An unexpected bonus of electric cars →

Stay with me for a moment on this one.

I’m not convinced in the slightest that cars should have any place in climate solutions.

Not even electric ones.

Constructing and disposing of an electric car and its battery currently creates more CO2 emissions than constructing and disposing of a petrol/gas/diesel car. As for running it, the electric car wins unless the electricity it’s burning comes mostly from coal. (Also, electric means no nitrogen oxide and small particle emissions, it’s not just about the CO2.)

On average, in the EU, the CO2 emissions look like this:

European Environment Agency/TNO (2014)

In the best-case scenario—100% renewable electricity—the electric car will have around 1/3 the lifetime emissions of a petrol/gas/diesel car.

In today’s electricity mix, it’s closer to 3/4 the lifetime emissions, which is not life-changingly better.

And in Poland, they’re building electric car batteries using electricity generated 80% by coal. Which makes sense for jobs but not for the environment. Where have I heard this before…

I digress Australia, I digress.

But…

And there’s a bigger “but” than I expected.

Here’s the footnote of the graphic above I removed to turn this post into a B-grade thriller:

So these estimates suppose that after 220 000 km, you throw away the petrol/gas/diesel or electric car, and start again.

You build another one and set it free.

Every 220 000 km, you get the same bar plot.

But what if it turned out that well-built electric cars just keep going and going and going?

Cue this quite surprising article on Tesloop, a shuttle service in California with 7 Teslas:

“Few have driven a Tesla to the point at which the vehicle really starts to show its age. But Tesloop, a shuttle service in Southern California composed of Teslas, was ticking the odometers of its cars well past 300,000 miles with no signs of slowing”.

Some of their cars are now nearing 800 000 km.

I’m not saying: This Changes Everything, but it definitely changes Something.

When you have to replace a petrol/gas/diesel car, you have to build a new one. If you don’t have to replace the electric car, you don’t!

Imagine if we draw the same bar plot above but cumulatively after 220 000 km, 440 000 km, 660 000 km, and 880 000 km.

For 880 000 km, you will have to add four blue segments to the petrol/gas/diesel bar, because you have to build four cars.

But only one blue bar for the electric car, if it’s still going strong after 880 000 km.

The point is: if you only have to build one electric car in the place of four petrol/gas/diesel ones for the same number of kilometers travelled, over time electric cars becomes massively “less bad” relative to petrol/gas/diesel ones for the environment.

This was a surprise to me, but maybe not to everyone:

“When we first started our company, we predicted the drive train would practically last forever,” Tesloop founder Haydn Sonnad told Quartz. “That’s proven to be relatively true.” He notes that every car except one, a vehicle taken out of service after a collision with a drunk driver, is still running. “The cars have never died of old age,” he added.

Of course, various caveats as usual. Basic wear and tear (tyres, small problems) will be higher for an electric car that ends up driving so many more kilometers, meaning more CO2 emissions for repairs. Not all electric cars are built as well as Teslas. And then there is the question of the battery. Batteries still don’t last forever:

“One Tesloop Model X has seen its original battery’s range fall from 260 miles (23%) to 200 miles after covering 330,000 miles (for comparison, pooled data from Tesla owners shows batteries losing about 10% of their charge after 155,000 miles)”.

Once a battery becomes useless, you have to replace it, with all the CO2 emissions that come with that. Still, a small drop in range from 260 to 200 miles after covering 330 000 miles remains a rather spectacular achievement for a battery.

Overall though, batteries, the rare earth metals that go in to them, and the CO2 emissions from constructing them, definitely still seem to be a major weak point in the whole “Electric cars are awesome” narrative.

However, it’s hard not to marvel at the technological convergence we are witnessing: cars that don’t wear out, drive themselves, and run on energy from increasingly renewable sources.

Black humour #1 →

Today I bring to you the first (and probably not last) post in a category I call “black humour”.

“Veneto regional council, which is located on Venice's Grand Canal, was flooded for the first time in its history on Tuesday night — just after it rejected measures to combat climate change”.

Photos from Democratic Party councillor Andrea Zanoni’s Facebook post

As for famous Saint Mark's basilica:

“It is the sixth time in 1,200 years that the basilica has been flooded, with four of those incidents happening in the last two decades”.

And it’s not over yet.

[Cover photo: Stefano Mazzola/Awakening/Getty Images]

A small development that smells like a trend →

Here’s an article from a New Zealand news website called Stuff. It was originally published in the Chicago Tribune.

