The environment is something I’m quite passionate about and like a lot of people I imagine: I get worried about the misquoting and lies that people are telling to justify continuing along without lifting our game.

Original letter

The letter I was responding to went like this:

Cheap energy must be given priority

Saturday’s front-page photograph of a wheat farmer knee-deep in mud should serve to remind us it was not so long ago that climate experts were predicting south-eastern Australia had moved into a state of permanent drought (“This drought may never break”, January 4, 2008).

The inability of climate experts to predict even a few years into the future casts much doubt on the credibility of their 50-year forecasts, and the extent to which man-made carbon emissions can affect these forecasts.

Politicians should take great care about formulating carbon emission policies that will result in large energy price rises based on the advice of those demonstrated to be frequently wrong in their predictions.

The climate does change: sometimes it gets drier and sometimes it wetter; sometimes it gets warmer and sometimes cooler. We would be better served by policies that recognise these cyclical changes occur and that result in securing our most critical resources: cheap water and energy.

Ron Blombery McMahons Point

To which I applied a bit of sceptical thinking to what he was claiming and thought “hey, that doesn’t sound like a prediction climate scientists would make”. Sure enough the original article “This drought may never break” made no such claim that if climate change was correct: we’d see no more rain..

My letter

My response to Ron Bombery’s misinterpretation of what was said:

Scientists didn’t come down in the last shower

Ron Blombery (Letters, December 6) wrongly says a rainfall prediction was made by climate experts in the 2008 article he cites. The story was very clear. It said: ”There is absolutely no debate that Australia is warming.” On the subject of drought (rainfall and temperature) it said: “There is a debate in the climate community, after … close to 12 years of drought, whether this is something permanent. Certainly, in terms of temperature, that seems to be our reality, and that there is no turning back.”

Short of reading only the headline (which says the drought ”may” never break, not ”will”), I fail to see how one could conclude that the scientists had staked the validity of climate science to a prediction of zero rainfall in a specific part of Australia. There was no failure of science, only a failure by Mr Blombery to read the article properly.

Nathan Lee Surry Hills

I think we have given preference to cheap energy plenty: cheap and dirty unfortunately. Mr Blombery needs to go to China to see what focussing on cheap energy, cheap manufacturing, cheap goods results in. So what if we’re wrong on climate change anyhow?
Looks like others agreed on the topic:

The recent rain is an example of weather, which is difficult to predict even a few weeks ahead due to its inherently chaotic nature. Climate is weather averaged out over a longer period. The recent rain does not somehow cancel out all the observations of the past

60 years that show south-east Australia is getting hotter and drier, or that the past decade has been the hottest on record.

The CSIRO’s State of the Climate Report 2010 confirms this, and points out that the number of record hot days has been rising since 1960, and the number of record cold days over the same period has been decreasing.

Unfortunately, too many politicians exhibit a similar level of logic and misunderstanding when it comes to differentiating between weather and climate, and this is partly why we find ourselves in the do-nothing position that characterises so much public policy associated with climate change.

Jim Russell Balmain

Cheap energy is the problem, not the solution. Whether or not carbon emissions are changing the climate, oil production is peaking and the coal and gas won’t last forever. The cheaper they are, the faster they run out. Raise the price and they last longer and encourage people to invest in alternative and renewable sources.

Hey presto, we postpone or even avoid wars over expensive, dwindling energy resources.

Jeffrey Mellefont Coogee

I love the Australian approach to climate change. “The climate does change: sometimes it gets drier and sometimes wetter; sometimes it gets warmer and sometimes cooler”. Onya Ron, problem solved, no worries. What do these bloody scientists know anyway?

Steve Durham Northbridge

Good to see there was a decent amount of column space to people replying to his climate change denial. I don’t think it’ll change his mind one little bit that he has managed to misread an article as supporting his view somehow when the scientist clearly said there’s no debate.

What if we're wrong on climate change?

I wonder at what point the guy reckons we stop focusing on cheap (dirty) energy? If not today: in 1 year? 5 years? 10 years? When the coal runs out and global temperature is many degrees higher? When we ARE able to predict that certain parts of Australia will be in permanent drought? When?

