New report on climate change mitigation: "No silver bullet"
I was greatly amused by the headline of this piece: "‘Silver bullet’ to suck CO2 from air and halt climate change ruled out."
Here's the explanation:
From simply planting trees to filtering CO2 out of the air, the technologies that some hope could be a “silver bullet” in halting global warming either risk huge damage to the environment themselves or are likely to be very costly.
So omigod huge damage to the environment! Folks, climate change under capitalism will simplify planetary ecosystems until most of human society confronts an empty wasteland, and maybe there will be something left in Alaska, Canada, Siberia or Scandinavia. Perhaps that's why these reports seem a bit confused to me. They cherry-pick, say, climate change or geoengineering as environmental problems, notwithstanding the reality of the matter: the human geological legacy will be junk. Guys! Look at the total picture.
And omigod very costly! We can't pay for stuff these days, you see, because government these days only prints money to keep its investments in the military-industrial complex deep in gravy.
Now, to be fair, the authors of this report appear to be critiquing some pretty lame solutions:
The report assesses the range of possible technologies, including “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage” (BECCS), on which the IPCC scenarios rely heavily. BECCS involves growing trees, which take CO2 from the atmosphere, and then burning them to produce electricity while capturing the emissions and burying them.
Bioenergy has always been estimated to have a low energy return on investment, and so for instance alcohol fuels from surplus corn (maize) grown in the Great Plains were at one point estimated to have an EROI of about 1.6. Carbon capture and storage ought to drive that number even lower. Why the IPCC was relying on this stuff is beyond me. What I'd really like to see is what sort of capitalist mess would be made if the industrialists were to scour the planet for gallium for a big ramp-up of solar panel manufacturing.
The fundamental problem of course is capitalism -- you leave a narcissistic transnational capitalist class in power, and toss away a third of the planet's population as whole societies of nobodies obliged to "make a living" on the margins of the system, selling their extra kidneys for a bit of cash or digging through waste-dumps for recyclables or something like that, and demand for a fake resistance will soar!
The technocrats have their own fake-resistance solution of course. From the Guardian article:
“You can rule out a silver bullet,” said Prof John Shepherd, at the University of Southampton, UK, and an author of the report. “Negative emissions technologies are very interesting but they are not an alternative to deep and rapid emissions reductions. These remain the safest and most reliable option that we have.”
The monks will save us, because they're the only ones who have the courage to make "deep and rapid emissions reductions"! The problem of course is that Shepherd and others are still operating within the conceptual boundaries of carbon metrics, in which the capitalist process of achieving total ecological simplification through narcissistic commodities-and-sales business is taken for granted but omigod we gotta worry about "emissions." This is what Moreno and Fuhr call the "end-of-pipeline approach."
Real resistance, of course, relies upon ecology for its notions of the world, and bands together for the sake of non-capitalist social relations. So for instance Zapatismo, or Rojava. In the present dispensation such groups are confined to war zones.
Comments
At this point carbon sequestration proposals
are analogous to rolling down the windows of a speeding car and sticking one's arms out to stop it before it careens over the abyss. Even "renewable" solar energy energy development, with the associated environmental costs you mention do very little to help in the near term.
I'm with the monks who have a simple and immediate impact by simply consuming very little (and not procreating) and who also sometimes adhere to plant based diets (natures most efficient processors of solar energy) thereby avoiding the extreme waste of animal husbandry. However, the shortage of monk-like humans will limit any impact of voluntary non-consumption programs. Ditto the non-procreation part.
It is telling that capitalism, powered by the engine of consumption, remains a beacon of hope to much of the world's population. As if we can consume our way out of the problems we have created by overconsumption of the planet's resources. You'd think more people would understand the absurdity of such a notion.
We humans can either do a quick about face with our consumption mania or simply wait for the planetary disruptions we have set in motion to trim our human herd, along with most of the other species. At the moment our trajectory clearly favors the latter.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes
Monks have no simple or immediate impact on anything.
Rather, the monks hope to claim, from within an incorrect "blame the consumer" explanation of the problem, that it's all "not their fault." In their Christian heads the monks hope to make Pontius Pilate the hero of Jesus' story.
In their big book Ecological Rift, Foster, Clark, and York showed that the problem with "consumption" is not consumptive consumption, operating from within the limited purview of "consumer choice" as presented to consumers, but rather productive consumption, the enormous wastage of planet Earth (including its human residents, in what Jason W. Moore calls "cheap nature") existing prior to consumptive consumption.
Examples: the fact that you buy tomatoes from the supermarket in March does not make you responsible for the vast networks of corporate farming, shipping, and other transportation, storage, pricing, and supermarket operations which brings you Chilean tomatoes in March, and your driving a fossil-burning vehicle does not make you responsible for the networks of vehicle production, oil production, road production, and production of vehicle maintenance products which bear the great bulk of responsibility for ecological simplification. You're merely the human being in all this, the individual who makes highly coerced "consumer choices" out of fundamental motives of "making a living" from within the purview of a capitalist system in which you and billions of others are trapped.
A managerial elite might be responsible for these other things, but they too merely do their jobs at the behest of even smaller financial elites. If you want this diagrammed, please consult Kees van der Pijl's Transnational Classes and International Relations. Blaming the consumer for the whole complex is like blaming laboratory rats for the mazes they inhabit.
