Emissions

Exaggerations in the pipeline
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Exaggerations in the pipeline

There are a lot of claims about the benefits that the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Extension (TMX) pipeline project will supposedly have for BC, and Canada generally. Recently, I listened to Alberta Premier Rachel Notley on the CBC the other day making her pitch, emphasizing the economic benefits for BC. Some of what she said made me immediately reach out to Google to try verify the claims she made. Along the way, I looked critically at some of the other assertions the pipeline promoters have made. In the interest of fairness, I’ll briefly mention some of the exaggerations of the pipeline opponents.

At the outset, let me say that I’m generally inclined to support Premier Notley. In particular, I’m an admirer of the Alberta Climate Leadership Plan that was put together by an expert panel led by University of Alberta economist Andrew Leach. This was a major step forward by an oil-producing province traditionally governed by conservatives. To be sure, the plan is insufficient to reduce emissions to safe levels, but there are yet no such plans enacted anywhere.

Show me one. Continue reading →

The looming irrelevance of big oil
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The looming irrelevance of big oil

This a long piece that would probably be better split up into several separate, focussed articles. Never mind, consider it as a rambling, idiosyncratic and opinionated mind-dump on the subject of the future of oil. I may later rewrite parts of it more coherently and rigorously for a wider readership. As I make my way through the recently published IEA WEO 2016, I will provide updates.

Pioneers or pariahs?

James Gandolfini, the late actor who played the gangster boss Tony Soprano, was once asked what profession he would never have wanted to have pursued. He answered: “an oilman” (video at 5:00). Those of us who have followed careers in the oil industry might be a little surprised, but not really that shocked, by a response like that.  To many people, oil companies and the people who work in them are often seen as the embodiment of greed and environmental destruction. Oilmen get used to being thought of as pariahs. Continue reading →

Carbon budgetting
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Carbon budgetting

Originally published online at Corporate Knights Magazine on May 18, 2016 and in the hardcopy magazine in June 2016.

The Paris Agreement on mitigating climate change seeks to limit emissions with the goal of holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 C above preindustrial levels while also pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 C.

As with any complicated international deal, the devil is in the language. While it acknowledges that developing countries will take longer to peak their greenhouse gas emissions, it agrees that these reductions will be made on the basis of equity.

parisagreement1

This phrasing, “basis of equity,” probably means very different things to different parties to the agreement. The Kyoto Protocol adopted in 1997 was based on the principle of “common but differentiated responsibility,” which is to say that developed countries, with their disproportionate historic responsibility for past emissions, were expected to cut sooner and deeper. This same language is still used in the Paris Agreement reached last year. Continue reading →

The quest for CCS
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The quest for CCS

This article was originally published online at Corporate Knights and will appear in the hard copy Winter 2016 Edition of the Corporate Knights Magazine, which is to be included  as a supplement to the Globe and Mail and Washington Post later in January 2016. The photograph used in the original was changed for copyright reasons. Also reposted at Skeptical Science.

Human civilization developed over a period of 10,000 years during which global average surface temperatures remained remarkably stable, hovering within one degree Celsius of where they are today.

If we are to keep future temperatures from getting far outside that range, humanity will be forced to reduce fossil fuel emissions to zero by 2050. Halving our emissions is not good enough: we need to get down to zero to stay under the 2 C target that scientists and policy makers have identified as the limit beyond which global warming becomes dangerous.

Photo: rustneversleeps

Shell boasting about its government-funded Quest CCS project, on a Toronto bus.  “Shell Quest captures one-third of our oil sands upgrader emissions”

Many scenarios have been proposed to get us there. Some of these involve rapid deployment of solar and wind power in conjunction with significant reductions in the amount of energy we consume.

Continue reading →

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The chance of staying below two degrees: INDCs and the Seven Ifs

There is an easy-to-follow video published by Climate Interactive titled How Could Paris Climate Talks Ratchet Up To Success? It runs quickly through a series a of what-if scenarios to calculate what the effects of various emissions promises could have on global temperatures to 2100. It starts with the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) pledged for the Paris COP, which in many cases only have targets up to 2030, and  extends them using various assumption out to 2100.

The numbers are based on the C-ROADS model, described here.

The presenter, Andrew Jones, shows how we can go from business-as-usual emissions to get to a fifty-fifty chance of staying below two degrees Celsius.  There are a lot of “ifs” along the way, I counted seven. You could easily count more. I assume that the expected warming for various scenarios is the median value, 50/50, derived from climate models. Continue reading →

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So long, Keystone XL

After an approval process that lasted longer than World War Two, President Obama finally said “No” to the Keystone XL pipeline.

This is undoubtedly a major victory for climate activists who had a lot staked on the outcome. Obviously, this is a defeat for the oil sands industry, but it is also something of a blow to the Serious People who are in favour of action on climate, but who consider protesting against the construction of infrastructure to be naïve at best and, at worst, a counterproductive distraction from the real action of international negotiations and policy wonkery.

If you haven’t done so already, read David Roberts who writes most of what I’m going to, but does it better.

What the Serious People say

  • One pipeline is not going to make much difference to global emissions.
  • Oil sands’ emissions have been overstated.
  • Coal.
  • What matters is reducing demand, not restricting supply.
  • There are transportation alternatives to pipelines, like railways, and they are more environmentally risky.
  • It’s a distraction.

This is all true, more or less. But it is also beside the point. Continue reading →

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Have we turned the corner on emissions?

One of these days, the world will get its act together and halt the growth in CO2 emissions. This week, the International Energy Agency reported that the rise in emissions did indeed stall in 2014. According to the announcement, this was the first time in forty years that IEA emissions did not increase, except in years of economic weakness.

When we start to turn the emissions corner for good, this is what it will look like. Although halting emissions growth does not yet put us on the path to meeting the 2°C target, it does at least mean that we might not be destined to follow the business-as-usual path to disaster along the worst-case RCP8.5 pathway. At least we are not going as fast along that road.

Chris Mooney, Climate Nexus and Joe Romm have articles on this, all worth reading.

The IEA announcement was a teaser: we are going to have to wait until June 15, 2015 to see the details of the analysis. In the meantime, I thought it would worthwhile looking at some data to see how confident we can be that this really is a positive signal that we can discern out of the noise and uncertainty.

First, let’s plot year-to-year growth in CO2 emissions, along with global GDP growth, against time:

IEA1

Continue reading →

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Fracking 3: Quantity has a quality all of its own

The essential characteristic of shale gas is that the resource volume is often huge and the magnitude and effort required to extract it is correspondingly enormous. What attracts the fossil fuel companies is the same thing that alarms people living near the shale gas resource. It worries those of us who are concerned about dangerous climate change, as well.

In 2013, the British Geological Survey (BGS) published an assessment on the gas resources of the Bowland Shale in northern England. They concluded that the median gas-in-place resource was 1329 trillion cubic feet. To put this in perspective, this is about 16 times the amount of gas produced  from the UK North Sea over 50 years. The BGS did not estimate the recoverable gas resource, because they considered that the recovery factors are too uncertain to quantify.

How much drilling would it take to exploit this resource?

Continue reading →

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AGU Fall Meeting 2014 poster presentation

I gave a poster presentation on December 16th  at the 2014 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The title is: Emissions of Water and Carbon Dioxide from Fossil-Fuel Combustion Contribute Directly to Ocean Mass and Volume Increases.

You can read the abstract here and I have uploaded a pdf of the poster here. There is a picture of the poster below, click on it to make it readable, although you will need to download the pdf to make out some of the fine print.

Poster2014a

Continue reading →

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