Y’all gave me quite an earful on global warming issues. In this post, I’m collecting them into larger categories. I won’t try to identify every contributor, and some suggestions came from more than one. If I missed your suggestion, let me know in the comments.
I am not an expert on all these topics, although I can put together creditably surveys of many of them. I am more than happy to hear from anyone who has expertise in an area and is willing to write a guest post. So far, Martin has volunteered on actions in California, Dan B on communication, and Boussinesque on ocean-related issues.
And yes, I know that the classification can be cut in different ways. I’m just trying to put things together in a way to provoke discussion and eventually start to choose topics for posts.
Climate Models
- Where is the tipping point?
- We have enough data now that we can move past the models into doing time series analysis and estimation. The economist time series guy who helped the climate scientists on that is Peter Phillips of Yale. (Disentangling greenhouse warming and aerosol cooling to reveal Earth’s climate sensitivity)
Electrical Generation
- Modernization of the grid – Smart grid
- Solar
- Wind
- Nuclear
- Regulation
Transportation
- Air travel
- Mass transit
- Eliminate the internal combustion engine
- Shipping
Agriculture
- High metabolism plants to soak up all the CO2?
- BBC – Would you give up beef to save the planet?
- Forestry for carbon sequestration
- Ocean fertilization
- Soil for carbon sequestration
- Indoor farming
- Livestock production
Mining
- Fracking
- Cement manufacture, substitution
Economy
- Jobs created and saved
- Economic opportunity for women
- Fossil fuel divestment
- Balancing economic development for poor countries against energy usage
- Transition – natural gas as a transitional fuel
- Occupational transitions
Governmental Actions
- VOTE DEMOCRATIC
- Carbon tax
- Carbon trading
- Importance of collective action rather than consumer choices
- Funding for research
- California as model (links here and here and here)
- Establishing virtuous outcomes through regulation, positive feedback loops
- Updates on currently proposed legislation, at the federal or state level, and why it’s important for the climate. Push to call congresspeople.
- What we can call on our individual cities to do. What policies should we be talking to our city councilors about? What has worked well in other places? How do we help people realize that these changes can be cost effective?
- Changing code requirements for more efficient buildings
- Could there be an environmental equivalent of ActBlue?
Mitigation
- Coastal infrastructure
- Displaced persons
- Population growth
- Denser cities
- Wood as construction material
- Have one less child if you’re planning to have more.
- Switch to a plant based diet (or mostly plant based)
- Banning all 2-stroke engines
- Suggestions for good climate change fighting organizations to donate to or volunteer for.
- How to make individual changes easier, or how to get more people involved in doing them.
Communicating the Issues
- Effective viral methods like the Parkland students, the Beto campaign, and how the annoying Avenatti gets headlines.
- Effective storytelling
- Fox News as a problem
- Coastline maps projecting sea-level rise
- Some sort of recognition and memorialization of each island as it disappears. They should not be consigned to the dustbin of history.
- A graphic that breaks down how Americans consume energy
- Downsides of global warming – local and regional impacts, crop yields and food, ocean acidification
Resources
- William Nordhaus, who just won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics
- Weitzman and Stern
- “Chasing Ice”
- Reddit has a subsection titled “ELI5”. Explain Like I’m 5. (Example and example)
- Marvel Avengers
- Drawdown
- Michael Coney’s novel “Rax”
RSA
I didn’t follow the last discussion, but I think the most important point here (and the most difficult) is changing people’s beliefs and priorities. Getting thought leaders on board will be critical: political leaders, religious leaders, media people, and so forth.
oatler.
Just to lighten things up, we now have the UK equivalent of Patton Oswalt’s “failure pile in a sadness bowl”.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/oct/10/chicken-filled-yorkshire-pudding-the-culinary-equivalent-of-a-mike-leigh-film
Major Major Major Major
I would enjoy reading something level-headed about nuclear energy (for which you are obviously highly qualified!).
GregMulka
I missed yesterday’s post also. I was dragging a client back from CryptoLocker hell. I’ve found Rocky Mountain Institute, rmi.org, and their book, Reinventing Fire to be excellent resources.
cthulhu
This is a good resource of courses one can take online to educate themselves on some areas in the above list.
https://www.edx.org/course/subject/environmental-studies
I took this course a couple of years ago. It specifically goes point by point through various climate change denial claims if you feel to need to bring the science into an argument that you might be having with someone:
https://www.edx.org/course/making-sense-of-climate-science-denial-1
jl
If it hasn’t been mentioned before:
Skeptical Science (being skeptical about global warming skepticism) blog has excellent resources on the history, basic physics, mass and energy balance equations, math and statistics, measurement methods, and particularly good at debunking bogus claims of climate science skeptics.
