Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed May 19, 2021 12:45 pm

Here is UN Secretary General António Guterres:
Every country, city, financial institution and company should adopt plans for net zero -- and act now to get on the right path to that goal, which means cutting global emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared with 2010 levels. In advance of next November’s UN Climate Conference in Glasgow, Governments are obligated by the Paris Agreement to be ever more ambitious every five years and submit strengthened commitments known as Nationally Determined Contributions, and these NDCs must show true ambition for carbon neutrality.

Technology is on our side. It costs more to simply run most of today’s coal plants than it does to build new renewable plants from scratch. Economic analysis confirms the wisdom of this path. According to the International Labour Organization, despite inevitable job losses, the clean energy transition will create 18 million net new jobs by 2030. But we must recognize the human costs of decarbonization, and support workers with social protection, re-skilling and up-skilling so that the transition is just.

Second, we need to align global finance with the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals, the world’s blueprint for a better future.

It is time to put a price on carbon; end fossil fuel subsidies and finance; stop building new coal power plants; shift the tax burden from income to carbon, from taxpayers to polluters; make climate-related financial risk disclosures mandatory; and integrate the goal of carbon neutrality into all economic and fiscal decision-making. Banks must align their lending with the net zero objective, and asset owners and managers must decarbonize their portfolios.

Third, we must secure a breakthrough on adaptation and resilience to help those already facing dire impacts of climate change.

That’s not happening enough today: adaptation represents only 20 per cent of climate finance. This hinders our efforts to reduce disaster risk. It also isn’t smart; every $1 invested in adaptation measures could yield almost $4 in benefits. Adaptation and resilience are especially urgent for small island developing states, for which climate change is an existential threat.

As an aside, it's worth dispelling the old-fashioned idea about stopping climate change necessitating ascetic lifestyles. Everybody's been stuck at home during the pandemic, doing basically nothing, and it's made no difference: emissions are at a record high. We need to address the carbon-intensity of the system that keeps us alive and well, not get rid of it.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed May 19, 2021 12:50 pm

One populist move could be taxing the absolute sh.t out of financial institutions that fund carbon-intensive projects. Like, tax them so much that those investments simply aren't profitable any more. At the moment most of them are trying to keep the fossil-furnaces burning, because otherwise they're stuck with a load of stranded assets (unburnable carbon).
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by IvanV » Wed May 19, 2021 6:58 pm

Fishnut wrote:
Wed May 19, 2021 12:18 pm
I think you misunderstood my comment, I was saying they were explaining the problems with net zero as a practical solution, not that they were offering one.
You are right, I now see I did misread it. We still need a practical solution and they don't provide one. I often say to people, that CCS is not yet demonstrated at scale, and the money that is being put into it is a joke if they really expect to develop it. And I agree it isn't an excuse to carry on burning coal, or burning gas at the current level.

The CCC has made it an assumption of their plans that CCS will be up and running in 10 years or so. They haven't got another plan. Well, they have several plans, but CCS is a large part of all of them. And they aren't using it as an excuse to carry on burning lots of gas, etc. They are using it to burn the least gas you can get away with to make the electricity system reliable at reasonable cost in 30 years. There isn't a plan B and no one has demonstrated a practical plan B. Hydrogen at scale is also a big technical risk. And such are the constraints of the laws of thermodynamics on the hydrogen cycle that it can never be cheap enough to be widespread energy source.

So, that is where we are. It is unsatisfactory. But unless they get CCS going in the 10 years or so they require, we are going to fail to get to 80% let alone zero by 2050. And that's for a country that is trying harder than most, albeit not hard enough.

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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Fishnut » Wed May 19, 2021 8:13 pm

IvanV wrote:
Wed May 19, 2021 6:58 pm
Fishnut wrote:
Wed May 19, 2021 12:18 pm
I think you misunderstood my comment, I was saying they were explaining the problems with net zero as a practical solution, not that they were offering one.
You are right, I now see I did misread it. We still need a practical solution and they don't provide one.
They don't provide a solution but that's not the point of their article so I don't think it's fair to criticise them for not offering one.