A search for Ron Blombery’s letters
It looks like Ron, like myself, likes to write letters to the SMH. It is easy to see why he thinks climate change is crap when he has shares in mining companies (or at least superannuation that he’s concerned about):
he doesn’t want them taxed more that’s for sure:

To fund our retirement, superannuation funds invest in businesses such as mining that offer good asset growth and dividends. Now the government is going to make these businesses pay a lot more tax, which will reduce their asset value and dividends. At the same time, it encourages us, and forces employers, to put more money into the superannuation system whose future returns it has just diminished. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

Ron Blombery McMahons Point

Perhaps they will move shares to green energy companies? Or do investors never sell shares?

He also seems concerned about the environmental benefits of the insulation scheme: though with a pro-mining, climate change denying stance it’s hard to see why he would care one little bit about environmental outcomes when he doesn’t think we’re changing the climate anyhow:

No one seems to be asking the most obvious question about home insulation: what did we get for $2.5 billion? The evidence shows we got rampant opportunism, skulduggery and employment of “the most vulnerable, youngest, unskilled workers” (”Spin and silver tongues can’t hide an empty morality”, February 18). But did the program achieve anything for energy conservation?

By now, a significant proportion of houses should be enjoying the benefits of new insulation. The energy companies can readily produce statistics on power consumed on comparable summer days this year and last year. If there were measurable benefits, surely the government would be telling us. Where are the results? Or did we just waste $2.5 billion?

Ron Blombery McMahons Point

Isn’t ripping out cheap coal and burning it despite clear evidence that it is polluting the atmosphere some sort of opportunism? Or is selling boatloads of it to China for cut price “opportunism”.

So perhaps instead of just thinking about purely financial matters: Ron should think about the future of the environment. If we dig up and burn away everything in the pursuit of Ron Blombery’s personal financial well being: we’ll not achieve much. We have to consider the children and grandchildren of Ron Blombery even if he won’t.

Businesses will get away with using as much energy, polluting as much as possible unless there is a cost attached to doing so. More than that actually, they have a duty to their shareholders actually to continue to pollute as much as possible while ever it is free to do so. So CO2, like any number of pollutants that had a cost attached via regulations/fines/taxes needs to have a cost associated. If you look back in time you’d see that any number of things have gone through this transition:

• lead
• asbestos
• CFCs
• DDTs
• etc

Prior to the health or environmental impact of the above triggering change it was the wild west type situation for businesses. Lead was in paint, added to petrol (gasoline for the yanks), smelters didn’t have to worry about minimising the contamination of ground water/soil around refinery/smelter operations. Then when the science and medical research came rolling in: it was either banned, phased out or required to be cleaned up (e.g. a fine last year for lead contamination). That made lead expensive to pollute with because it had to be treated with consideration to the impact on children etc.

Same deal with asbestos. It was (and still is) great for a number of things: heat proofing, building materials (the old version of “fibro cement” with asbestos was superior to the current cellulose variety (which is nowhere near as durable, strong, fire retardant or flexible.. seriously, asbestos is magic stuff). But while not as good in some ways, it doesn’t get into your lungs and cause nasty growths/cancers that will slowly kill you.

But back to global warming/climate change. What if we’re wrong about it?

I think the following cartoon sums up my thoughts on the matter:

The "horrible consequences" that await!

So I’ll take the argument from point of apathy: the “do you REALLY care” option.

• Does anyone care if they drive a petrol or an electric car if they both get you to and from your destination (assuming they start making them look half decent)? What if the electric one can be charged from the sun and doesn’t pollute the air around population centres?
• Would you care if you plugged in the car or dropped in a battery pack vs filling up with petrol? Battery packs should stink less and service stations look a bit cleaner (without run-off into drains etc).
• Does anyone care (or know for that matter) whether the electrons running your monitor that you’re reading this come from sunlight via solar cells or wind via wind farm or kite or does it HAVE to come via burning fossil fuels like coal? e.g. does your ability to put food on the table depend on energy being generated from fossil fuels, and if it does: could you possibly do one of the many new jobs away from coal?
• Would anyone notice if the hot water for the morning shower was heated via a solar hot water unit on the roof or is burning coal necessary for a good scrub temperature?
• Do you care if there are millions of new jobs in green industries created as environmentally dirty jobs are phased out?
• Do I care if my amazing Triumph Daytona 675 motorcycle is superseded by something sexy and electric like the MotoCzysz E1pc?

