Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish chemist, suggested in 1936 that carbon dioxide
from burning coal could create an atmospheric greenhouse effect and warm the
planet. In 1979 the American National Academy of Sciences warned that a
wait-and-see policy on global warming “may mean waiting until it is too
late”. In 1988 delegates from 46 countries to a Changing Atmosphere
conference in Toronto called for a 20% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions
by 2005. In February 2005, the Kyoto Protocol established an international
binding agreement to cut carbon-dioxide emissions. In October 2007, I can
now reveal the net outcome of all this science. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
CO2 emissions, now approaching 30 billion tonnes a year, have continued to
rise inexorably.
“In spite of all the rhetoric,” says Chris Rapley, director of the Science
Museum and one of the world’s leading climate scientists, “we sit perfectly
on or just above the business-as-usual curve.”
Green Europe is actually doing worse than the sceptical United States.
European emissions continue to rise while, last year, American emissions
fell by 1.6%. In fairness, this may be because America has outsourced much
of its manufacturing to China, so the US’s net effect on global emissions
will probably still be negative. And, of course, India and China are both on
rapid growth curves – economically and politically – and won’t take lectures
from western greens. So even if we switched to windmills and electric cars
tomorrow, total emissions would be unlikely to fall.
So here’s the big picture. The huge economic growth of the past 150 years has
been built on fossil fuels – oil and coal. This has resulted in the emission
of 500 gigatonnes of CO2, most of it in the past 40 years. Atmospheric CO2
is now at 385 parts per million (ppm), a third higher than it was before
industrialisation. Whatever we do now, it will rise to at least 450ppm, but
since we appear to be doing nothing, it may rise far higher. The best guess
is that this will cause temperatures to rise 2C over the next century, but
there is evidence that there may be a tipping point. The whole process may
accelerate uncontrollably, creating far higher temperatures and reducing the
amount of land habitable by humans either by flooding or desertification.
Deep-green James Lovelock – creator of the Gaia hypothesis, which views the
Earth as a single living organism – points out that the Earth has two
default conditions: icehouse or greenhouse. We thrive in the intermissions.
He thinks we’re definitely sliding towards greenhouse. The consequences will
be horrific, destroying ways of life and killing billions. On the other
hand, pale-green Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish eco-sceptic whose doubts about
deep-green claims make him one of the most influential thinkers in the
world, agrees it’s happening, but believes it’s manageable. We need to do
something, but not much.
The consensus lies somewhere between the two. But, on the whole, it’s closer
to Lovelock:most scientists think we do indeed have to spend real money and
political capital on either cutting emissions or developing new energy
technologies – or preferably both.
How we do this is the issue. Technologically it’s a problem. Politically it’s
a nightmare, requiring unprecedented levels of global co-operation from a
species whose second and third favourite pastimes are tribalism and war. The
technology can drive the politics if it’s effective, cheap and
geopolitically beneficial – for example, freeing us of the need to cover the
dubious expense accounts of the Saudi royal family. But is it?
“We are kind of poised, says Rapley, “to see if technology really is the
cavalry coming over the horizon or not.” The good news is that we can
definitely hear hoof beats and a bugle.
There are two broad approaches – cutting emissions and taking CO2 directly out
of the air. Which is more urgent depends on your view of how bad things are.
If they are very bad and we are close to a tipping point, we must scrub the
air as fast as possible. If we have time, we can take the more leisurely
approach of cutting emissions while developing low-emission energy sources.
First, air-scrubbing. This is a vast engineering task, far beyond anything
ever undertaken. We must capture billions of tonnes of CO2, then find
somewhere to put it – without emitting more than we are capturing. The most
obvious solution would be to get the Earth’s systems to do it. After all,
the Earth was spectacularly good at handling carbon before
industrialisation. Civilisation flourished in stable climatic conditions.
Even after industrialisation, the Earth is perfectly capable of looking
after itself, primarily by getting rid of humans, the most destructive
animals. But we can persuade it not to go quite this far.
Global warming is heating the ocean surface. This kills the algae that absorb
carbon and seed marine stratus clouds that keep out sunlight. So we are in a
vicious circle – the hotter it gets, the hotter it gets. One solution is to
pour vast quantities of iron into the oceans. This stimulates the growth of
carbon-absorbing organisms. This year, Planktos, an American company, dumped
100 tons of iron particles in the Pacific and of iron could remove 100,000
tonnes of CO2, but it is not clear how much of the carbon the algae would
take to the sea bed – nor how much collateral damage might be caused.
A less invasive approach, advocated by Lovelock and Rapley, is under
development by Atmocean, another American company. This would involve
anchoring 200-metre-long tubes in the oceans. As waves forced the tubes
downwards, cold water would be washed in at the lower end. As they rose, a
non-return valve would stop it draining out. This would draw cold water to
the surface and promote algal growth. Again, the wider impact is not known,
and the engineering feasibility has to be studied. More than 100m tubes
would probably be needed to achieve carbon capture on a large enough scale.
The big advantage is that, once installed, this system consumes no energy.
