So, what's your beef with climate change??

Over the years, I have blogged in plenty (like here) about the environmental impacts of the foods that we eat.  I have even made fun of ardent environmentalists who are not vegetarians, because of the huge environmental footprint meat has.  As if I needed more, the Economist provides this:

Overall the livestock sector accounts for between 8% and 18% of global emissions—about as much pollution as comes out the tailpipes of the world’s cars. Ruminant livestock, such as cattle and sheep, have stomachs containing bacteria able to digest tough, cellulose-rich plants. But along the way, huge volumes of gases are farted and belched too. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that the world’s domesticated ruminants annually release 100m tonnes of methane—a greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

So, what can a typical consumer do?  More research findings, please:

 A recent study also published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calculated the benefits of low-meat and no-meat diets using computer models through to 2050. The former daily regime included eating five portions of fruits and vegetables, less than 50g of sugar, up to 43g of red meat and a total energy content of between 2,200-2,300 calories. A vegetarian diet and a vegan diet were also analysed.

 How do you think the vegetarian and vegan diets compared with the "non-veg" habits, with respect to GHG emissions?  You need to think big numbers. I mean, big:

Following a modest meat diet, global greenhouse gas emissions were found only to increase 7% by 2050 (compared with an expected increase of 51% according to projections from the status quo). A widespread switch to vegetarianism could curb emissions by nearly two thirds and veganism by 70%.

Reduce emissions by two-thirds should be a great selling point, right?  Add to the GHG reductions the health benefits from not eating red meat or the "other white meat."  And then overlay the bypassing of the ethical issues about how we kill animals, especially the low-footprint chicken.  Going vegetarian is a win-win-win all the way around, right?

Which is why I, too, am puzzled that "People Still Don't Get the Link between Meat Consumption and Climate Change"

People who already eat less meat may be more open to hear and retain information on the climate impacts of meat, while people who eat lots of meat may be more inclined to deny or downplay it. That is, behaviors may inform knowledge as much as knowledge informs behavior. And as many studies have shown, although knowledge is an important aspect of behavioral change, it alone is rarely enough for people to change their lifestyles. Changing behaviors as intimate and culturally engrained as people’s daily dietary habits therefore demands a careful consideration of the psychological and cultural dynamics at play.

So, what can be done?

the greatest potential for a shift towards sustainable lifestyles is through a change in culture and worldview—a shift in assumptions about human nature, our relationship with the (natural) world around us, and our aspirations for the ‘good life’. Food touches on social habits and norms; plays a role in mediating power and status; is often key to social participation and acceptance; and is expressive of collective values and identity. Consumption and lifestyles therefore tend to be shaped more by people collectively than individually. The most effective strategies thus engage people in groups, and give them opportunities to develop their understanding and narratives about food in dialog together.

Tough luck, given that the youth in even the traditionally vegetarian culture is rapidly taking up serious meat eating!

Source

Climate change is a moral issue. Ergo, it is a bigger problem than it would otherwise be.

There is that wonderful scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, when Paul Newman's character traces with his shoe the symbol π on the dirt.  I am trusting my memory on this and refuse to Google for confirmation ;)

Oddly enough it was that movie scene that I was reminded when I came across the following image in yet another wonderful essay in the New Yorker by the Pulitzer-winning Elizabeth Kolbert:

Unlike Iron Curtain, Kolbert's essay is no spy thriller.  It is a rather depressing thriller in its own way--about the world's failure "to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”"  Kolbert explains in plain English those words in quotes:

In plain English, it means global collapse.

I suspect that Kolbert intentionally used the word collapse--in discussions on climate change, collapse might remind us about Jared Diamond's book that was titled Collapse.  Anyway, Kolbert's essay is about the upcoming global meet in Paris, later in December, to arrive at a path that will be a lot more constructive than the environmental path that we are currently on.  The meeting will determine "the fate of the planet."

The person whose responsibility is to coordinate all these is profiled in Kolbert's essay--"a Costa Rican named Christiana Figueres."

Of all the jobs in the world, Figueres’s may possess the very highest ratio of responsibility (preventing global collapse) to authority (practically none). The role entails convincing a hundred and ninety-five countries—many of which rely on selling fossil fuels for their national income and almost all of which depend on burning them for the bulk of their energy—that giving up such fuels is a good idea.  

We could have been doing something already by now.  But, remember how the politics in DC began after the contested Bush v. Gore?

It was the United States that helped rescue the protocol—Vice-President Al Gore flew to Kyoto when the talks appeared to be foundering—and it was also the U.S. that very nearly killed it. The Senate refused to ratify the treaty, and shortly after George W. Bush entered the White House, in 2001, he announced that his Administration would not abide by its terms.
“Kyoto is dead” is how Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national-security adviser, put it. In fact, the treaty survived, but in a zombielike state. The U.S. ignored it. The Canadians blew past their target and, midway through the period covered by Kyoto, withdrew from the agreement. Only the Europeans really took their goal seriously, not only meeting it but exceeding it.

