Living simply so that others may simply live.

Monday 28 July 2014

Why I don't think we're going to get an RCP8.5 (i.e. continued fossil fuel consumption growth until 2100) scenario.

Here's an interesting talk that suggests that we're not going to stay on the RCP8.5 scenario much longer even in the absence of any political action, but that emissions will go down simply due to geology. http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-02-25/oil-supply-and-demand-forecasting-with-steven-kopits The presentation shows that we've had peak conventional oil in 2005. What he doesn't try to date, but which other people have tried, suggests we're looking at peak liquid fuels sometime between now and probably before 2017, maybe 2020, with peak natural gas and peak coal to follow before 2050. My sense of the state of play is that we're not going to stay below 2 °C due to geology alone, though, so keep mitigating.

There are basically three complementary arguments why not everybody believes that there is enough coal for an RCP8.5 scenario: The resource argument: A few decades ago, the reported coal reserves were huge, and they've been coming down much faster than the coal been used. One way to look at that is that countries used to find it advantageous to overreport reserves. The other way to look at it is that as more information has come in, the amount of coal that is technically and economically recoverable turned out to be lower. This is why I mentioned the estimate of peak coal around 2050

The energy argument: At the moment, coal receives a big energy subsidy from oil. Everything from mining, transport and manufacturing runs on oil, and as the oil goes away it's not at all clear that we can build a coal infrastructure using coal. Part of that is an energy returned on energy invested issue; there is even more disagreement about the EROEI of coal than there is about coal reserves. The question of EROEI is like fractional reserve banking: in an expanding economy it makes sense to do fractional reserve banking because it generates money that you can pay back with interest from the grown economy later. That's how we built the oil economy from a niche market replacing whale oil to what it was in 2005. But as Kopits points out, all the energy we produce at the moment is spoken for, so there's none left to build the coal infrastructure now, and I think Kopits also goes through the argument why this problem is going to get worse in the future (or if he doesn't then http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/ does).

The economic argument: As I noted above, the economic argument is a capital expenditure issue of the infrastructure: in an economy that is contracting because oil is going away and the capital that has been running the oil economy becomes worthless, it's not a given that we can afford to build the coal infrastructure. This is the basic asymmetry between a growing and shrinking economy: in a growing economy we had inflation. Because we were used to doing with less, we delayed using up the growth in production for a growth in consumption, and used the remainder for an increase in infrastructure, which concentrates wealth. In a shrinking economy as I said you can no longer afford to borrow from tomorrow because there's no longer the economic growth with which to pay back the interest, so inflation no longer means you can build the infrastructure. While if you have deflation, then you diffuse wealth, and the building of infrastructure requires a concentration of wealth. That's why capitalism and an exponential growth in energy consumption was such a politically successful combination. I'm not sure whether that means that the growth in the cooperative economy is significantly correlated with the slowed growth in energy consumption and is due to continue, but either way I don't think that means that if the cooperative economy really takes off we can expect a collective investment in the coal infrastructure either. Firstly, because I'd like to think that if that happens investment into a renewable infrastructure would have an equivalent EROEI. But more importantly, because everybody is used to their iPhone by now, so the 10%/a degrowth that Kevin Anderson says is needed doesn't seem to be gaining ground the way the cooperative economy does, with which delayed consumption now could give (y)our child(ren) global warming of less that 2 °C. Possibly that's also because it wouldn't be a temporary delay as in the past, but a permanent one.

Friday 13 December 2013

Living without fossil fuel heating.

I submitted last month's post to resilience.org, but they didn't want to publish it. Because I was not fasting for my own enjoyment, in fact, because I was freezing with three sweaters on, because I didn't want to turn on the heating in my office and thus cause climate change while trying to convince others to stop causing climate change, and because my fasting wasn't actually stopping climate change by itself, I stopped. What does mitigate climate change is that my direct carbon emissions are zero. I don't fly, don't drive, and heat my house with wood that I've cut by hand. I do occasionally take the train, and sometimes that train is diesel powered, and very rarely I take the bus or share a car/taxi, but given that I don't get to decide what fuel goes into those trips, I argue that those are part of my embodied carbon emissions. In fact, I wish that train companies would start offering green surcharges that would buy enough Renewable Obligation Certificates to run my train trips on green electricity (would add ~0.008 £/km to the ticket price).
Now OFGEM has decided that they wanted to make it easier to compare utility prices, so they've said every supplier has to have the same pricing policy, with a standing charge that you pay no matter how much or how little electricity or gas you use. Talk about perverse subsidies: if you use less than 900 kWh/y electricity or 2650 kWh/y of gas, you get to pay more. In fact I get to pay twice what I used to pay for my electricity. I thought we had agreed to limit climate change to 2°C by the end of the century, and would therefore expect people who use less than the average to be rewarded. Well, anyway, if you're living a sustainable lifestyle in a deeply unsustainable country, other people's cognitive dissonance is a daily fact of life*. So, although I have heated my house exclusively with wood for the last 4 years, it wasn't until today that I've had my gas supply cut.
It does feel different, even if there's no actual difference. Because I no longer have a backup to my electric shower, I'm thinking whether I should have a different backup installed. I'm thinking in particular of a water jacket around my flue. And/or a solar water heater, although the systems that you can buy off the shelf are so expensive that I'm worried that their embodied energy are going to be higher than what they are ever going to pay back if there's no seasonal heat storage. Anybody know what it takes to store hot water underground in summer for winter use? My searches on the internet haven't turned up anything that sounded feasible on the household level, so if it's possible please let me know.

*Mind you, I'm not saying that I'm less prone to cognitive dissonance than the next person, simply that it's less likely to be biased towards unsustainable actions.

Thursday 14 November 2013

fasting in solidarity with climate change victims, present and future.

summary: Some of the deaths in the Philippines are attributable to climate change, that makes all of us murderers. Rather than send everybody to jail, I propose restorative justice: Contraction and convergence.

On Tuesday I learned that the climate change negotiator for the Philippines, Yeb Sano, was fasting in solidarity with the victims of Typhoon that hit the Philippines and future victims of climate change. I immediately thought I should try and add my voice to his. Since I already have a sustainable ecological footprint (i.e. use less than one 7 billionth part of the resources that nature produces), doing more must take the form of convincing others, therefore, since Tuesday I've been fasting as well.
So, who to convince? Obviously, those who are convinced there is a climate change problem that we're causing but that predominantly others will suffer from, but who are still using more than their fair share of resources, i.e. most of the readers of resilience.org.
I'm not asking you to start fasting as well. I'm asking you not to buy anything unless it's to survive. So, only buy food if it's organic, only buy clothes if you haven't got any without holes in. Pretty much everything else you can do without. I say this from six years of experience. Give the money that you'll have left over to charities.
One of my pet peeves is people who do something for a year, write a book about it, then forget about it. Climate change is going to be with use for at least the next 7 generations. So the changes that you make need to be changes that you keep at. It's fine to experiment, and find that some things don't work for you. But do things with the intention to keep decreasing your footprint until greenhouse concentrations are going down. We're all different, it took me 8 years from the intention to the reality.
I'm talking equity here. We only have the one biosphere, and if you get/take more than your fair share, someone else will have to do without, it doesn't matter whether that someone else is alive now or still to be born, it's the same direct relationship that equates to murder. So no, I'm not trying to convince you how great it will be. There will be compensations, but all in all I think there comes a point where you have to put maximizing your own convenience in the balance against other people's right to life. For some in the Philippines it's already to late, but at least their deaths could be our call to action.