Current post: Mike Mason, writes:

Grandma's lesson in carbon pricing

Some weeks ago I argued that we must recognise the need for a zero fossil fuel society, and as no-one is likely to vote for a serious reduction in quality of life we will have to get there mostly with new technology.

We have the technology, or soon will have, and although the cost looks a little high it is perfectly acceptable.  However this isn’t just about changing light bulbs or more efficient cars – on their own these can never get us to zero emissions.  What we need is a slew of new infrastructure and capital assets.  Changing our cars to electric means new ways of generating and distributing energy; improving public transport means new forms of road, rail and air transport with new roads, railways and types of airport; continued use of fossil fuels means finding ways to capture and bury CO₂ and to shift gas use out of the household.

All these infrastructure changes share some key characteristics: they need to be developed by companies or governments, they need vast amounts of capital, and they will shape the way we live for a very long time.  Some of our road systems hark back to Roman times; our railway network was established by the Victorians; our national electricity grid centres on coal mining areas developed a century ago; and our airfields were developed from military airfields of 70 years ago.

Some of our key assets also have exceptionally long lives.  A power station may live 50 years or more between first planning and closure.  The first 747 design studies began in 1963.  New 747s coming off the production line today will fly for 30 years  - giving an overall life for the design of 75 years or more.

We don’t have that kind of time to solve the problem of global warming.  Both the US and the UK have committed to an 80% cut in emissions in the next 40 years.  After you subtract what is needed for agricultural emissions that feed us, and a few unavoidable things like methane leaking from old coal mines, this means Zero from fossil fuels.  Thus everything we do from now on that has a long life has to be consistent with a Zero emissions world.

No company, however well intentioned, can afford to go bust; bankrupt companies cannot build new infrastructure or invent new products.  So, to get companies to develop the Zero emission solutions, they need the right signals and incentives which will come from things such as the price of carbon. 

Ultimately the price of carbon and its surrogates, such as green electricity tariffs, is set by policy.  The carbon price today is low – considerably lower than the price needed to drive us to zero emissions from fossil fuel.  It is low because the temptation to ease ourselves into the low carbon world instead of biting the bullet and dealing with the difficulties immediately means we have set ourselves weak short term reduction targets.  We seem to ignore the fact that the last 100 million tonnes of emissions reductions will be much more difficult to achieve than the first 100 million.

The tragic result of a low carbon price will be companies and governments developing the wrong assets and infrastructure.  The carbon price will determine how much they spend to get emissions down, but although developing power stations, aircraft and houses that reduce emissions by 50% may reflect the economic reality of today’s carbon price, it simply won’t be good enough.

As we recognise the increasing urgency of the problem targets will tighten and prices increase, and then we will realise the judgments we made but a few years before were wrong and we need to start again.  Our shiny new infrastructure and assets will be obsolete long before they are worn out, and we will have wasted a huge amount of treasure, human resource and time.   If we aren’t bold enough the second time we may even have to repeat this process more than once.  Then we will come to deeply regret not getting the carbon price right the first time.

As my grandmother kept telling me – “A stitch in time….”

View this and other articles on Mike's blog.

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Mike Mason writes:

Does anyone know what an 80% cut in emissions really means?

"Well, he won! And with a new president in the Oval Office we expect to see the US joining the world of climate action once again. Obama has very publicly committed to an 80% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Never mind whether the date is soon enough – this is a huge advance on the current administration position.

Not to be outdone, the UK has also bravely committed to the same target . These are all fine words, but I do wonder if the politicians really understand what those targets actually mean. Once again the answer – or problem – lies in the soil.

As a planet we emit about 42Gt of CO₂ equivalent each year , but not all of this comes from power stations and gas guzzlers; a surprising amount comes from agriculture. The International Panel on Climate Change produced a Special Assessment report looking at agriculture, and concluded that emissions from livestock and soils were somewhere around 7Gt per year of CO₂ equivalent . Methane from livestock and rice paddies adds up to 0.9Gt of C equivalent a year (3.3Gt of CO₂e) and N2O from cultivated soils and livestock adds a further 1Gt C equivalent a year (3.7Gt CO₂e).