Since then, the US got itself in quite some mess in Iraq and Afghanistan and seemingly everywhere, while China puffed out quite some smoke as the world's factory.

In the mid-nineties, China was emitting nearly a billion metric tons of carbon a year. By the mid-aughts, its output was twice that amount. In 2005, China surpassed the United States as the world’s largest emitter on an annual basis. (The U.S. still holds first place in terms of cumulative emissions.) Nowadays, China’s per-capita emissions are as high as Western Europe’s (though not nearly as high as those in the U.S.).

The net result?

During the last ice age, when much of North America was covered in glaciers a mile thick, carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere were around a hundred and eighty parts per million. For the ten thousand years leading up to the industrial revolution, they hovered around two hundred and eighty parts per million. By 1992, when the Framework Convention was drafted, they had reached three hundred and fifty parts per million. As MOP followed COP, carbon-dioxide levels kept rising. This spring, they topped four hundred parts per million.

China and India and all the developing countries want economic growth.  The world wants economic growth.  That is the straight line going up in that graphic.  The downward sloping arc?

The straight line was supposed to represent economic growth, past and future, the curved line the rise and fall of greenhouse-gas emissions.
“That’s where we are,” she said, drawing a dot right at the point where the two lines were about to diverge.

If Figueres is correct that we are about to decouple economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions, then our future looks good.  But, I think Figueres is being optimistic.  Overly optimistic.  But, hey, the world needs such optimists.

However, what if the December meeting fails, like how all the previous ones did not bring about real and significant changes?

“Ask all the islands,” she said finally. “Ask Bangladesh. We just can’t let that happen. Do we have the right to deprive people of their homes just because I want to own three S.U.V.s? It just doesn’t make any sense. And it’s not how we think of ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as being egotistical, immoral individuals. And we’re not. Fundamentally, we all have a morality bedrock. Every single human being has that.”

Actions in response to climate change are moral decisions, indeed.  I have been arguing along those lines forever, it seems.  I searched through my emails because I remembered having argued that point with a colleague, well before he launched his divestment campaign on campus.  In that email back in February 2008, I wrote:

 As long as we folks in the rich countries are not willing to change our ways, we have absolutely no moral ground from which we can preach the right thing to the billions who are slowly clawing their way out of dark economic conditions.

Will the seven-billion-plus "egotistical, immoral individuals" work out a way to prevent a collapse?  I suppose I will find out, in the remaining twenty-four years that I have.

King coal's final battle will be in ... India?

First, some good news about coal, before we get into bad news ;)

The biggest surprise is the slowdown in consumption in China, which burns half the world’s coal. Last year’s fall in demand no longer looks like a blip. In the first four months of 2015 it fell 8% year-on-year (and imports dropped by a stonking 38%). Environmental worries are spurring China to increase energy efficiency and boost its use of natural gas and renewables, particularly wind power.

Now, before you run out into the street rejoicing that coal is dead, that same report ends with this:

Coal may be unpopular, but it is not doomed. Its share of world primary-energy use is falling from a peak of 30% in 2010, but only to a likely 25% in 2035, according to BP’s annual energy forecast. For poor countries which prize growth over greenery, coal seems indispensable: cheap, abundant and reliable. India in particular is betting heavily on it.

India is betting on coal. Big time.

Ok, you sat up.  Good.

Think about the complex web of industries whose business is to manufacture equipment to use coal. If China is thinking twice about coal, then what would you do?

Just because momentum is shifting away from coal in China does not mean that the country is no longer part of the global coal boom. A glut in coal power equipment among Chinese manufacturers has led to China becoming a leading exporter — buoyed by state-affiliated banks and export-credits — with important implications for India’s power sector portfolio.

Yes, the coal train gets routed to India.

Over 60 per cent of India’s coal power equipment ordered by private developers in the past decade has come from Chinese vendors, commonly with the financial backing of Chinese state banks, amounting to over 100 GW of coal power installed or in the pipeline involving Chinese firms.

 With the world worried about coal, and with even China deeply concerned about using coal, you might wonder why India is betting so much on coal.  It is simple:

People living without electricity don’t just want to see in the dark, they want to live in light as others do.

And how many such people live in India without electricity?  More than the entire population of the United States!  If you want a taste of such a life, go completely off the grid for an entire day: nothing that involves electricity.  Nah, don't try that--I am worried you will go insane.  Instead, try to understand the coal situation in India before you get all high and mighty about banning coal and about divestment--especially when your money comes from selling fossil fuels!

So, back to India ... 

 If the coal power sector overcomes the current procedural and judicial barriers, growth could proceed quickly, aided by inexpensive imports from China. China and India’s coal power sectors are intertwined. How it plays out will have important climate impactions.

The world will increasingly note India's coal consumption.  In the fall, as scientists, reporters, and activists, gear up for the climate conference in Paris, expect to read and hear quite a bit about India's coal consumption.  

To many western environmentalists, who are determined to see a binding global deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the UN climate change conference in Paris later this year, India’s rising coal use is anathema. However, across a broad range of Delhi politicians and policymakers there is near unanimity. There is, they say, simply no possibility that at this stage in its development India will agree to any form of emissions cap, let alone a cut.