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
Buy flowers anytime and you are caught up in the same
network as tomatoes. I decided years ago living in the NE US that potato and rutabaga was not how I wanted to subsist. I can grow my own greens all year 'round. Indoors. I do like mustard greens, not lettuce. And never buy flowers, only bulbs and seeds to make me happy. I like repeat events, either by re-blooming or re-seeding.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
merely the human being
This.
And exactly the same thing can be said (and should be said) about ordinary working-class humans somehow being "complicit" in warfares they never called for.
We cannot bear blame for the exercise of control we do not possess. Those who possess that control -- the global 0.1% -- bear all of it.
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
@thanatokephaloides
Make them pay for the actual costs of their 'cost-cutting' profiteering - and there goes their obscene drained-from-all wealth and the ability to purchase political power and control. Multiple problems solved.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Blame has little to do with it.
Each of us make choices from within the range of possibilities we are presented with. Those choices, large and small, do have consequences. Period. Being more aware of the consequences will inform our future choices. Assigning blame is irrelevant. Being aware of the consequences of our decisions is not.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes
OK, except I have no truck with --
the idea that our decisions have consequences in cases where they clearly have no such thing.
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama
Now I understand why French revolutionaries kept going,
just to stay sharp. /rimshot
Another one for the filing cabinet under "things I never wanted to understand".
thanks
An interesting video on the Ebola clusterfuck.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6U91GXIodg]
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
Is there a vaccine for any filovirus now?
We (first world) are stumbling through a bad influenza season with best guess antigens from a 6-month ago at least time frame. A fail and a bad pneumonia year. What has/will happen in Africa? More birds and pigs; more new recombinants likely.
Filoviruses are ss RNA, IIRC. Reverse transcriptase is sloppy for retroviruses and I think filos are cellular with their own machinery.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
It almost seems like modern medicine
where the cure is some medicine that has troubling side effects. So more pills with their own side effects are taken, and needing more medicine to counteract other side effects, until the symptoms of the original disease subside into an amalgam of ills that reduce the quality of overall well being.
Also, all the goobers that deny science as fake and biased will be the first to tell you that scientists will figure this all out and fix it, so why worry.
There is some promise
in the tree farming/processing/storing method of mitigation. Growing the trees removes CO2 from the air. Young growing trees remove the most carbon while they grow larger and larger. But if you take those trees that are mature and no longer extracting the maximum and burn them in the absence of oxygen and at a constant temperature of around 300 degrees, it becomes biochar.
That biochar can be used to replenish the dead soils of farms subjected to Big Ag practices of petroleum based fertilizers that kill the natural biomes of soil.
In addition, the biochar, now almost pure carbon, is locked into the earth where it will remain for hundreds of years, providing it is not tilled up. The no til method of farming should be adopted.
In addition to biochar, recent research is indicating that plant growth, all living plants, suck CO2 from the air and trap it in the soil deep down at the root level. Tests in healthy gardens have shown concentrations of CO2 at 18" and below. Further studies are ongoing.
The possibility of using the earth and oceans as carbon sinks is the best option going forward.
It should be noted also that plants have the capacity to remove toxins and pollutants from the soil and air.
The agrarian lifestyle may be the saviour of mankind, as that guy from Bethlehem suggested. Smart guy, holy or not.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
Better to use the wood as wood instead of burning it
and using plastic as wood.
P.S. Not sure if decomposing wood releases CO2. Is mulch bad?
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
burning it
Not necessarily. Using the wood as wood eventually returns the carbon to the biosphere via bacterial and fungal deterioration. The carbon doesn't stay sequestered as it does as biochar. In addition, biochar, during its long, stable life, helps soils in numerous ways: keeping them porous and motile so that lifeforms can do their bit in them.
Plastic is nothing but pollution in the natural environment. The only acceptable ends for plastics are recycling or decomposition. And nature alone cannot do the latter; we humans created plastic, we must be in charge of destroying it.
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
biochar tillage
Even if it is tilled up, the carbon is still sequestered. Once crops are planted, it goes back into the soil and stays there.
Wood charcoal -- which is what "biochar" really is -- isn't particularly useful to most lifeforms and doesn't autocombust very well. (Unlike coal which is notorious for doing so.) One of the most reliable evidences used in archaeology and paleontology is charcoal from burning wood, for this very reason.
Indeed, if a "silver bullet" exists for carbon, it may well just be biochar.
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
Except that
wood charcoal is created in the presence of oxygen and biochar is not.
And biochar can be created from any organic material.
The key is the temperature and the absence of oxygen. Some studies have indicated a temperature of around 300 degrees.
Finding a heat source that doesn't cancel out the benefits of biochar is the holy grail.
Utilizing waste heat, such as the methane burn-off of oil refineries would be a great start as that heat is just wasted to the atmosphere anyway.
And many manufacturers vent heat from their processes too. 300 degrees is not a high temp. Using mirrors, solar is a good possibility.
We could really use some bright young engineers carving a path forward with this. The older engineers are stuck in the last century mentality, they are of no help.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
carbon sequestration via char
These differences argue in your favor (and mine), as biochar and wood charcoal are essentially chemically identical once produced. As you correctly pointed out, the only purer natural carbon is diamonds.
(Which also stay sequestered from the biosphere unless you burn them.)
What you're looking for is a way to make biochar with no net carbon expenditure, which, of course, is the optimum technology here. But even growing crops and then rendering them into traditional charcoal for soil improvement would leave us further ahead of the game than we are now.
EDIT: Which/Wich (which witch is wich?)
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
Now returning to the biological model of soil science
is an understandable effort to mitigate climate change, one which I endorse.
"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama