Apocalypse Now

    Finally, at long last, main stream media is starting to talk seriously about the danger of climate change. The election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a noticeable bump impelling the discussion forward with her advocacy of the so called Green New Deal. Gretta Thunberg, the 16 year old Swedish student picketing the Swedish Parliament to do something about climate change has catalyzed similar student movements in Europe and North America. Their advocacy is particularly poignant. It is they, the young, who will reap the whirlwind, not their middle aged parents and the white haired feckless politicians and corporate elites who have done nothing but offering lip service. Many politicians are worse than microcepahalic morons by actively denying the existence of  anthropogenic climate change and worse ridiculing scientific research warning of its negative implications to all life on earth. There is simply no credible evidence that the sudden rise in atmospheric CO2 is  not a direct result of the now long in the tooth Industrial Revolution. The exact role of how rising CO2 levels influence climate are still being researched but there is no doubt whatsoever that atmospheric CO2 plays and important and perhaps dominant role. The warming of the earth correlates with rising CO2 and perhaps the most stunning statistic is how fast atmospheric CO2 is rising. For perhaps the last 800,000 years atmospheric CO2 has ranged between 275 and 295 parts per million based upon ice core samples. A few studies indicate similar numbers going back as long as 15 million years. It has only been in the last 150 years that the numbers have been climbing. More than 85% of the carbon injected into the atmosphere has occurred since the end of WW2. More than 50% has occurred since the Administration of the senior George Bush. The world passed 400 parts per million in 2016 and 2 years on it is now 411,........ 5 ppm per year. This data is contained in a new book by David Wallace-Wells titiled “The Uninhabitable Earth.”

There was a brief dip in world CO2 emissions following the so-called great recession in 2008 but  nonsensical assertions that CO2 emissions have stabilized is not borne out by the data. The US emitted an increase of 1.6% in 2017 and 3.4% in 2018. The increase is greater for industrializing countries. China’s increase was 4.7% last year. India’s 6.3%. I will leave the reader to make up his/her mind on the urgency of the looming climate emergency. At the present time I see no sign of any coordinated action to address the issue. For most of us Americans, it simply hasn’t hit home. Until a critical mass of the population becomes convinced that the problem of global warming is real, nothing is likely to be done. James Schlessinger, the first energy secretary in this country said that Americans have only 2 modes of action: complacency and panic.  My purpose in this post is to try to offer possible strategies to slow or arrest the rise in CO2.  I have noticed to my dismay that even the advocates of action to combat global warming have not laid out in detail what actually might be done beyond opaque statements like “decarbonization” of the economy, or moving  to “renewable” energy sources like wind and solar. The Green New Deal has offered a mishmash of proposals which predate the election of AOC by more than a decade but I have found them vague and many of their recommendations have little to do with lowering CO2 levels. I would like to offer concrete proposals to reduce CO2 and in future posts I will continue the discussion on the consequences of doing so.

In order to lower CO2 emissions we need to know where the CO2 is coming from. What are the sources, the sectors and the percentages. The EIA has some extremely well done graphs and images which I will present.

The left hand column shows the sources of primary energy and the right hand the supplied  sectors. Fossil energy sources supply  80% of our energy.Renewable energy, primarily hydro supplies 11% and Nuke power 9%. The lines from these sources connect with the sectors giving the percentages . If we are going to cut CO2 emissions we will be targeting the right column. Transportation consumes 29% of primary energy, Industry 22%, residential and commercial structures 11% and electrical power generation 38%. If we as a country are serious about cutting CO2 production we will need a target figure. I think we should try to get to emission figures between the end of WW2 and the end of the 20th century. Arbitrarily I would think we could get to numbers emitted per capita in the 1950's, arguably the greatest boom years of the 20th century for the United States. This was the decade of Donald Trump's MAGA period. This was the dacade of the great suburbia build out, the private automobile explosion in transportation, Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System crisscrossing the nation. How much was the world emitting in that decade? Here is the graph:

It appears the world was emitting between 5 billionand 10 billion tons in that decade and we are emitting over 37 billion tons presently. . Is it realistic to think we can cut CO2 emissions from over  37 billion to 10 billion tons annually? There is little doubt that the world will eventually get to 10 billion tons because this tonnage came from a finite supply of fossil energy which is fast depleting. The issue is how should we get there? By apocalypse, by war? by a global warming Armageddon? Or by a global concerted effort to try save our planet from those scenarios by voluntary and cooperative reductions fast enough and powerful enough to avert those very real possibilities which will eventuate if we don't take concerted action. 

       What will cutting emissions of this magnitude involve? Specifically how will the lifestyles of our world's citizens be altered by such reductions of climatic CO2? How fast and how radical do we need to make these reductions ? These are just a few of the questions that will be asked if the world embarks on a fundamental reworking of our energy based economic system.In the next blog post I will try to offer possible options to reduce the world's most dangerous poison Gas:CO2.