Cut all CO2 emissions?
It came in July, courtesy of the chief climate adviser to the German government. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chair of an advisory council known by its German acronym WBGU,
Ooo-kay
is a physicist whose specialty, fittingly, is chaos theory. Speaking to an invitation-only conference at New Mexico’s Santa Fe Institute, Schellnhuber divulged the findings of a study so new he had not yet briefed Chancellor Angela Merkel about it. The study has now been published. If its conclusions are correct–and Schellnhuber ranks among the world’s half-dozen most eminent climate scientists–it has monumental implications for the pivotal meeting in December in Copenhagen, where world leaders will try to agree on reversing global warming.
Schellnhuber and his WBGU colleagues go a giant step beyond the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body whose scientific reports are constrained because the world’s governments must approve their contents. The IPCC says that rich industrial countries must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 (from 1990 levels) if the world is to have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. By contrast, the WBGU study says the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020--i.e., quit carbon entirely within ten years. Germany, Italy and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035, and the world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050. The study adds that big polluters can delay their day of reckoning by “buying” emissions rights from developing countries, a step the study estimates would extend some countries’ deadlines by a decade or so.
I hope the esteemed members of the WBGU will forgive my audacity, but here’s my advice:
Put down the crack pipe, Hans.
As scientists, you and your WBGU buddies ought to know that
- humans
- animals
- plants
exhale CO2. Yes, the biologists are the ones who say so, and I know chaos theory physicists aren’t best friends with biologists, but really.
For “the world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050”, it would mean the extermination of all forms of organic life on the planet, and even then you would have the carbon generated by their rotting process.
Friends don’t let friends stay on crack. Put down the pipe, guys.
Either that, or get a better translator.
Jonah Goldberg and Ace are posting on it too.
I suppose he will allow living animals to exhale. Of course, numbers of humans and many other creatures will diminish sharply as agriculture fails for lack of cultivation, and cities starve for lack of transportation. We’d eliminate all synthetic materials, paints, plastics, steel. Just about everything we have today. Welcome to the new stone age!
Safariman,
One can almost see the billboard, “Carbon free’s the way to be!”, only with no one around to read it.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber knows no country can be carbon free, but he can get Obama to pay a heavy tax (cap and trade) to the U.N. in order to make us carbon free. By the way, does anyone know what happens with the money paid for cap and trade? Who’s bank account does it go into?
Two things:
1.) Plants actually consume CO2 and “exhale” oxygen. That’s where we get our oxygen from. Like, all of it. Doesn’t really address your primary point, but takes a bit of the punch out of your “ha ha physicists don’t know biology” statement. Just sayin’.
2.) The old “…but WE produce CO2, thus we can never be at zero emissions!” is a fine attack on a complete straw man. Whenever someone talks about “zero emissions”, that’s *net*, not gross. So if burning one tree releases X amount of atmospheric carbon, growing Y plants will capture more or less that same amount of carbon (see point #1) and you’re back at zero. All the plants that grow on their own pretty much balance all the animals; the concern is that a combination of reducing the carbon-capturing plants (esp. rain forest losses and changes in the oceans that reduce algae) and releasing lots of formerly-solid carbon into the atmosphere (ie through burning fossil fuels) is producing atmospheric carbon way faster than it can be consumed. Pursuing “zero emissions” means reducing the amount of stored carbon we release as well as finding ways to increase the storage (by plants or whatever other means) of existing carbon.
This is all a simplified explanation, but it’s still more info than you appear to be packing. There’s a lot of valid debate over what, if anything, should be done, and how, and when. But you might want to get the raw basics in hand before strongly denouncing the conclusions of others.
All that said, yes, Schellnhuber’s friggin’ nuts. The changes that would need to happen to make the US zero-emissions by 2020 would barely be possible (and certainly disastrous) in a game of SimCity, much less in a real-world scenario. Saying “zero carbon by 2050 or APOCALYPSE!!!11!” is basically a longer way of saying “well, apocalypse”. And that assumes he’s right, which is hardly a proven point (and if he were, the sane thing to do would be saying “it’s going to happen, here’s how we prepare” instead of “here’s how we could prevent it in happy fantasy land”).
Making nonsensical demands backed by end-of-the-world hysteria doesn’t help anybody in the debate. But I’m sure it gets him plenty of guest speaking gigs and front-page interviews.
So I agree with your conclusion, despite the disrespect I display for how you reached it.
Raka,
At night plants burn up the sugars they need for their metabolism to work thus generating CO2.
shunha: In theory, if the total amount of carbon produced under cap+trade is equal or less than the total allotted under the “credits” that are given out, nobody pays for anything (except to one another, if they choose to trade). Anyone that produced more carbon than they had credits for (both given and purchased) would presumably have to pay a fine to whatever regulatory agency (EPA?) was managing the system. There are a number of very different plans being proposed, but all of them start with enough credits that it should very much be a buyer’s market for at least the first five years or so (a point that sticks in the craw of many environmentalists).
Nothing would be paid to the UN, period. Under some of the more likely plans, however, money *could* flow to other countries. These plans allow the purchase of offsets– which can take the form of foreign companies reducing their own carbon and passing those “credits” to a US company (basically taking the carbon-credit market global). So Acme Corp is going to produce 100 tons more carbon than they have credits for. They have the choice of either buying those credits from their neighbor Emca Corp at $10/ton, or buying offsets from some Chinese partner that can reduce its own carbon for $5/ton. Assuming this can actually be monitored and regulated in a feasible way (and I have no idea how it could), this is actually preferable from an environmental perspective, since it goes after the low-hanging fruit of the least efficient entities in low-income countries. But it’s yet another net outflow of cash from the US, which… yeah, I don’t think I need to go into why that can suck.
If worldwide carbon reduction has to happen, it’s probably the least-worst way to do it– a market solution, rather than trying to control it centrally. A global market also takes the sting out of some countries having more stringent rules than others, and it doesn’t punish developing countries the same way a global fiat system would (eg “We got to do whatever we wanted on our way up, but you guys have to jump straight from steam-power to nanotech with no infrastructure and heavy competition”). But it’s still a big flow of money across our border, which I don’t know that we can afford. So… yeah.
Fausta: yes, plants produce CO2 at night. But it’s a tiny fraction of the CO2 they consume during the day. I call hair-splitting.
The Germans seem to have an unfortunate tendency to become rigidly dogmatic every 50-years or so, and then something bad happens… Anyhow this is a world-wide ponzi trading-scheme with its main purpose taxing people in every direction possible to prop-up a failing collectivist inspired vision of Elitist Utopia.
Listen to Raka. He knows. You don’t. Not one. So quiet. Listen.
Raka, if Fausta split hairs, didn’t you do the same. You know what she meant. Too, I suspect that we also need to get rid of all the cows and old guys like me tat produce so much methane. 🙂
When beans digest, you get methane and carbon dioxide…and a touch of bad smelling mercaptans. I think Schellnhuber just ate too many beans. But he’s dangerous. The REAL long term goal is that we pay taxes and fees to the extent that we have no real control over our lives.
Don’t give them any ideas, GM!!
What bugs me the most about “climate change” is that the people who are the most concerned with it are the very same people who want nothing more than to control most of our economy and our people – socialists, progressives, communists, whatever you want to call them. The “Al Gores” of the world I find very untrustworthy, and therefore I find this whole subject to be suspect. The UN, the EU, and the US government are all fraught with corruption and the bend towards transnationalism is more and more recognizable. It is impossible to trust the information coming from these sources. So, should we really be concerned? Can climate change be proven and also proven to be so detrimental as to take away freedom from people? I am not convinced. Then last year, we are told it is too late to make any changes anyway, we’re doomed. So why are we making changes? The experts seem much more focused on how to use this “crisis” as a political tool to take even more power away from the individual and place it in the hands of government. Clearly our leadership is not humble enough to accept what we don’t know and is also not humble enough to accept as primary the individual’s freedom of choice to live life without the government’s “help”.