If you don’t really care about stuff like the above then keep your coal industry fibs to yourself, shut the hell up and let the people pushing for those things get on with the job. The absolute worse thing about these misinformed twits is that they are campaigning against improving the world for no other reason than because they want to go with the “do nothing and let everything get more polluted for our kids” option.

Want to see where we’re headed worldwide: take a look at China’s worst polluted spots for some hints (it isn’t pretty).

Yeah: what if it is (by some hugely unlikely plot by tens if not hundreds of thousands of scientists) a hoax and we end up with a world that doesn’t care about oil or coal. A state of being where we can let that shitty, dirty internal combustion technology retire into being another of those strange oddities in a transport museum (along with the coal fired steam engines and those planes with flapping wings failing on takeoff). If we lose the car noise and smoky exhaust smell in the cities and have the whir of electric driven wheels (or better yet trams/trains or electric buses) instead.

I would hope that certain jobs go quietly into the night and were replaced with many others:

• coal power plant technician
• oil rig drilling engineer
• internal combustion mechanic

Working in heavy dust, Chinese migrant workers invariably start to have health problems after 1-2 years.

Perhaps “replaced” with:

• solar array technician
• recycling engineer
• electric vehicle mechanic

But I suspect the anti-green Luddites and the climate change deniers will be digging in hard for many years to come.

Banish those bare rooftops says SA's premier!

The target set for SA is better than the national target, which is also good news:

Speaking at the Copenhagen climate conference, the premier informed that the South Australian government had came up with a new 2020 energy target that will generate 33 per cent power from renewable sources. The revised target is far higher than Australia’s nationwide 20 per cent Renewable Energy Target (RET).

Realistically though: we’ve truckloads of sunshine falling on Australia. The vast hoards of backpackers washing up bright red with sunburn on beaches over the summer is proof enough of that. So I can only hope that every government building in every country with half decent sunshine does this. Solving the global energy situation is like the eating an elephant concept: you have to do it one bite at a time. Government roof space is an easy win. I blogged some time ago about the nation building money going to good use on solar in Australia and how we should use the dead space for solar generation. I’ll post up some ideas in a separate post about some possible next steps Government could take.

The other thing that could fill some of that spare rooftop space, roof gardens:

Another use for that dead space: green rooftops.

I’ll leave you with the thought that if every government building rooftop was producing electricity: it’d be at least one thing in the building producing something worthwhile. Might even make up for the hot air coming out of parliament?

Hard at work on the planting!

The morning began with an introduction (after a pickup at central or else self drive/ride/jog/whatever to homebush). Everyone seemed get stuck in and enjoy the weeding far more than they should have.

Weeding: fun for everyone.

It wasn’t quite “tree planting” because the habitat was for a bunch of green and golden bell frogs rather than Koalas or possums.

Green and gold frogs.. Australian colours! No, I didn't take this picture (wikipedia did!)

Had to chuckle when the guy talked about these little green buggers “hunting”. I guess they’re always presented as pretty innocent little things, unless you’re an insect of course then it’s a horrible eating mouth attached to tongue of death on springs.

Apparently they love popping up in areas like Homebush that were once industrial dumping grounds. Not so interested in living where the conditions are too easy for some reason. Maybe when the post apocalypse is over it’ll be green and gold bell frogs and cockroaches raging battles over the waste land?

It felt really good to be out and doing something more useful than sitting inside working on software for a day.

One planting done.. erm.. Hundreds to go!

It was pretty time consuming work getting rid of the weeds (and some native species of high seeding grass that would quickly take over the whole area) and planting native stuff. Apparently the frogs like to have clusters of grass together then open spaces for a few metres then cluster of grass and so on.

On the work front I think it was the first time some of the people had done any manual labour judging by the questions and the incredible amount of obvious type information given by the minders (e.g. “don’t stab yourself in the head”, “this is how you make a small hole with a tool”). Perhaps they were as bored with the instructions as I was. I guess that’s also side affect of lawsuits and our ever increasingly sedentary city based lives (particularly as I was the only male along too.. poor showing by the boys.. which further damaged the statistical likelihood that people would have done anything outdoors or used tools). Everyone seemed to have fun though and no one stabbed themselves in the head.

I think the following picture sums up the level of “hardcore” physical labour required (if you’re worried and considering doing some volunteering):

Redbacks and Blundstones have nothing on these pink bad boys one girl was wearing.

So the end result: we carted away a tonne (not literally.. but a Ute load) of weeds, planted native grasses/reeds and spread mulch/woodchips to keep it weed free for a bit longer.