It’s about a trip to Sweden from the US for DNA tourism.

DNA tourism is a thing.

It turns out there’s a difference between the two published articles.

The New Zealand one has appended to the end:

This is totally like the warnings on cigarette packets and wine bottles.

It’s just a teensy-weensy bit harder to pretend it’s business as usual when the reality of your personal decisions is not hidden from view in the la-la-la-it-ain’t-happening zone of our brains.

2490 kg CO2.

This value appears to come from Air New Zealand’s carbon offset calculator.

If you use myclimate’s simulations, you actually get around 5.5 tonnes CO2.

Neither of these estimates is heart-warming.

[Photo credit: Gemma Evans and Unsplash]

[Thanks to Claire Waddington for giving me the heads-up and mentioning the link with cigarette packets]

Amtrak I love you (kind of) →

One of the most epic train rides I ever took was Amtrak’s Californian Zephyr from Chicago to San Francisco. It goes through seven states, gliding serenely through spectacular sections of the wilderness, canyons and desert of Colorado, Utah and Nevada. With a traverse of the Rocky Mountains thrown in for good measure.

There’s a top-floor viewing car with windows for walls and sofa chairs to lounge in all day long, where you can chat with the interesting mix of people that take slow trains across America.

California Zephyr

And boy are they slowwwwwwww. The Zephyr takes 51 hours. If everything goes to plan, that is.

I got lucky, my train was on time.

Others, not so lucky.

You see, Amtrak—the US’s public rail company—only owns 3% of its tracks. The other 97% are mostly owned by freight companies. This can pose a problem when a freight company decides to prioritize freight operations on a segment of track where an Amtrak train is scheduled to be. If this happens, delays can cascade down the line.

I was however surprised to discover that—legally—this is not meant to happen. From Amtrak:

"Most of Amtrak’s network consists of tracks owned, maintained, and dispatched by freight railroads, known as “host” railroads where Amtrak uses their tracks. In fact, the number one cause of delay to Amtrak customers is “freight train interference,” caused by freight railroads failing to comply with Federal law requiring that Amtrak trains be given preference over freight.”

From its takeover by the state in 1970, it was designed to fail by those who saw it as another overstep of federal government. Somehow it has survived, like a mountain climber left for dead in a blizzard who stumbles into camp like a frostbitten madman.

And that’s about where Amtrak is right now. As this blog post explains:

“After 2015’s deadly Amtrak crash in Philadelphia, former Amtrak CEO David Hughes put the problem in stark terms.

‘What Amtrak has is among the poorest I’ve ever seen given the level of use they get’, he told CBS News. ‘The accumulated deferred maintenance and lack of attention really makes it almost a Third World operation’.

“And that’s on its own tracks in the most popular region for the rail service in the country.”

But there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Amtrak is currently trying to reverse its death spiral:

“According to Amtrak’s preliminary results for the 2019 financial year, the US national passenger operator set ridership, revenue and financial performance records towards achieving its goal of breaking even in 2020”.

Last year, they lost $US 170.6m. This year, only $US 29.8m.

For better or worse, much of this “improvement” is due to Amtrak’s new CEO, Richard Anderson, who comes from the aviation industry.

On the “worse” side, freshly-cooked dining car meals have now been replaced by microwave dinners to cut costs on trains to the east of Chicago and New Orleans.

No-one was pretending there was much old-school glamour remaining on Amtrak’s cross-country trains, but removing cooked meals isn’t exactly a step in the direction of bringing it back.

Now if they could actually make some money, they could start to improve the overall experience again (speed, comfort, on-time performance, food) and get a virtuous cycle running.

Because the trouble in the US is that if you’re not directly making money, you’re nothing.

In comparison, in France riding the rails is subsidized to a level of more than 200 € per person per year. Passengers only directly pay 20% of the true cost of a ticket, the idea being that mobility has a positive effect on the economy.

Then again, direct taxation is very high in France, so one might argue that passengers are paying the full price, just that it’s hidden from view.

To sign off for the day, let me also note that Amtrak’s carbon emissions still have a lot of work to be done. Taking the train is only 1/3 more efficient per person per mile than flying, due in part to the ongoing use of diesel trains across much of the country.

The latest on Australia's bushfires (and coal) →

Here’s a round-up of the latest out of Australia.

If you would like to be amazed and terrified, check out these Reuters maps and graphics on the fires. If you scroll down on that page, the map covered in red showing where it’s “crazy dry” is scary as f*ck.

