Heat: how to stop the planet burning

[pozorvlak]

I've been reading George Monbiot's new book, Heat: how to stop the planet burning. It's an excellent book, and I urge you all to read it. He describes how we can achieve the necessary cuts in carbon emissions to prevent the worst effects of climate change, and furthermore how we can do it without giving up our civil liberties or our industrial society. He seems to have done his homework pretty thoroughly - the chapters average out at about a hundred footnotes each. If you've been following his Guardian column, you'll recognize a lot of the material (some of it looks like it was copied-and-pasted from old columns), but there's some new stuff, and it's good to see his thought presented as a coherent argument.
Herewith an executive summary, chapter-by-chapter:

1. Climate change is real, and its harmful effects are already being felt. The possible effects are truly catastrophic. At about 2C above pre-industrial temperatures, a wide range of feedback effects kick in, accelerating the process beyond any hope of our stopping it. This is what we need to prevent. To achieve this, we need to reduce the per-capita CO2 emissions of mankind to less than 0.3 tons/year by 2030, and the sooner the better. Proposed "atmospheric engineering" fixes are far too dangerous. The Third World will never listen to the First World on this until we make such a reduction ourselves. This means that the UK needs to reduce its carbon emissions by nearly 90%. Still, it could be worse: the US needs to reduce theirs by about 94%. Kyoto is pure tokenism - the target's so low it won't make any difference. Technologically, the 90% target is tough but doable: economically, it'll be hella expensive (the error bars are so large that it's impossible to attach a meaningful figure to the cost), but undoubtedly cheaper than doing nothing and sucking up the damage (and most of this stuff we have to do anyway to ameliorate the effects of peak oil). Anyway, at realistic rates of growth, all the spending will do is mean we get ten times as rich in 2102 rather than 2100. And we get to save all the money we would have spent on new roads and airports. And hey, millions of lives and thousands of ecosystems ought to count for something, right?
To achieve a 90% cut, we need to achieve close to a 90% cut in every sector of the economy - there's just too little room for manoeuvre. In subsequent chapters, he discusses the tough cases: most other sectors can be dealt with using similar methods. His biggest omission is the military: he says that they should be slimmed down and used only for peacekeeping, but doesn't give [to my mind] a very convincing argument that peacekeeping should require fewer carbon emissions or less use of air power. Goddamn hippie peacenik. More here.
2. People who say global warming isn't real are either in the pay of the oil industries or they're the unwitting dupes of those who are. The claim that global warming isn't real simply doesn't stand up: it's just part of an astroturfing campaign aimed at discrediting inconvenient scientific facts started by, of all people, the tobacco companies.
3. Voluntary reductions of emissions won't work, because of the tragedy of the commons. More efficient technology won't be enough, basically because of Parkinson's Law (which is known by the wonderful name of "the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate" in this context): as machines become more energy-efficient, more energy-intensive things become possible. Higher fuel taxes will just mean that the rich can carry on polluting and everyone else suffers. Regulation of what we can do with carbon would be little short of totalitarianism. What is needed is a rationing system: every year, it is decided how much carbon the world can emit, and everyone gets a number of "icecaps" (carbon emission currency units) to spend on transport, heating etc, or to trade with others. Once carbon has been monetized in this way, we can let the free market do its stuff, and we maximize our freedoms within the new constraint of limited emissions.
4. Much of Britain's housing stock is appalling - barely adequate for keeping the wind out, and thus needing lots of heating. Houses meeting Norwegian standards of building need around a quarter of the heating of houses meeting British standards, for instance. It is technologically possible to build houses that can be perfectly warm in the British climate and require no heating or cooling systems at all. They're called passivhausen, and they're increasingly popular in Germany. They're only about 5% more expensive than standard houses, and you save the money on heating bills. Unfortunately, it would be too expensive to rebuild every house in Britain as a passivhaus, but there's no reason why we can't require every house built after, say, 2012 to meet the passivhaus standard, and we can require all house renovations to improve environmental standards and all rented property to meet tough environmental criteria. [Again, I'm suspicious: the tough House in Multiple Occupancy rules we have in Glasgow seem mostly to have pushed a lot of business into the black market]. Electricity use could be reduced by the use of smart meters, which would encourage the use of more efficient technologies (as would carbon rationing).
