Spencer Weart has a doctorate in physics and astrophysics. He worked on solar physics before he turned to the study of the history of science. From 1974 until his retirement in 2009, he was director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics. He has published numerous papers and books, including The Discovery of Global Warming and The Rise of Nuclear Fear, which was published last year.

A disaster began when a tsunami struck the Fukushima nuclear reactors a little more than a year ago — but not the sort of disaster that most people think of. Attention has focused on the threat that Japanese citizens may have received doses of radiation that will increase their risk of cancer. But there are worse consequences for the health of the Japanese, and serious long-term impacts on all of us.

Japan has shut down almost all its reactors, and it’s unclear how many will ever restart. Germany has decided to phase out its nuclear power industry, and Italy and other nations are canceling ambitious plans for expansion. In the United States, prospects for additional reactors hang by a thread. Other nations, including India and China, continue to press ahead with their nuclear programs, but there can be little doubt that the Fukushima crisis has been a setback to prospects for a nuclear renaissance.

These blows to the world’s nuclear industry will have severe unintended consequences, most notably because they will inevitably lead to more burning of fossil fuels. Over the past half-century, wherever a nuclear reactor was not built, a coal-fired power plant usually was constructed to supply the necessary electricity. In future decades, the fewer nuclear reactors, the more coal, natural gas, and oil will be consumed. To be sure, there are promising alternatives like wind and solar, and increases in efficiency so that fewer power plants will be needed. Yet realistically these cannot meet the intense demand for rising economic prosperity, especially in China and other developing nations. And while nuclear reactors make me nervous, the consequences of fossil-fuel burning terrify me.

The harm done to human health and the environment by all the nuclear accidents and nuclear waste releases in history is minor compared with the harm caused by the mining and burning of coal, with other fossil fuels not far behind. And there is worse: global warming, caused largely by the emission of heat-trapping gases from fossil fuels. If emissions continue to increase in a “business as usual” fashion — let alone if they increase even faster as reactors are phased out — future generations will suffer as we destabilize the climate system that has supported human civilization for thousands of years. Rising sea levels, droughts in key agricultural regions, and ever-worsening heat waves will threaten people just as the world’s population is projected to expand from 7 billion today to 10 billion by 2100. We will see the impoverishment of some of the ecosystems on which our society depends. While nuclear power offers no magical solution, it could help us avoid the worst.

But wasn’t Fukushima a health disaster? Not in the way you’d expect. Thanks to the openness of Japanese society and prompt evacuation, nobody received the kind of radiation that struck Soviet citizens after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine.

So let’s look at Chernobyl as a baseline. The most visible harm there was due to ingestion of radioactive iodine, most commonly by children drinking milk from cows that had eaten radioactive grass in the contamination zone. Ingestion of radioactive iodine has caused nearly 5,000 children and young people to contract thyroid cancer in the ensuing 25 years, although most are doing well following surgery. The World Health Organization has projected that as many as 50,000 new cases of thyroid cancer could occur among young people affected by Chernobyl in the coming decades. But the Japanese were protected from this large-scale contamination, and few if any excess thyroid abnormalities are expected.

What about other health problems? Some scientists believe that radiation at the levels to which millions of people farther from Chernobyl were — moderately above the level of normal background radiation that we all receive — brings an increase in the rate of cancer. However, the increase, if any, has been too minuscule to detect amid the enormous number of cancers that afflict people anyway. Other scientists cite a variety of reasons to argue that low levels of radiation are completely harmless. We just don’t know.

It’s the uncertainty itself that has had the greatest impact on most of the Chernobyl survivors. Feeling themselves contaminated by mysterious and uncanny forces, millions became anxious and depressed. Many hesitated to have children, fearing their babies would be deformed. Adding to this were the dislocations of forced evacuation; no wonder psychosomatic illnesses proliferated. Overall, mental health problems caused far more harm for most Chernobyl survivors than the radioactivity. Even more after the Three Mile Island accident, it was not radioactivity but anxiety that caused health problems. The same problems are now being detected among the evacuees from Fukushima.

Feelings of deep horror and dread have become the normal response to radioactivity. Of course it is natural to fear anything that might cause cancer and birth defects. But ordinary elements like arsenic also act in these ways, and many widely used chemicals are still more potent in causing all sorts of dangers, without evoking the same widespread fears. For example, a recent National Academy of Sciences study reported that the smoke emitted by coal-fired power plants causes 10,000 premature deaths among Americans every year — yet agitation against existing plants is slight. Nor has severe pollution of water supplies in some areas resulted in large-scale evacuations.

Radioactivity gets special treatment for historical reasons. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings created a picture of horrid devastation. Then opponents of nuclear weapons fastened on the radioactive fallout from bomb tests, spreading stories of an entire world contaminated, even in the absence of war. Wouldn’t we face radioactive horrors like the gigantic insects that filled popular movies in the 1950s? These mythical fears actually began well before Hiroshima: Mad scientists and their monstrous radiation creations already were featured in science-fiction movies and stories in the 1930s.

The mythology did not go away when the Cold War ended. If you play a popular computer game like Fallout you will battle shambling post-apocalyptic zombies. On top of this is a fear of terrorists with “dirty” bombs, who might use conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials around a neighborhood, triggering panic, wholesale evacuation, and costly cleanup efforts.

Because this imagery has piled on top of the genuine risks of nuclear radiation, the nuclear power industry has been far more closely scrutinized and tightly regulated than other energy source. Oil spills, with their widespread contamination, and the daily contamination from coal and gas burning, have not inspired such visceral fears. Nor has climate change, although it poses the gravest threat of all.

Why doesn’t this prospect alarm the public more than the risk from nuclear reactors? One main reason is that there has been nothing like the same deployment of horrific imagery.

Television features pictures of ice falling from glaciers, or worried Pacific Islanders and Alaskan natives. But such images — and threats — seem remote in space and time. Indeed the most common icon of global warming is the threatened polar bear — and not everyone cares deeply about this far-away predator. Other common images come from hurricanes battering shorelines and drought-parched farms. But such pictures are nowhere near as dreadful as a looming mushroom cloud. To date, nothing in popular culture has presented a true, vivid picture of what global warming will likely bring, including the ruin of coral reefs and refugees fleeing low-lying coasts or drought-parched lands.

For the time being, economics is doing as much as public fears to prevent widespread deployment of nuclear reactors. Only if the true costs of fossil fuel burning are taken into account would reactors look cheap. Nevertheless some nations, notably China, are pushing ahead with nuclear reactor programs. The Chinese are literally choking on their smoke, and rightly worry that climate change can throw them back into abject poverty. Their reactors will not be prohibitively expensive. France, which gets most of its electricity from reactors, long since showed how to sustain an economically sound nuclear industry.

But what about nuclear wastes? Certainly we need to guard them carefully. But the tremendous fear of these wastes comes only from the dread of radioactivity, nourished by myths, that puts nuclear reactions somehow on a plane separate from chemical reactions. All the harm ever done by the wastes from the nuclear power industry is tiny compared with the harm done by the wastes from coal, which are vastly more widespread and more difficult to contain. Just in terms of radioactive elements, coal burning releases more into the environment than the world’s nuclear industry.

Sometime in the next couple of decades the reality of global warming will become too obvious to ignore. At that point, people will demand a massive deployment of renewable energy sources, huge gains in efficiency… and nuclear power as well. We won’t solve our energy problem by picking and choosing solutions; we will need “all of the above.”

