Probably not. But we can be low-carbon, and that should be enough.
In a comment on a recent article where I said that even my ambitious goal wouldn't prevent climate change, only stop the worst of it, Marguerite said,
I don't like to think I get people down. My aim is not to scare people, we already have enough doomsayers and excited newspaper headlines for that. My aim is to give friendly encouragement, explain the way things are in simple and clear ways, and to occasionally give some "tough love". Our problems are serious and complex, but have relatively simple solutions, solutions we can put in place if we just get our shit together and stop whining.
But is the solution being "zero carbon"? That would certainly solve our problems, but is it possible? I don't think so. Now, there are two basic ways of being zero carbon, apart from dropping dead: living as a sort of secular Amish, and living with some kind of high technology, solar panels and so on. I'm assuming that we're talking about the second one, living in an ecotechnic society. After all, we don't need to discuss whether we can live like the Amish, it's been done so it must be possible. Only the possibility of an ecotechnic society is in question.
Greenhouse gases are not just from burning stuff
The fact is that burning fossil fuels is not the only source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. So even if we change to entirely renewable energy, we won't be zero carbon. We'll be considerably lower carbon, and it may be enough to avoid catastrophic climate change - but we won't be zero carbon.
From the IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers report we get the following breakdown of greenhouse gases, given in CO2 equivalent in terms of greenhouse effect.
Having a look at this, we can see where we can reduce and where we can't. Ideally we stop burning any fossil fuels, so 56.6% goes. The N2O (nitrous oxide) mostly comes from too much NH4 (ammonia) fertiliser being put on the soil, but the ammonia is almost all made by natural gas; the rest of the N2O comes from car exhaust and the like. So again, eliminating fossil fuels gets rid of that, another 7.9% goes.
A good chunk of the CO2 emissions come from deforestation, again ideally we can stop this, planting as much as we cut down, so that gets rid of another 17.3%. Of course, when short of fossil fuels, it's likely that even more forests will be cut down - especially since the places where people will be first priced out of using fossil fuels, in the developing world, those places have a significant portion of the world's forests. Some like Mali are mostly desert already, but others like the Congo region and Peru are heavily-forested. But let's be optimistic and assume we plant as much as we cut down.
Where it's hard to reduce and be ecotechnical
"F-gases"? What are those? Well, that's chlorofluorocarbons and the like. As well as destroying the ozone layer they also contribute to global warming. But hang on, weren't CFCs banned in the 1980s? No, they just agreed to phase them out. Lots are still produced. Basically they're used for two things: refrigeration, and fire extinguishers.
Now, for refrigeration you need a substance that is noncorrosive and not explosive or extremely poisonous. It should have a boiling point somewhat below the temperature you want in the fridge, takes a lot of heat to turn into vapour, a moderate density as a liquid, and a relatively high density as a gas. Basically the only cheap substances that fulfill these criteria are CFCs and propane. And of course propane is also a greenhouse gas.
So if you want to have widespread and relatively cheap refrigeration, you have to have CFCs or propane. So that 1.1% isn't going away, and will probably increase as more people have access to refrigeration.
"CO2 (other) 2.6%", what's that? Well, that's mostly making cement. Cement is made from roasting limestone at high heat, this drives off the CO2 in it; the cement is then mixed with sand and gravel to make concrete. Essentially each tonne of concrete gives us a tonne of CO2 emissions. Can we do without concrete in our fossil fuel-free society? Not really. A typical 1.5MW wind turbine needs a couple of hundred tonnes of concrete for its base - it's a 100m tower, after all. A hydroelectric dam needs heaps of concrete, too. There just aren't really any substitutes which give us the strength and solidness of concerete. You're to going to anchor your wind turbines with stones. Ideally concrete production wouldn't increase much, at the moment a lot goes to shopping malls and useless things like that, if we did a big renewable energy buildout then we'd have it go to building renewables instead. So that's 2.6% or so we have to keep.
CH4 (methane) is what we're left with. Where does that come from? A little bit comes from leaks from natural gas extraction and distribution. But quite a lot comes from livestock. The typical Westerner eats 80-120kg of meat a year. There's just not enough pasture in the world to feed that many animals on grass and wild vegetables, so instead we keep the animals in most recent FAO World Food Outlook tells us that world grain production is about 2,109Mt, of which 740Mt goes to livestock, 357Mt to biofuels, and 1,008Mt is consumed directly. In principle with eating less meat we could be growing less grain to feed them, and we could abandon biofuels which also lets us leave land fallow. But the grain going to livestock and biofuels is not rice, it's wheat and maize. The rice is eaten directly.