I wonder if the odd name is click bait to get laypeople who are climate science skeptics to look at it.
Everything is presented at, I think, a high school graduate or first year undergrad level.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/
One of the national physics associations also has a great website, but I’ll have to go look for it.
Ken Pedersen
i’m working on a landmark climate change proposition in WA. yeson1631.org. it will slap the big oil dicks with a giant fee, supported by 400 coalition partners, the other side is funded by the Kochs. We’re doing remote phone banking from all over the country, could use all hands on deck. If it passes, it’s a template for the rest of the states.
grubert
Allan Savory’s research on reversing desertification would be worth adding ( IMO )
It’s pretty amazing that we can help CO2 levels and get the cows out of the barns at the same time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI
Why is Avenatti so disliked here? Sure, he’s egotistical and self-promoting, but you need to be to some extent in this media environment to get noticed, and he is attacking the right people and hasn’t done anything awful as far as I know.
mad citizen
My game is the electric industry, what do we need to know? Market forces are driving the industry to wind, solar, and now storage. Duke Energy announced today a $500 million investment in storage over the next decade or so. A utility in my state did an all-source RFP and things like solar-storage came in way below the cost new combined cycle gas plants. The future is coming very soon. But it’s not done overnight either. Clear-headed policies could speed it up, but the D’s would have to be in control of everything in this country.
Nuclear is simply too expensive by an order of magnitude. Georgia Power is building two nuclear units–just checked–they announced the cost was $1.1 Billion more than expected, now up to $8.4 Billion. This won’t cut it. Plus, the waste issue has never been solved.
Companies are still working on nuclear fusion, however.
mad citizen
U.S. Energy Flow, 2017: https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/flow/total_energy.pdf
This EIA page has many exhibits showing how energy is produced and consumed:
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=us_energy_home
Bill Arnold
[iPhone so short]
Many of the hard problems arw in a category that could be called “disrupting carbon lock-in”
And lock-in is actively defended and heavily funded – the fights will be political, regulatory, messaging/narratives, etc. And they will be hard.
Cheryl Rofer
jl
Nicholas Stern has a good non-technical survey article (just a little math and people can skip it and get the gist) on economic policy and global warming.
Public economics as if time matters: Climate change and the dynamics of policy
N Stern – Journal of Public Economics 162, 2018 – Elsevier
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727271830046X
I can only find the journal version, so might be behind a paywall, so may need to get to a college campus to download it.
And, I am looking for the other really good climate change blog that explains the math and science behind it. I think a lot of places emphasize the mere statistics way to much, and I am a statistical kind of person, so I would normally be prejudiced in the opposite direction. For questions like climate science, statistics only take you so far, and are in the big picture, relatively ‘mere’, or at least very far from sufficient for a good understanding.
Anyway, I thought it was the American Physical Society, but they just have a good page on it, So it is somebody else I am thinking of.
jl
@Bill Arnold: Thanks. That is an important part of Stern’s survey article. Stern says wrong type of economic policy modelling will produce bias towards way too much carbon lock-in infrastructure over next few decades.
dm
Vox has an interview with Paul Hawken about his new book on approaches to the climate problem.
Mr. Kite
Thank you for this. I recommend joining a group who are already working on this.
I just signed up with 350.org myself. They have local chapters and they have a toolkit for creating your own local group if there isn’t one already. See https://350.org/get-involved/
catclub
There was a paper by GMO (Graham Mayer Otterlink) which suggests that while carbon may be nearly solvable, other things (ocean loss of productivity, land loss of agricultural productivity)will still do massive harm to human prosperity and the environment. An interesting read. GMO is an investment company.
catclub
@jl:
is that a discussion of the fact that using almost any non-zero discount rate devalues the future to practically zero?
catclub
@Bill Arnold:
Much of the value of Exxon and Shell ( and Aramco) is based on oil reserves still in the ground, and the expectation that it is coming out at a profit.
If that assumption goes away,and that oil is NEVER coming out, then much of the value of their stock also goes away.
jl
@catclub: The use of variable discount rates that are very low and can go to zero is part of what Stern is talking about, but he covers a lot more ground than that.
