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)
C4
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/
7) http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/07/no-scientists-arent-predicting-10ft-higher-sea-level-by-2050/
8) http://www.climate.org/topics/sea-level/index.html
22)
Time Magazine March 9 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment