Gary Kendall – Are we starting to ‘get’ the oil question?

An opinion piece by Dr Gary Kendall, CPSL SA Deputy Director and author of ‘Plugged In: The End of the Oil Age’

As unrest in North Africa and the Middle East enters a fifth month since the first sparks of the Tunisian Revolution last December, oil prices are starting to dominate the political discourse. In the UK, Energy Secretary Chris Huhne warned of a 1970s-style oil shock that could cost the UK economy £45billion over two years. Closer to home, last week’s Financial Mail cover story on oil – the three letters that threaten economic growth – argued that a sustained high oil price threatens to completely stall the global recovery.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. A little less than three years ago, within the space of a few weeks, oil prices hit a record $147/bbl, Lehman Brothers collapsed into the largest bankruptcy in history, and the global economy fell into a ravine from which it has scarcely emerged. A recent article by Jacob Weisberg in Slate magazine discussed the cause of the economic crisis by examining “the 15 best explanations for the Great Recession”. Surprisingly, the price of oil did not feature in that long list of persuasive explanations. It’s surprising because in the prevailing economic system oil is the economy.

Until quite recently, many economists and the mainstream financial media didn’t seem to ‘get’ the profound significance of oil. True, it was widely acknowledged that economic slowdowns – particularly in the United States, the largest oil consumer on earth – tended to be preceded by spikes in the oil price. But the clear correlation between high oil prices and recessions did not, in itself, prove any causal relationship. As far as 2008 was concerned, surely Wall Street’s wizardry and former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan’s laissez-faire approach to regulation were the real culprits. Surely the rising oil price was just another ‘derivative’ of the bewildering world of credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations. Better still, by pinning it on these suspects we could even appear to be clever by pretending to comprehend the unintended consequences of ‘innovative financial products’.

Though we live in an increasingly fast-moving, interconnected and complex world, it remains a truism that the simplest explanations are often the best ones. First, consider that the economy is ultimately about the movement of people and stuff. Expressed as GDP – the market value of goods and services produced – it is difficult to envisage economic activity taking place to any great extent without people and things moving around. Whether it’s raw materials being hauled from the point of extraction to a processing plant, or from there being distributed onwards to retailers, whether it’s customers accessing goods, or employees getting to and from their places of work, very little of our globalised economic system functions without motorised transport.

Second – and here’s the rub – worldwide, 95% of the primary energy that moves people and stuff from place to place – in cars, vans, trucks, buses, trains, boats, and aeroplanes – comes from a single source. Transport is uniquely dependent on oil, meaning the economy is uniquely dependent on oil, or rather on the liquid transport fuels – such as diesel, petrol (or gasoline), kerosene – that we obtain from oil refineries. So when the oil price goes up, the price of transport fuels increases and virtually everything that counts towards economic activity is impacted, either directly or indirectly. Of course, in the case of oil companies, rising oil prices have a beneficial effect, at least in the short term…more of which later.

Intuitively it’s easier to understand this effect on the cost of physical goods that actually get shipped around. But why should high oil prices impact the service economy, and aren’t advanced economies more service-oriented than ever? Again, the simple answer may be sufficient for our needs. As household transportation costs increase – and, crucially, they are inelastic because most of us cannot or will not change our abode or place of work according to the forecourt price of petrol – all discretionary expenses experience downward pressure. Food bills climb as oil-dependent agricultural commodities track the price of crude, an effect exacerbated by the gasoline substitution potential of corn-based ethanol in the US. Debt repayments are more or less fixed, give or take fluctuating interest rates. What remains is a shrinking domestic budget: quieter shopping malls, fewer evenings at the restaurant, one less trip to the hair salon. Economic activity experiences a general slowdown – this is the very definition of recession, and not an ‘innovative financial product’ in sight.

Anyone doubting the importance of liquid transport fuel to the health of the prevailing economic system – and therefore to maintaining social cohesion and political stability – need only recall what happened in the UK in September 2000. Truckers and farmers protesting the relatively high pump price of diesel staged blockades of refineries and fuel terminals. Diesel and petrol supplies slowed to a trickle as the public queued at forecourts to top up their tanks “just in case”. Within a few days, 90% of filling stations were bone dry, just-in-time supply chains unravelled and people were fighting over loaves of bread among bare supermarket shelves. The UK had staged a compelling if entirely accidental social experiment.

