Posts Tagged ‘climate change’

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Green Paradox

May 21, 2019

German Economist Hans-Werner Sinn identifies a ‘green paradox‘.

This is that the more we discuss lowering, and act to lower, CO2 emissions from fossil fuels to reduce climate turmoil, the more temptation there is for fossil fuel companies to excavate fossil fuels to sell them and make money out of them, before the assets become unsellable and worthless. I suspect that this is one of the reasons the Right in Australia is so keen on new coal mines, to protect mining giants and get support from them in turn.

We can add, that acting to reduce CO2 also increases the temptation the companies have to broadcast false information to delay action and keep the sales going as long as possible. Both selling to damage the market, and emitting misinformation to influence the market, are part of normal capitalist functioning.

Furthermore, if plenty of green power is available, then the price of fossil fuels may come down (especially given the pressure to sell them) so even more fossil fuels get burnt. If Countries have not committed to green energy, then they can freeload on the cheap fuel created by those who have rejected fossil fuel. This can then lead to further lock-in of fossil fuel technology in those countries.

Another way of phrasing this is “The more we need to go green, the harder it will become”.

Solutions are difficult, but apart from overthrowing capitalism which is not going to happen, we could have a worldwide carbon tax, which is also going to be hard (misinformation problems), we could reduce the massive subsidies that go to fossil fuels for historical reasons (we tried to make supply safe for social good), or we could simply buy, or nationalize the reserves (which is also going to be difficult).

What the green paradox tells us, is that we cannot solve the problem of greenhouse gases and energy without legislating, or finding some other ways, to keep coal in the ground. That has to be the aim

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The Australian Election

May 20, 2019

I was uncertain for the whole last week that Labor would win. Partly because the movement of the polls was in the wrong direction, partly because of the relentless misinformation, and partly because Bill Shorten’s speeches were not precise, and did not say what Labor would not do – which was vital. Labor should also have broken with the misinformation that coal mines bring jobs…. but for whatever reason that seemed impossible.

However the main reason for my despair was reading right wing internet groups. Some of this reading was deliberate and some of this was because I was getting quite a lot of promotional material on Facebook without asking for it. Please note, any remarks here are impressionistic and not a mark of extended research…

The appearance of these groups is of seething hatred and dedication, together with apparent loathing of general uncertainty and uncertain boundaries in particular.

Groups tend to argue by abuse and by flat statement as a way of reinforcing boundaries (if you can’t take it then you are not one of ‘us’), but expressions of disgust and certainty are not uncommon online. The point is that ‘we’ are the righteous, and need to expel the different to keep the boundaries going.

According to participants, nearly everything bad that happens to normal people happens as a result of some left wing policy. Low wages and unemployment, because of restrictions on the economy, migrants, refugees, positive discrimination, green tape and so on. Corporate power is a problem, because the left is all on board and wealthy (a point Tony Abbott made in his retirement speech – it is wealthy electorates who are concerned about climate change, while real people understand the Coalition and know the Coalition is best). Cultural crisis occurs because of cultural marxists, radical homosexuals and transsexuals destroying ‘our culture,’ and weakening its self-preserving boundaries by insisting that foreign Islam, other races and gender constructions are acceptable. It is also felt that Leftists are snobs, hate ‘us’ and make no attempt to understand ‘us’ (or that such attempts are aimed at undermining ‘us’) – and indeed the common left lament that the people have failed has more than a hint of this. Green policies are further attempts to sacrifice working people to rich people’s needs, radical lies and snobbery. Taxation is theft, and its always the working people who get taxed by high taxing parties, which is pretty true; only its the Coalition that does this.

It is common to see people in these groups blame corruption in the Church, the police or politics on leftist values, or the sixties. There is a single handy explanation for everything, despite 40 years of largely right wing dominance.

This blaming merges with scapegoating of particular groups, as a form of avoidance of responsibility. And indeed, one of the problems of the modern world is that we are all responsible. Some more than others perhaps, but not ourselves ever – and we all often fight to avoid recognising that part-responsibility.

The Israel Folau issue (the sacking of a very expensive footballer for claiming gays would go to hell) was surprisingly important because it clearly ‘showed’ oppression of religion, or at the least suppression of authenticity, while demonstrating that the left had joined with the corporate sector in attacking working people who expressed righteous anger with people who attacked gender roles, boundaries and certainties. Again the scare campaign that Labor was going to force our kids to be gender fluid only makes sense in this kind of environment, of existential boundary fear. However, it is a mistake to think that traditional gender roles have much support either, even if people claim they do. Its more complex and flexible than that.

In a few academic articles I have got into trouble with reviewers for arguing that trust in authority has little to do with belief. While these groups fiercely distrust the left they don’t trust the political right either. If their own side is irrefutably shown to have lied or schemed against them, the response is not to consider the possibility of being wrong, but to state “all media lie,” “all politicians lie,” “both sides are the same” or something similar. This allows people to keep their opinion while dismissing evidence that it may be false. This is what contemporary skepticism (or ‘independent thinking’) means, being skeptical of counter-evidence to your own, or group’s, position.

