Transcript Strategies Dealing with Climate Change

Strategies
Dealing with Climate Change
Reducing, Removing Carbon,
Cooling the Earth…
• A. Alternative energy ideas
• B. Reducing carbon from existing energy
sources
• C. Removing carbon from the atmosphere
• D. GeoEngineering strategies to cool the
Earth
• E. Population, Policy Strategies
A. Alternative Energy Ideas
Solar, Wind, Hydro,
Geothermal
• Astrophysicist Frank Shu points out (Shu
2008) that the only energy sources which
can compete in the sheer volume of
energy which our society currently
requires, are…
• --- solar photovoltaics
• --- nuclear power
According to Shu – Wind is too
diffuse to be economical for
large scale power
• … except in the most favorable places, many of which
are already being used
• (This conclusion is controversial, however). Local wind
for a residence still makes sense, however
• Fossil fuel interests complain commercial wind turbines
kill large numbers of birds.
• Evn granting for the moment that the climate denialists
which make these claims actually care about birds, the
claim is vastly untrue...
• According to Sovocool (2012), wind turbines kill 0.27
birds/Gwh, while fossil fueled power plants kill 9.4
birds/Gwh, or 50x greater. Even nuclear kills more birds
(0.6 per Gwh) than wind.
For birds, wind farms are the
least of their worries
• Hydroelectric is very cost effective, but most of
the usable and economical sites are already
dammed; it’s not scalable, and also is costly to
local ecologies, and extremely expensive to
remove dams once they silt up.
• Geothermal: in rare places it is high grade and
very cost-effective, but most places you can only
access average annual temperature, via digging
many meters down with pipes. This is still quite
useful to do for heating and cooling homes and
should be more adopted than it is. No good for
high-grade needs like fuel, transportation, etc.
Solar PV Accessible Insolation, Including Cloud Cover
Solar PV: Good…
• Solar PV’s advantages:
• --- rapidly getting cheaper
• --- carbon nanotube-based solar may provide improved
power/cost ratios
• --- rooftop panels allow distributed systems “off the grid”
and therefore
• *** provide no easy targets with respect to national
security
• *** allow energy independence and are the ultimate in
“local”, motivating their care by owners
• --- few if any moving parts to break, only occasional
further investment (batteries mainly) once purchased
• --- in warm climates, rooftop systems also lower heat
load to structures, lowering air conditioning costs. As the
Earth warms, more and more of us will be in “warm
climates”
Solar PV price/watt 1977-2011
Solar PV module costs 1985-2011
But Problematic – The
Inconsistent Sun
• Power generation at the mercy of weather, and
completely unavailable at night
• Power needs greater in cold climates, which are
also where sun is weakest
• Requires better battery technology to be
feasible for high powered society
• Still, given an existing power grid, rooftop solar
can be a no-brainer for feeding energy into the
grid and lowering carbon footprint for all, as well
as lowering utility bills
Battery Technology
• How to power our transportation – cars, trucks,
rail?
• A recent (Duduta et al. 2011) breakthrough in
battery technology made at MIT is a hopeful
sign. If it works as hoped, it may double the
energy density of current batteries, and also
make possible the ability to "fuel up" at the pump
with an oil-like rechargable electrolyte much like
we do with gasoline cars at the moment. Read
about it here.
• A new all-liquid-metal battery technology is
also promising very high storage densities at
relatively low cost.
The Nuclear Option
• Nuclear reactors, to describe, are just steam engines
that use something other than wood or coal to stoke the
boiler. They use the heat generated by nuclear fission
reactions of certain heavy elements.
• Nuclear has some advantages:
• --- it’s “always on”, unlike solar
• --- its carbon emissions are minimal (even including
mining the uranium or thorium currently)
• --- it’s very energy dense and can supply a lot of power
in a small area, so is intriguing for use in technologies for
pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Conventional Nuclear Reactor
Cooling and condensing steam
back to liquid using cooling towers
Nuclear – the Disadvantages
• All reactors are necessarily big and very expensive. No
car-sized “Mr. Fusion” is on anyone’s horizon
• Safety - When they go wrong, they can go VERY wrong.
Remember, in the real world, bad engineers get jobs too.
• They were economically viable only when the
government stepped in to insure them. Are they
economically viable when they must be privately
insured? Any libertarian wanting to support nuclear
should consider that. Is no private company willing to
insure a nuclear power plant? If there are premiums to
be collected over/above the claims to be payed out, why
are private insurance companies not looking to exploit
this opportunity? …or have they in fact run their own
risk/reward numbers and decided it’s not worth it? (this is
not sarcasm, I’m genuinely wondering).
• There may be solutions to some of these… read on.
Nuclear – the Disadvantages
• Nuclear Waste – conventional waste is radioactive for tens to
hundreds of thousands of years. Stolen waste can provide the
material for a “dirty bomb” with no technological savvy required, for
terrorists. A “dirty bomb” can spread radioactivity packaged around
dynamite (for example) far and wide which can be much more
damaging than the dynamite alone can do.
• Merely the threat of using such a bomb can apply great political
leverage. Even low grade nuclear waste therefore provides a very
tempting target for terrorists.