5. There's no danger of our running out of coal any time soon - unfortunately, coal mining is horrifically environmentally damaging even if you don't consider the carbon emissions. Given the nuclear industry's record of mendacity, high costs and poor safety (plus the dangers of nuclear proliferation) it would be better to avoid nuclear power if possible. Gas looks OK for the medium term, and carbon capture and storage technology (which can be retrofitted) would make gas-fired stations acceptable from the emissions point of view. Essentially, you capture CO2 as it's given off, and pump it into an old gas field, saline aquifer, or similar underground reservoir. Gas-fired power stations with carbon capture could supply about 50% of our electricity needs in 2030.
6. A lot of rubbish is talked about renewable energy. Micro wind turbines, for instance, are snake oil - far too small to generate any appreciable power, and putting them on buildings means the air will be too turbulent for them to be useful anyway. There's real potential, though - wave power, onshore wind and (especially) offshore wind can supply the other half of our electricity needs. Solar thermal energy in desert regions is also looking seriously promising. The variability of wind and wave would be dealt with by building lots of generators all over the place so not all of them are dark at once. The transmission losses are minimised by using high-voltage DC cables rather than AC, as DC has better transmission characteristics over long distances. We'd also have to build some more pumped hydroelectric storage systems, but fortunately North-West Scotland (where the wind potential is best) has no shortage of suitable mountain lochs. We'd need some spare conventional power stations, but a) we do this anyway, b) we wouldn't need to run them all the time. There is, however, a problem: 80% of our energy use in the home is to provide heat, rather than electricity. Wood-burning stoves would be carbon-neutral, but growing enough wood would use up all our agricultural land. Ground-sourced heat pumps (networks of pipes under the ground, through which water is pumped to be warmed by the earth), which are popular in Scandinavia, pretty much require new houses to be built.
7. Another possibility is what some advocates call "the energy internet" - every house becomes a power station, automatically selling surplus energy back to the grid. The two most-cited generation technologies are micro wind turbines and solar photovoltaic panels. Micro wind turbines are rubbish, and photovoltaic panels are currently far too expensive, but another possibility is combined heat and power units - essentially, small generators, where the waste heat is used to heat your house. This would still emit carbon if we used natural gas in the boiler, but less carbon than under the current regime where (a) natural gas is burned in power stations, wasting 2/3 of its energy, (b) more natural gas is burned in houses for heat. Or we could use hydrogen: we'd have to replace the current gas pipelines with hydrogen pipelines, and there's the question of where we get the hydrogen from - it's much more efficient and cheap to reform natural gas and bury the carbon.
8. Private cars are so awful from a climate-change perspective that if every car journey were replaced with an equivalent coach journey we'd achieve a 90% cut tomorrow. (Trains aren't quite as good as coaches, though they'd be better for long-distance freight). The trouble with coaches is that they suck in every other respect. In fact, I'm going to quote his description of a journey on the X5 Oxford-Cambridge coach, because it's so very true: When I take the bus, as I sometimes must, from Oxford to Cambridge, I arrive feeling almost suicidal. First I must cycle for 20 minutes in the wrong direction, into the city centre. Then, usually in horizontal sleet and clouds of diesel fumes, I must wait for a man who looks as if he has just drunk a quart of vinegar to grunt that the bus is ready for boarding. I give my money to someone who makes the other man look cheerful and sit on a chair designed to extract confessions. Then, weaving around bicycles and bollards, the coach fights its way through streets designed for ponies. After half an hour it leaves the city. It then charts a course through what appears to be every depressing dormitory town in south-east England, hoping to pick up more custom. On a good day, with a following wind, the journey from my house to my destination in Cambridge, a total of 83 miles, takes four and a half hours. The average speed is 18 miles an hour, about 50 per cent faster than I travel by bicycle. If I made the journey by car, I could do it in 100 minutes.
   Fortunately, it needn't be this way. Coach stations are only situated in town centres by historical accident: if they were moved out to the edges of towns, and well-served by local buses, all the time they currently spend manoeuvring into town centres could be saved. If they were given priority at junctions (using radio emissions that are received by traffic lights) they could be faster again. Because coaches take up so much less road area per passenger than cars (if the M25 were filled with coaches, it would have a capacity of over 250,000 people, as opposed to about 19,000 at the moment) coaches could be scheduled to come every few minutes, as opposed to every few hours as at present. Investment in nicer coaches, with facilities for working, food and drink, decent suspension, etc, would mean that coach travel could be (don't laugh, I'm serious) faster, more relaxing, and more convenient than travelling by car. There's lots of potential for improving short-distance public transport as well.
