Monthly Archives: April 2011

CCS doesn’t make coal ‘clean’

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Reporting on SaskPower’s proposed $1.24 billion project to capture and store carbon dioxide from the Boundary Dam coal power station in Saskatchewan, many news sources have described the technology as ‘clean coal’.

There is no such thing.

Even if a power plant could be built that separates 100% of the carbon dioxide from its emissions and then buries them forever, there will still be lots about coal that is far from clean. There is coal mining, which kills thousands of people a year and contaminates land and water supplies. There are the particulate emissions from coal plants, which cause many human deaths. There are other toxic emissions from coal plants, including mercury, radioactive materials, and nitrogen and sulphur oxides (which cause acid rain and other problems). There is toxic coal ash that is left over after combustion, and which many countries store in sub-standard ways.

Even if climate change were not a problem, we would want the world to be moving away from toxic, dangerous, dirty coal. That said, given that countries like China and the United States have large coal reserves and that there is strong political pressure to keep burning the stuff, it does seem sensible to allow coal power companies to develop and deploy CCS technology, provided that it can be shown to be safe and effective. It is the companies and the people buying power who should pay for the deployment of such technology, however, since they are the ones who are harming everyone else with toxic and greenhouse gas pollution.

Regulating climate pollution is constitutional and necessary

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Aldyen Donnelly has written a problematic article on climate change policy for the Financial Post.

She is right to say that climate policies could create regional tensions in Canada. The big problem is that she ignores the victims of climate change. We need to stop burning fossil fuels because the alternative will hurt a lot of people. We need to take action despite the political barriers in the way.

The government can and must regulate greenhouse gas pollution. Otherwise, people will continue to profit from behaviors that impose suffering on defenceless members of future generations.

[Correction: 5:17pm] As originally written, this article wrongly referred to Aldyen Donnelly as male.

Climate change mitigation versus adaptation

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There are two big sets of actions people can take as rational responses to the threat of climate change: mitigation and adaptation.

When we mitigate, we work to produce less greenhouse gas pollution. This limits how much warming can take place.

When we invest in adaptation, we invest in ways to protect ourselves from warming, like building sea walls to protect against rising sea levels.

These two types of action have different effects on the risk humanity is facing. Specifically, mitigating reduces how bad the worst-case scenario will be. Adaptation improves how good the best-case scenario could be.

In the following graphics, the quantity being measured along the horizontal axis is human suffering. We cannot be sure exactly what the correct value is, but we have good reason to believe that it is within the range defined by the yellow bar.

With no action:

With mitigation:

With adaptation:

Given how bad climate change could be, I think the strong emphasis must be on mitigation. It is as though you are a patient, about to have an operation. The surgeon tells you that with the normal operation, there is a 10% chance that you will lose a leg and a 5% chance you could die. She then tells you that they can modify the operation in one of two ways:

a) Cut the chance of losing a leg to 5%
b) Cut the chance of dying to 2.5%

It seems far more sensible to choose option b.

With climate change, we don’t need to choose ‘100% mitigation’ or ‘100% adaptation’. Nonetheless, I think the same logic that lies behind the surgical decision lies behind the moral imperative for humanity to concentrate on mitigation.

Suing to reduce climate change

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The New York Times has an editorial about an ongoing attempt by eight states to sue six major electrical producers due to their greenhouse gas pollution:

The case about global warming scheduled to be argued on Tuesday before the Supreme Court is a blockbuster. Eight states — from California to New York, plus New York City — sued six corporations responsible for one-fourth of the American electric power industry’s emissions of carbon dioxide.

Rather than seeking money or punishment for the defendants, they seek what everyone should agree is the polluters’ responsibility: abatement of their huge, harmful part in causing climate change. The purpose is not to solve global warming or usurp the government’s role in doing so. It is, rightly, to get major utilities to curb their greenhouse-gas emissions before the government acts.

The courts have an advantage over politicians, in that they don’t need to worry as much about day-to-day popularity.

Also, if the court finds against the companies, it could drive the emergence of laws or regulations on greenhouse gas pollution.

Fugitive emissions from shale gas

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In addition to being the primary constituent of natural gas, methane is itself a powerful greenhouse gas. Indeed, it is one of the reasons why livestock agriculture and landfills contribute to climate change.

