Posts Tagged ‘drawdown’

An Ignorant Sketch of Offsetting

July 30, 2020

I am about to do some work on this, but do not know at the moment other than through anecdotes. So I may change my mind on this, and appreciate comments or refutations.

The theory of offsets, in general, is obvious. If you produce, say, a tonne or so of greenhouse gas then some people estimate buying the planting of 4 or so trees will absorb about 1 tonne of CO2 for a period of 100 years depending on the trees. This clears you of the guilt of greenhouse gas production and supposedly balances it all out.

However, at best, there is always a lag.  A business emits a tonne of CO2 probably in couple of hours or years depending on what they are doing, and it takes over 20 years or so (wild guess, but it is not instantaneous) for the trees to pull it down. So the gas stays in the air for quite a while – all else being equal. As implied above, the trees could die and release the CO2, if it is not done properly.  People could also harvest them, or burn them, if the offsetting was done really badly (I believe this has happened overtly in Brazil, but again I may be wrong).

Sometimes people spend offset money supporting forests in Indonesia, or somewhere. What often happens is that local forest people get chucked off their land, and get forced to move out of the area, so they stop being a secure, largely self supporting ‘community’ and have to engage in wage labour without support or connections. This dispossession can also provoke ecological problems as the people may have lived in the forest for thousands of years, looking after the forest and protecting it, or changing it in some way. When they go, diseases can spread with greater ease, pests get out of control, fire becomes more deadly as there is less clearance of fallen timber or undergrowth (for firewood or grazing) and so on. So the process may not only destroy ways of life, but make the forest vulnerable.

I’ve also heard of people being allowed to preserve land somewhere else to offset the destruction produced by the mine. Of course the land elsewhere is not the same as the land being mined, and frequently does not have the creatures who were endangered by the mine – and sometimes people claim the preserved terrain is not of the same rarity, or even with similar properties to that being destroyed etc.. In any case this is simply not destroying more land/ecosystem for the moment, rather than ‘making’ new replacement land or ecosystems. If such a process continues, then new land keeps being destroyed until we run out of mining land. This is not quite the same idea as the drawdown offset, but its often lumped together.

Farmers in Narrabri told me, and the people I was with, that one of the mining companies in the local area did offsets by planting trees (not sure what this was about), however they planted trees in areas in which any farmer could have told them the trees would not grow. Indeed the farmers showed us dying and stunted trees planted in rows, with absolutely no effort made to replicate the local scrub. And they told us the company just left them after planting, making no efforts to water or protect them – this, of course, may be mistaken. But there was little chance of mistaking the parlous condition of the young trees or the nature of the drought which had been going on for years.

I have also seen tree planting in the Hunter Valley, but this seemed pretty clearly to have the function of screening the dead mines from roadside observation. I don’t know if they got offsets from this.

There are people who argue offsetting is all marketing. It allows people to claim they are carbon neutral or pretend to themselves they are not contributing to climate change when they are. It also takes money and motivation away from investments in better technology. Plans for moving into low emissions technologies can get shelved because of the offsets.

Having said that, I think the evidence is that we need to stop emissions, and we need to drawdown CO2 or methane. There is some suggestion we can do this through technology. However, reducing emissions is the priority.

Planting trees, or seaweed, is not a bad idea as drawdown, but it is probably not a great idea if used as offsets, and it may only defer the problems as eventually organic life dies and releases gases – sometimes fewer gases if the forest is a real functioning forest, because insects and other creatures consume the dead trees and effectively bury them… But that does not seem to count for much when people are discussing offsets.

I tend to agree with the cynics. It is a method of trying to put a voluntary price on destruction, when it is better to stop the destruction itself.

Addenda September 2021

The Australian Conservation Foundation has reported that avoided deforestation projects, funded from the government’s emissions reduction fund, has taken about 20 per cent of the total Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) that have been issued under the Australian Government’s Emissions Reduction Fund.

These offsets are often not a carbon abatement as it “is likely to be resulting in projects being issued ACCUs for not clearing forests that were never going to be cleared” (ibid: p.3).

So it may not represent additional abatement.

