Reversing Climate Change

Plain Language Abstract

Reversing Climate Change isn’t easy, or we’d already have done it. After years of sifting through the science, turning raw data into climate models, and rethinking basics: I’ve concluded that we need to look at the problem from a completely different perspective. We need to turn climate change on its head. We need to change our focus away from limiting emissions by people and concentration on limiting fossil fuel production by companies.

If fossil fuels stay in the ground they never become emissions. So let’s ration the global total of carbon extracted by big business. This carbon ration would have to start at current levels and be reduced steadily to sustainable levels as quickly as possible, while still leaving time for alternative forms of energy to be developed.

Note that this carbon ration or quota has to be a global total because we are fixing a global problem. The question then becomes how does the carbon quota get allocated to those big businesses? The rule has to be that no business is allowed to extract carbon from the environment without having an appropriate matching amount of quota. The big businesses will have to acquire a tonne of carbon extraction quota before they can extract a matching tonne of real carbon. So this quota has value.

My proposal is that big carbon extraction businesses would have to buy this quota on the open market. If they can afford to buy quota they can extract carbon. If they can’t buy matching quota then they can’t extract carbon.

Obviously this proposal will have to be agreed by all countries and appropriate laws adopted by them. But why should countries bother? They will want to because they will be allocated the quota free, which they can then sell on the open market. Countries stand to make a lot of money.

I suggest that countries be allocated their split of the quota based on their population. This would not only be the fairest way of allocating quota, it will also move wealth to developing countries.

Reversing climate change is only possible by reducing total atmospheric carbon dioxide.(CO₂) levels. Reducing CO₂ emissions to quantities that allow natural sequestration to start reducing total CO₂ does not need fossil fuels and their emissions to reduce to zero, just well below half, say 20%. Rationing supply, fossil fuel extraction, is far more efficient than trying to limit demand, consumption and emissions. If the fossil fuel extraction ration/quota was issued as the common right of each person on the planet and traded in a cap and trade system, wealth would be redistributed to the developing world.

Introduction

I know a way, a realistic way, to reverse climate change. It doesn’t rely on some future tech advance that may become economic at some vague future date. It doesn’t rely on a revolution that is somehow going to change the system so that all our problems are solved. It can be implemented with existing technology, political structures and institutions.

Current Knowledge – Stocks and Flows in the Carbon Cycle

(Skip or skim this bit if you know it already).

First, let’s analyse the problem. Climate is changing because planet Earth is overheating. This overheating is caused by the greenhouse effect of increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) gas in our atmosphere, mostly caused by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. There are other causes of CO₂ emissions such as; making cement, clearing and burning forests, and bad farming destroying soil organic carbon, but these are all far smaller contributions. These flows are all shown below in this carbon cycle diagram from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5).

Figure 1: Carbon Cycle from IPCC AR5 WG1

This diagram shows the stocks and flows of carbon. The black lines are the old preindustrial stable, balanced situation. The red lines are the additional flows caused by human activity. This diagram dates from 2013 when AR5 was published and IPCC Working Group 1 published Chapter 6: Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles. The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) has recently been published, but I’ve not seen this diagram updated. Undated numbers have been published in AR6, and they are a little higher, but the diagram still illustrates the situation clearly. We are pumping too much CO₂ into the atmosphere. I’ll be referring back to this diagram later because it also points to the solution.

Monitoring Lack of Progress

Figure 2: Atmospheric CO₂ at Mauna Loa Observatory March 2022

Because Mauna Loa in Hawaii is a long way out in the Pacific and a long way from local industrial areas, the gases of the atmosphere are well mixed, so this is an ideal place to measure them. This is where regular measurement of atmospheric CO₂ was first instigated and so they have a long reliable record. The importance of this diagram is that it shows an unbroken record of increasing CO₂ with hardly a kink in the rise.

The IPCC was established in 1988. The first Assessment Report was published in 1990, the second 1995, the third 2001, the fourth 2007, the fifth 2013/2014, the sixth 021/2022. Each report showed 2the situation getting worse and an increasing need for urgent action to be taken to stop climate change getting worse. The Kyoto Protocol in 1992, the Paris Agreement in 2015 and all of the United Nations climate change conferences from 1995 up to Conference Of the Parties 26 (COP26) in November 2021 have not had any impact on this implacable rise in CO₂ levels.

 

Tipping Points – Feedback Loops

The really frightening aspect of global overheating is triggering various feedback mechanisms that add to the problem unpredictably. The relationship between CO₂ levels and temperature is straightforward, direct and linear. This makes it easy to predict. Positive feedback mechanisms are where changes loop back on themselves causing more change to happen that adds to the feedback.

