Climate Hawks

Did you ever have to make up your mind?

-Loving Spoonful

Forty thousand head men 

couldn't make me change my mind.

-Traffic

Greetings

I'm going to start off with public service announcement

The Clean Energy Jobs Bill is back before the legislature.

The bill will lower Oregon’s greenhouse gas emissions by adopting a cap, trade, and invest plan — we will cap greenhouse gas emissions from major sources, trade emission permits to allow maximum market efficiency in reducing carbon pollution, and invest proceeds to help Oregon transition to a greener, cleaner future.  You can learn about the bill and join the fight to protect our future in two ways:

For those who want to learn more about the CEJ Billbefore Lobby Day:

On Monday, Feb 5 at 3 PM the Joint Environmental and Energy and Natural Resources Committees will roll out the CEJ Billwith an Informational Meeting in Room F at the Capitol.

and on Wed, Feb 7 at 3 PM the same Joint Committee will hold a Public Hearing regarding the bill in Room F.

and you can join your friends from the Oregon League of Conservation Voters and Renew Oregon at the Clean Energy Jobs LOBBY DAY at the State Capitol on Monday, Feb. 12.  

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 You may want to stop reading here

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It may be a good idea to put this bill in perspective.  What can we hope to achieve?   What would we have to give up to get there?  Dave Roberts, a clear eyed "climate hawk"  displays what he sees as the best case scenario, as part of an article chiding environmentalists for getting in the way of implementing climate policy. see    Reckoning with Climate Change will demand ugly trade offs from environmentalists and everyone else  .  He says we can't meet our 2 degree target using solar and wind alone.   We also will need nuclear power, more dams, and loads of transmission lines running across sensitive habitats.

Mostly its because we waited so long, so we missed the gradual ramp down see e.g.

Implications for limiting warming to 2C

Here's what Roberts says it would take.   

It would mean an immediate, sustained global mobilization of a sort that has no precedent in human history.

If something like that mobilization were to happen, it would not be gentle or pretty. It would not unfold according to the best-laid plans of wonks. Some people, landscapes, and legitimately worthwhile priorities would suffer in the short- to mid-term.

One example: environmentalists often cite studies showing that high penetrations of renewables are possible in the US. But those studies all show that achieving high penetrations requires a country-spanning network of new transmission lines. If there’s a study showing how to fully decarbonize without tons of new transmission, I haven’t seen it. So yes, transmission lines connecting zero-carbon power sources and loads might disrupt some people and ecosystems, but systematically opposing them simply isn’t commensurate with being a climate hawk.

Another example: full decarbonization would require, among other things, an enormous industrial shift. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of jobs in polluting industries would be wiped out and workers displaced. There would be new jobs in clean energy, but the US has not typically handled such workforce transitions well. Being a climate hawk means accepting serious social and economic disruption.

Decarbonization will also involve a mind-boggling amount of manufacturing, building, and retrofitting. Multiple solar and wind gigafactories would be built every year. Renewables would cover every open surface. Every city would be as dense and transit-served as possible. Being a climate hawk means accepting that some natural areas will be turned over to energy production and that “the character of the neighborhood” is going to be disrupted by infill and multi-modal transportation systems.

Conservative climate hawks may have to tolerate climate solutions that involve heavy government intervention. Farmer climate hawks may have to tolerate swaths of their land being claimed for transmission lines or wind turbines. Wealthy climate hawks may have to tolerate restrictions on their consumer purchases or airline travel. Environmentalist climate hawks may have to tolerate large-scale carbon sequestration or new rivers given over to dams. And so on.

This is the future Roberts suggests that we need.   I am reminded of the "Chinese miracle".  New factories, new industries.  Forward !

So, lets put this activity in context.  How are we doing with respect to overshoot?    It just so happens that 15,000 scientists in 184 countries recently issued  a report :World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice"  which noted the a number of deteriorating trends

Among the negative 25-year global trends noted in the article are:

• A 26 percent reduction in the amount of fresh water available per capita
• A drop in the harvest of wild-caught fish, despite an increase in fishing effort
• A 75 percent increase in the number of ocean dead zones
• A loss of nearly 300 million acres of forestland, much of it converted for agricultural uses
• Continuing significant increases in global carbon emissions and average temperatures
• A 35 percent rise in human population
• A collective 29 percent reduction in the numbers of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and fish

So, Robert's prescription would make some of those things worse.   But perhaps the additional impacts would be offset by the reduced impacts of climate change on the biosphere?

