Tonight I will have the great good fortune to see Paul Hawken speak about Project Drawdown(and especially the newly-released book Drawdown) at one of my favorite places in the world: Bookshop Santa Cruz.
Project Drawdownis an amazing effort, documenting over 80 solutions for reducing carbon emissions or sequestering atmospheric carbon to mitigate climate change and reduce global warming. Each solution is meticulously researched, with extensive references on the website. The Drawdown team provides an estimate of the potential greenhouse gas reduction, the likely net cost of implementation for said reduction, and the likely net savings from other benefits of implementation.
The book itself is reminiscent of last-decade’s beautiful WorldChanging – more like a magazine than a complete narrative, brimming with inspirations for making a positive change in the world, illuminated by compelling photos that bring delight with every turn of the page.
One thing I would have liked to see in the book, and one thing I hope to see in the future from Project Drawdown, is a connection to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. There are already efforts underway by academics to articulate the linkages and intersections of the different SDGs. Project Drawdown clearly is focused on lucky 13 (Climate Action), but almost all of the solutions proposed have intersections with one or more other goals. It would be amazing to begin articulating the trade-offs and synergies of these in a rigorous, evidence-based way.
Drawdownis a book that is meant to be flipped-through rather than read sequentially. In one of those moments of odd serendipity, the first page I flipped to had a picture of air conditioners in Singapore, similar to this one that my husband had taken in an alley between Circular Road and Boat Quay. The solution in question was actually the one they rated #1 for its potential to reduce global warming: Refrigerant Management. Air conditioning is ubiquitous in burgeoning tropical cities like Singapore, a symbol of prosperity.
When I was there at conferences earlier this month (Education for Sustainability in Asia and the Singapore Sustainability Symposium), someone joked that Singapore has two seasons: outdoors and indoors. Outdoors is always steamy and usually approaching 30°C (86°F). Indoors is very chilly, requiring jackets and therefore comfortable for men in business suits. When I first arrived in Singapore, I noted that a big part of their energy cost is the culture of business attire. Part of refrigerant management may in fact be a change in that aspect of culture – completely inappropriate for equatorial climates. Of course, places like NTU generally prioritize technological fixes over social ones, but at least they were making some progress on that path. The Hive at NTU features passive cooling and a silent, fan-less, convection-based chiller for the classrooms. Such engineering-oriented solutions have the benefit of providing locked-in infrastructure for reliable savings, but they are more expensive and potentially much slower to implement than changing behavior.
I’m sure I will have more to say about Project Drawdown soon after tonight’s event – stay tuned…
[minor updates May 26th: “Only” 80 solutions are fully researched and documented, plus there are descriptions of many “coming attractions.” I was able to ask Paul Hawken about the connection to the SDGs – his reply was mainly that there wasn’t sufficient room in the book to get into those. More to come…]
Scholars from University of Calfornia, Santa Barbara, wanted to see if they could reap most of the benefits of an academic conference without the huge carbon footprint associated with air travel. They have launched an interdisciplinary, online conference about climate futures:
…a conference where anyone could give a talk, no one had to fly to, and which anyone could attend and even participate in wide open discussions about the talks.
They thought that asking people to think about what the world would be like in 2050 would get a conversation going, and so they called the conference “The World in 2050: Imagining and Creating Just Climate Futures,” and they invited the whole world to attend for three weeks starting on Monday, October 24 by going to a website at
Randall Munroe has given us a great way to look at climate change over a somewhat-deep-time perspective. (Remember, I’m an anthropologist, so 20,000 years is trifling – it’s next to nothing in geologic time, and only about one-tenth of the time since the first Homo sapiens evolved in Africa.) Today’s XKCD walks the viewer through a very nice scale model of the 20 millennia since the last glacial maximum, with some key events from the geological, archaeological and even linguistic record. I’ll admit I haven’t taken the time to fact-check his placement of these events, but the ones I’m familiar with seem to be in about the right place (tragic extinctions of saber-toothed cats and Pokemon, I’m less certain about). Scrolling through 500-year chunks of time, and reading the events therein, leaves one with a clear sense of just how out-of-the-ordinary the change over the last 500 years – and especially the last 100 years – has actually been.
As Randall Munroe had pointed out previously, the difference between the effects of regular corrosion and a car fire is simply a question of how fast the oxidization is happening.
When it comes to climate change, extinctions and far too many other phenomena, the difference between Anthropocene changes and natural background rates of change are roughly on that scale of difference. It’s time to be in emergency response mode if we are to have any hope of saving what’s left.
What every schoolkid (and investor) should know, and why it is time for fossil fuel divestment.
Energy Return on Investment (EROI) is easy to understand: how much energy do you get out (R) compared to how much energy you had to put in to get access to that energy (I) –R:I. EROI tells you how much net energy you can expect to use for other things (driving cars, running generators, etc.). Traditional petroleum (think gushing oil wells) used to have a spectacularly high EROI, about 1000:1 a century ago [1]. Since the 1970s, the EROI of the average barrel of petroleum has been dropping fast – it is now below 5:1 [1].
“The evidence suggests that the global production of conventional oil plateaued and may have begun to decline from 2005.” [2]
Essentially, we are expending a lot of energy to scrape the bottom of the barrel, digging out very hard-to-get stuff in deep seas (think Deepwater Horizon and its attendant complications), tar sands, and “tight” shale oil. Because we have to use so much energy just to get at that fuel, it only makes sense (from a profit perspective) if the selling price of the resulting fuel is very high.
“We find the EROI for each major fossil fuel resource (except coal) has declined substantially over the last century. Most renewable and non-conventional energy alternatives have substantially lower EROI values than conventional fossil fuels.” [1]
As you may have heard (or noticed, if you fill a gas tank), the selling price of petroleum has recently dropped a lot. Seems weird, but there are explanations (more on that later). What this price drop means is that a lot of places where it used to make sense to be extracting these fossil fuels, places where extraction companies have invested a lot in exploration and infrastructure to get at the stuff, don’t make sense anymore. This is part of what is meant by “stranded assets” (more below) and it can lead to things like bankruptcy [3].
So if energy from petroleum is increasingly hard to get, why would the price be dropping now? Some of it may be due to a drop in demand because of the global economic slowdown, in turn related to China slowing the pace of its phenomenal economic growth [4]. Some of it may be due to the production boom from short-lived tight oil extraction and fracking taking place in the U.S., where production is high enough at first, but seems to fall off rapidly after about 15 years at each new site [2].
The truth of the current situation is even more complicated than the EROI, of course. There is also the climate disruption represented by fossil fuel reserves. And this leads to the other reason that fossil fuel companies should expect collapsing prices: we don’t want it so much anymore. If we are serious about meeting the targets that global leaders just signed onto, we can’t even burn the fuel reserves that people have already invested in developing, let alone continue to develop new ones. This concern was laid out by Bill McKibben in 2012 in “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” and is even more relevant in light of the Paris COP 21 agreed ambition to attempt to stay below a 1.5C rise in average global temperatures [5].
When whales get stuck on beaches, helping them back to deeper waters is usually the right thing to do [6]. But when fossil fuel titans are stranded, gasping for profits under the weight of their history, the most merciful response for everyone might just be to put them out of their misery. A few brief moments of economic pain can spare us all from longer decades of climate and pollution disasters if these beasts are allowed to keep flopping around on- or off-shore. Sadly, we are past the point of easy, painless solutions now.
“If the oil crisis hits the economy hard, then the prolonged recession that results could dampen the rising demand that everyone projects. If oil prices thus remain relatively depressed for longer than expected, this could hemorrhage the industry beyond repair.”[6]
To hasten the inevitable demise of fossil fuels, there are increasing calls for divestment.
“Divestment is the opposite of an investment – it simply means getting rid of stocks, bonds, or investment funds that are unethical or morally ambiguous.” [7a]
Cities, colleges, foundations and individuals are hearing from activists demanding that they withdraw investments from fossil fuels. And they are responding, with 517 institutions committed to withdrawing their investments in fossil fuels as of this post [7b].
“For the divestment skeptics who believe I am pushing an environmental agenda at the expense of necessities such as financial aid, let it be clear: The financial argument for divestment is sound, even independent of environmental concerns. The investment literature overwhelmingly shows that fossil fuel-free portfolios have higher risk adjusted returns than those invested in fossil fuel companies, which is understandable, considering the increasing risk of fossil fuel companies’ faulty practices and the imminence of carbon legislation. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in August that California pension funds lost $5 billion due to investment in fossil fuels. ” [8]
If you are so inclined, you might think of divestment as a death penalty for criminal corporations who knowingly perpetrated [9] mass murders [10] in the past and who plan to continue into the future. I generally prefer less retribution-focused imagery, perhaps that of allowing an ill and deranged sufferer the dignity of a quick death, but then again, perhaps that metaphor is less accurate. Either way, the humane thing to do is to get it over with quickly, before more harm is done. Keeping fossil fuel extraction on life-support with continued investments is doing no one any good at this point.
Since EROI from fossil fuels will continue to drop, and since there is essentially incontrovertible evidence of harm from the stuff, why would any sane person invest money in fossil fuel extraction at this point?
Divestment is the rational and compassionate thing to do.
References
(Note: much of the cited information actually came from other primary sources, referenced in the summaries below, because this is just a blog and I didn’t want to take the time to dig for primary sources – not the best scholarship on my part, but still a good starting point for discussion.)
Craig Morris at Energy Transition makes the argument that, particularly in light of COP21 and the divestment movement, coal’s dropping price may not lead to more demand (as traditional economics would predict), but instead may be a consequence of the fact that no one really likes coal anymore. Even China’s coal use is down 5%, and their coal imports are down 35%. Is “The Invisible Hand” actually getting it right for a change, or is this really just demonstrating the efficacy of national policies in places like China and Germany?
This Science Climate Policy editorial notes that, although cheap coal is still Germany’s top energy source (43% in 2015) and top GHG emissions source (40% of carbon emissions), renewables are rapidly overtaking coal there. They are particularly heavy users of some of the least-efficient, dirtiest coal: lignite. Germany has pledged to go to 80% renewables by 2050 (and they’re committed to giving up nuclear power, and it’s not exactly the sunshine state up there, so it’s not as if they’re just doing it because it’s easy). Weaning themselves off coal is the only way they will get there. Agora Energiewende proposes halting all construction of new plants and lignite mines now, and closing down the older lignite plants beginning in 2018.
“The Stone Age did not end because people ran out of stones.”
Coal is the fuel that opened the way to the Industrial Revolution, for both good and ill. That was a long time ago, at the beginning of the Anthropocene. It really is time to move on to something better. Germany is one major industrial nation who’s getting serious about doing it, and China appears to be on her way as well. This is a most welcome reflection of the Great Work of our time.
I find it impressive that an article like this was posted in a mainstream magazine like Esquire. I especially like their web address that went with the article, which includes the phrase “ballad-of-the-sad-climatologists.” I guess it’s good to know we’re not alone with our worries. I find the perspectives expressed (in regards to not getting bogged down in anxiety and depression) heartening and important to cling to in these times of dire beauty, because the work is still worth doing.
Project Drawdown clearly is focused on lucky 13 (Climate Action), but almost all of the solutions proposed have intersections with one or more other goals. It would be amazing to begin articulating the trade-offs and synergies of these in a rigorous, evidence-based way.
Drawdown is a book that is meant to be flipped-through rather than read sequentially. In one of those moments of odd serendipity, the first page I flipped to had a picture of air conditioners in Singapore, similar to this one that my husband had taken in an alley between Circular Road and Boat Quay. The solution in question was actually the one they rated #1 for its potential to reduce global warming: Refrigerant Management. Air conditioning is ubiquitous in burgeoning tropical cities like Singapore, a symbol of prosperity.
Of course, places like NTU generally prioritize technological fixes over social ones, but at least they were making some progress on that path. The Hive at NTU features passive cooling and a silent, fan-less, convection-based chiller for the classrooms. Such engineering-oriented solutions have the benefit of providing locked-in infrastructure for reliable savings, but they are more expensive and potentially much slower to implement than changing behavior.
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