Big Oil changes sides in the War on Coal

The carbon budget idea and the divestment movement are quite complementary I think. One thing I have heard with regard to asking the organisations you have accounts with or are a stakeholder in (eg. superannuation companies or universities with endowment funds) how their investments are exposed to risk due to investing in fossil fuel companies, is that the next step would be asking them to develop a divestment strategy.

It is not practicable to ask that everyone divests from fossil fuels right away, as fossil fuels need to be continued to be used to fuel various things. So the idea is that there should be a divestment strategy in line with keeping global warming to safe levels – here the scientific evidence is for 1 degrees of warming or 350ppmCO2e but governments have followed Nordhaus’ 1970s recommendation of a limit of 2 degrees of warming.

For example: In Australia a lot of the companies that mine coal also mine various other materials too, so the divestment strategy could target companies that only mine coal, or some companies have bad environmental or social records, so the divestment strategy could target these companies.

The divestment strategy could also be time based. So for Paul Gildings rapid mobilisation to return to 350ppmCO2e by 2100 you would try to make a strategy based on that time frame. So investments in ghg emitting companies would be consistent with halving emissions from 2018-2023; then from 2024-2035 (I forget the exact year) it would be consistent with achieving zero ghg emissions by 2035; then until 2100 the investment strategy would be consistent with negative ghg emissions returning the atmosphere to 350ppmCO2e by 2100.

If you would like to ask your superannuation company, bank, or university if their investments are exposed to risk by investing in fossil fuel companies there are forms here , you just have to add your name and details. The site covers all countries and a great many companies and universities

http://www.areyouthevitalfew.org

There is no wedge, just two sets of concerns fighting it out. The real wedge is between fossil fuel and nuclear, with fossil fuel companies paying the Sierra Club millions to keep the heat on nuclear, but ‘build partnerships’ with fossil fuel companies. Course, when the secret donations were no longer secret, the Sierra Club reversed policy.

China and India will buy all the coal they can and Australia isn’t about to stop selling coal to China and India, no matter how bad the air quality becomes in north Asia.

So, there’s that. The rest is just hot air, increasingly dirty.

“China and India will buy all the coal they can and Australia isn’t about to stop selling coal to China and India, no matter how bad the air quality becomes in north Asia.”

If you are overseas you might not know there are objections in Australia to developing new coal mines that would exceed the carbon budget. There have been protests and there are ongoing legal challenges by environmental groups and traditional indigenous land owners.

Also China is moving away from coal, the people are upset at the air pollution and the government thinks greening China is the best strategy, this is reflected in the 5 year plan.

No matter Black Cat or White Cat, who can catch rat is good cat (Deng Xiaoping, 1962)

“The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) has proposed clearly that China’s growth pattern is going to be adjusted from “accelerated development” to “scientific approach of development.” The color of the “cat” will become much more important in the future. It is essential that China transform itself from the biggest “black cat” in the world into the biggest “green cat.””

http://www.daonong.com/g/2010EN/Insights/20100926/23030.html

I am shocked to learn that any of the world’s leadership or ruling classes take the threat of climate change seriously enough to actually do anything about it. Energy is both literally and figuratively power, and the business of a ruling class is to acquire, maintain, and extend its power: political power, economic power, military power, all of which are served by energy production. In general this has meant (in the case of fossil fuels) getting them out of the ground and burned as fast as possible. Getting the better of their competitors today or tomorrow is likely to seem much more important to them than something that might happen decades in the future. Hence such insane adventures as the invasion of Iraq or the putsch in Ukraine. So that’s changing now, is it? How come?

Then again, if the choice is between the CO2 released from coal and the methane released from natural gas, shouldn’t we be on coal’s side? Coal’s been having a pretty rough go of it in the last decade or so, and coal use has dropped significantly. By contrast, natural gas has experienced a meteoric boom, no doubt thanks to its labeling as the “relatively clean” alternative (methane is actually worse greenhouse gas than C02…).

To me, going after coal, while laudable, seems like a bit of a red herring, a way to pat ourselves on the back and divert our attention while all kinds of shady stuff happens over there.

I think that on ‘your’ side policy has already been set. Drilling for trillions in dollars in natural gas in the OCS would result in, well trillions of dollars, and millions of jobs, while lowering carbon output. But the whack jobs that drive your car won’t allow that. They really don’t give a rat’s ass about carbon output. They care about self indentfying as good and that requires a mindless blanket demonization of all fossil fuel usage. You can either mood affiliate with them or get accussed of eating babies.

The only possible response is all fossil fuel is evil and anyone who says other wise eats babies. If you start agreeing with fossil fuel companies, that natural gas is better than coal, you bcome are part of the evil conglomerate, and need to be shunned.

On balance, I agree with JQ that competition between fossil fuel interests over who’s going to get cut from the carbon budget is a good thing. It’s interesting that the article he linked to did not mention the decision by Norway’s SWF to divest from coal; this is very big in the world of internecine fossil fuel fights. It also points to a central battlefield, investment. While the ultimate driver has to be political regulation of fossil fuel extraction (taxes, permits), the transmission belt to energy transformation is the changing pattern of investment, both disinvestment from likely-to-be-stranded resources and new investment in alternatives. Investors do try to look down the road, and if significant regulation seems to be on the way, they will adjust their portfolios accordingly. So, yes, investment shifts are a leading indicator in this case.

I’m reminded of the decisive role played by private disinvestment in the nuclear power industry in response to and anticipation of heightened regulation in the 1970s.

Of course, the wheels are grinding far too slowly on the carbon front, as exemplified by yesterday’s minimalist action by the US government on airline emissions—this coming after the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act of 2012. This latest move clearly puts wealth maintenance above climate action in airlines. (Event study, anyone?) That’s the conflict we’re going to see in every sector potentially impacted by climate policy.

So that’s changing now, is it? How come?

Who you gonna believe, historical materialism or your lying eyes?

Also (in general but also responding to kidneystones’ assertions):

Anglesea coal mine to shut down in August
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/alcoa-to-shut-anglesea-coal-mine-and-power-plant-20150512-ggzgw9.html

South Australian coal mines to be shut down, partly due to competition from renewables
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-11/power-stations-port-augusta-alinta-energy/6537814

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jun/11/south-australia-power-stations-and-coal-mine-to-close-with-loss-of-440-jobs

Relatively small mines I think, but straws in the wind

There is reason to be careful abkut the recent numbers showing flat or ddclining chinese coal consumption. There was a previous decline in the late nineties, IIRC associated with a campaign to close small mines. Some years later, coal consumption figures skyrocketed at incrdible rates. Presumably, the small mines were not actually closed as fast as the official number showed, and part of the coal economy went undergound for a while.

It’s quite possible that the same is going on again. The recent offical goal is to reduce coal imports hard and to stop consumption growth, and there is quite some pressure behind it. It is not unlikely that part of the response has been to cut imports, and to replace them by unofficially sourced coal from within China. The official numbers show that coal plants in China are running at the lowest capacity in a long time, but construction of new plants is still substantial.

Then again, there are definitely also real efforts to cut back on coal use, and last year was not a strong year for Chinese production all over. But we might to wait a few years to be sure if their coal use is really stagnating.

Oh, I’m pretty sure that Chinese coal use has not yet reached its all-time peak. Chinese coal consumption is not down overall to the same degree that imports are down! And there is nothing unofficial about replacing imported coal with domestically produced coal: it’s an explicit goal to reduce loss-making Chinese coal enterprises by, in part, raising barriers to imports. Still, I will take good news where I can get it. The smaller and less profitable the Western coal industry becomes, the less influence and money they can direct to climate obstructionism.

Matt, kidneystones: Total Chinese coal consumption in 2014 was down 2.4%. These are revised figures from the National Statistics Administration, as kosher a China gets. China’s economy is still growing, so the drop reflects major and continuing structural shifts, not a cyclical downturn. The government has ordered the closure of 1000 mines.

Australian coal exports to China are therefore toast as definitively burnt as Alfred’s cakes. The only hope is India. Australian coal miners can point to encouraging (for them) Indian plans for even more coal generation. What they don’t stress is that the same policymakers say they expect to get the coal domestically, not from expensive imports. Counting on Indian policy to precisely half fail is a risky strategy.

The very rapid progress in India on the ambitious renewables targets – 100 GW of PV, 60 gigawatts of wind by 2022 – may well make the issue moot. Indian politicians, unlike Chinese, are under electoral pressure to deliver results quickly. Solar and wind plants are not ideal but they be got up in 18 months, and provide plenty of in-state ribbon-cutting opportunities when they are switched on, which makes a change from apologising for delays.

The wild card is international pressure on India to present a reasonable INDC before the Paris climate conference. India really does not want to be made a climate pariah like Australia. It has already lost the support of China for a “rich guys first” line.

Australian coal exports to China are therefore toast as definitively burnt as Alfred’s cakes. The only hope is India. Australian coal miners can point to encouraging (for them) Indian plans for even more coal generation. What they don’t stress is that the same policymakers say they expect to get the coal domestically, not from expensive imports. Counting on Indian policy to precisely half fail is a risky strategy.

The very rapid progress in India on the ambitious renewables targets – 100 GW of PV, 60 gigawatts of wind by 2022 – may well make the issue moot. Indian politicians, unlike Chinese, are under electoral pressure to deliver results quickly. Solar and wind plants are not ideal but they be got up in 18 months, and provide plenty of in-state ribbon-cutting opportunities when they are switched on, which makes a change from apologising for delays.