But it takes decades to reconstruct an energy system. We do not want to rely in the future on the Chinese for reactors, especially given their record of indifference to safety. The United States and other developed nations need to immediately support the nuclear power industry at a reasonable level. Besides maintaining technical expertise, we can experiment with new types of reactors, which are inherently safer; today we know how to build reactors that are physically incapable of suffering the kind of accidents seen at Chernobyl and Fukushima. We must not let mythical exaggerations prevent us from staving off the all too real danger of a global climate disaster.

Source: March 2012, Yale Environment 360

Nadia Halim joined the Public Policy and Partnerships group at Syngenta International AG last year, after being a freelance science writer for six years. Initially, her curiosity about living things and science in general led her to a career as an organic chemist. After several years of working in pharmaceutical research and development, Nadia decided to combine a love of writing with science. She has 10 years experience writing about science for a range of organizations and publications.

Access to safe water plays a pivotal role in sustainable development, including food security and poverty reduction. More food can be produced with less water – to meet this challenge, governments, NGOs, and public-private partnerships should facilitate implementing available technologies on the farm to enable efficient water management for food production and environmental protection.

Of the vast amount of water that covers the blue earth, 2.5 percent is fresh water, and only about a third of this resource can be economically available for human use. That is a mere teaspoon in a full bathtub when compared to the total amount of water on earth. Now think about the competing demands on this finite resource—drinking, hygiene, agriculture, energy, and industry in a world of 9 billion people by 2050. It quickly becomes clear that without better water management strategies today, the world is headed for a crisis that will affect every aspect of life.

Already, 80 countries suffer from water shortages that threaten health and economies while 40 percent of the world—more than 2 billion people—does not have access to clean water or sanitation [1]. In some countries access to public water tanks is allowed only once every 45 days, often resulting in rural conflicts over water. Though the effects of water shortage are more severe in the developing world, the United States and Europe haven’t escaped unscathed.

The public usually associates water shortages with a lack of drinking water. But global water scarcity has a critical impact on food security. Water is the biggest limiting factor in the world’s ability to feed a growing population and the link between food, energy, climate, economic growth, and human security challenges.

Roughly, a liter of water is required to produce every calorie, so an adequate daily diet requires more than 2,000 liters of water to produce enough food for one person. Of this, 40 percent on global average can come from irrigated agriculture. New factors such as increasing world population and improved affluence will further strain water resources. In addition, the uncertain effects of climate change on drought, floods, and agricultural productivity will exacerbate the situation.

If we continue to apply current water management practices, by 2050 the global agricultural sector will need to double the amount of water used to feed the world [2]. With finite freshwater resources on the one hand, and increasing demand, both in quantity and variety of uses, on the other, the need for water resources protection and management has never been greater. The question is how do we meet this challenge without increasing fresh water withdrawal to feed the world?

Increasing water efficiency on the farm

Our best option is to implement solutions that have the potential of increasing the efficiency, equity and sustainability of water use. This will require a shift from the focus on pure “land productivity” without concern for water use to “water productivity,” that is, getting the highest yield out of every drop of water used in agriculture. Resource efficient methods and technology will allow farmers to grow more food with less water while protecting biodiversity.

In many parts of the world, mismanagement is depleting freshwater resources—the blue water in rivers, lakes and groundwater stores—which in turn has threatened freshwater biodiversity and permanently changed patterns of water flow. Agriculture utilizes on average 70 percent of the world’s available fresh water. But this is higher in areas such as the Middle East and northern Africa, where up to 90 percent of freshwater withdrawals are used to irrigate crops [3].

More efficient ways to irrigate land will save tremendous amounts of water. About 40 percent of water used in irrigation is wasted through unsustainable practices such as field flooding. Modern irrigation systems can drastically reduce the amount of water used in farming by efficiently delivering water directly to plants. This reduces the amount of water lost through surface evaporation by 30 to 70 percent depending on crop and weather conditions.

Irrigation holds the most promise for increasing food productivity and security, provided it is managed efficiently. Steady irrigation combined with optimum delivery of fertilizers, seed care, crop enhancement and crop protection products can make fields more productive, even with a reliable supply of rain and is crucial to maintain productivity in times of drought.

The second part of the equation comes from the rainfall that infiltrates and remains in the soil, called green water. This is the largest fresh water resource and the basis of rain-fed agriculture. While farmers cannot control how much it rains, they can do a lot to retain rain in the soil. All rain-fed agriculture depends on the soil’s capacity to capture rain water. Heavy rain cannot penetrate parched and crusted soil and just runs off the surface.

Modest measures like conservation tillage practices that improve soil structure by avoiding plowing, mulching to prevent evaporation, and small-scale water harvesting can increase rain water infiltration by as much as 2-3 fold. However, the yields from irrigated farms are often higher than from solely rain-fed agriculture. Thus, farmers must integrate a combination of rain-fed and irrigated agricultural methods to optimize the yields of crops for the water used.

Even with optimum soil and water management, farmers will still lose crops to drought and heat if they do not have the best seeds and crop protection to carry them through inevitable dry spells.  Researchers have developed new crop varieties which are more water efficient and tolerant to heat and drought through advances in breeding and biotechnology.

In the past, breeders have slowly improved crop varieties by crossing pairs of plants that exhibit desirable qualities. Now this slow and labor-intensive method is getting a helping hand from molecular biology. Researchers are saving time by examining plant DNA for clues to predict which plant crosses are most likely to be successful in producing a given trait. Genetic modification is another tool used to improve seeds in such a way that they can produce the same or more yield with less water.

Today’s crop protection technologies can also help plants use water more efficiently. Some products have a beneficial effect on root systems, allowing plants to make the most of available water and cope better in dry periods. Plant regulator products are designed to help prevent crop loss when plants grow too tall and collapse. They also provide additional benefits by reducing water needed to grow crops. Other products are specifically designed to protect plants from moderate drought and other stresses by blocking the plant’s response to stress which increases the long-term health of plants and improves farmers’ yields.

Integrated approach to address the water challenge

There is no silver bullet—no one answer to addressing the global water challenge. But an integrated approach using the technologies outlined here and tailored to the local conditions, crops, and farmers can maximize water use efficiency.

As a result, farmers will not only produce more food but also become stewards of the land, protecting against rain run-off, soil erosion, water stress on plants, flooding, and desertification of arable land. Desertification, which occurs in arid areas from various factors, including climate variation and human activities, degrades land to the point it can no longer grow crops.

Water efficiency measures using existing agricultural technology can sustainably increase net water availability, at a reasonable cost. In comparison, trying to increase water supply often requires energy-intensive measures such as desalination, which are vastly more expensive than the efficiency measures outlined here [4].

To better manage the competing demands for water, agricultural policies will have to make water efficiency a priority. This will require investment in research to develop innovative water-efficient technologies in addition to drought tolerant seeds, new crop protection products, and optimized irrigation systems for specific crops. But the best and most innovative technology is useless if farmers cannot afford it, see no advantage to it, or do not understand it.

Therefore, a key component of policymaking will have to include infrastructure for knowledge sharing and access to technology. Governments, NGOs, and public-private partnerships should facilitate implementing technology on the farm where better water management is critical for food production and the environment. This includes access to affordable credit and financial risk-management mechanisms, such as insurance for weather-related crop losses. Already the benefits of this model can be seen in partnerships between developed country governments, international organizations, and private companies which are helping small farms with access to finance, guaranteed markets, technical assistance, and insurance.

