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This publication is an excerpted chapter from The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Centurys Sustainability Crises, Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch, eds. (Healdsburg, CA: Watershed Media, 2010). For other book excerpts, permission to reprint, and purchasing visit http://www.postcarbonreader.com.
Even if its concentration of greenhouse gases was stabilized at the current level, Earths lower atmosphere would continue to warm.
The nations of the world have agreed that climate change is the most serious threat facing humankind. Before they can develop a joint plan to deal with the problem effectively, however, they must agree on the maximum level of greenhouse gases they should risk allowing in the atmosphere. to overcome the considerable thermal inertia of Earths climate system. The leading American climate scientist, James Hansen of NASAs Goddard Space Institute, points out that the Arctic ice began to melt significantly in the 1970s and suggests that a concentration of 300325 ppm of carbon dioxide might be necessary for the ice to increase again. Professor John Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, thinks that almost any concentration above the pre-industrial level of 270 ppm might be too much. He told the Guardian in 2008 that even a small increase in temperature could trigger several climatic tipping points: Nobody can say for sure that 330 ppm is safe. Perhaps it will not matter whether we have 270 ppm or 320 ppm, but operating well outside the [historic] realm of carbon dioxide concentrations is risky as long as we have not fully understood the relevant feedback mechanisms.1 If these experts are right, two things must be done to stop runaway global warming. One is that every ton of carbon dioxide that humans release by burning fossil fuels and clearing forests from now on must be recovered from the air and sequestered safely in the ground. The other is that a lot of past emissions must be recovered too.
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Figure 5.1. Cumulative carbon dixide reductions required by 2050 to reach 350 ppm
Lets put some figures on the size of this formidable task (figure 5.1). Fossil fuel combustion will release about 29 billion tons of carbon dioxide this year: If that was phased out over 40 years on a straight-line basis, a total of 580 billion tons would be released before emissions stopped completely by 2050. Deforestation is releasing 7 billion tons a year: If it proves possible to stop that in ten years, it will add 35 billion tons to the atmosphere by 2020. If we ignore other releases from the way we use and abuse the land, including the methane from the cattle we keep and the rice we grow, and the nitrous oxide from the fertilizers we apply, we look set to add 615 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2050even with an incredibly aggressive emissions mitigation program. This 615 billion tons of carbon dioxide will have to be removed together with the excess carbon dioxide thats already in the air. Suppose we take 350 ppm as our initial target, as James Hansen and many others suggest. At present, 2,900 billion tons of carbon dioxide are in the air, so reducing its concentration from 390 ppm to 350 means weve got to take 300 billion tons out. In total, then, saving life as we know it entails extracting between 900 and 1,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locking it safely away. This amount of carbon dioxide contains about 250 billion tons of carbonand the only place that carbon can be stored on the scale required is in plants and the soils. Land plants hold 600 billion tons of carbon at present and Earths soil holds about three times that amount. So at a minimum, we need to find ways to increase the total amount of carbon held by plants and soils from 2,400 billion tons to 2,650, or just over 10 percent. That seems a feasible goal if the political will is there.
45 40 35 30 Billion Tons of CO2 25 20 15 10 5 0 2011 2020 2030 Year 2040 2050 Deforestation Emissions Combustion Emissions Already in Atmosphere
note: Calculations assume global deforestation is phased out over ten years and fossil fuel combustion is phased out over forty years.
7percent a year, the rate required to put them on track to phase them out completely by 2050. Unless at least 95 percent of every countrys fossil-fuel emissions have ceased by then, achieving the 350-ppm target seems impossible. After all, the rough calculations weve just made show that two-thirds of the carbon that needs to be sequestered has yet to be released. Cutting emissions more slowly increases the amount of carbon needing to be recovered and allows the planet longer to warm up, thus increasing the risk that unstoppable feedbacks will develop. Another problem in Copenhagen was that the rich countries were not prepared to pay countries like Brazil and Indonesia enough to stop cutting down their tropical forests and thus releasing the carbon they contain. This was despite a report in Nature earlier in the year showing that the worlds remaining tropical forests are not only carbon stores but remove a massive 4.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere each year2about a fifth of that released by burning fossil fuels. The only proposals on the table at Copenhagen were about slowing the rate of deforestation rather than stopping it entirely. For their part, the big developing countriesIndia and Chinarefused to accept any emissions limits at all,
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A Failed Approach
But the political will is lacking, as the December 2009 United Nations (U.N.) climate conference in Copenhagen showed. The rich countries are not prepared to cut their fossil-fuel emissions by around
saying that it was up to the richer countries to make deeper cuts to allow them space to raise their peoples incomes by increasing their fossil-fuel use. Only about eighty small, poor countries, including the small island states that will disappear under the waves because of rising sea levels, pressed for a 350-or-less target. Copenhagen demonstrated that humanity may not be able to save itself for two reasonsboth of which can be overcome. One is that our economies have no reverse gear. While people lived very well at much lower levels of energy use in the past, we cannot return to those levels now without an economic collapse because of the way our money system works. The other is the way the U.N. process attempted to deal with a world problem on a nation-by-nation basis rather than on a whole-world basis. The process left it up to each nationor each group of nations such as the European Unionto volunteer to do something to solve the crisis. It did not tell them what to do. As a result, it was scarcely surprising that the sum total of the offers was completely inadequate to reduce the risk that a tipping point will be passed and an unstoppable catastrophic series of changes will take off. The artificial way the process divided the world into rich countries with responsibilities to act and poorer ones with no responsibilities was particularly unhelpful. Every country in the world has rich people enjoying more than their fair share of the benefits that flow from the use of fossil fuel, and it is these people who should share their benefits wherever they live. What the U.N. failed to do was to look at the problem in the way weve just done and say: This is a massive problem that needs a global rather than a piecemeal response. Heres what humanity needs to do to have a chance of survival. Now how can we share out the cost and the work fairly among us all?
produced around the world come from two hundred big companies, so policing the system is logistically quite feasible. The fossil-fuel producers would naturally add the cost of purchasing the permits to their fuel prices, so the price of energy would rise around the world. All other prices would rise, too, because energy is used in the manufacture and delivery of everything we buy. Food prices would be affected, just as they were before oil prices peaked in July 2008, because some crops like corn would be diverted to bioenergy production. These price increases are one reason that cap and share insists that permits covering the majority of the capped emissions tonnage should be issued directly to everyone. If governments got the money from selling the permits instead and did not pass it on, many people would be squeezed out of the energy and food markets altogether. They could freeze or starve. Another reason for distributing the permits to people is that, with higher energy prices, every household is going to want to invest in ways to cut its purchased energy useand the income from the sale of its permits will provide it with the means to do so. Lots of families will be happy to borrow so that they could buy, say, a solar water heater or get insulation work done, knowing that they could use the money earned from selling their carbon permits to pay off the loan. Cap and share would make anybody financially better off whose lifestyle enabled them to live on less fossil energy than covered by their emissions allocation. In South Africa, for example, 80 percent of the population would come out on top in the year the system started, 10 percent would be unaffected, and the richest 10 percent would lose about 14 percent of their income for a few months until the fact that their tenants, clients, and customers were more prosperous enabled them to make their losses up. In India, 90 percent of the population would stand to gain, and the more rapidly emissions were reduced, the greater their gains would be. For example, if the
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pace was rapid and the world price for emissions permits rose to $100 per ton of carbon dioxide, the poorest 10 percent of Indians would see their total income increased twenty times. The incomes of the richest 10 percent would be reduced by only 0.26 percent at that price, and this group would soon make that up through their better business and professional opportunities. It all sounds too good to be true until you realize that in emissions-intensive countries like the United States and those in Europe, everyone would see their incomes decline, because they would, in effect, be buying permits from much poorer people around the world. However, the money they paid would come quickly back as demand for their solar cells and other hightech goods. Their economies would also become more stable because fossil-fuel-producing countries would not take in more money than they could spend as scarcity drove fuel prices up. The subprime-mortgage fiasco was caused when the U.S. banks with whom the energy producers had deposited their surplus cash resorted to dodgy ways of lending it out. A problem with cap and share is that it could be so effective that energy prices would rise quite a bit and people would start cutting down even more forests to replace fossil fuel. Grazing land might also be plowed to grow biofuels, releasing carbon in the soil. Fortunately, modern aircraft surveillance technology can measure not
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only the carbon in the trees and other plants growing over entire countries but alsoif combined with onsite surveysthe carbon in the soil itself. New Zealand is already using this technique. So, under cap and share, governments of countries that increased the amount of carbon they were storing in their plants and soils would be paid for every extra ton using some of the funds from the permit sales. Even before the disappointing results of the December 2009 Copenhagen climate summit were known, the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) became interested in possible whole-world solutions like cap and share and began to assess them at the request of Norway and the European Union. Besides cap and share, UNEP is investigating contraction and convergence, which shares out the capped emissions among governments according to the size of their populations, after a transition period in which the emissions-intensive countries get more. Other proposals under review include Greenhouse Development Rights and Kyoto 2, both of which propose raising money from energy users across the globe for the massive changes that need to be made. Whatever carbon-management system the world adopts, farming methods will need to change, and the efforts of hundreds of millions of people will be necessary to get the carbon out of the air. We, the residents of the worlds industrialized countries, should not expect our lives to continue in much the same way. While it is going to be extraordinarily difficult to persuade ourselves to reduce our consumption to make the resources available to avert disaster, its the only way the job can be done. There is cause for hope: Now that the process which began at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992and led to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and then the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009is in total disarray, cap and share or some other global-level proposal (see box5.1) has a chance of becoming the basis for future discussions. The international community certainly needs to move quickly. The time window in which it must act if disaster is to be averted is closing fast.
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Box 5.1
Under cap and dividend, companies that emit greenhouse gases would presumably pass the cost of the permits on to their customers, but the periodic dividend everybody receives from the permit sales minimizes that extra cost. This system encourages people to use less fossil fuel, because customers who reduce their use of fossil fuels would be more than compensated by the dividend cash. It especially helps low-income households, which are less able to absorb the increased costs of fuel. Dividends could also help solidify political support for a carbon cap and minimize populist backlash against putting a price on emissions. Cap and dividend entered the debate on U.S. climate legislation in late 2009 when Senators maria Cantwell (D-Washington) and Susan Collins (R-maine) introduced the Carbon limits and energy for Americas Renewal (CleAR) Act. 2 The bill would auction 100 percent of the carbon permits and return 75 percent of that permit revenue
2 Information on the CleAR Act may be found on Senator Cantwells Web site, http://cantwell.senate.gov/issues/CleARAct.cfm.
endnotes
1 2 3 David Adam, Roll Back Time to Safeguard Climate, expert Warns, Guardian, September 15, 2008. helene C. muller-landau, Carbon Cycle: Sink in the African Jungle, Nature 457 (February 19, 2009), 969-970. The author helped design the cap-and-share approach in 2006.
Photo Credits
Page 4, Refinery panoramic Vetta.
Acknowledgments
Cover art by mike King. Design by Sean mcguire. layout by Clare Rhinelander.
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