Tag Archives: carbon emissions

meat

Here is the BBC raising the alarm about meat consumption:

Global consumption of meat needs to fall to ensure future demand for food can be met and to help protect the environment, a study says.

Research from two universities estimates greenhouse gases from food production will go up 80% if meat and dairy consumption continues to rise at its current rate.

Meanwhile National Geographic has a long, interesting article about what our ancestors actually ate. The answer: pretty much everything and anything they could get their hands on. Some societies ate a lot of meat while others did not. Some made a big deal of meat, but filled up on a steady diet of twigs and berries in between successful hunts.

In other words, there is no one ideal human diet. Aiello and Leonard say the real hallmark of being human isn’t our taste for meat but our ability to adapt to many habitats—and to be able to combine many different foods to create many healthy diets. Unfortunately the modern Western diet does not appear to be one of them.

“blue carbon”

This article in Ecological Economics is about carbon sequestration in “mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and tidal salt marshes”, and policy and market mechanisms that can help make this happen. To me carbon sequestration is not the only or the primary reason to try to conserve these ecosystems, but I will certainly support it if it gets the job done. Plus if we can come up with hard-nosed market-based approaches that actually work, we can apply them to conservation and restoration of a whole range of ecosystems.

Blue carbon – the carbon stored and sequestered in mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and tidal salt marshes – is considered a cost-effective means to achieve positive climate change mitigation and adaptation outcomes. Blue carbon is therefore of considerable interest to the scientific and policy communities, and is frequently discussed in relation to carbon markets and climate finance opportunities. This paper identifies peer-reviewed and ‘gray literature’ documents that discuss blue carbon in the context of finance and market mechanisms. The document set is analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively, and the principal scientific, economic, regulatory, social, and management issues that emerge are discussed. The study reveals that (1) the blue carbon literature is dominated by technical and policy commentary, with a dearth of research into practical social considerations and a stark absence of private sector perspectives; (2) there is confusion over the nature and role of important concepts including private and public sector finance and instruments; and (3) understanding of the important issues of investment priorities and risk considerations is also limited. This paper therefore identifies gaps in the blue carbon literature, clarifies critical concepts and issues, and proposes novel pathways for blue carbon research and project development.

Integrating the planetary boundaries and global catastrophic risk paradigms

I think this article in Ecological Economics gets at a very important idea. There are planetary boundaries we are at risk of exceeding, most obviously the ability of the atmosphere and oceans to absorb and hold greenhouse gas emissions before reaching some catastrophic tipping point. Then there are catastrophic risks that come out of left field every once in a while, like war, plague, accidents, and asteroid strikes. Since our attention span and ability to respond seems to be severely limited, we really need to understand which of these risks are the most likely and the most consequential, so we know where to focus our efforts.

Planetary boundaries (PBs) and global catastrophic risk (GCR) have emerged in recent years as important paradigms for understanding and addressing global threats to humanity and the environment. This article compares the PBs and GCR paradigms and integrates them into a unified PBs-GCR conceptual framework, which we call Boundary Risk for Humanity and Nature (BRIHN). PBs emphasizes global environmental threats, whereas GCR emphasizes threats to human civilization. Both paradigms rate their global threats as top priorities for humanity but lack precision on key aspects of the impacts of the threats. Our integrated BRIHN framework combines elements from both paradigms’ treatments of uncertainty and impacts. The BRIHN framework offers PBs a means of handling human impacts and offers GCR a theoretically precise definition of global catastrophe. The BRIHN framework also offers a concise stage for telling a stylized version of the story of humanity and nature co-evolving from the distant past to the present to multiple possible futures. The BRIHN framework is illustrated using the case of disruptions to the global phosphorus biogeochemical cycle.

cars are evil

One of the most important things we can do to build a sustainable, resilient society is to design communities where most people can make most of their daily trips under their own power – on foot or by bicycle. It eliminates a huge amount of carbon emissions. It opens up enormous quantities of land to new possibilities other than roads and parking, which right now take up half or more of the land in urban areas. It reduces air pollution and increases physical activity, two things that are taking years off our lives. It eliminates crashes between vehicles, and crashes between vehicles and human bodies, which are serial killers of one million people worldwide every year, especially serial killers of children. It eliminates enormous amounts of dead, wasted time, because commuting is now a physically and mentally beneficial use of time. There is also a subtle effect, I believe, of creating more social interaction and trust and empathy between people just because they come into more contact, and creating a more vibrant, creative and innovative economy that might have a shot at solving our civilization’s more pressing problems.

No, Joel Kotkin, this is not the same thing as saying everybody has to live in tiny apartments, or in a “luxury city” where young childless “hipsters” do nothing but eat and drink and shop and party. Only someone who has never really experienced a walkable community would have this misconception. These are communities where people live, work, innovate, raise families, shop for groceries, garden, and care about each other. There are a lot of ways the actual buildings and infrastructure can be laid out to achieve the basic objective. It might be “dense” in terms of people, but it won’t feel crowded if the space is used well rather than wasted. There can be lots of breathing room for people, and even for plants and wildlife, as long as space is not wasted on oceans of parking lots and rivers of angry people trapped inside glass and steel bubbles separated by one car length for every 10 miles per hour of speed.

cap and trade

This Greentech article has a long analysis of how cap-and-trade is likely to affect gas prices in California. The author comes up with ten cents a gallon, then explains why he thinks the higher estimates offered by the oil industry are just scare tactics. To put the ten cents in perspective, he offers the following options to offset the cost:

This is all good, common sense advice. But I would offer one more: live where you can (safely) walk or bicycle to work, shopping, recreation, and medical care. But, you say, I don’t live in a place like that. Well, you control where you live. Decide that in 5 years you want to live in a place like that, then make it happen. If enough people do that, there will be more places like that. Or if you are a truly tough-minded person, decide that in 10 or 20 years you want the place you live now to be like that, find other people who agree with you, and get out there and make it happen. You will not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions and put money back in your pocket. You and your loved ones will be at much less risk of serious injury caused by a car. You won’t drive drunk, or get run over by someone else driving drunk. Increased physical activity and decreased air pollution will add years to your life. And most important, at least to me, commuting will no longer be an enormous waste of so many precious hours of your life, but quite possibly the best part of your day.

EU considering ban on gasoline and diesel powered cars

According to Wired, the EU is floating the idea of a complete ban on gasoline and diesel powered cars in European city centers by 2050.

An ambitious set of goals, laid out in the document “Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area” (PDF), calls for a gradual phase-out of gas-guzzling vehicles in favour of electric vehicles and improved rail networks. The EU wants to “halve the use of conventionally-fuelled cars in urban transport by 2030” before getting rid of them entirely by 2050.

This doesn’t strike me as all that ambitious. We can and will switch to electric, natural gas, and propane powered vehicles a lot faster than that if the economics begin to favor it. And they will if, for example, distributed solar energy comes online in a big way. And I expect to see that in decade, not four decades. However, just the fact that most people and governments see it as ambitious illustrates exactly why it is good to get it out there and in peoples’ minds – it may be more likely to happen that way.

the urban carbon cycle

This article from Landscape and Urban Planning looks at carbon emissions and carbon sequestration in Beijing:

During the study period, carbon sequestration only offset 2.4% of carbon emission, indicating a serious imbalance of the city’s carbon metabolism. The city’s core built-up area expanded along eight axes, and its form fluctuated between simpler and more complex. From a small-scale perspective, the spatial pattern mainly showed expansion and aggregation of patches with high carbon emission and shrinkage and fragmentation of patches with high carbon sequestration.

I think this sort of study is useful as we think about what it would mean for cities to be truly sustainable either within their own boundaries or in the context of the larger landscape. 2.4% doesn’t sound like much, but if that is the answer with no system-level planning or management, could it be boosted to 5% or 10% with a more systematic approach to green infrastructure? The rest of the landscape (farms, protected forests, grasslands, and wetlands, and bodies of water) would do its share. Finally, technology would have to make up the remaining gap, if we really want to one day get to carbon neutral or even begin to role back the damage we have done to the atmosphere and oceans.