My little grassy babies.. Aaw..

All in all a good day’s work.

Oh, one thing though, make sure you put sun cream on your lower back, just trust me on that one.

The report, prepared by the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, finds the cost increase to coal electricity generation if fully-fledged clean coal technology is installed will be up to 78 per cent.

78 percent! Assuming of course they can actually do it at all. To me it still smells like good old snake oil:

Premium quality clean coal snake oil. Guaranteed to prolong the inevitable.

So all that bleating about “nuclear is expensive” or “solar is expensive” is garbage. The alternatives are only expensive because their manufacturing waste needs to be dealt with rather than just puffed up the chimney into the atmosphere (well, unless it is pollution in China I guess.. Then it all probably ends up in the air, land or river regardless). It’s assuming there are the magic clean coal breakthroughs that allow the long term storage of carbon dioxide such that it won’t just float back up (I wonder if the cost of developing a brand new technology factors into this figure?).

The Government will spend $2.4 billion over nine years developing two to four commercial scale carbon capture projects.

It’s money spent on what will have to be dead technology. I mean it’d be great to have some magic process for capturing the CO₂ but I’d have to think the energy/resources that go into that will be so high as to be a waste of time in the long term.

I think we can do almost anything if we exert enough money, manpower and energy (hell, that’s why I want widespread renewable energy to have oodles of energy to do crazy stuff like desalination to overcome drought and remove pressure on rivers.. if you have the electricity for “free” then you can do that sort of thing AND repair the environment). But at some point you start making so little energy that it isn’t worth doing or you compromise on your original goal. I suspect coal companies will settle on a massive compromise. Like a small dick Hummer driver recycling a softdrink can and proudly proclaiming they are green, the coal industry will settle on locking away some small fraction of emissions or in such a way as to be non permanent. Perhaps it will be enough to deflect opponents sufficiently to milk another few decades.

Money spent on solar or wind generation is money on a real technology that works now and has many large scale installations worldwide. Carbon sequestration technology today (as far as I can tell) has no real viable option to long term lock away the gas. The closest we have to “capture” is pumping it into oil wells (to help squeeze more oil out). That notion of using it to help get out more carbon dioxide producing fossil fuels seems to me to not really be helping reduce overall emissions (e.g. “oh look, the coal’s emissions are buried to help us get hard to get oil which is then burnt in cars”).

The Glowing Green Green
I’d say if we’re going to have money spent on currently theoretical but likely looking: go the new generation IV reactors I reckon. We know that nuclear power generation works, because it powers big chunks of the population around the world. It’d power even more if not for the scaremongering.

Generation IV Nuclear reactor timeline. If we only get over demonising nuclear!

The advantage of some of these designs are that they can run off what we currently call waste, unlocking some of the large amount of remaining energy thus making use of the current stockpiles of waste from aging nuclear facilities.

But let’s get back to renewables.

Ideal “best” approach

The ideal best solution overall would be a combination:

1. using less energy to begin with
2. re-using things rather than endless/mindless consumption
3. solar
4. wind
5. geothermal/tidal/hydro/whatever other clean energy sources there are available for the locality

I think massive amounts could be attained via the first 4 of those things which require no new technology (next gen nuclear or magical as-yet-no-working-scale carbon dioxide capturing).

The first is definitely achievable as an article today “Pull the plug, it’s socket science” says:

ALL over the world, electrical appliances are blinking away on standby – and burning so much energy they need 60 coal-fired electricity stations a year to power them, analysis by the International Energy Agency has found.

And they go on to say that “efficiency is the fastest way to cut greenhouse gas emissions” and discuss the role of legislation (since market forces aren’t usually enough):

Dr Jollands believes legal standards on energy efficiency are important where the market is failing to deliver reform and cited the example of set-top boxes for pay television, which are usually switched on all day, every day.

In most homes and offices, set-top boxes are supplied by a company that has no incentive to make them energy efficient because the electricity bills are paid by the consumer. An analysis by the energy agency found that in the United States about 150 million switched-on set-top boxes burned the equivalent of six supertankers of oil a year.

Dr Jollands said there was a cultural aversion to regulation in some parts of the world, but if the market was not working, regulations could be effective without imposing additional costs.

I agree we need legislation to push this stuff forward. History has shown that left to their own devices things do not progress past the “what ever is cheapest”. You have to put a cost or penalty on polluting in order to get things cleaner.