Sydney (population: 5 million) it is surrounded by tinder dry bushland. Fires came within 15 km of the city centre yesterday before being put out.

Here’s the fire risk around Sydney today:

Yesterday, I asked a friend in jest whether Sydney could actually burn down. I didn’t think it was possible as a concept. But there’s a lot of wood in Australian houses. And it’s surrounded by bushland. Can big modern cities burn down?

Here’s a feed of live updates coming out of Australia.

One of the updates is this chilling message from New South Wales’ Rural Fire Service a few hours ago:

EMERGENCY WARNING: Carrai East Fire (Kempsey LGA)
Bush fire is burning west of Kempsey. The fire breached containment lines & is spreading quickly. If you are in the area west of Kempsey you are at risk. It is too late to leave. Seek shelter as the fire approaches.

The State of Victoria is considering adding a new category of heatwave over and above the current “extreme” level.

The new category will be called, “very extreme”.

That gets to the point.

More of the climate change subject avoidance by Australia’s deputy prime minister can be found here.

In other joyful news, a couple of the fires may have been started deliberately. What a mess.

On Sunday, it basically didn’t rain in all of continental Australia. And Australia is very, very big.

On each day these fires burn, Australia continues to export more than one million tonnes of coal.

That’s one billion kilograms, per day.

Burned, that produces around 2.6 billion kilograms of CO2.

That CO2 goes into the atmosphere, 100% man-made.

The atmosphere gets hotter.

The temperature rises.

Droughts become more frequent in Australia. Its forests become drier and burn more frequently, over longer periods of the year.

Australia green-lights a new coal mine.

Jobs are created.

Australia burns.

Australia's The Project makes the same point as me →

An Australian friend sent me the link to a great video from yesterday’s episode of The Project.

In it, they make the point that the Australian government is doing everything it can to avoid talking about climate change. It is a planned political strategy, not an accident.

If you have Facebook, here is the link.

If you are in Australia and without Facebook, here is the link.

If neither apply to you, welcome to the joys of monopolistic social networks and geo-blocking! You could try going through a VPN to get the Australian feed perhaps.

The Australian government is using American gun control-suppression tactics to avoid action on climate change →

How bad are the fires in Australia?

“Thousands of people are in the path of deadly Australian bushfires that have produced clouds of smoke seen as far away as New Zealand”.

It’s a three hour flight from the east coast of Australia to New Zealand; slightly over 2000 km.

In New South Wales:

“As of Monday morning, 64 fires were burning across New South Wales, 40 of which had not been contained”.

In Queensland:

“There were 50 fires raging across Queensland, with three significant blazes located across an area of 500 kilometers (310 miles), Megan Stiffler with the Queensland Fire and Emergency Service told CNN. She added that there is no rain predicted in the area until January”.

January!

So how is the Australian government dealing with these fires and the fact that climate change is leading to them happening more often and with greater strength?

Well, for a start, Australia is the world’s biggest coal exporter, providing 29% of internationally traded coal.

On June 19, Queensland gave the go ahead for a massive new coal mine in Carmichael.

Australia became the world’s biggest liquified natural gas exporter last year, overtaking Qatar.

The CO2 emissions from these exported fossil fuels correspond to 3.6% of total global CO2 emissions.

Here’s how Australia’s great leader reacted to being accused of inaction:

“Morrison sidestepped questions this weekend when asked about climate change. On Saturday, he said, "My only thoughts today are with those who have lost their lives and their families. The firefighters who are fighting the fires, the response effort that has to be delivered and how the Commonwealth has responded in supporting those efforts".

This was the guy that brought a lump of coal to parliament in 2017, as savagely reported by the Guardian:

“This is coal,” the treasurer said triumphantly, brandishing the trophy as if he’d just stumbled across an exotic species previously thought to be extinct.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, soothingly, “don’t be scared.”

No one was afraid, or scared. People were just confused. What was this fresh idiocy?”

As for the deputy prime minister—Michael McCormack, he had this to say:

"What people need now is a little bit of sympathy, understanding and real assistance. They need help, they need shelter."

The sickening thing is that they’re using the bullshit American “thoughts and prayers” strategy that comes out every time there’s a mass shooting. The idea is to divert attention from the underlying problem (climate change, gun control) by attacking the moral standing of those who want to solve the underlying problem. Then they cross their fingers that the story will fade out of the news cycle before the next round.

And…repeat.

You have to be a pretty nasty piece of work to push back with this technique. Or a politician.

McCormack also had this to say about Greens party members who had the gall to face the reality that climate change seems to be using Australia as its poster child:

"I don't need the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies".

What he needs is an editor.

In a desperate hunt for an adult in the rather hot room that is Australia 2019, Greg Mullins, the former Commissioner of New South Wales' Fire and Rescue Department, was discovered hiding out as an extra in Reality Bites. He had this to say:

"If anyone tells you, 'This is part of a normal cycle' or 'We've had fires like this before', smile politely and walk away, because they don't know what they're talking about".

If you have any good stories out of Australia of communities trying to do something about climate change or trying to push the government on to the right path, please get in touch, because—quite frankly—there’s not much good news on this coming out of Australia these days, and I’ll take anything I can get.

[Photo credit: CNN]

Naomi Klein's frankly hypnotic writing about the Paradise wildfire and the Green New Deal →

Naomi Klein in a brilliant piece for The Intercept on the wildfire that burned down the town of Paradise one year ago:

“The intersecting hardships experienced by so many in the region also explain why, days before the one-year anniversary of the deadly Camp Fire that burned down Paradise and killed 86 people, local politicians in neighboring Chico unveiled a plan calling for the small city to adopt its own Green New Deal”.

The Chico—population 100,000—connection:

“As the community that housed the vast majority of people displaced by the Camp Fire, Chico shows that there is no way to cope with climate breakdown without a simultaneous shift to a very different kind of economy, one that is willing to make major nonmarket investments in housing, transit, health (including mental health), water, electricity, and more”.

The Walmart connection:

“Some of the most beautiful nights were in the Walmart parking lot,” Stemen told me as we drove the Skyway out of Paradise and approached the big-box retailer on the outskirts of Chico. The black asphalt surrounding the store, he explained, acted as a fire break, repelling the flames that destroyed between 17,000 and 19,000 structures up the road. So, as cars and trucks fled that rain of fire, hundreds of them pulled into the Walmart parking lot, safe at last”.

The anarchist connection:

“There they were met by North Valley Mutual Aid, the now legendary anarchist disaster response group that self-organized in the immediate aftermath of the fire. Thanks in large part to these grassroots activists, the evacuees who ended up at the Chico Walmart were greeted with clothing, pollution masks, hot meals, dog food, and much more. A whiteboard shared information about people who were still missing. Portable toilets appeared and showers a few days later. Walmart donated some supplies —and also made a killing selling tents, sleeping bags, and whatever else anyone needed.”

Then, she manages to sum up the American experience in one epic paragraph:

“It’s true that California’s fires have provided the world with some extraordinary examples of disaster capitalism and climate apartheid: ultrarich mansion owners protecting their homes with private firefighters and failing to inform their immigrant housekeepers and gardeners that their workplaces were under evacuation; Cal Fire’s reliance on hyper-exploited prison inmates to do some of the most dangerous firefighting in the state; migrant farmworkers in wine country forced to work in a haze of wildfire smoke”.

And we’re not even halfway through the article at this point. It just keeps getting better.

I encourage you to read it in full—it left me gasping.

[Photo credit: Noah Berger/AP]

Europacity bye bye →

Out on the northern fringes of greater Paris lie 700 hectares of wheat fields known as the Gonesse Triangle. They are located right next to some of the poorest parts of Paris, where unemployment is high and hopes are low. The town of Gonesse itself has no rail links to the rest of Paris, the closest station being 2.6km away, which means it’s a pain in the ass to get in and out of there for work, studies, health care, etc.

[Photo credit: Le Monde]

As part of a huge package to help improve the lot of Paris’s outer suburbs and avoid new riots like the fairly epic 2005 and 2007 ones, the government decided to build new metro line 17 through Gonesse (the dotted pink line above) and green-light a massive construction project (ahem: “leisure center”) covering 80 of the hectares where wheat currently grows:

Europacity.

[AFP]

Europacity was intended to be Disneyland without the entrance fees. All kinds of glorious statistics were bandied about: 30 million visitors per year, 10 000 jobs, the return of Jesus Christ our Saviour, and more.

It always gets me when you see the projections for new jobs created by a megaproject. Either these jobs are going to lead to job losses elsewhere, or you have to increase overall tourist numbers (and CO2 emissions).

And as over-tourism becomes a global nightmare, it is only a matter of time before Parisians shit a collective brick. It hasn’t really happened here yet like in Barcelona and Venice, but I can smell it coming.

The ecologists were on to Europacity long before the design was even finalized. In March 2011, the collective for the Gonesse Triangle centralized the work of 15 NGOs. They were quick to label Europacity a BUP or Big Useless Project.

Catchy.

Some of them started gardening on land slated for redevelopment:

Tending her rows of courgettes, leeks and potatoes, Cécile Coquel, a telecoms worker and guerilla gardener, stood firm despite local authorities’ recent warning that everything must be ripped up and the field vacated.

“These are the vegetables of the resistance!” she proclaimed. “We’ll fight to save this land.”

Indeed, one of the ecologists’ propositions was to turn the 80 hectares of wheat fields into an epic market garden for the local region, thus providing more employment than a wheat field (of which France definitely has no shortage).

“The irony is that we’re right next to Le Bourget where France signed the Paris climate accords and then Emmanuel Macron promised to ‘make our planet great again’,” sighed Coquel, 46, a former Communist councillor. “This type of giant out-of-town development seems like a relic of the past. If we instead replanted this land with market-gardening, we could feed the surrounding area with local produce”.

Things have been going pear-shaped for Europacity for a while, but the fatal blow was when the political calculations of our great leaders finally converged to the following epiphany:

We cannot build massive shit on agricultural land and expect to get away with it any longer.

Europacity was definitively cancelled yesterday.

This debacle follows last year’s abandonment of the Notre-Dames-des-Landes airport project in western France, also on agricultural land, after a 40 year struggle.

Small steps. Small steps.

These do however seem like minor turning points in the battle to keep Earth habitable for at least a few humans, when one country’s politicians have decided that—at the very least—they should not be trying to actively make CO2 emissions worse through massive new construction sites that lead to more tourism.

Not that construction in France is on a downward trajectory or anything. For a country with an almost flat net population, you’d be surprised at how many apartment blocks and individual homes are still being built, many of which match communist brutalist architecture if not in style then definitely in hideousness.

But back to Europacity and the big picture.

This shit is getting real.

Inequality in France—a rich country—is coming face to face with what happens when you realise you don’t know how to keep the “poor” masses happy and “save the planet” at the same time.

There’s no obvious solution here as long as we all keep expecting that our lives should get better, and that consumerism will do the hard graft to get us there. Those days are on the way out, and society is floundering about like a fish on a hook, trying to work out what happens next.

In any case, as long as massive and visible inequality continues to poison modern life here and elsewhere, there will never arise some kind of shared feeling like, We are all in this together.

And without that feeling, no reckoning can be had as to what kind of life we need to learn to be happy with in the years to come.

One more step towards connecting Europe without planes →

I stumbled upon the Rail Baltica project this week.

It’s a plan to build a standard gauge railway from Warsaw across the three Baltic states to Tallinn, a total length of around 950 km.

You may not have known, but Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia ended up with Russian gauge tracks after the Soviets took over the show in 1944. Whereas most of Europe has standard gauge:

The gauge is the distance between the two rails. To pass from one gauge to another, you basically have to either change trains, or lift them up—wagon by wagon—at a border and fiddle the distance between the wheels.

Variable gauge trains that can slip and slide between two gauges do exist but are rare. Poland has actually had one running to Lithuania for night trains and some freight transport in the past.

The first step to connect the Baltic states to the standard gauge zone (i.e., “Europe”) was the completion of standard gauge tracks from Bialstok in Poland to Kaunas in Lithuania in 2015.

Now it’s full-on planning is to get the standard gauge tracks built right through to Estonia for 2026, with further construction starting next year.

The trains will have a top speed of 249 km/h because 250 km/h was taken already.

This new railway should—by accident or design—mean the end of flights between Tallinn and Kaunas (it will be 3.5 hours by train) and perhaps even flights from any of the Baltic states to Warsaw, given the likely evolution in attitudes towards short-hop European flights over the next 7 years.

Public consciousness has changed massively in just the last year. Let’s see what seven can do.

The US city preparing itself for the collapse of capitalism

The title of this Guardian article on the city of Kingston (population: 23 000) in New York State is borderline clickbait. But after reading it, you do see their point.

“The streets of uptown are bustling with eateries and, of late, places to buy velvet halter dresses, vintage boleros, CBD tinctures, and LCD tea kettles with precision-pour spouts. But strolling by 10-year-old Half Moon Books, passersby might glimpse a different side of this city. The bookshop’s windows exclusively feature nonfiction on the end of the world as we know it. “I started out putting together a window of utopias,” says bookseller Jessica DuPont, “but somehow I ended up with the death throes of capitalism.”