We need a practical solution to climate change but I can't help but think the reason we haven't come up with a solution for removing excess carbon in the atmosphere is that one doesn't exist. There may be lots of strategies that help remove small amounts but even that feels grasping at straws. We've f.cked up. We need to focus on slowing our emissions before we start talking about reversing them and as far as I'm aware we haven't even managed to do that yet.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Woodchopper » Thu May 20, 2021 7:57 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed May 19, 2021 12:45 pm
Here is UN Secretary General António Guterres:
Every country, city, financial institution and company should adopt plans for net zero -- and act now to get on the right path to that goal, which means cutting global emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared with 2010 levels.
Would any of you better informed people be able to recommend something focused upon an individual employer and what they should do to cut emissions by 45 per cent by 2030.

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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by IvanV » Thu May 20, 2021 11:39 am

Fishnut wrote:
Wed May 19, 2021 8:13 pm
They don't provide a solution but that's not the point of their article so I don't think it's fair to criticise them for not offering one.
Whenever someone argues "don't do this", then it is indeed a hole in their argument if they fail to analyse what to do instead.

I learned that a long time ago when I wrote a letter to my MP and said "don't do this, it's a big mistake". He pointed out in response that I had failed to justify an alternative. The fact that I was very soon proved right, and the goverment quickly had to undo what proved to be an enormous mistake, doesn't alter the fact that what I wrote was completely unpersuasive without a demonstration of a better alternative. The better alternative was "do nothing", but I had failed to show that.

Without such a demonstration, the proposed action can be like Churchill's description of democracy - a bad system but everything else is worse. In fact, it was reasonable to argue in this case that "do nothing" was the Churchillian bad system - bad but still better than anything else. The government was trying to change it precisely because it recognised it as bad. But it failed to realise that everything else was worse, because their option framework only compared radical options against each other, and not against do nothing or do not very much. Because it was committed to doing something, something big, about it.

So if you say don't do this, then unless you demonstrate a better alternative, there is a hole in your argument.

Even if you don't accept that, then it is still reasonable for me to take what they said as a starting point, and then discuss "so what are we going to do then"?

What I believe I have showed is that, at least in the UK maybe it's different in the US, is that the CCC's recommendation of proceeding with CCS is not for the bad reasons that are the main subject of the article. They are doing it because, having done everything else sensible without it, they still need something like that to reach the target.

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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Fishnut » Thu May 20, 2021 12:11 pm

IvanV wrote:
Thu May 20, 2021 11:39 am
Fishnut wrote:
Wed May 19, 2021 8:13 pm
They don't provide a solution but that's not the point of their article so I don't think it's fair to criticise them for not offering one.
Whenever someone argues "don't do this", then it is indeed a hole in their argument if they fail to analyse what to do instead.

I learned that a long time ago when I wrote a letter to my MP and said "don't do this, it's a big mistake". He pointed out in response that I had failed to justify an alternative. The fact that I was very soon proved right, and the goverment quickly had to undo what proved to be an enormous mistake, doesn't alter the fact that what I wrote was completely unpersuasive without a demonstration of a better alternative. The better alternative was "do nothing", but I had failed to show that.

Without such a demonstration, the proposed action can be like Churchill's description of democracy - a bad system but everything else is worse. In fact, it was reasonable to argue in this case that "do nothing" was the Churchillian bad system - bad but still better than anything else. The government was trying to change it precisely because it recognised it as bad. But it failed to realise that everything else was worse, because their option framework only compared radical options against each other, and not against do nothing or do not very much. Because it was committed to doing something, something big, about it.

So if you say don't do this, then unless you demonstrate a better alternative, there is a hole in your argument.

Even if you don't accept that, then it is still reasonable for me to take what they said as a starting point, and then discuss "so what are we going to do then"?