That's 429Mt of rice, enough to provide the entire calories for 1,260 million people, or be the staple of 2,500 million people - many of whom are among those 2.6 billion people on $2 or less a day. So they're not going to stop growing that rice, even if it does cause about 4Gt of the 49Gt CO2e of greenhouse gas emissions. In recent years a practice intended to save water has also reduced CH4 emissions, as noted here. But increasing prosperity means they're eating more rice, especially as wheat and maize are taken from the world market by livestock and biofuels. So we can't really expect this to reduce.
Not zero carbon, but one-fifth
Where does that leave us? Well, again assuming an instant buildout of renewables, everything turning electric, no more burning of fossil fuels or use of their derivatives - no ammonia fertiliser, no plastics, etc - we're still left with,
This leaves us with 18% of current emissions as still present even with no use of fossil fuels at all, or 8.82Gt CO2e annually. That would be an 82% reduction on present emissions, and as I've noted many times before, the IPCC November 2007 report told us that a 50-85% reduction by 2050 would keep eventual CO2e to 450ppm and warming to 2-2.4C, which is very serious but most likely not catastrophic. It could be even better than that, depending on how early we reduce, but I'll write more about that in another article about CO2e.
Of course we may find better ways of doing things. In temperate climates it's possible to do without refrigeration at all. If fossil fuels are absent, as I noted in the shape of food to come, we'll have more local and seasonal food, so there'll be far less need for refrigerated trucks, or even refrigeration in the home. A greater diversity of livestock (not just cattle, pigs, sheep and chicken) could reduce the need for grain for them, and the resulting emissions.
Nonetheless, if we wish for the ecotechnic low-carbon society rather than the Amish one, we cannot be zero carbon, only low carbon.
Marguerite also asks,
No. However, I don't think it's a problem we'll face, because the measures which enable a low-carbon lifestyle also lower the birth rate.
If we aim for a worldwide low-carbon lifestyle using technologies, that implies an improvement in the wealth and education level of many countries. The UN's 2007 Human Development Report notes that,
Now, you can chuck a solar panel or wind turbine or two in villages of people on a dollar or two a day, but they'll never make their own one, and they won't know how to maintain the one they've been given. So for them to be able to manufacture and maintain the things needed for a low-carbon lifestyle requires that they be lifted out of poverty and educated at least to basic literacy. And when the prosperity and literacy of women increases, they have less children (the wealth and education of the men doesn't affect the birth rate nearly as much).
So either we increase the wealth and literacy of the poorest parts of the world to support their lower-carbon ecotechnic lifestyles, and this then gives us a steady or declining population, or else we ignore or exploit them keeping them poor and illiterate, and they have lots of babies and if they get half a chance, cause lots of emissions; though in a world of declining mineral resources especially fossil fuels, they probably won't get the chance.
Hope and faith
We don't do ourselves any favours by being overly optimistic or pessimistic, by looking at just one side of the story, as I noted in talking about Cuba. We need to examine the facts seriously and thoroughly, and try to understand the way the world works. Some say we need to do nothing because Science! or The Market! will save us all. Others say that we need to do nothing because we're all doomed anyway. Neither is the truth.
The truth is that failure is not inevitable, and success will come through first understanding the problems we face, and next working hard. Knowledge and effort. It's rather like the workplace where we earn our money: knowing your job and working hard does not guarantee success, but it makes it much more likely; not knowing and not working makes failure certain. We're frequently offered dreams of success with no real work or effort. The hooker with the heart of gold meets and marries the handsome millionaire, the trailer park family wins the lottery, someone invents the hula hoop and sells millions of the things. But the reality is that we usually have to work for rewards.
What's important is to have faith in ourselves as humans, as a society. We can hope for scientific advances, for government to step in, or whatever. But let's not hold our breaths. There's an old saying in my faith, "pray as though everything depends on God, act as though everything depends on you."
We probably can't be zero carbon. But we can be low-carbon, and that should be enough. But it depends on us, you and me, the work we do, work that does not have to convert the world, just change the way we live day-to-day.
In a comment on a recent article where I said that even my ambitious goal wouldn't prevent climate change, only stop the worst of it, Marguerite said,
This post of yours is exactly why I am feeling down. You are spelling out the hard truth and it is just overwhelming.[...] This is why we should be aiming for a zero carbon lifestyle for all, regardless.
I don't like to think I get people down. My aim is not to scare people, we already have enough doomsayers and excited newspaper headlines for that. My aim is to give friendly encouragement, explain the way things are in simple and clear ways, and to occasionally give some "tough love". Our problems are serious and complex, but have relatively simple solutions, solutions we can put in place if we just get our shit together and stop whining.