Others are looking at more direct air-scrubbing techniques. Frank Zeman, an
engineer and geologist at Columbia University in New York, is researching
giant structures like cooling towers. Air would flow upwards through a cloud
of sodium hydroxide. CO2 would dissolve and fall to the base of the tower.
The pure CO2 produced would then be buried in well-capped geological
structures. A similar effect could be achieved by the “fly swatters” of
Klaus Lackner, a geophysicist and engineer also at Columbia. In this case
the wind would push the air through a giant Venetian blind structure –
shaped like a fly swatter – treated to capture CO2. Again the pure CO2
produced would have to be sequestered.
All these involve gigantic engineering projects. They are aimed primarily at
carbon that is hard to capture by any other means – from cars, planes and
domestic heating and cooling systems. For this reason – and because somebody
has to decide to pay for such vast schemes – they would be the climax rather
than the start of any carbon- capture programme. The first things to do are
the easiest: capturing carbon as it is produced in static locations like
power stations and factories.
The problem, as Sir Nicholas Stern said in the Stern Review on the Economics
of Climate Change, is that climate change is the result of the greatest
market failure in history: the abject failure to put a price on growth. We
now know the cost of growth is a dangerous increase in atmospheric carbon,
but those who cause this – all of us – do not pay the price. One answer is
to tax every tonne of emitted carbon. Lomborg agrees, but thinks the tax
need only be about $2 a tonne. Others go as high as $85, a figure that would
transform and possibly paralyse the world economy at a stroke. Carbon
trading schemes – whereby we buy and sell carbon credits that allow us to
emit – look like a solution, but their record so far has been abysmal.
So perhaps the best solution is to start with ourselves. If we can’t clean up
the air, maybe we can clean up our act. “We have met the enemy,” says Jesse
Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller
University in New York, “and he is us. He’s not the Saudi oil minister or
George Bush. He is us.”
The technology to reduce emissions in small ways at home is advancing rapidly.
Compact fluorescent lamps use up to 80% less power than ordinary bulbs. And
LEDs, the tiny lights that flash on electronic equipment and use hardly any
energy, can be scaled up for domestic lighting. Widespread adoption of such
technologies will bring down prices and, over time, make it more profitable
to do the right, green thing.
In addition, Ausubel points out, all the technology is in place for producing
effectively zero-emission buildings. These would be covered in solar panels
and use natural air flows for heating and cooling. It isn’t difficult and,
indeed, it’s financially sensible. All that is needed is the will.
Painting everything white might also be a good idea. White increases the
Earth’s albedo – reflectivity – and cools the planet. The polar snow fields
have a huge cooling effect. Some big cities like Los Angeles are seriously
considering painting their roads and many of their buildings white. This is
not just because of global warming but because of urban warming. Cities
absorb heat. The differential between city centres and the countryside – the
so-called urban heat island – has been growing: summer temperatures in Tokyo
have hit 40C, compared with 28.5C in the country. Painting things white and
planting many more inner-city trees would help correct this, making
city-dwellers happier, while also cooling the planet and capturing carbon.
Transport, of course, is a harder problem. Outside the US, cars have become
much more efficient. The next step, however, is far more difficult. The EU
has been pressing to get CO2 emissions down to an average 140g per kilometre
– for perspective the Toyota Prius hybrid emits 104g and the Land Rover
Discovery around 250g – but it’s an enormous task: most middle-range cars
are still well into the 150-250g range. Hybrid technology is expensive,
adding thousands to the price of a car, and though fully electric cars are
on the way, it is not yet clear whether they will be good enough and cheap
enough to lure consumers away from petrol.
Commitment is the big problem. People accept the green message – hence all the
green rhetoric in politics – but don’t yet seem to let it affect their lives
on a large scale. As Lomborg points out, there are hundreds of schemes for
offsetting your carbon when you fly, but less than 1% of passengers use
them. And they certainly don’t want to swap their high-status wheels for an
understated plodder like the Prius. Nevertheless, it is clear we want
politicians to do something. But what, after the failures of emission
controls and in the face of rapid industrialisation involving a third of the
global population, can they do?
Most effectively, they can rethink their energy strategies. Nuclear power is
respectable again after its long disgrace following the Three Mile Island
and Chernobyl disasters. It’s still expensive – but then we are just waking
up to the true cost of coal and oil. Furthermore, nuclear plants are being
designed that promise up to 20% gains in efficiency. So-called “pebble bed”
reactors also promise much greater safety. And nuclear plants, once built,
are more or less emission-free. There are also ZEPPs – zero-emission power
plants that use new ways of handling coal and oil. Again, we know how to do
this. We just have to find the will.
Unfortunately, even those who have the will are deeply divided, especially on
issues of energy strategy. Whereas Lovelock and Ausubel believe we have to
go nuclear, more conventional greens see renewables – wind and wave energy –
as the only way forward. And conventional greens are even further divided.
So the scheme to build a barrage across the Severn has been endorsed by some
as a huge emission-reducer and rejected by others as invasive and
devastating to wildlife.
All these divisions point to a fundamental problem for the green movement that
has dogged all its campaigning and drained its political credibility. They
squabble among themselves, and, beneath the surface, it’s always about the
same thing: what are we trying to achieve?