People seek to defeat the uncertainty of a complex crumbling society by being stable, righteous, and avoiding responsibilty by finding scapegoats, who, if removed would solve all the problems people face. For the left it might be capitalists or neoliberals, for the right it is leftists, feminists, gays, transsexuals and sometimes abortioneers. Obviously I think the first position is more likely to be correct

The Coalition campaign made fertile use of these trends – they are much better than Labor at it, perhaps because it avoids criticising real power. More and more, Labor depends on the powers that undermine them, for funding, publicity and respectability.

The basic assumptions of these groups were supported by the Murdoch press and other media promoting the general social fantasies they depend on such as ideas that the coalition manage the economy better, the economy is primary, virtue involves identifying or punishing out-groups. The Labor party ignored this part of life, or perhaps they did not see it or dismissed it as the work of a few fanatics, rather than of a relatively large group of people, who would support anyone who promised to get rid of what they perceived as the leftist challenge to their existence.

Due to communication having to involve interpretation rather than transmission of meaning, it is more or less impossible for such groups to actually hear what people on the other side are saying. Once identified as from that other side, then the boundaries are to be reinforced: that person’s comments are to be attacked, and the person ideally driven away if they cannot be converted. This then leads to a shouting war which tends to reinforce the separation and the further rejection of ‘good communication’.

What to do? The first thing is to admit these groups exist, and that they are powerful and real expressions of ordinary people’s lives. Even intellectuals can often be quick to blame the left for problems or for hostile fanaticisms… Rather than convert them intellectually, they need to be listened to and understood, and then argued with, with some understanding rather than just a condemnation which reinforces their boundaries and life worlds. This requires patience.

It is another example of the paradox that if we are to do anything democratically it will be slow (perhaps too slow), but if we don’t do it democratically and bring people along, then we will fail.

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Pollution and Extraction

May 10, 2019

Climate Change is not our main problem. Climate change is symptomatic of two other major problems:

1) Pollution and
2) Extraction

1) Let us define ‘waste’ as the byproducts of production and consumption that can be ‘re-cycled’ or processed by either the economic system or ecological system.

‘Pollution’ is then defined as the byproducts of production and consumption that cannot be ‘recyled’ or processed by the economic or ecological systems.

Sometimes, what would normally be waste can be produced in quantities which exceed the capacity of the ecology or economy to reprocess and it becomes pollution, as has happened with CO2 emissions. It is theoretically possible that pollution could likewise become waste, but I’m not sure this has ever happened easily or well. It is often hard to make reprocessing pollution profitable or even cheap (financially or energetically).

The changes to geological markers which define the Anthropocene are largely down to pollution. Climate change is mostly generated by pollution from excess greenhouse gas emissions made from energy production.

2) Extraction is the process of extracting food, minerals, materials, fuels etc. from the earth’s ecologies.

Extraction can likewise be of two types.

‘Tame extraction’ which allows the ecological system to repair itself after the extraction occurs. This takes time.
‘Excessive extraction’ which damages the ecological system, either through straightforward destruction, or through not allowing the ecology the time to regenerate.

The more ecologies are damaged the less they can process and recycle waste, therefore excessive extraction increases the chance that waste will become pollution.

For example, the amount of carbon dioxide we can produce safely goes down as we increase deforestation and poisoning of the oceans. Instead of being absorbed, as it should be, CO2 increases and traps in heat, changing the climate. This is compounded by massive increases in the amounts of CO2 and other Greenhouse gases being emitted, largely through burning fossil fuels (or dead forests), but emissions from warming seas and tundras are also starting to accelerate, and the weather becomes more tumultuous and unstable.

Politics of pollution and extraction

Pollution has both an economics and a politics. Pollution is emitted because it is cheaper to emit it than to restrain it, or to reprocess it. Pollution increases profit. We might say a key technique of capitalism is to freeload costs onto taxpayers or those who cannot resist. This is why pro-corporate politicians, such as President Trump, often boast about how they are reducing green tape and making it easier to pollute and poison people. So any political or economic system with people in power who consider reprocessing pollution too expensive, too diminishing of corporate (or other) profit, or as inhibiting some other beneficial project, will increase pollution, and that will have consequences; in some cases that will include direct harm to people. One, not yet recognized problem for polluters, is that some forms of pollution cannot be confined; they affect everyone detrimentally.

The politics of excessive extraction is similar. It is cheaper and more profitable (in the short term) to destroy ecologies than it is to preserve them. This is especially the case if the companies involved do not have a local base. They can then move elsewhere leaving a trail of destruction behind them. A good example of this is coal mining in Australia. Anyone who travels to the Hunter Valley can observe this, if they are careful, as the destruction is often hidden by high green mounds alongside the roads. We also have massive over-fishing in the world’s oceans because it is cheaper to take huge amounts of fish than to fish selectively. This is helping to causing a complete destruction of ocean ecological cycles, which is furthered by plastic, oil and other pollution. Small fisher peoples cannot compete and they end up having to change their lives and buy the fish they used to catch or starve. It is no longer true that if you teach a person to fish you feed them for a lifetime.

The politics of pollution and the politics of extraction mean there is a tendency to put the pollution and the destruction from excessive extraction onto relatively powerless people. Powerful people, by definition, often have the ability to push poison and mess away from themselves, and the wealth to import food from places that have not yet been destroyed. It is almost always the poor, or those living in relatively remote places that suffer poisoning, or destruction of their land and surroundings. However, the effects of destruction cannot always be confined (it spreads) and as poor and remote areas get destroyed, the destruction is likely to move into more prosperous areas. For example, with the NSW government’s determination to poison residents, and destroy their homes, with the Westconnex highway and tunnel system so a toll company can tax travel forever. Pollution may also have a psycho-political component as putting it on others indicates dominance over those others, and is a literal way of making a mark on the world – hence the apparent joy some people appear to take in polluting.