Annica Schoo said:

“Our findings demonstrate that the avoided deforestation method – which makes up one in five of all Australian carbon credits – is deeply flawed”

Morton One in five carbon credits under Australia’s main climate policy are ‘junk’ cuts, research finds. The Guardian 22 September 2021

Investigations show environmental offsets promised by several NSW coal mines have been delayed for years because governments allow companies to push back deadlines to secure permanent protection of habitat….

the embrace of biodiversity offsetting in NSW and other Australian jurisdictions has not been accompanied by sufficient critical scrutiny of the effectiveness and integrity of these schemes…

At best offsets are ineffective at protecting biodiversity, at worst they facilitate the destruction of irreplaceable habitat…. [A]n inherent problem is… that demand for environmental offsets is driven by environmental destruction

ACF Offset schemes facilitating environmental destruction. 9 September 2021

Richie Merzian, from the Australia Institute, said landholders were being issued with credits to retain forests that they could not have cleared had they wanted to.

I’m not sure that is entirely a bad thing as it still puts a value on forests, even if it does not lead to actual carbon reduction or offset.

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

CO2 and Drawdown technology

January 11, 2020

There is lots of new drawdown technology, which claims to be able to make plastic and fuel out of CO2 extracted from either the air, from coal power, from cow farts and so on. I’m not being sarcastic about the cow farts, that is apparently a real claim (although I doubt it is functional).

The argument seems to be that as this tech exists, and people seem to keep demanding new electricity, we can happily extend, or increase, the use of fossil fuels and be ok with any ‘temporary’ increase in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions.

To me there seem to be a number of problems with this approach.

1) We seem to be perilously close to massive tipping points. This is vitally important:

  • If we get a run of summers like the one we have just had in Australia (and there is no reason to assume that we will not, as the trend for average temperatures has been increasing steadily over the last 20 years), then, we will have little surviving natural bush, we will have no place for the bush fauna, and we will lose a large number of our farmers, for economic and fertility reasons. We have almost certainly lost some normally non-inflammable rainforest forever.
  • The fires have come close to increasing Australia’s carbon emissions to 175% of normal.
  • The fires have significantly reduced our natural extraction of CO2. We hope that regrowth will compensate, but regrowth could be problematic and slow (See previous post).
  • Rivers and creeks will continue to breakdown and dry up. The water supply situation will get worse. Fish and other fresh water creatures will continue to die. Local food supplies for people outback will decline.
  • It is highly probable, that large numbers of Aboriginal people (and other outback based people), will no longer be able to live on their land, or maintain their ways of life.
  • Other countries are likely to follow a similar course. Australia is just more sensitive to global warming than most other places, we are a country of erratic weather, droughts, floods and storms.
  • The permafrost is melting elsewhere in the world, due to global heating. There is thought to be a large amount of methane and other green house gases stored in the permafrost. If so, there will come a time when this gas starts to leak. Some reports suggest this is already happening. When it does, climate turmoil will accelerate even more rapidly than it is doing. It is extremely likely that the resulting weather changes will affect the world disastrously.
  • There are other effects which will accelerate as well, but you probably already know this.

Summary: We cannot afford to increase the amounts of Greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere.

If we increase GHG emissions we are heading for destruction. It is that simple.

We need to lower emissions now and we need drawdown of CO2 from the atmosphere now. Technological drawdown is a great idea in principle. Whether it is currently useful is another issue.

2) Historically, drawdown technology has not eventuated, but the promise of drawdown technology has been used to increase GHG emissions: “Soon we will be able to extract all this, and fossil fuels will be clean!”

In Australia, the government has given the fossil fuel industry significant amounts of money to build this technology.

  • The coal industry largely used the money for dinners and promotion of coal. No vaguely working extraction and drawdown technology emerged. Naturally they did not have to pay the money spent on parties and promotion back.
  • Some gas companies did some work, but this was primarily to use extracted CO2 to push more gas out of wells. The successes in extraction, or storage, were minor, or significantly less than the increased emissions, arising from the use of the field.
  • No commercially useful long term, non-propaganda, successes were reported, or implemented outside the test sites.

