But It’s Cumulative!

It is so strange that most articles and reactions to greenhouse emissions address how much we release into the environment every year, how we can slow those annual numbers to “tolerable” levels, or at least make the perpetrators buy “carbon credits” for the right to pollute. We are told that if we truly were to make serious reductions, we would be shutting down economic growth and development everywhere, costing millions and millions of jobs. Developing nations argue that the big successful nations built their wealth at the expense of the environment and that, therefore, they need to have an equal opportunity to generate that kind of growth, even if it adds a mass of pollution to the planet. China’s industrial engine is literally fueled by an acceleration of building new coal plants (one new plant every few days!!! – the photo above was taken in China), and environmental pollution has made life in too many Chinese cities completely intolerable.

Somehow, governments that proselytize against continuing to allow such emissions have been rather ineffective in communicating the hard dollar-per-person costs, the hard numbers on illness and life expectancy that such egregious emissions cause. When a climate disaster occurs, from typhoon to hurricane, the damages tend to be addressed as if the event were a standalone occurrence. Global leaders have failed to instill in their electorate how the impact of global warming – turning fertile farms into desert dust – has fueled the dissatisfaction, created millions of angry farmer-refugees, and provided the very setting, the impetus if you will, for the rebellions in Syria and the devastating spread of the Islamic State. What we have here is a failure to communicate. Even as evangelical leaders are beginning to accept man-induced climate change, very few of us truly have put all these pieces together.

And we almost never talk about the biggest issue of them all: the amalgamation of greenhouse gasses is not an annual event… it is a long-term cumulative gathering of atmospheric toxicity that does not clear out at the end of the year. What we release this year is simply added to what we release last year… and the year before that, and the year before that. While there is a minor degree of dissipation of these gasses, this is too small to have any real consequence. And adding to “bad” at any level makes it “worse.” Add to “bad” every year, and “worse” becomes “intolerable horrific.”

We probably have passed that magical tipping point of irreversibility, but that does not mean we cannot make things worse. On the contrary, we are making things worse much faster than even the most pessimistic scientists have predicted, facts which I have blogged about many times before. And so much of the problem stems from our insatiable need for power, mostly related to the generation of electricity.

“[D]espite international efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, total remaining commitments in the global power sector have not declined in a single year since 1950 and are in fact growing rapidly (by an average of 4% per year 2000–2012)…

“‘One of the things that makes climate change such a difficult problem is that it lacks immediacy,’ Steven Davis of the University of California, Irvine, told environmentalresearchweb. ‘It’s going to have huge impacts in the long run, but its effects on our day-to-day lives seem small. The way we’ve been tracking carbon-dioxide emissions reinforces this remoteness: the annual emissions we monitor are small relative to the cumulative emissions that will cause large temperature increases. The alternative we present, what we call commitment accounting, helps by quantifying the long-run emissions related to investment decisions made today.’…

“‘I think this emerging form of emissions accounting provides a valuable way to show how the growing coal (and natural gas) greenhouse-gas emissions commitment will play out, but — because of the competing social and economic values embedded in that extracted energy, along with the equity argument poor countries use against established fossil-powered industrial giants — I’m not sure it leads to a more effective strategy for cutting those emissions.’…

“Christopher Green, an energy-focused economist at McGill, [responded]: ‘Without taking anything away from the importance of the Davis-Socolow [Robert Socolow of Princeton] contribution, your suggestion that we should also look at the benefits of the electricity generated is, in my opinion, dead on. The world as a whole (especially the emerging/developing country component) is going to require increased energy consumption for the foreseeable (and likely more distant) future. That that energy, however produced, provides enormous benefits cannot be denied

“‘The important question is how the world’s huge and growing energy requirements are going to be met. [Researchers like NYU’s Martin Hoffert have] provided what still is the clearest framework for establishing the huge magnitude of the energy technology challenge to meeting a growing energy commitment—a challenge measured in terawatts not gigawatts. That challenge has been largely ignored, with the policy focus placed on emissions and emissions reduction and the political will to reduce them, without due regard to the current limits on alternative low carbon energy technologies. The failure to address the Hoffert et al energy technology question is reflected in the fact that since 2000 (and including 2013) the share of global energy consumption accounted for by fossil fuels has remained essentially constant at 86.5-87.0%. (Here I use BP Energy Statistics.) globally, the “progress” made with non-hydro renewables is offset by a decline in energy from nuclear power plants. Not surprisingly, the carbon content of energy is the same in 2013 as it was in the early 1990s and actually rose a little since 2000.

“‘While Davis and Socolow are clearly right that the climate has not benefited from the lack of progress on the energy technology front, billions of people, particularly in the emerging country/developing world, have benefited substantially from the energy generated. As far as I can see the standoff will continue until there is recognition that climate change is first and foremost an energy technology problem, one that cannot be solved/resolved without a great deal more than emission reduction pledges.” Cited in the New York Times, August 30^th.

As scientists battle among themselves on how to account and explain this cumulative toxicity, is it any wonder that so few among us have the slightest idea about how bad the situation really is? It’s time to focus on how to make what is happening clear in basic and simple, personally-relevant, terms… to everybody.

 I’m Peter Dekom, and how proud are you that this “future of global toxicity and climate change” is the legacy that we are leaving our children?