The problems we face increase because pollution and destruction go hand in hand. They reinforce each other, or feedback into each other, making the situation worse. They further reinforce and are reinforced by relations of power. Governments want to encourage business, economic growth and development and, in current terms, that means pollution and excessive extraction. There is little corrective available, unless governments can be recaptured by the people being damaged, and regulations imposed on the amount of pollution that can be emitted and the amount of destruction that will be tolerated. This in itself generates a problem in an age of international neoliberal capital. Capital will likely move to them areas of lowest regulation and highest permissible destruction, because this is more profitable, leaving the area without the investment. The oceans are a particular problem as it is easy to escape observation of destruction and pollution at sea, and there is confusion over who controls what is done.

So while local regulation is important, it is also important to have international regulation, and then international competition for capital and investment can get in the way.

Unfortunately, neoliberal governments tend to believe that the State exists to protect and encourage corporate business and wealth, and regulations are only worthwhile when they prevent opposition to business, or protect established business, and hence the idea that business should be regulated for the general good, or for self-protection is anathema, and hard to achieve. People also tend to think that more consumption is good, and this supports destruction by business.

This implies nothing will change without a general change in philosophy, as well as encouragement and support for those who are resisting pollution and excessive extraction in their local areas.

To reiterate, climate change is, itself, not the problem. The problem is that we are destroying and overloading our ecologies through pollution and excessive extraction, and this is occurring for political and economic reasons; often to reinforce the power and wealth of the corporate elites. Climate change is just a very destructive symptom of these processes, which makes everything worse.

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Carbon Markets

April 30, 2019

Elaborations on a lecture by Gareth Bryant (Political Economy, Sydney University) although probably not accurately, and I’ve probably added some inaccuracies.

The aim of carbon trading and taxes is to keep capitalism and economic growth while making them more ecologically sensitive. We are in no way certain that we can keep corporate capitalism or keep economic growth while reducing pollution and ecological destruction, but that is the hypothesis. It could be wrong to begin with.

Assuming that it is possible, the idea is that by allowing the market to set prices on Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, they become more expensive and this diminishes their attractiveness. It lets ‘the market’ seek the answer to how this reduction is done. That contemporary corporate markets can succeed in this, is also a hopeful hypothesis.

If you go with emissions trading you have to set up an artificial market in which emissions can be traded. The idea is that people who cut emissions have ‘carbon credits’, ‘carbon permits’ or ‘carbon allowances’ which they can sell to others, allowing those others to pollute. What this does in reality is keep the emissions stable, unless permits are regularly removed from the market – which can be difficult unless taxpayers buy them.

Both allocating and removing the credits are political processes open to influence, so large companies usually end up with larger amounts of credits than they should have. In the EU trading system there was a massive over-allocation of permits, which may have made the market under-priced and under-responsive with little incentive to reduce GHG.

Some companies, predicting a trading system is coming, can increase their emissions deliberately, so as to receive larger numbers of credits than they should have. When the credits are introduced, the companies reduce their emissions back to normal and sell off the excess. This increases emissions rather than lowering them.

If people don’t want to change, or there is a severe lock-in effect, then this can just increase prices for everyone, without reducing emissions.

‘The market’ is advocated, because it is supposed to remove the knowledge and planning problem from the process. That is, if the State is going to promote Green energy, reduced emissions and so on, then it has to know what it is doing. It has (in the terminology) to “pick winners”.

In neoliberal theory, the State is inefficient and always stupid and the market always knows what is best or finds the best way of doing it. Neoliberals do not like the possibility that ordinary people could influence corporate behaviour or diminish profit, through effective use of the State.

The problem with this idea is that the ‘best way’ can just mean cheapest and most profitable in the short term, Or, perhaps, the method that requires the least actual change. The market may crash or opt for destruction in the long term.

The idea also forgets that many uses of the environment are actually destructions of the environment, and once the environment has been destroyed, or transformed into waste, it takes massive amounts of energy to put it back together again (more than it took to demolish it). Corporations are nearly always primarily concerned with whether the process of destruction and waste makes them a profit. They are unconcerned about generating waste and pollution, especially if it could significantly diminish profit to tidy it up.

While government planning is given up, as it potentially interferes with the market, the scheme pretends that there is no significant corporate planning, and that corporations do not crony together for their own benefit. Unfortunately this happens – many boards have shared members for one. So the markets get distorted in the interest of the more powerful players, and this is not perceived or considered to be part of the market process, while State planning (which could possibly be in a more general interest, and have a general input, not just a corporate input) is defined as interference in the process.

In general, carbon markets diminish the tools available to a government, and make politics become about saving the carbon market rather than dealing with climate change. As already suggested, any governmental action, or target setting, whatsoever can be construed as interfering with ‘the market’ and as stopping it from working with its supposed efficiency. It is always possible to blame the State for market failure.

However the market does not have to go in the direction intended. Markets do not force emissions reduction. If it becomes more profitable to increase emissions (perhaps they are under priced because of market collapse), or prevent decrease, or to emit false information, then that can happen.

Financial markets, such as carbon markets, depend on volatility for both their profitability and financial-trader interest. We would essentially be trying to use a volatile financial market with its continuous stream of bubbles, crashes and information corruption in order to stabilise the ecology we depend upon for life. This makes no sense at all.

Let us be clear, there is no evidence that carbon trading anywhere in the world has successfully reduced emissions by any significant amount, but such markets do reduce the possibility of demanding emissions reduction in a relatively democratic way.

Carbon taxes are better because they set a relatively predictable price and can be moved up or down depending on the results being attained. Money from a carbon tax can also be distributed to the consumers to lessen their costs nd allow them to make market choices with greater ease. However, Carbon taxes do not seem politically possible, as all Australians know. This is probably because they are step towards letting the State interfere with the markets, rather than letting corporations interfere with markets.

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The world will end in 12 years???

April 9, 2019

Another meme that seems to circulate around the net is that climate scientists are saying the world will end in 12 years. This would appear to be ridiculous, and therefore is intended to discredit the whole idea of climate change.

I personally don’t know of, nor have I read of, any scientists who warn that the world will end in 12 years due to climate change. As usual, I’m welcome to correction, but I doubt this will happen.

However, what plenty of people have warned is that we have about 12 years left in which to seriously diminish the causes of climate change. If we don’t, the weather conditions are likely to move into greater degrees of instability and tumultuousness, and sea level rises will be significant.

With only a warming of one degree, it appears that areas of the USA seem to be on the edge of failing to cope with the stresses of fires, floods and storms, and areas like Puerto Rico seem to have largely been abandoned by the current US government. The same is becoming true in Australia; areas are getting too hot for habitation, and water supplies seem to be diminishing (sometimes because of mining as well as climate change).

As chaotic weather gets worse, it will cost billions in destroyed property, and distract from other economic activity. It will probably also mean massive people movements, food shortages and so on.

I quote here from the LA times

By the end of the century, the manifold consequences of unchecked climate change will cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars per year, according to a new study by scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency. (emphasis added)

Cynically, this is probably a reason why EPA research is being cut back; it gives results some people might not want to hear, and might not want other people to hear.

However, while climate change could well begin the end of the civilizations we know and live in, and lead to lots of people dying, it won’t end the world. The world will carry on and some humans, those who have learnt to co-operate and have farming or hunting and gathering skills, will probably survive. With some luck, relatively large scale societies in more fortunate parts of the world may well survive. The scale and prosperity of social life we have now in the developed world and are aiming at elsewhere, will probably end.

Strangely, attempting to prevent this collapse seems relatively easy. People can disagree about what action is needed to diminish climate change, but it usually comes down to phasing out fossil fuels as quickly as possible, lowering other forms of pollution and poisoning coming from productive processes, and not taking more fish and trees than can be grown back.

If we would like long term survival, this would seem sensible anyhow.

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Questions about ‘nature’ and geological time

April 6, 2019

A friend responded to the last post on nature. I understood them to be essentially making three points:

Point one: The division between human and nature is similar to the division between body and soul, essentially ficticious.

Point two: As Humans are natural phenomena, everything they have done is natural. So nature is damaging itself.

Point three: Any act has unforeseen consequences and the world exists in geological time, consequently we have no hope of a political solution to climate change or ecological degradation.

This is my attempt to deal with these issues.

Point 1: The idea of ‘nature’ is a human construct. Like Bateson and others I prefer to think of ecologies and systems. These ideas do challenge ideas of separation, but I’d also like to suggest that the conceptual differences between ‘mind and body’ and ‘human and nature’ are different. The degrees of separation and independence are not the same.

Firstly, there is a non-human world which has, in many senses, little to do with me. I am not it, and it is not me. It has gone on for billions of years without me. It will go on, hopefully for more billions of years, without me. Currently, humans cannot survive without the non-human, and they have emerged out of it – yet once emerged, humans are no longer just a non-reflective part of the rest of the ecology. They are never the whole of the system, and could even be thought of as having a potential to differ from the rest of the system.

However, my body and me do not exist separately in this sense. I can only learn and act with this body. If one dies the other dies. My body is not non-human. It is what makes me human. There is no sense of independence of one side from the other, unless you believe in immortal souls – and that is probably the basis of the idea of separation. There is nothing obvious in the idea of the two being potentially separate or independent.

This takes us to point 2.

Point 2: This potential to be different may not be unique to humans, but there are human constructions which would not exist without humans. Just as there are destructions of ecological systems which would not happen without humans.

It seems to me, there is a problem with dismissing the term ‘nature’ and then keeping the word ‘natural’ to apply to everything which happens on earth and take a position in which human acts and decision become irrelevant, or perfectly in keeping with the rest of the eco-systems. Without this somewhat indiscriminate application of the idea of ‘natural’, there is a sense that humans are ‘extra’ to nature, despite emerging from nature.

Paving a forest is not ‘natural’, as in the world without humans, or human equivalents, this could not occur. Again it emerges out of an ecology, but is destructive of the ecology in a way that the ecology could not achieve without humans. Humans are special, but they are not so special they are above nature. This seems hard for people in the west to grasp. People seem to want humans to be either above nature, or just another bacteria of no real consequence.