Well......no.     It turns out that climate change has had very little impact on species extinction.   This great extinction is bring caused by the ordinary things that humans do.   A recent article in Nature points out that main cause of species extinction is over consumption -  logging, fishing, agriculture, urban expansion, and pollution are the real culprits.     In fact climate change ranks very low.  see here

But even though climate change is going to have a very powerful impact on plants and wildlife world-wide, climate change has also become a sort of scape-goat, with a “growing tendency for media reports about threats to biodiversity to focus on climate change,” write the authors of a new study analyzing the impact each sector of our society has on life on Earth. According to their findings, the real culprits are staple human activities such as logging, hunting, or farming, which pose a far greater — and much more immediate — danger to Earth’s biodiversity.

“[Agriculture and rampant resource over-exploitation are] by far the biggest drivers of biodiversity decline,” the authors write in a comment published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

A team of scientists led by University of Queensland doctoral student Sean Maxwell analyzed thousands of species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species to determine exactly what we’re doing to put them on that list.

They found that over-exploitation, including logging, hunting, fishing and the gathering of plants is the biggest single killer of biodiversity, directly impacting 72 percent of the 8,688 species listed as threatened or near-threatened by the IUCN. Agricultural activity comes second, affecting 62 percent of those species, followed by urban development and pollution which threaten 35 and 22 percent respectively. Species such as the African cheetah and Asia’s hairy-noes otter are among the 5,407 species that find themselves threatened by agricultural practices, while illegal hunting impacts several populations such as the Sumatran rhino and African elephant.

Climate change on the other hand comes in on a surprising, if somewhat unimpressive, 7th place in the 11 threats identified by the team. Even when you combine all its effects, it currently threatens just 19 percent of the species on the list, the team reports. 

So add to that Robert's prescription of  a " ..... mind-boggling amount of manufacturing, building, and retrofitting. Multiple solar and wind gigafactories would be built every year. Renewables would cover every open surface"  

Of course, the alternative of doing nothing is much worse.   A recent article by David Spratt, author of Climate Code Red, puts the possible futures in perspective

 

Not going to zero emissions would be worse in the short term: other recent work shows warming would be 2.2-2.4°C by 2050 if we continue on the current high-emissions path.  And it would be disastrously worse not to go to zero emission very fast, due to the longer-term impacts: continuing on the current high-emissions trajectory would bring warming of 4.1–5°C by 2100.

Nevertheless,  Spratt, points out that even if we went to zero emissions tomorrow, we would be unlikely to avoid two degrees,

Thus, without solar radiation management (replacing anthropogenic aerosols from fossil fuel use with anthropogenic aerosols spread from planes or fired into the atmosphere) it will be difficult to avoid 2°C no matter what CO2 emissions path we take, and all but impossible not to overshoot 1.5°C by at least a third. It is not yet clear that there is demonstrable clear net environmental benefit from solar radiation management, and we should only do it if that is the case. But in not doing it, we need to be honest about what will be lost and what further tipping points may be crossed.

(Speaking of tipping points,  I suppose its worth pointing out here that a recent study suggests that 1.5 is likely to be the trigger to the beginning of the permafrost melt..  

      Roberts makes a good argument, but it contains a hidden premise.  It may be true that all of the things he mentions, nuclear plants, more dams, transmission lines crisscrossing the country will be needed, if we are to stop CO2 emissions,  and we are to continue to live a high consumption, high energy lifestyle.     But maybe its that lifestyle itself that is the problem.  Not just. for the climate.

 We want a functioning ecosystem.  We want to keep temperatures down.  And we want to continue our high consumption high energy lifestyle.  

We want all three.

But ,  perhaps Roberts is right.   We can't have all three.   

So, how about that lifestyle?

But how much energy do we really need?   Here is an interesting exploration of energy poverty and energy decadence