A lot of CW that is taken for granted now doesn’t have much solid theoretical justification in economics. Forcing the use of discount rates suggested by observed market interest rates, and that are biased against long term projects is just one of them. You look at early literature, economists were much more open minded and even, like, inquiring, about whether, for some purposes, discount rates used for long term projects should be anything but zero. Nowadays you have pooh-bahs saying that a zero discount rate can’t ever be rational, and leads to intractable problems. I don’t think that is true. The math and rationality do not demand non-zero discount rates. And I think if you read back to beginnings of all of the economic policy planning hoo-haw, back to the 1930s through early 1960s, you get a different picture.
Bill Arnold
@catclub:
Trillions of dollars. That’s a lot of power.
The wikipedia article looks not-bad (hadn’t looked previously):
Carbon lock-in
Wikipedia references this, which has a lot of citations. (I need to study it.)
Understanding carbon lock-in (2000)
https://scholar.google.ch/citations?user=s3pViocAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra for more by the author
Ken Shabby
@Cheryl Rofer:
This is an excellent breakdown.
Thank you, Cheryl.
I remain optimistic –
(I think this issue (trumps? No) overrides almost else. Bigotry? Yes. Getting rid of GOP until they’re forced to change their marketing? Yes. But. This. This first.)
There’s a difference between the almost absolute need for Energy and, the elective need for Stupid Energy. Couldn’t be further apart.
The Pale Scot
@mad citizen:
Weren’t those canceled/abandoned recently to the tune of a couple of billion?
chris
Obligatory xkcd just for fun.
beef
Why is nuclear power so expensive? It’s fairly mature technology at this point. Seems like it ought to be far cheaper.
Mike E
Destroy Fox News!
…in a carbon neutral way, of course
Aziz, light!
It’s too late to prevent further warming, although there is time (we hope) to mitigate its extent. The big expense and headache will be dealing with all the outcomes, that is, how we adapt to the many problems warming brings.
There are some scary thresholds we don’t want to cross, and it may be too late. One, melt the permafrost, releasing all the methane locked within, a greenhouse gas much more potent than carbon dioxide. This is already underway. Two, let the ocean keep absorbing atmospheric CO2 until it becomes too acidic (from the formation of carbonic acid) to support the critters at the bottom of the food chain. Result is the collapse of ocean food webs. Three, make winters warm enough to turn mountain snowpack to rain, then your water supply will run off and not be there when you need it. Four, a lot of ecosystems will be royally screwed up.
Larry B
Hi,
Just found this.
Very interesting analysis of what policies can make a difference. Very much worth exploring.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/5/10/15589038/top-100-solutions-climate-change-ranked
imonlylurking
I’m really looking forward to this series.
BC in Illinois
At the same time that we need to take unified, world-wide actions to reduce greenhouse gasses, we also need to take unified, world-wide actions to combat the white supremacy / Trump / Putin / Bannon / Miller / “us first” mentality.
To deal with Global warming, we need to act together, for the good of everyone. All of us, together. And our nation has placed in power a group of people who don’t give a rat’s ass about the “good of everyone.”
If one part of the world is trying to stave off a threat to us all, and another — fairly powerful, but not all-powerful — part of the world wants to build walls because they don’t care about the “threat to us all,” they only see the threat of some other people trying to get into their space, then there is no hope for unified action.
All we can do is try to make people as safe as we can.
BruceFromOhio
This is The One Topic To Rule Them All.
Nail this one, and many others fall as well. (Fracking, CO2 emissions, sequestration, land use, et al).
Sorry not helpful, in your excellent lists this one stands out, and is eminently do-able.
BruceFromOhio
@chris: holy smokes that’s good. and terrifying.
Bill Arnold
@jl:
Thanks. I acquired a copy, and it looks interesting, with some recent references since it is a 2018 paper.
It has a much broader focus (macro) than the line of scholarship exemplified by Gregory C. Unruh linked above that focuses on path dependencies and lock-in and breaking/bypassing them.
I’m struggling for an analogy here; perhaps something like this, but rendered by a talented storyteller:
We’re on a road to hell. The maintainers of that road (who, or their children, will burn/starve/[choose their fate] along with the rest of us) have dug deep deep moats on both sides of the road, filled with piranhas and candiru, crocodiles, ebola, flesh-eating bacteria, brain-eating amoebas, etc, to discourage us from forging new paths that lead somewhere other than hell, or even to purgatory. Our job as sappers build bridges over those moats, which are also defended by active evil sappers tasked with blowing up such bridges.
Most of these enemies think that they are Good People.