3) It is possible that the empty promises of drawdown tech are not essential to the talk about it any more. We may even have working tech. If so, the basic conditions for acceptable working tech are:

  • If it is making fuel, then the total amount of energy consumed is considerably less than the amount of energy emitted (ie it has an Energy Return on Energy Input greater than 1).
  • If making plastic or any other substance, then it has to have significantly less emissions than the normal production of the substances, and it has to be economically competitive with recycling and normal production. If it is massively more expensive, then it will not be deployed, or be deployed as a novelty, or demonstration of capacity to be discontinued when the costs do not come down.
  • If we are storing the extracted CO2, then we have to be able to test the stored CO2 for escape into the atmosphere. If such tests are impossible then storage should not be undertaken. Theory of success is not enough.
  • If extracting CO2 directly from the atmosphere, then the technology has to be able to deal with the small amounts of CO2 in real atmospheres and again not be dependent, in any way, on GHG emitting sources of energy.
  • It should be competitive with reforestation, regenerative agriculture, or education of women, over the long term, otherwise let’s use an existing (simpler) working technology.
  • Technical data and the results of experiment has to be freely available. In most of the sites dealing with the new tech, the technical data seems to be mainly hype, based on assumptions of success. They rarely tell you current data. Sometimes there is no technical data at all. This may not be the case about every product, but it is common enough that we cannot assume it is not the case in advance.
  • Independent testing is needed before we risk the technology’s use for GHG reduction.

Summary: We cannot assume, without thorough investigation, that the hype about drawdown technology is accurate, and the technology is ready for commercial or effective layout now rather than in some distant future.

4) Given these issues, if we are to increase the amount of fossil fuels we use, for whatever reason, then we need to be sure that:

  • We reduce the use of other fossil fuels so that the amount of GHG emissions does not increase.
  • If the drawdown technology is being used to extract new fossil fuels, or otherwise unviable fossil fuels, then the total levels of emission (including those from burning the fossil fuels extracted) has to be zero or less; otherwise we are increasing emissions.
  • Drawdown tech has to be installed, thoroughly tested, and shown to be viable, before any new emissions get released. AND we measure the drawdown accurately, and make sure there is no escape.
  • We increase the fossil fuel emissions by less than we are actually drawing down through tech now, so the emissions trend really is downwards.
  • We do not increase the fossil fuel energy supply, or GHG emissions, to power the drawdown technology.

If drawdown technology is ready and functional, then these conditions should seem fairly straightforward. If these conditions seem onerous, then the drawdown technology is not ready, and we need to stop increasing GHG emissions now. The easiest way to stop increasing emissions is to stop increasing fossil fuel based power.

5) We should spend the limited amounts of money, and energy available, primarily refining technology we already have that works to reduce emissions now. If that includes drawdown tech that meets the criteria above, then great.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Carbon Extraction

March 31, 2019

There are many plans to extract CO2 directly from the air. Many people assure us it is necessary if we are to keep climate turmoil moderately stable, and avoid tipping points. However, as there is not that much CO2 in the air, you have to move vast quantities of air through the extraction plant, which requires heaps of energy, so you already have a problem.

The second problem is what do you do with the CO2?

Storage underground is unreliable – especially under the ocean or in old oil and gas wells (as the wells tend to fracture and crack releasing the CO2) and leakage has to be monitored and prevented for 100s of years, well beyond the life span of most companies or even governments.

Some solutions seem silly – after all in capitalism nothing is done, even something as obvious as save the world, unless it is compelled or makes a profit.

It has been proposed to use the CO2 to make the bubbles in soft drinks. Or to pump oil out of nearly dry wells, getting a substance that then produces more CO2.

Other people have suggested turning the CO2 into fuel and burning less oil or coal. The ‘and’ is important here, otherwise we are just adding to greenhouse gas emissions.

The problem with this last solution is the laws of thermodynamics. This process will have to use energy both to recover the CO2 and then turn it into fuel – more energy than will be gained by burning the fuel.

So the process can only be useful if we have lots of non-greenhouse gas making energy to spare, which we use to extract the CO2 from the air and manufacture the fuel. Our energy should likewise not be ecologically disruptive, and hydro for example certainly can be, as it floods some areas, dries up other areas, stops natural seasonal flows, stops aquatic creatures going upriver and so on.

The process is not impossible, but currently unlikely, at any level which makes the process useful.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

CO2 and non-linear systems

December 19, 2018

The amount of CO2 in the air has dramatic effects out of all proportion to the amount of the gas in the air or in proportion to the amount emitted by humans. It produces a non-linear effect.

