Our Climate Change Cul-de-sac

or The Wrong Trouser Leg

When I contemplate just how ineffective the COP26 agreement is, it seems the world is still driving at full speed down a climate change cul-de-sac towards a terminating brick wall. The major participating countries with their independent plans have a wide variety of agreed targets and timescales for net zero carbon emissions, none of which are adequate. But of course they are inadequate. Any country that agreed to an adequate plan would be at an economic disadvantage to the others. Worse than that, any country on a change of government can change the plan or even do a complete U-turn. The global warming problem doesn’t have a global solution for the global problem and so is bound to fail.

I’m reminded of Terry Pratchett’s book Jingo and the trousers of time. The hero Sam Vimes makes the right decision, chooses the right trouser leg and saves the day, but he is kept in touch with the disaster that happens in the alternate universe where he made the wrong decision and took the wrong trouser leg of time. I feel like I’m in the wrong trouser leg in this multiverse and I want to change legs.

So what’s happening in the right trouser leg of time where good decisions were made?

Firstly it was agreed that a global plan was needed with a global limit on carbon emissions that reduces year by year to sustainable levels. At first this carbon ration starts at current levels and reduces slowly since this change is going to be difficult to adjust to. Then the rate of reduction speeds up as everyone adapts to a lower but totally predictable level of carbon ration.

Secondly it was recognised that the place to control carbon emissions from fossil fuels is at the beginning of the supply chain from producer to consumer. The complex network of fossil fuel extraction and distribution has so many branches that it is nearly impossible to control at the point of emission. Just think of all the gas that is flared from oil wells. It’s far more efficient to include all carbon at the point of extraction.

So now we have the idea of a global ration for carbon extraction from the geology of our planet. And the extraction of carbon by fossil fuel organisations is limited by that ration. But how is the ration distributed fairly? In my vision it is decided that every person on the planet has an equal right to a fair share. For practical reasons the carbon extraction ration is actually distributed free to every country in proportion to their population. This ration is then sold on a global market so that every fossil fuel extracting organisation can buy the quantity of ration they need to match extracted carbon. No one is allowed to extract geological carbon without adequate ration. This ration is controlled with block chain computing and is open to all to see and is part of the audit process for all fossil fuel extraction organisations.

Countries, especially developing low carbon countries, get a lot of revenue from this system and the world becomes a more equitable and stable place with fewer wars and refugees.

Because countries do not control the carbon emission plans, just the way they adjust by switching to non-carbon energy sources, it is impossible for countries to mess up the system. Countries are responsible for regulating and monitoring any fossil fuel extracting organisations based on their soil, and any disputes are settled by an independent dispute settlement system as with most trade agreements.

There is also a parallel but completely separate system for rationing organic carbon extraction. This is to control carbon extracted by forest clearance, peat extraction and similar activities. The reason they are separated is to allow for carbon sequestration either geologically or organically. This is needed because organic sequestration of carbon in the short-term carbon cycle is so fragile that the possibility of the carbon being released suddenly by sequestration woodland burning down needs to be catered for.

The final important item is that the right leg of the trousers has a net negative carbon target instead of net zero carbon. This is because we are starting with an atmosphere that already has far too much carbon in it, and so is way out of balance. And that imbalance is getting worse all the time. Net zero sounds great, balanced, a “what goes up must come down” situation, but it’s not going to fix the imbalance, only net negative carbon will put things back like they were. But the good news is that because the balance of carbon in our atmosphere is so badly out, about half of the excess carbon we emit is naturally sequestered by natural process on land and sea. So the sustainable levels target of carbon extraction for the next few decades turns out to be between 10% and 25% of current levels if we want to keep below +2°C of global warming. 10% of current levels could even keep us close to +1.5°C.

If only I could somehow get into that right trouser leg of time. Well just maybe we can back out of this cul-de-sac and take a better path.

 

Carbon Conjuring

Misdirection: Its Recognition and Mitigation

As well as showmanship and a few trick mechanisms, the main skill of a magician doing conjuring tricks is misdirection. While your attention is being focussed over there, the key manipulation is happening just here – right in front of you, but you can’t see it. The same is happening with carbon.

Many of us know about BP hiring public relations firm Ogilvy & Mather to sell climate change being not the fault of the oil giants, but that of individuals – they invented the Carbon Footprint - “One of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever”. This misdirection is achieved by moving the focus away from the fossil fuel companies who extract carbon and actually control it, to the end consumers who have very little control, and being divided can never in reality control carbon. Divide and Rule. Concerned carbon activists also waste their efforts trying to promote individual actions instead of the necessary global changes required to fix a global problem. But because our Carbon Footprint makes us feel responsible and guilty we continue to fall for it.

The same shifting of blame happens with COP. The Paris agreement set things up so that each nation was responsible for controlling their own emissions, setting targets and trying to stick to them. This sets country against country since cutting carbon more quickly than rival countries sets then at an economic disadvantage. So the global problem is not tackled globally, and no one is really surprised that the carbon problem is not fixed. Once again Divide and Rule.