   This wouldn't eliminate the need for cars entirely, however. So we need to think about alternative fuels. Biofuels, unfortunately, make the problem even worse: if grown here, they'd use up all our agricultural land, but it's more likely (indeed, inevitable under current world trade rules) that they'd actually be made from palm oil from South-East Asia. Cutting down jungle, burning the trees and drying out swamp to plant oil palms emits incredible amounts of carbon. And let's not forget the mass extinctions and harm to native peoples that it will cause. All the same objections go for ethanol from South America, naturally. Hydrogen fuel cells are interesting, if the hydrogen could be produced in a carbon-neutral way, but suffer from the chicken-and-egg problem that there are no hydrogen filling stations. And hydrogen's very bulky, dangerous to store, etc - basically, we're a long way from being able to solve the technical problems cost-effectively. Electric cars are much closer, and could be made practical by having filling stations sell fully-charged batteries which you swap in when you need to "refuel". And there's a lot of scope for making cars more efficient by using lighter materials and reducing performance (most of which simply isn't needed). Lift-sharing, telecommuting, better facilities for cyclists etc, all have a role to play too.
9. There is, alas, no real alternative to jet aircraft. Propellor-driven aircraft have lower carbon emissions, and don't form contrails (which have a warming effect of their own), but they're much slower. High-speed trains (shinkansen/TGV style) can be almost as fast as jets for journeys of a few hundred miles, once you take check-in and travel to the airport into account, but at speeds above about 200kph their energy use is almost as bad as jets. Maglevs would be fast enough, but laying maglev track is ludicrously expensive: around $40-100 million per km. Hell, TGV track is expensive enough, at over $12 million per km. He doesn't investigate trains running in vacuum tubes, but it's probably a bit optimistic to hope for those by 2030 anyway :-) Ships may in fact be worse than planes: the only figures he could obtain were for the QE2, which emits 7.6 times as much carbon per passenger in a transatlantic voyage as an aeroplane. Airships are safe and faster than ships, and their emissions are almost 90% lower than those of jets, but their top speed is around 130kph, and they're affected more by the wind. Still, they could be the best way of crossing oceans in the New World Order [I've been reading occasional articles saying that since I was in primary school: it's a lovely idea, but I'll believe it when I see it]. But there's no way around it: if we want to save the biosphere, we need to drastically reduce the number of flights we make, which in turn means we can't travel as far or as fast as we do now. Though this sucks, it's only going to affect a very small number of people, globally speaking.
   Try telling that to the UK government, though: since the carbon emissions of international flights don't count towards the country's total, they're having great fun building lots and lots of new runways. By Parkinson's Law, this inevitably means that demand for flights will rise, and the increase in aviation is due to cancel out any benefit from the European Emissions Trading Scheme. Oh, and don't let anyone tell you that budget airlines are socially inclusive: 75% of those who fly on budget airlines come from the top three socioeconomic classes. The poor may be able to afford the flights, but they can't afford the holiday at the other end.
10. The supermarkets are horribly polluting - think of the harsh lighting, the heaters over the door, the masses of unnecessary packaging, the open fridges and freezers, and the huge car parks. Fortunately, there's a solution: internet and telephone shopping. Warehouses don't need any of the energy-wasting technologies listed, and you can fit a lot more stuff into a warehouse than you can into a shop of the same area. You also eliminate all the car journeys to the shops (trading them for substantially fewer miles travelled by the delivery van).
    The cement industry is also horribly polluting, not least because the production of cement involves removing CO2 from limestone. But this problem, too, can be solved: geopolymeric cements (invented in about 1970) are better in almost every respect than standard Portland cement, and their production emits about 90% less carbon than the production of Portland cement. The only reason they're not widely used already is the extreme conservatism of the building industry. And the carbon produced in the production of Portland cement can be buried as discussed for power stations.
11. The practice of planting trees to offset carbon burned is based on (possibly unintentional) false accounting: it's basically impossible to know how much carbon is actually saved, and it's saved in the future rather than now, when we actually need it to be saved. The whole business is little better than the medieval practice of selling indulgences. We need to actually emit less carbon if we're going to do this. The measures above, while technically and economically possible, will require an act of political will not seen in this country since the Second World War, so go! Campaign! Organise! Protest!
    Oh, and George Monbiot's first child (a daughter) was born while he was writing the book. Innat nice :-)

He's also summarised his plan here, with timings.
I'm currently reading The Utility of Force by General Sir Rupert Smith, which, while not quite so well-written, is also fascinating. Yay for the Blackwell's sale! :-)