What I believe I have showed is that, at least in the UK maybe it's different in the US, is that the CCC's recommendation of proceeding with CCS is not for the bad reasons that are the main subject of the article. They are doing it because, having done everything else sensible without it, they still need something like that to reach the target.
I disagree. If you propose to jump off a cliff and I say you really shouldn't, it is enough for me to stop you from doing something stupid without telling you what else you should do.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with writing articles but the general consensus is to have one main argument in them. Too many subjects and people get lost, confused or simply bored. The article they wrote was already about 4x longer than most pieces in The Conversation because the point they were making was an important one and needed a lot of context and evidence.

You may have wanted solutions given as well but that's another story, for another article. And as I said in my previous post, there may be one really obvious reason that no solutions were given - maybe there aren't any. If there aren't any then sitting around proposing ever more pie-in-the-sky solutions is just wasting more time. We are still increasing our carbon emissions. According to this site in the last 20 years we managed to reduce emissions by a very small amount in 2015 compared to 2014, and 2009 compared to 2008, but every other year up to 2019 has seen an increase in previous years emissions. If we can't even stop increasing our emissions then what hope in hell do we have of reversing them? Carbon capture seems to me to be a great way of diverting attention to where the focus really needs to be - stopping production of CO2.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by IvanV » Thu May 20, 2021 3:03 pm

Fishnut wrote:
Thu May 20, 2021 12:11 pm
I'm not sure if you're familiar with writing articles but the general consensus is to have one main argument in them. Too many subjects and people get lost, confused or simply bored. The article they wrote was already about 4x longer than most pieces in The Conversation because the point they were making was an important one and needed a lot of context and evidence.
You are right, a lot of public advocacy writing is effective, at least with particular audiences, despite being fallacious or incomplete. And The Conversation is a venue for public advocacy, not a technical journal. But such incomplete arguments will not satisfy those who see through them.

I do write for a living, in the sense that our work ends up written down as the final product. I even give internal courses on effective writing. But our work is not public advocacy, it is tangible analysis. So we do have to present, as best we can, arguments that are complete and lacking in fallacy, it would otherwise be unprofessional.

I did try to engage with the partial nature of the argument in that article, and even agreed that many of the things it says are true. It says we should not invest in CCS for certain reasons. But we are investing in CCS for different reasons than those it argued against. So that is why it fails to be an argument against it. I accept we may fail to develop CCS adequately, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We are trying many other things that may also fail, and I may be wrong in concluding they are more likely to fail than CCS.

I'm sorry if this does not conform to your view of the world. It is based on a sincere desire to reduce CO2 emissions as best we can within the constraint of it not costing too much. Unfortunately that will be much harder than many people think.

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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Bird on a Fire » Thu May 20, 2021 3:12 pm

The article's argument was more that we can't rely on CCS.

Plan A needs to be reducing emissions ASAP. That doesn't mean people can't keep trying to develop scalable CCS, but it means we need a pathway to 45% reductions in 2030, and zero in 2050, without it.

Obviously if some magic silver bullet turns up later we can change those plans, but the procrastination needs to stop yesterday. Reality-based plans are more likely to be effective.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Stephanie » Thu May 20, 2021 4:16 pm

IvanV wrote:
Thu May 20, 2021 3:03 pm
Fishnut wrote:
Thu May 20, 2021 12:11 pm
I'm not sure if you're familiar with writing articles but the general consensus is to have one main argument in them. Too many subjects and people get lost, confused or simply bored. The article they wrote was already about 4x longer than most pieces in The Conversation because the point they were making was an important one and needed a lot of context and evidence.
You are right, a lot of public advocacy writing is effective, at least with particular audiences, despite being fallacious or incomplete. And The Conversation is a venue for public advocacy, not a technical journal. But such incomplete arguments will not satisfy those who see through them.

I do write for a living, in the sense that our work ends up written down as the final product. I even give internal courses on effective writing. But our work is not public advocacy, it is tangible analysis. So we do have to present, as best we can, arguments that are complete and lacking in fallacy, it would otherwise be unprofessional.

I did try to engage with the partial nature of the argument in that article, and even agreed that many of the things it says are true. It says we should not invest in CCS for certain reasons. But we are investing in CCS for different reasons than those it argued against. So that is why it fails to be an argument against it. I accept we may fail to develop CCS adequately, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We are trying many other things that may also fail, and I may be wrong in concluding they are more likely to fail than CCS.

I'm sorry if this does not conform to your view of the world. It is based on a sincere desire to reduce CO2 emissions as best we can within the constraint of it not costing too much. Unfortunately that will be much harder than many people think.
I don't think it's about her view of the world - it's about you being dismissive of the article she shared, because it doesn't say exactly what you want it to. What you could do, rather than complaining, is share an article with a solution that you prefer.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri May 21, 2021 12:03 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Thu May 20, 2021 7:57 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed May 19, 2021 12:45 pm
Here is UN Secretary General António Guterres:
Every country, city, financial institution and company should adopt plans for net zero -- and act now to get on the right path to that goal, which means cutting global emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared with 2010 levels.
Would any of you better informed people be able to recommend something focused upon an individual employer and what they should do to cut emissions by 45 per cent by 2030.
It would be hard to recommend something totally general, as it would massively depend on the sector that employer is in.

As a general resource, the Project Drawdown website is a pretty sensible evidence-based guide to solutions. And as a first step I supposed I'd recommend, if not a formal carbon audit which is probably a bit much for small organisations, at least having a think about main sources of emissions - typically energy, transportation and land use.

A very general overview of their hierarchy of solutions here: https://drawdown.org/drawdown-framework

Obvious things would be switching energy supplies, reducing use of private vehicles, less meat and dairy, cutting waste and generally reducing consumption of "stuff", much the same as for a private household tbh. If the company owns buildings or land, improving efficiency/management is well worth it. Are investments and pensions supporting fossil fuels?

There also may be areas where lobbying/advocacy within a sector could help wider change - exploring those routes might be a more efficient use of limited resources for forward-thinking employers.

But yeah, I think it's a little bit like the conversations about race everyone was having last year: step one is basically introspection.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri May 21, 2021 12:11 pm

Sorting the table here by contributions to scenario 2 (meeting the Paris Agreement target of 1.5°C) is quite revealing. Reduced food waste and Plant-rich diets are numbers 3 and 4, right up there with various forms of renewable energy generation.

So assuming you don't work for a large landowner or industrial refrigeration specialist, get your canteen to go vegan and maybe check your coffee supply if you get through a lot of it.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Woodchopper » Fri May 21, 2021 12:37 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Fri May 21, 2021 12:03 pm
Woodchopper wrote:
Thu May 20, 2021 7:57 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed May 19, 2021 12:45 pm
Here is UN Secretary General António Guterres:


Would any of you better informed people be able to recommend something focused upon an individual employer and what they should do to cut emissions by 45 per cent by 2030.
It would be hard to recommend something totally general, as it would massively depend on the sector that employer is in.

As a general resource, the Project Drawdown website is a pretty sensible evidence-based guide to solutions. And as a first step I supposed I'd recommend, if not a formal carbon audit which is probably a bit much for small organisations, at least having a think about main sources of emissions - typically energy, transportation and land use.

A very general overview of their hierarchy of solutions here: https://drawdown.org/drawdown-framework

Obvious things would be switching energy supplies, reducing use of private vehicles, less meat and dairy, cutting waste and generally reducing consumption of "stuff", much the same as for a private household tbh. If the company owns buildings or land, improving efficiency/management is well worth it. Are investments and pensions supporting fossil fuels?

There also may be areas where lobbying/advocacy within a sector could help wider change - exploring those routes might be a more efficient use of limited resources for forward-thinking employers.

But yeah, I think it's a little bit like the conversations about race everyone was having last year: step one is basically introspection.
Cheers, I'll read that. One issue is that the introspection can be indefinite as its preferable to making decisions that would be very unpopular with some people.

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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri May 21, 2021 1:23 pm

Yes, for sure. It's the sort of thing where a working group with a time-limited remit could be helpful, perhaps.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Woodchopper » Fri May 21, 2021 8:30 pm

The world’s richest nations have agreed to end their financial support for coal development overseas, in a major step towards phasing out the dirtiest fossil fuel.

After nearly two days of wrangling at a meeting of the G7 environment and energy ministers, hosted virtually by the UK on Thursday and Friday, all reaffirmed their commitment to limiting global heating to 1.5C, and committed to phasing out coal and fully decarbonising their energy sectors in the 2030s.

Japan, one of the world’s biggest sources of finance for coal power, along with China, held out on agreeing to stop helping to build until the final stages of the two-day virtual meeting. Japan’s government raised concerns that if it halted the financing, China would step in and build coal-fired power plants overseas that were less efficient than Japanese designs.

The other G7 members – the UK, the US, the EU, France, Italy, Germany, and Canada – were all united in calling for an end to such financing. The rich countries that make up the G7, along with other major non-G7 economies such as China and South Korea, have played a major role in the past in financing fossil fuel development in poorer countries. Japan, China and South Korea in particular have offered to help build coal-fired power plants in cash-strapped developing countries.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sat May 22, 2021 11:27 am

This is

A. excellent news - a necessary step in the right direction, representing a huge leap towards concrete steps to match decades of bloviating rhetoric with some action.

B. totally inadequate - they also need to end indirect government support, and private sector support, for all forms of fossil fuels in all countries by the end of the year. Hopefully this is just an amuse bouche in advance of the COP, signalling that wealthy countries are prepared to do stuff.

Also, I get pretty cheesed off at the "well we can't agree to do anything unless China does too" b.llsh.t. Of course they can - either you commit what you were going to commit anyway and hope China joins the effort later, or better yet assume China is going to keep pissing in everybody's porridge and plan around that, stepping up efforts to counteract where China undermines them. Sanction the c.nts while you're at it - with new carbon mechanisms via e.g. the WTO if necessary.

But yes - one small step for man, a giant leap for the lizard people in charge of us.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by bmforre » Mon May 24, 2021 7:37 am

CCS possibility by traditional methods:

Wood and other organic materials can be dry-distilled to give a rich mix of hydrocarbons and stuff. In times with restricted access to petrol this has been widely used to power cars. Carbon remaining from such distillation could be buried - efficiently sequestrated.

Here are nice views of woodgas powered cars: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knottgenerator
Note the truck in North Korea running on wood in 2008.

Economics of such supplies have been investigated and here is an interesting report from 1987: Liquid fuels from wood ...

There's more to be found e.g. google "carbohydrates wood distillation price"

Compare to this recent AP report::
PARIS (AP) — Air France-KLM sent into the air Tuesday what the company called its first long-haul flight powered by sustainable aviation fuel – petroleum mixed with a synthetic jet fuel derived from waste cooking oils.

The fuel used for the Paris-to-Montreal flight is part of efforts by the industry worldwide to experiment with alternative sources as regulators and governments tighten emissions rules for the coming decades. Other airlines and plane-makers are also experimenting with using varying levels of biofuels or different kinds of sustainable fuel.
They need to think outside just used cooking oil.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon May 24, 2021 9:05 am

"They" certainly are thinking beyond used cooking oil. :roll: Bioethanol is already used to dilute petrol in the EU, for instance, currently only at 5% but increasing that proportion is part of longer-term planning https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/why ... sions.html

However, as article Fishnut posted explained, the benefits are often overstated. For one, using biofuels isn't CCS - the S means storage, and if you're burning the carbon you've captured you're not storing it.

There's also the small matter of where to grow all these extra crops. Land use is responsible for a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. Forestry plantations are typically less efficient carbon stocks than natural woodland (and are generally dense monocultures with less biodiversity value too). So expanding agricultural production would be a backward step without offsetting it elsewhere.