Global Warming and Climate Change are terms we take for granted, but they are another form of misdirection. It is little known that there was a massive lobbying effort when the IPCC was created to get the them to use these neutral terms instead of more accurate, but more frightening terms, such as; Global Overheating and Climate Chaos or Climate Catastrophe. This is another form of misdirection by the targeted use of language.

Emissions instead of Extraction. This is arguably the biggest and most successful bit of misdirection. It’s understandable that we concentrate on personal, local or national carbon emissions, but this is a global problem that needs a global solution. So a global perspective gives a better chance of solving the carbon emissions problem. Currently we are pinning our hopes on the Paris Agreement and the COP commitments by separate nations adding up to a solution. But as we know the national commitments don’t come anywhere near adding up to the necessary total. This is no surprise. Any nation committing to their fair share of emissions reduction will be at a competitive disadvantage. This is why this approach will probably never work. The other fundamental flaw is that COP is trying to control emissions, which is far too late in the process. Controlling the global supply of carbon at source would be far more efficient in so many ways. And we’ve done it before. Let’s remember how CFCs were phased out under the Montreal Protocol. It was done by phasing out manufacturing of CFCs – by limiting the supply. We can also look at the example of OPEC where oil supplies were limited by that cartel of nations in order to keep the price of oil high. I say that controlling the global supply of carbon is the most certain way to control carbon emissions.

And, why Net Zero Carbon? It sounds like a good thing to achieve. A ‘what goes up must come down’ balance. But the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere are way out of balance already, so shouldn’t we be pushing for Net Negative Carbon? Climate is already tipped way out of balance so that we need to get back to the historic CO2 range of 280 to 350 ppm instead of the current range of 413 to 420 ppm. There’s another big flaw in Net Zero, it ignores the fact that currently about half the CO2 we add to the atmosphere comes back down again because of natural ecological processes. This shows us that in the short term we don’t need to reduce carbon extraction to zero in order to obtain Net Zero and even Net Negative Carbon.

So having recognised that we need to control the global supply of carbon at source, how can we do it? I think that setting a reducing ration for how much carbon is allowed to be extracted globally is what’s necessary. The only question then is how to fairly distribute the carbon ration? One way would be expand OPEC to include all countries and all fossil fuels, and then let the new universal OPEC decide. I think a better way would be one that also sends that missing COP mitigation funding to developing nations who weren’t responsible for the mess we are in but need to cope with it. So I propose that a tradable global carbon extraction ration or quota is the right of every person equally. Practically distribution of this quota to individuals is impractical, so the quota would be split between all countries proportionally be population. There would be a global market for this quota and no carbon extracting organisation would be allowed to extract carbon without sufficient quota.

Such a system would allow the efficient and totally predictable reduction of carbon fuels in a way that would allow all governments to plan the necessary switch to renewables. It would also give low carbon developing countries a regular income that would fund mitigation measures. I think this would not only give the world a more stable climate, but also more stable politics.

Offsetting Porn

Sam was just paying for yet another piece of porn and noticed that the website offered the option, for a small additional fee, of offsetting any damage caused by watching the porn. Sam was vaguely aware that there probably was some damage caused, associated with making the porn, but porn was far too enjoyable to just give it up. But there was a small amount of guilt associated with Sam’s porn watching. Maybe offsetting could remove that guilt? So Sam investigated further. What was this offsetting? The website had a link that explained. There was an offsetting NGO that showed a picture of a schoolgirl, Maria. The NGO explained that Maria was an indigenous Amazon virgin schoolgirl in danger of being kidnapped, sold and trafficked as a sex slave to the porn industry. Sam’s small additional fee would enable them to keep Maria safe, thus the damage not caused to Maria would offset any damage caused by Sam watching the porn. So Sam paid the fee and felt better for it, and the porn website was pleased because they appeared to be doing something to become more ethical.

What Sam didn’t know, was that the NGO was keeping Maria safe by kidnapping her and separating her from her family. Also after 30 months of gathering in offsetting fees and taking publicity photos of Maria, the NGO would sell and traffic Maria as a sex slave for the porn industry anyway. Not only that, but instead of Maria being sold at the beginning of the 30 months, Isabella, her school friend down the road, was kidnapped and sold instead. The steady supply of virgin sex slaves for the porn industry did not halt for an instant.

This fable is the exact parallel to what happens with carbon offsetting on your plane flights etc. Just change months to years and virgin schoolgirl to virgin rain forest.

Offsetting NGOs either buy outright or buy the logging rights to a plot of virgin rain forest and promise that it won’t be cut down for at least 30 years while they collect offsetting fees. They exclude the indigenous population who were living a sustainable lifestyle on that land. The excluded people then have to take up a new way of living, which is likely to depend on either poaching, logging or both. Although this plot of virgin rain forest is saved for 30 years, a neighbouring unprotected plot is still felled, and the supply of valuable timber doesn’t halt for an instant.