Enabling individuals and communities to understand their options for managing water, to choose from these options, and to take responsibility for their choices could positively alter the way the world uses its limited water resources.

Source: July 2010, Global Water Program (John Hopkins University)

David Hone, graduated as a chemical engineer, combines his work as a climate change adviser for Shell, with his responsibilities as Chairman of the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA). He also works closely with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and has been a lead contributor to many of its recent energy and climate change publications.

Interest in the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) is high at the moment in the European Parliament. MEPs are being asked to support a key amendment to the proposed Energy Efficiency Directive which will see the removal (set aside) of a substantial number of allowances from the Phase III auctions. Such an action would bolster the EU carbon price. Not surprisingly, the upcoming ITRE Committee (Industry, Research and Energy) vote has polarised business groups. I have written about the need for such action in the past, but thought it would be useful to outline the case once again.

A Baseline Correction for the EU ETS

The EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) is the flagship instrument within the EU energy and climate policy framework, and is designed to deliver emission reductions at lowest cost to the economy and provide the necessary price signal for the development of low-emission energy technologies. But the EU ETS is now faced with issues of real environmental improvement and international credibility.

Compliance with the EU’s 2020 target, of a reduction of greenhouse gases to 20% below 1990 levels, is almost a given as a result of a growing surplus of allowances in the system. This hasn’t come from real changes in the EU energy mix driven by the carbon price, but from a combination of industrial downturn and compliance with an increasing number of overlapping energy and environmental policies at both EU and member state level.

The market that develops as a result of an ETS is unlike other commodity markets, in that it is an artificial construct with a fixed supply of allowances determined by the desired emissions cap. Supply cannot naturally adjust when major changes to the system take place, such as in the current economic circumstances.

The underlying purpose of an ETS is not simply to meet an arbitrary target, but to impose a certain level of ambition on the covered sectors to catalyze the transition to a low-emission economy. If those sectors undergo a macro-level change, so too should the ETS to ensure that this level of ambition is maintained. Otherwise, there is no incentive for any underlying environmental improvement, because demand reduction hits the system. A similar argument could also be made for the case of a macro change that significantly increases demand, where the economic penalty on the system would otherwise become burdensome. This is also no different to the baseline changes that companies make when measuring emissions against a voluntary target, as would be dictated by, for example, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.

Supply-side measures to enable such a baseline change are now required in the EU ETS. The current allowance surplus (now around 1.4 billion allowances) needs to be removed from the system to restore the ambition level, or scarcity, originally intended. A set-aside of allowances from the auctions in Phase III (2013–20) is the only short-term option available. There exists an opportunity through the discussions on the proposed Energy Efficiency Directive to do this, thereby restoring value to the system. The original system design rewarded action in Phase II (2008-12), on the expectation of scarcity in Phase III; this needs to be reintroduced.

With limited experience in operating trading schemes, it was difficult to foresee that predicting emissions would be so challenging. Most systems have therefore not been designed with sufficient supply-side measures to ensure the required robustness. This is a key learning point and should feed into EU policy formation as design discussions for Phase IV get underway in the coming years.

However, this would be a one-off measure. A longer term fix to the system is necessary. There is a body of literature that argues in favour of combining certain features of both price-based and quantity-based instruments, to create so-called hybrid policies. A recent example[1] concluded that trading schemes with price-like features, such as an reserve price below which allowances are not auctioned, should be considered to support carbon prices. An auction reserve price could be established for Phase IV of the EU ETS, thereby giving a long-term carbon price signal and providing companies some certainty over the return on investment in abatement technologies. Furthermore, an EU ETS auction reserve price would remove the need for EU member states to act unilaterally in this direction, such as recently done by the UK with its introduction of a carbon price floor.

Some may argue that a period of financial uncertainty is not the time to act, with some businesses struggling and unemployment rising. However, sectors exposed to international competition are given a transition period through the allocation of free allowances up to 2020 and are aware of Europe’s requirement to move towards a competitive low-carbon economy. Taking this opportunity to adapt to such an economy is vital for the future success of EU manufacturing as other regions and jurisdictions start to see the value in this new business opportunity. As recognised by the International Energy Agency, the EU ETS is the most cost-effective way for EU companies to meet climate change targets while remaining competitive, which then ensures energy costs and goods remain affordable for consumers.

Since the EU ETS is a leading symbol of the effort to tackle global climate change and reach Europe’s environmental targets, it is critical that the European institutions take decisive action now, with a baseline correction by setting aside and cancelling allowances from the Phase III auctions, and the introduction of an auction reserve price from Phase IV. These two measures would enable the EU to achieve the dual energy mix and emission goals that it has, but importantly still relying on the energy markets as the force for change.

Source: February 2012, The Energy Collective

Connie Hedegaard is a Danish politician and public intellectual who has been European Commissioner for Climate Action in the (second Barroso) European Commission since 10 February 2010. She wrote this article for Thomson Reuters.

This week the U.S. House of Representatives passed a rather unusual bill directly addressed to Europe.

Through the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act H.R. 2594, America’s legislators want to tell American airlines not to respect an EU law.

This seems to me a rather unorthodox course of action, but here in the EU we are confident that in the end the United States will respect our legislation, just as the EU respects U.S. legislation and U.S. lawmakers’ authority in U.S. airports.

After all, there is nothing new or unusual in requiring airlines to meet certain rules which, given the global nature of the industry, have international ramifications.

As Congressmen who opposed the House bill pointed out, the United States itself requires international airlines to comply with a wide range of U.S. laws when it comes to passenger, baggage and cargo security in order to do business in the U.S. Other laws also require overseas ports to put in place certain security measures before cargo can be sent to the U.S.

If the U.S. wants to handle emissions from aviation differently, that is fine; our legislation clearly envisages that if a country outside the EU takes ‘equivalent measures’ to address aviation emissions then all incoming flights from that country can be exempted from the EU system.

We are ready to engage constructively with the U.S. and all other partners about such an approach. We also recognise and encourage agreeing to global measures to reduce GHG emissions from aviation. In the event of such agreement, we could adapt our legislation.

To us, what matters, is that aviation also contributes to fighting climate change.

Why is this important?

Our law addresses a major environmental issue of our times, namely the vertiginous growth in carbon emissions from aviation which is contributing to global warming and climate change. The global body for civil aviation, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), estimates that emissions from the sector will increase by up to 88 percent between 2005 and 2020 and by up to 700 percent by 2050.

Such growth scenarios are completely at odds with the internationally agreed objective of holding global warming below 2C (3.6F) compared with the temperature in pre-industrial times. To respect that ceiling, all sectors will need to contribute.

Despite work and pressure from the EU, states in ICAO have not yet agreed on a global solution to limit aviation emissions. No one has fought harder than the EU to find a global solution- and we are still trying to reach agreement.

Faced with the urgent need to address climate change, the EU chose to go forward by bringing the aviation sector into our emissions trading system (ETS) while continuing to press for a global solution.

The EU ETS is a cap and trade system designed to keep emissions covered by the scheme within a pre-defined limit. It’s a pollution ceiling. While the EU ETS is moving towards making industrial installations buy their allowances, airlines will receive more than four in five of their allowances for free. For next year the figure will be 85 percent and for the period 2013-2020 it will be 82 percent.