On the one hand are the greens who advocate “sustainable retreat”. Thinkers
like Lovelock and Ausubel believe humanity must step back from nature and
allow the wilderness to return, for it is wilderness that preserves the
systems of the living planet. This means we must free the land of our
presence, and it involves a very high-tech commitment to nuclear power and
new ways of producing food – perhaps synthesising our own meat or building
the urban “vertical farms” proposed by yet another Columbia professor,
Dickson Despommier. These would be 30-storey towers growing fruit,
vegetables and cereals. Clean water and energy would be by-products.
The point about such schemes is they reduce the need for vast areas of
agricultural land. Agriculture, to sustainable retreaters, is a disaster. It
expends vast amounts of energy and resources to produce protein in the most
inefficient way – through sheep, cows and pigs. And it reduces large parts
of the Earth to barren monocultures, absorbing too little CO2 and destroying
many of the natural processes that keep systems in equilibrium. For
retreaters, biofuels – petrol and diesel made from plants – are the worst
“green” idea yet. They are supposed to be carbon-neutral in that the plants
absorb as much carbon as the fuel releases. But, in fact, they commit more
land to agriculture and are likely to kill more Africans by raising the
price of agricultural land and thus the cost of food.
For similar reasons, sustainers are keen on encouraging people to live in
cities. Again this frees land, but it also makes energy generation and
supply much more efficient. New power plants can be built on the sites of
the old and delivered short distances to more users.
On the other side are the more pastoral greens who focus primarily on
renewables. They want to see a landscape dotted with windmills, the sea full
of wave farms and the streets full of electric cars. They don’t see people
retreating; they see us living in more perfect harmony with nature.
For me the retreaters are more likely to be right for two reasons. First, they
are more realistic about human nature. We are rapacious creatures not given
to living in harmony with anything. If we can be rapacious in the cities and
leave the wilderness alone, so much the better. Secondly, it is clear that
we can do nothing to stop the world population rising to almost 10 billion
by 2050. A disaster might intervene, but, assuming it doesn’t, we need to
generate vast amounts of energy to prevent starvation on an unprecedented
scale. Renewables are not up to the task.
Yet renewables and small-scale technologies must be developed. Using wind
power, solar panels, LED lights or hybrid cars are baby steps, but they are
steps nonetheless, and, cumulatively, they will one day make a difference.
There are three things nobody need argue about. First, global warning is a
reality; secondly, it is largely caused by humans; thirdly, we know how to
slow or reverse it. Our attitudes to those truths may vary. We may panic,
thinking we are on the brink of extinction. Or we may shrug our shoulders,
thinking that nothing can be done or that it’s not that serious. But
the balanced view is that of the very wise Chris Rapley. He admits he
doesn’t know for sure that rising CO2 levels will be disastrous. But, he
says, imagine this:
“Suppose you’re taking your granddaughter on to an aircraft and the stewardess
says, “Welcome on board. By the way, there is a one-in-a-hundred chance the
wings will fall off.” You certainly wouldn’t put your granddaughter on
there. Well, my granddaughter sits on the planet, as we all do. If there’s a
one-in-a-hundred chance that we might be inviting some pretty unpleasant
climatic future, then I think we need to try and take some measures to avoid
that.”
It can be done. It should be done.
The changemakers
Steve Skill, biochemist, algae cultivator
Skill hopes that algae will be the biofuel of the future
'Algae were responsible for creating the crude oil and gas we're using today,
so in many respects we're just turning back the clock. I’ve put myself out
100% on this one, sticking at it through thick and thin. It's an uphill
battle, but we will get there. The way things are turning out now, with this
interest in biofuels, and using algae to clean up waste like sewage, I see
it happening fairly soon'
Frank Zeman, carbon-capture engineer
Zeman, of Columbia University, designs ways of capturing C02 from the air
‘When I found out about air capture, I thought “wow”.
I first showed up in 2003 and said: “Hey, it’ll cost $40 per tonne to capture
CO2 from the air.” Because the numbers were so low, there was a lot of
scepticism. The more you flesh out an idea, the more seriously people take
it. You have to put in the work and be patient. Until climate change really
starts to affect people, on a consistent personal basis, it’ll be hard to
motivate them to pay any extra money to do anything’
Philip Kithil, ocean-pump inventor
The CEO of Atmocean, Kithil hopes that ocean pumps will tame hurricanes and
enrich the seas
‘What we are doing is not at all different to what happens under natural
conditions. I got the idea from Hurricane Katrina, which stirred up the
ocean a tremendous amount. Some people oppose geo-engineering without
actually exploring the evidence. We have to do ocean research to learn more
about the implications’
Russ George, founder and CEO of Planktos
George hopes to enrich plant life by sprinkling iron on ocean surfaces
‘There’s a lot of misunderstanding in the world. Many people think the oceans
are still this wilderness unaffected by man and that we should just leave
them alone. The oceans are dying. Carbon dioxide that we put into the
atmosphere is scalding the oceans by turning them more acidic. They cover
72% of the planet, and the plants that live in them are vanishing at 1% a
year’
