“No one can be free to learn without patience and forgiveness. But in a condition of overshoot, there is not much time for patience and forgiveness. Finding the right balance between the apparent opposites of urgency and patience, accountability and forgiveness is a task that requires compassion, humility, clearheadedness, honesty, and – that hardest of words, that seemingly scarcest of all resources – love.”
Last night, I gave a local presentation about climate change, “Bridging the Climate Change Gaps: A Plea for Vigorous, Focused, and Effective Activism to Avoid Chaos”.
I will have more to say on this very soon, especially once some of the TCOE (highly ir)regulars chime in, but for now, you can grab a copy of the presentation at the links below:
Some thoughts, hopefully coherent, on Hurricane Sandy and its ramifications…
The best summary I’ve seen so far as I struggle to catch up with news feeds, Google Alerts, etc. after being sans Internet for a couple of days, comes from Mark Hertsgaard in The Nation
Sandy is short for Cassandra, the Greek mythological figure who epitomizes tragedy. The gods gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy; depending on which version of the story one prefers, she could either see or smell the future. But with this gift also came a curse: Cassandra’s warnings about future disasters were fated to be ignored. That is the essence of this tragedy: to know that a given course of action will lead to disaster but to pursue it nevertheless.
He also goes on to say:
But ours need not be a Greek tragedy. Especially in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, there is no reason to continue disregarding scientists’ warnings about where our current path leads. Nor is there reason to doubt that a better path is possible. The solutions we need—a dramatic increase in energy efficiency; a rapid shift to solar, wind and other clean energy sources; a reversal of our current government subsidy patterns to champion climate-friendly rather than climate-destructive policies; and much else—are already available. Moreover, they promise to advance economic prosperity and summon the best of the American people and spirit.
…
The challenge of climate change is no longer a technical one, if it ever was. The challenge has always been primarily political, political and ultimately economic, as exemplified by the de facto veto power the richest industry in human history, Big Oil, has long exercised over US federal policy. We as a civilization have known for more than 20 years how to stop global warming: we have to stop burning so much fossil fuel. But Big Oil won’t hear of it. They’d rather relocate the Farm Belt, as Exxon-Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson recently suggested, than leave the last drop of petroleum unburned.
…
The question Hurricane Sandy really raises, then, is how long Big Oil will be allowed to hold the government of the United States hostage. How long will Exxon-Mobil’s business plans take precedence over the wellbeing and indeed survival of our children? Neither of the two presidential candidates provides great inspiration on this point, though Obama is at least willing to talk about the problem, as when he advocates eliminating some taxpayer subsidies to oil companies. (Romney, for his part, thinks Big Oil has not been favored enough by Washington.)
I strongly agree with everything above, but I would stress the political and economic aspects, because they are the valve through which all action must pass. Figuring out the basic feeds and speeds of our climate mess is relatively trivial in 2012: We’re emitting way too much CO2, and need to get on a war footing to change that fact as soon as possible. But making that happen in the context of various nation political systems and economic challenges — consider just China, India, the US, and the EU, for example — is nothing short of withering.
This is where humanity has to prove that it has grown up and made the transition from belligerent, ignorant adolescent to responsible, forward looking, educated adult.
Will Sandy be the shock that finally makes us (or even just the US) re-assess our ways and fundamentally change? Or will it merely deepen the political polarization
Perhaps I’m just too beat down by the bad news[1] to be optimistic any longer, but I honestly don’t see Sandy spurring anything but a lot of talk and virtually zero action in terms of public policy that makes a meaningful difference in our CO2 emissions.
I’ve said repeatedly online in recent months that any single huge event, like a massive storm crushing Houston or Miami or Washington DC or NY City, would do nothing to change our ways, simply because it’s too easy to treat it as a one-time event, deny any connection to climate change, and keep pumping tens of billions of tons of CO2 into the air every year. I remain convinced that the only thing that will get us over the conceptual hump is a series of Sandies (or Katrinas or …) in a 10- to 20-year time frame. Frankly, I don’t expect to see that happen; there’s still too much of a random element to such events, even with the constant and growing shove by the accumulated CO2 content of the atmosphere, for us to get so “lucky”. It’s much more likely that the next big storm to hit the US East Coast hard will be at least a few years from now[2], and people not directly impacted by Sandy will have forgotten about it to the extent that dot connecting will be out of the question.[3]
I shouldn’t have to say this, but the current hyper-polarized world, let me make it unmistakeably clear: Of course, I hope I’m wrong and Sandy belies the meaning of her name and provides the shove that makes us wake up and act in our own best interest.
Some might wonder, then, if we won’t take action until reality punches us in the mouth so hard and so many times that we’re spitting out teeth, if we’ve put Isaac Newton and Adam Smith in the driver’s seat (to borrow and extend a line from Apollo 13), then what’s the point of climate activism? Are we doing nothing more than making ourselves feel good while the fossil fuel industries continue to buy influence and commit global, long-term child abuse? Are we laying the political groundwork so that when change becomes possible we can push as hard as possible and in the right direction as quickly as the political system and economy allow?
Perhaps. And perhaps that last point is nothing more than my Pollyanna side peering through the pessimism, however briefly.
[1] I have relatives in the affected area, including my nephew who, along with his wife and two sons, lost his house to Sandy.
[2] Yes, I know that Irene and its devastation was just last year. Until we see otherwise, I would assume that such back-to-back events are a fluke. And if it turns out that they’re not, and we have entered a “new normal” where strings of years with such devastation are to be expected, then we’re in so much trouble I can’t begin to describe it.
[3] Ask people you know, mah fellow ‘Mericans, what year Katrina hit, or if they remember the heatwave and fires in Russia in 2010 or the heatwave that strangled Europe in 2003.
India is poised to contend with China as the globe’s top consumer of coal, with 455 power plants preparing to come online, a prominent environmental research group has concluded.
The coal plants in India’s pipeline — almost 100 more than China is preparing to build — would deliver 519,396 megawatts of installed generating capacity. That is only slightly less than pending new capacity in China, which remains the undisputed king of coal consumption.
…
The research found 1,231 new coal plants with a total installed capacity of more than 1.4 million MW proposed worldwide. Beyond the biggest users — China, India and the United States — the assessment finds a heavy coal demand building up in Russia, Vietnam, Turkey and South Africa. The United States, with 79 coal plants in the pipeline, ranks fourth in this category.
Wow, that sounds like a lot of new coal-fired electricity, doesn’t it? Yes, it is, and the numbers are even more unsettling than one might surmise…
The planned coal-fired electricity generation has a nameplate capacity of over 1.4 million MW, or 4.1 times the total existing US capacity as of 2010.
Scaling up the US numbers to the size of the planned additions (by multiplying by 4.1) gives us yearly figures of 7,376 billion kWh of electricity generated, 4 billion short tons of coal consumed, 7,495 million metric tons of CO2 emitted, and 185 trillion gallons of water withdrawn, all yearly figures.
Worldwide CO2 emissions are 34 billion metric tons per year, which means this additional generating capacity will add 22% to current worldwide yearly emissions, which are, to put it mildly, far too high. It’s also about 130% of the US’ total CO2 emissions for 2010 from all sources and sectors, not just coal and not just electricity, which were about 5,700 million metric tons.
Assuming an average lifespan of 50 years for the individual coal plants, we have a grand(iose) total of 200 billion short tons of coal consumed, 374,750 million metric tons of CO2 emitted, and 9,250 trillion gallons of water withdrawn. That emissions total will push up the atmospheric CO2 level (very) roughly 23 parts per million higher than it would be in the absence of these new plants.[2]
Given that some of the new power plants will certainly be in service longer than 50 years, and none of them are built yet, this means we’ll be emitting CO2 from some of these plants well beyond the year 2060, surely into the 2080′s.
Once again, let me stress that this is additional coal consumption, water withdrawal, and CO2 emissions, on top of the consumption and emissions associated with other electricity generation, transportation, building energy use, etc. And I haven’t even touched on non-CO2 issues, like methane emissions and landscape destruction from coal mining, and mercury pollution.