Our legislation applies to all airlines taking off from or landing in the EU, whatever their nationality. We have made the fair choice of applying a measure to all airlines and therefore avoid creating unacceptable distortion of competition.

Being in the ETS means that airlines will need to have emission allowances that cover the emissions along the entire route of flights to and from the EU.

This approach is specifically provided for in ICAO’s Guidance on Emissions Trading, which considers the alternative – delimitation based on national airspace – as “impracticable.”

ICAO recognised as far back as 2004 that market-based measures have a role to play in tackling aviation emissions, that among such measures emissions trading is preferable to taxes and charges, and that emissions trading for international aviation was better implemented by including aviation in States’ own trading systems than by creating a new, single ICAO system.

In other words: our system gives airlines a clear incentive to become more efficient and pollute less.

That is in everybody’s interest.

And where airlines do need to buy additional allowances through government auctions, the auction revenues will be used to tackle climate change in the EU and third countries. To ensure transparency, the EU Member States will publish reports on how they spend the revenues.

How much will our system add to the cost of a ticket? Any increase will be modest at most. They will largely depend on whether the airlines decide to pass on the market value of the 85 percent allowances they get for free. Costs can thus range between $1.40 and $8.60 a ticket each way on a transatlantic or other long-haul flight at current carbon prices.

Let’s take the example of a one-way flight from New York to London. The estimated CO2 emissions per passenger would be around 385 kilograms. The value of the allowances that need to be surrendered would be $5.40 per passenger at current carbon prices but, given the high level of free allowances to airlines, the actual cost for the airlines would be only around $1 to $2 – which can hardly be an insurmountable issue for them.

Europe’s legislation is a key contribution to global climate action. We encourage others to join in our efforts.

Source: Oktober 2011, Thomson Reuters

This article was written for Yale Environment 360 by Paul J. Crutzen and Christian Schwägerl. Paul J. Crutzen is an atmospheric chemist who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research on ozone-depleting chemicals. From 1980 to 2000, he led research at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, and he continues to publish on the interaction between humans and the environment. Christian Schwägerl is an environmental journalist who has reported on science and public policy for two decades and is author of the book The Age of Men.

It’s a pity we’re still officially living in an age called the Holocene. The Anthropocene — human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth — is already an undeniable reality. Evidence is mounting that the name change suggested by one of us more than ten years ago is overdue. It may still take some time for the scientific body in charge of naming big stretches of time in Earth’s history, the International Commission on Stratigraphy, to make up its mind about this name change. But that shouldn’t stop us from seeing and learning what it means to live in this new Anthropocene epoch, on a planet that is being anthroposized at high speed.

For millennia, humans have behaved as rebels against a superpower we call “Nature.” In the 20th century, however, new technologies, fossil fuels, and a fast-growing population resulted in a “Great Acceleration” of our own powers. Albeit clumsily, we are taking control of Nature’s realm, from climate to DNA. We humans are becoming the dominant force for change on Earth. A long-held religious and philosophical idea — humans as the masters of planet Earth — has turned into a stark reality. What we do now already affects the planet of the year 3000 or even 50,000.

Changing the climate for millennia to come is just one aspect. By cutting down rainforests, moving mountains to access coal deposits and acidifying coral reefs, we fundamentally change the biology and the geology of the planet. While driving uncountable numbers of species to extinction, we create new life forms through gene technology, and, soon, through synthetic biology.

Human population will approach ten billion within the century. We spread our man-made ecosystems, including “mega-regions” with more than 100 million inhabitants, as landscapes characterized by heavy human use — degraded agricultural lands, industrial wastelands, and recreational landscapes — become characteristic of Earth’s terrestrial surface. We infuse huge quantities of synthetic chemicals and persistent waste into Earth’s metabolism. Where wilderness remains, it’s often only because exploitation is still unprofitable. Conservation management turns wild animals into a new form of pets.

Geographers Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty argue we are no longer disturbing natural ecosystems. Instead, we now live in “human systems with natural ecosystems embedded within them.” The long-held barriers between nature and culture are breaking down. It’s no longer us against “Nature.” Instead, it’s we who decide what nature is and what it will be.

To master this huge shift, we must change the way we perceive ourselves and our role in the world. Students in school are still taught that we are living in the Holocene, an era that began roughly 12,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age. But teaching students that we are living in the Anthropocene, the Age of Men, could be of great help. Rather than representing yet another sign of human hubris, this name change would stress the enormity of humanity’s responsibility as stewards of the Earth. It would highlight the immense power of our intellect and our creativity, and the opportunities they offer for shaping the future.

If one looks at how technology and cultures have changed since 1911, it seems that almost anything is possible by the year 2111. We are confident that the young generation of today holds the key to transforming our energy and production systems from wasteful to renewable and to valuing life in its diverse forms. The awareness of living in the Age of Men could inject some desperately needed eco-optimism into our societies.

What then does it mean to live up to the challenges of the Anthropocene? We’d like to suggest three avenues for consideration:

First, we must learn to grow in different ways than with our current hyper-consumption. What we now call economic “growth” amounts too often to a Great Recession for the web of life we depend on. Gandhi pointed out that “the Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.” To accommodate the current Western lifestyle for 9 billion people, we’d need several more planets. With countries worldwide striving to attain the “American Way of Life,” citizens of the West should redefine it — and pioneer a modest, renewable, mindful, and less material lifestyle. That includes, first and foremost, cutting the consumption of industrially produced meat and changing from private vehicles to public transport.

Second, we must far surpass our current investments in science and technology. Our troubles will deepen exponentially if we fail to replace the wasteful fossil-fueled infrastructure of today with a system fueled by solar energy in its many forms, from artificial photosynthesis to fusion energy. We need bio-adaptive technologies to render “waste” a thing of the past, among them compostable cars and gadgets. We need innovations tailored to the needs of the poorest, for example new plant varieties that can withstand climate change and robust iPads packed with practical agricultural advice and market information for small-scale farmers. Global agriculture must become high-tech and organic at the same time, allowing farms to benefit from the health of natural habitats. We also need to develop technologies to recycle substances like phosphorus, a key element for fertilizers and therefore for food security.

To prevent conflicts over resources and to progress towards a durable “bio-economy” will require a collaborative mission that dwarfs the Apollo program. Global military expenditure reached 1,531 billion U.S. dollars in 2009, an increase of 49 percent compared to 2000. We must invest at least as much in understanding, managing, and restoring our “green security system” — the intricate network of climate, soil, and biodiversity. To reduce CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to safe levels, we need to move towards “negative emissions,” e.g. by using plant residues in power plants with carbon capture and storage technology. We also need to develop geoengineering capabilities in order to be prepared for worst-case scenarios. In addition to cutting industrial CO2 emissions and protecting forests, large investments will be needed to maintain the huge carbon stocks in fertile soils, currently depleted by exploitative agricultural practices. For biodiversity, green remnants in a sea of destruction will not be enough — we need to build a “green infrastructure,” where organisms and genes can flow freely over vast areas and maintain biological functions.

Finally, we should adapt our culture to sustaining what can be called the “world organism.” This phrase was not coined by an esoteric Gaia guru, but by eminent German scientist Alexander von Humboldt some 200 years ago. Humboldt wanted us to see how deeply interlinked our lives are with the richness of nature, hoping that we would grow our capacities as a part of this world organism, not at its cost. His message suggests we should shift our mission from crusade to management, so we can steer nature’s course symbiotically instead of enslaving the formerly natural world.

