Freeman Dyson on global warming

Freeman Dyson is usually worth reading. Here he is on global warning and other matters.

Carbon offsets and waste, fraud, and corruption

On Maverecon, Willem Buiter writes a sensible post, Carbon Offsets: Open House for Waste, Fraud and Corruption,

Offsets, the creation of credits that can be added to the (national, regional or global) CO2E [carbon dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas emissions] quota under cap and trade schemes, require not only the (difficult) verification of how much CO2E is actually emitted in the real world, but also the impossible verification of how much CO2E would have been emitted in some counterfactual alternative universe. The quantity of offset credits earned by some activity is the net quantity of CO2E that has been saved as a result of this activity.

Just stating it makes one shout out: impossible! Fraud! Bribery! Corruption! Wasteful diversion of resources into pointless attempts at verification! And indeed this is what is happening before our eyes. Enterprises get paid for not cutting down trees and for installing filters and scrubbers they would have installed in any case. The new Verification of the Carbon Counterfactual industry is growing in leaps and bounds. The amounts of money involved are vast and the opportunities for graft, bribery and corruption limitless. The offset proposal has birthed a monster.

Who came up with this demented offset concept? It’s an attempt to placate the developing world for not having enough CO2E emitting activities historically to benefit from a significant free initial allocation of credits in proportion to a country’s historical track record of CO2E emissions[...]

- but read the post.

Will Live Earth save the planet?

Nature magazine writes about the Live Earth concerts, “Concerts aim to save the Earth“.

Comedian Chris Rock says about Live Earth, “I think this will do for global warming what Live 8 did for ending world hunger.”

(Here is a classic Chris Rock video clip)

Terraforming Terra

What should scare us most, climate change or hubristic schemes to mitigate climate change?

The unintended negative consequences of e.g. biofuel production from food crops are large, and include tortilla riots in Mexico because of rising food prices, destruction of rainforests in Indonesia to make way for palm oil plantations, and a general expansion of land under cultivation.

Here is a harbinger of things to come. A company plans to dump iron particles into the ocean in a 100 by 100 kilometer area near the Galapagos Islands in order to stimulate the growth of plankton.

In this case it is not the action of some mad scientist, it is business. The company is peddling “carbon offsets”.

What will be next? Why not seed the stratosphere with sulphur particles and claim carbon credits for that?

The biofuel fiasco and other well-meaning attempts to improve nature - think of the introduction of rabbits in Australia - should make us vary of climate change interventions.

How should we experiment with our poorly understood, nonlinear planetary systems? Very, very carefully.

Climate change is not as scary as climate change mitigation schemes that are driven by the combination of a powerful rent-seeking lobby, investors’ feeding frenzy, opportunistic politicians, and political correctness. Biofuel from food crops is one such scheme. There will no doubt be other even more ambitious schemes in the future. The danger is that they will do more harm than good, and that they will be almost impossible to stop because of the groups that benefit from them.

Update: BBC: Galapagos experiment sparks alarm.

Let me add that I don’t think that dumping 100 tons of iron filings in a 10,000 square kilometer area in the ocean is a cause for alarm. It is not going to trigger a new ice age, destroy the Galapagos ecosystem, or end intelligent life on Planet Earth. The main effect will be to relieve some rather naive people of some of their cash when they pay for carbon offsets.

Tie carbon taxes to actual levels of warming?

Ross McKitrick has a proposal for harmonized carbon taxes tied to temperature. Note that if temperatures fell, this would turn into a carbon emissions subsidy. Somehow I don’t think that global-warming activists would buy into this. Why not?

The Clean Development Mechanism under fire

The Clean Development Mechanism isn’t working. From The Guardian,

Truth about Kyoto: huge profits, little carbon saved

Abuse and incompetence in fight against global warming

If a significant number of the 1,900m CDM credits [Clean Development Mechanism; it is supposed to offset greenhouse gases emitted in the developed world by selling carbon credits from elsewhere] waiting in the pipeline also prove to be bogus, the whole Kyoto project would start to backfire.

The Kyoto project is not credible. And as Charles de Gaulle said about treaties,

Treaties are like girls and roses. They last while they last.

The $40 billion handout

This week’s survey in The Economist of business and climate change explains why the US is likely to get a cap-and-trade system (as in the EU), rather than a carbon tax.

If the American governments adopts a cap-and-trade system [...], it will hand out permits to pollute. They are, in effect, cash. According to Paul Bledsoe of the National Commission on Energy Policy, those allowances are likely to be worth in the region of $40 billion. Companies therefore want to be involved in designing those regulations. As Mr Rogers explains: “There is a saying in Washington: if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” [...]

