Sorry About That!

Guilt: I will discuss each of these flaws at greater length, but would like to start with the last, the developed countries feeling of “guilt” at having caused the current global warming crisis (or as the IPCC blandly viewed it “need for adjustment”). It was clearly felt by developing countries, and many environmental activists, that developing countries had the “right” to follow the same “cheap energy development strategy” that has already been proven disastrous in causing global warming.

But wait a minute! Even granted the right to pursue this cheap energy policy, why on earth should they want to? The situation the developed countries find themselves in is in no way enviable. They have a huge inventory of legacy investments that are either useless or will have to be replaced. All coal fired generating plants should be decommissioned as soon as possible indeed all fossil fuel generating plants need to be decommissioned. Long haul trucking needs to be discontinued. Aluminum use has to be drastically reduced (replace cola cans with bottles?). Only a small fraction of the existing aircraft fleet will be needed, if that. The entire automobile fleet needs to be scrapped. Military technology is totally unprepared for the fossil-free age. The inter-state road system has been over-built, and the (high-speed) rail system grossly under-built. With higher energy prices, America’s endless suburbs seem unlikely to survive as the housing pattern of choice, and on and on and on. The developed world faces huge investment requirements just to maintain living standards in a world of higher energy prices.

Kyoto excluded developed countries from any responsibility to cut emissions. Thus tempting them to pursue a cheap energy (energy intensive) development path, that would lead to investment in inappropriate technology due to be scrapped long before the end of its useful life.

   China is reputedly opening a new coal fired generating plant every week, when at modest additional cost it could be opening equivalent nuclear capacity at the same rate, without the clear need to scrap the plant before fully amortized. The rapidly growing economies have the opportunity to invest in the appropriate technology, at much lower cost than developed countries will have to incur in replacing their legacy investments.

   Feeling in no moral position to demand that developing countries reduce greenhouse gas production with the same (modest) intensity as developed countries may have favored the creation of the CDM (Clean Development Mechanism) by which developed countries or industries could pay developing countries or industries to reduce actual (or planned) emissions. See below.

Greenhouse Gases: As is becoming increasing well known, the cause of global warming is the addition of fossil carbon to the naturally occurring carbon cycle. The obvious cure then is to stop adding fossil carbon to the carbon cycle, that is to say, to stop producing fossil fuels. Understandably, the powerful energy companies (represented at international meetings by The Global Climate Coalition) were keen to obscure this connection at all costs, hence the euphemism “greenhouse gasses”. Unfortunately this euphemism came to be regarded as a true description of the problem, leading Kyoto negotiators to focus on emissions, rather than the production of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels would have been easy to monitor, (data on production could be cross checked with amount transported). Emissions are hard to monitor, since they occur in widely geographically distributed plants and cannot be easily measured. Often monitors rely on self (and hence unreliable) reporting. In addition most countries excuse “small” source from any monitoring, meaning that even claimed coverage is incomplete.

Worse, while carbon (in the form of carbon dioxide and methane) is the major source of global warming, there are other greenhouse gases, (nitrous oxide, hydroflorocarbons and some other minor gases). These gases have wildly different heating coefficients. By putting these different gasses into the same pool, it has been possible to argue that a reduction in one ton of a hydroflorocarbon equates to several thousand tons of carbon dioxide. Thus;

“Some chemical factories in China have been generating billions of Euros in CDM credits by installing cheap equipment that stops the generation of a potent greenhouse gas called HFC-23. In a report in the January 2007 issue of Nature magazine, it is estimated that it would have cost €100 million to make these changes by simply regulating the implementation of the equipment through an international process or through international funding, but instead €4.6 billion has been spent on purchasing the massive amounts of
credits generated by the CDM projects….. China has become the largest exporter of CDM credits through the HFC-23 loophole.”

Get that, a €0.1 billion investment yielded CDM credits worth €4.6 billion! Clearly this was a case where it would be profitable to build a factory to produce HFC-23 effluent gas, in order to capture this gas, and earn CDM credits! Had carbon and HFC-23 been treated as different gasses this ridiculous generation of bogus credits could not have occurred.

Clean Development Mechanism (CDM): The most notorious example of the miss-functioning of the CDM has been cited in the last paragraph. However, the CDM/trading approach is fundamentally flawed. The problem is that CDM credits can be generated by activities that do not remove carbon from the carbon cycle, but can be used to permit additions to the cycle. The result is that total carbon added to the cycle exceeds the original allowances.

