Sunday 16 August 2015

# 23 Florida can still be saved by taxing carbon


A)     Summary
Recently I had a long on-line debate with the “green majority”. It was on the desmog.ca website (1).  I wish politicians could have such debates because different opinions, problems and solutions come forward. They told me that I don’t pay enough attention to the catastrophic effects of climate change, even though I mention some of it in E) of post 22. Since I just read 2 articles showing how badly and how soon Florida will be flooded (2,3),  I will discuss that along with further carbon tax considerations. I also found out why some journalists predict sea levels to rise as much as 10 feet by the year 2050,(5), while expert researchers put the upper limit at under two meters this century. (7) In my opinion such a catastrophic rise can only be prevented by a global carbon tax. It will make alternative energy cheaper than that from fossil fuel and make carbon capture and storage more affordable. That will allow the more modern coal based power plants to continue operating. Ultimately we will be able to remove vast quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere to diminish the problems we created years ago. The “green majority”  told me that carbon tax is no solution to combat climate change. They figure it can only be done by leaving 2/3 of all reserves in the ground. I see that as a scientific requirement like the 2o C criterion ( 5,6 ) and the trillion ton communiqué (post 16). I feel that the 2/3 requirement can be achieved when the carbon tax is global and high enough. I urge all environmentalists to campaign hard for a global carbon tax. The fossil fuel does not stay in the ground by just wishing it or opposing a few pipelines. The “green majority” felt that I take a wishy washy middle of the road approach while my ideas are more of an activist. As an environmentalist I just analyse problems as I see them. I record them to show younger people how important carbon tax is. The “green majority” feels that I “use information that is already being published from sources (and frequently paid for by the oil industry to confuse public discourse)”. Almost all oil company information comes from the Carbon Tax Centre, an excellent US organisation which keeps people informed of new development. The “green majority” also objects to green power being used for oil extraction. In British Columbia we have surplus green power which is hard to sell (4), we could supply much more of it but not at the present 4c/KWh price. So until a global carbon tax solves that problem we could force Alberta to buy it for a reasonable price for oil extraction and export clean oil rather than dirty oil. As long as there is demand for oil it makes little difference in the world’s GHG emission which country supplies it. So why should we give our share to others and lower our standard of living?

B)     Flood predictions for Florida
Virtually all of South Florida is only a few feet above sea level (2). Should the ocean crawl just one more foot up the edges of this peninsula – something that’s projected to happen in the next two decades, by some estimates – most of the canal systems that keep the saltwater out of the area’s drinking wells would cease to function. A few more feet, and entire towns suddenly turn neo-Venetian, the roads flooded, the infrastructure almost impossible to salvage (2). Few places are as geographically ill-equipped to deal with rising water as southern Florida. Not only is much of the land barely a few feet above sea level, it also sits on a bed of porous limestone and sand, making measures such as dikes far less effective. Higher sea levels would eat away at the barrier islands that buffer the coast against powerful storms – which is hugely problematic, given that more powerful storms are one of the hallmarks of climate change (2). Rising waters may eventually consume large swaths of South Florida, but sudden storms will likely change the geographic and economic landscape first. “Insurance companies are already increasing flood insurance premiums,” Prof. Briceño says. “There is a point when insurance companies will say ‘no more.’ And if you are unable to insure a property with a mortgage on it, your property is worth nothing.” (2)

 With the increasing effects of climate change, urban dwellers must brace for a new reality in which extreme weather events are more frequent, less predictable – and more deadly – than ever before. Two to four billion people in coastal regions could be hit hard. (3)  And we need to think about where water is going to be 25 or 50 years from now.” “We have a management-by-disaster mentality,”. “What we need to do is take a different approach – to avoid having problems in the first place.(3)


    C )  Present predictions of rising sea levels

In order to find out what the present predictions are and how much rise there has been thus far I looked at 4 websites. They have widely different figures but all point out that due to specific conditions the rise will be much faster than anticipated a few years ago.

 The first site was the most frightening. It states that:  A crucial recent study led by James Hansen, the former director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The study, authored by Hansen and more than a dozen other scientists and published online, warns that even staying within the internationally agreed goal of keeping the planet within the 2-degree Celsius temperature warming limit has already caused unstoppable melting in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. The study shows that this will raise global sea levels by as much as 10 feet by the year 2050, inundating numerous major coastal cities with seawater.(5) In the next site Mr Hansen explained that that ice sheets may be more vulnerable than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated and that he looked at studies by  Paul Hearty, a geologist. Hearty found strong evidence for sea level rise late in the Eemian to +6-9 m (20-30 feet) relative to today. The Eemian is the prior interglacial period (~120,000 years ago), . Hearty also found evidence for powerful storms in the North Atlantic near the end of the Eemian period.(6) The real reason for such alarming figures is that the study was released  on line to be available at the upcoming Paris conference and that the media drew their own conclusions from some of the data. A realistic story of what happened is shown on the third site as follows:

The problem is, all those headlines describe a study, and that study doesn’t predict anything. It certainly doesn’t predict 10 feet of sea level rise by 2100 (or even 2050) as a number of stories have claimed. The choice of journal and the early publicity was deliberate. Hansen badly wanted the paper to come out before the December international climate talks in Paris, and peer review can often take much longer than that. For reference, the researchers note that satellite measurements of Greenland’s melt rate from 2003 to 2013 would imply a 10-year doubling time, but acknowledge that “this high rate may not continue.” It very well may not; that’s a very short time period to extrapolate from, and 2012 was an anomalously big melt year. The latest IPCC projection of about half a meter to a meter this century increased from the previous report. However, a couple of efforts to askexpert researchers for individual estimates put the upper bound of likely sea level rise under two meters this century. (7)

The fourth website I looked at showed how much the sea level rose since we started burning so mach coal and oil products. It shows a graph of tide gauge records. There was no rise between 1880 and1910 but then it starts climbing ever more rapidly to 20cm in 2000. It looks very little compared to all present prediction but the same source explains why the present observations are indicating a much more rapid rise:

Observations of the retreat of glaciers have been, in a number of situations, more rapid than models have simulated. Third, and most important, are uncertainties relating to the potential loss of ice from the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. The dynamics of ice sheet movement are not well understood—some ice streams are moving very rapidly, suggesting the potential for contributions to sea level rise of order 10 mm/year or even larger, a rate that is far larger than any of the other terms. There seems even the possibility of a collapse of one or both ice sheets, especially if there is rapid loss of buttressing ice shelves that would reduce the resistance to ice stream flows (9). Capturing these processes accurately in climate models is extremely difficult, while omitting the process that is likely the most important contributor to sea level rise presents quite a quandary—the result being that IPCC’s projections of sea level rise during the 21st century and beyond may be significantly too low.(8)


PS Sept 15th 2015

I had thought that Dr Hanson pointed out that 240,000 years ago sea levels rose to 20-30 ft above present to show that there is still plenty of ice around and that we will be flooded by that amount if we let it all melt. There is more to it. A lot can be learned from what happened after the ice ages. I found that the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was similar to what is happening at present. During the PETM, 55-million years ago, the Earth warmed by more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit after huge amounts of carbon entered the atmosphere over a period of just a few thousand years
During the Eocene around 1,500 to 2,000 gigatons of carbon were released into the ocean/atmosphere system over the course of 1,000 years. This rate of carbon addition -which peaked during the PETM- almost equals the rate at which carbon is being released into the atmosphere today through human activity. (25) It shows that history can predict a lot of what may happen. More recent history which has been carbon dated can give an even better picture how ice fields can behave

I sent a copy of the original C) above to my brother and sister in-law, authors of the book “Rediscovering Sustainability”. They had careers in economics and law but also closely follow the environmental problems. I found out that my brother had written a paper about  the pre-historic flooding in the Netherlands where there is evidence of 9 metres sea level rise and violent storms, throwing boulders some 20 m. further up on a beach. This is in line with Dr Hansen’s findings for other areas. My sister in law wrote a 12 page paper with dozens of references with the title “Biodiversity of seas and oceans under threat”. She wrote it for the Green Economics Foundation and gave a talk about it as well. It explains, among many other aspects, how the present excess of CO2 in the air causes acidification. That also occurred in the PETM(25,26)