A tax would be a better option. Unlike a cap-and-trade system, which stipulated the amount of CO2 that may be emitted and allows the price to vary, a tax sets a price and lets it determine the quantity emitted. [...] But the prospects for a tax are not good. Business - particularly in America - is allergic to the very word; and the allowances which companies tend to be handed in the early stages of a cap-and-trade system have an obvious appeal to companies concerned about rising costs.

There is an academic discussion (e.g. here and here) about which is better, a carbon tax or cap-and-trade. But the discussion will remain academic. The $40 billion cap-and-trade allowance giveaway offers so many opportunities for patronage, lobbying, and campaign contributions from firms that stand to benefit that it is hard to see how a carbon tax could stand a chance. And on top of that, it is called a “tax”.

Quote of the day

From this week’s survey of business and climate change in The Economist,

Climate change is fashionable, and although fashion has the virtue of being able to transform the dull and worthy into the hip and happening, it is, by definition, transitory. Hollywood stars will probably get bored of their Priuses, and executives may become weary of mouthing green platitudes and move on to whatever branch of corporate social responsibility next catches the popular imagination.

Carbon trading and subsidies

In the excellent series the Financial Times has been running on carbon trading, Fiona Harvey writes that

Power generators will make tens of billions of euros in profit from the second phase of the European Union’s emissions trading scheme, according to predictions in an analysis of the market released on Friday.

Companies don’t have to pay for most of the carbon they may emit, they are issued with allowances.

Across the EU, governments plan to auction only 1.5 per cent of the available allowances. Electricity generators are expected to profit by passing on the cost of buying allow­ances to customers in lib­­eralized electricity markets.

The EU Emissions Trading Scheme is a scheme that provides huge subsidies for power generators, most of which are coal powered.

Biofuels and greenhouse gasses

The demand for biofuels is driving the destruction of forests and the emission of greenhouse gasses.

Origin of greenhouse gasses:

• Deforestation 25%
• Transport and industry 14%
• Aviation 3%

From The Independent (via EcoWorld),

Most people think of forests only in terms of the CO2 they absorb. The rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo basin and Indonesia are thought of as the lungs of the planet. But the destruction of those forests will in the next four years alone, in the words of Sir Nicholas Stern, pump more CO2 into the atmosphere than every flight in the history of aviation to at least 2025.

Indonesia became the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world last week. Following close behind is Brazil. Neither nation has heavy industry on a comparable scale with the EU, India or Russia and yet they comfortably outstrip all other countries, except the United States and China.

What both countries do have in common is tropical forest that is being cut and burned with staggering swiftness. Smoke stacks visible from space climb into the sky above both countries, while satellite images capture similar destruction from the Congo basin, across the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo.

If CO2 offsets make sense in aviation (a rather large “if”), then people who use biofuels in their cars should buy offsets to make up for the CO2 emission caused by the deforestation taking place when biofuel plantations are established. But this is absurd.

A sensible first step would be to get rid of all subsidies for biofuels. Why should EU taxpayers, for example, subsidize palm oil plantations, rainforest destruction, and greenhouse gas emissions in Indonesia and Malaysia?

Homage to Reid Bryson

Interview with Reid Bryson, “the father of the science of modern climatology.”

Via CCNet.

Carbon credit smokescreen

Financial Times reports under the headline Carbon trading schemes often not so green that there are

• Instances of people and organisations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.

• Industrial companies profiting from doing very little - or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.

• Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.

• A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the credits’ true value.

• Companies and individuals being charged over the odds for the private purchase of European Union carbon permits that have plummeted in value because they do not result in emissions cuts.

Read the story here, also this story by Fiona Harvey Beware the carbon offsetting cowboys.

Ethanol and respiratory-related deaths

From ScienceDaily,

Using ethanol-based fuel instead of gasoline would likely increase the ozone-related death rate in Los Angeles by 9 percent in 2020, according to a new study by atmospheric scientist Mark Jacobson. (Credit: Mark Z. Jacobson)

The deleterious health effects of E85 [a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline] will be the same, whether the ethanol is made from corn, switchgrass or other plant products, Jacobson noted. “Today, there is a lot of investment in ethanol,” he said. “But we found that using E85 will cause at least as much health damage as gasoline, which already causes about 10,000 U.S. premature deaths annually from ozone and particulate matter. The question is, if we’re not getting any health benefits, then why continue to promote ethanol and other biofuels?

Global warming mitigation and adaptation

As several people have observed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report favors mitigation over adaptation. Read for example here,

“…the IPCC continuously tries to deemphasize the importance of adaptation as development, for instance writing that,

there are formidable environmental, economic, informational, social, attitudinal and behavioural barriers to implementation of adaptation.