I definitely agree with the last sentence of your first paragraph, which is why I am not willing to break out the champagne for India’s electricity plans just yet. India has a long history of setting electricity targets more ambitious than it can actually achieve: in the past it has regularly missed targets for coal, hydro, and nuclear generation. Experience from other countries indicates that solar and wind projects are more often on-time and within-budget than coal, nuclear, and big hydro projects, so there is room for hope. But India meeting the renewable plans and totally flubbing the coal plans is not terribly likely IMO.

@22 and @24 Cheers to both of you. Speculating about the long-term prospects of fossil-fuel consumption is risky, but I think that even declining consumption rates in China at a more rapid rate of say 5% per year will still generate a high level of pollutants. The key factors, of course, are the availability and price of various alternatives.

I’m very guardedly optimistic that the combination of improved energy efficiencies and high prices will see the shuttering of more coal plants, but barring a major breakthrough (possible) on hydrogen, say, we have accept that coal will be consumed at the same or higher rates between now and 2020. Political pressures inside China are a major factor, I suspect, as the air quality in large parts of China is appalling. Toxins in water and agricultural add hours to preparing safe meals in many households, in part, the residue of ‘bury the problem’ practiced by Dow in America.

We do not own a car. We own a new house with no air-con or fossil fuel furnace. We save and re-cycle water in strategically place buckets around the home, call it the new aesthetic. There’s a lot we can do to reduce our energy footprints. With hard work and good science new technologies are sure to emerge.

#23, methane trapped in coal and released by mining accounts for about 10% of man’s methane emissions. Since modern mining breaks up the coal at the mine, this heating value is lost. Not the biggest, but not zero.

http://epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/ch4.html

James @24.

The idea is that Indian democracy is more responsive to citizen needs and views than China? Well, as a general claim this is surely false. Consider Indian Democracy and poverty and caste. (Teaching in China recently I tried to talk about democracy. A student said incredulously: “You want us to be like India?!!” Looking around, she had a point.)

Link got et. Dunno why.

This post reminds me of Oswald Spengler’s adage: “optimism is cowardice.”

I get it, I guess: why optimism is more attractive and comfortable than pissing your pants and screaming. Still I have to ask, at what point does optimism make you delusional? Pretty close to the point of this post, I would think.

Oil and Coal are playing good cop, bad cop. And, this is good, how?

A Carbon Budget is emerging as a policy concept pretty much at the point at which the remaining carbon budget — calibrated to a high assurance of avoiding runaway catastrophe — is pretty much zero. And, this is good, how?

It does seem to me that eliminating fossil fuel use pretty much completely, even over the course of a decade or two, and constraining energy use generally, would require some fairly drastic, indeed heroic measures on an unprecedented scale of collective action. And the longer we continue to dither, the more drastic and heroic — and counterfactual — effective action becomes.

I guess I understand that there’s some risk of realism leading to pessimism leading to hopeless resignation. But, how is optimism and minimizing leading to accommodation and adaptationism leading to accelerating toward catastrophe — how is that course supposed to be superior?

@37 “Pissing your pants and screaming” is the default behavior of cranky infants, so there’s that.

Re: optimism. The question is simple: do you believe that life is materially better for large numbers of people today than it was a century ago. In my view, the answer must be a resounding yes. The larger half of the population of the western world has yet to enjoy a full century of equality under the law. Women won the vote for themselves less than one hundred years ago. The list of positive developments is virtually endless. I rank improvements in dentistry during my lifetime one of the great unrecognized blessings.

Is the world perfect? No, thank god. We need to do much more to reduce inequalities and improve living standards for greater numbers of people. A little democracy here and there wouldn’t hurt, either.

We’re living, in many cases, lives our parents and grand-parents could not even dream of and we tell our kids this every day. Getting to this point cost a lot, the least we can do is enjoy it as we try to improve the general good.

I think it is monumentally unlikely that the world will stay within the 2C carbon budget. I think that the target will be well overshot by 2050. Later there might be expensive active measures working over decades to centuries to draw down atmospheric CO2. Or if people don’t bother to do that, or societies collapse to the point that people can’t do that, there’s a ~100,000 year wait for natural geological carbon cycling to scrub the CO2.

Any billionaires reading this thread? Millionaires? OK, if you’re not in one of those groups, and you think that the situation calls for measures beyond normal political participation, direct sabotage against fossil fuel facilities might buy us a couple more decades before blowing the carbon budget. Or not. China’s emissions are greater than the EU and USA combined, and I don’t think democratic politics or monkey wrenchers are going to reverse its emissions trajectory.