To restate: while humans emerge from an ecology of ecologies, the consequences of their acts and decisions can be destructive to the rest of the ecology, and they can be aware of this. In that sense they can be contra-‘natural’ or contra-ecological. This is not a purely human phenomena, other organisms have changed the world’s ecology, but those organisms do not appear to have decided to do this, and have done it slowly enough for other life forms to evolve to deal with, and take advantage of, the transformation. The change has been ecological. Again this is not saying humans will destroy the world, eventually new life will arise, but possibly human life will not survive the rapid changes we are inducing in our ecology, and I personally would find that sad.

Point 3: While it is true that many other creatures seem intelligent or self-aware, it also seems that humans are both intelligent and self-aware to an extent which is unusual. This does not mean that humans are intelligent or self-aware without limits, but it does mean that we have a greater degree of responsibility for our actions. If a bacteria developed which ate everything in its path, then we would probably try and defeat it, but we would not hold it morally culpable. If humans destroy everything in their path then, most humans in their path would say the destroyers should, and perhaps could, have made a different decision. Indeed it appears to be the case that humans, and many creatures, can make decisions.

Finding the right time scale on which to live and make decisions, is likely to be vitally important for life in general. Some decisions or reactions have to be made immediately if you are to survive. Some decisions reflective creatures have more time to make, and for some decisions the creatures may need to think about the time frame for the effects of that decision, whether it is hours, days, months, years, centuries and so on. Thinking either in too long time frames or too short time frames can be deleterious to effectiveness.

Looking at making political or ethical decisions within a time frame of geological time is a good way to achieve demotivation. This is probably why many of the people who embrace climate do-nothingness, or those few non worried scientists, appear to prefer thinking in geological time frames. In terms of geological time, human lives do not matter, creatural lives do not matter, even species survival does not matter. The rocks go on. Life goes on, and it is way outside our sphere of activity.

Nothing matters so we don’t have to make decisions, we don’t have to struggle, we don’t have to worry, we do not have to take any responsibility for any of our own actions in geological times. We can, inadvertently, just let powerful people get on with destroying life chances for everyone, for their temporary benefit – because you can be sure the rulers of the world are not thinking in geological terms. Indeed it seems a common complaint that business does not think beyond the next quarter, which is probably too short a time frame for long term social survival, and increases the risks of any climate change….

One thing that seems to happen regularly when people discover complexity theory, is the assertion that because you cannot control everything in fine detail, you cannot influence anything, or make any decision that is wiser or better than any other. As a consequence, some people argue that complexity theory is wrong, while others argue that politics is wrong. In both cases people seem to be saying that because we cannot do everything perfectly, we can do nothing. This seems silly, and we make decisions and act in our lives all the time despite the fact that these decisions don’t always have the expected consequences. Indeed, most of us might be bored if they did.

It then seems strange to argue that human oppression of other humans is nothing new, and that some humans suffer disastrously because of this. This again seems an abdication, a demand for perfection of complete non-oppression, or a refusal to deal with difficulty. We may not remove hierarchies completely, but that does not mean that some hierarchies are not better than others, and we should not strive for better hierarchies. It also seems odd to tie this in with geological time, as in geological time, these kinds of destructive human hierarchies are extremely new. They are probably at most 10,000 years old, which is nothing.

As a side note, it seems to me, that the so-called hierarchies found in ecological systems are not the same as hierarchies in human systems, it is just a metaphor being taken for reality; ecological hierarchies don’t deliberately oppress in an attempt to generate their own benefit.

Humans are capable of living without mass destruction of global ecological systems, if they learn to adapt to systems or discover how change those systems in beneficial ways, that continue in human time frames. We know this. Some complex civilisations have lasted for considerable periods of time. This means that it is possible to live with ecologies. Difficult, but possible. It is partly a matter of choosing the right frameworks.

Making all human behavior ‘natural’ and thinking in geological time frames are probably not the right frameworks.

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Sea level rise and Climate change

March 31, 2019

We all know the threat that coastal cities will likely be inundated by rising seas. Indeed in some parts of Australia, Local Councils are apparently declaring that some low lying residential areas are to be abandoned. Residents are, I’m told, even being forbidden from raising their houses higher or otherwise attempting to protect them. This is, in my opinion, crazy. It seems to be a way of trying to pretend that we should not act, or that everything will be ok.

Other people point out that certain cities, such as New Orleans, or even countries such as Holland, are already beneath sea level, and its all ok. Of course in New Orleans this was one reason why Katrina was so disastrous. However, when things, like being beneath sea level are normal, and have been normal for a long time, they can be generally be dealt with, no question. Levee and dyke walls already exist and perhaps it will be feasible to expand them to cope with the extra pressure of more water.

Some problems here stem from the nature of the cities themselves. Some cities are built on relatively porous rock, or even on sand (think of the Queensland Gold Coast) and, in that case, waters may flow under levy walls, and rise up to sea level. New sea walls are also likely to have to extend either for large distances inland or along the coast and change the coastal ecology and erosion patterns – although those will also be changed by climate change. Relatively close to the surface water tables could also be contaminated. It is complicated.

Other people can argue that the current rate of sea level rise is so slow that we have nothing to worry about at all. For example we can quote the Royal society, the “best estimates of the global-average rise over the last two decades centred on 3.2 mm per year (0.12 inches per year).” At this rate it would take over 600 years to get a rise of 2 metres. We could probably deal with this quite easily.

