Denial of political pathways.

This is part four of climate action denial.

Part one...Introduction

Part two....Denial of the science of climate change.

Part three....Denial concerning Technological Solutions.

Different political pathways to decarbonising.

The important point to make at the onset here is that, globally, we have a very urgent need to decarbonise our energy use largely by reducing consumption of the fossil fuels that we heavily depend on. We have known this for considerable time and yet we have not found the will or the political pathways in doing so. Now that the window of opportunity in terms of staying within a carbon budget is much much tighter we cannot rule out any of the methods of reducing carbon emissions. Not only should we consider the range of technological solutions some of which were briefly mentioned in part three but we should also consider the different political pathways.

I will argue that political extremism and the fear of opposing political extremism has been a major problem. In fact it seems a good way of defining political extremism to be one that relies on ideology that narrows or excludes good and effective choices that we allow to solve political problems. One approach is to see both the benefits and downsides of different political systems so that we don’t end up choosing one or the other or even just a compromise of different systems. Good design is not just about a compromise ending up between two extremes but ending up with a solution better than the extremes. Similarly good political governance will reach for maximum benefit with different systems for different locations and for different enterprises depending on many factors such as availability of resources and technological advance.

Of course good successful governments do already use many different approaches but for election purposes they often focus on simplified rhetoric leaning towards one or other political sides or a wishy-washy ineffective compromise. This may partly explain our clearly observed indecisions on effective action on climate change. The more enlightened the electorate is on incorporating different political pathways that complement each other the more likely we will have effective and transparent government.

In the late 18^th century the economist Adam smith extolled the advantages of individuals pursuing their own self interest free from poor regulation or control (Invisible hand) and in the early 19^th Century the economist William Forster Lloyd explained the problems of individuals pursuing their own self-interest without effective regulation (tragedy of the commons). It should be clear today that to solve the problems of climate change we need the benefits of innovation that also requires taking into account the effects that this has on others.

When countries race to extract fossil fuels they see the individual benefit to their own economy but the environmental cost is shared across the world.  Each country behaves in their own self interest by extracting fossil fuels as fast as they can because they reap the rewards of the finance gained in the short term from these resources but they don’t pay the full price of the environmental damage. Of course in the long term we all lose out
.

It is the realization of these facts and an attempt to break this deadlock that led world leaders to agree targets at the COP21 meeting in Paris. This is a good example of global cooperation which some political extremists trying to discredit this as an attempt at a world government at the same time as denying the science of human induced climate change with their contradictory viewpoints. Of course we have had previous examples of good global cooperation for example on tackling ozone depletion:- Montreal Protocol   or of making ongoing steps towards tackling world poverty with the millennium development goals. (Goal 8 for example aims for a “global partnership for development”).

Market forces alone will not stop the consumption of fossil fuels or the irresponsible deforestation of the rain forests. Believing that regulation is not required is a dangerous political extreme that sees government only necessary for raising armies to invade or defend or to keep the masses in order. This form of extremism leaves us vulnerable to those that will exploit people and situations within and without their own countries. We become at the mercy of those with the most short-sighted outlook who seek their own profit with no regard to the external costs. Overfishing or over grazing (as in the tragedy of the commons scenario) would become inevitable as does environmental damage without adequate control measures on the irresponsible. The fallacy in this way of thinking (market forces alone will suffice) is an example of a more general fallacy...the fallacy of composition. The fallacy is the belief that everyone following their own self interest will necessary turn out to be the best on average for everyone. This is not the case. Just as in the case of an audience all being able to watch an event better if they don’t follow their own personal self interest of standing up to try and view the event better. The spectator would be able to view the event better if they alone stand up. A country may benefit if they alone continue to burn fossil fuels. Civilized countries know that out of control (unregulated) behaviour is detrimental to us all and do pass necessary regulatory laws, however when it comes to urgent climate change mitigation we seem reluctant or slow to take enough necessary regulatory steps. The point I am making here is that we should be flexible and open to the best combination of market forces, planning and regulation that will change with time and situation. By limiting our political pathways it seems we pander to the political extremist perhaps in the hope that we can bring them on board in agreeing that humans are causing the climate change today but at the expense of delaying action.

It is worthwhile to exemplify this with possible strategies already existing that differ with time and place but also have room for improvement.

Improving efficiency of appliances and buildings.

From the diagram at the top of the post we can see that one way to cut back on emissions is to improve efficiency of appliances or buildings. We can consider the pathways that encourage this to happen. The entrepreneur perhaps motivated initially by carbon taxes and market forces will use the engineer’s scientific knowledge and skill to develop higher standards of appliances or buildings. This in turn creates a higher minimum standard that can become the new regulated target for further entrepreneurs to challenge and thus drive up standards. This can be applied to transport vehicles (for example in minimum mpg per person or for EV’s mpkWhr! per person) and electrical appliance rating plates.

Improving clean energy production and sustainable cities.

The same strategies of market forces and regulation can obviously be applied here but we can also see the importance of planning at a governmental level in the energy supplies and at more regional level in improving the design of cities. A well designed city won’t just happen without overview and planning, leaving it instead to individual businesspeople pursuing their own interest. Today most people live in cities and the future indicates that the population growth will occur in the cities. Cities around the world are expanding. The efficiencies of these cities are about more than the efficiency of the appliances and the individual buildings. Design of clean transport system that is both energy efficient and efficient in moving people with minimum congestion, and design of water, sewage, energy and communication systems are all essential to be planned to the highest standard.

We need the best innovative engineering motivated if necessary by market forces, guided by scientific understanding on environmental and climate issues and by the inspiration of well planned public policies to make our cities truly sustainable.

Planning decarbonisation.

 A decarbonised energy system will require not just our existing electrical supply to be powered 100% from alternatives, but also our transport system and heating systems that are likely powered by natural gas in many parts of the world. While we should be planning, using R&D, in all these areas, should we start implementation of all these areas now? Is there a preferred order of implementation?  As indicated in the last post on intermittency issues it was suggested that these issues could be reduced by increasing electrical vehicles at the same time as increasing our electrical energy from renewables. This is not the only reason to start implementation of electrical vehicles. Our cities will be much cleaner in terms of air pollution and also the overall energy efficiency will be increased reducing carbon emissions even before the grid is completely supplied from renewables. The motor car powered from an electrical motor is much more efficient than the internal combustion engine and this outweighs the inefficiencies involved in electrical generation from fossil fuels and the energy losses in transmission lines to charge the batteries in the EVs. This is not the case for direct heating of buildings by natural gas. The humble gas boiler of today is extremely efficient and in the order of 90% plus. It seems that using fossil fuels to generate electricity and transmit to homes and factories to provide heat for water and room air will never be as efficient as burning the fossil fuels directly in the building concerned. The conclusions here are obvious:- While any country or region requires the need for fossil fuel in electrical generation it will not only be cheaper to continue with gas boilers for direct heat in the home, offices and factories it will also be better for minimizing carbon emissions. However when the country is free from fossil fuels in electrical generation we have the following dilemma.:- It will be cheaper to use gas boilers for direct heat (if external costs to the environment and subsequent costs in addressing the climatic problems are ignored)  but it will be worse for carbon emissions. We have a conflict here between market forces and regulation and hopefully we will have the sense to regulate being aware of the external costs.

Free market works by failures getting eventually forgotten and the successful providing the next stepping stone. This is a very useful development method when you have many chances at finding the best way forward. When you have but one chance then it is foolhardy to leave the outcome to market forces alone. The important point to make here is that when looking for political ways to combat climate problems we should not fear or apologise for incorporating the use of the concepts of market forces, government planning and regulation. Rather we should use these methods to complement each other for maximum and urgent effect and look for politicians to outwardly and transparently express these ideas.

In terms of what the individual can do, if we, the electorate don’t realize the necessity for different political pathways then the only politicians that will be electable are those that will not take the necessary steps on action.

Next:-

Denial of the need to limit energy demand. (To follow)

Denial concerning Technological Solutions.

This is part three of climate action denial.

Part one...Introduction

Part two....Denial of the science of climate change.

Is there a technological solution to decarbonise energy use?

This is an important worthwhile question to ask but there are different ways this question is used as a form of denial of the need to tackle the problems of greenhouse gas emissions. One way is to deny that there are effective technologies that exist that can replace fossil fuels for energy and another is that we should wait until some new technology appears. Of course both have the same intention...... And that is to prevent action being taken.

Of course there are technologies that exist that could replace fossil fuels and have been shown to be effective but the important questions are how quickly can we do this, how much energy (rate) can we achieve and how can we deal with problems of intermittency if we rely on wind and solar energy? (I will briefly consider some of these issues on intermittency in this post below).

 If the alternatives can’t replace fossil fuels then the logical conclusion is that human civilisation can’t be maintained and the contrarians who express this are expressing not just considerably more alarm but also hopelessness than those who they often derogatively call alarmists. We know ultimately that human civilisation will need to decouple energy usage from net carbon emissions either because of the climate impact or because of the finite nature of fossil fuels which ever we come to realize first. Most climate scientists, and lately supported by the governor of the bank of England (at a world bank seminar), believe that most of the known world reserves are deemed unburnable if we are to stay within the 2C limits agreed at the climate Paris conference 2015.

It is not known whether or not we can achieve this decoupling at a fast enough rate to avoid serious climatic impacts by staying within the 2C limits agreed at the Paris COP 21 talks by political world leaders at the end of 2015. With this uncertainty it is logical that we should take the path to urgently decarbonise as is technologically feasible. The longer we procrastinate the more difficult it will be to decarbonise as world growth and hence world energy use grows. Ultimately this inaction would lead to a time whereby creating the necessary infrastructure (with its energy demands) to maintain human civilisation would become impossible.