A well-known example of a positive feedback loop is the Arctic Ice melting so that instead of the white ice reflecting the sun’s heat, the exposed dark ocean absorbs the sun’s heat, making the water warmer and melting more ice, which exposes more dark ocean – hence the loop. Currently the seasonal change in winter, with the freezing of new ice, reverses the melt and swamps out a lot of the feedback, but as average temperatures rise, the feedback could take over, creating a permanent dark Arctic ice free ocean. This takeover would occur if a tipping point was passed.

There are negative feedback mechanisms that are a vital part of keeping the whole system of world systems in balance. The most obvious one is that as the world gets hotter it radiates more heat, and then as it cools it radiates less heat.

Unfortunately negative feedback mechanisms don’t always protect forever, as we can see with our sister planet Venus. On Venus the greenhouse effect has got so far out of control that a planet that once was a water-world like Earth now has a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead. Mars, Earth and Venus were once thought to all be in the Goldilocks zone where liquid water could exist, but when the other planets were explored it was found they were nothing like Earth. The signs of water erosion are plain to see on Mars, but it was too small to hold onto its atmosphere and so froze, losing most of the water to space. For Venus we need to look at the greenhouse effect of water vapour and clouds. If it wasn’t for the greenhouse effect of clouds both Earth and Venus would be at sub-zero temperatures because neither is close enough to the Sun. Water vapour on Earth causes a far stronger greenhouse effect than CO₂, but is currently stable so doesn’t get talked about as much. On Venus it seems that the greenhouse effect of water vapour got out of control and drove the planet to be totally covered in permanent cloud with no liquid water and no life. With this example of what can happen with global overheating, and with it being the sole example of what will happen, finding a solution and reversing climate change becomes even more vital. The alternative is truly terrifying.

Net Zero Carbon Fallacy

We are told that the current targets of Net Zero Carbon from the Paris Agreement will fix Climate Change. This is misdirection. Actually, Net Zero Carbon, if achieved, at best will keep Global Warming at whatever increased temperature has been reached by then. This will mean that Greenland and Antarctic ice will carry on melting, causing sea level rise that will flood all coastal cities. The climate will also be kept in the disruptive chaotic state that is already causing catastrophic fires and floods as well as famine through crop failure. Melting of the permafrost will also continue releasing methane which could still reach yet another tipping point, even at the stable temperature, because it is higher. In order to reduce temperatures to safe liveable levels we need Net Negative Carbon.

Net Negative Carbon Fix

Net Negative Carbon will move us in the right direction. Can Net Negative Carbon be achieved with current technology? The answer is yes. The reason is that although CO₂ is a persistent atmospheric gas that does not decay in the atmosphere, it is absorbed by both photosynthesis and direct solution in the oceans. Increased levels of CO₂ cause more vigorous growth of plants and more rapid absorption by oceans, unfortunately making the oceans more acidic. This is where we need to refer back to the Carbon Cycle diagram. When we look at the numbers by the red arrows we see that about half of the total CO₂ going up into the atmosphere comes back down again because of natural processes. This is because the levels of CO₂ are so high and out of balance that the flows of CO₂ have changed. Note that for Net ocean flux the flow has reversed. The black arrow shows that before industrialisation the oceans actually gave off CO₂ where they now absorb it. This imbalance means that if CO₂ emissions are reduced well below half the current levels, we can reach Net Negative Carbon, start reducing CO₂ and start bringing temperatures back down to sustainable levels.

To illustrate this benefit from reducing CO₂ emissions to well below half, we need to consider a bathtub.

Figure 3: The Bathtub

Think of the bathtub as containing all the CO₂ in the atmosphere. The inflow is total current CO₂ emissions. The outflow is total current CO₂ absorptions. Currently the inflow is about twice as fast as the outflow and so the level of CO₂ is rising. If the inflow is cut to well below half, the level of CO₂ in the bathtub will fall. Net Zero Carbon would be the case where the inflow exactly matches the outflow, keeping the bathtub level steady. In other words Net Zero Carbon maintains CO₂ levels at the same high levels, and consequently maintains whatever increased temperature level has been reached. But we want the level in the bathtub to fall so that as CO₂ levels fall so does the temperature.

Note that the outflow is dependent on the height of the CO₂ in the bathtub, not the inflow of CO₂ emissions.

The exact level that CO₂ emissions need to fall to is debateable. It depends on how soon we start to reduce CO₂ emissions, and on how steeply they fall. The target probably needs to be somewhere in the range of only emitting 20% to 30% of current levels of CO₂. Climate change models give some indication of why the cuts need to be this drastic.