Conclusion: five days of petroleum separate an advanced civilisation from savagery. Note that we didn’t even run out of oil, we merely panicked!

Returning to the companies that maintain our oil flows: perhaps uniquely in the global economic village, they do rather well when oil prices are on the up. For instance, in 2008 – the year in which oil spiked to $147/bbl – ExxonMobil posted an annual profit of $45 billion, the largest in corporate history. That same year, oil companies accounted for six of the seven largest global corporations, as measured by revenues. (The outlier was Wal-Mart, an enterprise utterly symbolic of the economy’s dependency on relatively cheap and free-flowing transport fuel.)

In this context, it should not surprise anyone that oil companies are somewhat reluctant to allow the Oil Age to draw to a graceful conclusion, as the transport system inevitably electrifies to become several times more energy efficient and compatible with the full range of sustainable renewable energy sources. Not vested in the electricity generation game, oil companies continue to lead us astray. BP recently argued that biofuels are “the only game in town”, the only major way to decarbonise road fuel, possibly contributing around 12% of the road transport fuel mix by 2030. Or to put it another way, within twenty years if BP have their way the transport sector will be only 88% dependent on oil.

BP is missing the point, of course. The question is not only how we can decarbonise the transport sector, rather it is how we can achieve this while meeting the primary objective: gaining independence from oil. How can we divest ourselves of turmoil in the politically fragile oil exporting regions of the world, and insulate our economic and social stability from events over which we exercise no control? Ultimately, independence from oil means getting off liquid transport fuels, which won’t be achieved by shifting to 12% biofuels over the next two decades.

To paraphrase BP, electricity is the only game in town.

This article was first published in Business Day, 7 April 2011

Jorgen Randers – Green paper fails to address climate change challenges

Prof Jorgen Randers,  professor of climate strategy at the Norwegian School of Management and a faculty member of the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership

The deadline for commentary on the government’s green paper on climate change recently closed with many commentators agreeing that it is a vague document that does not present a sufficiently detailed or coherent plan for addressing the looming challenges of climate change.

The paper is yet more evidence that the democratic process may not be able to deliver the pace and scale of change needed to confront the problem. The perception is that the imperatives of economic development and the pressures of big business will always conspire to prevent governments from taking the long-term view.

The hard truth is that South Africa – in common with the rest of world – is faced with the challenge of simultaneously having to grow its economy and protect natural systems – including a stable climate – that are vital to that growth.

In a country like South Africa economic growth is the most effective way – in the short term probably the only way – of providing social goods such as increased employment, poverty alleviation and security in old age.

The challenge is to find a way to grow the economy while addressing very real climate change threats. The good news is that this is entirely possible.

While world governments remain sceptical, evidence is that economic growth with a reduction in carbon emissions is fully doable using existing technologies. Furthermore, it is not very expensive – consumption levels may fall by perhaps 1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

This means that countries that pursue climate friendly strategies will be as rich in June 2020 as they would have been in January 2020. It may be even cheaper than that as fresh levels of innovation kick in.

In principle there are no limits to economic growth and growth need not be a threat to sustainability. The real problem is that humanity tends to be too slow in deciding to push back the resource constraints that will stop growth if left unattended. Examples of actions that can be taken include finding climate friendly substitutes for oil, or cutting greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels. This can be done from a technical and economic point of view. But it takes time – the decision to act must be made decades before the solution is needed.

Societal decision delay is the real problem. That is what is dangerous, not that the world has a limited capacity, not that we are growing too fast, but that the hard decisions that need to be taken to ensure that we can survive this growth are not being taken early enough because politicians are not given a mandate to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term security. The biggest obstacle is a lack of political will caused by non-existent voter support, as the green paper illustrates so well.

Unfortunately, unpalatable as it might seem to a Western audience, those who are getting it right are the institutions that are free of the worst aspects of democratic governance. For example, the Chinese Communist Party is successfully growing the economy and raising the standards of living of its population, while reducing carbon emissions relative to GDP – which should be the goal of governments everywhere.

China is very aware of the dangers of climate change. Temperatures over large areas are already up by an average of 2°C and rainfall patterns have shifted radically.

The Chinese are responding by, among other things, investing in green technologies such as electric cars, alternative energy and carbon capture and storage and will soon be world leaders in these fields.

When we get to 2020, the politicians in democratic countries may very well still be debating whether we can afford measures to curtail climate change.

By that time the Chinese may equally well have solved the problem, and be profiting from selling the solutions back to these democracies.

The European Commission, which by virtue of the way it is structured is still not completely controlled by the European Parliament, is also able to take decisive steps, as evidenced by its bold announcement that Europe will reduce emissions by 20 percent by 2020, regardless of whether others do likewise.

More such examples are needed. The challenges facing the world now are considerable. The global economy is set to quadruple in size by 2050, and world population will continue to grow for another few decades before it stabilises.

In the same time frame, emissions must be reduced by at least a half in order to avoid widely predicted and potentially catastrophic temperature rises.

This means that on average all countries and companies need to reduce greenhouse emissions per unit of value added (Geva) by 5 percent a year to know that they are “doing their bit”.

But if history is anything to go by, the decisions needed to effect these changes will not be made in time so long as the democratic process holds sway.

The failure at Copenhagen and Cancun is likely to be repeated in Durban if all 190 nations are to agree. It may take a climate crisis to galvanise democratic governments into action.

In the meantime, business is starting to move on its own. In the UK and the EU, the Corporate Leaders Groups on Climate Change – supported by the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership – were launched in 2005 and 2006, respectively, when prominent chief executives came together to try and provide the political space necessary for progressive climate policy with the belief that investing in a low carbon future is a strategic business objective – whether their governments recognised it or not.

Similar moves are afoot in South Africa as businesses and individuals start to realise that, while we cannot do without the democratic process entirely, action needs to be taken at other levels to protect the environment without sacrificing economic growth.

The economic imperative is that business in South Africa needs to grow like crazy. The mind shift needed to accommodate this is that it does not have to come at the expense of sustainability – quite the reverse; growth that does not maintain and restore the natural systems underpinning our economies is suicidal.

And if one wants a simple way for businesses and government departments to measure adequate progress along this path, use a target of 5 percent annual reduction in Geva.

Jorgen Randers is a professor of climate strategy at the Norwegian School of Management and a faculty member of the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership (CPSL). He is co-author of the highly influential Limits to Growth, which first appeared in 1972 and was in South Africa as a guest of the South African office of the CPSL in February.

This article was first published in Business Report of 13 April

The CPSL Experience

Cambridge Resilience Forum: Beyond Petroleum?

Recent events in the Middle East have raised concerns about oil supplies in the world and led to the oil price increasing to above US$100 per barrel again. As 95% of mobility – the movement of goods and people – are dependent on liquid fuels, this rise impacts the price of most other goods and especially agricultural products.

This must be seen within the broader context of geo-political and geological constraints in extracting oil resources and the associated heightened environmental risks.

Given the negative impact of price volatility, the inflationary impact of higher oil prices and the significant environmental impact (including contributing to climate change) of liquid fuels, there is a strong case to move away from oil, but this transition will be one of the most difficult challenges lying ahead for society.

The University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership invites to join us for a session as two sustainability experts with in-depth experience of the oil industry discuss the future ‘Beyond Petroleum?’

DATE: Friday 8 April 2011

TIME: 12:30 – 14:00

VENUE: IDASA Bookshop, 6 Spin Street, Cape Town

COST: Entrance is free – R35 brown bag lunch available, please pre-order

To confirm your attendance please e-mail Magda de Kok on magda.dekok@cpsl.cam.ac.uk

SPEAKERS

David Rice is an independent adviser on the social and environmental impacts of business. He joined BP as a research geophysicist in 1979, from the UK National Physical Laboratory where he had been part of an atmospheric research team measuring and modelling stratospheric ozone. Before that he was a research astrophysicist at London University, working in a joint team with the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. In his career at BP David was Head of Geoscience Training, Exploration Manager for BP in China, a senior commercial analyst and strategic planner in the upstream business, Director of the Policy Unit, Chief of Staff for BP’s global Government and Public Affairs function and the BP Group Adviser on Development Issues. He instigated for BP a number of relationships with NGOs. He was one of the initiators of the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights for the oil, gas and mining industry, launched by the governments of the USA and the UK in 2000.

Since leaving BP David has been working with companies and NGOs and academics on social and environmental issues at policy and individual project level, and on the engagement of businesses and NGOs with those issues. He has worked with natural resource industries in Australia, Angola and Azerbaijan, and on issues in the pharmaceutical and chocolate industries.

Dr Gary Kendall has been working with the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership since January 2011, having previously led SustainAbility’s think tank function. He regularly contributes articles – in particular relating to energy security and climate change – and speaks at international conferences and through the media. Gary has advised several leading companies on how to approach and tackle sustainability challenges, including Coca-Cola, Ford, Nestlé, Novo Nordisk, Rio Tinto, A.P. Møller-Maersk and Shell.

Previously, Gary spent two years working in WWF’s Global Climate & Energy program, where his main interests were the causes of – and solutions to – the series of environmental perils associated with society’s addiction to hydrocarbon fuels. This followed nine years in the oil industry with Mobil (and later ExxonMobil), spanning diverse roles from Research and Product Development to Sales, Marketing, and Business Development. Working across Europe, the US and Asia offered Gary first-hand insight to the strategic and day-to-day sustainability challenges posed by one of the world’s most problematic sectors.

Gary is the author of the WWF publication “Plugged In: The End of the Oil Age”.

Economic Growth in the Real World – Prof Jorgen Randers

The Cambridge Resilience Forum presents an exciting keynote address by Prof Jorgen Randers entitled ‘Economic Growth in the Real World.

DATE:  Monday 31 January 2011

TIME:  17:00 for 17:30 – 19:00

VENUE: BMW Pavilion, V & A Waterfront, Cape Town

When in 1972 Prof Randers co-authored the seminal book “Limits to Growth” the core debate it sparked was between those who believed that the problems increasingly associated with economic growth could all be solved and those who believed that the problem lay with economic growth itself. Today – and particularly here in Africa – the question that needs answering is “What kind of economic growth is actually possible in a world where biophysical limits are increasingly acknowledged as real and not theoretical?”

Having worked as an academic, policy advisor and company director at the vanguard of sustainable development for almost 40 years, Prof Randers will share his insights into how the world and its limits have changed since their 1972 analysis and the implications of this for economic development in a country like South Africa.

Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership in association with Webber Wentzel would like to invite you to listen to this world-renowned expert share his latest thinking.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jorgen Randers (born 1945) is professor of climate strategy at the Norwegian School of Management, where he works on climate issues and scenario analysis. He lectures internationally on sustainable development, and especially climate, within and outside corporations.

Jorgen Randers is non-executive member of a number of corporate boards in Norway, including the multinational Tomra ASA. He also sits on the “sustainability councils” of British Telecom in the UK and The Dow Chemical Company in the US. Recently he chaired the Commission on Low Greenhouse Gas Emissions which reported in 2006 to the Norwegian cabinet on how Norway can cut is climate gas emissions by two thirds by 2050.

He was formerly President of the Norwegian School of Management 1981 – 89, and Deputy Director General of WWF International (World Wide Fund for Nature) in Switzerland 1994 – 99.

He has authored a number of books and scientific papers, including “The Limits to Growth” (1972) and “Limits to Growth – The 30 Year Update” (2004).

Cancun Unpacked

In January 2010 Investec, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, hosted a very lively post Copenhagen breakfast to discuss the outcomes of the climate negotiations with an expert panel.

We are delighted to invite you to a similar breakfast where the UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun (COP16) will be unpacked by a similarly expert panel.

We will be posing two main questions:

• What progress did Cancun’s COP16 make towards a legally binding international agreement and other subsidiary goals, and what are the implications for the South African economy?
• What have we learned that will shape our planning for South Africa’s hosting of COP17 at the end of 2011?

Date:     Wednesday 2 February 2011
Time:    07:30 for 08:00 – 10:30
Venue:  Auditorium, Investec Sandton (click here for map)

RSVP: Please confirm your attendance and special dietary requirments with Carryn Penhall by Wednesday 19 January 2011

Guest speakers:
Joanne Yawitch: Leader of the SA delegation to Cancun and Deputy Director General, Environmental Quality and Protection at the Department of Environmental Affairs

Richard Worthington: Climate Change Programme Manager, WWF South Africa

Dr Fred Goede: Group Safety, Health and Environment Centre Manager, Sasol

Prof Jorgen Randers: Director of the Centre for Climate Strategy, Norwegian School of Management and faculty member of the University of Cambridge Programme for Sustainability leadership

This is likely to be one of the benchmark discussions of Cancun’s outcomes within the South African business community. We hope you will join us.

Summary of Forum Session on valuing ecosystems

On 30 September 2010 CPSL hosted a Cambridge Resilience Forum session entitled: “Is there a case for investing in ecosystem services?”

The four contributors were:

• Dr Martin de Wit – De Wit Sustainable Options & Sustainability Institute
• Tony Knowles – The Cirrus Group
• Sarshen Marais – Programme Manager, Climate Action Group
• Dr Belinda Reyers – Biodversity and Ecosystem Services Research Group, CSIR

Martin de Wit’s comments can be found at the end of the post, and here is a summary of all the contributions:

Martin De Wit focused on the economics of ecosystem and the notion of public good and common good. There is no immediate incentive for private investors to invest in ecosystem services – we need to redesign financial instruments. How do we translate ecosystem services into investment opportunities? The language we use needs to speak to economists!

Sarshen Marais shared CAP’s work on rehabilitating ecosystems and the return on investment for communities in general well being and some job creation through implementation of mitigation and adaptation projects.

Belinda Reyers told 4 different stories of human connection to ecosystem services:

• Coastal areas and how the use of river sand for building has caused the sea near the river mouth to start undermining some of those very buildings
• Houses surrounded by alien trees and the attendant fire risk
• Agriculture, water and the emerging threats to the production of beer
• Changing wind patterns off the West Coast and the impact they are having on the presence of fish.

The challenge for us is how we manage landscapes and development in an integrated manner.

Tony Knowles emphasised that 80% of all carbon emissions in Africa are as a result of deforestation. The challenge in Africa is the tension between the need for development and no planned land use or tenure.

Dr Martin de Wit’s comments:

Climate Finance for a Green Economy

By Monica Graaff

There are an increasing number of global climate funds available to invest in climate change mitigation projects and kick-start a green economy, but accessing these funds is not as simple as it might seem, according to speakers at a Cambridge Resilience Forum event in Cape Town this week.
 
The funds range from the $30 billion committed to climate friendly development at the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Copenhagen conference last year to private equity funds. But, according to Smita Nakhooda of the World Resources Institute based in Washington DC, many tensions exist as to how these funds should be sourced, committed and managed.
 
“At the heart of the debate is how to maintain high standards of financing, while ensuring that funding institutions are nimble enough to ensure that things get done,” she said. “And how do you ensure that the finance reaches the kind of projects that will have traction and bring about major change?”
 
Nakhooda said one of the major tensions was that developing nations wanted to have direct access to funding and many donors felt safest working through the tested international bodies such as the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (GEF). Advances in meeting this challenge of ‘top-down versus bottom-up’ had been made with the introduction of the Adaptation Fund and the growth of national low carbon development funds, but it was too early to judge how these would fare.
 
Richard Sherman of One World Sustainable Investments and a member of the South African delegation to the UNFCCC said that the Copenhagen Accord included an agreement to set up a new fund that was currently being negotiated. Debated issues were over global technology intellectual property rights, insurance mechanisms, whether to make grants or loans, and what the sources of funding should be.
 
A possible source for this new fund could be using 1% of GDP from developed countries, but then the question would be how the UN Secretary General would decide to mobilize these funds, he said.
 
Funds could also possibly be sourced from the private sector via climate transactions taxation, leveraging emissions of the transport industry, and implementing George Soros’s proposal of an IMF rights issue.
 
However, the good news, he said, was that the $30 billion committed at Copenhagen would flow through existing channels, and would therefore not be hampered by this process of negotiation.
 
The important thing for South Africa to remember was that it needed to ensure that it had established the right channels to receive these funds so that it would be ready to receive them, he said. Work still had to be done in this area.
 
Carl Wesselink of the South African Export Development Fund called for a pragmatic approach to accessing climate-related funds and putting them to good social and economic use. The point was not to focus on becoming ‘carbon neutral’ (which usually had “zero social impact” and had a “negative impact on the country’s Balance of Payments”) but rather to focus on “how we get energy and how we use it”.
 
“Our decisions need to be practical and socially responsible,” he said.
 
Best known for the role he played in implementing South Africa’s acclaimed flagship Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) housing retrofit project at Kuyasa in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, he said it would cost R1500 per unit over five years to retrofit an RDP house with a ceiling and a solar water geyser.
 
“This might not sound like a lot to us, but we need to understand the social and economic benefits from these simple interventions for the people who live in RDP houses. It means the inhabitants regain about 10% of their income in energy saving, get access to hot water for the first time, and avoid having to endure about 3 litres of condensation a night dampening their beds and affecting their health,” he said.
 
While the CDM was a useful mechanism, it was laden with bureaucratic processes that used up about 75% of the funds available, he said. Accessing funds from local funding institutions, such as the National Sustainable Settlements Facility, should not be ruled out as an interim measure to get things going.
 
Graham Sinclair, principal at Sinclair & Company, a boutique investment advisory firm specializing in sustainable investment in emerging markets, said private investment offered a possible source of climate finance.
 
“Investors are geared up to make investment decisions along ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) principles if people insist on them. The more investors ask for this kind of investment, the more the market will work in this direction,” he said.
 
But the bottom line for private funding, all agreed, was that the market required a reasonable degree of certainty that investment will be profitable.
 
As Nakhooda pointed out in her opening remarks, it is cheaper to mitigate the effects of climate change through climate friendly investments than to deal with post-event adaptation. Mitigation offers an opportunity for profiting from the development of a green economy. Adaptation is more likely to be expensive damage control.
 
Dirk Visser of the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership, who chaired the session, noted that, according to the World Bank, $50 billion was needed annually for Africa to cope with climate change. According to some, this figure is severely underestimated.
 
Monica Graaff is a freelance journalist who works on projects with the University of Cambridge’s Programme for Sustainability Leadership.

GreatPoint Energy Hydromethanation

Burning natural gas made from coal in a modern power plant generates about 60 percent less in greenhouse-¬gas emissions than burning coal directly and eliminates almost all other pollutants. Converting coal into natural gas has long been too expensive to implement on a large scale. But, GreatPoint Energy has developed a process called catalytic hydromethanation, which can economically convert coal (or petroleum coke or biomass) into pure natural gas while removing and capturing most of the carbon.

The Company’s cost of production is expected to be significantly lower than current prices of new drilled natural gas and imported liquefied natural gas (LNG), and the natural gas it produces, called bluegas™, meets all high-grade natural gas quality specifications. It can be transported through the thousands of miles of pipelines already in place around the world and can be used interchangeably with drilled natural gas for all applications, including power generation, residential and commercial heating, and the production of chemicals. SynGas produced by Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) cannot be distributed in this way.

Currently natural gas provides about 24% of the world’s energy needs.

Original article: Andrew Perlman. Technology Review. September 2009. Read article here…

Can we manipulate the weather?

Chinese scientists claim to be able to control the weather by firing chemical filled rockets into the clouds to catalyze precipitation or to drive rain away.

Although the success of such weather alchemy is still disputed, there seems to be a growing interest in large scale geo-engineering exploits to counteract the impacts of climate change.

A recent article in the UK’s The Guardian newspaper asked: Can we manipulate the weather?

The unseasonal snow that fell on Beijing for 11 hours on Sunday was the earliest and heaviest there has been for years. It was also, China claims, man-made. By the end of last month, farmland in the already dry north of China was suffering badly due to drought. So on Saturday night China’s meteorologists fired 186 explosive rockets loaded with chemicals to “seed” clouds and encourage snow to fall. “We won’t miss any opportunity of artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from a lingering drought,” Zhang Qiang, head of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, told state media.

The US has tinkered with such cloud seeding to increase water flow from the Sierra Nevada mountains in California since the 1950s, but there remains widespread scientific sniffiness in the west at such attempts at weather control. The chemicals fired into the sky, usually dry ice or silver iodide, are supposed to provide a surface for water vapour to form liquid rain. But there is little evidence that it works – after all, how do investigating scientists know it would not have rained anyway?

Such doubts have not stopped China claiming mastery over the clouds. Officials said the blue skies that brightened Beijing’s parade to celebrate 60 years of communism last month were a result of the 18 cloud-seeding jets and 432 explosive rockets scrambled to empty the sky of rain beforehand. Last year, more than 1,000 rockets were fired to ensure a dry night for last year’s Olympic opening ceremony.

“Only a handful of countries in the world could organise such large-scale, magic-like weather modification,” Cui Lianqing, a senior meteorologist with the Chinese air force, told the Xinhua news agency after last month’s parade.

Magic or not, there is growing interest in such attempts to deliberately steer the weather, and on a much larger scale. Next spring, a group of the world’s leading experts on climate change will gather in California to plan how it could be done as a way to tackle global warming, and by whom. The ideas, some of which, similar to cloud-seeding, involve firing massive amounts of chemicals into the atmosphere, can sound far-fetched, but they are racing up the agenda as pessimism grows about the likely course of global warming.

As interest grows, so does concern about whether such techniques, known as geoengineering, could be developed and unleashed by a single nation, or even a wealthy individual, without wide international approval. “What will happen when Richard Branson decides he really does want to save the planet?” asks one climate expert. If China thinks it can make cloud seeding work, then what about geoengineering?

“If climate change turns ugly, then many countries will start looking at desperate measures,” says David Victor, an energy policy expert at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Logic points to a big risk of unilateral geoengineering. Unlike controlling emissions, which requires collective action, most highly capable nations could deploy geoengineering systems on their own.”

Victor is a heavyweight policy analyst, but one of his most impressive academic feats could have been to smuggle the name of the world’s favourite secret agent into the sober pages of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy. “Geoengineering may not require any collective international effort to have an impact on climate,” he wrote in an article published last year. “A lone Greenfinger, self-appointed protector of the planet and working with a small fraction of the [Bill] Gates bank account, could force a lot of geoengineering on his own. Bond films of the future might [enjoy incorporating] the dilemma of unilateral planetary engineering.” Move over, Goldfinger.

Unilateral geoengineering worries experts for two reasons. First, the massive side effects; what it could do to the world’s rainfall, for example. Second, once started, geoengineering would probably have to be continued, as stopping could bring an abrupt change in climate. “One of the many dangers with unilateral geoengineering is that once a country starts, it becomes very hard to stop,” Victor says. “Removing a warming mask, even if it is a flawed mask, would expose the planet to even more rapid and probably dangerous warming.”

In a world where action on global warming has created new markets in carbon worth billions of pounds, countries are not the only players. Geoengineering would require investment and the private sector is already eyeing up opportunities. Two companies have emerged with a business plan based on dumping iron in the sea and then selling carbon offsets based on the extra pollution supposedly soaked up by the resulting algal bloom. And in their new book, Superfreakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner talk approvingly of Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, whose company, Intellectual Ventures, is exploring the possibility of pumping large quantities of reflective sulphur dust into the Earth’s stratosphere through a patented 18-mile-long hose held up by helium balloons.

This is the point where most people will shake their heads, say the whole silly idea will never happen, and skip to the crossword. They could be right, but the global warming story has a tendency to outpace most attempts to predict its path. Just a few years ago, scientists and politicians talked of the need to avoid a 2C rise in global temperature, yet experts recently gathered at an Oxford University conference openly talked of a likely 4C rise, which, without urgent and unlikely action, a new report from the Met Office says could come within many of our lifetimes.

A decade ago, an unproven idea called carbon sequestration, that would see carbon emissions from power stations trapped under the ground, was talked up by a small group of advocates, but was dismissed by most people as too expensive and unworkable on a large scale. Renamed carbon capture and storage, the idea is now mainstream energy policy in countries including Britain, despite still being unproven and dismissed by many as too expensive and unworkable on a large scale. Last month, the International Energy Agency said the world should build 100 full-scale carbon-capture power stations by 2020, and 850 by 2030.

If the geoengineering narrative follows a similar arc, then how long until nations or individuals that have the most to lose, or are the first to accept that the required massive emission cuts are impossible, turn to the presently unthinkable option? The US government, under President Bush, has already lobbied the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to promote geoengineering research as “insurance”. When the Royal Society recently carried out an investigation of the options, senior figures privately expected it to dismiss the whole concept as nonsense. Instead the society, Britain’s premier scientific academy, concluded in September that methods to block out the sun “may provide a potentially useful short-term backup to mitigation in case rapid reductions in global temperature are needed”. The society stressed that emissions reductions were the way to go, but recommended international research and development of the “more promising” geoengineering techniques.

“My guess is that we will be taking geoengineering a lot more seriously in the next decade,” says Victor, “but we won’t be in a position to deploy systems for some time. Most nations will decide it is needed only if we have really bad luck as warming unfolds and if we fail miserably in controlling emissions. I put the odds of using such systems in the next 40 years at perhaps one in five.”

