05/04/2020

Climate Change: For Big Emissions Reductions, We Need To Think Small

The Daily Climate - Brian Bienkowski

"Big new infrastructure costing billions is not the best way to accelerate decarbonization"

Credit: BlackRockSolar/flickr
 
Small-scale clean energy and low carbon technologies—such as solar panels, smart appliances and electric bicycles—are more likely to push society toward meeting climate goals than large-scale technologies, according to a new study from a team of international researchers.

The findings, published today in Science, suggest governments and investors around the world should prioritize small-scale, low carbon technologies in policy design and research development in order to reduce emissions responsible for climate change in a more efficient and just way.


The study authors make their case for small-scale climate change solutions.

 For years, scientists have issued stark warnings that, without drastic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, we will further warm the planet and increasingly experience "substantial" consequences—wildfires, droughts, flooding, coral reef die-offs, food shortages.

A groundbreaking 2018 study from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that the planet is on a trajectory to warm by as much as 2.7-degrees Fahrenheit (compared to pre-industrial temperatures) by 2040.

The message from climate scientists has been clear and consistent—we have to act fast.
In the new study, researchers examined how to best attack the problem with available technologies.

They collected information on a wide assortment of energy technologies and examined their viability to help push countries toward meeting international climate change goals, defined in the study as needing to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half within the next decade and to net-zero by 2050.

They tested how well each technology performed in cost, innovation, accessibility, social return, equality of access, investment risk and other characteristics.

The team divided technologies into two categories: "lumpy" technologies such as nuclear power, carbon capture, high speed transit, whole building retrofits; and "granular" technologies such as solar panels, electricity storage batteries, heat pumps, smart thermostats, electric bikes, and shared taxis.

They found the granular options "can help drive faster and fairer progress towards climate targets," said lead author Charlie Wilson, a researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, in a statement.


"Big new infrastructure costing billions is not the best way to accelerate decarbonization," Wilson said. "Governments, firms, investors, and citizens should instead prioritize smaller-scale solutions, which deploy faster. This means directing funding, policies, incentives, and opportunities for experimentation away from the few big and towards the many small."

Wilson and colleagues wrote the granular tech was "associated with faster diffusion, lower investment risk, faster learning, more opportunities to escape lock-in, more equitable access, more job creation, and higher social returns on innovation investment."

They cautioned that small-scale technology is not always the answer—for example, there are no alternatives for planes or industrial plants.

"Smaller scale innovations are not a panacea," said co-author Nuno Bento, a researcher at the University Institute of Lisbon, in a statement.

However, these smaller technologies are, in general, quicker to get to market and less complex. This accessibility means more jobs—which makes them an easier sell for policymakers crafting climate change plans.

"Large 'silver bullet' technologies like nuclear power or carbon capture storage are politically seductive," said co-author Arnulf Brubler, a researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, in a statement.

"But larger scale technologies and infrastructures absorb large shares of available public resources without delivering the rapid decarbonization we need."

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Footprints By David Farrier Review – Fossils Of The Anthropocene

The Guardian - 

From nuclear waste to huge numbers of jellyfish … what signs will future generations find of today’s ecological crisis? 

Our throwaway plastic will persist … a dumping site in Nairobi, Kenya. Photograph: Ben Curtis/AP
 
by David Farrier is published by 4th Estate
David Farrier’s idea in this book is to try and imagine our present moment of climate and ecological crisis from a far-distant future. What fossil traces will post-industrial human civilisation leave behind for the future to find? Roads and vast cities, long abandoned and forgotten, will show up as layers in the geological strata; our buried radioactive waste will still be deadly; our throwaway plastic will persist until eventually “over the coming millennia, hydrocarbons leach from the fossil plastic, accumulating in small deposits and setting in motion a slow chemical return” to its origins as oil.

Future archaeologists may comment on the dreary sameness of our collective biomass: almost all of it Homo sapiens, along with the few species we like to eat. Which future archaeologists would those be, by the way? Sometimes Farrier is addressing human generations to come; at other times he’s thinking on timescales longer than any species is likely to last, let alone ours with its over-sophistication and bad habits.

One microbiologist fantasises that some day a “commune of evolved bees” will encourage bee-scientists to study the Anthropocene as “a warning for all hive-kind”.The transience of what appears indestructible has been a rich theme in poetry and story. The mists shift on a bleak hillside in Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, where bloody Cobweb Castle is visible, now vanished and forgotten; Saxons write poems about stumbling on the ruins of Roman Aquae Sulis; Batman chases villains round the fallen grandeur of Gotham City.

