What can be done (climate change debate)?

Great Debates
1

We have a lot of debates about climate change on the board. To be honest, I’m not interested in another one debating whether or not it’s happening or whether or not humans are the cause. Let’s take it as a given that climate change is happening, and that a large or at least non-zero part of it is caused by human actions. Let’s take it as a given that at a minimum the IPCC projections for the 50-100 years (i.e. 1.5-2 degrees C increase likely) are going to happen. If you disagree with the fact that global climate change is happening and that it’s got a human component then feel free to go debate in another thread…this isn’t the thread for you.

What I’m looking for is…what can we reasonably and realistically do about it? I’m looking at this from a global perspective. Given the attitude of both the public in the various countries and the various governments around the world (especially the large, powerful countries such as China, India, the US, the powerful European and other Asian nations, etc), what can actually and realistically be done to change the outcome? And this runs the spectrum from mitigation strategies to pro-active measures designed to, in theory, shift the final outcome…to anything in-between. Whatever you, the poster, thinks we both should do and actually CAN do from a real world perspective…and what you think the realistic proposals you offer will actually change, i.e. what will the realistic outcome of your proposal be wrt the final outcome of the changing climate.

2

There have been large number of international conferences over the past few decades intended to hammer out international agreements for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. None have resulted in anything meaningful. Carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise.

Hence I propose canceling all further such conferences. If world leaders don’t all fly to a single location in their personal jets and ride to the conference center in their personal limos, that will reduce emissions. Not much, but every little bit helps.

3

Well, the place where one of the last conference took place (Copenhagen) is becoming carbon neutral. And the country has a plan to become energy independent with mostly renewable energy by 2050.

http://denmark.dk/en/green-living/

4

I think most of us can agree that no single country, not even a country like the US or China which are the largest single emitters, can be effective unilaterally at reducing global emissions to the necessary stabilization levels. Not just from the standpoint of the arithmetic of mounting carbon emissions, but also because strong regulations in the US would just shift more manufacturing offshore, basically moving a good chunk of the emissions instead of reducing them.

So no matter how you slice it, and no matter what technologies and domestic policies are brought to bear, binding international agreements are absolutely key to making anything happen, and this is going to involve the more advanced and enlightened countries taking a leadership role in forging international cooperation.

So your proposal to cancel all international talks strikes me as a curious approach to a problem in which international agreements are crucial to the solution.

5

My thoughts for the US:

  1. Make nuclear power a national focus.
  2. Begin phasing in higher (ultimately much higher) Federal gasoline prices. Potentially balance those with lower income taxes.
  3. Seriously consider carbon taxing.
  4. Did I mention nuclear power?
  5. Investigate geoengineering as a last resort.

I don’t believe we can reverse AGW but we can hopefully mitigate it enough to keep it from causing major problems.

6

Stop destroying our rain forests and similar ecosystems.

I understand the third world wants malls and economic development. But they will be our ruin. Is this view self-serving? You bet it is.

7

I agree with your points except for #5. Well, OK, I agree with all your points but #5 is so fraught with peril that I can’t imagine it ever being on the table. We inadvertently did engage in a bit of geoengineering earlier in the 20th century by emitting sulphate aerosols and what we got out of that was stabilized temperatures and acid rain. Getting rid of it was the most successful emissions regulatory initiative ever enacted and we don’t want it back. Every other reasonably imaginable scheme has similar side effects of one kind or another.

Reversing AGW is out of the question and the realistic question is where we can stabilize. To reiterate a point I made in another thread, we are already committed to a 3.2 to 4ºC temperature rise associated with stabilizing CO2 at between 485 and 570 ppm, with a corresponding CO2 equivalent of 590-710 ppm. At this point it’s doubtful that we can stabilize even at the high end of that, which would put us in Category V (Table SPM.5) with a committed temperature rise of up to 5ºC.

My third point here is that along with mitigation we (the industrialized world) need to be on the forefront of developing clean energy technology. The only way this problem is going to be solved is to involve the entire global community in binding international agreements, and the only way that’s going to happen is if the first world takes a leadership initiative and can also offer the third world a viable way to industrialize with low- or zero-emissions. As long as we have the unbelievably primitive scenario of getting our power from belching coal plants, we can hardly blame China for doing exactly the same.

8

I think it’s fairly simple and straight forward:

-Find a way to clean the CO2 from the atmosphere and add that cost to energy production based on the amount of CO2 emitted by that production mechanism

-Use nuclear, like Europe does, on a fast track build-and-approve method

-Continue enhancing and expanding our Water/Solar/Wind energy concerns

-Continue development, enhancment, and deployment of power retention/storage systems to properly balance and distribute solar and wind power generation

9

If international conferences are not actually accomplishing anything, then there’s no point in having them. And as a matter of fact, they are not accomplishing anything. If they’re a waste of time and money, then they’re a waste of time and money.