But is the solution being "zero carbon"? That would certainly solve our problems, but is it possible? I don't think so. Now, there are two basic ways of being zero carbon, apart from dropping dead: living as a sort of secular Amish, and living with some kind of high technology, solar panels and so on. I'm assuming that we're talking about the second one, living in an ecotechnic society. After all, we don't need to discuss whether we can live like the Amish, it's been done so it must be possible. Only the possibility of an ecotechnic society is in question.
Greenhouse gases are not just from burning stuff
The fact is that burning fossil fuels is not the only source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. So even if we change to entirely renewable energy, we won't be zero carbon. We'll be considerably lower carbon, and it may be enough to avoid catastrophic climate change - but we won't be zero carbon.
From the IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers report we get the following breakdown of greenhouse gases, given in CO2 equivalent in terms of greenhouse effect.
Having a look at this, we can see where we can reduce and where we can't. Ideally we stop burning any fossil fuels, so 56.6% goes. The N2O (nitrous oxide) mostly comes from too much NH4 (ammonia) fertiliser being put on the soil, but the ammonia is almost all made by natural gas; the rest of the N2O comes from car exhaust and the like. So again, eliminating fossil fuels gets rid of that, another 7.9% goes.
A good chunk of the CO2 emissions come from deforestation, again ideally we can stop this, planting as much as we cut down, so that gets rid of another 17.3%. Of course, when short of fossil fuels, it's likely that even more forests will be cut down - especially since the places where people will be first priced out of using fossil fuels, in the developing world, those places have a significant portion of the world's forests. Some like Mali are mostly desert already, but others like the Congo region and Peru are heavily-forested. But let's be optimistic and assume we plant as much as we cut down.
Where it's hard to reduce and be ecotechnical
"F-gases"? What are those? Well, that's chlorofluorocarbons and the like. As well as destroying the ozone layer they also contribute to global warming. But hang on, weren't CFCs banned in the 1980s? No, they just agreed to phase them out. Lots are still produced. Basically they're used for two things: refrigeration, and fire extinguishers.
Now, for refrigeration you need a substance that is noncorrosive and not explosive or extremely poisonous. It should have a boiling point somewhat below the temperature you want in the fridge, takes a lot of heat to turn into vapour, a moderate density as a liquid, and a relatively high density as a gas. Basically the only cheap substances that fulfill these criteria are CFCs and propane. And of course propane is also a greenhouse gas.
So if you want to have widespread and relatively cheap refrigeration, you have to have CFCs or propane. So that 1.1% isn't going away, and will probably increase as more people have access to refrigeration.
"CO2 (other) 2.6%", what's that? Well, that's mostly making cement. Cement is made from roasting limestone at high heat, this drives off the CO2 in it; the cement is then mixed with sand and gravel to make concrete. Essentially each tonne of concrete gives us a tonne of CO2 emissions. Can we do without concrete in our fossil fuel-free society? Not really. A typical 1.5MW wind turbine needs a couple of hundred tonnes of concrete for its base - it's a 100m tower, after all. A hydroelectric dam needs heaps of concrete, too. There just aren't really any substitutes which give us the strength and solidness of concerete. You're to going to anchor your wind turbines with stones. Ideally concrete production wouldn't increase much, at the moment a lot goes to shopping malls and useless things like that, if we did a big renewable energy buildout then we'd have it go to building renewables instead. So that's 2.6% or so we have to keep.
CH4 (methane) is what we're left with. Where does that come from? A little bit comes from leaks from natural gas extraction and distribution. But quite a lot comes from livestock. The typical Westerner eats 80-120kg of meat a year. There's just not enough pasture in the world to feed that many animals on grass and wild vegetables, so instead we keep the animals in most recent FAO World Food Outlook tells us that world grain production is about 2,109Mt, of which 740Mt goes to livestock, 357Mt to biofuels, and 1,008Mt is consumed directly. In principle with eating less meat we could be growing less grain to feed them, and we could abandon biofuels which also lets us leave land fallow. But the grain going to livestock and biofuels is not rice, it's wheat and maize. The rice is eaten directly.
That's 429Mt of rice, enough to provide the entire calories for 1,260 million people, or be the staple of 2,500 million people - many of whom are among those 2.6 billion people on $2 or less a day. So they're not going to stop growing that rice, even if it does cause about 4Gt of the 49Gt CO2e of greenhouse gas emissions. In recent years a practice intended to save water has also reduced CH4 emissions, as noted here. But increasing prosperity means they're eating more rice, especially as wheat and maize are taken from the world market by livestock and biofuels. So we can't really expect this to reduce.