Concentrations of CO2 have been much greater than they are now, in times when there were no humans around. Nobody is arguing that the world would end with much higher CO2 levels, just that relative climate stability would end, as the climate system shifts into new patterns, and human civilization would be extremely likely to suffer significant disruption and possibly destruction depending on how bad it gets.

As far as we can tell for the last half million years or so CO2 levels have remained between 180 and 300 parts per million (again, that’s pretty low compared to some other geological periods). In the last 100 years or so, this has risen to about to 410 parts per million (people were hoping the rise would stop at 350 parts per million, but it hasn’t).

There is no indication that this increase in CO2 concentration is slowing. That is a pretty rapid and significant change and most of it seems to have come from human emissions. The theory of greenhouse gases which has been around for well over 100 years would lead us to expect a rise in global average temperatures as a result, and this is happening – and it is happening pretty much as predicted (although a bit higher and more rapid than some official predictions).

Again it needs to be said that the average temperature rises are relatively small, but these small rises appear to be disrupting climate stability already. What seems small to us can have large effects on the system as a whole.

Now natural emissions of CO2 are huge – figures usually suggest around 800 giga tonnes per year. Natural ‘carbon sinks’ and conversion processes handle these emissions quite well. Human emissions are much, much, less than that, even now about 30 giga tonnes per year but increasing.

You might think its a matter of common sense that this little overshoot would not make that much of a difference, but we are not dealing with a simple linear system here. Small changes (in CO2 levels and temperature) can make large differences, due to the way feedback loops work and trigger, or disrupt, other systems.

For some while these emissions made little difference because natural carbon sinks could deal with the extra burdens – these sinks produced the well known pause in the rate of increase of average temperature (not a decrease in temperature or even a stabilizing of temperature, but a decrease in acceleration of temperature increase). These now seem to have been used up. The more we destroy the ecology and engage in deforestation etc. then the worse the accumulation gets and the higher the temperature increases. The rapidity of the change together with environmental destruction renders natural evolutionary or adaptational processes irrelevant – natural sinks do not appear to be able to handle the increase any more.

The more that the average temperature increases, the more that some natural sinks will start releasing CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases. For example the Russian Steppes might already be releasing previously frozen methane for more green house emissions.

This makes the situation even worse; it compounds the problems and shifts them into a whole other realm. We have to stop temperature increases now, if we don’t want extreme weather events to become more and more common, and remediation to become more difficult than it already is. Also as you probably know, land ice is melting and glaciers are disappearing and this will also likely lead to temperature increases and to rising sea levels. Neither of which is good for coastal cities or for human water supplies.

So if we continue with our current patterns of CO2 emissions we are heading for likely catastrophe – we are certainly not heading for good times.

This whole process is difficult to predict in its entirety, because of the way local conditions act with global conditions. For example, higher average temperatures could disrupt the patterns of the Gulf Stream which has kept the UK relatively warm. If the Gulf stream moves southward, then parts of Europe could heat up while the UK’s average temperature lowers. Whatever, happens the weather will change and probably change violently. If we do not stabilize CO2 emissions then the system fluctuations will get wilder, as it is subject to greater stress.

We need to stop CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, and start protecting the rest of the environment to allow its resilience to function. So we have to stop massive deforestation and other forms of pollution as well as stop CO2 emissions.

Human CO2 emissions largely come from burning fossil fuels, some forms of agriculture, and with some from building (concrete use). For some reason official figures for fossil fuel emissions often split the burning into electricity production, transport, industry, domestic and so on, but they all have the same cause.

We can pretty much end coal fired power for electricity now if we put money into it and impose regulations bringing coal burning to an end. We are helped in this as building new coal fired power stations is becoming more expensive than renewables, even with all the subsidies that fossil fuel mining and power receives. Ending coal burning won’t necessarily be pretty, but it can be done. Coal is poisonous during the mining and during the burning, and devastates fertile land during mining, so its a good thing on the whole. Petrol/oil burning may be a bit more difficult. We need an excess of renewable power and storage to allow transport to work like it does now. Possibly generating hydrogen from water is one way around that, but we need heaps of excess renewables to do that and that may then come up against material limits. Changing agriculture will be more difficult still, but people are claiming low emissions concrete is becoming available (I’m not sure).

