your shrinking carbon dioxide allotment

Preface, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Fire from fossil fuels burning in internal combustion engines and electric power plants is the foundation of the global economy and makes our modern lifestyles possible. We are surrounded with the tangible benefits of fire’s energy, but its most notable by-product — carbon dioxide — goes unseen. Only relatively recently have we learned how threatening the increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is to the very way of life fire supports.

The highly developed technology we have to extract, deliver, refine, and combust fossil fuels is one reason the CO2 concentration has become dangerous, but the other reason — rarely mentioned — is our sheer numbers, about 6.6 billion with more arriving every day. And everyone one of us wants the benefits of this ancient, concentrated energy source. So there is not just pressure to continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, but also to increase the rate of burning.

Over at Growth is Madness! John Feeney has another compelling post, After a “lost decade”, experts call for renewed focus on population growth and in the comments Magne Karlsen challenged me:

A math genius like Trinifar, for example, could quite easily make a diagram here? One which can show how much additional CO2 cuts must be expected from each and every one of us, as the world’s population keeps growing, and we are still expected to look forward to cutting our CO2-emissions by 20%, 50% or even 80% by such-and-such time.

Ever fond of a friendly challenge, what follows is my response. (See notes below for data sources used to build the charts.)

the CO2 problem

Here’s what the historical data looks like with projections for the next century.

Until the beginning of the 20th century the concentration of C02 in the atmosphere was stable, then things began to change quickly.

• The gold line splits in two after 2000 to show the results of best and worst projections from the six scenarios addressed in the IPCC report.
• The red line highlights the danger zone. There is wide agreement among climate scientists that a C02 concentration at or above 450 ppm will cause irreversible damage to the environment, the sort of damage you don’t want to subject your children to. In fact, some say 450 may be too high.

the population problem

This chart adds population information that some of you have have seen before.

Notice the proximity of the Green Revolution to the upswing in both population and C02 concentration. Note too the industrial revolution beginning in the later half of the 18th century. It was largely fueled by coal, a necessity since most of the trees in the UK had been chopped down for fuel. Not shown is the Age of Oil which began at the beginning of the 20th century and made possible the automobile, the airplane, and the Green Revolution.

zooming in

Let’s focus on the two century span centered on the year 2000.

Same data, but it doesn’t seem quite so scary at this scale — that is, until you think about it a little bit. With the population still rising sharply, we need to find a way to limit the CO2 concentration and satisfy everyone’s desire for a modern lifestyle.

the target

If we take away the worst case projection, we get this:

The obvious question is, how to we get there from here? That’s what efforts like the Kyoto and Montreal Protocols try to map out, but it is rare to find anyone being explicit about the shear scale of the problem, certainly not a fragile international coalition. Consider,

• Everyone wants a modern lifestyle.
• The rise of the C02 concentration in the atmosphere will soon (within your lifetime if you are under 30) make it impossible for anyone to have the current modern lifestyle.
• The modern lifestyle is dependent on burning fossil fuels.
• Burning fossil fuels — which power the world economy — must be severely curtailed in order to stop the rise of CO2.
• We are adding (at least) another 40% to the current population all of whom will want a modern lifestyle.
• We have about 10 to 20 years to act before changes in the global climate become irreversible and after which no one will have a chance at the type of lifestyle Americans and Europeans enjoy today (not even Americans and Europeans).

That’s why more people have to pay attention and why scientist who study these matters are often seen as alarmists. The data is alarming and the people who understand it are trying to sound the alarm. If there is a fire in a crowded theater you must warn everybody.

CO2 emissions

C02 concentration rises when we emit more C02 by burning fossil fuels in power plants and internal combustion engines than can be naturally absorbed by the oceans, plants, and soil. The natural absorption process works on the order of centuries which is why we have to act now. You don’t get to go over the red 450 ppm line for a few years, then reduce emissions and expect the concentration to fall back into the safe range within your lifetime.

Let’s look at total worldwide CO2 emissions:

• The heavy black line is the historical data for world-wide CO2 emissions.
• The red line is the IPCC’s projection for its “business-as-usual” scenario (which we might call unmitigated disaster in perhaps the most appropriate use of that term ever).
• The green line is what’s needed to achieve a CO2 concentration of less than 450 ppm (I believe this was from Kyoto Protocol work from the 1990s. I use more current data below.)
• GtC02/y means gigatons (billions of metric tons) carbon dioxide per year.

Notice how the green line keeps going down even after its peak, yet the C02 concentration doesn’t fall. That’s due to the length of time it takes for C02 to be reabsorbed from the atmosphere into the land, oceans, and plants — a very long time. The reason we want the green line to continue down is to avoid staying on the edge of the danger zone indefinitely. That is, we need to get down to the level that the planet can naturally absorb and go a little lower to give the environment a chance to recover from what we’ve done to it. This is a case of “do if for your children and your children’s children.”

your personal allotment

Given a projection for total emissions (the green line in the above chart) and population data (the dotted blue line), we can calculate how much CO2 the average person gets. Since population is going up and the total emissions are going down, the allotment per person goes down fast. More people, less C02 per person.

Let’s look at a more immediate time span and use more current figures to get a better handle on what these numbers mean. The goal of the Kyoto Protocol is to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012. What does that modest but explicit short term goal look like in terms of emissions per person?

Here are the data points. 1990 is the base year for Kyoto, 2004 the most recent year for which I have good data, and 2012 the tail end of the Kyoto time period referred to.