• There may be solutions to these problems. Read on…
• Nuclear power safety standards and enforcement is poor and needs
major upgrades. This will significantly increase the cost of building
reactors
• These problems do not exist for wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal,
and other renewables
The Homer Simpson Effect
• Nuclear Regulatory Commission
employees caught surfing the web for porn
while on the job (Washington Times
article)
• Sleeping with the industry people (literally)
they’re supposed to be regulating.
How Many Reactors Operating
Today?
• As of March 1, 2011, there were 443 operating
nuclear power reactors spread across the planet
in 47 different countries [source: WNA].
• In 2009 alone, atomic energy accounted for 14
percent of the world's electrical production.
Break that down to the individual country and the
percentage skyrockets as high as 76% for
Lithuania and 75% for France [source: NEI].
• In the United States, 104 nuclear power plants
supply 20 percent of the electricity overall.
Breeder Reactors – The Solution?
• Breeder reactors convert long-lived radioactive by-products into
power and into (relatively) short-lived radioactive by-products –
requiring storage for ~several centuries, rather than thousands of
years as with conventional reactors. They produce nuclear fuel as
they run, and so are also fuel-efficient.
• Capital costs are ~25% higher than for conventional reactors. With
the abundance of Uranium, they were not thought economical,
however with the worries about radioactive waste storage, they are
now more interesting.
• Supplies will exhaust with current designs in a matter of decades,
but with breeders and intelligent design using Thorium, could last for
well over 1000 years at current power needs (Shu 2011)
• Require a large starter of U235 to provide fast neutrons for fissioning
other nuclei. U235 is rare (0.7% of natural uranium is U235), but
available.
• For the waste to be safe after just a few centuries, requires very high
grade separation of actinide series chemical elements.
• From the Yale 360 forum, this article argues in favor of Breeder
technology, and this is a rebuttal
Should we give Nuclear another
chance?
• It’s possible that nuclear has been given an unfair knock from a few
bad accidents, and better oversight in engineering, and PRIVATE
insurance, would insure lower odds of costly and dangerous
accidents. It was, at one time, hailed as a clean and low-cost new
power source…. before Chernobyl
• Chernobyl killed only 31 people directly, but estimates of excess
cancer deaths from the radiation cloud range from 9,000 (U.N. and
Atomic Energy Commission) to 25,000 (Union of Concerned
Scientists) to ten times higher (Greenpeace) - it’s easy to see the
correlation with “green”ness, but I myself am not in a position to say
who’s most correct.
• Japan’s Fukishima disaster in 2011 is still being assessed, but was
the only other “Level 7” nuclear disaster. Direct excess cancer
deaths here are expected in the hundreds, although many argue this
is too conservative.
• Mining of Uranium involves radon left in the tailings seeping into
ground water, and according to the International Atomic Energy
Agency, and here, this adds about 40,000 excess cancer deaths per
year, worldwide.
However ALL these death rates
Pale…
• … in comparison to deaths caused by fossil fuels, even
without global warming’s eventual casualties
• Black lung, emphysema, cancer, heart disease, air
pollution’s many other health effects.
• 13,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone from coal dust
• Even hydroelectric has a worse record than nuclear… A
string of dam failures in China once killed 230,000
people.
• Fossil Fuels kill 320 times more people per unit
power produced than solar + nuclear combined…
• Add in the deaths global warming will cause show
that arguments about nuclear safety, by comparison,
are a non-issue
• Fossil Fuels (all) = 164 deaths/TWh
• Solar = 0.44 deaths/TWh
• Nuclear = 0.04 deaths/TWh
But – a Big Problem with Nuclear is Rapidly
Escalating Cost:
Even more serious - the time to
permit a 1 GW power plant: 13 yrs
for Nuclear vs. 1 yr for solar...
• Time we do not have.
• During that time to permit, solar costs are
projected to continue to fall
Sobering as Nuclear’s Rising
Costs Are…
• …They don’t include the cost of insuring the
power plants against disaster
• Uninsurable?
• Yes, says a study commissioned in Germany in
2011 (here) …
• …finds that insurance would cost as at least as
much as the electricity produced ($0.20/KwH), at
a bare minimum, on up to 15 times the price of
the electricity produced ($3.40/KwH)!
A Lecture by Frank Shu in 2011
• Discusses the advantages and disadvantages of
alternatives to “business as usual” and climate disaster
• Bottom line, solar is expensive (but he doesn’t mention
that costs are dropping rapidly, nor include externalized
costs!!), carbon capture and sequestration he therefore
concludes is the short term solution, and nuclear using
breeders is the longer term solution, both to extend the
limited nuclear fuel resources, and to “burn” existing
nuclear waste.
• He does not mention nuclear cost escalations, does not
mention the tax and dividend strategy which totally
changes the cost arguments.
• Still, it’s a very worthwhile lecture on the details of how to
do nuclear properly
• Lecture Nov 2011 to U. Michigan students, (43 min)
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My Thoughts
First some disclaimers: (1) I’m no nuclear expert, and ideological emotions cloud
both sides of this pro/anti-nuke debate, so far as I can tell. (2) As I emphasize in
Chapter 0, Nature doesn’t give a damn about my opinion, or yours. She only cares
about the Truth. That said, here goes…
The dangers of global warming induced disaster rises with every new day of
research that comes in. Beyond replacing fossil fuel energy currently, we MUST think
seriously about removing existing CO2 from the atmosphere on a large scale.