There’s always more history still to come. No matter how badly the carbon budget is blown, people can still make the problem relatively worse or better in the future. It’s not reasonable to just give up and wallow in fossil fuels even if you believe, as I do, that the world is going land in the upper range of IPCC projections. Keep voting, donating to pressure groups, marching, doing that usual boring, weak incremental stuff. It’s perhaps less stimulating than playing Cassandra but it’s no more unlikely to keep the world within the 2C carbon budget. Talking about tiny bits of climate optimism instead of the larger bad news is no more incongruous with believing in climate crisis than talking about favorite pop songs is incongruous with believing that everyone dies and everyone dies alone.

Points off for sp. and editing errors!

kidneystones @ 39: do you believe that life is materially better for large numbers of people today than it was a century ago?

Yes. Not the same people, of course, but corresponding populations, I guess. Also, life is materially worse for surprisingly large numbers of people or mostly unchanged. There are a lot more people. The population of the U.S. has doubled twice since 1915, and so has the population of the world. The scale of technological civilization has increased more than apace and the rate of technological change across the global space it occupies has accelerated.

kidneystones @ 42: Overstating the risks of global warming, extreme weather, climate change, has clearly made it much more difficult to persuade people to change behaviors – for example: to consume less and more wisely.

Lying about the consequences of our choices, the forces shaping the planet’s future economic or ecological course, or expressing anxiety in the hysterical fantasies of a B-movie, is not particularly helpful. I wouldn’t suggest that it was.

I am talking about the struggle to tell the truth, to understand emergent phenomena and systems, get politics — which is how humans “think” and decide collectively — to respond in way that genuine meliorate the situation.

I think a case could be made — has been gestured at already by others in this thread — that the case is, in the main, hopeless. I don’t know that that is true. I haven’t made those arguments. I am taking the position, heuristically though not from conviction, that the situation can be substantially remedied, and it makes sense to try to motivate political action appropriate to limiting climate change and preventing ecological collapse.

It is an odd sort of optimism that attempts to “improve the odds” by advocating attitudes and delays and adaptive measures that accelerate the inevitable catastrophe. ymmv, I guess.

The danger with making too big a deal with the 2C goal, is that more and more people are realizing we won’t make it. Some want to double down on control efforts, but many react counterproductively and develop the “might as well party on” attitude. Personally, I think we won’t be able to muster heroic efforts, but I think renewables are advancing at a pace which will make meeting 3C seem to require little sacrifice. As I see it our efforts today may determine how far above 2C we hit, so our efforts are not wasted, even if the 2C goal appears futile.

@45 lives “worse, or unchanged.” Is that like O’s jobs created or saved claim? I disagree wholeheartedly. And given the bumper crop of material improvements ranging from global decreases in infant mortality rates, overall life expectancy, social mobility (still very limited, but at least now theoretically and legally possible in most nations), the onus is on you to provide some evidence to support your [implicit] claim that generally life is not measurably better for most people across the globe over the last century. I say it is.

I’m not all surprised to see come out against half-truths and hysteria, as a principle. Your difficulty, I suggest, is not seeing the hype when it’s staring us in the face. As in :
“As the time left to save the planet from uncontrolled climate change gets shorter and shorter….blah, yikes, blah, yikes, blah.” As much as I respect the general tenor of much of the CT content, this lead is built upon some highly suspect concepts.

For example: What exactly is ‘uncontrolled climate change?’ What is ‘controlled climate change?’ Until quite recently I retained what turned out to be an entirely unjustified faith in the integrity of the climate science peer-review process. I have always been aware of the hysterics and outright lies of the ‘forces for good,’ but relied on academics to provide the hard science and skepticism. Instead, they provided ammunition for the hysterics and, as the ABC clip confirms, corporations were quick to milk the hysterics cash-cow for all its worth. Clorox and sundry other brands paid environmental groups millions to ‘partner’ up to the financial benefit of both. A highly significant sub-set of reliable academics assert that the risks of climate change, AGU, extreme weather, or whatever other term you may wish to employ have been inflated for political/economic/career ends. If any part of this comes as news to you, I suggest you get out more and read more broadly.

The arguments for lower and wiser consumption rates are self-evident in many cases, whether we are talking about individual lifestyle choices, or policy decisions. I need to exercise, I don’t need to buy a membership to a gym or a new pair of trainers. Universities don’t need safe spaces, spanking new buildings, and 2,000 dollar chairs. We need better salaries, higher standards, and open minds.

I don’t believe one word of the apocalyptic claptrap currently polluting the discussion on the environment and the sooner we return to objectivity and probity the better.

50@ “Endtimes are nigh. Repent, all ye sinners!” All you’re missing is a bible, a cup, and a tambourine. In case you haven’t noticed a whole lot of people are making a real good buck out of predicting the world is ending. I rank climate science right alongside phrenology.