Balconesfault
To me, one of the bigger issues that often gets overlooked,is how large a percentage of the world’s population lives along estuaries for major rivers. Because as sea levels rise,the gradient for rivers flowing to the ocean grows less, forcing wider and wider flood patterns. Simple evaluations of sea levels and coastal elevations sometimes ignore how the impacts will reach far upstream.
Jay
@beef:
Nothing in a Nuclear reactor is “off the shelf”, it’s all custom made to mil-cert standards with extreme redundancies and safety standards.
A radiation spill or nuclear melt down is a much bigger “deal”, with the consequences lasting for hundreds of thousands of years, than say a natural gas pipeline explosion.
Real estate near Chernoble’s really cheap. So’s land near Fukashima.
Bill Arnold
@Aziz, light!:
This is unclear, because the modeling is not adequate. Perhaps I’m wrong; take a look:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2018&q=phytoplankton+ocean+acidification&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1
However, warming of surface waters in equatorial ocean regions will severely hit productivity in those regions. Big hit to global protein production.
Found an interesting looking recent paper (PDF)- Declining oxygen in the global ocean and coastal waters
Coastal artisinal fishing is an important source of food in many parts of the world.
Bill Arnold
From OP
Or more generally, destroy the Republican Party. Max Boot[0] says it must be destroyed (and so have you:-), and he says that the pieces should be rebuilt into a proper center-right party. I can’t say I disagree. (Center needs to be shifted left significantly more than this though.)
[0] Conservative commentator Max Boot: “The Republican Party needs to be razed to the ground”
Interstadial
Two-stroke engines are remarkably polluting in terms of hydrocarbons and other pollutants, but that doesn’t mean they put out more carbon dioxide per unit of work performed. They actually put out more power per unit of displacement than four-stroke engines. Phasing them out is an environmental issue but not particularly a global warming issue. That will change when we have enough +/- carbon-neutral power that doing work with electricity more than offsets things like transmission and charging inefficiencies.
jl
@Bill Arnold: I normally refuse to respond to comments with references to candiru, but will make an exception in this case due to the importance of the topic. Yes, I think Stern is talking about the same problem, as you describe, just in more neutral language, and from a more macroeconoomic perspective.
Bill Arnold
@jl:
Sorry about that.
I’m looking through both papers tonight; both are interesting (and spawned plenty of descendant papers). I need to understand this material better to be able to properly mentally model it. Technical advances will happen in the necessary technologies, e.g. bulk electrical storage, higher density batteries for transportation, transmission, etc. Commercialization and large scale deployment of them will be fought by entrenched interests, passively (through existing lock-in) and actively (including in the political realm).
Tim in SF
That’s true of Gen1/Gen2 light-water reactors. They are expensive, unsafe, dirty, and a proliferation risk. Molten salt reactors like the LiFTR have none of these problems.
Cost: Light-water reactors have to be custom built for each location. They are huge. They cost billions of dollars. LiFTRs are small – the whole reactor portion could fit into a shipping container. They could be built on an assembly line using *one* approved design that could be used in any location. There is no need for cooling towers. They do not need to be built near a source of water.
Safety: The design of light water reactors makes them inherently dangerous. If anything gets too out of whack, you have an unavoidable meltdown. With thorium liquid-salt reactors like the LiFTR, if anything gets too out of whack, the reaction stops and everything shuts down on its own. There is zero meltdown possibility. They are walk-away safe.
Dirty: As we all know, the waste from light-water nuclear reactors is something we have to store for tens of thousands of years. Since transporting the stuff is problematic and storage facilities are scarce, we often end up storing waste on the same site as the plant. This is a terrible idea, in that it makes accidents so much worse, and yet it is a common practice. LiFTR waste is hot for just 300 years – and some of the waste (“fission products”) have medical, commercial, and military application.
Proliferation: The plutonium coming out of light water reactors is perfect for making bombs. The waste coming out of LiFTRs is much harder to weaponize and there’s a lot less of it.
There was a LiFTR in operation at Los Alamos for about a decade, but it was mothballed. Molten salt reactor technology was abandoned in the sixties in order to focus on light-water reactors, the latter of which would give us fuel for bombs. Thanks, Nixon! LiFTR research is now happening in China and India.
If you’re interested in this topic, google Kirk F. Sorensen’s TED talk. Or watch LiFTR in Five Minutes on Youtube. Or
catclub
@Tim in SF: all that sounds too good. So why is no nation or large multinational company deploying them?
chopper
@beef:
the plants are expensive to build, expensive to insure, and expensive to decommission. that’s a lot of it. also, they have to be built along ocean, lakes or major rivers and that land is expensive.
