Rachel Smolker 2013-05-21T06:01:19-04:00 Rachel Smolker http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=rachel-smolker Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Rachel Smolker Good old fashioned elbow grease. Geoengineering Is a Dangerous Solution to Climate Change tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2907068 2013-03-22T17:30:00-04:00 2013-03-22T17:30:15-04:00 Rachel Smolker http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-smolker/
But the technologies that are promoted -- from spraying sulphate particles into the stratosphere, to dumping iron particles into the ocean, to stimulate carbon absorbing plankton, to burning millions of trees and burying the char in soils -- are all fraught with clear and obvious risks, and are most likely only going to make matters worse.

Yet zeal for these approaches continues unabated. According to right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute, geoengineering offers:

"...the marriage of capitalism and climate remediation...What if corporations shoulder more costs and lead the technological charge, all for a huge potential payoff?...Let's hope we are unleashing enlightened capitalist forces that just might drive the kind of technological innovation necessary to genuinely tackle climate change."


Forget about cutting emissions: manipulating the atmosphere and biosphere through geoengineering is the only sensible option for business and thus policy makers, they claim.

Notably, on the very same website, American Enterprise Institute claims that opponents of the Keystone Pipeline are exaggerating environmental risks while undermining economic gains and 'neighborliness'.

The connection between the tar sands industry and geoengineering advocates is perhaps not immediately obvious, but it makes perfect, ugly sense. Tar sands investors and their allies have long realized that geoengineering could provide them an extended lease on life -- and a convenient means to avoid the shuttering of their industry, which many consider the single most destructive and climat -- damaging form of energy extraction.

Hence, it isn't surprising that tar sands magnate Murray Edwards, director of Canadian Natural Resources Ltd, actually fact funds a geoengineering company that works on techniques for capturing CO2 from the air called Carbon Engineering.

Carbon Engineering's president, David Keith, is one of the most vocal and best funded advocates of geoengineering. Carbon Dioxide air capture is often viewed as benign or "soft" geoengineering. After all, what could possibly be wrong with removing carbon dioxide from the overloaded atmosphere?

For starters, air capture of CO2 requires vast amounts of water and, yes, more energy. According to one study, scrubbing all current annual fossil fuel emissions from the air would deprive 53 million people of water. Even capturing CO2 from power station smokestacks, where it is already in a relatively concentrated stream, requires those power plants to burn nearly one third more fuel in order to generate the same amount of energy, plus the additional demand required to power carbon capture.

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Capturing CO2 from the air, where it is measured in parts per million, would require vastly more power stations to be built in the first place. More carbon-spewing power stations that is, to help scrub a bit of the emitted CO2 back out of the air.

What Carbon Engineering is developing may be nonsensical from an environmental and scientific perspective, but it fits neatly into the tar sands' industry agenda for portraying themselves as "low carbon." In 2011, Richard Branson chose Calgary for announcing the shortlist of his "Virgin Earth Challenge" which offers a $25 million prize to one project working to remove CO2 from the air. His spokesperson explained the rationale for this choice:

"Calgary is a good place to start low-carbon technology. It's an energy centre [with inventiveness and rigor to apply "to sustainable, low-carbon and economically viable technology."

Tar sands influence behind so-called 'soft geoengineering' can be found in unexpected places. Take a recent announcement by Vermont-based Green Mountain Coffee:

"Mountain Coffee Roasters is helping to fund nonprofit Radio Lifeline's Black Earth Project, an initiative that uses biochar to help Rwandan farmers mitigate the effects of climate change. Radio Lifeline's project partner Re:char, a Kenyan developer of small-scale biochar technologies, will use agricultural residues such as dried corn stalks, grasses, rice hulls, coffee pulp, cow manure and wood chips as feedstock for the biochar production."


Green Mountain Coffee and Radio Lifeline may not associate such a project with ConocoPhillips Canada, but in fact, ConocoPhillips has been the foremost corporation to promote and fund biochar developments, apparently motivated by hopes that they can eventually purchase cheap offsets for their tar sands operations -- for example under the Alberta 'tar sands' Offset System. Re:char themselves have received funding from Conoco .

Far greater Conoco funds have gone to biochar developments in Iowa, to the Biochar Protocol , which aims to get biochar included into carbon offset markets, and to CoolPlanet, a US Venture with the motto: "Imagine driving today's cars & SUV's while actually reversing global warming using fuel that costs less than $1.50/gallon."

Other tar sands investors, including Cenovus Energy, BP and Shell have also funded biochar developments, as has their friend Richard Branson.

Some might argue that it is acceptable to take dirty money to fund projects that will help African farmers make their soils more fertile and hold more carbon. Yet what the scientific evidence and experience from field trials shows is that biochar cannot be relied on to achieve either of those goals.

It can even have the effect of suppressing yields and causing a loss of soil carbon. Farmers who are recruited for supposed "trials" tend to be ill-informed, hearing only the hype from project developers. In effect, they are being duped to take part in these projects based on incomplete and in some cases downright false information.