Farrier’s argument is nuanced slightly differently, channelling our contemporary angst. It’s not only that our way of life is transient. Our heedless interventions in the life of the planet – herding, ploughing, planting, building, mining, smelting, processing, communicating – have degraded its complexity and beauty in ways that will long outlast us, leaving their ineradicable taint. “We live in the shadow of an eclipse that will endure perhaps as many as ten million years before sound, shape and colour return in full to the land and the oceans.”
An uninitiated eye can only glide over Farrier’s summaries, adding them on to the mounting heap of glum
The climate and ecological crisis hurts us: and not only materially, physically. It hurts in the imagination, in the stories we tell. An idea of nature’s boundlessness, the recurring seasons, the ocean’s endless renewal – vaster than we are and cruelly, consolingly indifferent to us – has salved our private and public despairs, perhaps often almost unconsciously, through plagues and floods and wars, tragic ending after tragic ending. I remember the happiness I felt when we were shown black and white slides, in school, of the equatorial forest – much too long ago for any warning that it was threatened. My happiness didn’t make me want to go there; I just needed it to be there. Nature holds together our sense of being, organically, at the root; and it’s therefore in the roots of our language. We didn’t know how fundamental our trust was in “the treasure of nature’s germens” – that’s Macbeth invoking chaos – until news came that the treasure after all couldn’t be counted on.

And therefore the language and style in which we address the crisis are all-important. Obviously there’s a first responsibility for the words to produce effects: an urgent need to change minds, change governance, change practices. And then alongside that there’s the other responsibility that words have: to put up their supple resistance to stupidity and ugliness and evil, so that our consciousness of what’s at hand has form, and we can bear it. There’s a fascinating chapter in Farrier’s book on two contrasting approaches to burying nuclear waste. How can we warn the far future not to dig where we’ve put it, when we know that the future won’t understand our language?

Olkiluoto nuclear power plant … the world’s first underground repository for highly radioactive nuclear waste, on the island of Eurajoki, western Finland. Photograph: Sam Kingsley/AFP/Getty Images
Near Carlsbad, New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has devised a scheme that sounds like a computer game: “Five levels of warning messages, rising in complexity, and a mix of monoliths, buried clues and archives … accompanied by faces of disgust and repulsion, modelled on Edvard Munch’s The Scream … A thirty foot earthen berm, studded with magnets and radar reflectors to signal an anomaly, will enclose the inner ring of granite markers.” In Finland meanwhile, they’ve decided that “given the long lifespan” of their nuclear waste repository on Olkiluoto island – it will probably be buried at some point under another ice age – “it would be foolish to try to mark it”. They will “bury the waste in specially designed copper canisters; backfill the hole; and retreat, without leaving a single trace aboveground”; it’s meant to be forgotten. This difference, too, feels like a choice about language; it’s aesthetic as well as practical. Only one of those options is in good taste.

Farrier’s book is full of fascinating things, yet doesn’t in its totality work for me. Its central conceit, to begin with – that idea of viewing, in some unimaginably distant future, the fossils left behind by our Anthropocene – feels strained because such a future is indeed impossible to imagine. The very terms of our love for our planet will no doubt turn out in deep time to be so much stardust – or carbon, or whatever; we can’t begin to know in what ways our depredations might matter, on the timescale proposed here. No doubt Farrier wants the future-fossil idea to work as a rhetorical device, reminding us of the sheer size of our disaster now; but the harder he works to conjure the geological scale of the problem, the more tempting it is for his language to become vatic and sententious. “Fragments of artificial glass will be glazed with cataracts, like glaucomatous eyes staring blindly into the dark.”

Farrier’s a literary critic and not a scientist, and the book is intended for a lay readership; but there just isn’t room here to begin to lay out the complexities of these diverse scientific disciplines. A reader might finish his chapter on jellyfish convinced that they’re taking over the sea (“the ocean’s one lonely god will be frilled and eyeless, drifting placidly and implacably through its vast, empty dominion”), but ocean scientist Juli Berwald, in her book Spineless, resists any certainty even as to whether jellyfish numbers are on the rise. Each “ecosystem in the ocean”, she writes, “has its own unique characteristics, with distinctive vulnerabilities, threats, and resiliences”. A reader can’t conceivably do justice to the chunks of science in Footprints: the account of lateral gene-swap transfer, for instance, or palaeoclimatologists’ varying theses of the rhythms of ice ages. An uninitiated eye can only glide over Farrier’s summaries, taking what’s there on trust and adding it on to the mounting heap of glum. “The shadows are racing onwards … life is collapsing into darkness and silence.”

