George Monbiot - What is Progress ?

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To know what information means, read the article below, it is
dynamite !

Yours,

Reginald de Potesta


What Is Progress? The numbers show that this should be the real
question at the Bali talks.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 4th December 2007

When you warn people about the dangers of climate change, they call
you a saint. When you explain what needs to be done to stop it, they
call you a communist. Let me show you why.

There is now a broad scientific consensus that we need to prevent
temperatures from rising by more than 2°C above their pre-industrial
level. Beyond that point, the Greenland ice sheet could go into
irreversible meltdown, some ecosystems collapse, billions suffer from
water stress, droughts could start to threaten global food
supplies(1,2).

The government proposes to cut the UK's carbon emissions by 60% by
2050. This target is based on a report published in 2000(3). That
report was based on an assessment published in 1995, which drew on
scientific papers published a few years earlier. The UK's policy, in
other words, is based on papers some 15 years old. Our target, which
is one of the toughest on earth, bears no relation to current
science.

Over the past fortnight, both Gordon Brown and his adviser Sir
Nicholas Stern have proposed raising the cut to 80%(4,5). Where did
this figure come from? The last G8 summit adopted the aim of a global
cut of 50% by 2050, which means that 80% would be roughly the UK's
fair share. But the G8's target isn't based on current science
either.

In the new summary published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC), you will find a table which links different cuts to
likely temperatures(6). To prevent global warming from eventually
exceeding 2°, it suggests, by 2050 the world needs to cut its
emissions to roughly 15% of the volume in 2000.

I looked up the global figures for carbon dioxide production in
2000(7) and divided it by the current population(8). This gives a
baseline figure of 3.58 tonnes of CO2 per person. An 85% cut means
that (if the population remains constant) the global output per head
should be reduced to 0.537t by 2050. The UK currently produces 9.6
tonnes per head and the US 23.6t(9,10). Reducing these figures to
0.537t means a 94.4% cut in the UK and a 97.7% cut in the US. But the
world population will rise in the same period. If we assume a
population of 9bn in 2050(11), the cuts rise to 95.9% in the UK and
98.3% in the US.

The IPCC figures might also be out of date. In a footnote beneath the
table, the panel admits that "emission reductions ... might be
underestimated due to missing carbon cycle feedbacks". What this means
is that the impact of the biosphere's response to global warming has
not been fully considered. As seawater warms, for example, it releases
carbon dioxide. As soil bacteria heat up, they respire more,
generating more CO2. As temperatures rise, tropical forests die back,
releasing the carbon they contain. These are examples of positive
feedbacks. A recent paper (all the references are on my website)
estimates that feedbacks account for about 18% of global warming(12).
They are likely to intensify.

A paper in Geophysical Research Letters finds that even with a 90%
global cut by 2050, the 2° threshold "is eventually broken"(13). To
stabilise temperatures at 1.5° above the pre-industrial level requires
a global cut of 100%. The diplomats who started talks in Bali
yesterday should be discussing the complete decarbonisation of the
global economy.

It is not impossible. In a previous article I showed how by switching
the whole economy over to the use of electricity and by deploying the
latest thinking on regional supergrids, grid balancing and energy
storage, you could run almost the entire energy system on renewable
power(14). The major exception is flying (don't expect to see battery-
powered jetliners) which suggests that we should be closing rather
than opening runways.

This could account for around 90% of the necessary cut. Total
decarbonisation demands that we go further.
Preventing 2° of warming means stripping carbon dioxide from the air.
The necessary technology already exists(15): the challenge is making
it efficient and cheap. Last year Joshuah Stolaroff, who has written a
PhD on the subject, sent me some provisional costings, of £256-458 per
tonne of carbon(16,17). This makes the capture of CO2 from the air
roughly three times as expensive as the British government's costings
for building wind turbines, twice as expensive as nuclear power,
slightly cheaper than tidal power and 8 times cheaper than rooftop
solar panels in the UK(18). But I suspect his figures are too low, as
they suggest this method is cheaper than catching CO2 from purpose-
built power stations(19), which cannot be true(20).

The Kyoto Protocol, whose replacement the Bali meeting will discuss,
has failed. Since it was signed, there has been an acceleration in
global emissions: the rate of CO2 production exceeds the IPCC's worst
case and is now growing faster than at any time since the beginning of
the industrial revolution(21). It's not just the Chinese. A paper in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that "no
region is decarbonizing its energy supply"(22). Even the age-old trend
of declining energy intensity as economies mature has gone into
reverse(23). In the UK there is a stupefying gulf between the
government's climate policy and the facts it is creating on the
ground. How will we achieve even a 60% cut if we build new coal
plants, new roads and a third runway at Heathrow?