For example, when a Cameroonian researcher looked at a Biochar Fund project in his country, he found that farmers had been promised great benefits, including finance from nonexistent carbon markets. They had donated their land and labor. Yet the promised benefits failed to materialize, and the project was shortly abandoned. It was nonetheless touted as a "success" on websites and in the media.

So far, biochar projects are invariably small, largely serving PR purposes. Yet if, as many of its advocates hope, it were to be scaled up to the level needed to supposedly offset any significant amount of fossil fuel emissions, the consequences would be grave. According to a study about the "sustainable biochar potential", 556 million hectares of land would need to be converted to biochar production to "offset" 12 per cent of annual CO2 emissions (presuming, of course, that all of that biochar would actually sequester carbon, which is contradicted by evidence).

Carbon dioxide air capture and biochar, despite their potentially massive impacts in terms of energy, water and land requirements, are among the geoengineering proposals that are considered more benign. They are being promoted in part to soften up public opinion for other more intuitively objectionable forms of geo-engineering, such as spraying vast amounts of sulphur particles into the stratosphere or manipulating clouds over large areas.

Those approaches would indeed be guaranteed to produce rapid effects. Among them: immediate crop-failures, acid rain and ozone destruction. In sum, geoengineering options amount to "picking your poison." The tar sands industry, with somewhere on the order of 50 billion dollars invested and rapidly expanding its operations, is hoping that choice will enable them to continue profiting from their dirty business, at any and all cost to the planet.]]> Laugh or Cry? Obama's New Commitment on Climate Change tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2550507 2013-01-28T15:54:15-05:00 2013-03-30T05:12:01-04:00 Rachel Smolker http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-smolker/ saying: "We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations." Following on, the right-wing deniers predictably flew into a frenzy of obnoxious blather, largely serving to clog up the media. Meanwhile the liberals, progressives and enviros cheered with glee, as if the mere mention of the word "climate" were a big happy victory, a frankly pathetic display that I can only imagine the right-wing deniers found amusing. The spectrum of responses is a clear reflection of the extreme dysfunction of, most especially, Washington D.C. Even as Sandy smashed NYC to smithereens and prolonged drought decimated crops across the Midwest, the leader of the country most responsible for this frightening mess is so cowed by his detractors as to feel it necessary to wait until after his reelection to even mention that seven-letter word? Oh yay.

For climate justice activists, the question is: Should we laugh or should we cry? It has certainly been disturbing to watch Obama, facing the greatest threat to life on Earth ever (yes, far greater even than the economic crisis) fail to even utter that word. But, we are also aware that when he has in fact stepped up to the plate on climate, it has not usually been pretty. For example, in 2009, when, at the eleventh hour he flew to the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen to push through, via the back rooms, a "made in the U.S." deal that removed any teeth from the negotiated agreement that had been painstakingly hammered out in accordance with participatory UN protocols. That showing in the international climate debate followed on the heels of years of U.S. interference and obstructionism, remarkable given that the we are not even a signatory to the Kyoto protocol. Going back even further into history prior to Copenhagen, there was the U.S. role in demanding (against the will of many other countries at the time) that the main approach to reducing greenhouse gases be a market-based approach: carbon trade, which has subsequently and predictably, entirely failed. A headline of the Financial Times reads:"EU Carbon Prices Crash to Record Low."

So the question is: What will our emboldened president offer up this time? Will it be more false solutions intended to create an impression of doing something while really just ensuring more profitable business opportunities for the 1 percent? A good indication this is likely is Obama's "Blueprint for a New Bioeconomy." In sum, that plan is to maintain business as usual by simply converting from fossil to biological carbon -- that means running cars on biofuels, packaging our stuff in bioplastics, dousing ourselves and the planet with biochemicals, treating subsequent illnesses with bio-pharmaceuticals. All that will be required is astronomical quantities of land, water, soil and nutrients -- several planet's worth. It will also require a biotech industry free-for-all. Their role is to deliver GMO crops that "make more biomass" and also synthetic microbes that will magically convert all that biomass into all the products and goods we presumably must buy and sell to ensure that the economy keeps on growing ad infinitum. A big part of the "new bioeconomy blueprint" is to remove regulatory "barriers," so, for example, synthetic microbes and GMO crops can be quickly and easily approved and sent on their way to commercialization. We know how well the already slack regulatory process works. Just this week we learned that regulators have belatedly found viral genes present in many GMO food crops that is likely to result in greater susceptibility to all manner of viral infections for both humans and plants. Oops. So now we should further loosen regulation even as we introduce even more risky synthetic organisms -- microbes capable of liquefying plant life?

The arrogance underlying the entire concept of a "bioeconomy" is phenomenal. We are told that we shall " harness the biological sciences for the benefit of the Nation." The whole concept illustrates utter disregard, disrespect for and misunderstanding of nature -- as if we so mightily master all of creation that it is entirely under our control to be precisely and predictably manipulated and engineered for our own purposes. No problem. Have faith!

Further we are enticed to accept the idea with claims that the bioeconomy will provide all manner of new jobs and economic opportunities, while freeing us from our dependence on the increasingly unfriendly world community of nations from whence we currently derive our fossil fuel energy. But of course we shall need their biomass, if not their oil.