However, there is a problem, even if we could stop tomorrow. The natural carbon sinks are over-stretched and unlikely to recover quickly. They will not remove the “excess” CO2 from the atmosphere quickly enough to prevent already dangerous average temperature increases. We may need to research Carbon dioxide removal techniques as well. These are being developed, but more money for research is needed, and we need to find some way to dispose of the extracted CO2, so it is not returned to the atmosphere in a couple of years. This is a massive technical problem, which is not really close to being solved (that is a matter of argument, but that is my opinion). Hopefully the problem can be solved.

We need to cut back emissions quickly. We will then almost certainly need to develop an extraction technology. If we can’t do either of these, then we face truly massive disruption: more extreme weather, flooding, city destruction, people movements, food shortages, and warfare.

Tags:, , , , , , ,
Posted in complexity, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Some remarks on Geo-Engineering

January 22, 2018

Geoengineering (GE) involves the attempt to solve the problems of climate change by altering the Earth’s ecology.

It largely comes in two forms:
Solar Radiation Management (SRM) in which we try and lower the amount of the Sun’s energy/heat reaching the earth’s surface. This can involve: mirrors in space, reflective gasses in the upper atmosphere, or painting mountains white.

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) in which you try and suck CO2 from power stations or from the atmosphere. One recognized problem with this technique is the question of what we do with the CO2 once it is extracted.

The idea of GE is that we can continue on with polluting, and try and lower the effects of that pollution.

A common argument from pro-GE people, is that there is no evidence that the world can halt CO2 production and the resultant climate change, through political or economic processes at this moment, so GE may give us a longer period in which we can change, or transition to a new set of energy generators.

Both the IPCC and IEA seem to expect that we can establish CDR and gain negative emissions, but at the moment the technology is largely a fantasy technology which largely exists as a rhetorical way of saying new coal energy should be acceptable. CDR does not exist at anything like the scale we need, and there is no really useful, safe and permanent way of disposing of the collected CO2.

The primary question for both SRM and CDR is a simple one. GE, like everything else that depends on humans, is unlikely to be immune to its social bases. If the dynamics of contemporary societies are inherently destructive of ecologies, then GE is unlikely to prevent that destruction, nor to give a breathing space for new developments. It is likely to help make things worse, or continue the destructive dynamics of that system.

Clearly if we use SRM, the system has to be continually maintained, and that will cost billions. There will be ongoing arguments over who should pay, and how much they should pay. If there is a financial collapse or large scale war, then that maintenance is unlikely to be without problems. In which case climate change would have the brakes taken off, and would accelerate rapidly, causing even worse climate turmoil.

The governing idea of SRM seems that it is easier to change the whole ecological system than to change a political arrangement of economic power and profit. This I’m not sure about. The risk of unintended consequences when fiddling with a system as complex as that of climate is very high. We may already be living in a complex maladaptive system, which is bent on its own destruction and SRM simply magnifies this.

GE could be the equivalent of encouraging smoking to preserve corporate profits, while trying to do research in the hope of some day being able to postpone the inevitable and increasing cancer toll. It might be simpler to discourage people from smoking and to make cigarettes less profitable.

Basically, it can be suggested that if GE becomes the main way of dealing with problems of Climate change, then we live in a society in which ‘instrumental reason’ does not function very well as there are cheaper and possibly better options available, but those options require us to challenge established corporate power, and we are unlikely to do that successfully. I think the last 20 to 30 years of politics in the English Speaking world demonstrates that this failure is very likely to be the case.

Amazingly it is true that among people who both support corporate dominance and deny climate change, GE is quite popular. At the moment I can hypothesise this is precisely because GE does not challenge corporate power, and provides an opportunity for leeching money away from the taxpayers, but I don’t know. It certainly strikes me that if you really wanted less State intervention in life, then you would not want geoengineering.

I have not seen any viable self-supporting GE proposals. Nearly all of them require massive tax-payer subsidies, and some require appear to need massive cross-national governance and regulation. Of course we could give the massive subsidies to private enterprise and hope they do they job without any oversight, but I doubt that will appeal even to the pro-corporate power lobby. With CDR when that involves storage of CO2 underground, we know that ultimate and infinite responsibility of checking for leaks and collapse of storage, will reside with governments and taxpayers, as corporations do not last that long and will not take on those responsibilities. At the least, it seems probable that people will be concerned about other countries freeloading on their efforts, and there will be massive governmental jaunts to try and sort this out. The likelihood of small government and GE seems miniscule.

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »