So, the EPA and the current U.S. administration squares off against twelve states and enviornmental groups in front of the Supreme Court today. Rather than go over the particular legal issues involved, which are done better by lawyers, I’d like to meditate a bit on the very idea of Carbon Dioxide as a pollutant.

There’s an interesting surface plausibility to saying that carbon dioxide cannot possibly be a pollutant. One simple reason is that humans exhale it — so how the hell could that be a pollutant? One wants to say, however, that if we’re using the “naturally produced by humans” standard, urine and excrement also cannot be pollutants.

Like so many things, whether something pollutes is a matter of proportion. Quiet noise is just fine, but increase it too much and it becomes noise pollution. Same for urine — a little bit nature can handle, but if everyone pisses and shits outside without an organized system, well, you have pollution and a serious public health hazard.

This line of thought shouldn’t divert us from one of the serious ironies of the last twenty or thirty years, however. In the seventies, there was a worldwide worry about global cooling. It turns out that, even though at the time we were entering the middle stage of our drunken carbon bender, the world experienced global cooling because all the aerosols — read ‘godawful sulfuric and nitrogenous airborne gunk’ here — reflected so much radiation. As we and Europe tightened up our laws about airborne visible pollution, we left the pure waste product, carbon dioxide, out of our thoughts. Carbon dioxide is odorless, colorless, used by plants, and basically what would seem to be the ideal by-product of anything we might do.

I think about that pure by-product, carbon dioxide, now as a sort of extra-pure drug. We didn’t know it at the time — we thought, There’s no way “that” could be a drug, or damaging to us! Carbon dioxide seems so pure that we used to think this way: If we could just clean up all the gunk we could see, we could have our industrial cake and breathe it too.

(Similarly, oxygen seems to be another model of purity — but, again, too much oxygen and the room explodes, and burning oxygen in the body creates free radicals, which are primary causes of cancer.)

A pessimist might say that our problem is wanting the fruits of industrialization in the first place. But that’s a whole other topic.

From the perverse consequences file: there’s a story in the November 24, 2006 episode of Living on Earth about the booming fossil fuel exploration industry in Hammerfest, Norway. Hammerfest is analogous to Nome, Alaska: it is on the northern coast, and is amidst an enormously changing ocean landscape. And, you guessed it: the oil industry is all over it. There no doubt are amazing opportunities in both fossil fuels and shipping (now that Arctic pathways are opening, due to runaway heating of polar water). To an entrepreneur, these two industries would be the very paradigm of growth.

Be on the lookout for new markets created by our pathetically idiotic non-stewardship of the earth. They may well make you pessimistic.

Robert J. Samuelson, in the Nov. 13 2006 issue of Newsweek, tries to claim that the Stern’s approach to global warming is alarmist public relations. While I disagree with that overall assessment, Samuelson has some things exactly right. (I’ll quote him in italics, but you should read the Stern Report, as well as his article, first.)

Samuelson argues:

• “With today’s technologies, we don’t know how to cut greenhouse gases in politically and economically acceptable ways.” True. Alternative energies like wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal are way too minor to make much of a dent in global energy demands quickly enough. And, nuclear energy (the choice of Stewart Brand and James Lovelock) is a significant political challenge, with environmentalists and intelligent people everywhere split on both sides. Lovelock, for his part (in The Revenge of Gaia), claims that only nuclear power could bring the amount of electricity our culture would need for a soft landing out of our carbon addiction. (Nuclear would be our methadone, so to speak.)
• In rich democracies, policies that might curb greenhouse gases require politicians and the public to act in exceptionally “enlightened” (read: “unrealistic”) ways. Well. Nicholas Stern spends the entire early chapter 2 on economic concepts like discounting and ethical concepts like regard for future inhabitants of the earth. In a certain sense, Samuelson is exactly right: it will be impossible to motivate governments of rich nations to act without an ethical regard for those most impacted by climate change in the future. If such an ethical regard is truly impossible, or as Samuelson puts it “unrealistic”, then we, and all future humans, are truly in trouble.
• Even if rich countries cut emissions, it won’t make much difference unless poor countries do likewise—and so far, they’ve refused because that might jeopardize their economic growth and poverty-reduction efforts. Very true. For instance, I wrote last week about peat bog burning in Indonesia, which on its own spews more carbon into the air than many Kyoto reductions. Beyond that, India and China are in hypergrowth mode, and China has an enormous stockpile of the nastiest coal you could imagine. There is no doubt that, even with Chinese governmental leadership on greenhouse gas reduction, many entrepreneurs, already used to horrific environmental problems and choking smog, will find a way to mine and market that coal.
• The notion that there’s only a modest tension between suppressing greenhouse gases and sustaining economic growth is highly dubious. True enough there also. As Bill McKibben argued long ago in The End of Nature, the solution to global warming most likely appears in a total reversal of our acquisitive, consumptive ways. In Jared Diamond’s Collapse, we read that a deep re-evaluation of core values is often necessary to prevent collapse. Well, yes — in this case, the value of economic growth.
• The other great distortion in Stern’s report involves global warming’s effects. No one knows what these might be… Erm, well. I depart from Samuelson here. The science really isn’t that complex. You have ice on land — glaciers –, it melts, the resulting water goes into the oceans, changing ocean currents and salinity. Meltwater from the top of mountains which helped communities survive flows away and is gone forever, leading to droughts. Permafrost and floating ice melts, changing a reflective white into an absorbtive brown or blue, leading to rapid rises in temperature. Changing climate zones leads to the survival of insects which could never survive before, leading to massive die-offs of trees (as currently in British Columbia). These are critical dynamics of the 21st century, and it isn’t too hard to see where they lead. And they have all, on a smaller scale, already happened.

What Samuelson needs to do is take a risk assessment job at an insurance company which guarantees oceanfront property in a hurricane zone, or tree stands in Canada, or roads and pipelines on permafrost — and then decide what the 30 year horizon looks like.

If you’re following global warming studies, you already know that the peat bogs contain stupendous amongs of carbon, which burned, dwarfs the fossil-fuel carbon output of the entire world. However, this article about peat bog burning from Climate Ark states, among other things, that the global demand for biofuels is, uh, fueling the draining and burning of peat bogs in Indonesia.

In other words, the demand for biofuels, based in part on our belief that biofuels are a partial solution to global warming, is leading to the burning of peat bogs, which itself is one of the worst contributors of global warming.

Ethanol, to remind everyone, depends on large fossil fuel inputs: fertilizer for corn takes the most, and there are other fossil fuels which need to be burned for the farming, corn transportation, processing, and fuel transportation of the ethanol.
Let’s be on the lookout for these sort of unintended consequences, shall we? We’re engulfed in a web of relationships which enmesh us in carbon burning of all different varieties and variations, and trying to wiggle out — with biofuels — may simply make us more stuck.

Katrina was a mere taste of what is in the future. The combined threats of more powerful storms and rising oceans will make some of the best places to live impossible places to live. The insurance industry may be able to price a small percentage of people out of places like Miami or Amsterdam, but insurance folks are like all of us: they make their decisions based on past experience. With a world shifting to something outside of human history, how will they know how to price flood insurance?

It will be easy to distance ourselves in the West from events like a flooded Bangladesh. Perhaps also a flooded Calcutta or Beijing. But a flooded Houston? or Manhattan? Where will those people go?

It is worth playing ‘predict the impossible’ with these scenarios. If you live in Australia, where can you even go? If you live in Den Haag, do you have to move to Scandanavia, France, or Germany? If you live in Manhattan, do you move to the Alleghenies or to northern Ontario?

Unfortunately in Vietnam or Bangladesh, there really isn’t anywhere you can move — without creating stupendous problems.

This will be the first of my posts about the Stern Review Report.  (Living on Earth had a discussion about the Stern Review on 11/3/2006.)

The aim of this blog is to sort out the various ways human society and culture is going to (need to) shift, in the face of the shifts in climate. One especially interesting moment comes when it emerges that a few quasi-positive things will happen in the US as global warming gets going. (See the chart on page 57 of Chapter 3.) Essentially: for a brief time, yields for certain crops will probably go up, and winters will get milder. These effects will occur mostly before global averages have gone above 2 degrees centigrade higher.

Think about those effects. They seem to mean that the worst carbon polluter, with the largest amount of global warming skeptics, will have some minor positive effects at the beginning of global warming’s toll. As any quick look at the map and the distribution of people in the US will show, most people either live on the coasts — where global warming’s effect is muted prior to rising seas and if you can ignore hurricanes — or in the north-east and rust belt — where winters are usually nasty, and reprieve from the cold and high heating bills will be appreciated, by especially the lower and middle classes.

In a time when the US needs to be a leader rather than a complaining follower, it is not good news that some nominally good effects of a warming climate will be felt by people on the coasts and by people in the snow belt during the next 15 years or so.