Climate change goes construction mainstream

Last week we were asked to look at 'How to Make Your Home More Environmentally Friendly' on the Stanmore Contractors website. We were promised:

“plenty of valuable information such as:

• How increasing populations, strained natural resources, carbon emissions, and deforestation are all contributing towards global warming.
• The many health and economical benefits of reducing our carbon footprint, and having an energy efficient home.
• Tips and advice on how to assess energy efficiency
• Making the most of government schemes and incentives”

Frankly I was expecting puffery and special pleading. I was pleasantly surprised.

The site gives a simple and accurate account of climate change. It mentions sea level rise, Arctic ice, droughts and heatwaves and notes that “hundreds of coastal towns, cities and islands around the world [are] at risk of being underwater within the next century.” And it’s uncompromising about human responsibility for this, referring to both fossil fuels and population increases. That last point is better than some environmentalists I could mention!

So what are we to do? There are lots of suggestions, all sensible though some rather minor, and home insulation, part opf Stanmore’s business, is not given excessive space. It does mention the need to eat less meat but not the need to fly much less.

Let me repeat – I’m glad to see an ordinary business addressing climate change.

But there’s a problem – really three problems. First the site does not say that climate change is a crisis that threatens many lives. The death toll from the Paradise fire is still rising as I write and 993 people are missing. That’s in a rich country but most of the death and damage will be in poor countries with much worse services.

Second it does not say that we are on track for catastrophe:

• The world is on course for 3-4 degrees of warming.
• The UK’s policies are too weak to deliver the fifth carbon budget.
• No (or almost no) country has policies consistent with keeping within 1.5 degrees – the Paris target.

Third the advice implies, by omission, that we can address climate change by relatively minor lifestyle changes and some green shopping. And that’s nonsense. Of course it doesn’t say that and the author probably knows better but there it is.

Avoiding a climate breakdown requires immediate, vigorous action by every government. It requires major investments by businesses in every sector. And it requires all of us to accept change we really won’t like.

Perhaps I'm asking too much. Stanmore is a business, not a political party or a Green lobby. And the advice from environmental NGOs often falls into the same trap.

Yet it adds to the sense that avoiding catastrophic climate change will be easy. It won’t.

Unplugging the space Internet

Mark Handley of University College London has revealed Elon Musk's Starlink to be a leading contended for the title 'world's worst technology project' (New Scientist, 10/11/18 p 5).  The project will consume a lot of skilled effort. And it will add to climate change from the manufacture and launching of 900 comsats per year - a vast number.

And for what?

Starlink will allow some banks to gain a milisecond level advantage in that form of automated high-stakes gambling called high-frequency trading (HFT). HFT is a singularly useless activity that supports no businesses and feeds no children. And though it does make some bankers richer few of us are likely to see that as an advantage.

There are better uses for the money and effort that Starlink will consume. Musk should pull the plug now.

Caught in a NET?

As usual Greenpeace is being sniffy about NETs. https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2018/10/08/ipcc-climate-change-carbon-capture/

Of course in a sense they are right. NETs are unproven at scale and very uncertain as to cost. It would be better to cut emissions hard now than to continue emitting CO2 that will be removed from the air later. Prevention is better than cure and so on.

In a sense. But it's almost certain that we won't cut emissions hard enough so we will have to capture CO2 from the air. You have only to look at the pathways in the recent IPCC report on staying below 1.5 degrees to see that they represent, and are explicitly stated to require, an almost unprecedented economic transformation. 

We have been making this argument for 20 years. We have stressed the costs of inaction, the human benefits of mitigation, the moral case to reverse the harm we have done. And emissions have risen. Actions have been inadequate at best. Need I mention Putin, bin Salman and Trump? Perhaps not.

 

We are imposing large economic costs, the destruction of much of the natural world and perhaps a high death rate on future generations - now probably in our grandchildren's lives - to avoid cost and inconvenience to ourselves. This is a serious moral failure on the part of almost all governments, and indirectly of us. But that is now the baseline. 

We cannot now avoid presenting future generations with the bill for NETs. The best we can do NOW is to invest in the technologies needed, starting with CCS and a selection of NETs.

So where are we with NETs? Greenpeace cites an authoritative report on NETs which says that NETs "offer only limited realistic potential to remove carbon from the atmosphere and not at the scale envisaged in some climate scenarios".

The reasons for this conclusion are not clear. The report also notes "A recent study (Marcucci et al., 2017) concluded that ....substantial deployment of (direct air capture] (several gigatonnes of carbon removals per year by 2100) would allow these targets to be met." The big issue is simply cost. DAC will cost a lot more per ton than CCS used on a power station or cement works but the costs are highly uncertain, being quoted as $30-$1,000 per ton CO2!

There are still many technical options. The sooner we put serious money into R&D and pilot plants the better!