I thought you might find this piece by Casey Crownhart at MIT Technology Review interesting. It has three relevant graphs and the most relevant is the one above.
I have four problems with President Biden’s declaration about the U. S. paying “loss and damage” to poorer countries for its emissions. First, the president doesn’t have the legal authority to make such a commitment. The Constitution is quite clear about that.
Second, the whole concept is implicitly Marxist and wrong, dividing the world into exploiters (the United States and other rich countries) and exploited.
Third, those supporting “loss and damage” imagine a completely one-sided ledger. What they conveniently ignore is the contributions to modern agriculture, medicine, and transportation that the rich countries have made and from which the remainder have benefited. A lot of people in those poor countries owe their lives to the rich countries. Isn’t that worth anything?
Finally, it has the typical problem with foreign aid: poor people in rich countries paying rich people in poor countries. If it does anything respecting carbon emissions it will exacerbate them since the rich guys into whose hands the money flows tend to have higher carbon emissions than anybody else in their home countries.
Also, why start at 1750? Why not start at 10,000BC? Weren’t people emitting carbon then?
Agree. The loss and damage thing makes little sense and subject to lots of abuse. Much better to take the same monies and put it into research. Renewable energy options are already the cheapest in many places and if costs keep going down at anywhere near the same rate they will be the preferred energy source anyway even without loss and damage.
Steve
Dave Schuler: the whole concept is implicitly Marxist and wrong, dividing the world into exploiters (the United States and other rich countries) and exploited.
Exploitation considerably precedes Marx.
Dave Schuler: Also, why start at 1750? Why not start at 10,000BC? Weren’t people emitting carbon then?
Not appreciably. People of the Neolithic were largely carbon neutral, burning renewable resources. Deforestation may have had an impact later in history, but was still a small contributor compared to the industrial age.
Dave Schuler: What they conveniently ignore is the contributions to modern agriculture, medicine, and transportation that the rich countries have made and from which the remainder have benefited.
The practical problem is rapidly greening the entire global energy infrastructure. It’s going to take investment and cooperation. Poorer countries will naturally emit if that is required for economic growth. Even rich countries will tend to emit in a tragedy of the commons.
which is why CCS is a better solution than tyring to “green” the entire global energy infrastructure.
Only over a very long time horizon. That’s the same argument as those who don’t believe that anthropogenic climate change due to carbon emissions is a problem are making. Slash and burn is a documented Neolithic practice. When you burn down a forest that’s been in place for tens of thousands of years or longer it is only carbon neutral over a very long time horizon.
That’s also the problem with Germany’s extensive use of compressed wood pellets for heating and cooking.
I also think that the massive deforestation that has gone on in China over the last century is being underestimated as a source of emissions.
Dave Schuler: which is why CCS is a better solution than tyring to “green†the entire global energy infrastructure.
At this point, trees and soil remain the best methods of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). And they are not nearly enough. Certainly, investment should be made into CCS technology.
Dave Schuler: Slash and burn is a documented Neolithic practice.
Slash and burn is carbon neutral, or nearly so, for low population densities. It’s much the same as natural fire.
Dave Schuler: When you burn down a forest that’s been in place for tens of thousands of years or longer it is only carbon neutral over a very long time horizon.
When population density is high, the forests are not left alone long enough to regrow. But when population density is low, forests quickly recover and recapture the carbon.
Furthermore, we have evidence that atmospheric CO2 was about the same 10,000 years ago as it was at the advent of the industrial era.
https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/co2_10k.png
That’s false. The carbon that was originally captured over thousands of years will take thousands of years to recapture.
The evidence to which you point is not sensitive enough to capture non-linear change.
Dave Schuler: The carbon that was originally captured over thousands of years will take thousands of years to recapture.
Even in moist forests, slash and burn can be sustainable, given the time and space inherent in low population densities. See Kukla et al., The effect of traditional slash-and-burn agriculture on soil organic matter, nutrient content, and microbiota in tropical ecosystems of Papua New Guinea, Land Degradation and Development 2018: “we studied a chronosequence represented by active gardens, abandoned gardens (5–10 years old), secondary forest in abandoned garden sites (20–40 years old), and primary forest with no evidence of cultivation for at least 60 years.”
Dave Schuler: The evidence to which you point is not sensitive enough to capture non-linear change.
Not sure your point. Excess atmospheric CO2 has a high residence time in the atmosphere. If there were an accumulation of CO2 from slash and burn, it should show in the data. If it shot up and then fell back down (why?), then it might not show in the data, but then it wouldn’t have a sustained effect on global temperature.
No argument. It can be. It might not be. There is no way to determine. There are, however, ways to determine how much carbon is emitted by burning a tree. Offsetting the carbon emitted by burning a two year old tree is reasonably easy to do in two years as an approximation. Offsetting the carbon emitted by burning a 60 year old tree in less than 60 years is a lot harder.
Do whole forests have equilibrium carbon points? Nobody really knows.
Dave Schuler: There is no way to determine.
With science. An interesting aspect is that even with low population density, modernity has changed traditional practices. The young move away to the city, and the old people left behind can’t migrate as easily, so tend to wear out the soil more.
Besides, primitive lifestyles are way, way better and can’t be improved upon.