Consumption is not success

The second thing (reusing and cutting back on consumption) would require a major shift in how we view a successful economy. This is probably a topic that requires its own blog, the idea of banishing consumption driven measures. But basically I think that consumption should NOT be the primary measure of success as it is currently because it largely consists of rewarding inefficiency and celebrating unnecessary buying of items. Consider the reuse of something in a consumption based economic model: bad! Bad because no new products are consumed, thus no new jobs making stuff, delivering stuff, stocking shelves, retailing etc.

Consume! Consume!

Should goods cost a bit more to be made robust, repairable and reusable? Hell no: that’s going to damage consumption down the track!

But back to clean coal: it’s no surprise the cost estimates are high because they’re just subsidised by society at large copping the pollution. Naturally when they start adhering to environmental standards they, like every other industry subject to environmental controls, will start to cost more. We already force other types of polluters to wear the costs of filtering, processing or otherwise dealing with waste: coal should have to do the same.

A few years back (ok a handful of years back.. I’m getting old) I had the “pleasure” of having a seat next to the trading floor while I was consulting at Macquarie bank. It was a fun team to be sitting with, but the constant roar of non-nonsensemustgetthistradecommunicatedtosomeonebyyellingquickly got a bit hard on the nerves. Sure: you were awake, but it was more of a fight or flight type instinct.

Unlike the economy, I escaped from the insurance bankers and got back to a quieter seat, but I’d have to say that too much exposure to that sort of environment day in day out would slowly but surely fray your nerves.

Shepard by the yellow river can't stand the pollution smell.

Villager in Guangdong province washes in polluted water.

Wroking in heavy dust, migrant workers invariably start to have health problems after 1-2 years.

See here for some explanations of the pictures, original source is from here.

Some other equally scary pictures from China (originally from here):

Man collecting dead fish in Guanqiao Lake in central China's Hubei province.

Migrant workers sort through industrial and household waste in Beijing.

I’ve posted in the past about the idea that China may solve global warming (kinda) because of the pressures such massive growth puts on it, but as I mentioned (at length): it is paying a hell of a price currently. Let’s hope with that comes the ability to clean-up the vast unliveable areas (and soon!).

Although my current job is a little lacking on presentations, I’ve ended up over the years with a bit of an appreciation for presentations (that’s why TED talks are pretty interesting to see various styles).

I liked his presentation for the part with the paper plane as a “prop” then a very real world way of comparing the energy output of different sized kite wings. Lots of good linking with analogies. Not the world’s best speaker (I still rate Bill Clinton for impeccable noise word free delivery), but the end effectiveness of the talk is the sum of the parts.

I’ve talked previously about China possibly solving global warming. It’d be fitting if they did this in part with one of their inventions: the kite.

MotoCzysz E1pc - Electric just got sexy!

Their petrol burning version is pretty sexy also:

The petrol burning cousin the C1

I mean there’s so much good stuff about this thing it’s hard to know where to start:

• aesthetics are beautiful (see here for the full sized glory)
• it’s electric
• it has easily swapped out battery packs
• it’s beautiful from any angle I’ve found a picture of

Dash of the MotoCzysz E1pc, is that an iPhone for the console?

Technicals

Bit hard to find out much, but here’s what I’ve found or guessing on:

• lightweight carbon fibre and aluminium construction to free as much weight for batteries as possible
• 125kg of “hot swap” lithium ion battery packs (according to ecofriend and ashphaltandrubber). There are 10 (6 visible, 4 hidden under the faring).
• Three electric motors for drive
• Suspension adjustment is different (MotoCzysz fork/suspension assembly has some magic from their C1 bike)
• crank appears to go through the pivot point to the right side for final drive to the rear sprocket (see picture below and see whether you agree with me)

The swingarm, but pay attention to the pivot point - some magic for drive transmission to the other side of the bike?

• I think the chain goes something like:

My guess as to how they have the 3 motors rigged

• This appears to be the “frame” of the bike:

The frame I presume. Certainly a bit different.

• No gears (pretty standard for electric vehicles)
• 0 to 120mph (193km/h) in less than 11seconds (this was an “easy” test with less than 100% capacity)
• probably has some storage capacity in the “fuel” tank

History and Early Concept Pictures

The earlier pictures are a bit different, but pretty close really:

Early sketch

Earlier concept shot

There’s a video of the MotoCzysz E1pc to show it’s not just fluff.