So, even ignoring the emissions from making fertiliser, the food we eat creates 17% of global emissions today and of course it won’t stop there. As population grows, so food consumption will grow. The US is acquiring one new citizen every 11 seconds , which amounts to over 100 million people by 2050! Even the UK’s population is expected to grow by around 20% between now and 2030 – never mind 2050. The second dimension in this is of course wealth. As we become wealthier we tend to eat more, and eat more meat. We all know we shouldn’t but I fear it takes an awful lot of willpower to overcome all those millions of years of evolution that prime us to grab what food we can in case there isn’t any tomorrow.

The problem that this raises is disturbing. Unless we make some major breakthrough in the way we grow our crops and meat, our agriculture emissions will rise by 20%-30% or more and we will need around 20% of current emissions simply to support the biotic processes that feed us. Well, if you need 20% of emissions for food, and have promised a cut of 80% of emissions, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that there’s nothing left for industry, transport, lighting, or heating our homes.

In effect both the UK and the US have committed to a zero fossil fuel economy. Is that what the policy makers really had in mind? I hope it is but fear they think an 80% cut is just a little more difficult than a 60% cut – which is really only a 40% cut but a bit more ….

If they really intend a zero fossil fuel economy I wholeheartedly applaud them – but it does raise some interesting questions about some of our current energy policy. Anyone for a third Heathrow runway?"

References:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/newenergy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/oct/24/climate-change-carbon-emissions-miliband
WRI 2006
IPCC Special Report Land Use, Land use change and Forestry – table 1-3.
http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html

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Mike Mason writes:

Biochar…biowhat?!

"Optimism seemed a good place to start a new column, and so to “Biochar”. After “bail-out”, “biochar” could be the most important new word you will hear this year.

The story of biochar begins several thousand years ago in the Amazon basin where communities of people lived by ‘slash and burn’ agriculture. These communities lived at relatively high population densities in spite of the generally low fertility of Amazon soils. Around five hundred years ago Portuguese explorers started to venture into the Amazon basin, where they found these communities living on pockets of exceptionally fertile soils. What distinguished these soils wasn’t their geology but their blackness, so they were named the ‘Terras Pretas’ or ‘Black Earths’. For the next five hundred years they remained a garden centre curiosity – you could buy a bag of ‘Terra Preta’, put it in your flower pots, and get wonderful geraniums.

Then in the 1980s a Dutch professor of soil science, Wim Sombroek, decided to look more closely. What he found was intriguing. The soils were black because of carbon, clearly the agriculture was more ‘slash and char’ than ‘slash and burn’, and the carbon was hundreds or thousands of years old. What was really perplexing was how this carbon increased soil fertility. After all, after a thousand years of Amazonian rainfall any nutrients in the char or ash would have been long gone and carbon itself has no nutrient value.

So, what has this to do with global warming? Well, one man’s perplexing question has suddenly exploded into a small but rapidly growing scientific quest to get to the bottom of the ‘Terra Preta’ story – and where we have got to looks exceptionally exciting!

It seems that charcoal has a really complex structure that does two things that plants need. Firstly, it traps plant nutrients that are flowing naturally through the soil – preventing them being washed away by rain. Secondly, small pores in the charcoal act as secure, water filled refuges for the bacteria and fungi that move nutrients from soil to plant. Every charcoal particle becomes a nutrient rich fertiliser factory. This means that plants with the right dose of the right type of charcoal in the soil grow faster than plants in untreated soil, even with much less fertiliser.

Fertiliser manufacture, of course, is one of the world’s large sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Nitrous oxide is 230 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO₂, and by reducing the amount of fertiliser we also reduce the amount of soil nitrous oxide emissions. Better still, making the charcoal produces energy rich gases which can be trapped and used to generate electricity – so avoiding the use of fossil fuels.

Best of all though, by taking plant waste (straws, husks, and so on), making charcoal and burying it in a stable form, CO₂ is being removed from the atmosphere for a very long time. If we put 3% charcoal in the top 30 cms of the arable soils of the earth we would remove around 100ppm of CO₂, equivalent to the total amount of human emissions over all time. If we can do this whilst also improving soil condition, increasing food production, and reducing fossil fuel use we shall have discovered something rather important.

The science is well demonstrated, but far from complete – we are trying to compress fifty years of research into five. To find out more look at the work being done by the team at Cornell University, have a look at this article by Johannes Lehman or visit the International Biochar Initiative website."