• 1990: 21.4 GtCO2/y, 5.3 billion people, 4.0 tCO2/person
• 2004: 27.0 GtCO2/y, 6.3 billion people, 4.3 tCO2/person
• 2012: 20.3 GtCO2/y, 7.0 billion people, 2.9 tCO2/person

In per capita terms the Kyoto goal doesn’t look quite so modest. The 2012 goal of 2.9 tCO2/person is 76% of that in 1990, 67% of the 2004 figure. If in five years everyone in the world reduced their use of fossil fuels by 33% from what they were using three years ago, we’d hit the Kyoto target.

Are you willing to drive 33% less, use 33% energy for heating and air conditioning, eat 33% less, buy 33% less, move into a house that is 33% smaller, have 33% less to give your children? That’s the scale of the change.

the world is not egalitarian

Sadly, this is a zero-sum game. If you have more someone else has less. Americans have more than most — quite a bit more.

In terms of carbon dioxide emissions per person the American lifestyle is seven times higher than the Kyoto goal for 2012. If a 33% reduction didn’t seem like too much — it came from looking at worldwide averages — perhaps a 86% reduction to bring America to the 2.9 tC02/person goal more easily garners attention. If you live in the USA, don’t worry; as the section heading says, the world is not egalitarian. No one expects much from a nation which, even while being the wealthiest on Earth, can not, or rather, chooses not to provide heath care to all its citizens. [Sorry, the editorializing was just unavoidable.]

The Chinese also live in interesting times:

• 1990: 2.2 GtCO2/y, 1.1 billion people, 2.0 tCO2/person
• 2004: 4.7 GtCO2/y, 1.3 billion people, 3.6 tCO2/person
• 2012: 10.0 GtCO2/y, 1.4 billion people, 7.2 tCO2/person (assuming 10% annual growth in emissions which seems conservative since for 2002 to 2004 the figure was over 20%)

Compare:

The USA did not sign onto the Kyoto Protocol and the Chinese are in essence exempt from it. However, together US and China accounted for 40% of all CO2 emissions in 2004. Worse, neither country has any plan to reduce CO2 emissions — not an inkling. (GWB has only committed to backing voluntary efforts to reduce CO2 emissions per dollar of GNP which is a pernicious way of appearing green without being so.)

it’s the economy stupid

That famous phrase from Bill Clinton’s first successful presidential campaign still provides food for thought. Clinton himself learned a lesson in 1993 when he tried to pass a tax on energy. Then in 1997 he tried to support Kyoto. In both cases he was defeated by the business lobby and (somewhat redundantly) the Republicans. Not even everyone in his own party stood with him.

How can we find the will to make any real reduction in CO2 emissions? You’ll find no one in America — even the political mouth pieces — objecting to reducing CO2 as long as it doesn’t mean a reduction in fossil fuel use. That’s the laughable state of the dialog.

From January 2007 WaPo article:

The United States, with its enormous demand for foreign autos, electronic products and clothing, remains the biggest prop for the global expansion. Not only did U.S. imports total $1.3 trillion in the first 11 months of last year, that figure was nearly $600 billion higher than U.S. exports during that period. As a result, the U.S. economy was providing most of the demand for goods shipped overseas by all countries.

But China is increasingly emerging as the other powerhouse of global growth, particularly as Europe and Japan have lagged. Although China’s exports have decimated companies and jobs around the world, the nation’s appetite for goods is also expanding at great speed, with imports rising about 36 percent last year. Chinese demand for commodities such as petroleum, cement, steel and grain has helped drive prices of those goods sharply upward, bolstering economies as far away as Latin America.

Moreover, any step that severely weakened the Chinese economy would risk dampening growth in countries that serve as major markets for U.S. goods.

We are addicted to economic growth at any cost — even if it means selling off the future. Any cut back in fossil fuel use, the only way to cut CO2 emissions, will retard growth or drive it negative. Until we accept why that is the case and the necessity of cutting back in spite of it, nothing will change.

no silver bullet

No one is going to pull a technological bunny out of the magic hat that enables us to maintain what we know as a modern lifestyle and give up fossil fuels.

• biofuels
• nuclear energy
• hydrogen economy
• carbon sequestration

All of these proposed solutions are fraught with practical, economic, and technical problems. That’s not to say pursuing them is a waste of effort, only that expecting them individually or in combination to substitute for fossil fuels would be foolish. They might help, they might be bridging technologies, useful in weaning ourselves from fossil fuels, but nothing can substitute for fossil fuels without changing the way we live pretty dramatically.

• solar power
• wind power

These are the only working, practical, safe, long-term energy sources we know about. Yet even these are in their infancy when used at large scales and don’t yet begin to replace the vast amount energy produced by fossil fuels — nor do they serve as a direct source of fuel for transportation. They are also intermittent power sources without the flexibility to respond to grid demand in the way we are accustomed to.

acceptance

“Change is gonna come,” as Sam Cooke sang, either in the form of a warming world with a degraded environment or a new sense of what we mean by “a modern lifestyle.” A neomodern lifestyle based on a low-carbon, low-consumption economy must become the goal for America and the rest of world and something to embrace rather than fear.

notes

Primary references:

• IPCC third and fourth assessment reports
• US Census Bureau and its International Data Base
• International Energy Annual of the Energy Information Administration. “An independent agency within the U.S. Department of Energy that develops surveys, collects energy data, and does analytical and modeling analyses of energy issues.”
• Global Carbon Project
• Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, an organization within the United States Department of Energy. See its excellent FAQ.

See the index for related posts.

When looking at C02 data measured by mass you must know if the figures are given for CO2 itself or just C, the carbon. If the latter, multiply by 3.67 to get the CO2 equivalent (which accounts for the mass of the two oxygen atoms). All the figures given above are in mass of C02 rather than C.

credits

I created the image at the top of the post from text and an image in the public domain on Wikipedia.

Many thanks to Magne Karlsen and John Feeney for their encouragement.

Preface, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3