Daily Quick Read - August 30, 2019

The Last Straw

Is replacing plastic straws with the paper version going to save the planet or does it just make us feel good to make a small sacrifice?   We abandon plastic straws, recycle, tote reusable bags into the story, but does any of that really matter when our government works diligently seven days a week to turn more greenhouse gases loose.  

The bright, cold, bitter tang. The soft notes of walnut and dirt. The anticipation of the jolt of electricity. The feeling of wet cardboard in my mouth. Nowadays this is what I get when I grab my morning iced coffee in San Francisco, one of several municipalities that have banned plastic straws in recent months. The paper ones are a necessary corrective, the argument goes. They work just fine, while their plastic cousins choke the oceans and extend our dependence on fossil-fuel products.

Replace plastic straws with paper straws, solve some proportion of the problem, right? Yes, if only a tiny share. Straws make up just 0.025 percent of the plastic that finds its way into the ocean each year; the United States, the biggest per capita producer of garbage on Earth, is not even close to the biggest producer of mismanaged plastic waste. On the one hand, straw bans will lead to thousands and thousands of fewer straws in the ocean; on the other hand, straw bans will not change the underlying environmental calculus at all.

Arguably, it might prompt consumers to think about their consumption, with paper straws and reusable grocery bags and shared urban bicycles acting as a gateway to more meaningful changes. Social norms matter a lot when it comes to the environment, and social contagion is real. Maybe paper straws will persuade people to do the big stuff: stop flying, quit eating cows, give up their cars, have one fewer kid, vote into office politicians who could use the levers of government to do something meaningful, such as impose a tax on carbon.

BAU vs GND

The problems we must overcome in the next decade (or two) are more massive than most people are willing to accept.  The possibility that we will continue with business as usual (BAU) is going to diminish over time as the magnitude of the disaster becomes inescapable.  At the other end of the spectrum is something like the Green New Deal (GND) which is an attempt to solve a global crisis by looking back to solutions from the past.  The original New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression.  World War II ended the Great Depression.  Isn’t that the level of global mobilization we need?

So that’s the choice at your local political theatre. BAU promises a magical future, with some robots and drones thrown in. GND sets out energy goals that could only be possible in some sort of Marvel superhero movie.

And the real unfolding drama — the collapse of a global civilization founded on a highly material culture created by cheap energy — is not a narrative we want to tell ourselves or our children.

They are both energy blind. Neither BAU nor GND, for instance, understand that energy flows underpin economic flows. The more carbon-based energy we use, the more economic growth global civilization experiences.

The less we use, the more our economies contract. 

BAU pretends that expensive fossil fuels like fracked oil or bitumen can replace cheap conventional stuff with no global economic contraction. They can’t.

GND pretends that renewables can provide the same quality of energy as fossil fuels with no global upheaval. They can’t.

“I Feel Your Pain”

Have we failed to adequately address the climate crisis because humans, as a species, lack empathy?  This argument suggests why getting traction is so hard, but it does finally get to the main point, we need to rise up and demand the action our future requires.

Empathizing with the future, alone, will not save the planet. The majority of carbon emissions come from a tiny number of massive companies, which are abetted by government deregulation. Empathy can be a psychological force for good, but climate change is a structural problem.

That doesn’t mean individuals don’t matter. Our behaviors create norms, social movements and political pressure. Newfound awareness of how voiceless, powerless people suffer has sparked enormous change in the past. It can again.

Empathy is built on self-preservation. We watch out for our children because they carry our genes, for our tribe because it offers sex, safety and sustenance. Spreading our care across space and time runs counter to those ancient instincts. It’s difficult emotional work, and also necessary. We must try to evolve our emotional lives: away from the past and toward a future that needs us desperately. Doing so might help us to finally become the ancestors our descendants deserve.

Two More Things

But first a note.
At the end of the day, we need several things to mitigate the climate crisis.  We need a change in human behaviour away from convenient consumption.  We humans need to have a better understanding of the long sweep of human history.  We need to demand of our political leaders a sustained, planet wide effort.  And, we need to aggressively deploy the technologies we have in hand, while working to develop and deploy new technologies.  Below, two experts look at the same data, come to nearly the same conclusion and argue about it. Arguing about the need for both immediate action and scientific research seems petty and helps the deniers who will then argue that we shouldn’t do anything until we have the “right” (magic) technology that will fix everything.

A Reality Check on Ambitious Climate Targets

Says that scientist think we need more science to fix this thing, but that we also have some good technology in place.

An interesting commentary published in Nature this week explores what it would take to achieve California’s ambitious plan to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. It is worth exploring here because it holds lessons that apply far beyond that state.

The piece, “Piecemeal cuts won’t add up to radical reductions,” is by Jane C. S. Long, a principal associate director at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the co-leader of a team of energy analysts who spent two years writing “California’s Energy Future – The View to 2050,” an analysis of what mix of efforts could possibly achieve the required changes in energy and transportation systems.

She writes that a no-holds-barred deployment of known technologies and programs to push energy efficiency to the limit could take the state more than halfway to its goal, but going further would require fundamental leaps in technology.

Long’s bottom line?

California can’t just spend or deploy its way to an 80-percent reduction or beyond — and neither can anywhere else.

Climate Strategy: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy, Research and Develop, Deploy, Deploy, Deploy

Assumes we can do two things at the same time.

This report is an incredibly strong endorsement of the “deploy, deploy, deploy, research & develop, deploy, deploy, deploy,” strategy that I and others have been advocating. In fact, the report explicitly states that failing to adopt “Aggressive efficiency measures for buildings, industry and transportation” and “Aggressive electrification to avoid fossil fuel use” would “significantly increase the 2050 emissions.”

The fact is that California has been pushing efficiency and low-carbon electricity aggressively since the 1970s. It is considerably more efficient in its use of energy than almost every other state. For a long time now the CO2 intensity of its electricity (CO2/Mwh) has been nearly half that of the rest of the nation. So obviously the rest of the country — which is far more coal-intensive and inefficient — has considerably more low-hanging fruit for emissions reductions.