Below are some lines of what my brother wrote me about sea level predictions:

C1
Yes I had seen Hansen’s warning that IPCCs estimate might be too conservative. First of all, I have a feeling that the way IPCC is supposed to provide a unanimously agreed opinion has a built in element of avoiding dramatic forecasts, in particular because there are members whose reputation is at stake. The economist Richard Tol is an obvious example. I am, for example amazed at the lack of reference to Ken Caldeira’s alarm (also cited in my paper) on ocean acidification.

C2
We just do not know how fast the sea level will rise in the next 50 years. IPCC 2007 contained a zero term for Antarctica. As far as I know, the contribution per year of Antarctica was in fact negative around that time: warmer oceans result in more precipitation and on most of Antarctica and Greenland, the dominant form of precipitation is snow. Now there is rain on Greenland, but not as yet on Antarctica..

C3
Until a few decades ago, it was generally thought that the very thickness of ice sheets meant that their bottoms would for the foreseeable future stay frozen to the bedrock, even whilst there was evidence of spurts of much more rapid sea level rise between about 12,000 and 8,000 years ago, which were not really explainable as surface melt. We now know that melt water from the surface can penetrate to the bedrock through crevasses and transform frozen fine clay into slippery clay.

C4
We also know a major part of the Laurentide ice sheet which covered most of North America during the last ice age, slid into the Atlantic, depositing glacial erratics half-way to Europe. Sea level rise at the end of the last ice age included a spurt of about 1.5 m in at most two years. This was associated with a break-up of the remaining barrier of ice between the Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean, releasing the entire content of Lake Agassiz. It must have been a catastrophe on Doggerland (now the Doggersbank off the coast of Essex); there were humans living there then. Although there are now lakes under the Greenland ice sheet, if they would be on a Lake Agassiz scale, glaciologists have not done their homework, whilst both Greenland and West Antarctica have submerged mountain ridges.


 D   The double function of carbon tax

The most obvious advantage is that the tax will eliminate cheap 4c/KWh electricity from fossil fuel power plants and make wind and solar the cheapest source for additional electricity.(9). That will allow converting all on-land transportation to green electricity resulting in a reduction of the word’s GHG emission. The tax has to be global so that it can be charged on exports without unfair competition from countries which don’t tax their carbon. As shown in post 17 at the BC rate, taxing adds 70 % to the cost of thermal coal and that is why at the moment we export it tax free.

A second advantage of the carbon tax is that by reimbursing companies at the tax rate for all the carbon they capture and store a thriving CCS industry will develop. In Norway, Statoil gains $58 million per year over potential competitors without CCS (12). It is a unique case because their $17 per tonne of CO2 cost for CCS is obtained by stripping it from the natural gas they withdraw from their wells (13) rather than obtaining it from flue gas.  There are several ways to capture carbon from coal burning power plants (10) and costs are bound to come down. Some 2011 figures show that CCS for coal fired power plants costs $ 23-92 per tonne of CO2 (11) Union Engineering built over 1000 plants to produce CO2 but is now also involved in extracting it from breweries and flue gas(14). If such companies are paid at the carbon tax rate for every tonne of CO2 they recover it can become a very profitable business.  With a stiff carbon tax, Coca Cola, whose drinks emit 3300 tons of CO2 per day (15), could gain a lot by recycling its CO2. At the moment there are at least 2 companies that invest a lot of money in pilot projects to capture carbon from the atmosphere.(16,17) When a carbon tax makes that more profitable we can recover CO2 emitted by automobiles and eventually reduce the carbon already in the air from previous excess emissions.