Carbon neutral will not save us from serious and permanent climate change. I
suspect the only feasible way of powering the large energy needed to pull CO2 out of
the atmosphere may be nuclear power. Breeder technology is probably best, as it
makes the most use of existing isotopes and insures the long term safest nuclear
waste.
What should power the grid into which your rooftop solar pumps its power? Perhaps
nuclear, but again – ONLY if it can be privately insured. If insurance companies
refuse to insure, that’s a bad indication. Others make good arguments that a proper
balance of renewables, especially wind, could provide a stable grid.
A de-centralized power grid, minimizing high tension lines from juicy terrorist-target
big power plants, is a necessary goal, with power generated by rooftop solar as
much as possible, and perhaps cellulosic or algae-based fuel in hybrid vehicles as a
carbon-neutral strategy for transportation, where high power density is essential.
There is a place for nuclear… whether that place is big or niche, remains uncertain.
• Fossil fuels need to be abandoned. The world’s naïve sentiment seems to
be – “OK, maybe so, we’ll inch towards other power sources, but only so
long as we don’t have to make any real sacrifices.” This attitude is a
prescription for disaster!
Rapidly Dropping Energy Costs are
Making a Huge Impact in Germany
Shifting from Conventional
Utilities to Distributed Energy
Ownership and Generation
• Good article (2014) here. Summary:
• “Vattenfall, a Swedish utility with the second-biggest
generation portfolio in Germany, saw $2.3 billion in
losses in 2013 due to ‘fundamental structural change’ in
the electricity market. The problem is well documented:
high penetrations of renewables with legal priority over
fossil fuels are driving down wholesale market prices -sometimes causing them to go negative -- and quickly
eroding the value of coal and natural gas plants. At the
same time, Germany's energy consumption continues to
fall while renewable energy development rises.”
• All it took is strong legal framework. Government
commitment to a renewable future.
• “To make matters worse for (conventional fossil
fuel) utilities, their commercial and industrial
customers are increasingly trying to separate
themselves from the grid to avoid government
fees levied to pay for renewable energy
expansion. According to the Wall Street Journal,
16 percent of German companies are now
energy self-sufficient -- a 50 percent increase
from just a year ago. Another 23 percent of
businesses say they plan to become energy selfsufficient in the near future.”
B. Reducing Carbon from
Existing Energy Sources
• We produce 32 billion tons of CO2 per year… ideas for capture:
• Using microalgae to remove CO2 from coal flue gas. Acidic flue gas reduces
CO2 uptake greatly.
• The Economics of CO2 Separation and Capture (Herzog MIT, late ’90’s)
• Other processes have been considered to capture the CO2 from the flue gas
of a power plant -- e.g., membrane separation, cryogenic fractionation, and
adsorption using molecular sieves – but they are even less energy efficient
and more expensive than chemical absorption. This can be attributed, in
part, to the very low CO2 partial pressure in the flue gas. Therefore, two
alternate strategies to the “flue gas” approach are under active consideration
– the “oxygen” approach and the “hydrogen” or “syn-gas” approach.
• Herzog estimated that by 2012 CO2 removal from coal flue gas could cost
as little as 1.5cents per kWHr (hasn’t worked out that way).
• Gasify’ing coal allows up to 65% of the CO2 to be captured, according to
industry sources. Are such “industry sources” to be trusted? I don’t know…
• IPCC Report on Carbon Capture
C. Removing Carbon
from the Atmosphere
Plant Trees; have evolved over millions
of years to extract CO2 and sequester
it as hydrocarbons
• Advantages:
1. Low tech! Given the political will, millions of
people could be employed immediately to plant
trees with minimal training. This is vital – we
need IMMEDIATE solutions in order to avoid
long term disaster
2. They have evolved over millions of years to
extract and sequester carbon from the
atmosphere. They’re good at it!
Planting parties – fun! Build a sense of shared effort
towards our future
But, Tree Planting Looks to be
Too Little and Too Late
• --- Where do we plant them? The reason most of our
forests are gone is that we wanted that land to grow
crops and pave over for cities and houses. Over 90% of
all arable land on Earth has already been converted to
agriculture.
• --- In a rapidly changing climate, can we plant trees in a
place where they will thrive for decades to come?
• --- Worse, tree planting will only help a little: This IPCC
report, described more digestably in this article, finds
that planting trees will only sequester about 1.4 gigatons
of CO2 per year; vs ~50 gigatons of human-generated
CO2 emissions.
• In other words, less than 3% of current emissions.
• It turns out to be even trickier…..
Trees do more than take up CO2
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The dark color of forests means they absorb more solar energy than the grasses
that would replace them, and according to one study, actually heat the Earth,
with the effect stronger at higher latitudes. (Bala et.al. 2006)
Especially true in the far north, where winter snow is highly reflective while dark
conifers absorb sunlight.
There are three other effects of trees that both cool climate:
--- 1. Evapo-transpiration; taking water from the ground and evaporating in
leaves into the air absorbs the latent heat of evaporation from the environment
--- 2. This evaporation also promotes the formation of low clouds, which also
cool climate
--- 3. Trees take up CO2 out of the atmosphere to build their tissues
So there are 3 cooling effects, and one heating effect of trees. Finding out the
net of these was the subject of the Bala et.al. study. See summaries here
Lawrence Livermore Labs 2006 study, and also here.
Lee et.al. (2011) claim that the cooling effect of clearing high latitude forests is
not just theoretical, but shown in real data.