Until now, our behaviors have defied the goals of a functioning and fruitful Anthropocene. But at the end of 2010, two United Nations environmental summits offered some hope for progress. In October, in Nagoya, Japan, 193 governments agreed on a strategic plan for global conservation that includes protecting an unprecedented proportion of Earth’s ecosystems and removing ecologically harmful subsidies by 2020. And in December, in Cancún, countries agreed that Earth must not warm more than 2 degrees Celsius above the average temperature level before industrialization. This level is already very risky — it implies higher temperature increases in polar regions and therefore greater chance of thawing in permafrost regions, which could release huge amounts of CO2 and methane. But at least, Cancún and Nagoya turned out not to be cul-de-sacs for environmental policy. After years of stalemate and the infamous Copenhagen collapse, there is now at least a glimmer of hope that humanity can act together. Between now and 2020, however, the commitments on paper must be turned into real action.

Imagine our descendants in the year 2200 or 2500. They might liken us to aliens who have treated the Earth as if it were a mere stopover for refueling, or even worse, characterize us as barbarians who would ransack their own home. Living up to the Anthropocene means building a culture that grows with Earth’s biological wealth instead of depleting it. Remember, in this new era, nature is us.

Source: January 2011, Yale Environment 360

This article was written for the New York Times by Asit K. Biswas and Leong Ching. Asit K. Biswas is founder and president of the Third World Centre for Water Management in Atizapán, Mexico. Leong Ching is a researcher at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.

If we are failing to feed the world’s 7 billion people, how will we feed 9 billion in 2050? Last year, more than 925 million people — or nearly 1 in 7 people in the world — were undernourished.

The fact is that the world could feed itself, both now and in 2050. The problem is not that the world grows too little food; there is plenty of food overall. The problem is that while there is too much food in some places and not enough in others, everywhere food is wasted. Each year, 1.3 billion tons of food is lost worldwide.

The Londoner who walks home with three bags of groceries will never eat the contents of one of them: One-third of all the food bought in Britain is thrown away every year. Americans discarded a staggering 33 million tons of food in 2009, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — making food the single largest component of solid waste in U.S. municipal landfills and incinerators. It costs the United States nearly one billion dollars a year to dispose of food waste.

The countries of South and Southeast Asia produce less food per capita than industrialized countries in the West, but they waste roughly the same proportion, 30 to 35 percent. Although tiny Singapore needs to import more than 90 percent of its food supply, in 2008 it nonetheless threw out some 570 million kilos, or one-fifth of the total — mostly edible scraps.

In industrialized countries, much of the loss occurs at the consumer level, after the food has reached supermarkets and stores. This is partly because food expenses as a percentage of a family’s income have come down significantly in the West, especially relative to transportation and housing costs, which have gone up. People don’t throw away designer clothes or iPhones; these have what economists call “scarcity” value. Food does not.

The issue is different in the developing world. Some 35 to 45 percent of the food produced is also lost there every year, but typically well before the supplies even reach buyers. Most waste occurs during and just after harvesting and at the distribution stage.

India, the world’s second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables, loses about 40 percent of that production because of mismanagement, inadequate infrastructure and storage, poor transportation, shoddy supply-chain logistics, and underdeveloped markets. It also loses more than one-third of its cereals.

Such local problems are compounded by international economic trends. Farmers in the United States and the European Union, for example, have an incentive to grow corn, sugarcane, oil seeds or coarse grains for ethanol and other biofuels. In the United States, where government subsidies encourage such activities, ethanol production consumes nearly 40 percent of the corn crop.

If these trends continue, the price of vegetable oils could increase annually between 2013 and 2017 by 35 percent, that of coarse grains by 13 percent, and that of oilseeds by 7 percent. This would further aggravate poverty and hunger throughout the world. According to the World Bank, during the second half of 2010 “an additional 44 million people fell below the $1.25 poverty line as a result of higher food prices.”

In industrialized countries, reducing food waste will require raising public awareness and changing consumer attitudes. Consider carrots. On farms, photographic sensors scan all harvested carrots and reject those that are crooked, dull, blemished, too thin or too fat. As a result, 25 to 30 percent of carrots end up as animal feed even though they pose no health risk to humans. Many other fruits and vegetables are also set aside because supermarket managers believe consumers will not buy them for aesthetic reasons.

In developing countries, the effort to cut back on waste must focus on building better infrastructure facilities, including for storage, and significantly improving supply-chain and marketing systems.

In India, some 35 million people (7.3 percent of the workforce) earn their living in the unorganized retail sector. But wholesale retailing has been gaining momentum with the entry of Bharti, Wal-Mart, Reliance Industries and Carrefour into the market. This is contributing to the rise of trade over medium and long distances and the establishment of special production areas, procurement systems and modern food retailing.

Several NGOs are working with small farmers so that they can meet the quality requirements of these new supply chains. Modernization could also help reduce food losses by helping India process more of its fruits and vegetables: Currently it processes only about 2 percent of production, compared with 30 percent in Thailand and 80 percent in Malaysia.

The problem of hunger cannot be solved if we continue to seek solutions focused almost exclusively on boosting agricultural production and yields. When one-third of the food produced in the world is never even consumed, limiting waste must be our first priority.

Source: October 2011, The New York Times

Derek Taylor is a geologist with a PhD in geochemistry, 5 years working in exploration, 7 years at the OECD and 25 years with the European Commission. He wrote this article – in which he sums up the most important results of a public opinion survey (the Eurobarometer) about the awareness and acceptance of carbon capture and storage – for the Global CCS Institute.

Awareness and acceptance of CCS

Last month the European Commission (EU) released the results of a public opinion survey, called the Eurobarometer, about awareness and acceptance of carbon capture and storage in 12 (out of 27) of its Member States. Over 13,000 people were interviewed during the survey (February – March 2011) with the countries covered being:

• Germany;
• United Kingdom;
• Italy;
• Spain;
• Netherlands;
• Poland;
• Finland;
• France;
• Greece;
• Czech Republic;
• Bulgaria; and
• Romania.

In six of these countries the EU has already made a very significant contribution to financing large-scale CCS demonstration projects (around one billion euros already committed) while the remaining six countries are either heavily dependent on coal or have expressed an interest in launching their own CCS demonstration projects. So these are all countries in which public awareness of CCS could be expected to be above the average.

Awareness of the technology is still very low

The very large majority of people had never heard anything about the large CCS demonstration projects in their countries.

While public awareness could be expected to be above average, awareness of the technology is still very low with only one person in ten knowing what it is. A further 18 per cent had heard of CCS, but did not know what it was, while 67 per cent had never heard of it. There are very important regional differences between the countries. In the Netherlands over half the people knew what CCS was. No other country was anywhere near as well informed with Germany (13 per cent), Finland (12 per cent) and the UK (11 per cent) being the only ones with ‘above EU average’ knowledge of CCS. In Poland, Italy and Spain, all countries with plans for large CCS demonstration projects, the public has a well below the EU average knowledge of CCS. The very large majority of people had never heard anything about the large CCS demonstration projects in their countries.

Interestingly, while there was a low level of knowledge about CCS, once it had been described to them, there was a fairly even spread of whether or not people thought it would be effective against climate change with:

• nearly 40 per cent of the people interviewed saying it would be;
• 25 per cent did not think it would be; and
• 36 per cent remained undecided.