And:

“From my vantage in the deep south, it looks as though, one mission at a time, Kingston is piecing together the infrastructure for a self-sufficient community – one that wants to survive the possibly impending systemic collapse we nervously joke about…”.

I’ve been to the Detroit that reporters have salivated over, gushing about how it’s “coming back”, and seen the reality: small corridors of development surrounded by a vast city in which you just feel plain unsafe on the street, even during the day. So is it mostly in the reporter’s mind here too?

“DuPont at Half Moon doesn’t believe the average Kingstonite is actively battening down the hatches for a societal implosion. “But,” she says, “I do think the economic pressures–especially skyrocketing housing costs–are causing people to look to new ways to network and support each other.”

What is interesting with Kingston in the context of the US is that back in 2010—following the 2008 recession—they started a festival called O+, a week-long extravaganza of street art, live music, and… free healthcare provided to the artists involved.

Other local initiatives include the Hudson Valley Farm Hub for pushing an ecologically resilient food system, and a system of bike trails going between local towns and local farms.

It’s a bottom-up solution that they hope will spread:

“The way you change a system nationally is you do thousands of local things, and eventually the system evolves,” says O+ executive director Joe Concra […] Every time I walk into the clinic, I think: ‘Oh yeah, it is possible to build a new system.’ I refuse to believe we can’t. So, we keep doing it.”

It’s a good bunch of actions to take even if Capitalism as we know it does not collapse like a house of cards and daily life becomes like Cormac McCarthy’s book, The Road. Which is probably sitting in the window of Kingston’s Half Moon bookstore as we speak.

[Photo credits: for the town photo: Chris Boswell/Alamy, and for the street art photo: O+]

Fantastic new night train cabins for Europe coming in 2021

Just finished reading the report from the big European train meet-up in Hamburg.

So much good news and lots of real developments in improving Europe’s day and night train networks.

The report mentions the new night train designs being built by Siemens for Austrian Railways (ÖBB) with a 2021 delivery date.

The design work for these was done by PriestmanGoode in London.

Even as a fan of night trains myself, I get that one of the turnoffs is the unknown of what the other 3 (or 5) people you are going to be sharing an enclosed compartment with will be like. Will there be a weirdo? Will someone snore like a madman or smell like poo?

If you recognize yourself in such worries, Austrian railways has come up with the option of pretty cool sleeping pods à la Japanese, shown in the picture below.

You have a sliding door that provides total privacy. Brilliant.

There are also the typical 4 bed couchettes which can be booked by individual travellers or families:

And, bringing up the rear, fancy-looking 2-bed first class cabins with their own bathrooms:

As a reminder, the Austrians are the ones currently driving the newly-expanding night train network in Europe. They bought out Deutsche Bahn’s rolling stock a few years ago and are totally kicking it. Here’s their current night train network:

They’re expanding the network to Brussels in January 2020, and intend to get to Amsterdam in December 2020.

With the drive to properly tax short-haul plane flights in Europe underway (it will be messy), the Austrians are very well placed to take up some of the the slack, and—better still—are continuing to push forward with new ideas.

Good on them.

On the slippery border between climate change acceptance, denial, truth, lies, and scary shit →

Roger Pielke writing for Forbes:

“So the math here is simple: to achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, the world would need to deploy 3 Turkey Point nuclear plants worth of carbon-free energy every two days, starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050. At the same time, a Turkey Point nuclear plant worth of fossil fuels would need to be decommissioned every day, starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050”.

What if we put that in terms of wind turbines?

Net-zero carbon dioxide by 2050 would require the deployment of ~1500 wind turbines (2.5 MW) over ~300 square miles, every day starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050.

Great.

Of course, any analysis like this has to start from hypotheses about what the near future will be like, and in particular the hypothesis that energy demand will continue to increase, but in the scope of his stated hypotheses, what he suggests seems to make sense more than not.

What if I then tell you than Roger Pielke has one butt cheek on either side of the slippery fence between human-caused climate change denial and acceptance?

On the one hand he says that he accepts the science:

“The IPCC has concluded that greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activity are an important driver of changes in climate. And on this basis alone I am personally convinced that it makes sense to take action to limit greenhouse gas emissions”.

On the other hand, he has been involved in some sloppy science arguing that the rise in damage cost from extreme events is due to humanity becoming wealthier, rather than from climate change. This is particular drew scorn from scientists, and makes one just a little suspicious of his motives.

He has denied however receiving any funding from the fossil fuel industry.

