by industrial barrages. The croplands and even the rainforests, the richest habitats on this terrestrial Earth, are already highly profitable sites for biofuel plantations designed to provide guilt-free car fuel to the motion-hungry masses of Europe and America.

What this adds up to should be clear enough, yet many people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted, and the nonhuman. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this “environmentalism.”

The eternal question

Does it really matter why we do things as long as they get done?

I am attending a conference on issues of communicating climate change to those who don't believe or accept it. Leaders from all areas of the debate, including academia, activism, non-profits, conflict resolution, and corporations have convened in Ann Arbor in an event co-sponsored by the Erb Institute and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Nancy Jackson, a community organiser, and executive director for the Climate+Energy Project in Kansas. She said that to the atmosphere, all that really matters it the amount of carbon dioxide in it. Therefore, it doesn't matter what people think, it matters what people do.

While I find this argument compelling for a second, I am quickly led to think about the greater umbrella that guides our behaviours. Say that we are able to fully "solve" or "address" the issues of climate change through energy efficiency, "smart growth", "green" consumerism, and eating away at the carbon stabilisation wedges. Say we are able to steer the world away from the worst-case scenarios of climate change and sea-level rise. Say we are able to have our cake and eat it too. I wonder then, say one hundred years from now, or one hundred and fifty years from now, will the world be faced with some other massive existential problem? I wonder, if people aren't made to really think about their choices and the consequences of their choices, are we setting ourselves up for an even bigger challenge and hurdle (if that is fathomable) in the future?

Several questions then abound. What sort of legacy do we leave people with? How do we educate and train the next generation? What values do we instill in them? How might we best equip them with the capacities to think through issues facing them and the collectives they are embedded in? Are we making the next generation more resilient than ours? Or are we setting them up for problems that they, too, will kick down the road, if possible?

I think it is powerful to play this out in our own lives. Most all of us would agree that the ends do not always justify the means. For those of us that are not in desperate situations, we would think that selling drugs to pay for the monthly electricity bills is not acceptable. We might start making due with less or cutting costs by being inventive and creative about our electricity use. Many of us would think it unacceptable to leave our very children unprepared for the world by not equipping them with an understanding of human relationships and how to treat other people.

For some reason, we continue to want a better world for future generations, while at the same time undermining their abilities to address the challenges they will face, while at the same time creating even larger problems. So, does it matter what people think? Absolutely.

FRACK YOU - The government-industry-university complex

I came across a piece on Dot Earth today about a recent report out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the future of natural gas in this country. What is written and recommended in this report is all that you'd expect from the government-industry-university complex that holds neoclassical/neoliberal economics as key, that is technocratic and technology-driven, that is committed in continuing behaviour that has led to ecological degradation, and that will continue to tradeoff the environment and local peoples in pursuit of broader policies. The fundamental question the study asked was, What is the role of natural gas in a carbon-constrained economy? What a lousy, narrow, and short-sighted question to ask. I fully recognise that the answers that come from such a question are those that the question askers want to hear - investing in fracking is the way forward. What is more disturbing though is the power such documents wield in policy-making and politicking, as well as the recommendation that there must be a reliance on industry best-practices, given that regulation is difficult, with an eternally constrained and curtailed EPA. Here are some key bullet points, with emphases and comments added by myself.