Feel my bumps.

@53 Cheers, John. I have to say I expected some push back, but not a complete retreat. I’ll go ahead with a more complete attack on your introductory statement, a statement I’ll allow is perfectly acceptable in most contemporary discussions of the environment, and that should not be judged as your final, or most careful, description of the challenges we face. I’ll note, however, that you have failed to provide any detailed explanation of what “controlled and uncontrolled climate change” might be. Let’s take a look at your opening statement.

“As the time left to save the planet from uncontrolled climate change gets shorter and shorter, the previously glacial pace of movement on the issues has speeded up.”

You cannot possibly be serious. The earth is 4.5 billion years old and is in no need of saving. The idea that any single species could determine the survival of this body is patently ludicrous, so let’s allow that you do not mean that the earth is going to disappear and be somehow transformed into a mass of rubble, gas, and dust orbiting around the sun. Perhaps you mean that a single species is going to render this body incapable of supporting any form of life, and that the earth will be transformed into a second, much larger, moon. This is equally nonsensical.

Hence, my assertion that Bruce could not recognize hype when it’s staring him in the face. That’s my point. Why the hype? What you may mean, but for some strange inexplicable reason simply refuse to state clearly, is that we are currently doing irreversible damage to the ecological system that supports human life, and that prompt action is required.

Given the amount of hair-splitting over definitions and exactness on this site over other I cannot fathom why you would choose hyperbole where clarity and accuracy are clearly called for, given the stakes, as you see them. Or are you so used to mute agreement, that any hype will suffice? Fair enough. You still need to explain how you plan to regain control over the earth’s climate and what you plan to do with climate once you get it. Let’s call that hype, too, and leave it at that.

There are a number of reasons why I compare climate science to phrenology – the first is because its fun. There are some actual similarities, not these are particularly relevant. Both grow out of a need to justify political and economic behavior – phrenology ‘explained’ aptitude and personality, but was used more broadly to justify political actions, the exploitation of ‘inferior races’ and for social and economic ends. See Keiman above on that.

What wins climate science its well-deserved opprobrium is the climate scientists cowardice in the face of bullying by the hysterics. Anyone familiar with the IPCC reports is aware that the dissent I alluded to earlier does in fact exist, and that these dissenting positions are typically shunted into appendices that never see the light of day. The dissenting scientists are so cowed by the very real threat of career-ending punishments that they remain silent when horror stories about the ‘end of the world’ are used to panic the public and make money for corporations. If you are unfamiliar with these cases, I strongly suggest to try to learn more. They’re real.

I defended climate scientists and accepted the arguments about climate change until 2008. I then began reading the dissents, and the more I read the more unhappy I became. Academics do not threaten to destroy evidence rather than subject it to scrutiny. Reputable physicists, statisticians, and mathematicians question the sampling and methodologies of individuals who can quite properly be described as ‘quacks.’

The climate scientists claims of ‘settled science’ have evidently disappeared right down your memory hole. What discipline claims the science is settled? Why the need to change the science from AGW, to extreme weather, to climate change? In what other scientific discipline do these changes occur, and at such a rapid rate? The central argument of AGU resulting from increased CO2 omissions came into question fifteen years ago, when temperature records confirmed record emissions, and no warming.

The CRU emails confirm that leading climate scientists across the globe had no clue as to why, and colluded in keeping their concerns from the public. Does this strike you as best academic practices? Is this how you run your investigations? Theories break down, so don’t tell anyone lest the funding tap gets turned off? I very much doubt it.

New studies of changes in water temperatures may well tell us more about where the heat went, or whether there was actually a pause. The very real problem for me is the combination of confirmation bias, secrecy/dishonesty, refusal to promote dissenting views to the public, and the fact that the same gang of a#holes are still running the show.

I have no doubt that there are a great many good scientists working to learn more about temperature changes and the environment. I wish them every success. I’ve read enough of the dissents to believe that claims of imminent long-term irreversible damage to the ecosystems that support human life have been greatly overstated and that the ‘planet’ is no danger whatsoever.

There are a great number of good scientists working in climate science. I’m not sure, however, if you really are familiar

Bruce Wilder,

“It does seem to me that eliminating fossil fuel use pretty much completely, even over the course of a decade or two, and constraining energy use generally, would require some fairly drastic, indeed heroic measures on an unprecedented scale of collective action. And the longer we continue to dither, the more drastic and heroic — and counterfactual — effective action becomes.”

This is why I always say we need a rapid response like in wartime.

Things were done very quickly in wartime, the government intervened in the economy eg. in the US they told all the car factories they could not make personal cars any more they had to stick to making military vehicles, and the percentage of GDP that went on military expenses soared even in the context of GDP generally growing.