His position is therefore a wet dream for crude oil lovers everywhere, throwing a subtle spanner in the works that causes people to stop, think, be confused/scared/give up (because they are not experts), and carry a hint of scepticism into their daily lives.

So where does this leave us with the one new nuclear power plant or 1500 wind turbines a day for the next 31 years?

I’m guessing that in the absence of any huge divergence from his hypotheses, he’s probably more right than wrong.

So, what about those hypotheses then? Will they become false because of climate change or our actions to mitigate its effect?

Will capitalism crash suddenly and/or some significant part of the world population die off in an apocalyptic sequence of very bad climate events?

Or will a miraculous scientific invention (fusion, carbon capture, etc.) save the day?

Any of these would certainly break his model, for good or for bad—for humans.

But for the moment, his hypotheses stand, and anyone with a kind of fantasy that we’ll get to net-zero carbon dioxide emissions easily with renewable energy needs to have a good check-up with reality, and remember that even a broken clock is right twice a day.

[Photo Credit: Anna Jiménez Calaf on Unsplash]

Organic farming is "worse" for the climate. But... →

There’s a pretty intense study in Nature Communications out on this. Summary: here.

They looked at what would happen if England and Wales fully converted to organic farming: crops and animals.

It turns out that if you want to obtain the same amount of total metabolisable energy overall, you would end up having to import more food from overseas, and clearing the land from grasslands/forest to produce this food would mean that—overall—greenhouse gas emissions would rise. Given current consumption, they predicted a 40% shortfall in metabolisable energy from domestic sources.

There are of course heaps of hypotheses they have to make in order to model this kind of thing. And they talk about the advantages alongside the disadvantages of organic farming. It’s a tricky one, and not an anti-organic diatribe at all.

As I was reading it though, a couple of things came to mind.

First, let’s face it, on average people eat too much in rich countries. In the UK, a full 28% were clinically obese in 2018, and a further 34% overweight. It is unlikely anyone would actually starve to death in England or Wales if total energy production decreased, even if there were a shortfall of 40%, unless society as a whole let it happen.

Second, there’s an elephant in the room, trying to hide in the corner: How does the math turn out if meat consumption decreased by say 50%?

That would free up land, both directly in terms of less space needed for animals, and indirectly in terms of less plants needed to be grown to feed animals (especially chickens and pigs).

This scenario not taken into account at all in the article’s calculations, but to be fair, they do mention it near the end:

“Given the much larger contribution of livestock farming to GHG emissions, a greater impact could be gained from reduced meat consumption. Less livestock farming could release land for crops for human consumption and for other purposes such as carbon storage”.

Before we have time to digest this possibility, they put it in a global context:

“However, against this, global trends are towards greater per capita and total meat consumption”.

It will be interesting to see what happens at the intersection of climate catastrophe, population increase, meat consumption, and lab-grown meat consumption over the next few years.

Stay tuned.

[Photo credit: Ivan Bandura on Unsplash]

US green economy already has 10 times more jobs than the fossil fuel industry →

Baseline:

“The fossil fuel sector, from coal mines to gas power plants, employed around 900,000 people in the US in 2015-16, government figures show”.

Whereas, over the same period,

“…this was vastly outweighed by the green economy, which provided nearly 9.5 million jobs, or 4 per cent of the working age population”.

Note that the authors of the study, Lucien Georgeson and Mark Maslin at University College London, defined the “green economy” as anything from renewable energy jobs right through to environmental consulting.

This data comes from just before Trump took over, but despite his surreal insistence on the future of coal (hint: there is no future for coal), the difference between the two sectors is probably even wider by now.

Yesterday for instance, Murray Energy, the largest privately-owned coal mining company in the US, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

As reported by Sky News, It is the 8th US coal mining company to do so in the past year.

The words they used to describe this phenomenon were: death spiral.

Good choice of words.

[Photo credit: Sky News]

SUVs cause cancer →

More precisely:

“Growing demand for SUVs was the second largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions from 2010 to 2018, an analysis has found”.

This unfortunate illness in which first-world “citizens” believe they have the right to drive their kids to school in a 4WD, ON A FUCKING ROAD, is a particularly moronic way to accelerate the climate catastrophe.

I don’t enjoy saying it, but members of my direct family have this illness, which especially depresses me.

It shows that many people will take short-term personal convenience over giving a fuck when it comes to basic choices about the future of humanity on the planet.