While Norway with its high tax rate pays $75 per tonne of CO2 captured and stored the question is, who will pay others, like Coca Cola which operate in so many countries? It seems logical to have a huge international fund, fed by export taxes. There is no reason why countries with a lot of fossil fuel should gain even more by charging tax to less fortunate countries. The fund could be used to help countries cope with higher energy cost, effects of climate change and promotion of CCS world wide. CCS could help Canada to come closer to our Copenhagen commitment and may save the US coal industry. It will also drastically reduce China’s emissions and since that country is a leader in CCS development there is hope that climate change will be curbed, See D) in post 22.

E) Carbon pricing history 
Originally a lot of carbon pricing was done by cap and trade where large emitters like power stations were give targets to reduce their GHG emissions. Those that could not reach the target were allowed to buy tradable offsets from companies that made more improvements than agreed upon. The system is complicated but has achieved good reductions in emissions both in Europe and in 10 North Eastern US States. It causes energy prices to go up and there is no clear indication how individuals and businesses get reimbursed to deal with the extra cost. People are told that they would share in dividends from the sale of auctioned pollution allowances, but how much will that be?

A revenue neutral carbon tax can be implemented much quicker than cap and trade and is easy to administer. The BC system modified existing tax rates and special credits to return all money collected as fair as possible to those who paid for it, By law the government has to produce yearly tables to show how it is achieved.(18) There are 17 refund categories and of all tax collected 48% is paid out to people and 52% to businesses. The 48%includes 37% for low income earners. It encourages people to use less fossiI fuel, As a result use of petroleum products has dropped 17% while it rose by 1.5% in the rest of Canada. In the US the proposed Sanders Boxer bill(19) will pay 60% of all tax collected to households. As shown in post 12, those people who use a below average amount of carbon get more money back than they paid in tax. That allows them to buy a heat pump system for their home. These have come down in price, use only 20-30% of the energy of conventional heating systems and will run on electricity which, when obtained from green sources, will cut GHG emission. Some people feel that the tax money should be used to subsidize green projects. The heat pump example shows that green projects don’t require subsidies.

F)  Political Problems

For far too long carbon tax has been used as a political football between parties, using simplistic slogans without any serious debate. Many Canadians still see it as a tax grab rather than a tax shift. They believe that it will hurt the economy and the poor while the opposite has been shown in over 70% of more than 100 studies reviewed by the World Bank. They were also influenced by powerful organisations which, as late as 2013, did not know or ignored how the tax money flows back to individuals and businesses. As a result they published completely wrong figures on how it affects households (post 1 points 3 and 4). This allows politicians to keep portraying it as a tax grab. The word “tax” is  repulsive to many. In the US the Sierra Club asked president Obama to support a fuzzy cap and trade system rather than a carbon tax. Preston Manning, co-founder of our conservative party now supports taxing carbon but does not like the word “tax” (20,21). Like in the horse and buggy days it is easy for politicians to predict job losses without mentioning resulting gains. In the US solar is now a $15 billion business employing more people than coal mining (22)

PS
Since the main media reports a lot about the effects of climate change but little about the cause, politicians can’t be expected to have it all at their fingertips. This is demonstrated by what happened in Kamloops BC

Prior to the Canadian federal election there was an article on desmog.ca showing that the conservative candidate in Kamloops said during a radio interview that human emissions contributed only 1.5% towards climate change. The opposition candidates and one provincial MLA contested it with what they observed. Only one mentioned that is was 95% sure that humans caused it.  None of them mentioned that since 1950 humans caused the CO2 level to rise to 30% higher than it ever was during the last 400,000 years and that it started rising shortly after the industrial revolution. I gave one comment and soon got an email from disqus digest telling me that my contribution was among the “Top conversations on DeSmogBlog”. You can see the whole story on http://www.desmog.ca/2015/10/08/conservative-candidate-mel-arnold-hit-hard-after-questioning-man-made-climate-change-cbc. The next day I got views from 7 countries almost all entered via disqus. It included 16 Russians, 8 Americans, and 6 Canadians . They all read post 23 and 24. Now there are hardly any viewers until I or any of you place another comment. 



3)      http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/shelters-from-the-storm-preparing-cities-for-a-changing-climate-before-its-too-late/article25554271/
8)      http://www.climate.org/topics/sea-level/index.html