However, there are lots of problems with accurate prediction of such things as sea level rise.

The first is that the rate of rise is not going to be linear. The more land ice melts, the less radiation reflected into space and the more land ice will melt. The more greenhouse gases we keep emitting then the faster the melting will happen, and if we reach the tipping points at which methane starts rising from the deep ocean and the tundras, then it could start happening very rapidly.

People keep talking as if climate change and its problems expressed a nice gentle and smooth process, but it is not going to be that way. It is turbulent and chaotic. The climate system is what is known as “complex”, and turbulent change, once it is thrown out of equilibrium, is its nature. It will be hard to deal with, once things really start shifting, and they could shift rapidly.

That is why we need to act now while the situation is not too bad. That is why we keep being told that we have to reach greenhouse gas targets by 2030, and that it is better to come in even lower. If we don’t reach those targets then the probability of great turbulence is very high.

Anyone who tells you there is nothing to worry about, is assuming that they can predict a nice transition or control that transition. This position is extremely unlikely.

It is best to agitate for action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the possibility of chaos, now.

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The difficulties of being climate aware: Social and Psychological

March 4, 2019

Official climate action is way too slow. Despite Rightist allegations that governments are pro-climate change because they could use it to increase their power and suppress dissent, on the whole governments seem extremely reluctant to do anything about climate change or ecological destruction. We can see them threaten scientists or others who talk out, remove useful information from official websites, appoint industry figures to investigate climate change or to lead departments of environment, attempt to destroy data, support coal mining and construction of coal power, change regulations constantly so as to make renewable ventures more difficult, make it easier to do more land clearing and emit more pollution and so on. There are few governments in the world who don’t exhibit at least some of these policies.

Why does this happen? For two main reasons.

  • 1) Dealing with climate change is difficult both practically and psychologically, and
  • 2) [a related factor] Dealing with climate change disadvantages quite a number of established powerful people who would have to stop making money from actions which lead to climate change. Change is threatening, as other people might displace them, or they might lose out on their current positions. Imagining change is psychologically disorienting for many people.

    • Those people who are interested in doing something about climate change, may need to remember that an extremely powerful and wealthy group of elites oppose them. Activists are the underdog, and this can be a hard position to accept.

    Corporations and Governments have (for about the last 100 years or so) been tied in with a model of profit and development which depends on fossil fuel consumption, the massive dumping of pollution on less powerful people (where possible) together with the destruction of natural resources, through mining, deforestation, housing development, industrial farming, modes of warfare, and so on.

    It should be hardly necessary to add that while this process has helped lift millions of people out of poverty, it has also forcibly dispossessed millions of people from relative self-sufficiency into wage labour and dependece, and stopped people from living a roughly sustainable life style. It has also produced truly massive inequalities of wealth. And massive inequalities of wealth lead to massive inequalities of power, confidence and apparent ability to act.

    Those wealthy people and organisations who get wealthy from producing climate change and ecological destruction as side-effects of their wealth generation, can buy governments all over the world. They are marked as wise and successful people by their wealth, they have access to governments, they can provide well-paying jobs for people who help them and so on.

    In most countries they own and control the media, and hence they either attack ideas of climate change, threaten climate scientists, provide money for ‘skeptical’ research, or at the best pretend that the science is undecided and hire opinion writers to scare people about climate science, the economic consequences of change, or the abuse and exile you will suffer if you oppose them. This occurs irrespectively of whether the media is supposed to be ‘left’ or ‘righteous’, as it is still largely owned by corporate people. This wealthy group also supports think-tanks which make money by providing arguments in favour of their aims.

    Government people often give more credence to endlessly repeated ‘information’ they read and hear, than they do to real research, and if governments were to act then they might lose media and donor support, so they could lose government. Governments (particularly in ‘developing countries’) also fear that if they did not maintain ecological destruction then it would be difficult to increase living standards for their people, and thus they would be replaced by governments who might be even worse. Investors might go on strike and take their money elsewhere. There is no obvious way forward – renewables may not work as well as fossil fuels.

    So you will find power and bought-information working against any progress towards not destroying our current ecology and eventually our civilisation.

    It almost goes without saying that realizing the world you depend upon is being destroyed, and that powerful people support that destruction or, at best turn away from it, is deeply depressing. It is also isolating as most people follow the lead established and find it difficult to talk about climate change, or will dismiss it as a ‘downer’; and it does hit people by reminding them of ends and mortality. Global ecological destruction is too upsetting for many people to face.

    Acting requires people to change their lives, and to admit that their children and grandchildren are endangered by ordinary life; you too are partially responsible for climate change, through how you live, what you buy, and what you consume. It is hard to keep psychologically functional and live with the realization that you face almost overwhelming power and overwhelming routine. Changing one’s life is threatening for both powerful and ordinary people. Climate change and its consequences may even satisfy any unconscious desires you have for self destruction.

    To some extent, continuing with climate change depends on you giving up, and accepting some other group’s superior power over your life and fate, and that too is hard to face.