It is fair to say that fossil fuels have been a major contributor to the growth in both prosperity and world population. Our understanding on these resources has also, for some considerable time, included the facts that not only are these resources finite but they have serious environmental impacts. Used sensibly with adequate planning and foresight these resources could be (or better still could have been) used as a stepping platform to a sustainable future. Not doing so is a reckless gamble. The gamble becomes more reckless and more difficult to solve the longer we leave it.

Intermittency problems with renewables.

This is a topic that deserves a separate detailed discussion but a very brief overview of how this issue has been used to promote action denial is worth describing. One way is to confuse predictability with the intermittency issue and the other way is to argue that the intermittency issue is unsolvable, or that the intermittency issue will become more problematic when we rely fully on alternatives.

The intermittency issue can be reduced considerably and eventually eliminated by a combination of strategies used in parallel:-

a) Have a combination of different resources depending on location such as on shore wind, off shore wind, solar, geothermal, wave, tidal, geothermal, hydro and biomass.

b) Share energy over larger regions using high voltage direct current transmission lines which considerably reduce transmission costs when transmitting over large distances.

c) Make the grid “smarter” by matching demand with supply where possible.

d). Develop different storage techniques that can then deliver the stored energy almost immediately. Examples here could be pumped hydroelectric, battery storage or synthetic fuels.  

As an aside an example here could be useful, although how new innovative use of technology will eventually pan out often leads in unexpected directions. Further an example can illustrate how relying fully on alternatives in the future can actually help reduce some of the variability problems of supply and demand. Imagine parked cars around the world with many of them connected to the grid. The owners merely state (electronically) the time they might next need to drive the car and the battery is used at the convenience of the grid to store or charge with the owner being paid or charged accordingly. This smart use of storage alone may in many locations solve the intermittency problem.  Even without smart technology cars will generally be charging at times when other demand is low but the supply of wind overnight or peak sunshine during midday is high.

The idea that wind and solar are necessarily more unpredictable than say a large conventional power station is a myth. Unpredictability of energy can be due to weather or plant failure. The unpredictably due to weather will not likely affect the conventional power plant but plant failure is of much greater concern. If a conventional power plant fails then that will represent a much higher proportion of the supply than the failure of a wind turbine say. It can be seen that predicting exactly where rain will fall or clouds cover the sky can be problematic but when we look at average sunshine or wind patterns over an entire region then we see that these are very predictable over many hours with enough time to plan accordingly.

An over reliance on a technological fix.

Finally it is important to address another viewpoint on technological solutions that can prevent enough action being taken that I will come back to on a future post regarding our attitudes to growth. This is the view that there must be a technological fix no matter what energy demands we make globally. Before dealing with this in later posts I will discuss (in the next post) denial of political ways to allow efficient action on climate change by political extremism or ideology.

Next:-

Denial of political pathways.

Denial of the science of climate change.

This is part 2 of addressing climate action denial.   For part 1 see here.

If one’s intent is to stop or hinder action on climate, denying that the problem exists is one obvious way of doing this. Thus the science contrarian may hope to:-

• ·         Rationalize or attempt to justify ones inaction that is based on some other reason for denying the need for action,

Alternatively or additionally to:-

• ·         Persuade others and society to rationalize in this way.

Typically this contrarian is not really interested in the science and if you follow their reasoning you are likely to see that it is quite irrational. This form of denial generally comes from members of the general public and not from climate experts. They are also likely to hold another irrational viewpoint that I will explain in the next post concerning the proposal of using alternatives to fossil fuels for our energy supplies. These issues are independent of each other. For example whether or not alternative energies can replace fossil fuels has no bearing on whether or not the enhanced greenhouse effect due to the use of land and fossil fuel consumption is causing global warming. The contrarian holding both of these viewpoints points to the likelihood that there are other underlying reasons for their denial of the science.

The physics of the greenhouse effect is based on established physics that is used in many many fields of science, for example in the use of spectroscopy that the contrarian doesn’t question or are possibly unaware of. The question that can’t be answered precisely is how fast the changes and impacts of climate change will be. There is no real scientific opposition to these general views and for this reason the contrarian attempting to discredit the science will end up having to present viewpoints that are likely mutually exclusive. (A few examples are given here). Equally you may find groups of contrarians sharing the same platform but with opposing arguments that agree only to the point that they disagree with the current knowledge on climate science. Clearly it is not the science that they agree on.

Once you realize that the contrarian is able to hold mutually exclusive arguments simultaneously and their position is based on other political or economic positions then the next step is to realize that you are extremely unlikely to be able to change their viewpoints using scientific reasoning alone on the factors causing climate change today.