Bottom Line: Reforestation is best in the tropics to lower middle latitudes.
From latitudes of the northern U.S. northward, reforestation might actually
have an albedo-related heating effect which competes with the cooling due
to absorbed CO2.
Simulated temporal evolution of atmospheric CO2 (Upper) and 10-year running mean of
surface temperature change (Lower) for the period 2000–2150 in the Standard and
Deforestation experiments. Warming effects of increased atmospheric CO2 are more than
offset by the cooling biophysical effects of global deforestation in the Global case, producing a
cooling relative to the Standard experiment of ≈0.3 K around year 2100. Bala et.al. 2006.
Simulated cumulative emissions and carbon stock changes in atmosphere,
ocean, and land for the period 2000–2150 in Standard (A) and Global
deforestation (B) experiments. In Standard, strong CO2 fertilization results in
vigorous uptake and storage of carbon by land ecosystems. In the Global case,
land ecosystem carbon is lost to the atmosphere as a result of global
deforestation. Most of this carbon is ultimately reabsorbed by grasses and
shrubs growing in a warmer CO2-fertilized climate at year 2100. Of the land
ecosystem carbon in the Standard simulation that is not present in the land
biosphere in the Global case at year 2100, 82% resides in the atmosphere and
the remaining 18% in the oceans.
Let’s Ponder The Implications
• Before thinking about clear-cutting boreal forests, note
that the released carbon goes into the atmosphere and
the oceans
• The resulting greenhouse heating effect in the
atmosphere is slightly less than is the expected cooling
due to the more reflective grasses (and seasonal snow)
that replace trees.
• However, from reading the papers, it’s not clear that they
have included the fact that there is little or no snow to be
reflective in spring and certainly summer, especially as
temperatures soar in the Arctic
• Also, the carbon going into the ocean worsens
acidification
Natural Vegetation Changes due
to Global Climate Change
• Port et al. (2012) model expected rising
CO2’s effects on vegetation for 300 years
• Find fertilization due to rising CO2 causes
boreal forests to spread north, deserts to
slightly shrink.
• By including the rise in carbon
sequestered by CO2-fertilized plants, the
reduced greenhouse warming is 0.22 C
• 0.22C is only a tiny fraction of the net ~7 C
rise in global temperatures
From Port et al. 2012
U.S. forests are currently taking up carbon in excess of releasing it). This is as
expected on land that has had most of its forests already cut. Halting further tree
cutting would sequester carbon even more than currently. This is even more true in
the tropical rain forests where clear cutting is rampant. However, in the far north,
lowered albedo might raise global temperatures as much as sequestering CO2 would
reduce them, if Bala et al. are correct.
Deforestation and the Ocean
• Other vegetation change simulations give similar results
• Note in the previous graph that in the global deforested
case, the ocean takes up much more CO2 than in the
‘standard’ case. While global temperatures may not
change much by 2150 between the ‘standard’ and
‘global deforested’ cases, the oceans suffer much
more by deforestation, and that CO2 must further
acidify the ocean.
• Planting mid and high latitude trees to take up carbon
should perhaps be seen more as a strategy for
minimizing ocean acidification and its dire
consequences, and not as much a direct global warming
solution.
Artificial Trees – Currently an evolving research
project with promise to remove CO2 from the
atmosphere
Some Resources on this Idea
• Lackner video lecture on our Carbon
dilemma (53 min) at SUNY Stonybrook
• Video interview (5 min)
• Good quantitative overview of the carbon
dilemma, from DOE and Lackner
• Demonstration video of artificial tree, BBC
2009
• NovaScienceNow video 2008 (12 min)
• Yale Environment 360 op/ed
Some Bullet Points on the CO2
Capture ideas of Lackner et al.
• Need 7 typical (real) trees just to pull out of the air the CO2
generated by one human being (476 lb/yr)
• We’re injecting the equivalent of 126 billion people’s worth of CO2
into the atmosphere
• Pulling CO2 by Lackner’s resin is very energy intensive. This is why
I suggest nuclear may be the way to power them.
• Since CO2 rapidly moves through air, can pull it out from anywhere.
The resin idea works poorly at low temperature and in high humidity;
Therefore, site them in deserts at mid latitudes for best results.
• Pack the “trees” around nuclear power plants above carbon
sequestration sites
• Now – the American Physical Society’s evaluation (2011) and a
summary: Bottom line, uneconomical until all large point-source
carbon emitters are already thoroughly scrubbed.
• But Lenton & Vaughn 2009 conclude: “In the most optimistic
scenarios, air capture and storage by BECS, combined with
afforestation and bio-char production appears to have the potential
to remove 100 ppm of CO2 from the atmosphere…”
• (BECS= Bio-Energy with Carbon Sequestration)
The real point should be – we need
to do it all – Immediately.
• …We need to scrub CO2 out of the existing carbon
energy sources, and also pull and sequester CO2 out of
the atmosphere. Both, at the same time, and rapidly
abandon fossil fuels altogether.
• Even if we end all CO2 emissions immediately, global
temperatures are already high enough to melt a
significant fraction, and perhaps nearly all, of the Earth’s
ice, given a few centuries of melting. Global sea levels
would rise many 10’s of meters, submerging nearly all of
the Earth’s great cities where presently sited.
• The characterization of CO2 removal from the air as a
“non-starter” – is a non-starter. We need to “start” all of
the above.