If a short and simple explanation of the technology can convince at least 30 per cent of the population about the effectiveness of CCS … then it is possible that public acceptance of the technology could be influenced by properly targeted information.

This is reason for some optimism for the CCS community. If a short and simple explanation of the technology can convince at least 30 per cent of the population that CCS can be an effective weapon against climate change then it is possible that public acceptance of the technology could be influenced by properly targeted information.

One disappointing result was that only 23 per cent of the people in Germany believed CCS could be effective while 34 per cent believed it would not be (43 per cent remained undecided). This is in the context that 80 per cent of Europeans know that carbon dioxide plays a major role in climate change.

Most Europeans did not expect local benefits from CCS projects

Most Europeans did not expect local benefits from CCS projects with only 23 per cent expecting benefits (improved air quality and employment) while 38 per cent see disincentives to such projects (lack of positive impact on the environment and risks of water and air pollution). Again, however, there was a high percentage of ‘don’t knows’ at 39 per cent. The majority of safety concerns related to storage (61 per cent) though 39 per cent were also concerned about the transport aspects of CCS.

Mixed opinions on potential site storage

The question about where to locate storage facilities gave rather intriguing results with:

• 21 per cent indicating offshore;
• 20 per cent indicating onshore near the capture plant;
• 23 per cent indicating onshore but away from centres of population;
• 19 per cent did not know where it should go;
• 15 per cent did not want any storage at all; and
• 5 per cent did not mind where it was stored.

Results seem to indicate greater support for onshore rather than offshore storage.

Surprisingly, this would tend to indicate greater support for onshore rather than offshore storage however there was considerable regional variation.

The people in the Netherlands and the UK preferred offshore storage, which would explain, or possibly be explained, by the fact that both governments have made it clear that CCS demonstration plants would only be licenced with offshore storage sites (at least for the time being). On the other hand the people in both Poland and Spain have a strong preference for onshore storage although ‘don’t knows’ is still the reaction of many of the population in all of these countries.

Asked if they knew about sources of their electricity, most people were aware of the role that coal played in generation in their country though many overestimated the role renewable energies played. Asked about alternative energies the best known was photovoltaics followed, rather surprisingly, by nuclear fusion (a technology many people believe is still decades away from commercialisation) with clean coal coming very low on the list (especially in Germany).

Most people believe that CCS should be compulsory on all new coal-fired power plants.

This may partly explain why that in only four out of the 12 countries (Bulgaria, Poland, Romania and the UK) there was a majority in favour of the use of coal in energy production. Not surprisingly there was a strong majority in favour of photovoltaics (94 per cent) and wind energy (89 per cent) with only nuclear having lower support than coal.

In Germany and in Greece, both countries which rely heavily on coal for their electricity production, there was a strong majority again for coal. In spite of these numbers there are more than twice as many people in the EU who believe that fossil fuels will still be used for electricity production after 2050 as think it will not be (49 per cent vs. 23 per cent) – with the most positive views being in Finland, the Netherlands and Germany! Even more people believe that CCS should be compulsory on all new coal-fired power plants (60 per cent for vs. 11 per cent against).

The full report on the survey – which includes many other interesting insights into the public’s views on climate change, carbon dioxide and energy, can be found here.

Source: June 2011, Global CCS Institute

This article is written by Christopher Short. He is Chief Economist at the Global CCS Institute and is responsible for advice on economic and policy issues relating to accelerating the development of CCS as a mitigation response to climate change.

In a summary report for renewable technologies (from may 2011), the IPCC reiterated that the demand for energy and associated services to meet social and economic development and improve human welfare and health is increasing and that overwhelmingly, this energy demand is met by fossil fuels. In 2008, more than 85 per cent of global primary energy supply came from fossil fuels, with coal and gas accounting for over 50 per cent.

Stabilising CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere at any given level, already at 393 parts per million and rising at an average 2.3ppm per year, requires annual emission be reduced more than 80 per cent below current levels eventually.

For the energy sector, this is likely to mean the complete decarbonisation of the energy system. Yet much of the policy discussion is focused on implementing carbon taxes or cap and trade schemes, with an often-unstated expectation that the technologies exist to achieve decarbonisation, or will emerge more or less spontaneously. Often, the debate is presented as if the only question is how high, and how fast does the carbon price need to climb in order to substitute existing fossil fuel technologies with clean energy technologies, whilst also maintaining economic growth.

This completely ignores the fact that the clean energy technologies available tomorrow depend on what is done today. Worse, it can lead to calls for delaying action on climate change in the hope that new technologies will somehow become available, or their costs will be lower in the future.

Like other economic activities, the challenge of creating, developing and demonstrating technologies is motivated, at least in part, by the expectation of future financial rewards. These expected rewards are determined both by the future prices as well as the size of the market. The larger the expected price, or the larger the existing market, the more resources and effort applied by the private sector to technology development.

Unfortunately, a key insight from the economics of innovation is that the existing market size always dominates the price incentive. And the existing market size for clean energy technologies, including CCS, is small relative to that of the existing fossil fuel technologies. Correspondingly, the R&D effort in clean energy technologies is relatively small. In a recent study, it was estimated that the share of patents for renewable energy technologies accounted for less than 0.5 per cent of all technology patents in the OECD countries (far smaller than the share for information technologies, biotech or nano-technologies, and smaller than nuclear and car pollution control). CCS research efforts, which has even fewer patents issued in the last decade, was too small to be recognised.

Governments have a role to shift both production and consumption activities towards low carbon technologies, but to also shift the allocation of research, development and demonstration between existing and clean energy technologies.

For CCS, the policy frameworks being developed by governments cover a range of activities including:

• accelerating the innovation and development of CCS technologies through:
  • funding a demonstration program that seeks to understand and improve the operation of large-scale applications of CCS as well as demonstrate the safe and long-term effectiveness of CO₂ storage; and
  • increasing specific research and development activities around new capture technologies to improve performance and reduce costs;
• identifying viable geological storage areas;
• developing legal and regulatory frameworks to protect human and environmental health and safety;
• undertaking public awareness and consultation activities; and
• effectively and rapidly sharing lessons learnt.

With regard to funding for demonstration projects and for research, governments have made commitments valued at up to US$40 billion in order to support CCS. Of this US$11.7 billion has been allocated to specific large-scale demonstration projects and a further US$2.4 billion has been allocated to expand research and development activities.

Twenty-two projects account for 87 per cent of funding allocated to all large-scale projects to date.

Governments have a key role to play but private initiative is also required. Governments must initially redirect market forces towards CCS and other low carbon technologies before market forces can take over.

Establishing a price on carbon is necessary to support innovation activities, and the price must be high enough, or expected to increase sufficiently, in order to support on-going demonstration and innovation activities for CCS projects. But this must be done in conjunction with significant support for research, development and demonstration by the private sector.

The question is: is the current balance between the two drivers to decarbonise energy correct?

Source: May 2011, Global CCS Institute

This article, written by Michael Bachelard and Deborah Gough was a contribution to ‘The Climate Agenda’ – a partnership between The Sunday Age and website Oursay.org – which let readers vote for the 10 questions they wanted the paper to answer.