I went to a talk on the technical and scientific advances of wartime the other day for the ANZAC centenary lectures at the Museum. While in Germany it had been recognised that science was important for the nation, in Australia there was not a national approach to science until WWI.

Billy Hughes was the 7th Prime Minister since Federation in 1901, serving from 1915-23 during wartime. He changed political parties most regularly for a politician from Labor, to National Labor, to Nationalist (these three just during WWI) then Australian, then United Australia, then finally Liberal.

Anyway, he was the first to start a national scientific organisation. This failed before the late Bruce government later started the organisation which was the beginning of our present day CSIRO.

But Billy Hughes’ national science organisation was a good prototype as since he never liked political parties as you can see from his incredibly varied party allegiances — he cut out the politicians and at the helm of the science organisation put the Commonwealth Governor-General, the Governors of the States, and then the Chancellors of all the Universities.

I think this is a very good model for a scientific body to govern Australia’s response to climate change as then the Governor-General and the Governors can work directly with the Chancellors to be most up to date and then tell the parliamentarians they have to adopt the recommended proper measures to address climate change so as to maintain a safe and prosperous climate for young Australians and future generations of Australians, as per their parliamentary duties.

“As far as I know, there is no convincing evidence that such a threshold exists in terms of accelerating climate change.”

This is not accurate. I have seen 3 degrees posited as being the threshold for feed backs like the Siberian tundra melting and releasing methane, and some say lower like 2 degrees. Because these feed backs are complicated they are not included in a lot of climate modelling.

Many scientists say we need to go back to 350ppm CO2e. This is because of the geological records and climate reconstructions of these past geological epochs. For all the history of human agricultural civilisations we have had under 300ppmCO2e in the atmosphere until with the release of greenhouse gasses from the machines of the industrial revolution.

The current level at 400ppmCO2e has never been seen in human history – the last time levels were so high was more than 2.6 million years ago in the Pliocene period. That was when temperatures were cooling – thus allowing the formation of the ice sheets at the North Pole and the South Pole. But now we are at 400ppmCO2e again – and going up rather than down this time – and so then the ice would all melt again like before the Pliocene Period and alligators will live in Greenland again.

That is why having a wartime mobilisation response to return to 350ppmCO2e by 2100 is important.

“The last time the concentration of Earth’s main greenhouse gas reached this mark [400ppmCO2e], horses and camels lived in the high Arctic. Seas were at least 30 feet higher—at a level that today would inundate major cities around the world.

The planet was about 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer. But the Earth then was in the final stage of a prolonged greenhouse epoch, and CO2 concentrations were on their way down. This time, 400 ppm is a milepost on a far more rapid uphill climb toward an uncertain climate future.
…
In a way, 400 ppm is an arbitrary milestone, like a .400 batting average in baseball. But the fact that no one has batted .400 since Ted Williams in 1941 still says something important about baseball. The same goes for CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere.
…
The last time the concentration of CO2 was as high as 400 ppm was probably in the Pliocene Epoch, between 2.6 and 5.3 million years ago. Until the 20th century, it certainly hadn’t exceeded 300 ppm, let alone 400 ppm, for at least 800,000 years. That’s how far back scientists have been able to measure CO2 directly in bubbles of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice cores.

But tens of millions of years ago, CO2 must have been much higher than it is now—there’s no other way to explain how warm the Earth was then. In the Eocene, some 50 million years ago, there were alligators and tapirs on Ellesmere Island, which lies off northern Greenland in the Canadian Arctic. They were living in swampy forests like those in the southeastern United States today. CO2 may have been anywhere from two to ten times higher in the Eocene than it is today. (See related: “Hothouse Earth.”)

Over the next 45 million years, most of it was converted to marine limestone, as CO2-laden rains dissolved the ingredients of limestone out of rocks on land and washed them down rivers to the sea. CO2-belching volcanoes failed to keep pace, so the atmospheric level of the gas slowly declined. Some time during the Pliocene, it probably crossed the 400 ppm mark, as it’s doing now-but back then it was on its way down. As a result, at the end of the Pliocene, it became cold enough for continental ice sheets to start forming in the northern hemisphere. The Pliocene, says geologist Maureen Raymo of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, “was the last gasp of warmth before the slow slide into the Ice Ages.”