Of all the apparent obstacles to geoengineering, cost is not likely to be among them. Compared with the expense of investing in renewable energy and phasing out fossil fuels, the cheapest geoengineering options come with a price tag of just a few billion pounds, perhaps 1% of what it could cost to tackle global warming through emissions cuts.

Alan Robock, an expert on volcanos and climate at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has looked at how much it might cost to carry out one of the most commonly discussed geoengineering options, to mimic the cooling effect of a volcanic eruption by filling the high atmosphere with sulphur compounds, which reflect sunlight.

The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 threw so much shiny sulphurous dust into the atmosphere that temperatures across a shaded Earth dropped a year later by about 0.5C. The 1815 explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia triggered the notorious “year without a summer” and widespread failure of harvests across northern regions including Europe, the north-east US and Canada.

Robock has worked out the likely cost of technology needed to deposit a million tonnes of sulphur in the stratosphere each year, an amount equivalent to a Mount Pinatubo eruption every four to eight years, and which scientists think could be enough to cancel out the global warming caused by a continued rise in carbon emissions.

The cheapest option could be to use giant mid-air refuelling aircraft, such as the US air force’s KC-10 Extender, filled with sulphur dioxide or hydrogen sulphide gas. It would be a round-the-clock operation, with nine aircraft each required to fly three sorties a day. In a new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Robock and his colleagues say it could be done for “several billion” dollars a year. The results have forced Robock to revise a high-profile list of 20 objections to geoengineering he published last year. “It turns out that being way too expensive is not the case.”

Robock’s new analysis still includes 17 reasons why geoengineering is a bad idea. Throwing sulphur into the atmosphere could slow down the world’s water cycle and do more damage to rainfall patterns than the global warming it aims to prevent. And because techniques that focus on stopping sunlight do nothing to stop carbon dioxide pollution from cars, factories and power stations, they cannot address the looming disaster of ocean acidification. The surface of the world’s ocean is slowly turning to acid as our extra carbon pollution dissolves in seawater. Coral reefs already appear doomed and many shellfish could follow. Altering the atmosphere could also weaken solar power and reverse years of work to close the hole in the ozone layer.

With such a catalogue of potential disasters waiting to unfold, there must be a law against geoengineering? The international rulebook is fuzzy on this issue. The only international framework that directly covers many geoengineering techniques, the 1976 Environmental Modification Convention, designed to stop nations at war from meddling with each other’s weather, has never been tested. The 1982 UN Law of the Sea Convention and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty could be used to regulate activities and experiments in those shared spaces, but releases to the atmosphere are legally more problematic because nations have sovereignty over their own airspace.

Rather than laws and treaties, many experts argue that the best way to prevent countries or companies from going it alone is to plunge in and start serious research. “The way to tame the worst forms of unilateral geoengineering is to promote a lot more research, especially [into] the side effects,” Victor says. “One of the biggest dangers is that some governments will try to create a taboo against geoengineering. A taboo would stop a lot of research but it wouldn’t stop determined rogues. That scenario would probably be the worst, because rogues would not abandon their efforts and the rest of us would not have done enough research to know what to expect.”

Mike MacCracken, chief scientist at the Climate Institute in Washington, is organising the California meeting next spring, which aims to figure out some guidelines. He says large-scale unilateral geoengineering is “not very plausible” and his main concern is fairness to future generations. Once started by anybody, a geoengineering attempt would probably need to be continued by everybody else because it would offer a mask on global warming that could be dangerous to remove.

“It might be that this is how unilateral concerns should be reframed; this generation more or less deciding it will take only slow action on any type of emissions, essentially forcing the next generation to be more likely to have to invoke geoengineering to save much that anyone considers beneficial and unique about the Earth.”

Read between the lines of most scientific reports on geoengineering and there is a tacit assumption that the idea sounds so extreme that merely discussing it will refocus efforts on emission cuts. But what if the reverse is true? What if a heavily funded research programme, and articles such as this, promote the idea to people who have little interest in moving to a low-carbon world?

“Knowledge is hard to hide,” says Robock. “It would be great if people didn’t know how to build nuclear bombs, but they do. We need to research and debate the consequences and then use politics and influence to let people know what would happen.”

Original article: David Adam. 4 November 2009. The Guardian. Read more…

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