There are many myths on climate science that have been debunked but the perpetrators are not deterred and seem to cycle round them in differing degrees of sophistication. Here is an excellent site that explains nearly every myth that you may come across.

http://skepticalscience.com/argument.php

And also an online course (MOOC) that deals with some of these issues...Making Sense of Climate Science Denial

https://www.edx.org/course/making-sense-climate-science-denial-uqx-denial101x-0

These links provide good examples that serve the purpose of:-

·         Increasing awareness of climate change and the associated impacts.

·         Providing evidence of human induced climate change and addressing the myths associated with denial of the science.

·         Understanding some of the psychology associated with this type of denial.

Important as it is to continually confront this out spoken denial it is equally important that we must deal with other forms of denial that prevent effective decarbonisation.

Next: - Denial that existing technological solutions to startdecarbonisation of our energy can be effective. 

Addressing Climate Action Denial

Considering the importance and urgency of this problem, addressing climate action denial is a bit of an understatement. Climate science denial is one way that attempts to discourage action on dealing with the build up of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere that is having a detrimental effect on our environment. There are, however, other factors that prevent us from effectively dealing with climate action. If we are to move forward and address climate change and remove the obstacles causing procrastination it is important first that we identify as many factors as possible on action denial. The purpose of tackling denial is not just to get people to agree that humans are causing climate change but to also get them to do something about it.

Climate action denial.

(This is part 1 of a series of posts on addressing climate action denial)

Humans have known about the science of greenhouse gases and climate change associated with the burning of fossil fuels and land use for many decades. World leaders all agreed recently at the 2015 Paris COP 21 talks on climate change that we need to cut global emissions to ensure the planet does not exceed 2 degrees centigrade of global warming on average from pre industrial levels and preferably not exceeding 1.5⁰C. This agreement does not make the necessary steps happen.

In essence we must effectively reduce our present accelerating human induced emissions that currently stand around 35Gigatonnes of CO2 per year.  This must be reduced to a net zero in the coming decades if we are to limit serious climate impacts that will remain for many millennia. The task is daunting requiring not only technological revolutions in energy management but also the change in mindset by individuals, businesses and governments to make it happen.

It is perhaps the most serious problem facing mankind but it is not a problem that has sneaked up on us. As I previously stated humans have been aware of this for considerable time and yet here we are, globally, leaving appropriate action until it is too late to be sure of avoiding some of the serious impacts. While we see politician’s frequently signing worthwhile agreements on intentions of dealing with climate change we also see countries around the world racing to get as much fossil fuels out of the ground. This often involves countries flexing their muscles in strategic locations associated with the energy reserves. With what appears to be little commitment to the agreements we are presently risking future generations to be committed to as yet untested global engineering solutions such as carbon capture and storage, CCS.

So how have we reached a crisis point without adequate action having taken place? With political leaders around the world agreeing with the consensus of scientists that imminent and far reaching action is required, the answer cannot be simply due to lack of awareness or even simply due to denial of the relevant science.  Although the issue of climate science denial and lack of general awareness are important issues (that need to be continually confronted) there must be other very pervasive forms of denying the need for action that have allowed us to procrastinate.

Whatever the underlying causes of denial that prevent actions there are different ways that this can be rationalized or expressed by some. One method is to deny that the problem exists or that the problem is caused by humans. (Another way that is outwardly expressed, which I will describe later, is to deny that technological solutions to the problem can be effective).

Essential as it is to deal with the relevant science denial it is worth realizing that only some outwardly express denial in this way.

Although this is a complex subject I will propose that there are four separate areas of denial that can help us explain the unfortunate situation that we have reached. These can be seen at an individual level but also result in this collective denial.

Clearly there is the outspoken denial of the relevant climate science that describes and explains the problem of human induced climate change in the first place. This is essentially a denial of the science behind what is generally known as the greenhouse effect. See part 2 of this series.

There is also the denial that there is a technological solution to this problem or that we can presently use technology to gradually but urgently decarbonise our energy usage. Part 3.

There is denial of the political ways that can be used to address the problem. Part 4.

Finally, on denial, there are the underlying issues concerning our outlook on economic growth. Part 5.

Each area may include more people and explains the dilemma we face at the present time. On identifying these forces of denial we are in a better position of achieving meaningful solutions. Our future depends on how well we establish technological decarbonisation with the possibility of success by this century or otherwise. Wishful thinking leaving this to sort itself or alternately that we have an easy technological fix that we will get around to doing sometime in the future is incredulous irresponsible behaviour that should not be an option. . I will also make the claim that the underlying, hidden but more pervasive forms of denial can be several times more damaging than the science denial and that we will have to address all these areas of denial if we are to ensure adequate action.

Next:-

 Denial of the scienceof the greenhouse effect and the resulting climate change.