Australia plans to build the world’s largest solar power station with an output of 1000 megawatts in a A$1.4 billion (US$1.05 billion) investment, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on Sunday.

Finally! maybe this will be the boost that is needed to get solar over the tipping point from the niche “isn’t that a shiny expensive novelty” to something substantial. Or at least to the “isn’t that a shiny expensive widespread thing”.

Always good to compare things to the rest of the world:

“The government plans to invest with industry in the biggest solar generation plant in the world, three times the size of the world’s current biggest, which is in California,” Rudd said.

I think solar has enormous potential in Australia to cut down the amount of coal we’re burning for daytime things like air conditioners, factory equipment, aluminium smelters etc. Particularly when (as I’m still enjoying the novelty after the UK) we get so much bloody sunlight:

It’s a bit of a pity we’re also blessed with oodles of coal, which means Australia can afford to be lazy and polluting and still have enough electricity for everything.

As an aside: here’s an interesting quote from the long dead Thomas Edison from way back in 1931:

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. … I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.

Incidentally, he was talking to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone.

For practical solar hitting the mainstream: I’d like to see more use of dead space as solar collection areas. We’ve lots of roads/railway lines/rooftops that could surely be feeding back into the grid. Lots of space you can run strips of metre wide solar cells for long distances. All we really need is for the cost per unit and the ability to plug back into the grid without too many $$$$.

Anyhow, good to see a proven real technology like solar getting such a chunk of cash, rather than more bleating on about the hopes and dreams of a clean coal fantasy land. I’m hoping we get to a point where we just leave the coal in the ground and it becomes just another geological feature because we just don’t need it.

Oh and here’s another one:

and a cutesy cartoon one explaining the “science”:

More science:

Scary thing is that there are a tonne of serious ones from the coal industry making grandiose claims about technology that simply does not exist.

• ability to lay down the law
• massive market to apply new technology to
• lots and lots of money

So let me start by saying China is a horribly polluted place. The type of polluted that makes bushfire haze a clear day and makes effluent outfall water look like Evian spring water. Not only horribly polluted, but possessing some messed up socio/economic habits. An example of this is the willingness to trade in their environment, quality of life and ability to not have 3 headed babies for a quick buck.

There’s an overwhelming attitude problem that if something looks “kinda close enough”, then that’s good enough or that dumping pollution into rivers/land can be take place without consequence.

Some particularly shocking examples of this came up while I was living just over the border in Hong Kong:

• baby food that looked and smelled ok, but had zero nutritional content. Result: 50 to 60 dead kids who starved to death while the poor parents tried in vain to feed them with milk powder that was pretty much sawdust. (See http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/10/health/main616432.shtml )
• Use of a carcinogenic red dye (called sudan red) in duck eggs because the redder the yolk, the more they can sell ‘em for (see http://french.hanban.edu.cn/english/health/189567.htm ) and also in sauce (http://www.china.org.cn/english/health/209080.htm)
• Benzene slick down the river. This stuff causes leukaemia upon exposure! (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4545502.stm )
• Major pollution of the rivers, such that freshwater dolphins are now gone. (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6935343.stm)
• Fake medical supplies (see http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-01/08/content_10625425.htm and  http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/jul/05/china.internationalnews1 )

Those are just some of the cases that spring to mind. This one kinda sums it up though:

Pollution from China blows out to sea. Image courtesy of NASA.

Anyhow, on to how this environment and how they might (kinda) fix it.

So China has the balls, ability and pliable population who are well trained to accept blanket decisions necessary for the massive change in lifestyle, technology and society that tackling climate issues demands. If coupled with blanket decisions that yield a good environmental outcome: they may well drag the necessary technologies from niche upper-middle-class-with-expendable-income to mass produced for peasants affordability.

An example of this ability to execute mass bans or decrees is the decision to ban motorcycles in Guangzhou (http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200611/14/eng20061114_321188.html). Now I don’t happen to think that this is going to necessarily have a good environmental outcome (more likely the opposite if people get cars instead), but it shows the sort of scale of sweeping authoritarian powers that China can swing into action. Try that in USA, UK, Australia and see how far it gets you. If you dig further and look into the darker areas where China has flexed its muscles: censorship. So successfully implemented (see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/internet/sidebyside.html) that uni students fail to recognise perhaps the most famous and powerful photograph of political protest and indeed of China (see http://www.stwr.org/india-china-asia/the-tank-man.html)

A survey of uni students in China revealed censorship to have been very successful. Most thought it was from another country.