So far, nobody seems to have a good plan to deal with the externalities of biofuel production. It will need at best national planning, and probably international agreements. I'd love to see rich countries with large forestry sectors, like Norway and Sweden, leading the charge.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon May 24, 2021 9:10 am

Really pisses me off when people assume climate scientists "haven't thought about" something.

Have you seen how big the climate literature is?! They've definitely thought about everything you're thinking about already, in more detail.

So if you don't see something being promoted as a solution, why not see if you can find out what the downsides are, or at least ask, rather than assuming that silly little climate scientists are incompetent.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by nekomatic » Mon May 24, 2021 9:31 am

I think the ‘they’ here may have been airlines, rather than climate scientists (or even aero engineers).
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon May 24, 2021 9:59 am

Ah, yes I can see that possibility. If so, apologies bmforre.

But I think the distinction between "sustainable" biofuel, made from waste, vs biofuel produced from virgin feedstock, is still an important consideration. Chopping down a f.ckload of trees isn't the climate solution we're looking for, I fear.

Aviation does seem to be the toughest nut to crack.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Fishnut » Mon May 24, 2021 10:17 am

Something that I heard on the No Such Thing As A Fish podcast recently was that reducing contrails can have a important impact reducing atmospheric heating. A quick google suggests it's not b.llsh.t, but is actually based on research,
Lead author Dr Marc Stettler, of Imperial’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said: “According to our study, changing the altitude of a small number of flights could significantly reduce the climate effects of aviation contrails. This new method could very quickly reduce the overall climate impact of the aviation industry.”
...
Previous research suggests that contrails and the clouds they help form have as much of a warming impact on the climate as aviation’s cumulative CO2 emissions... The key difference between CO2 and contrails, however, is that while CO­2 will have an impact in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, the impact of contrails is short-lived and could therefore quickly be reduced.
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon May 24, 2021 10:40 am

Cool. I was wondering about decreased engine efficiency with changing altitude, but it seems they thought of that too:
The diversion in flight paths caused less than a tenth of a per cent increase in fuel consumption - but, the researchers say, the reduced contrail formation more than offset the CO2 released by the extra fuel.

Dr Stettler suggests that their method of targeting only the few flights that cause the most climate forcing is the best way to avoid hikes in CO2 emissions. He said: “We’re conscious that any additional CO2 released into the atmosphere will have a climate impact stretching centuries into the future, so we’ve also calculated that if we only target flights that wouldn’t emit extra CO­2, we can still achieve a 20 per cent reduction in contrail forcing.”
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by bjn » Mon May 24, 2021 10:42 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon May 24, 2021 9:59 am
Ah, yes I can see that possibility. If so, apologies bmforre.

But I think the distinction between "sustainable" biofuel, made from waste, vs biofuel produced from virgin feedstock, is still an important consideration. Chopping down a f.ckload of trees isn't the climate solution we're looking for, I fear.

Aviation does seem to be the toughest nut to crack.
Long distance shipping is equally hard. Arguably a big chunk of aviation is a luxury and doing without it might hurt a bit, but ultimately not have too huge an effect on day to day well being. Shipping goes deeper, cutting back on that means a big kick in the teeth for a bigger number of people, eg: the UK needs to ship in food, as does Japan and China. Though adding a carbon cost to shipping should ideally move some production closer to consumption.

Concrete is the other one that is hard to decarbonise.

bmforre
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Re: Tackling the Climate Emergency:Economic and judicial instruments

Post by bmforre » Tue May 25, 2021 8:03 am

There is considerable surplus growth in northern forests that extend over vast areas. If wood is taken out and distilled you get hydrocarbons and remaining solid carbon. The solid carbon can be sequestered without needing overpressure that is required for storing CO2. For this to be sustainable the woods must be replanted so they can go on doing photosynthesis.

The huge boreal woods do not compete much against agriculture in contrast to biofuels made from e.g. maize/corn.

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