The problem we’re having is that while there are many possible strategies for dealing with global warming, the global elite is wedded to one strategy. That strategy would involve a worldwide agreement, huge transfers of money from rich nations to poor ones for “carbon offsets”, and suchlike. The details vary, but every conference in the last tens years has been organized around that outline. The problem is that it’s simply unworkable. There are too many competing interests with too much to gain by holding out for extra favors for themselves.

If individual nations want to combat global warming, they should do so by working with the profit motive rather than against it. Here’s an idea. The U.S. government could offer a prize of $10,000,000,000 to the first company that produces a solar panel which is competitive, price-wise, with coal as a source of electricity. If we did that, big companies would have a serious incentive to work on solar power.

10

Nuclear would help, but the Greens are too divided over it.

Everyone has an Agreement, and a Plan.

None of it will work, because the developing world is coming online and frankly they are uninterested in waiting anymore than we’ve had to wait.

Until some really obviously attributable, serious, frequent proximate catastrophes occur, absolutely nothing of substance to change total global CO2 output will happen.

Occasional big storms aren’t enough; the most energy intense hurricane ever was over a hundred years ago. The recent near-record quiet Alantic hurricane season didn’t help, and neither has the chilly winter that targeted a fair proportion of decision-makers in the US.

Rising oceans aren’t going to happen fast enough and may not happen at all, if precipitation at the poles increases.

People care about polar bears, but not as much as they care about new golf clubs even if they were made in China in a high-polluting plant.

Ocean acidification is not nearly the disaster that just plain eating everything we find there already is. We’re gonna eat up the ocean long before acidification becomes a disaster.

In short, two things sink ACC Alarmism in its effort to effect change:

  1. We are so lousy at predicting what’s going to happen that we are wrong way too much of the time, and we have to keep backpedaling and retro-fitting our predictions to observed events. (Cold winter: Oh, the polar vortex which we now realize was ACC all along…). This substantially undermines credibility and you need credibility to drive big changes.

  2. We have so many people that to get them all developed we need all the energy we can make. All the fossils. All the renewables. All the nuclear. This idea that we are going to replace fossils has no bearing in reality. Small, luxury, developed communities who can farm out manufacturing to India and China can go green. But net net there’s a lotta peeps out there who want what the developed world has already, and that means energy. Lots and lots of it.

Right or wrong, the Alarmists have won the message: ACC is real, and it’s here. Deniers are pretty marginalized, and reduced to muttering about freezing their ass off. But there’s just nothing on the horizon that’s horrible enough confirmation that the consequences will be (proximately) horrible to induce real sacrifice on a global scale and there’s not enough support for nuclear.

So…nothing.

11

It is already there, but as usual there are some sources of information that do not tell the whole story to their viewers or readers.

https://energy.stanford.edu/news/stanford-scientist-unveils-50-state-plan-transform-us-energy-use-renewable-resources

As Stanford University scientist Mark Jacobson reported, it is now mostly politics what is getting in the way. And seeing groups like the conservative ALEC making efforts to prevent the growth of solar in the west, it is clear who is not only denying the reasons, but also the solutions.

12

In short, you did not read the OP. This is about what can be done, not reheated baloney to delay the solutions.

Indeed.

13

I agree that it’s fraught with peril but I think due-diligence requires that we at least explore it. What if by some miracle a low-risk solution was possible?

14

Like “the greens” have any say so, any power at all, over the Chinese government, or Iran, or France.

China is supposedly building at least 32 reactors, with many more planned.

And in the real world, that means almost nothing in regards to their power needs. They need 800 new reactors to meet their current needs for power,and by the time they built them they would need more.

But long before they reached even half that goal the uranium would have run out. The greens have nothing to do with the nuclear problem. Affordable fuel is the limit, not the reactors, even if it were possible to build them.

And of course the 10 trillion dollars it’s going to cost.

15

Aside from some of the wording (I’m not sure what a “global elite” is) I’m actually somewhat in agreement with you on this particular point. Far too much has been made of cap and trade in both domestic and international discussions, and it has so spooked the industrialists that they simply decided that AGW must be decreed out of existence by sheer force of PR. Unfortunately nature doesn’t care about cap and trade, carbon offsets, or the flow of money among its more advanced species. Moving money around doesn’t change the laws of physics.

Cap and trade may have some value domestically in helping laggard industries get some breathing space in meeting emissions targets; better to pay a penalty than to be shut down. But I agree with you that internationally there are already many poor countries with their hands opportunistically out for compensation and developing countries demanding special considerations. What I object to are the specious claims that this “proves” that the problem is somehow fabricated or that it makes the need for solutions any less urgent. I don’t know what the answers are to securing international cooperation except that it’s essential that we have it, and my inclination is to think that in the carrot-and-stick game the stick may be the operative factor here: namely, that if developing countries expect to benefit from trading relationships with the industrialized world, they’re going to have to abide by the same rules, and be signatories to the same emissions protocols.