It’s not that there isn’t plenty to be glum about: glum, anxious, desperate even. We have to hope to turn this stinking, filthy tanker of our civilisation around: do something globally, for the first time ever, for our collective good. Not easy. And things won’t ever all be all right again anyway, or all pristine, even at the best – they never were. Nature itself isn’t pristine, that’s a fallacy that belongs with the dream of original sin. If it’s the right moment for jeremiads, though, let’s at least have scorching ones, and not the lyric soulfulness of an admonitory headteacher. “Behold, mine anger and my fury shall be poured out upon this place, upon man, and upon beast, and upon the trees of the field, and upon the fruit of the ground: and it shall burn, and shall not be quenched” (Jeremiah VII, 20).

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Universities Form New Global Alliance To Tackle Climate In Midst Of Pandemic

RenewEconomy - 

UNSW leads new group of 40 universities to form a new Climate Alliance to accelerate climate action, despite current focus on Covid-19 pandemic.


Vision
The Climate Alliance will provide a central hub for universities to share the latest climate research with the public and enable greater collaboration between leading research teams, supporting global leaders, policy makers and industry in planning for and responding to climate change.
A group of 40 leading international universities have formed a new “Climate Alliance” to accelerate climate action, saying these efforts remain crucial even during the global disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The formation of the alliance has been led by UNSW Sydney, with members agreeing that the urgent threat posed by climate change meant that global cooperation and action on climate change could not be delayed.

The International Universities Climate Alliance (IUCA) will support collaboration on climate change research across 40 international universities, including Australia’s UNSW Sydney, Monash University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Tasmania.

International members of the alliance include the King’s College London, the National University of Singapore, New York University and the TERI School of Advanced Studies.

The IUCA will focus on ensuring governments, the media and the general public have access to accurate information on climate science, the expected impacts and measures to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

“The climate alliance will elevate the voices of exceptional researchers by providing a new, global platform for universities to communicate climate research with authority internationally,” UNSW President and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Ian Jacobs, said.

“This new platform is needed now more than ever as the world grapples with providing a coordinated approach to tackling climate change.”

“This new Alliance will be at the forefront of the international conversation around addressing climate change.”

The alliance will look to facilitate collaboration across a range of fields relevant to climate change, including science, economics, engineering, law, social science and planning.

The universities said that while it was important that governments focused on the immediate response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the threats posed by climate change remain, and it made sense for climate scientists to continue their efforts.

In fact, UNSW climate researcher professor Matthew England said that he hopes the new alliance between 40 of the world’s leading climate change research institutions would accelerate action on climate change.

“Worldwide interest to act on climate change has been growing but the pace of that change has been far too slow. The alliance aims to accelerate climate action and ensure mitigation efforts are properly factored in with adaptation actions,” England said.

Many Australian universities, including UNSW Sydney, have ramped up efforts in response to Covid-19, but in driving the formation of the new climate change alliance, acknowledged that not all of its academics have a central role to play in the immediate response.

“While universities like UNSW have set up a special COVID-19 Rapid Response Research initiative, not all of our researchers are able to lend expertise to the virus effort, and so other work will continue within the constraints of the current pandemic,” England said.

“As hard as it is to comprehend amid virus information saturation, the climate change emissions pathway, with every delay, becomes so much harder to overcome.”

England pointed to the findings of a survey of community attitudes undertaken by UNSW that showed two-thirds of people supported the formation of a global alliance of climate change researchers.

A similar number of people said that the Australian government still needs to introduce a comprehensive policy on climate change.

A recent poll published by Essential showed that even amongst the disruption caused by Covid-19, that most people are still overwhelmingly concerned by climate change and many still think governments still need to do more to address it.

“With various scientific and government-related reports across many nations demonstrating that climate change is causing more extreme events, it is understandable that people feel frustration about a lack of government policy and leadership in tackling this issue.”

Environmental groups issued a similar call on governments not to use Covid-19 as an excuse to delay increasing action on climate change after it was announced that the next round of international climate talks would be delayed until sometime in 2021.

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