Not zero carbon, but one-fifth
Where does that leave us? Well, again assuming an instant buildout of renewables, everything turning electric, no more burning of fossil fuels or use of their derivatives - no ammonia fertiliser, no plastics, etc - we're still left with,
F-gases, 1.1%, 0.54Gt CO2e "other" CO2, 2.6%, 1.27Gt CO2e CH4, 14.3%, 6.37Gt CO2e
This leaves us with 18% of current emissions as still present even with no use of fossil fuels at all, or 8.82Gt CO2e annually. That would be an 82% reduction on present emissions, and as I've noted many times before, the IPCC November 2007 report told us that a 50-85% reduction by 2050 would keep eventual CO2e to 450ppm and warming to 2-2.4C, which is very serious but most likely not catastrophic. It could be even better than that, depending on how early we reduce, but I'll write more about that in another article about CO2e.
Of course we may find better ways of doing things. In temperate climates it's possible to do without refrigeration at all. If fossil fuels are absent, as I noted in the shape of food to come, we'll have more local and seasonal food, so there'll be far less need for refrigerated trucks, or even refrigeration in the home. A greater diversity of livestock (not just cattle, pigs, sheep and chicken) could reduce the need for grain for them, and the resulting emissions.
Nonetheless, if we wish for the ecotechnic low-carbon society rather than the Amish one, we cannot be zero carbon, only low carbon.
Marguerite also asks,
Which brings the question, is it possible to keep growing exponentially as a population and maintain a zero carbon lifestyle on an individual basis.
No. However, I don't think it's a problem we'll face, because the measures which enable a low-carbon lifestyle also lower the birth rate.
If we aim for a worldwide low-carbon lifestyle using technologies, that implies an improvement in the wealth and education level of many countries. The UN's 2007 Human Development Report notes that,
There are still around 1 billion people living at the margins of survival on less than US$1 a day, with 2.6 billion — 40% of the world’s population — living on less than US$2 a day. [p25]
Now, you can chuck a solar panel or wind turbine or two in villages of people on a dollar or two a day, but they'll never make their own one, and they won't know how to maintain the one they've been given. So for them to be able to manufacture and maintain the things needed for a low-carbon lifestyle requires that they be lifted out of poverty and educated at least to basic literacy. And when the prosperity and literacy of women increases, they have less children (the wealth and education of the men doesn't affect the birth rate nearly as much).
So either we increase the wealth and literacy of the poorest parts of the world to support their lower-carbon ecotechnic lifestyles, and this then gives us a steady or declining population, or else we ignore or exploit them keeping them poor and illiterate, and they have lots of babies and if they get half a chance, cause lots of emissions; though in a world of declining mineral resources especially fossil fuels, they probably won't get the chance.
Hope and faith
We don't do ourselves any favours by being overly optimistic or pessimistic, by looking at just one side of the story, as I noted in talking about Cuba. We need to examine the facts seriously and thoroughly, and try to understand the way the world works. Some say we need to do nothing because Science! or The Market! will save us all. Others say that we need to do nothing because we're all doomed anyway. Neither is the truth.
The truth is that failure is not inevitable, and success will come through first understanding the problems we face, and next working hard. Knowledge and effort. It's rather like the workplace where we earn our money: knowing your job and working hard does not guarantee success, but it makes it much more likely; not knowing and not working makes failure certain. We're frequently offered dreams of success with no real work or effort. The hooker with the heart of gold meets and marries the handsome millionaire, the trailer park family wins the lottery, someone invents the hula hoop and sells millions of the things. But the reality is that we usually have to work for rewards.
What's important is to have faith in ourselves as humans, as a society. We can hope for scientific advances, for government to step in, or whatever. But let's not hold our breaths. There's an old saying in my faith, "pray as though everything depends on God, act as though everything depends on you."
We probably can't be zero carbon. But we can be low-carbon, and that should be enough. But it depends on us, you and me, the work we do, work that does not have to convert the world, just change the way we live day-to-day.
7 comments:
Gwag, what do you think of carbon sequestration? The reason I ask is because my provincial and national governments in Canada seem to think this is the way to go, pretty much to the exclusion of other CO2 management/reduction strategies.
My heart and gut tell me that this is not the best long term approach, because it doesn't encourage any kind of reduction in fossil fuel use. Instead it seems to just say, "go ahead and burn all you want, we'll just build this big new pipeline and store the CO2 in this here big underground hole, and don't worry because we're pretty sure it won't come out again."
To me this just seems like a way for the oil companies and the government officials to keep each other in business, and pat themselves on the back for being 'green' when they are actually contributing to the root problem of overconsumption. It drives me crazy because it seems to me that the cheapest and quickest thing to do would be to get our consumption down.