Underlying the immediate problem is a much greater one. In a lecture
to the Royal Academy of Engineering in May, Professor Rod Smith of
Imperial College explained that a growth rate of 3% means economic
activity doubles in 23 years(24). At 10% it takes just 7 years. This
we knew. But Smith takes it further. With a series of equations he
shows that "each successive doubling period consumes as much resource
as all the previous doubling periods combined." In other words, if our
economy grows at 3% between now and 2030, we will consume in that
period economic resources equivalent to all those we have consumed
since humans first stood on two legs. Then, between 2030 and 2053, we
must double our total consumption again. Reading that paper I realised
for the first time what we are up against.

But I am not advocating despair. We must confront a challenge which is
as great and as pressing as the rise of the Axis powers. Had we thrown
up our hands then, as many people are tempted to do today, you would
be reading this paper in German. Though the war often seemed
impossible to win, when the political will was mobilised strange and
implausible things began to happen. The US economy was spun round on a
dime in 1942 as civilian manufacturing was switched to military
production(25). The state took on greater powers than it had exercised
before. Impossible policies suddenly became achievable.

The real issues in Bali are not technical or economic. The crisis we
face demands a profound philosophical discussion, a reappraisal of who
we are and what progress means. Debating these matters makes us
neither saints nor communists; it shows only that we have understood
the science.

References:
1. See, for example, IPCC, 2007. Climate change and its impacts in the
near and long term under different scenarios.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_topic3.pdf
and:
2. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber (Editor in chief), 2006. Avoiding
Dangerous Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.
http://www.defra.gov.uk/ENVIRONMENT/climatechange/research/dangerous-cc/pdf/avoid-dangercc.pdf
3. Royal Commission On Environmental Pollution, June 2000. Energy -
the Changing Climate. http://www.rcep.org.uk/newenergy.htm
4. Gordon Brown, 19th November 2007. Speech on Climate Change.
http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page13791.asp
5. Sir Nicholas Stern, 30th November 2007. Bali: now the rich must
pay. The Guardian.
6. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007. Fourth Assessment
Report. Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report. Summary for
Policymakers, Table SPM.6. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf
7. All the following figures are for CO2 from the burning and flaring
of fossil fuel. http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1co2.xls
8. Currently 6,635m. http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
9. The latest figures are for 2005. http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/tableh1co2.xls
10. Population figures for 2005 came from http://www.prb.org/pdf05/05WorldDataSheet_Eng.pdf
11. This is a conservative assumption.
12. Josep G. Canadell et al. 25th October 2007. Contributions to
accelerating atmospheric CO2 growth from economic activity, carbon
intensity, and efficiency of natural sinks. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences. www.pnas.org_cgi_doi_10.1073_pnas.0702737104
13. Andrew J. Weaver et al, 6th October 2007. Long term climate
implications of 2050 emission reduction targets. Geophysical Research
Letters, Vol. 34, L19703. doi:10.1029/2007GL031018, 2007
14. George Monbiot, 3rd July 2007. A Sudden Change of State. The
Guardian.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/07/03/a-sudden-change-of-state
15. Frank Zeman, 26th September 2007. Energy and Material Balance of
CO2 Capture from Ambient Air. Environmental Science & Technology, Vol.
41, No. 21, pp7558-7563. 10.1021/es070874m
16. Stolaroff's figures are $140-250/US ton-CO2. I have converted them
into £/metric tonne-C. The weight of CO2 is 3.667x that of C.
17. You can read his PhD here: http://wpweb2.tepper.cmu.edu/ceic/theses/Joshuah_Stolaroff_PhD_Thesis_2006.pdf
18. Department of Trade and Industry (now the DBERR), 2003. Energy
White Paper - Supplementary Annexes, p7. www.dti.gov.uk/energy/whitepaper/annexes.pdf
19. The DBERR gives figures for C savings through capture-ready power
stations of £460-560/tC.
20. It cannot be true because the concentration of CO2 in thermal
power station effluent is many times higher than that in ambient air.
21. Josep G. Canadell et al, ibid.
22. Michael R. Raupach et al, 12th June 2007. Global and regional
drivers of accelerating CO2 emissions. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, Vol.104, no. 24. Pp 10288-10293.
www.pnas.org_cgi_doi_10.1073_pnas.0700609104
23. ibid.
24. Roderick A Smith, 29th May 2007. Lecture to the Royal Academy of
Engineering.
Carpe Diem: The dangers of risk aversion. Reprinted in Civil
Engineering Surveyor, October 2007.
25. Jack Doyle, 2000. Taken for a Ride: Detroit's big three and the
politics of pollution, pp1-2. Four Walls, Eight Windows, New York.