When 400 million-plus people have no electricity, and when environment-friendly alternatives like solar and wind simply cannot be scaled up to meet that kind of a demand with the current technological capabilities, India will turn to coal a lot more.  Especially when coal prices start plunging, thanks to countries like Australia having placed their bets on China buying coal.   

[Navroz] Dubash, a lead author of the IPCC’s reports, is personally in no doubt as to the need to reduce global emissions. ... In India, he added, the number of people who consume as much energy as anyone deemed to be above the official poverty line in the developed world is, at most, a few tens of millions. Everyone else consumes less. “From a global perspective, you have to give India carbon headroom.”

Which means:

“By 2030, coal use is projected … to be 2.5-three times current levels,” the report says. Even with stringent policy action to increase the deployment of renewables and increase energy efficiency, “coal use is projected by all but one study to be more than two times current levels”.

With the result:

The consequence is that if, as the projections suggest, India’s emissions grow between two and three times by 2030, “India could be the second largest global emitter within the next decade.” Its projected output – between 4bn and 5.7bn tonnes of carbon dioxide each year – will surpass that of the US, which in 2011 was 5.3bn tonnes and falling, and be smaller only than China’s.

This projected emissions from India will be a big reason why there will be a lot of emphasis on the country that by 2028 will have a population that will exceed China's.  India's politicians and analysts are gearing up for the conference:

Nitin Desai is a retired UN diplomat, who organised the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and later represented the UN secretary-general at international climate conferences. He is now a member of a small expert panel advising Modi in the lead-up to Paris. “In a country with blackouts and so many people without access to electricity, can I really manage without developing more coal?” he asked. “Why should we be accountable? The pressure should be on the countries whose per capita emissions are much higher. If you try to force India to adopt emissions targets, you will fail.”

Let's face it--the only way we can avoid the coal train wreck is if the developed, richer, countries--beginning with the US--make developing cheaper and scalable alternatives as important as, if not more important than, the mission to send humans to the moon and bring them back.  If we don't--and it looks like we don't care a shit about the urgency of developing alternatives--then we have to accept dramatic increases in coal consumption, and in GHG emissions, in India--even if it chokes the life out of people there :(

Caption at the source:
Mining overburden in the Singrauli coalfield. Photograph: Greenpeace/Sudhanshu Malhotra 

So, humans are the main agents of climate change. Now what?

The Economist explains:

ON NOVEMBER 2ND the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which represents mainstream scientific opinion, said that it was extremely likely that climate change is the product of human activity. Extremely likely in IPCC speak means having a probability of over 95%.

In the probabilistic world that we live, that 95 percent confidence or more is pretty darn good.  All the more reason to ignore that shrill minority in the Geriatrics Only Party who continue to deny climate change and the human causation.

The Scientific American chips in with this briefing:

What has changed is the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have now touched 400 parts-per-million. Pollution in the first decade of the 21st century grew twice as fast as it did in the last few decades of the 20th century. The resulting global warming poses risks ranging from rising sea levels that drown inhabited coasts to crop failures from stronger heat waves and drought.

The IPCC has now offered a budget for how much pollution people can add to the atmosphere without too much climate change. Unfortunately, humanity has already used more than half of that budget.

So, what might be the effects if we continue along the same path?

In terms of impacts, such as heatwaves and extreme rain storms causing floods, the report concludes that the effects are already being felt: “In recent decades, changes in climate have caused impacts on natural and human systems on all continents and across the oceans.”
Droughts, coastal storm surges from the rising oceans and wildlife extinctions on land and in the seas will all worsen unless emissions are cut, the report states. This will have knock-on effects, according to the IPCC: “Climate change is projected to undermine food security.” The report also found the risk of wars could increase: “Climate change can indirectly increase risks of violent conflicts by amplifying well-documented drivers of these conflicts such as poverty and economic shocks.”

Emissions are a big problem, which is why:

The report also states that behavioural changes, such as dietary changes that could involve eating less meat, can have a role in cutting emissions.

A whole lot of behavioral changes will be needed.  Not easy to get that across.  For instance, imagine telling people that eating beef is way more harmful to the environment than it is to drive around in cars:

Beef’s environmental impact dwarfs that of other meat including chicken and pork, new research reveals, with one expert saying that eating less red meat would be a better way for people to cut carbon emissions than giving up their cars. ...
the message for the consumer is even stronger. Avoiding excessive meat consumption, especially beef, is good for the environment.

Think about what is coming up here in the US of A, which emits a seventh of the greenhouse gases.  This month end is the granddaddy of all eating occasions: Thanksgiving.  And, we would barely have time to loosen our belts before we dash out to buy a whole lot of stuff that we don't really need.  Almost four weeks of a buying binge.

You think such behavior, and more, will change?  And change soon?  Dream on!

On the other hand, one could use the season of Christmas to adopt behavioral changes of a less-is-better life, which will be consistent with that radical thinker from the Levant, right?

Ok, got to go--cheeseburger is ready!