The Chinese government has in various degrees stomped on, arrested, imprisoned, “disappeared” and executed countless people for disagreeing with the party lines or expected behaviours.

So that’s the “balls” and execution aspect (no pun intended).

The motivation for China is that world prices for resources are going up, as is their internal needs as well. This will continue to rise most likely exponentially. Their energy needs (to fulfill the USA, Australasia and Europe’s increasing desire for plastic trinkets to show self worth) are going through the roof. So short of military action to secure supplies of diminishing oil/gas/coal: they’ll have to look elsewhere. This elsewhere is likely to be from renewable energy.

Wind energy not just hot air in China

An article (see http://ecoworldly.com/2008/07/03/energy-experts-say-chinas-wind-energy-could-grow-1667-by-2020/) talks of how China is exceeding their targets for wind energy and are likely to increase their wind energy sources by 1667% by 2020. Another article (see http://www.cleantech.com/news/3815/china-drives-global-wind-energy-supply-market) says that China has the fastest growing wind energy market. The rest of the world is struggling with NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) or pseudo environmentalism bullshit, government apathy and planning hurdles to the point where they’re almost crippled when it comes to actually executing on plans for renewables or affordable nuclear over coal fired power stations.

I predict it won’t be long before China’s dabbling in electric bikes turns into enforced decrees about electric/hybrid cars.

Meanwhile we’ll have the same old stories of misdirected consumer/voter energy as ridiculous ideas like “reduce the tax on petrol/gasoline” are the best we can come up with elsewhere. Want to live in a huge house, buy lots of shit we don’t need, eat 10 kilos of meat a day followed by a 2Litre bucket of coke while driving a hummer h2 with 1 mile per gallon fuel efficiency, but expect both the cost of living and quality of life to improve as well as the environment sort itself out? Get ready for a severe reality check. But hey, maybe reducing taxes will put off that reality check by a month or two while we pointlessly worry about plastic bags instead.

So while the stream of coal, oil will continue into China at increasing rates, when the crunch time comes China will have massive investments in the “other” options that the industrialised nations are putting off because they can (with a bit of whinging) withstand because they can afford them.

It can’t NOT go green

In short China can’t afford NOT to cut itself off from oil/gas/coal as soon as possible. It has money, sure, but thrift is the name of the game when you’re talking a billion or so citizens wanting refrigerators and transport.

Want a car? All cars in China must be electric. The only whining allowed is the whine of an electric drive train.
Want a house? You’ll have to put 5 square metres of Mao’s best solar cells on the roof and a little red transformer box or it’ll be bulldozed.
Need a job? We need a million workers sticking propellers on small scale wind generators, and another million sticking the “made in china” stickers on the propellers.
Don’t want a wind farm, nuclear plant, tidal generator or solar farm in your backyard: tough. Protest and you’ll disappear like all those before you.

How will this help? Well it’ll hopefully bring down the price of technology, give other governments a kick up the arse when they get left for dead as China becomes the world’s super power while the rest of the developed world struggles to support an industry nearly entirely dependent on oil and coal.
Sure, China will have by that stage pretty much guaranteed their people will be unable to drink clean water, eat food free of countless carcinogens or see 10 metres down the road on most days due to the street level nature of the cloud in “The land of the great white cloud”: but they’ll have main-streamed the solar/wind/nuclear technology and mass produced it for 5 bucks a pop which will (I hope) give the rest of the world some viable options to fix their problems while they debate on the colour of the promotional fridge magnets for members of the community consultation committee for deciding the font to be used in the applications for the environmental impact statement studies for a trial wind farm project.
That’s if China hasn’t experienced the (quite justified) mass uprising against the big brother nature of their existence. If so: they can join the rest of us in our paralysis of social freedoms as the end grows ever nearer.

I’ve heard suggestions involving burying, sticking in oceans, filling mines with it, blowing it into oil wells. While the oil well option sounds like it might work a bit (they currently pump salt water into a lot of ‘em to keep the flow going): I don’t really see how you can capture all (or even a significant portion) of the CO2 and stuff it in there (last time I checked the oil rigs weren’t exactly near to power stations either). None of these options sound like a particularly permanent solution or likely to be able to account for a decent chunk of the emissions.

