Global Warming Notes (from Articles)
Palm Oil:
* Once planted, the tropical palm oil tree can produce fruit for more than 30 years, providing much-needed employment for poor rural communities. AND the oil is highly lucrative, due largely to the fact that the plan yields more oil per hectare than any major oilseed crop.
* Indonesia is the leading supplier for palm oil
* Palm oil used for cooking, cosmetics, and biofuel
* But palm oil comes with significant costs - oil palm plantations often replace tropical forests, killing endangered species, uprooting local communities, and contributing to the release of climate-warming gases.
**Due mostly to palm production, Indonesia emits more greenhouse gases than any country besides China and the United States
* it is estimated that international buyers, especially in China, India, and the Middle East, will continue to buy more palm oil, regardless of the commodity's environmental or social effects.
* Indonesia's palm oil exports have increased at a very fast rate. This expansion came at an annual expense of some 340,000 hectares of Indonesian countryside, mostly tropical lowland forests. Such expansion could wipe out the remaining natural habitat of several endangered species.
** The promotion of oil palm-based biofuel policy is biased against the need for forests and biodiversity conservation.
***Palm-oil biodiesel was once supported as a solution to climate change - a low-carbon alternative to burning fossil fuel-based gasoline in vehicles. In recent years, however, research has revealed that oil palm development, which often involves the clearing of intact forestland, can contribute far more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than it helps to avoid. The reason is found within the region's expansive peatlands, large deposits of carbon-rich forest debris that is too wet to decompose. When each hectare of peatland is drained for oil palm production, an estimate 3,750-5,400 tons of carbon dioxide is released over 25 years (by comparison, the carbon dioxide released from clearing a hectare of tropical forest, without peat bogs, ranges between 500-900 tons)
* The worse thing you can do, in respect to greenhouse gases, is to have deforestation on peatland forests. It's way worse than normal forests, which is bad enough.
* Global business leaders have joined environmentalists to demand more-sustainable oil palm production. Within Indonesia, industry leaders have publicly stated plans to develop oil palm on "idle lands" instead of dense rainforest.
Changing Fossil Fuel Infrastructure:
* The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient building in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be lost forever.
* Anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this "lock-in" effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change.
* If we do not have an international agreement, whose effect is put in place by 2017, then the door to holding temperatures to 2oC of warming will be closed forever.
* 1997 Kyoto protocol is the only binding international agreement on emissions . . . its current provisions expired in 2012.
* IEA (International Energy Agency) analysis shows what happens if you do not change investment patterns (in power stations, factories, buildings . . . ), which can only happen as a result of an international agreement.
* This is NOT just a problem for the developing world as some people like to believe. In the UK, Europe and the US, there are multiple plans for new fossil-fuelled power stations that would contribute significantly to global emissions over the coming decades.
* Despite the worst recession in 80 years, emissions had risen by a record amount in 2010.
*** The IEA's data is regarded as the gold standard in emissions and energy . . . the central problem is that most industrial infrastructure currently in existence - the fossil-fuelled power stations, the emissions-spewing factories, the inefficient transport and buildings - is already contributing to the high level of emissions, and will do so for decades. Carbon dioxide, once released, stays in the atmosphere and continues to have a warming effect for about a century, and industrial infrastructure is built to have a useful life of several decades.
*** Yet, despite intensifying warnings from scientists over the past two decades, the new infrastructure even now being built is constructed along the same lines as the old, which means that there is a "lock-in" effect - high-carbon infrastructure built today or in the next five years will contribute as much to the stock of emissions in the atmosphere as previous generations.
***The "lock-in" effect is the single most important factor increasing the danger of runaway climate change
* Warming of as little as 1.5oC could cause dangerous rises in sea levels and a higher risk of extreme weather
* Another factor likely to increase emissions is the decision by some governments to abandon nuclear energy, following the Fukushima disaster. Much more investment in renewable energy will be required to make up the gap, but how that would come about is unclear at present.
* Another issue - an unacceptably high number of people - about 1.3 billion - still lack access to electricity. If people are to be lifted out of poverty, this must be solved - but providing people with renewable forms of energy generation is still expensive.
* The decisions being made by politicians today risk passing a monumental carbon debt to the next generation, on for which they will pay a very heavy price. What's seriously lacking is a global plan and the political leverage to enact it.
Political Involvement:
* Severe adverse effects from climate change can be avoided at reasonable cost but only if politicians stop talking and start acting.
* Calls on leaders of the Group of Eight leading economies, particularly the US - the world's largest per capita polluter - to commit themselves to firm timetables of emissions reductions.
* Projections for the amount of carbon that would be released between now and 2050 have been raised because of expected stronger economic growth in China and India over the next four decades.
****Governments in all major economies must demonstrate their political will to establish a well functioning global carbon market that puts a price on carbon emissions. That will send the right economic signals to investors and consumers to deliver the new technologies and changes in behaviour required to combat global warming.
** In addition to a carbon market, countries will need a combination of carbon taxes, regulation and government support to ensure that all parts of their economies are pushed towards a low carbon future.
*Significant carbon reductions are technologically feasible IF the world makes a big move into renewable energy, hugely increases its energy efficiency and embarks on large-scale carbon capture and storage to trap the emissions released by burning coal. Costs of de-carbonising economies could even end up being lower than expected if technological advances speed up. (Previous efforts to reduce ozone depleting chemicals and acid rain ended up costing less than predicted.)
* Nuclear energy could potentially play a role but is not necessarily crucial. Similarly, there could be a role for biofuels but this has to be balanced against the need for affordable food.
* High oil prices could accelerate a move away from oil and gas but the change has to be towards clean alternatives such as renewables rather than dirty options like coal
Fuel Tax, Transport, Climate Change:
* Government money could have funded a low-carbon transport revolution - cheaper, better public transport, safer walking and cycling, and smarter cars that use less fuel.
* To cut carbon, clean up our air and protect motorists from the sting of soaring oil prices, the Government must invest now in developing a transport system the UK can be proud of.
* The Coalition must help to wean our transport system off its addiction to oil if David Cameron is going to deliver on his pledge to lead the "greenest government ever"
* Petrol and diesel prices have risen significantly in recent months prompting calls for the government to take urgent action to make fuel cheaper. BUT when the wider costs of owing and driving a car are taken into account, the overall cost of motoring has been falling in real terms for many years.
***Earlier this year, a Parliamentary Answer revealed that between 1997 and 2010 the real cost of motoring, including buying a vehicle, fell by 7% in real terms. Over the same period, bus and coach fares increased by 24% and rail fares increase by 17%
*** It does illustrate the fact that price signals have relentlessly encouraged motoring - at the expense of cleaner transport alternatives. Little wonder we now have such a car-dependent society.
* In 2011, the government introduced a "fair fuel stabiliser" - which will use income from an increased Supplementary charge on oil and gas production to subsidise the cost of fuel at the pump when crude oil prices are high.
**While environmentalists support the decision to raise £10 billion from oil and gas producers, they say this money should be used to pay for transport measure that will reduce our vulnerability to volatile oil prices. The Government's plan to use this income to subsidise fuel at the pump will simply delay the inevitable and will mean increased pain in the future. We need a package of policies to cut car use, reduce our dependency on oil and reduce carbon emissions.
* Fuel duty rises are effective at changing travel behaviour - high fuel prices have resulted in changes to how people travel and how often they travel. Multi-purpose journeys and car sharing are more common as are walking and cycling for short trips.
* BUT fuel duty must be accompanied by strong measure to ensure all people have access to decent and affordable alternatives to driving, and planning policy that puts walking, cycling and public transport at the centre of new developments
* Environmentalists are urging the government to increase taxation on pollution so that taxes can be cut elsewhere - for example, taxes on jobs
* Transport represents about 25% of domestic UK emissions and more than 90% of this is from road traffic
*** Electric cars have been championed as one of the solutions to reducing carbon emissions from transport, but commentators agree that these are unlikely to be a significant part of the UK's car fleet until well into the 2020s. This is because it will take some time to put in place the necessary charging infrastructure to power them - and develop the battery technology to make these vehicles viable for long journeys. Even then, the carbon-cutting potential of electric cars will only be realised if the electricity that powers them comes from green sources such as wind turbines and solar panels. This means that if we want to cut transport emissions in the short term this will have to be achieved by making conventional cars greener, reducing the need to travel and persuading people to leave their cars at home and travel by greener means. Despite industry foot-dragging, diesel and petrol cars have become more fuel-efficient over recent years, but they could be better still.
*Encourage people to use smarter vehicles that use less fuel - EU car standards must be strengthened to cut carbon from new cars; Vehicle Excise Duty must be changed to make road tax more expensive for gas-guzzlers.
Climate Change Impact on Global Economy:
* Climate change is already contributing to the deaths of nearly 400,000 people a year and costing the world more than $1.2 trillion, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP
* The impacts are being felt most keenly in developing countries where damage to agricultural production from extreme weather linked to climate change is contributing to the deaths from malnutrition, poverty and their associated diseases.
* Air pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels is also separately contributing to the deaths of at least 4.5 million people a year
* A 1oC rise in temperature (temperatures have already risen by 0.7oC globally since the end of the 19th century) is associated with 10% productivity loss in farming. For us, it means losing about 4 million tonnes of food grain, amounting to about $2.5 billion. That is about 2% of our GDP. Adding up the damages to property and other losses, we are faced with a total loss of about 3-4% of GDP. Without these losses, we could have easily secured much higher growth.
* But major economies will also take a hit, as extremes of weather and the associated damage - droughts, floods and more severe storms - could wipe 2% of the GDP of the US by 2030, while similar effects could cost China $1.2 trillion by the same date
*Some research suggests that the melting of the Arctic sea ice could be linked to cold, dull and rainy summers in parts of Europe (such as has been the predominant summer weather in the UK for the last six years.) In the US, this year's drought has raised food prices and in India the disruption to the monsoon has cause widespread damage to farmers.
* Formerly one-off extreme weather episodes seem to be becoming the new normal.
How Global Warming Can Affect the Economy:
*** Most companies that will benefit financially are those that are in the higher lands that will not become flooded, those that can easily adapt to the needs of the Earth and of Earth's population, and people whose job it is to study the environment.
* Real estate prices will rise, due to the simple fact that there will be much less land to buy and sell