There’s an interesting article over at Nature’s News Blog you might want to take a look at. Apparently, by the end of this year China’s per capita carbon emissions will exceed those of the EU. That’s per capita emissions.
The U. S. is still the heavyweight champ of carbon emissions but U. S. production is declining sharply while Chinese production continues to rise sharply.
I see this development as completely vindicating the position I have held: that the primary mechanism by which the EU and the U. S. have decreased their carbon emissions, exporting their heavy industries to China, has been counter-productive. Sure, that strategy has reduced carbon production in the U. S. and the EU. It has moved it from here, where it might have been addressed, to China where the problem becomes intractable. More recently the U. S. has decreased its carbon production by using natural gas in energy production rather than coal or oil. Let’s hope that trend continues. Note that energy production in the U. S. is already reaching the targets of the Kyoto Protocol without “cap and trade”. That’s now a dead letter.
The population of China is larger than the U. S., the EU, and Russia combined and by a substantial margin. As long as China’s per capita production rises no level of reduction here will result in actual reduction in total global production. That battle is lost, routed, driven from the field.
Attention should now be turned away from getting U. S. energy producers to reduce their carbon emissions and towards removing carbon from the atmosphere by technological means.
I urge commenters not to debate whether anything should be done but rather what should be done. There’s going to be a buck in this for somebody and I’d prefer that it be us.
Scrubbing CO2 would mean a tremendous investment of financial resources, but it would also be one hell of a jobs program. On the one hand we have a problem that will require a sustained national response and massive labor, while on the other we have an army of 20 million ready for work. If we’re going to make an effort to deal with unemployment and the continuing economic downturn I can’t think of a better use of those people than environmental defense.
Attention should now be turned away from getting U. S. energy producers to reduce their carbon emissions and towards removing carbon from the atmosphere by technological means.
Why not just plant a bunch of trees? Figure out which trees grow fastest and sequester carbon best. Genetically modify trees to make them better at the sequestration. Cut the forest down periodically and stack up the trees someplace deep, like the Yucca Flats mines that were supposed to house nuclear waste. (Other options would be to sink the stuff to the bottom of the oceans – perhaps it will eventually end up as methane hydrates.)
Once you get carbon levels where you want them use the trees as you would normally.
Expect that once you reduce CO2 sufficiently that you will find out something else is causing a crisis that will lead to “the end of life as we know it” and you’ll be stuck having to do some other damned thing to save the planet. You’d think after hundreds of millions of years of multi-cellular life on this rock it could take care of itself.
Heck, don’t even worry about tearing the trees down and stirubg then. Genetically modify California’s redwoods to grow faster and let them reclaim all the areas they lost to logging before the tree-huggers managed to save what was left. (Score one for tree-huggers on that front. Those forests are amazing and I’m glad someone stopped the loggers before they stripped the earth of them.) That alone would probably take care of a good chunk of the sequestration problem itself. Similarly for the Amazon rain forest, Madagascar, Haiti, etc.
and STORING them. That’s what I get for letting a cat do the typing for me….
The problem is a political and social one not an existential one. 10,000 years ago the way human beings handled climate change, whatever its cause, was by moving somewhere that was more hospitable. Now we have more people, national boundaries, property lines, and so on.
I’d be a little bit careful, Dave. I’m not sure we have outsourced to China our energy intensive businesses. I think it’s more energy not intensive, but labor intensive, businesses.
China is chugging out CO2 because it has developed its own energy intensive businesses. It’s been a growing economy.
Our CO2 emissions seem to be declining because of the service/manufacturing mix, but not necessarily steel or petroleum production etc.
Lastly, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Per capita is bull. It’s CO2 per GDP dollar. Is your energy consumption and CO2 emission footprint producing anything? Or not.
I don’t even want to get into the bizarre global warming thingy.
The problem is a political and social one not an existential one.
I know that. You know that. But we both know that is not how it is framed. And the next crisis (I’ll skip the scare quotes, on the off chance that the next one actually IS a crisis) will be billed that way.
Drew, the premise is very straightforward. Proving it is not. I’m personally agnostic on the topic, but the proponents have done a helluva lot of damage to their cause by scientific and political recklessness.
And the next crisis (I’ll skip the scare quotes, on the off chance that the next one actually IS a crisis) will be billed that way.
That is an asinine parenthetical. “Crisis” should have been in scare quotes. A real crisis should of course be treated as such, and anything that isn’t a crisis but is billed as such should get the scare quotes. Dumb-assed piece of writing….