16

This is incorrect. There’s no real shortage of nuclear fuel, only an artificial one. The problem with uranium is that people don’t want fast breeder reactors because they produce plutonium. Fortunately there is thorium.

17

Back to the OP. I think a question that needs to be asked is ‘Do we need to do anything about it?’ Does it really matter if London or New York get flooded? Sure it will suck for those who live there, but they can move. And the problem is self-correcting anyway: we will run out of economical fossil fuels soon enough, and after that the world’s flora and fauna will steadily reduce CO2 levels. In a thousand years they’ll likely look back and wonder what all the fuss was about.

18

If the Greens–i.e., those who care about the environment–don’t have power, there isn’t much point about debating climate change is there?

It will all become about waiting for catastrophic effects and ameliorating them as they arise, particularly since none are going to happen overnight.

So…as to the OP’s question: nothing. Which is exactly what has happened so far.

19

This is the absolute bottom line:

Every ounce of fossil fuel we can reach s going to be burned for energy until it is too expensive compared to the alternatives.

You can sign all the agreements you want, implement all the carbon taxes you want in the west, and this will still be true. If you doubled the price of fossil fuels in the west, all that would do is drive down the cost of it for everyone else who isn’t taxing their fuel. That would lead them to consume more of it. It may even have the perverse effect of moving manufacturing to places with lower energy efficiency, raising the carbon footprint of the product and making the problem worse.

For that reason, local carbon taxes are idiotic. Of course, many in the ‘green’ community support them anyway, because even without global warming they like the idea of taxing producers and putting more money in the hands of the government, and they like the idea of large NGOs having more power. But as a practical response to global warming, local taxes are almost completely ineffective. At best they might move the equilibrium point a little bit, at tremendous cost.

So what to do? Stimulate the development of technology that will obsolete fossil fuels. But don’t do it the stupid way by having government tax the people and shift money to cronies. Let the market do what it does best - innovate. Lower barriers to innovation. Maybe create some prizes for various breakthroughs. On the regulatory front, work to make sure that there are no barriers to adoption of new energy sources - forcing the suppliers of the power grid to accept inputs and pay for the power generated by small producers seems like a good idea.

If it were left to government to solve the problem, the fracking revolution would never have happened, and fracking is the best thing to happen with respect to global warming in a long time because natural gas emits much less CO2 per btu than do the alternative fossil fuels. And, because it’s cheaper, you don’t need to put a gun to anyone’s head to get them to use it. Coal plants are shutting down today because they can’t compete with natural gas.

My feeling is that this is a problem that will solve itself faster than any worldwide government-imposed solution could manage. If you look at the cost curves of alternative energy sources compared to fossil fuels, it would seem that we’re maybe a couple of decades away from a major transition. In the meantime, Thorium reactors and small nuclear reactors look very promising. We need to clear regulatory hurdles to develop of these technologies.

Reducing regulatory barriers to nuclear power would be a good start. China can build a new nuclear plant in 4-5 years for about $5 billion dollars. In the meantime, construction in many countries in the west has completely stalled because the regulatory, legal and resulting financial challenges are too great.
The other thing we can do is become wealthier so we can afford mitigation. Dealing with rising sea levels is easier if you’re wealthy. So let’s focus a little more on improving economic conditions that lead to the creation of wealth around the world. Free trade, lower regulatory barriers, tax systems that reward innovation and wealth creation, etc. Carbon taxes decrease wealth, and are counterproductive from that standpoint.

And by all means, keep working on getting that binding agreement on limitiing carbon with Russia, China, and India. If you can get that done, along with suitable enforcement mechanisms, then I’m willing to listen to the idea of carbon taxes in the west. But not until then. My suspicion is that you’ll never get that agreement, or if you do it will be something totally non-enforceable that will be broken the minute it becomes inconvenient, just like Kyoto was.

I also suspect that the only enforcement mechanism you could come up with that has a chance of working would involve military force - blockades and the like. So if you want to risk a nuclear war over this, that might be the way to go.

20

One problem with fracking is that it uses a lot of water. Which is often in short supply in places fracking is used (like California and the High Plains states).

Personally, I think there’s not much more that can be done absent some gamechanging innovation, like working fusion. People in leading developing countries are just not going to take “Sorry, you just can’t have the lifestyle we have” as an answer - look at the new middle classes in India and China. They all want the same things as citizens in developed countries.

So the things that are already being done - nuclear, renewable energy, electric cars, those will continue to be rolled out at increasing pace. I’d say increased forestation is the biggest area we should be working on accelerating.