What do you think?
It's also worth noting that all the solar panels, batteries, electric cars, etc. that we'll need to get to low-carbon release carbon and consume fossil fuels during their production.
In fact, I know that there have been great strides in solar panel efficiency these last few years, but there is still the question of whether solar panels generate more energy over their lifetime than they consume during construction and installation. So, the simplest and oldest solutions (passive solar heat, wind power, hydro power) may very well wind up being the best anyway.
Theresa, I think "let's just bury it" is a stupid idea. It always comes out eventually. Consider for example Lake Nyos.
It also, as you say, puts people in the wrong mindset. At least the volume of (say) nuclear waste is relatively small so that it's physically possible - though not wise - to bury it all. But CO2 is a gas, it takes up a lot of space.
Carbon dioxide as a gas at room temperature and normal atmospheric pressure has a density of 1.98g/lt.
If pressurised down to 59 atmospheres, CO2 turns liquid, and it's in this form that it's sold for industrial applications. But of course, you need a pretty tight seal to keep it in, doing that for one big tank is one thing, for million of tonnes of it is another. Anyway, pressurised CO2 has a density of 59 x 1.9 = 112.1g/lt.
So, CO2 at room temperature and normal atmospheric pressure, 1 tonne (a million grams) of it will take 1,000,000/1.9 = 526,315lt of volume, which is 526.315 cubic metres. A million tonnes will take up 526.315 million cubic metres, which is 0.526315 cubic kilomtres.
Pressurised liquefied CO2 will take up volume at the rate of one million tonnes using 0.00892 km3.
Canada's CO2 emissions are something over 600 million tonnes annually.
So, pumped into the ground at room temperature and pressure, Canada's 600Mt CO2 will take up 316km3, and if pressurised to 59 atmospheres and liquid, it'll be 5.4km3. That's each and every year.
Thus, depending on what pressure they choose, it'll take 5.4-316km3 of underground space to put Canada's entire emissions. Of course, it would take less to put less in, but even 10% is a substantial volume.
And remember that the higher pressure it's under, the less volume it takes, yes, but the harder it is to keep any from escaping. So I'd be asking my politicians what pressure it'll be at, and where they're putting it, exactly, each and every year for the next several decades.
Grant, we are building new things all the time anyway, so the only question is whether the things we build will have further emissions.
It does not take any more energy or material, overall, to make an electric car than it does to make one with a petrol engine. So in general they'll produce the same emissions in being built; the question is whether they produce any emissions when running.
New cars, power plants, roads and rail, refrigerators and so on are going to be built anyway. We can build them to be low-emitting in use, or high-emitting.
Solar panels made in the 1950s and early 1960s did indeed take more energy to construct than they would generate in their lifetime; that's because basically only NASA and the Soviet space agency built the things. One-offs are always stupendously expensive and wasteful.
Nowadays, so long as you don't keep the thing in a box, it'll produce 10 to 30 times as much energy as was taken to create it.
See for example,
Alsema, E.A.; Wild - Scholten, M.J. de; Fthenakis, V.M. Environmental impacts of PV electricity generation - a critical comparison of energy supply options ECN, September 2006; 7p.
Joshua Pearce and Andrew Lau, “Net Energy Analysis For Sustainable Energy Production From Silicon Based Solar Cells”, Proceedings of American Society of Mechanical Engineers Solar 2002
You should research this before making statements like that again.
Thanks Kyle, that info helps. I should do a bit more research myself so I become more conversant with the principles/processes. The "bury it" idea just always seems stupid to me, since I'm pretty sure the earth's crust is a porous and dynamic entity, what with all the plate techtonics and such.
What do you make of www.zerocarbonbritain.com, which lays out how Britain could become Zero Carbon Britain in the next 20 years?
My take on them is that they're not aiming for zero carbon, but zero fossil fuels. They say,
"zerocarbonbritain details how Britain can eliminate emissions from fossil fuels in 20 years and break our dependence on imported energy."
They do mention agriculture, and say that it needs to be organic - by which I understand them to mean "doesn't use artificial fertilisers, pesticides, etc". But their focus is on energy - transport, heating and cooling.
I've only scanned over the website, but it doesn't change my overall conclusion, that I don't think we can be zero carbon, but we can be much lower carbon.
In saying this I'm not speaking only of what's technically and physically possible, but what seems likely given all the public and world leaders having the best intentions and setting their minds to it.
Deforestation and agriculture are really significant contributors to climate change and human suffering. Haiti, Ethiopia, etc. They're rather neglected as issues globally, and need to be addressed along with our use of fossil fuels.
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