And, of course, there’s the least convenient truth of all, that nasty business of CO2′s hideously long atmospheric lifetime, which extends the reach of these new coal plants well into the lifetime of multiple generations of our descendants, unless we can manage a large-scale roll out of an effective carbon recovery technology.
This is the point where people leap into the comment section and beat me up for not being realistic. Surely I can’t expect all of that planned coal capacity to be built, they’ll say. And, in fact, I don’t expect it to all be built, but not because we’ll realize what a colossally stupid thing it would be to do that to ourselves and our descendants, but because we’ll run into serious limitations in coal production and water supplies before we can erect all those coal plants and put them into service. What portion of that 1.4 million MW of new coal plants do you think we’ll actually build? Two thirds? Half? Make your guess and scale the numbers I calculated above, and you still get a daunting result.
The point of all this back-of-the-envelope (calculator applet?) number crunching, should it not be painfully obvious by now, is that:
The planned coal plant additions are a huge story that gets very little attention, even on greenie web sites. Lately we’ve all been transfixed by the Arctic news, which is understandable and likely even a good thing, to the extent that it helped spread the word. But new coal plants are so far off our radar screen that I only knew about the article above because it popped up in one of my Google alerts, and not any of the dozens of sites I track via RSS feeds.
The sheer scale of the planned coal plant additions is not just terrifying, but it becomes more terrifying the more you endeavor to put it into context, as I tried to do in this post.
These new coal plants, assuming that at least a small portion of them are actually built and run for decades, make our global target of reducing CO2 emissions and thereby, eventually, the atmospheric level of CO2 vastly more difficult. Once again, everything I’ve described above is electricity only, and doesn’t include the rapidly expanding use of private motor vehicles in China and India, for example.
If we don’t make a serious, focused, global effort to turn away from coal we’re far more likely to see global annual CO2 emissions rise to 40 or 45 billion metric tons a year from its current level of 34 long before it drops to 30.
[1] I’ve used numbers just for the US electricity sector, as opposed to all electricity generation, as that is probably more representative of the large-scale build out of coal fired generation around the world that the original article and the WRI study mention. I’ve also ignored the possibility that any significant portion of the new coal plants will utilize CCS (carbon capture and storage).
[2] One ppm of atmospheric CO2 is about 7.81 metric tons of CO2. But since (very) roughly half of our emissions are removed by natural processes, like being absorbed by the ocean, I assumed a ratio of 16 billion metric tons of CO2 per ppm increase.
Pete Sinclair does his usual fantastic job with a video.
See also:
Neven’s post and discussion
What Will Ice-Free Arctic Summers Bring?
I’ve made my feelings about this known in more detail and with more repetition than most of you care to experience, I suspect, but for the benefit of those entering through the side door of an Internet search, . . . → Read More: Arctic Ice Summary
This post is one in a series that I decided to write shortly after hearing that Neil Armstrong had died. That news reminded me, yet again, of the importance of recognizing people for their contributions — to your own life, to society as a whole, or somewhere in between — while you still can. . . . → Read More: Thank you, installment 1
I’m sure that virtually everyone who reads this blog is quite aware of what’s happened recently (and continues to happen) with Arctic ice. If you need a quick refresher, however…
The first two images are from the US NSIDC (National Snow and Ice Data Center). The last is from Cryosphere Today.
As I’m sure you all know by now, Neil Armstrong, he of The Footprint and The Quote on the moon, has died.
This news hit me particularly hard this afternoon, as not only was I very tired, both physically and emotionally, but Armstrong was one of the people I most admired for a variety of reasons. . . . → Read More: Neil Armstrong
From Paul B. Farrell’s WWIII: Great commodities war to end all wars (emphasis added):
Yes, WWIII: The Great Commodities War to End All Wars. We’ve heard that before. Remember WWI, known as The War to End All Wars, 37 million casualties. WWII was bigger, 60 million. Will WWIII finally end all wars? Or end the world, civilization, . . . → Read More: Nowhere to hide from ourselves