Which implies that short-term personal convenience is seriously underpriced in the current market because its true effect on the climate is clearly not being taken into account.

Correct pricing would be when only farmers that truly need a 4WD to make money, and a few really rich bastards, can afford to buy one.

Pop Quiz: How many people were driving their SUVs to evacuate from the horrific wildfires in California this week?

Answer: Here’s a picture of the evacuation (obtained from this article - AP):

It looks like more than 50% of the automobiles ON THIS FUCKING SEALED HIGHWAY were SUVs, or bigger.

Fun times.

[[Sorry, I had a problem with an autocorrect of the title. The original title was: “The fact that people are still buying SUVs in droves shows that humans are quite willing to actively push for their own extinction”. ]]

My bad.

End game for the Amazon? →

Grim times for the Amazon:

“Soaring deforestation coupled with the destructive policies of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, could push the Amazon rainforest dangerously to an irreversible “tipping-point” within two years, a prominent economist has said.”

What is the tipping-point being talked about?

“…the rainforest would stop producing enough rain to sustain itself and start slowly degrading into a drier savannah, releasing billions of tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, which would exacerbate global heating and disrupt weather across South America”.

Well, that’s just great news. Is there a more positive way to look at this?

“The report sparked controversy among climate scientists. Some believe the tipping point is still 15 to 20 years away”.

Well, if it’s 15-20 years away, there’s simply nothing to worry about this weekend at least, is there?

Phew (wipes brow).

Have a good weekend y’all.

Eurostar's biggest August ever →

Eurostar runs the trains that go through the tunnel between England and France.

“Eurostar has reported its busiest August ever, with more than a million passengers travelling on the cross-Channel train service in that month.

“The service appears to have benefited from increasing demand for an alternative to flying - a trend highlighted in Eurostar’s advertising campaign.”

The other good news is that Eurostar is still far from full capacity. It seems that it could double the number of passengers without too much bother.

Direct London to Amsterdam trains are on the way in a few months, with only Brexit fun-and-games to sidestep. Plans are underway for direct trains between London and Germany too, part of the new Green Speed initiative by the SNCF (France’s state-owned railway company).

Clever marketing.

New night train from Amsterdam to Munich, Innsbruck, or Vienna →

Trains are definitely the place to look for good news these days:

From December 2020, the Austrian night train specialist ÖBB and the Dutch State Railways NS will start a daily night train from Amsterdam to Munich, Innsbruck and Vienna. In the evening, the passengers board the train to arrive at their destination sleepily the next morning.

Or maybe not sleepily but fresh and ready to go!

Here are the juicy details (taken from this article translated to English using Chrome):

  1. It will start in December 2020

  2. Early evening departure from Amsterdam

  3. In Nuremberg, the train will divide in two, one part going to Munich + Innsbruck, the other to Vienna

  4. Seats will be 29€ for seats (no thanks!), 59€ for berths (better), and 79€ for sleeping cars (best!)

  5. There will be a space for wheelchairs and bicycles (fantastic if true).

I presume taking the trip the other way has the same train gymnastics in reverse.

One more piece fitted into the jigsaw.

Good.

Facing unbearable heat, Qatar has begun to air-condition the outdoors →

In a Qatari football stadium for the 2022 World Cup:

“…a cool breeze was blowing. Beneath each of the 40,000 seats, small grates adorned with Arabic-style patterns were pushing out cool air at ankle level. And since cool air sinks, waves of it rolled gently down to the grassy playing field.”

Qatar has the world’s highest per capita CO2 emissions, three times those of the already ridiculously high US ones.

“Already one of the hottest places on Earth, Qatar has seen average temperatures rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial times, the current international goal for limiting the damage of global warming.”

One of the dumbest ways to accelerate global heating is to try cooling down outside temperatures in one of the hottest places on Earth.

“Qatar has used its riches to great effect at home, where 11 winners of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize have built striking high-rises and stadiums. The result is a strange combination of avant-garde architecture, oil wealth, Islamic conservatism, shopping malls and climate change that Qatari American artist Sophia al-Maria has dubbed “Gulf Futurism.”

She added:

“With the coming global environmental collapse, to live completely indoors is like, the only way we’ll be able to survive. The Gulf’s a prophecy of what’s to come.”

We all need more positive vibes like this to get through the day.

For me, the (very sweaty) Elephant in the room is this: Why do 2.7 million people need to be living in this hellhole? And I don’t just mean the heat. Qatar is the most mind-numbingly dull place I ever had the chance to spend 24 hours in.