What was Earth like then? In Africa, grasslands were replacing forests and our ancestors were climbing down from the trees. (See related: “The Evolutionary Road.”) On Ellesmere, there were no longer alligators and cypress trees, but there were beavers and larch trees and horses and giant camels—and not much ice. The planet was three to four degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the 19th century, before man-made global warming began”

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/05/130510-earth-co2-milestone-400-ppm/

The whole 2C number was pulled out of a hat. It was something thought reasonably doable, and thus not so intimidating as to be immediately rejected. The planet survived the PETM, although many species didn’t. The carbon in permafrost will be released slowly because heat diffusion through meters of soil/peat is slow, and at slow rates even much becomes methane that oxidizes to CO2 fast enough that the methane concentration will be limited. Its estimated the rate of release is something like 15% of the rate of current human emissions, very damaging to be sure, but not the end of life on earth. Obviously it behooves us to limit the excursion as much as we can manage, but in any case -especially considering the large uncertainties, 2C is worse than 1C, and 3C is worse than 2C, and 4C is worse than 3C, but there is no actual known cliff that we can approach but must not step over.

“I can’t imagine how you think that could happen politically any time in the near, sort-of-foreseeable future.”

Paul Gilding’s plan is to start at 2018, then for the first 5 years halve ghg emissions globally through easy ways like conserving energy by lowering uneasily energy use, retrofitting housing, avoiding air travel, installing solar and wind etc. it is all in an article, I can’t recall the title off the top of my head but I’ll look for it tomorrow.

2018 would be an auspicious starting date as it is the centenary of the end of WW1 – so everyone will be thinking about war these next 3 1/2 years anyhow. Whenever anyone mentions the war, just bring up how we need a wartime mobilisation approach now to climate change. If everybody does this then the idea will get popularised quickly as there will be so much discussion of the First World War in the next 3 1/2 yearsbecause it is the centenary.

My great grandfather was a soldier and got a soldiers settlement after the war, then his daughter married my grandfather after the next world war he had been a soldier in. Already the conflicts in the Middle East are said by military experts to be the first conflicts due to climate change because of the droughts before the Arab Spring that meant Russia stopped exporting grain to the Middle East causing food price hikes and shortages. The situation is very bad in several countries. Climate change is already going to get worse because it takes 30 or so years to take effect – this means more droughts, more limits of food exports, and more conflict, unless the countries co-operate to rapidly decrease ghg emissions. The option of a wartime mobilisation response is much better than more actual wars.

ZM. As far as I’ve been able to determine a two to three decade transition of energy to be fully renewable is an investment of only a couple of percent of GWP. Its a longer commitment than was WW2, but spread over several times the timespan. Will is required, but not really much sacrifice, except for those owning fossil fuel related assets which will have to be written off.

As far as I’ve been able to determine a two to three decade transition of energy to be fully renewable is an investment of only a couple of percent of GWP. Its a longer commitment than was WW2, but spread over several times the timespan.

And of course worth remembering that over that 20-30 year period, we will be replacing most of the vehicle, airliner and power plant fleets of the world anyway – so really the figure that matters is the difference between “building a completely new fossil fuel powered fleet” and “building a completely new renewable fleet”.

Omega Centauri,

“ZM. As far as I’ve been able to determine a two to three decade transition of energy to be fully renewable is an investment of only a couple of percent of GWP. Its a longer commitment than was WW2, but spread over several times the timespan. Will is required, but not really much sacrifice, except for those owning fossil fuel related assets which will have to be written off.”

I don’t think this in right. There are lots of things that need changing for both climate change mitigation and adaptation, and also the other sustainability challenges we face.

I do not take the cost estimations very seriously because they do not factor in all the things that need to change, and they also don’t factor in the impacts of regulation on greenhouse gas emitting businesses, or unsustainable businesses. Some can change what they do and stay in the same field, but some fields will just have to stop.

Farming can become more sustainable and have less greenhouse gas emissions by decreasing the amount of animal farming, changing machinery to work on electric battery power (I don’t know if batteries have developed this far yet?). Extra land that was used for pasture that is no longer tenable due to the greenhouse gas budget can be re- or a-forested, which will draw down emissions, but this is quite likely to draw the ire of some animal farmers so the government will have to pay them for their land outright or pay them per annum to act as new forest stewards maybe together with the traditional indigenous owners since it was their land first. There can be more local food production in gardens, community gardens, or unused land that is suitable.

Stationary energy is recognised as one of the easier things to change, to replace with Renewable Energy Technology. But some countries have more potential for renewable energy than others, so you might need international energy grids.

Moving shipping to 100% renewable energy may be possible, there are some prototypes now, but looking at them ship sizes may need to decrease. Aeroplanes need to be banned as their is no way to fuel them except with biofuel which is a waste of crops except for extremely important people like the Queen and Prime Minister and President etc, diplomats can just take boats unless there is a diplomatic crisis. A friend said you could have balloons and such things maybe if people are set on having some air travel options.