Here’s a novel idea: if you want the CO₂ back in the ground so much: don’t dig the bloody stuff up in the first place! Yet still the politicians believe this will surely work, yes that’s right they have lots of faith in this energy industry quackery. It’s akin to the cigarette industry saying people don’t need to stop smoking because one day there’ll be a cure for cancer soon enough.

Whatever the solution it’ll most likely be expensive, require large changes to infrastructure and require quite a bit of energy to do. Yet it has widespread professed support from the energy industry, you know: the same industry that baulks at anything other than coal (e.g. solar, wind, tidal, nuclear) because of the above reasons (too expensive, requires new infrastructure and still requires energy to build everything).

A Time article by Bryan Walsh points out another issue with Coal fired power stations: the ash left over after you burn it (and have the goblins and fairies take away the CO₂ in little balloons or something) is pretty nasty stuff. In an accidental spill of coal ash/water a power plant in Tennessee Valley, USA has “released 100 times more waste than the Exxon Valdez disaster“, wiped out property and polluted the waterways with all of the nasty stuff that still lurks in coal after it’s been converted into airborne pollutants and power for those flat screen TVs and air conditioners we all know and love.

So not only do you have massive amounts of this toxic slurry to get rid of still but the information has been floating around for years that coal power stations release more radioactive substances into the atmosphere than nuclear ones, and the ash also contains the nasty radioactive stuff. To what extent that is true is a bit trickier to figure out due to the battle of misinformation that went on back a few decades ago. Given anything dug out of the ground tends to have radiation of some sort (e.g. household bricks leak small amounts of radiation) it stands to reason that coal would have that too, difference is that it is getting burnt (so would release that into the air in some quantities) but the real problem is the heavy metals and other “hostile to humans” stuff in the ash by the sounds of it.

I found a fact sheet that has an analysis of some coal from the USA and what it typically contains (from Radioactive Elements in Coal and Fly Ash:
Abundance, Forms, and Environmental Significance). Their conclusion:

Radioactive elements in coal and fly ash should not be sources of alarm. The vast majority of coal and the majority of fly ash are not significantly enriched in radioactive elements, or in associated radioactivity, compared to common soils or rocks. This observation provides a useful geologic perspective for addressing societal concerns regarding possible radiation and radon hazard.
The location and form of radioactive elements in fly ash determine the availability of elements for leaching during ash utilization or disposal. Existing measurements of uranium distribution in fly ash particles indicate a uniform distribution of uranium throughout the glassy particles. The apparent absence of abundant, surface-bound, relatively available uranium suggests that the rate of release of uranium is dominantly controlled by the relatively slow dissolution of host ash particles.
Previous studies of dissolved radioelements in the environment, and existing knowledge of the chemical properties of uranium and radium can be used to predict the most important chemical controls, such as pH, on solubility of uranium and radium when fly ash interacts with water. Limited measurements of dissolved uranium and radium in water leachates of fly ash and in natural water from some ash disposal sites indicate that dissolved concentrations of these radioactive elements are below levels of human health concern.

I don’t think having the water/ash mix free and easy through the waterways would really constitute an environment that you’ll be able to control the pH or final destination of the particles much. Subsequent human/animal ingestion of said particles probably won’t be great either, but seems fairly upbeat about the danger it poses “below levels of human health concern”. So perhaps the radiation won’t kill you, but all the other nasty stuff might.

Regardless of how nasty and in what way the ash is, I think everyone knows coal is a dirty industry. Deadly if you consider how many people die in coal mines worldwide. We built our modern world on burning whatever crap we could (wood, dung, peat, coal, oil, gas) and now we need to clean our act up. While we continue to be stuck burning things to release their energy there’s likely to be stuff pumping into the atmosphere that we can’t sensibly prevent (at least not without using a significant chunk of that energy we’re trying to produce in the first place) so the best course of action is simply not commit ourselves to having to burn the stuff in the first place.

Containing and collecting gasses will always be tricky or require energy to convert them into something that won’t just float on up to mess up the climate so how about something a bit less aesthetically challenged and which we know works:

Renewable energy is much prettier huh? (in Germany, near border of belgium. )

Perhaps then we’ll spend less time on CO₂ pie in the sky solutions and more on something real,
Nathan