Solution – Modelling Carbon Rationing

Climate Change is a global problem and so needs a global solution. Although the solution needs to be put in place by the world’s leading politicians, on behalf of their countries and the world, it must not be undoable by rogue politicians choosing to do a U-turn.

Professor Kate Raworth’s book, Doughnut Economics, was key to forming many of my ideas. She mentions that about half our CO₂ emissions are sequestered by natural absorption. But the most important influence is the ring doughnut itself, especially the CO₂ limit. This boundary reminded me of a limit and a ration.

I considered the idea of somehow rationing global emissions of CO₂: but this is nearly impossible to achieve. The Paris Agreement and the COPs have tried to ration emissions by countries volunteering to reduce CO₂ emissions to Net Zero Carbon. We’ve seen above both that CO₂ has continued to increase and that the target falls short. Also it is far too easy to export CO₂ emissions by importing high emission products from countries with a weak commitment. This also encourages countries to compete with each other by delaying emission reductions. Far more efficient would be to ration fossil fuel extraction. If the fossil fuels stay in the ground they can’t become CO₂ emissions. So the sensible thing to do is address the start of the supply chain: limit production rather than consumption. This is what worked when the Montreal Protocol phased out the production of CFCs in order to save the ozone layer. To limit CFC emissions we didn’t try to manage its use in aerosol cans: production was managed, not consumption.

So I came up with the idea of a Global Carbon Extraction Quota that reduces steadily year by year to sustainable levels. When I modelled this idea I found that temperature increase can be limited to well below the Paris Agreement +2°C limit: as shown below.

Figure 4: Modelling the Solution

Note that my model starts to limit carbon slowly in order for the world to start the change slowly. This will minimise the impact on the economy and allow time to plan for the change. The end of the change is also slow to change because the final changes are going to get harder and harder. I also originally had a target of zero carbon.

This model of the quota has the same shape as CO₂ emissions because they are directly related. The shape of the temperature line is also the same shape as atmospheric CO₂ levels.

Also note that the temperature increase peaks roughly when the quota reduces down to about half current levels of quota/CO₂ emissions.

Solution – Buying Carbon Ration

The rule for any organisation wanting to extract carbon will be that they have to buy sufficient quota in advance in order to be authorised to extract the carbon they want. The quota would be available to buy on an open market and the limited amount of quota automatically limits carbon extracted, and eventually emitted as CO₂. This would be in effect a tax on carbon extraction. As quota shrinks year by year it will become more valuable: who should sell the quota and gain from this increase in value? The carbon fuels extracted would be managed and marketed by the extracting organisations in exactly the same way as now, but every carbon tonne would have to be tracked with its matching quota as it moves through distribution and processing. Note that all leakages and losses of carbon would have to be tracked, accounted for, and have a matching quota. About half methane emissions are from leakages and losses from extracting fossil fuels. Also a lot of gases are flared instead of being captured. Because methane is a more potent greenhouse gas it would need to be matched to quota by its CO₂ equivalent measure: that’s a factor of about x30.

Solution – Distributing Carbon Ration

How should the Global Carbon Extraction Quota be distributed fairly? Personally I feel that this Right-to-Extract should be viewed as a human right and be fairly distributed to every person on the planet to sell and get the benefit. In reality this might not be practical, so quota would be given to each country based on its population size. Countries could then choose to distribute the quota to their population or sell the quota to the market directly.

Money – How Much Cash?

The value of the quota will be left to the market to decide. Given that the initial quantity of quota will be about 10 billion tonnes per year, reducing to about a quarter of that, and the world population being about 8 billion, that works out at an initial quota per person of just over one tonne each year. Carbon Offsets could create quota if they are created by true sequestration. An experimental plant in Iceland is turning atmospheric CO₂ into rock at a cost of about $1,000 per tonne. So the quota value won’t rise above about $1,000 per person per year and as quota reduces over the years to about a quarter, so this will fall accordingly to about $250. But this is of course the maximum. The minimum value could be anything, but given that oil costs in the region of $100 a barrel, an additional cost of $1 a tonne of carbon, (about 9 barrels per tonne of carbon), seems cheap, very cheap. That would be a minimum price of about $85 million for the UK each year, up to a maximum near $85 billion. Shrinking to about a quarter of this by say 2050.

Who Issues and Manages Quota?