An early and perhaps overly rosy
quantitative evaluation of the
Lackner idea…
• Can remove CO2 a thousand times faster
than real trees
• Emits only 200g of CO2 for every kg of
CO2 removed from the air
• Each “tree” costs about the same as a
new car, and removes 90,000 tons of
carbon per year.
Compare Lackner’s Artificial
Trees to Real Trees
• Real trees: 7 trees to remove 1 human’s
worth of CO2 production (476 lb/yr)
• Lackner’s “tree”: claim - 1000x more
efficient than real trees.
• Would need 100 million Lackner trees to
remove as much CO2 as we are emitting
• Would need 100 billion real trees to do the
same.
• Source for these figures is here
Let’s Run Some Simple Figures…
• 100 billion additional trees would require:
• At 33 ft x33 ft = 1000 ft2 per tree as a ballpark rough
number, means
• 1000 ft2 /tree x 100x109 trees = 1014 ft2
• = Area of United States = 1.06 x1014 ft2
• In other words, we’d need to plant additional real trees
on a tree farm as large as the United States to soak up
all the CO2 emissions. That sounds very hard to do
• If Lackner’s claims are correct, we’d need only 1/1000 of
this area, or about ¾ of the area of Los Angeles County,
if we still allow 1000 ft2 per artificial tree. This sounds doable… IF Lackner’s claims are correct
Where to put the carbon is still
an issue…
Injecting CO2 into underground porous spaces
• Norwegians have been putting 1 million tons of CO2 per year back
into the ground undersea.
• The Utsira Sand has pore-space volume of ~600 km^3. 6 km^3
would be sufficient to store 50 years emissions from ~20 coal-fired
or ~50 gas-fired 500 MW power-stations.
….but
• Remember that China alone is stoking up 1
coal-fired power plant PER WEEK.
• It gets worse… "Global Coal Risk Assessment:
Data Analysis and Market Research," released
on 11/20/2011, estimated there are currently
1,199 proposed coal plants in 59 countries.
China and India together account for 76 percent
of these plants.
• The United States is seventh, with 36 proposed
new coal-fired power plants.
This is despite the buzz about
natural gas as the new energy
source (“thanks” to fracking)
Artificial photosynthesis
An electrochemical cell uses energy from a solar
collector or a wind turbine to convert CO2 to
simple carbon fuels such as formic acid or
methanol, which are further refined to make
ethanol and other fuels.
• Very energy intensive, but recent discovery of a
catalyst – an ionic liquid electrolyte (Rosen et.al.
2011) may make it energetically viable
• Process involves converting CO2 into
(poisonous) carbon monoxide as a first step.
Safety issues?
Capturing CO2 by way of
Accelerated Weathering of
Limestone
• Rau et.al. find this a viable process for capturing CO2 from fossil fuel
power plants, converting it to calcium bicarbonate through the
reaction…
• Cost estimated at ~$25/ton of CO2 sequestered
• http://aftre.nssga.org/Symposium/2004-09.pdf
• If these costs can be realized, this looks relatively economical
• What to do with the calcium bicarbonate? It only exists as an
aqueous solution at standard atmospheric conditions, so the volumes
required mean it would have to go into the oceans, presumably. How
would this affect ocean chemistry?
Rau method w/ outflow to the ocean results in minimal
pH and pCO2 effects vs. letting atmospheric CO2
directly diffuse into surface waters
Rau Process is the Most Promising CO2
removal mechanism I’ve yet found for
scaling up to GeoEngineering scales
• Requires ready source of limestone, so could only be
done on large scale from certain coastal locations
• Results in equilibrium pH change in ocean, after 1000
years, of -0.0012 per 30B tons CO2 processed. (30B
tons/yr is current rate we’re injecting CO2 into
atmosphere) (my calculation), and this is acceptable in
terms of its effect on ocean life (compare to ocean slide
show on pH rate of change today)
• More figures and power requirements should be done,
but the basic paper provides enough to do this – it’s
worth a careful examination, if/when we get serious
about removing atmospheric CO2 before it’s too late.
Related: Add CaCO3=Calcium Carbonate
Powder Directly to the Ocean?
• Harvey et.al. 2012 suggest this, although it would take
decades to have an effect on fighting acidification, and
it would be tiny
• Would (marginally) help the ocean absorb CO2 from the
atmosphere, but plenty of limestone is already in contact
with the oceans along many shorelines worldwide
• 10% of the Earth’s surface is covered by limestone.
• Add CaCO3 to upwelling areas, sequester an additional
0.3 billion tons of CO2 per year (1% of what we add to
air by fossil fuel burning).
• Would seem to be a pretty minimal effort, and Stanford’s
Caldeira agrees
• Bottom line – doesn’t look promising
Drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere and using it to
make carbonates - limestone rock (Belcher et.al.
2010)
• … a process which happens naturally by ocean life (but too slowly,
and cannot happen at all in a too-acidic ocean such as rapid CO2
rise is creating).
• Major problems to be overcome; the amount of energy required in
the process, scaling up to the levels needed to affect our
atmosphere, sourcing calcium, and cost, among others.
• Given that humans have injected an additional 1.2 trillion tons of
CO2 over the past 250 years, the Belcher et.al. process would
require ~2.4 trillion tons of CaCO3, and at 2.71 g/cc density of
calcium carbonate,
• This would require building 8x1017 cc's of rock, or a cube 1 million
centimeters on a side, which is equivalent to a block the height of
Mt. Everest (30,500 ft on a side) from sea level.
• That's also going to require a lot of calcium. Calcium is common, but
mostly it is found as - calcium carbonate! Destroying CaCO3 in
order to make CaCO3 is questionable, except that we might hope to
use low-carbon energy (nuclear) to make this round trip(?)… that’s
frankly very speculative at this point.
• This is NOT the most promising strategy
Start Smaller?
• To instead immediately drop current CO2 atmospheric levels from 400
ppm to 350 ppm would required a cube of calcium carbonate of only
22,180 ft on a side; still higher than any mountain in the Western
Hemisphere.
• At current production rates of ~30 billion tons of CO2 per year, it
requires an additional cube-shaped mountain 7,100 ft on a side every
year.
• Is it possible to build "scrubbers" for the atmosphere that could
accomplish such a vast task? Where do we put it all - the ocean? We'd
better make sure ocean acidification levels don't reach levels (as they
will this century, on our current trajectory) that begin to dissolve existing
oceanic calcium carbonate. When that happens, the problems we have
been presenting so far will pale by comparison.
• Maybe besides putting it in the ocean, we could take a clue from the
ancient Egyptians… There is something satisfying about visualizing oil
company executives conscripted to toil under the hothouse conditions
on 21st Century Earth building the Great Carbon Pyramids - pyramids
of calcium carbonate (or calcium bicarbonate, as the case may be)
miles high, sufficient to clean up our atmosphere. And, at wages
comparable to those of the poor souls who built those at Giza, Egypt.
I'm sure there will be little problem finding people who would donate
the land just for the satisfaction of watching them toil.
Creating carbon fuels on-the-fly, rather
than mining fossil fuels
Gasoline and gasoline substitutes are attractive because…
• --- transportation vehicles (trucks, cars, trains) require very high energy
density power sources, and gas is hard to beat.
• --- we have existing infrastructure to deliver
• --- require little modification to existing vehicles to utilize
• But….
• Corn-based biofuels make little sense. They consume 30% more energy in
growth/manufacture than they give. Other problems:
• --- commandeer valuable farmland which could go to food
• --- vast acreage of tropical forests are cleared to produce sugar cane, palm
oil, and cereal grains destined for ethanol. Clearing tropical forests adds
both heat and CO2 to the atmosphere
• --- biofuels leave soils poorer, are supplemented with artificial fertilizers,
which add nitrous oxide and other pollutants to the atmosphere in their
manufacture, and are heavy water users.
• --- they nevertheless are being pursued, incentivized by government
subsidies for growers.
• --- accounting for carbon flows is deeply flawed on the part of the
proponents of corn and sugar ethanol biofuels. This strategy is not carbon
neutral
Good: Cellulosic Ethanol
• A Berkeley study published in Science
(Farrell et al. 2006) finds the cellulosic
ethanol has significant advantages over
fossil fuel in the making of gasoline
• Cellulosic ethanol many times more
efficient and lower carbon footprint than
corn-based or other ethanol’s.
(A) Net energy and net greenhouse gases for gasoline, six studies, and
three cases. (B) Net energy and petroleum inputs for the same.
Small light blue circles are reported data that include incommensurate
assumptions, whereas the large dark blue circles are adjusted values that use
identical system boundaries. Conventional gasoline is shown with red stars, and
EBAMM scenarios are shown with green squares. Adjusting system boundaries
reduces the scatter in the reported results. Moreover, despite large differences in
net energy, all studies show similar results in terms of more policy-relevant
metrics: GHG emissions from ethanol made from conventionally grown corn can
be slightly more or slightly less than from gasoline per unit of energy, but
ethanol requires much less petroleum inputs. Ethanol produced from cellulosic
material (switchgrass) reduces both GHGs and petroleum inputs substantially.
Better: Microbe-based fuel producers
• Bio-engineered bacteria at MIT produce isobutanol – a
burn-able fuel. It appears it may be feasible to scale this
up to industrial scales.
• Algae-based diesel production. The company Algenol
claims to be able to produce over 6,000 gallons of
ethanol per acre per year, compared to corn’s rate of 370
gallons per acre per year. That’s 15 times more!
• Algae-based fuels may be viable, as judged in this paper
on alternative energy economics and investments
Biodiesel from Algae
From Algenol’s website
Vertical hangers better utilize space, but
lose some incoming sunlight
Related: Utility-Scale Solar
Shades of Plants
• This is a problem with current massive
solar farms… they are incompatible
with the local ecology
• Better: Research at UCSC on solar cells
which are transparent at wavelengths
needed by plants, and placed much
higher, minimizing local ecological
damage
• See local news
We have TOO MANY people competing for
TOO FEW resources on this finite planet
• However, a major point is that ANY method of
producing significant quantities of biofuels are
going to have a major impact on raising prices
for competing resources. For ethanols, the
dilemma is “food-vs.-fuel”, and for cellulosic it is
(to some extent) “everything-vs.-fuel”…
• Cellulosic ethanol led to price rises in pulp such
that Mexicans were unable to buy tortillas, and
wood pellet factories pricing dairy farmers out of
the market for sawdust.
All Biofuels Share a Common Problem
• They emit CO2 back into the atmosphere!
• At their most perfect manifestation, they are at
best “carbon neutral”.
• That’s not good enough. However, it’s
certainly better than the vastly “carbon
positive” fuels we have going currently
So, we’ve had alternative fuels employed now for going on 20
years. How are we doing on reducing CO2 emissions? Answer:
CO2 is not going down, not staying level, nor merely increasing
linearly… rather, it continues to accelerate upward.
Maybe we need more Drastic
Measures…
D. GeoEngineering
• Launch billions of “butterflies” to the L1
point, to block sunlight. Must be actively
controlled to keep them there. (Angel et al.
2007)
Or… Move one or more asteroids to the L1 Lagrangian point between
us and Sun, and sputter dust off of it to attenuate sunlight
Tug an asteroid to the L1 Lagrangian
Point, keep it there and blast off dust
to block sunlight from Earth?
• A related idea which avoids having to launch occulting
objects from Earth is to nudge a suitable asteroid or
asteroids into a proper orbit so that we can blast dust off
of it and let the dust be a partial absorber of sunlight.
• This would seem quite dangerous to attempt and far too
difficult to engineer. But you can read the paper (Bewick
et al. 2012) and see what you think. You can read more
opinions here.
• There is precedent, in that there is a great deal of
circumstantial evidence that comet impact(s) / debris
associated with the Taurid Meteor Shower may have
been the culprit which initiated the Younger-Dryas
cooling 12,900 years ago which reversed the exit from
the last great Ice Age and cooled the Earth for an
additional 1000 years (Napier 2010 and references
therein)
Injecting Reflective Aerosols
into the Stratosphere
• This would mimic the effect of large volcanic
eruptions in their climate effect, and so we are
confident they would indeed cool the planet
• My (cynically sarcastic) thought – why not just
encourage through direct subsidies, the
construction of more coal mines, coal plants,
with very tall smoke stacks??
• Let’s make the world’s air look like China’s!
• Oh, I forgot – we already subsidize fossil fuel
corporations in the amount of
$1,000,000,000,000 in 2012 alone (source)
Are These Shade Strategies
Really a Solution?
• Huge problems:
• 1. Sulfate aerosols are toxic (sulfuric acid) and would come down
out of the stratosphere on a ~few years time scale
• 2. Energy required to get the sulfates up there. Dozens or hundreds
of cubic kilometers of material raised into the stratosphere
• They cool only daytime, not night time temperatures
• 4. Astronomers would not be happy (but, they’re not a significant
voting block, so just forget about them)
• 5. Aesthetics – permanently smoggy hazy skies everywhere. Anyone
who’s lived in a smoggy city like I have, wheezes just thinking about
it, and finds this pretty depressing.
• 3. Most serious – ALL shade strategies only cool the planet,
they do nothing to help the problem of CO2-induced ocean
acidification
• Radiative forcings of GeoEngineering
strategies (Lenton & Vaughn 2009)
Can We Get Off Fossil Fuels? In
Some Countries - Yes
E. Population, Policy Strategies
Policy, Legal Solutions
• Politically, there are very obvious steps which
can and need to be taken immediately. The oil
and mining companies will continue to cause
environmental damage as long as they don't
have to pay for it.
• These political solutions do not require brilliant
people to make difficult scientific breakthroughs,
they "only" require political courage. Our global
political systems are clearly not very good at
empowering people with intelligence,
political courage, and integrity. But that's an
even tougher problem, perhaps, than climate.
Externalized costs must be
converted to true costs
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Externalized costs is a vast and pervasive flaw in the laissez faire paradigm.
What would fossil fuel companies have to charge for their products if they
were forced to pay for…
--- the destruction of a significant amount of the 217,490 miles of the
planet's current coastlines?...
---the costs of insurance premiums caused by escalating weather extremes
(which I've already linked here)?
---the costs of the wars to be fought over food as climate zones shift too
rapidly for agriculture to adapt to?
---the cost of destroying the ocean's ecosystems through acidification by
CO2?
--- Compensating most of the world’s population for rendering uninhabitable
the land they live on now?
This list could go on, of course…. What if those costs were then returned,
dollar-for-dollar, directly to those who will pay those costs - all of us, and our
children? This would provide overwhelming incentive to drastically cut CO2
emissions and scale up non-fossil energy sources such as nuclear and
photovoltaics.
Subsidies to fossil fuel
corporations
• Global subsidies to fossil fuel companies
is estimated in 2012 to have risen from
$775 Billion to $1 trillion, although precise
figures are difficult to know because so
many countries hide the figures.
• These should end. Immediately.
Population Incentives
• Consider; if the larger problem is a planet
living beyond its carrying capacity, how
wise is it to provide tax credits for adding
more population, as we do in the U.S.?
• Child tax credits should be eliminated, and
additional tax imposed for having
additional children.
Consumption vs Income
• It will always be true – if you want more of
something, tax it less. If you want less of it,
tax it more. Therefore…
• Eliminate all income taxes and fund government
strictly through consumption taxes (progressivity
could still be added in as a secondary step)
• Motivate the reduction in consumption and
instead motivate saving and therefore capital
investment in the changes which must be made
The Carrying Capacity of Earth
- Reducing Population
• Burning through in a few hundred years the Earth's store of fossil
fuels - an inheritance which took many tens of millions of years to
create, is symptom of a larger problem. We on Earth have been
living far beyond the ability of the planet to sustainably support.