THE QUESTION: Solar powered 24-hour baseload power is available now. So why do you allow pollies and shock jocks to get away with saying coal or uranium are still needed for baseload? Has The Sunday Age reported on the fact that the US Department of Energy has identified fuel ethanol from Australian eucalypts as essential for its strategic future? Do your readers know Virgin Blue will get its aviation fuel from gum trees? My point is that people are entitled to details on renewables that are viable now. GEOFF PAIN

IN THEORY, 100 per cent of Australia’s electricity needs could be provided by renewable energy using available technology. But it would be very costly.

A team at the University of NSW (UNSW) has run a computer simulation based on Australia’s hour-by-hour energy consumption in 2010, and the model demonstrated that a combination of solar, wind, gas derived from plant material and hydro-electricity could bear the load.

”There are challenges,” says Associate Professor Mark Diesendorf, who is part of the team. ”But they are solvable. They are not roadblocks, they’re potholes. Some of them are a bit large, but they’re potholes.”

This remains a contentious view. In the Treasury modelling of the federal government’s carbon price scheme, for example, renewables would make up only 40 per cent of our energy supply by 2050. Fossil fuels – coal, gas and oil – would still do the heavy lifting, with power stations equipped to capture the carbon dioxide they produce and store it deep underground.

There is wide agreement that Australia needs more renewable energy sources, but there the consensus ends. Electricity produces 51 per cent of all our carbon emissions now, and to cut this down, the network needs major change. The challenges? Cost and reliability. Governments do not want blackouts and they do not want power bills (or taxes) to rise exponentially to pay for expensive new infrastructure.

At the moment we burn coal in huge power stations to provide the bulk of our power.

Coal power is classic ”base-load” energy – it works 24 hours a day. But this, according to Diesendorf, is both an advantage and a disadvantage. The amount these power stations produce is inflexible because they take a long time to fire up or shut down, which actually encourages profligate use of energy.

The alternative, under almost any non-nuclear, non-sceptics model of the energy future, would be that those coal-fired workhorses are phased out and replaced by a diverse array of smaller generators. The UNSW model is one attempt to show how that might be done, but it illustrates the magnitude of the task. In this model, 40 per cent of the electricity would be supplied by ”solar thermal” power stations. These involve vast arrays of mirrors, which move to catch the sun and focus its energy on a central point. In the case of Spain’s new Torresol Gemasolar plant near Seville, this central point is a tower surrounded by about 2600 mirrors.

The tower captures the heat, where it boils water and generates steam that turns turbines to produce electricity. At Gemasolar, the heat melts a special blend of salts, which act like a vast battery, storing the energy for up to 15 hours and overcoming solar’s main drawback – that it cannot produce power when the sun does not shine. In the UNSW plan, Australia would need to build 130 similar solar thermal power plants.

Rooftop solar panels (known as a photovoltaic system) would provide 10 per cent of our power needs, with panels erected on industrial as well as residential buildings increasing the number of solar panels in Australia thirtyfold.

One-quarter of the power would be provided by wind generators, with 7000 further turbines needed, an elevenfold increase in the number of windmills nationally. The remainder of the power would come from existing hydro-electric plants and biomass – from, for example, burning wood, capturing methane from garbage dumps and extracting gas from grasses and trees. In the model, the biggest challenge came on winter evenings when overcast days stopped the solar generators from working. For these times, large gas turbines – ”like jet engines” – could fire up, burning gas derived from wood or other biological material.

This, says Diesendorf, would ensure the supply was secure. However, the plan would require a large number of new wires and poles, including a new high-grade power line through Broken Hill in NSW, to join South Australia to the main grid in the east.

How much would this cost? ”We haven’t done the economics yet,” Diesendorf says. It would be expensive but, as the world starts mass-producing the hardware for renewable energy, the cost is predicted to come down.

This is not the first attempt to work out how Australia’s energy needs might be met with renewables. A group called Beyond Zero Emissions did it last year using what Diesendorf describes as ”some heroic assumptions”, such as a massive transmission line across the Nullarbor. Beyond Zero Emissions costed its plan at $370 billion by 2020, or $8 per week on the average power bill.

But that is disputed. Martin Nicholson, who wrote the book Energy in a Changing Climate, claims it is more like $1.7 trillion. To pay for this, he argues, the weekly hit to your electricity bill would need to be more like $50.

When the Australian Treasury modelled the country’s energy supply mix in 2050, it assumed $100 billion would be spent on a much more modest move towards renewables but that, for cost reasons, in one of the sunniest countries on earth, solar in all its forms would contribute just 5 per cent. In its modelling, solar thermal power, the backbone of the UNSW scheme, costs four times as much as wind power to build – which is why in its model wind has a larger role, with 13 per cent.

Energy expert and consultant Keith Orchison says Treasury had ”examined it all in detail” and come to the conclusion that ”massive use of solar power is just not going to happen”.

Treasury’s preferred form of renewable energy is geothermal technology, which it said could provide about 18 per cent of power in 2050. This involves pumping water down deep drill holes, where it boils on the hot rocks, and the steam is used to drive turbines.

This illustrates one of the key problems with the move to large-scale renewable energy: the moment you begin investigating it you end up with what people in the industry describe as the ”beauty parade”, where the cost, reliability and availability of dozens of different options are relatively untested, and are therefore argued vigorously.

All, however, are more expensive than coal – though a carbon price significantly reduces the gap – and will require subsidies to fund. Subsidies generally come from the government through the tax system, which is only fair, says Diesendorf, because the existing power stations and transmission networks were built with subsidies of their own.

Under the government’s carbon policy plan, there are three ways in which renewable energy will be subsidised. The Renewable Energy Target requires power suppliers to take 20 per cent of their power from renewable sources by 2020; a $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation is intended to provide funding for developing technology; and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency will administer grants for experimental generation methods.

In Spain and Germany, where the take-up of solar energy is high, the governments use ”feed-in tariffs”, which subsidise producers of renewable energy by paying them top dollar for any power they feed into the electricity network. It’s an option the Australian government has chosen not to pursue, partly because, according to the Productivity Commission, it’s a high-cost way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Some forms of renewable energy are already working. Dr Stephen Schuck of Bioenergy Australia said this country was ”a world leader in biogas, and many of our large landfills and sewage treatment works catch it and burn it to feed electricity into the grid”.

Another biofuel, pointed out by questioner Geoff Pain, is being developed for the Australian airline industry.

By 2020, Virgin Blue wants 5 per cent of its fuel to be sourced from biofuel and the airline is backing eucalyptus mallee from Western Australia to provide it.

Virgin Australia’s manager of sustainability, David White, said there were farmers in Western Australia who had been growing trees for 15 years to combat soil salinity and erosion problems.

Farmers would harvest the trees by cutting them to ground level, then waiting for them to regrow. The wood is chipped to fine particles, which are heated without oxygen, breaking the particles down into solids, liquids and gas. The liquid is used as fuel and should be in Virgin’s tanks by 2014. The solid and gaseous components have other industrial applications. Biofuels, under the Kyoto protocol, are carbon neutral; even though they emit carbon when burnt, the trees suck an equivalent amount out of the atmosphere as they regrow.

White said it would take 2 million hectares of eucalyptus trees to fuel Australia’s domestic air travel, and so far there are just 12,000 hectares growing.

The world is moving in the direction of renewable energy, but whatever happens, according to Diesendorf, ”Electricity is going to have to be dearer. And there’s no point people whinging about it.”