My initial thoughts were that since the UN has been so involved with organising IPCC, the Paris Agreements and COPs they should organise the quota. The trouble with that is that it is too political. Nations get together and agree something that they can easily back out of by doing a U-turn. Trump taking the USA out of the Paris Agreement is a prime example. Far more stable are trade agreements under the watch of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

The management and trading of the quota is best done over the internet using the same sort of blockchain technology that bitcoin uses. This would allow transparency of all transactions, enabling auditing of all quota and carbon tracing.

It would be the duty of all countries to audit carbon extracting companies operating in their country.

The penalty for countries that fail to audit and enforce the quota would be loss of quota allocation.

What about Non-Fossil Fuel Carbon?

When fossil fuel carbon is rationed carbon will be in short supply, so there will be a strong incentive to look for other sources such as peat and of course wood from forests. That is why the quota must also apply to all other carbon sources. This won’t be as straightforward. Fossil fuels were permanently sequestering millions of years of carbon captured from the atmosphere by photosynthesis. Biological fuels such as wood are rapidly changing stores of carbon. Carbon credits can be created by growing new trees, but the trees are vulnerable to fire and disease. This is hardly equivalent to those that safely sequestered fossil fuel carbon. So what I propose is that biological stores of carbon such as forests are monitored by satellite, (this is already being done), and losses and gains modify the quota allocated to each country. So it is down to each country to manage their own forests, with the incentive that when they do well and grow new trees, they will get extra carbon quota. That satellite monitoring can also monitor methane leaks which could be a check on reported emissions, and even another way of adjusting quota.

Consequences

Existing schemes to discourage the use of fossil fuels such fuel levies and similar taxes would no longer be needed. Because the quota scheme is global and all-encompassing no other measures are necessary.

Campaigns to stop coal mines, drilling for oil and fracking would no longer be necessary to prevent climate change because the quota market keeps everything in check automatically. Fossil fuel companies would able to mine and drill and extract as much as they wanted – just as long as they had purchased sufficient quota. Local environmental consequences would of course still be reasons for debating whether fossil fuel projects should be allowed, but that is a different issue.

Fossil fuel companies would tend to limit extraction to existing known sources, and stick to the easiest and cheapest. Fossil fuel company profits may actually increase. The total volume of throughput will fall, and in a totally predictable way, but cheaper extraction costs and increased scarcity will increase prices.

Increased fossil fuel prices will of course make renewables even more competitive than they already are. Also the totally predictable future smaller supply of fossil fuel will drive the political need to switch to alternatives.

What about existing carbon credit and offsetting schemes? CO₂ emitting industries would no longer need to buy carbon credits or offset their emissions because the limits are being managed by the global carbon extraction quota. Only national forestry and other biological carbon depletion industries would still need to be incentivised in order not to reduce the national allocation of quota.

Political Buy-In

Will world leaders buy-in to this idea? There is the obvious advantage of this scheme in that it enables us to reverse climate change. There is also the advantage that countries, especially developing countries, will get a substantial income. This redistribution of wealth will make the world more stable politically, decreasing the need to migrate. The leaders of some countries may also see this as an opportunity to make a lot of money for themselves. I consider that a price worth paying.

Summary

Burning fossil fuels is the major cause of global overheating and climate chaos. It needs to be put into reverse quickly, before tipping points are exceeded that cause feedback loops to get out of control and drive temperatures so high that all life is exterminated. The most effective way to limit CO₂ emissions is not at the point of emission, but at the point of production where fossil fuels and their carbon are extracted. A global ration or quota on carbon extraction that steadily reduces to well below half current levels as quickly as possible will reduce total atmospheric CO₂, reduce global temperatures, and steady the climate. Giving the quota to every country based on population size is a fair distribution, and when the quota is sold in the open market will bring wealth to developing countries.

Because the reduction in fossil fuel carbon is known decades in advance, the change to alternative forms of energy can be planned and managed so that economies are not ruined.

The redistribution of wealth from selling the quota will support developing countries. This means that the need to migrate will be reduced, leading to a more stable world.

As the climate returns to a more stable state in a cooler world natural disasters will become far less frequent. Reduced famine, flooding and drought will also stabilise the world’s politics.

Reversing Climate Change is possible and necessary, but who is going to make it happen?

Support For This Approach of Controlling Fossil Fuel Extraction

THE FOSSIL FUEL NON-PROLIFERATION TREATY

References

IPCC AR5 Working Group 1 chapter 6

6:Carbon and Other Biogeochemical Cycles - IPCC

Mauna Loa CO₂ data

NOAA Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

Stocks and Flows [The Climate Leader] – The Bathtub

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRlYGDBGcRA

My Blog about Net Zero Carbon and Model Graphs

https://martinsgreenworld.blogspot.com/p/zero-net-carbon-isnt-necessary-probably.html