• In a carbon-constrained economy, the relative importance of natural gas is likely to increase even further, as it is one of the most cost-effective means by which to maintain energy supplies while reducing CO2 emissions. This is particularly true in the electric power sector, where, in the U.S., natural gas sets the cost benchmark against which other clean power sources must compete to remove the marginal ton of CO2. (So it's not that continued energy use is the problem. It's just the source.)
• The current supply outlook for natural gas will contribute to greater competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing, while the use of more efficient technologies could offset increases in demand and provide cost-effective compliance with emerging environmental requirements.
• The environmental impacts of shale development are challenging but manageable. (?) There has been concern that these fractures can also penetrate shallow freshwater zones and contaminate them with fracturing fluid, but there is no evidence that this is occurring. (?) There is, however, evidence of natural gas migration into freshwater zones in some areas, most likely as a result of substandard well completion practices by a few operators. There are additional environmental challenges in the area of water management, particularly the effective disposal of fracture fluids. (to where?) Concerns with this issue are particularly acute in regions that have not previously experienced large-scale oil and natural gas development, especially those overlying the massive Marcellus shale, and do not have a well-developed subsurface water disposal infrastructure. It is essential that both large and small companies follow industry best practices. (How do we trust them? Why should we trust them? Please some one try to convince me.)
• Government-supported research on the fundamental challenges of unconventional natural gas development, particularly shale gas, should be greatly increased in scope and scale. In particular, support should be put in place for a comprehensive and integrated research program to build a system-wide understanding of all subsurface aspects of the U.S. shale resource. In addition, research should be pursued to reduce water usage in fracturing and to develop cost-effective water recycling technology. A concerted coordinated effort by industry and government, both state and Federal, should be organized so as to minimize the environmental impacts of shale gas development through both research and regulation. 
• The U.S. should support unconventional natural gas development outside U.S., particularly in Europe and China, as a means of diversifying the natural gas supply base.

Sweet! So there'll be money to be made, so industry is happy, there'll be more jobs, so the government is happy, and of course, there will need to be research, so universities are happy. If you were to take a look at the participants and advisory committee members in this study, you would find only those names on it who stand to profit from fracking. Indeed, the report was written at MIT, not at Lehigh University or Bucknell University or West Virginia University or any university close to the Marcellus Shale (picture below), where much fracking is going on and anticipated. The ill-effects of fracking I've written about previously, with much more to be found in the work done by ProPublica.

http://www.marcellusshales.com/marcellusshalemap.html

Time capsule

Sherri, Laura, Laura, Katherine and I were talking trash (I like the sound of that) last night at Crazy Wisdom Tea Room, when Sherri mentioned how people, scientists/researchers I assume, once took a core of a landfill, similar to how ice cores are taken to study paleoclimate. She mentioned that they found a phone book from forty years ago, that was remarkable still a phone book; it had not degraded, decomposed, or anything of that nature. (If you want to know how McDonald's Happy Meals don't go bad or decompose, check this out - Sally Davies photographed a Happy Meal everyday for six months, with very little about the "meal" changing...) This got us talking about legacies we would like to leave behind. This is a post I have been thinking about for a while - trash as a time capsule.

I would assume that most of us want to be remembered, at least for a generation or two, for being good people, for being positive influences on our families and communities, or at least for not being, for lack of a better word, bad. We want to be remembered for being there when people needed us, for being a good listener, for being responsible, thoughtful and kind. Indeed, there are social and legal pressures for us to be this way, if we want to live in "civilisation." Word spreads about people's karma; our criminal records just don't seem to go away. Our credit scores follow us whether we like it or not, and so it is better for us to pay off credit card debt on time. We don't want our name sullied with accusations of misconduct, driving under the influence, or indecency. We are held accountable and responsible for our actions, and we "suffer" the consequences of our actions. Now say we were held accountable for the environmental harm we've caused, or more tangible yet, the trash we've produced...

Imagine if we had to write our names, hometowns, and dates on each piece of trash we produce. As we know, most of our trash doesn't decompose over human and multi-generational time-scales, especially in landfills, as Sherri can attest to. Imagine if fifty years from now, people dug up your trash, and saw what trash you produced, and made judgements about how you chose to spend your money, time and effort. Imagine if they made judgements about you as a person, responsible or otherwise. Why did she have to buy that knick-knack from the dollar store that came in a lot of packaging? Didn't she know that Styrofoam is harmful to the environment, both its production and its after life?

How can we be held responsible or accountable for our actions? Indeed, it is the unaccountability that is cause of environmental and social harms. Clearly, if there are rules for behaviour, rules of engagement, people try not to break them, because there are consequences. You pay a fine, you get sent to jail, you are shamed in your community and family. Carbon dioxide molecules don't have the names of those that caused their formation attached to them, and neither does our trash.

What would you like to be remembered for?