Other transport is also an issue — and there are public health problems and social problems with our current over-reliance on personal motor vehicles — so in urban planning more mass transit and more active transport facilities are considered the better option, not just replacing cars running on petroleum with cars running on batteries. Also having people be able to work and go to schools closer to where they live is considered a better idea — which entails what I’ve seen referred to as “retrofitting suburbia”

For climate adaptation, planting urban forests is a good solution to counter the warming associated with both climate change and the urban heat island effect. However you will need more people to look after the urban forests and take the leaf litter away to be mulched and put back into the earth. Another solution to cool down cities and towns and make them greener is to “daylight” creeks and streams that were put into drainpipes, there is a lovely very noteworthy example in South Korea of this, and other examples in other places such as in the USA.

Manufacturing might need to be spread around the world more fairly as Asia probably does not have the renewable energy potential to manufacture such a high amount of goods for the rest of the world like it does now. This means a transformation of advanced economies back to having some manufacturing.

And consumption should be more conservative overall and also more fairly spread around the world too, because there are limited resources so it is not fair for advanced economies to take such a high proportion and less advanced economies have more poverty, and it is not fair for present generations to use all the resources especially in such a disposable way like we do now.

Then as we are also facing declining resources since so many have been used by now, we should be moving to a circular economy — this is where everything gets recycled instead of going to landfill. This is a good idea to save resources and because landfills get quite toxic with all the mix of things people don’t want anymore and even when regulations say plastic has to line the landfill, the plastic lining will not last forever so the toxicity will get into the soil and water at some point down the track anyway. So waste management practices need to change too.

Then low lying coastal areas need to plan for moving people and residences by the time the sea level rise is significant.

And by 2050 experts predict there will be 200-250 million refugees and displaced people due to climate change impacts. Yet look at what’s happening now and at the moment we are not even making progress on resettling the current 50 million refugees and displaced persons. This is the highest number since WW2, but I went to a talk earlier this year and found out it took until 1968 to resettle all the refugees from WW2 — that is 23 years without the increasing numbers we face due to climate change.

These are just a few things off the top of my head, but I am sure you can see why I am dubious about estimates of costs.

BW: “Not to belabor the point, but I think “we” are responding. The response of the globalized elite of billionaires and corporate executives, in particular, worries me.”

I can only repeat that they aren’t us. Sure, the global elite is responding, in a sense. If anyone not in the elite isn’t satisfied with that response, it makes no sense to talk about “we”. There is only a “we” in a *political* sense if there is some kind of functioning political mechanism that causes the values and interests of the large mass of people to influence the people who make the decisions. There isn’t currently such a mechanism. Obviously there is a “we” in the sense that we’re one species on one planet and we’ll all suffer together (sort of — wealth can buy your way out of a lot of suffering) but that’s not a useful way to look at the project of getting a political outcome past opposition when the conflict is exactly an elite vs mass phenomenon.

ZM: “Nordhaus was the first to say the threshold was 2 degrees, this was in a 1970s economics paper, not a science paper, and he did not have any scientific basis for this judgement, except it delayed action.”

I don’t see the basis for the last clause in that sentence. As far as I know, global warming activism started pretty much everywhere in the 1980s, later than Nordhaus’ paper. I don’t think someone can be said to have delayed action that wasn’t really in prospect at the time. In particular, Carter’s energy conservation and alternative energy pushes were not about global warming: they were about not being dependent on foreign oil. (His 1997 national energy plan objectives were: “a. In the short term, to reduce dependence on foreign oil and to limit supply disruptions. b. In the medium term, to weather the eventual decline in the availability of world oil supplies caused by capacity limitations. c. In the long term, to develop renewable and essentially inexhaustible sources of energy for sustained economic growth”.) Global warming activism took off in the US and UK largely around 1988.

I recommend these two short articles:

a history of 2 degrees
social movements and climate change

I know something about this: that poem I linked to earlier itself has links to what I was doing at the time. (There are no links to the ads in the middle section because they’re unarchived.)

ZM: “Nordhaus could have suggested the moon landing program approach in 2008 since he missed the opportunity in 1975”

Criticizing what he wrote in 2008 sounds fine: criticizing what he wrote in 1977 as “delaying action” sounds anachronistic. Arrhenius discovered the greenhouse effect in 1896, and figured that doubling CO2 concentration because of releases from human sources would cause a 5-6 degree rise in temperature, but (based on 1896 release rates) he thought it would take 3000 years for that to happen. I don’t think he was delaying action either.

Nordhaus’ economic thinking fed into the whole cap-and-trade idea, which was implemented for the acid rain control program in the U.S. And since I’m going to keep on talking about that poem until someone else says something about it, that was the source for the lyrics in the R.E.M. song “Fall On Me” in 1986 about buying and selling the sky. That program remains, as far as I know, poorly studied in terms of what actual effect it has (my impression is that the purchasable permits never did anything: that reductions were caused by regulation) but in any case that approach was not widely adopted for GHGs and I think could never really have been, for obvious coordination reasons. So I don’t have a problem with saying that his economic approach failed.