@Icepick
The problem with relying on new trees to scrub CO2 is that it would take enormous numbers of trees decades before they could be removed and stored. Also much of the carbon they absorb is stored in the soil, and can’t be sequestered by us. Also it appears trees are capable of storing less CO2 as the atmosphere warms, and warmer temperatures make it more likely that carbon will be released from the deeper soils as they warm. The same thing happens with our oceans: as they heat up they can store less dissolved CO2.
I found an old link regarding construction of tens of thousands of artificial scrubbers. The question appears to be whether it would require more energy than is utilized by burning the fossil fuels in the first place. As we all know the financial costs of such a program are not relevant, but whether the real resources used in producing these devices are available. Labor clearly is, but do we have the metals, energy and many other ingredients needed to cook these up on a planetary scale?
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/pulling_co2_from_the_air_promising_idea_big_price_tag/2197/
China’s CO2 per incremental GDP dollar has been rising for at least a decade even as it has declined in the U. S. and EU. I wrote a post on this very subject seven or eight years ago. The trend has persisted since then. Strengthened, even.
I posted on this subject a couple of years back. You might be interested in the report to which I link there.
It’s probably the building, the development as much as anything else. Most people don’t realize it but cement production is the second most intensive carbon-producing industry, right after energy production.
Ben, those things are true, but so is the fact that any program is going to take decades in any event. Plus, growing trees is (a) something we already know how to do, (b) cheap, and (c) something that is politically viable. Try getting a trillion dollars for building all those scrubbers you imagine and see how that works out. (There’s no way the governments manage this on anything less than that scale.) Not to mention the gazillion zoning problems, compounded by NIMBYism.
OTOH, the number of people growing a forest of redwoods where a forest of redwoods used to exist as recently as 130 years ago is going to be limited, not to mention that growing the trees (even if genetically modified) will take time, allowing to mitigate some of the problems of human displacement.
I will also confess that I am somewhat concerned about geo-engineering projects of a technological nature. Okay, so we start building all those artificial trees. Let’s say we build the five million of them called for in the article Schuler hyper-linked. Okay, when the planet starts cooling off and Russia starts getting much colder, what happens then? The Russians then have cause to start complaining that we’re trying to fuck them in the ass by turning north Asian into a big damned glacier. And they’ll be correct! They might not want that. They may start blowing the things up. Not here, most likely, but why not blow up the scrubbers in central Asia or eastern Europe. for example.
On the other hand, if we’re just reforesting our part of the world, well, it will be harder for them to complain that we’re using a new hi-tech super-weapon to screw them.
TL,DR Version: Not everyone will be on board with geo-engineering, but we can do my program here as mitigation (a common idea in real estate development) here, and it will be hard for others to object.
Plus, I have to side with Reynolds on this one: Why is Schuler siding with armies of murderous artificial tree robots?
You turn some of them off.
I don’t see this as an either/or. Real trees, artificial trees, other solutions I’ve posted on from time to time, are all part of the arsenal.
Slightly more seriously, how much “fluid” would be required for all those artificial trees? And are we talking about something we’ve got lots of (sea water) or something we have less of (potable fresh water)?
What would be the effect of locating scrubbers in some places (the US, Western Europe, Japan) but not others (the BRIC Block, the Third World)? Would that change heat distributions and thus weather patterns? Who would be the winners and losers? Same problem with forests, but who’s going to complain?
I don’t see this as an either/or. Real trees, artificial trees, other solutions I’ve posted on from time to time, are all part of the arsenal.
My point is that people will argue about when and how many should be turned off. No one is going to argue about someone growing a forest, especially one that used to be there.
This is big engineering, and that usually means lots of political considerations too. That’s why I think a natural approach works better, it cuts down on the political capital needed.
Plus, I really don’t want to piss off the Russians on this topic. What if they decide they really REALLY want a warmer world? Could they try burning off or even releasing methane hydrates they have access to? That kind of crazy stunt is something more likely to be tried (and I assume it is very UNlikely) if a big political ruckus happens beforehand.
If trees can have a significant mitigating factor on their own, I suggest using them first.
Another suggestion from the report I linked to: algae-coated buildings.
Another suggestion from the report I linked to: algae-coated buildings.
I’m sure the people working and living in the buildings will love that feature. Nothing like coming home to the stagnant aroma of pond scum!
One I’ve wondered about is whether or not having a lawn on top of your roof might not help keep the building cooler. However, even a thin layer of dirt and grass will add weight, and give you another reason to worry about cracks in the roof.
Paint the roof white.
Steve