    But, despite the overwhelming odds and difficulties, you have to continue to fight anyway, in whatever way you can. It is helpful to remember that many local communities are working together, sometimes rather anarchically, outside the system, or breaking the regulations, in order to do something. There are likely to be people in your local area interested in practical action, who are not blinded by the wealthy and powerful, and who just get on with things. They may be prepared to talk and express their feelings and recognize the difficulties even while they act. They act even if all seems dark, just as people have done when facing invasion or tyranny – and acting is a tonic providing you recognize the darkness within and do not suppress it or let yourself be taken over by it.

    See if you can find such groups and join in. If you don’t like a particular group, there will probably be some other groups you can link together with. It may be useful to engage in therapy, providing the therapist does not encourage you to isolate yourself from action, or the problem. It may be useful to learn how to work with your dreams as they reveal information, symbolically, that you may otherwise be unaware of. There is no reason why action cannot lead to a happier more contented self, once you realise the traps. The current state of affairs leads to a despondent, or suppressive, self. Moving to oppose, or get out of the system, may help you in every way possible.

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    Climate Consensus?

    March 4, 2019

    The question often arises of “what does consensus mean in the usual talk of the consensus on climate change?”

    The answer is simple, but controversial. It means that almost everyone who works and publishes in climate science is convinced by the current evidence that climate change is happening, and that it is primarily caused by human beings.

    That is all. And yet that is quite significant, given the nature of science.

    The theory and supporting data has been around and largely unchallenged in general (specific points have been challenged and refined) for more than 50 years, and it goes back to the 19th Century. This general consensus is unusual, because most scientific theories are constantly under challenge from within their domains, as scientists can gain status for showing problems with theories and proposing persuasive new interpretations of data. Science tends to be fractured that way. Furthermore, there will always be problems with the data and its interpretation that need to be explained, and this gives an opening for new theories and approaches. Finally, in complex systems predictions are hard to make, and sometimes predictions have been conservative and wrong – although this is not discussed that much.

    When a scientific theory remains around for that length of time and the consensus is high, it’s usually pretty good. It is better than the alternatives.

    Now of course, the great thing about science is that people eventually change their minds when faced with better theories, or data which contradicts the theories. The theory can be abandoned. So far this has not happened. It could happen, but hoping that it could happen is not the best way to run your politics.

    The question people need to think about is: is climate change a conspiracy joining the notoriously factional UN (which usually can’t get its act together to do anything simple) with competitive scientists of all kinds of political persuasion (who often face hostility from governments who don’t want to act on climate change) to put forward a socialist conspiracy, or is it more likely that fossil fuel companies who (at best) have a dubious reputation for honesty and democracy, fund think-thanks to deny climate change, and promote climate change denial, because it is in their economic interest to do so?

    Climate change is one of the most highly probable pieces of contemporary science. It should not be rendered political, even though it is in some corporate interests to do so.

    Where climate change should be political and openly so, is on the question of how we try and prevent, or ameliorate, it.

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    Jancovici on the problems with Renewables

    February 27, 2019

    I’m pro-renewable, but it is useful to know in advance what the likely problems with renewables are going to be. That way we can attempt to deal with those problems.

    Jancovici does not believe renewables can save the day. By which he seems to mean preserve our society in the way it is today, and allow everyone in the world to share in that mode of living. This is possibly true. We need social change as well, and that will be difficult. Conscious social change is always difficult and prone to unintended effects. Sometimes such change is relatively successful as the change from free market capitalism to democratic socialism in Europe after the Second World War. Unfortunately this was not stable in the face of sustained political attack and was replaced by “neoliberalism”. It would have been useful to have been prepared for this attack, rather than to assume (as many people seem to have done) that we could never return to such a destructive and unstable system… That depends on knowledge and experience, both of which are malleable to concerted propaganda. The eternal problem of any political system.

    Anyway, back to renewables. This is a little repetitive of my last couple of posts, because I want it to be understood without reference to them. Please forgive me, if you have struggled through the others.

    Please note I am not even attempting to evaluate his estimations of costs at this stage.

    Non-fossil fuels are needed because of massive problems with non renewables:

  • 1) Climate change will produce massive trouble for current economies, due to destruction of habitation, disruption of food supplies and so on.
  • 2) Climate change is produced by burning fossil fuels. So we need to stop burning them.
  • 3) Oil, which is the most efficient form of stored energy is running out, or will run out eventually.

    Once you have extracted and burnt a resource that takes several ten million to several hundred million years to renew, you have less.

  • 4) Oil is also used in many chemical processes such as plastic, synthetic materials, and fertiliser production. It is central to much industrial production and processing, not just as a fuel.

    when you eat a kilogram of beef, you kind of eat a kilogram of fossil fuels

    In that sense it is another polluter and currently necessary for growth.

  • 5) Coal is heavily polluting and deadly to humans, both in terms of mining and burning. The sickness and death rate from coal usage is not insignificant.
  • 6) Cheap easily accessible coal tends to be lignite which is more polluting, so there are always economic incentives to use this (where profit is central) and increase pollution.
  • 7) Clean coal burning requires further energy expenditure, lowers the efficiency of coal as an energy source, and is so far not successful enough to bother with. The same is currently true of carbon capture, which may be necessary to lower CO2 in the atmosphere and slow warming.