• Humans and our domesticated livestock have gone from being
0.1% of the biomass of all land vertebrates 10,000 years ago to
now being 97% today.
• We're losing 1% of the Earth's topsoil every year, due to typical
agriculture practices. Topsoil is irreplacable on anything but
geologic time scales.
• World population will reach 9.5 billion by mid-century. Our planet
can, with current technology, support this many people sustainably
only at a standard of living equivalent to today's Ethiopia,
according to a number of studies at Stanford University (links here
and here).
• Ethiopia, with one of the harshest standards of living on Earth.
Ethiopia – a place of widespread
grinding poverty
Correlation: Intelligence vs. the
Willingness to Tolerate Shortterm Discomfort for Long-term
Reward
• I'm haunted by the results of the classic Stanford "delayed
gratification" studies (and here) of children, which show that the
willingness to delay gratification for ultimately larger reward in 4-year
olds is predictive of later measures of intelligence and success in
life.
• We as a planet behave like the immediate gratification 4 year olds in
these studies, preferring to eat through our seed corn now rather
than clearly acknowledge what that means for our future.
• What's interesting about the studies is that the choice is so easily
grasped by all (1 candy now, or 2 candies if you wait a bit), that it is
not a test of the ability to understand what is being asked…
• It is a test of the willingness to pause and make real in one's
mind what the future will hold, vs. simply avoiding that
awareness in order to indulge short-term wishes.
Reducing Population size has another aspect…reducing the size of
existing people! Obese people use up excess resources just like
additional people do. Enough corporate-promoted junk food, please!
Also relates to delayed gratification studies
Game Theory Says – We’re
Doomed
• A study applying Game Theory and Nash equilbria
(remember, “A Beautiful Mind”?) finds that climate
negotiations will fail. Experiments with real individuals
verified this.
• When given realistic rules and choices, including a
certain amount of uncertainty as to when we hit the
tipping point and climate catastrophe is inevitable,
competitive negotiators will not do the right thing.
• Why? Selfish interests, trying to get the other guy to
make the carbon sacrifice instead of you.
• In a system of competitive players within a global
atmosphere, mutual assured destruction is the result.
• Read the details here
Along the Same Lines…
• A History of Climate Change Negotiations
in 83 seconds… (you’ll laugh, you’ll cry)
The Problem Goes Deeper Still
• The Culture of Growth as THE Primary Value and
Goal to Achieve Human Well Being
• Endless growth on a finite planet must end. We have
reached that point.
• Efficiency increases, better insulation, more renewable
energy sources, etc etc... only make the problem
WORSE - not better. Despite huge improvements in the
technologies of efficiency and steep drops in the cost of
solar panels, the rate of CO2 and methane release is not
only not decreasing, not only is it not staying the same,
not only is it not trending upward merely at a constant
slope - it's actually accelerating. Why?
• The reason is that we are taking those
savings and simply using them to indulge in
additional uses which further desecrate the
planet that must support us all.
Nolthenius’ 2nd Law: A value will attract
exploitation, thus degrading it until it is no
longer an attractive value
• This is analogous to the thermodynamics of heat. The
heat equation expresses this same idea. Heat
(degradation) flows in to a non-degraded area at a rate
corresponding to the gradient (i.e. how “great” the value
is)
• Ponder why, when freeways are widened, the traffic
quickly grows and the freeway is again clogged.
Freeway widening only encourages more people to use
the freeway, when instead, health and well-being would
be improved better by cycling, walking.
• Another example – wonderful places to live: only end up
attracting people to the point that the “quality gradient” is
extinguished – the town, the land… degrade until it is no
longer desirable enough to attract more people to it. I’ve
watched this happen in Santa Cruz during my 28 years
here. It’s still a more desirable place than most, and so I
expect the degradation to continue.
What is needed is a change in
cultural values. Happiness,
genuine well-being, must be rethought by the average voter
• See “The Conundrum” by David Owen
• I’m going to stop here. This is getting to be
too deep to go further for this limited
course! I hope I’ve stimulated you to think
further….
• Let’s get out there and make the world
better – there’s lots of work to do
Key Points - Strategies
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Shu (2008); only Solar PV and Nuclear can provide practical large scale nonfossil power
Solar requires high quality battery technology to go “off grid”
Solar has many advantages: know them.
Existing point-source CO2 emitters are more economical to scrub than is the
atmosphere
CO2 and high temperatures are permanent, unless CO2 can be removed rapidly
from the atmosphere
Artificial trees to scrub CO2 from atmosphere – must be sited in mid-latitudes
Artificial trees; rapidly evolving, require high energy input, probably nuclear
CO2 must be removed from atmosphere before it is absorbed by the ocean, or
ocean life in peril and climate change truly permanent
How much world power supplied by fossil, and by non-fossil
Renewable sustainable present technologies can support world’s current
population only at a standard of living equivalent to that of Ethiopia. Or, at
current income distribution, can support about 2 billion people.
Most promising carbon-neutral bio-fuel source appears to be algae-based
Reducing atmosphere CO2 from 400ppm to 280ppm by making calcium
carbonate would require a Mt. Everest sized cube
Game theory experiment show: climate negotiations will fail due to perceived
selfish interests
Tragedy of the Commons, plus the Culture of Economic Growth as the top
societal value, insures environmental degradation for all.