Of course the 30 year delay probably started many years ago. The first carbon offsetting scheme started just over 30 years ago. So the time for protecting that virgin rain forest is probably a lot shorter than 30 years.

There are other offsetting schemes that aren’t quite as bad as this, but all of them are flawed, unless they are similar to the Iceland carbon dioxide sequestration project that turns it into rock. Anything less is probably going to release the carbon back into the atmosphere – eventually. The current cost of the Iceland project is nearly $1,500 per tonne of carbon. So any carbon sequestration scheme that is cheaper than this is suspect. Maybe the scheme plants trees, but what if the trees burn in a forest fire? Are they insured for replacement? What if the scheme area is disrupted by armed violence as with the Dutch NGO, Face the Future and Mount Elgon National Park in eastern Uganda? Maybe carbon dioxide is being captured and stored in an old oil or gas field. Will those storage caverns leak? Or is the stored carbon dioxide being used to push out the last difficult bits of oil or gas that otherwise would have been left in the ground. It’s a minefield of problems, 

Basically any carbon offsetting scheme is suspect if it is much cheaper than $1,500 per tonne of carbon.

 

Net Zero Carbon 

How Big Are The Holes In The Net?

It turns out they are huge.

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

And there is more...

 I've been working on my blog pages for a while. The job of planning how to limit carbon dioxide emissions by rationing carbon extraction is a never ending process, but on the principle of the 80:20 rule, I think I'm 80% there. So now is the time to start publicising this blog and it's pages.

With COP26 on the horizon this adds to the reasons to publish. Also a number of bodies are publishing other ideas about how to control carbon emissions globally.

• Climate change: ditch 90% of world’s coal and 60% of oil and gas to limit warming to 1.5°C

Fixing Global Overheating and Climate Chaos 

The IPCC AR6 Summary for Policy Makers has just been published so - time to take another look at how to get out of this mess we've created. This diagram is no doubt the core of the report for stating the current position.

So carbon dioxide is still the main problem, but methane has risen to become a close second but is balance by an equal and opposite contribution from our sulphur dioxide emissions.

So it's time to look again at my Carbon Extraction Quota idea from 2018. This idea is a novel and effective way to control and limit carbon dioxide emissions that will actually work, but it only controls carbon.

The Boom and Bust of Markets, Ecosystems and Politics

I was reading George Mombiot's excellent speech Put a price on nature? this week. This speech puts the skids under the attempt to merge nature into our economy by putting a price on 'services' provided by nature. As well as wondering about the difference between the economy and nature, it got me thinking about why we intervene at all as politicians. Why not let the natural processes of our ecology, and I see us and all our works as part of the total world ecology, just happen? The answer has to be that if a see a problem I just have to fix it. So what is the problem?
 

The Mandelbrot set

Chaos Theory

What can this beautiful fractal pattern possibly have to do with politics? We've become so familiar with the stunning images discovered in the Mandelbrot set that we forget that the maths around fractals is only a few decades old. It is linked to chaos theory and the logistic difference equation used by biologists to describe how populations change from generation to generation. So this is the maths of natural ecological systems. It is also the maths of any complex dynamic system, such as our economy.

Boom and Bust

What have markets and ecosystems got in common? They may seem poles apart, but they are both systems prone to boom and bust. In nature this is most apparent in ecologies with low biodiversity. So the lemmings in the Arctic have population booms that are so huge they are alleged to throw themselves off cliffs. What actually happens is a delayed boom of lemming predators that nearly wipes lemmings out next season. This boom and bust is happening throughout the natural world, but where there is a more diverse ecology the ups and downs are gentle. This is because there are far more interactions between the different species. Organic gardening relies on this to keep the aphids in check with lots of different natural predators. This is also why the Green Party is in favour of an economy of lots of small enterprises rather than large. It was no surprise that our banking system, dominated by a few massive businesses, was so vulnerable. This is why the banks have to be split into smaller units with increased diversity. It's safer that way.

Lorenz attractor diagram

The Problem of Instability

The butterfly effect, part of chaos theory, and famous for how the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one part of the world can set off a hurricane elsewhere, is aptly linked to this Lorenz attractor diagram that looks so like a butterfly. The dangerous thing about this particular butterfly, and the point of the hurricane story, is that chaos theory shows just how vulnerable many of our systems are to seemingly small changes that can push us over various tipping points.

Tipping points are frequently mentioned with climate change, but it is also true for the ecology which supports us. There was another recent story about the dinosaurs being specially vulnerable to the meteor strike that wiped them out. This was because dinosaur ecological diversity was low and they could be more easily be tipped into extinction.

Green Intervention

So the reason for taking up green politics is that we are in danger. Because of human activity we have the dangerous stresses of climate change and world wide pollution at the same time as our decreasing biodiversity makes our whole ecology most vulnerable. As human beings we have intelligence, the ability to predict future problems, and plan how to stop them. I can't just sit back and let the natural boom bust cycle destroy the world I love. I am human. I can choose, and I choose to make a difference.