    • The prime problems with renewables are:

  • 1) The sun and wind energy is not freely available in the concentrated forms useable in industrial society by anyone who can dig it up and burn it. It has to be collected and transformed, and this takes energy.
  • 2) [Not in Jancovici] Changes in land use can disturb people and destroy environments they love. Renewable use is always less traumatic and disruptive than conversion of land to a coal or oil mine, or a fossil fuel power station, but it is not negligible. We are asking people to accept disruption of their relation to the environment so as to save the environment.
  • 3)[Not in Jancovici] If energy usage is important, we can expect that our patterns of power relations are embedded in that energy usage and the habits that it encourages and allows. If this is the case, then changes in the energy system will be heavily resisted, and attempts will be made to make any change replicate the existing system.
  • 4) Manufacture of renewables, especially solar PV requires large amounts of energy, currently being supplied by coal.
  • 5) Collection can never be constant, there will always be variation, and this causes a loss in efficiency.
    Far more energy needs to be generated than used, so that the energy can be stored to smooth out the variations in electricity generation. Attempting to store energy causes further losses in efficiency.

    • Storage
    The main potential forms of storage are battery, pumped hydro, and manufacture of hydrogen as fuel. All of these have ecological consequences, although hydrogen’s seem minimal and could possibly make use of the infrastructure we use for gas and petrol.

    Pumped hydro often consumes land for reservoirs dispossessing people or destroying biodiversity, unless it is limited by being constructed underground. It requires energy expenditure to build. It depends on water availability, which could be affected by Climate change. It also depends on there being excess renewable energy which can be diverted to make it useful, and it has significant losses of energy through efficiency issues – and the second law of thermodynamics – energy is always dissipated if used or moved.

    A conservative 30% of the initial electricity is.. lost into the storage process.

    In OECD countries, all this costs 5,000 to 6,000 euros per kW of pumping power, and the lifetime of the corresponding investment is roughly a century.

    Batteries, so far, require rare minerals – we don’t know for sure there is enough of these – and batteries also require renewable energy to be manufactured if they are not involve greenhouse gas emission. Batteries also have a shelf life. I do not currently know how much energy is required to make the materials reusable for new batteries – but it is probably significant.

    Hydrogen power is not being taken up, but it seems a reasonably interesting idea.

    For storage to be successful, without too much disruption, we need technological innovation (just as we do for CO2 removal). That we need this innovation, does not mean it will occur, but it is necessary to fund such research, and this adds to the expense of the transformation. Most massive technological innovation has depended on fairly high levels of State Funding and freedom from patents, at the initial stages at least.

    Grids

    Renewables also require refurbishment of the grid. The grid has usually been designed to be one way from producers to consumers, now it needs to be multiway. Furthermore as renewable plants are usually fairly small, it requires more installation, more energy expenditure and more expense. Jancovici remarks:

    it is much more expensive to install 500 lines of 100 MW each (magnitude of the nominal power of a set of wind turbines or a medium to large scale PV plant) than 20 cables of 2 GW each (magnitude of the nominal power of a nuclear reactor… or coal power plant): it requires much more materials, bulldozers and public works!

    And

    it seems reasonable to consider that for 1 euro invested in production, it will take about one additional euro for investments in the “electrical environment” in the broad sense (connections to the grid, additional low and high voltage power lines, transformers).

    And

    “decentralizing” production strongly increases the total amount of investments required, and thus the overall cost of supply.

    We are probably again in the situation in which the State needs to fund the necessary development of grids, yet this will lead to freeloading by established power companies. Perhaps the State needs to re-start its own power company to encourage competition?

    vs Nuclear

    Jancovici is pro-nuclear. Because the variation in energy emission is not significant we have to install a lot less of it, and we don’t need storage.

    He calculates that nuclear is at least 10 times cheaper than any renewable system. He is optimistic about ‘accidents’ based on the French record, and forgets the difficulty and cost of insurance. The problem is not that serious accidents are rare, but that when they occur they seal off land for a humanly significant period of time, cause illness, widespread fear, lack of confidence and suspicion of suppression of information.

    Jancovivi concludes that for everyone in the world to gain or maintain the standard of living familiar in the Western World today (with all its needed energy expenditure and energy available pretty much on demand) through renewables is prohibitively expensive. It is probably only possible in a world without energy, material, financial or social restraints. Given that we have to make the transition quickly, he thinks, nuclear is the only option.

    With nuclear, replacing all coal fired power plants in the world (a little over 2000 GW presently) would cost 10,000 billion dollars. With wind and solar, it jumps to at least 100,000 billion dollars, knowing that the overall investments in the energy sector are now close to 1500 billion dollars each year.

    Summary

    We can summarise Jancovici’s position by saying that the cost of transformation into renewables to maintain current lifestyles and modes of social organization is prohibitive, especially when we are in the middle of an energy crisis and hence an economic crisis

    If point is correct, then as said earlier this means we need to be aware of the need to change our ways of life, as well, and this is difficult, and possibly politically toxic. It does mean State encouragement of renewable infrastructure is probably necessary. Research into the social transformations needed and possible is as necessary as research into storage and CO2 removal.

    Ultimately, however, we must not be distracted by climate change from other massive ecological collapses occurring. We must analytically face the problem of energy as central to economy, and to the entropic effects of economy. We cannot simply pretend that we do not create the disorder which is going to eventually end our economy, if we do not attempt to curb that disorder or compensate for it. Unintended effects do not arise solely because of planned action, they also arise through ‘free markets’ and capitalism.

    Next post: Objections to Jancovici

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