Tim in SF
There’s about a billion dollar regulatory hurdle to development and deployment in the US. Some US companies are working on it, like Flibe Energy. China and India are way out ahead of us.
chopper
@Interstadial:
today’s two strokes can be phased out not by outright banning an entire cycle of engine, but by modifying regulations in order to eliminate the under-50cc exception. that’s a hell of a lot simpler, and it allows future engines to come to market if in fact companies figure out a way to make them compliant with current standards.
likewise, if we’re going to make them full-on illegal because they don’t meet emission standards, we should also make four-stroke engines that don’t come close to meeting today’s emissions standards illegal.
chopper
@Tim in SF:
people have been saying that about every new idea in nuclear power for the last 50 years. “oh yeah, well this new type of reactor is cheap and foolproof!”
chopper
@catclub:
india is cutting back on reactor building, including their experimental thorium program.
as to proliferation, thorium reactors produce a reasonable amount of protactinium which readily decays into uranium 233, which is usable in weapons.
i guess thorium is definitely better than what we have now (especially in places like india that have lots of thorium and not a lot of uranium), but it’s not the panacea many people promise.
Tim in SF
@chopper: I don’t know what people have been saying about every idea in nuclear power for the past fifty years. I only know what I’ve researched myself for the past twelve years.
We are using Gen-1 solid-fuel, light-water reactors in this country. What I’m talking about is entirely different kind of reactor – a Gen-4 molten-salt reactor. They are so different I can’t even come up with an analogy. A lawn-mower and a Prius are closer together than a Gen1 and a Gen4 reactor.
Bess
Wind and solar have become the lowest cost ways to produce electricity. The unsubsidized global average for wind is $45/MWh and for solar it’s $40/MWh. The cost of wind and solar will continue to fall rapidly over the coming years.
New nuclear is currently $130/MWh. Bringing the cost of nuclear down to that of wind and solar is highly unlikely. The world has been working to reduce the cost of nuclear for over a half century but the cost has only risen.
Over the last five years global electricity generation has moved from fossil fuel to renewable energy by 0.8% a year. The planet now gets 65% of its electricity from fossil fuels.
In order to reach 0% fossil fuels by 2050 we would need to average an annual transition from FF to RE of 2% per year. That’s about 2.5x the rate we are now moving and should not be a difficult thing to do. To reach 0% by 2040 would mean moving a bit less than 4x as fast, not at all impossible. Especially when one considers that many countries (and US states) have barely started to install wind and solar generation.
Between now and 2050 we will have to replace almost all existing coal and gas plants. Things get old and wear out. We’re going to have to replace those plants with something. New coal would be very expensive as well as not acceptable. Wind and solar are the obvious choices. The installed cost of wind and solar are a small fraction of the cost of new coal and they have no fuel costs.
We have the technology we need. We really do not need to invent anything new. Wind and solar are our cheapest sources of electricity. If the changeover time was not critical we could sit back and let market forces clean our grids. Over time the less expensive would push out the more expensive. But we need to find a way to accelerate the transition.
One way it, obviously, to vote in office holders who will move things along. A revenue neutral carbon price would probably be the most effective thing a government could do. Tax the burning of carbon fuels, driving their cost higher. Utilities will move faster to less expensive renewables. Use the tax money collected to subsidize utility bills so that the cost of electricity will not be changed and the economy impacted.
On an individual level the most important thing to do is to conserve. Install LEDs. They’ll pay for themselves very quickly. Get rid of the old beer fridge in the garage that hardly gets used. Shop for appliances that get high marks on the Energy Star ratings. Turn off stuff when you aren’t using it.
Buy your electricity from a provider that sells only green electricity if you have the option. Even if it costs a few more bucks a month. As non-green providers lose customers to green providers they’ll clean up their acts.
If the math works for you, install solar. Don’t assume that it’s too expensive based on some numbers from a couple years back. The cost has really dropped in many places.
Arclite
Nice list.
Tim in SF
The Indian thorium program that was cut was a solid fuel breeder reactor program. They developed their own THOREX reprocessing. That was cut.
There is still Indian research on thorium molten salt reactors.
km
I don’t see this topic there, and perhaps it isn’t the type that you are tracking, but there is some concern that the nutritional value of some crops may decrease with increasing CO2:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/climate/rice-global-warming.html
reports on http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/5/eaaq1012