Source: Oktober 2011, The Age

For more information on ‘The Climate Agenda’ click here

Bachelard is a senior reporter, specialized in political reporting, currently for the Australian newspaper ‘The Age’. This article was a contribution to ‘The Climate Agenda’ – a partnership between The Sunday Age and website Oursay.org – which let readers vote for the 10 questions they wanted the paper to answer.

THE QUESTION: When are we going to hear more about the great elephant in the room – animal agriculture? The CSIRO and the University of Sydney have jointly reported that it is responsible for more that 30 per cent of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Meaningful action in [reducing emissions] cannot be achieved without a general move towards a plant-based diet.

PAUL MAHONY
AUSTRALIANS chew through more red meat a head than Americans, and we export more again. So attached are we to red meat and dairy products that the sheep and cattle population of this country outnumbers the human population by five to one, and 56 per cent of Australia’s land mass is devoted to grazing.

As grass makes its way through the four-stomach digestive process of these ruminants, it ferments, and the animals burp, fart, urinate and defecate with such gusto that they pump out, on official figures, between 11 per cent and 15 per cent of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions, about the same as every car, truck and bus in Australia.

To solve this problem, our questioner, vegan Paul Mahony, says there is only one option: a general move towards a plant-based diet.

Nutritionally, we could do it. All the nutrients found in meat can be found in vegetarian alternatives. And while eating lean red meat is an easy way to take in vital protein, vitamins and minerals, Australians eat 45 kilograms of red meat a person every year, much more than necessary.

So is it possible, or desirable, to create a nation of vegans? The British government is trying to reduce meat consumption, mainly for health reasons. But Australians are kings of the barbecue, weaned on the myths of the drover. Should we limit, even eliminate, our red meat consumption to help climate change?

The Meat and Livestock Association says no. ”Why wouldn’t anyone living in this great country desire a balanced diet that includes red meat?” says marketing general manager Glen Feist. ”That anyone could presume to tell someone else what to eat in a country where food is so bountiful and healthy is outrageous.”

But by simply existing, sheep, cattle, goats and buffalo pump out large volumes of methane and nitrous oxide. Methane is produced during digestion – what the scientists call ”enteric fermentation” – and is 21 times stronger as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It stays for less time in the atmosphere (about 12 years compared with carbon dioxide, a proportion of which can last thousands of years) but while methane is there, it traps more heat.

Nitrous oxide is produced when animal manure and urine decomposes. It is produced in far lower quantities than methane, but stays in the atmosphere for 114 years and is 310 times better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

But the picture becomes even more dire if you include, as Mahony does, the clearing of forests to create land for ruminants. Deforestation unlocks carbon dioxide from trees as they decompose, and releases it into the atmosphere. If you add that into the equation, according to Department of Climate Change figures, almost 20 per cent of Australia’s emissions can be attributed to agriculture, most of which is to raise meat.

(The 30 per cent referred to by Mahony comes from a CSIRO report that used information from the 1990s. But in the past two decades deforestation for agriculture has been outlawed, halving emissions. The clearing that takes place in Australia now is, by and large, cutting back the regrowth from land already cleared.)

Throughout the rest of the world, deforestation is a very big problem. An area the size of Greece was cleared of trees each year between 2000 and 2010 – seven soccer fields every minute – with South America and Africa the worst offenders. Much of that land is cleared for grazing. The senior scientist at the World Preservation Foundation, Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop, says livestock now outnumber wildlife by eight to one, eat six times the amount the dinosaurs did, and five times what humans consume. To deforestation, methane and nitrous oxide, he adds another powerful warming agent, ”black carbon”, the soot released when forests and savannahs are burned to make way for grazing animals. Black carbon, he says, blows onto the ice sheets in Antarctica and causes rapid melting. All these are ”extremely potent, shorter-lived climate forcers”, according to Wedderburn-Bisshop.

But the world, instead, is increasing its herds of sheep and cattle, and the demand for red meat from the developing world is rising.

But people in these countries are not likely to aspire to the same red meat habit as in the Western world because they prefer the white meats, pork and chicken, which produce barely measurable methane emissions.

Even in the West, the red meat habit is waning. In Australia, the consumption of beef peaked in 1977, when we ate 70 kilograms a person each year. Last year, according to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, we ate just half that, 34.1 kilograms. Lamb and mutton consumption is at just one-quarter of its peak, down from 43.6 kilograms a person in 1971 to 11.5 kilograms last year. At the same time the consumption of chicken in the West has grown quickly.

Ruminants’ environmental footprint goes well beyond their greenhouse gas emissions. They are inefficient converters of food to energy, consuming, on some estimates, up to 54 kilograms of feed to produce just one kilogram of beef. And when they graze in arid zones, cattle degrade the quality of soil and increase the size of deserts, a process called ”desertification”.

”It is pretty obvious that if you want to feed a growing world population, 9.5 billion people by 2050, the most energy-efficient way is to grow crops,” says Associate Professor Richard Eckard, of the Primary Industry Climate Challenges Centre, at Melbourne University.

”The second-most efficient way is to feed crops to monogastric [single-stomach] livestock, pigs and chickens, and the least efficient is to feed crops to a ruminant, then to feed humans,” he says.

Bruce Poon, the research manager for a lobby group, Vegetarian Victoria, believes that to achieve our greenhouse gas reduction targets we must not only reduce the number of grazing animals but also regrow forests on a large scale.

More than 90 per cent of the forests cut down in Australia historically were to make way for animal agriculture. As trees regrow, they suck carbon back out of the atmosphere and lock it into the tree in a process called sequestration.

Our politicians recognise the problem, but do not agree with the vegetarian lobby’s prescription. (Read their full responses on our website theage.com.au). Quite apart from the economic value of animal agriculture – $18 billion a year, including $15 billion in exports – governments are unpopular enough without invading the plates and palates of their constituents and trying to ban the barbecue.

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet denied that the government was ignoring the ”elephant in the room”, but pointed to the $429 million it was putting towards research to reduce methane and other emissions, and incentives for farmers themselves to reduce their stock emissions with better animal husbandry.

Opposition spokesman Greg Hunt said it was likely that agriculture would ”attract a significant proportion of emissions reduction” money under the Coalition’s direct action policy.

“The answer is incentives for cleaner production, not killing off the national cattle herd,” he said.
And Greens deputy leader Christine Milne said her party wanted to see agriculture included in carbon accounting once farm emissions could be accurately counted.

Poon believes agriculture should be included in the federal government’s carbon trading scheme (currently excluded) and farmers charged for all the environmental damage done by grazing animals..
”If you had all that: pollution, water, carbon taxes, no one would eat meat because it would be too frigging expensive,” he said.

The dividend would be a much easier road to a carbon-free economy. Mahony cites a study by the Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency, which showed a transfer to a completely vegan diet would reduce climate change mitigation costs by about 80 per cent.

Poon acknowledges that his policy prescription to reduce meat consumption is ”extremely threatening, even for people who want to believe it politically, because it sounds like – to the best politician in the world – that I’m trying to tell people what to eat. It won’t happen.”

But Mahony draws an analogy with an emergency of another century.

”Look back to World War II, when there was food rationing in Britain because there was a tangible threat. They were in desperate straits. We could do that again.

”The problem is that people don’t equate climate change to anywhere near that kind of threat, where I say it is. And if we did have to change our diet, that’s a small price to pay.”

Source: September 2011, The Age

For more information on ‘The Climate Agenda’ click here