As discussed in The New York Times, one reason why the expanded production of natural gas is worrisome from a climatic perspective is that drilling for and extracting gas causes some of it to leak directly into the atmosphere. These are called ‘fugitive emissions’. According to the article, as much as 7.9% of the gas extracted from shale gas wells is released directly into the atmosphere in this way.

Of course, the gas that is put through pipelines and burned for heat or electricity is also problematic from a climate change perspective. One molecule of methane (CH4) combines with two molecules of oxygen (O2) to form one molecule of carbon dioxide (CO2) and two molecules of water (H2O). That basically means that for every cubic metre of natural gas that gets burned, a cubic metre of carbon dioxide gets added to the atmosphere.

The article repeatedly quotes Robert Howarth, a professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University. He points out several studies that identify the problematic effects of natural gas production on the Earth’s climate, concluding that “[w]hen all is factored together… the greenhouse gas footprint of shale gas can be as much as 20 percent greater than, and perhaps twice as high as, coal per unit of energy”.

That certainly raises questions about the idea that natural gas is a clean-burning fuel that can help us deal with climate change.

Just think about the ice sheets

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The question of exactly how bad any particular degree of climate change would be is extremely challenging to answer in advance. How much net human suffering would result from warming the planet 1°C? What about 2°C? 5°C? 10°C?

The answer to this question is important, since it helps to determine what the best course of action for humanity is. In theory, we could ban the use of fossil fuels tomorrow, shut down the world’s coal-fired power stations, park cars, ground airplanes, and start re-building the energy basis of society without the use of planet-warming sources of energy. Alternatively, we could ignore the problem for years, decades, or even centuries – allowing the planet to get ever-hotter until we completely run out of fossil fuels.

Here’s one way to simplify the problem: just think about the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. These massive slabs of frozen water could raise global sea levels by 14 metres if they melted completely. That would have a gigantic human impact. Major cities like New York, Vancouver, Tokyo, and London would be seriously inundated. Whole countries like the Netherlands and Bangladesh would largely cease to exist as dry land.

Bearing in mind that we are eventually going to have to abandon fossil fuels anyhow (because they exist in finite quantities), it seems sensible to say that it is worth switching away from them early to prevent the loss of these ice sheets. That is just one of the many climatic consequences that would arise from a particular level of warming. It would be accompanied by droughts, floods, agricultural changes, species relocating, ocean acidification, loss of glaciers, and much else besides. But – to simplify – we can just think about the ice sheets. That lets us set an upper bound for how much warming we can tolerate, which in turn establishes an upper bound for how many fossil fuels we can burn.

Where exactly does that boundary lie? One suggestive fact is that the ice sheets in question formed when the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was about 450 parts per million (ppm). Before the Industrial Revolution, it was at around 280 ppm. Now, it is around 392 ppm and increasing by about 3 ppm per year. Based on a very crude calculation, it may be plausible to say that if we continue on our present course for twenty years or so, we will seriously endanger the integrity of the ice sheets.

The implications of that are pretty huge. Humanity needs to substantially cut greenhouse gas pollution not over the span of 50, or 500, or 1000 years, but over the next couple of decades. Furthermore, for it to be plausible that this change will occur successfully, rich developed countries like Canada need to cut first and fastest. Thus, just by considering one likely consequence of unmitigated climate change, we can make an argument that the complacent attitude of politicians who think we can concentrate on other issues is unrealistic. If we don’t handle this problem now, and we commit those ice sheets to eventual disintegration, people living during the time of inexorable sea level rise will quite rightly view our leaders and our generation as failures, when it comes to taking the most basic precautions to respect the welfare and rights of those who will come after us.

Why care about 2100?

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I know it sounds obscure and Klingon to say it, but protecting future generations from climate change is a matter of honour.

As far as scientists can tell, climate change is the most serious major threat facing people a couple of hundred years from now – worse than nuclear proliferation, worse than other environmental problems. If the icesheets really start melting, they will have major problems. How many times in history have dozens of major cities been moved?

At the same time, we have the technology now to stop climate change by abandoning fossil fuels over the span of a few decades. It will be expensive to do that, but it will bring other advantages. Fewer people will die from air pollution. We won’t need to import fuel from dangerous places or produce it in incredibly destructive ways like the oil sands.

It will probably use up a lot of land, but it seems possible that it can be made to work in a way that is fair for all of humanity, with everybody living in comfort.

We are lucky that we live in this generation – the one that will start to pay the cost of decarbonization. That is far preferable to being part of the generation when the actual warming of the planet peaks after all the lags kick in.