Of course the exact same thing could be said about mitigation (but is not said), and by contrast the IPCC always frames mitigation in a positive light:

Many impacts can be avoided, reduced or delayed by mitigation.”

Mitigation favors global solutions such as the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. It favors states, international organizations, and international bureaucracies. Mitigation is based on a belief that a central elite can set the rules and manage away our problems, it is managerialism.

In contrast, adaptation is local. The power to act must therefore be with local people, not with international organizations. The best way of empowering local people so that they can adapt is to make them prosperous. That means economic opportunities. An emphasis on adaptation therefore leads to radically different policies. These policies would not necessarily lead to an increase in power and funding for international organizations.

Of course we also need mitigation, but the present bias against adaptation only makes sense if we assume that it is in the nature of bureaucracies to want to accumulate money and power.

Biox: dead man walking

Instant transformation of corporate image from good to bad. How do you do it? Simple, just add palm oil.

Czech President Klaus on environmentalism

…”The biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism… [but] the threat of ambitious environmentalism,” wrote Mr Klaus. Environmentalists think they are guardians of the “undisputable truth”, he went on. They manipulate the media to exert pressure on policymakers by spreading “fear and panic”, so creating a “media-driven hysteria”.

But the centrally planned world environmentalists call for would be “catastrophic”, Mr Klaus adds. Their philosophy is static and denies change. They do not believe in economic expansion, they ignore technological progress, and they neglect the fact that climate has been changing throughout the earth’s history.

Czech environment minster Martin Bursik warned on Tuesday that Mr Klaus risked making a fool of himself and harming the Czech Republic’s reputation, national news agency CTK reported.

From ENDS Europe Daily (subscription necessary).

Why doom and gloom?

Benny Peiser: Britain’s leading cosmologists seem to be particularly gloomy about the future of civilisation and humankind… How do you explain this apocalyptic mood among leading cosmologists in Britain and the almost desperate tone of their pronouncements?

Freeman Dyson: My view of the prevalence of doom-and-gloom in Cambridge is that it is a result of the English class system. In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status. As a child of the academic middle class, I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher and have been gloomy ever since.

From CCNet via FuturePundit and Muck and Mystery.

The Sustainable Investment Holding

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has written a report for WWF Germany entitled Sustainable Investments for Conservation - The Business Case for Biodiversity (pdf, free, but registration necessary).

The ideas is to mobilize funds held by institutional investors (in this case, in the German speaking area) for conservation through the creation of a sustainable investment holding.

Most conservation projects are too small to be of interest to institutional investors. By pooling multiple commercial projects it should be possible to create a sustainable investment holding with a portfolio that could be of interest to large investors.

The projects described in the report (ecotourism in Costa Rica and Namibia, forestry in Brazil) do not pay directly for conservation, only indirectly. And, as mentioned in previous posts, neither ecotourism nor tree-growing CO2 offsets are without problems. Still, the idea is certainly worth exploring.

Fighting over carbon offsets

Many carbon offset schemes are bad, and there is a growing backlash against them (see this post on In Balance). Companies and NGOs with green goals are also competing for money and power. From BBC,

Carbon offsets ‘harm environment’

The current trend for “offsetting” carbon emissions by planting trees is doing more harm to the environment than good, MPs have been told.

The public is being “seriously misled” by companies peddling carbon offset schemes, campaigner Jutta Kill told the environmental audit committee.

The schemes did not reduce emissions and simply gave industry a “licence to pollute” elsewhere, she argued.

People should give money directly to climate charities instead, she said…

Jutta Kill is Climate Change Campaign Co-ordinator for the Forests and the European Union Resource Network (FERN), a charity.

The myth of carbon neutrality

From the Carbon Trade Watch publication The Carbon Neutral Myth - Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins,

…the idea of achieving climate neutrality through offsetting is no more than media spin. First, it takes 100 years to fully cancel out the carbon effect of one aeroplane flight. Second, the more you fly, the more you need to offset, and finally, depending on how quickly you think offsetting needs to happen, it is also more expensive to offset than Climate Care [a company selling emission offsets] would lead us to believe.

How much should we be paying to offset? Let’s go back to the original table of offset time objectives. How much should we be paying to Climate Care if we want to achieve our objectives:

 

So what can we conclude?

First, we are told that offsetting makes us climate neutral when it doesn’t. Each time we fly, our emissions go up.

Second, offsetting is far too cheap. Depending on how quickly we think we need to offset, we need to be paying as much as 15,000 times more to see our emissions offset in a sensible time frame…

That doesn’t mean we should feel guilty for not paying £86,402 ($169,684) in offsets for a New York to London flight. It also doesn’t mean that the offset scheme is totally harebrained. After all, it works for Climate Care.