In part enthusiasm for CDMs is a simple minded neo-liberal belief in the “magic of the market place”: People believe that things always work better with a market than without it. And in part the enthusiasm stems from a false understanding of the United States experience in controlling sulfur dioxide emissions. In this case emission credits were traded and total cost of reducing sulfur emissions proved to be much lower than industry had estimated. It is probable that the primary cause for these “lower costs” was initial cost exaggeration by industry. However, the market in emission credits did play a constructive role: This was because sulfur credit could only be sold by plants that were not going to emit their full pollution entitlement. Thus every credit bought, represented an equivalent real saving elsewhere in the system, and trading did not allow actual emissions to exceed total permitted emissions.

Unfortunately, CDM is badly designed, since it allows planting trees, or changing light-bulbs that do not withdraw carbon from the carbon cycle, to be equated with adding fossil carbon to the cycle: Total additions to the carbon cycle can thus be total allocations plus total CDM credits purchased. CDM represent a “get out of goal” card.

Physical Limits: By “physical limits” I mean that the Kyoto Treaty targets reducing (tons of) emissions by given percentages at future dates: Ideally emissions should be 5% below 1990 levels by 2012 for developing countries, although target reduction differ by country. Taking this approach it is evident that some countries are likely to find it much more costly to cut their emissions than others. This leads to the idea of “cap and trade” allowing countries (or firms) to buy and sell emission caps, so that savings can be made where they are least expensive.

The exact mechanism for allocating caps and whether to charge for them is left up to national governments.

It would have been much simpler to use the price mechanism. That is to say, to charge a fee per ton of carbon (collected at the mine or well-head). This would have obviated any need for trading, since additional carbon could be purchased, simple by paying the fee. It would also have generated an income source that could be used to compensate consumers for the higher energy costs inherent in limiting supply. A high fee, would raise costs to consumers, reduce demand, and allow fossil-free energy suppliers to raise prices (and hence profits) to match the higher fossil-energy prices.

IPCC Optimism: The IPCC reports gave no great sense of urgency, and indeed a misleading sense of certainty. Significant sea level rise was expected to be limited to less than two-feet in the next century, and the IPCC strongly implied that atmospheric carbon dioxide could safely rise to 450 parts per million (ppm) from a current level of about 385 ppm (and pre-industrial level of 275 ppm). Tracing the history of the 450 ppm estimates, it started with the suggestion that it would probably be safe to double the pre-industrial level to 550 ppm. But then taking note of the increase in other greenhouse gasses (other than carbon dioxide, that is) it was suggested that the concentration of carbon dioxide per se, should not go above 450 ppm. On closer examination, however, it becomes apparent that these were just “suggestions” that did not rest on any experimental evidence or even hypotheses as to what would happen before or after the 450 ppm level was reached.

Since completion of Kyoto, scientists have become very much more conscious of the existence of “positive feed-back loops” or “tipping points”. Once a tipping point is reached, it triggers a positive feed-back loop by which the effects of warming set motion changes that themselves will tend to accelerate warming. Examples are:

Melting Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, where the melting result in dark (heat absorbing) open sea replacing the white (light reflecting) ice. The more open water at the poles, the more quickly the poles will warm up in summer, the faster ice melts, and the more heat is absorbed.
Melting perma-frost in Siberia, Alaska and Canada, releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, that tends to increase the rate of warming.
Forest fires from drier tropical forests, or beetle-killed artic forests can shift massive amounts of carbon within the carbon cycle from being sequestered in trees to being atmospheric carbon dioxide, again raising the rate of warming and accelerating the drying of tropical forests or dying of artic woodlands.
Huge amounts of methane hydrate are stored on the polar sea beds. Methane hydrate is a solid form of methane kept solid by the pressure of the sea above, and low temperatures. Should temperatures rise, the hydrate could volatilize into gas, resulting in a massive release of methane into the atmosphere and further temperature rises.
Higher sea temperatures will eventually limit the amount of carbon dioxide that the seas can contain. At higher temperatures, the oceans will themselves begin to release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

While scientists have become increasingly aware of the possibility of these feed-back loops, over the last decade, they are still very unsure as to exactly the conditions that would initiate feed back. There are indication that the first two loops are already in operation, and Dr. James Hansen

(probably the leading U.S. climatologist) said early in 2008 that he now believes that the “safe’ level for atmospheric carbon dioxide was at about 350 ppm: That we are past key tipping points.

With hindsight, scientist should have been much more cautious in suggesting that a rise to 450 ppm would be safe, since we can now see that they had no basis for any such suggestion.

In any case the result was a relatively relaxed view of what needed to be done: It would be sufficient for the developed world to reduce emissions by (only) 5% below their 1990 level by 2008-2012. In fact, it looks as if the developed world will come nowhere near (especially the United States) meeting this modest target.

It is vital to remember that so long as there are any emissions of fossil carbon the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide will continue to rise.

To be fair, the Kyoto protagonists always saw Kyoto, as “the foot in the door”: Everyone knew and accepted that stronger treaties would be needed. What they did not realize was the urgency of achieving stronger international agreements.