Other than the bioeconomy vision, what else might we expect from Obama? The last comprehensive climate legislation that was floated seriously in D.C. was the 2009 American Clean Energy and Security Act. James Hansen along with many in the environmental justice community referred to it as "worse than nothing." Among other features, the bill sought to establish a cap and trade scheme for emissions trading. Hopefully, the total collapse of the EU emissions trading scheme since then should give lawmakers pause. But we can be just about certain that market-based approaches will prevail, and one way or another, we will yet again face a charade of false solutions whose primary purpose is not to effectively address the problem but rather turn the crisis into an opportunity to capitalize -- maintaining and enhancing the excessive profits of big corporations who got us into this mess -- oil, coal, gas, nukes, big agriculture and biotech.

This may serve to create an appearance of doing something to forestall the nightmarish consequences of our failure, but Earth, the climate and future generations will not be fooled. My kids tell me I am "too negative." I try to encourage them in that perception rather than embracing the realities of what we are doing to their future. A few days ago my daughter exclaimed "you have the most important job of all (as climate activist) -- and I am counting on you." Well, I hate to be such a downer, but frankly, difficult to join the squadrons cheering as Obama spoke "the word." When he takes, as his first of many bold steps the executive decision to halt the Keystone XL pipeline, referred to as the "fuse leading to the ultimate climate time bomb", then l will in fact, at long last, stand up and cheer. So what will it be, Mr. President: more bioeconomy B.S. or diffusion of the bomb? Remember your own words about "betraying future generations"?]]> Doha, Forests and the Production Tax Credit: On Track to Burn, Baby, Burn tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2285872 2012-12-13T18:04:41-05:00 2013-02-12T05:12:01-05:00 Rachel Smolker http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-smolker/
The actual causes of deforestation -- above all, the already unsustainable demand for wood and agricultural products in the North -- were considered a far lower priority than carbon market-related accounting. Nonetheless, some governments, especially those of the UK and Norway, paid at least lip service to them. A Synthesis Report financed by those two governments was released at Doha; it acknowledged that forests were under increasing pressure from "renewable energy" supports for biofuels, large hydro-dams and wood-based bioenergy (although, curiously, the authors blamed growing demand for fuel wood in poor countries rather than the rapidly growing biomass demand in North America and Europe for the latter). According to the lead author of the report: "This means demand for natural resources -- agricultural products, wood, minerals, biofuels -- will occur on a scale different than we have seen in the past, with demand coming from different markets than those dominant in the past."

Although the UN climate talks are stalled, actions government and corporate actions taken in the name of "climate change mitigation" will indeed put the world's remaining forests and other ecosystems under unprecedented pressure, this during a century when climate change is already seen to cause a first wave of forest die-back. In the U.S., the government's Energy Information Authority has just released new predictions according to which energy from biomass will grow at a rate of nearly 8 percent a year between now and 2040, four times as fast as all types of energy classed as renewable combined. Most of this growth is to come from biomass co-firing in coal generating plants -- a particularly cheap, convenient and polluting way of meeting Renewable Portfolio Standards. In Europe, bioenergy is to account for the largest share of the mandatory 20 percent renewable energy target by 2020. During the Doha talks, forest campaigners from the Global Forest Coalition, Biofuelwatch and Global Justice Ecology Project highlighted in particular the UK's role in developing a massive new market in woodchips and pellets for power stations. In response to generous subsidies, energy firms in the UK are planning to burn around nine times as much wood a year as the country produces annually. Most UK biomass is currently imported from the southern U.S., Canada, Russia and other European countries although pellets from large new industrial tree plantations particularly in Brazil, West and Central Africa are widely seen as an important future source.

So far, the southern U.S. is the biggest pellet producer worldwide. Biodiverse and carbon rich forests in the region have long been destroyed for monoculture pine plantations for the paper industry and now this trend is accelerating to meet U.S. and EU demand for biomass electricity -- while GE eucalyptus trials are underway and could eventually lead to wood pellets being produced from large GE eucalyptus plantations in the region. Climate scientists increasingly recognize biomass electricity as having a disastrous carbon balance, too, particularly if it is produced from whole trees, as it inevitably is when energy companies rely on constant supplies of millions of tonnes of wood for their power stations. Generating a unit of electricity from biomass releases around 50 percent more CO2 than generating that unit from burning coal. Although in theory future trees will regrow and re-absorb that carbon again, in practice it will take those trees decades to do so -- that's if they will ever be able to do so in the face of escalating climate change and massively increased logging for bioenergy. Even then, biomass electricity will still increase CO2 levels for at least a generation -- i.e., during the short period of time when we must rapidly reduce CO2 levels if we are to have any hope of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

A 2009 study published in Science illustrates the scale of the bioenergy impacts which we can expect if Governments continue to falsely promote it as "carbon neutral." It suggests that such policies will result in the complete destruction of all forests, natural grasslands and nearly all other ecosystems worldwide by around 2065.

Re-defining "renewable energy" is vital for protecting forests, communities and climate. Currently in the U.S. there is a push to renew the Production Tax Credit, a major source of support for renewable energy. While the discussion in the media, and even a letter from leading big environmental organizations like NRDC, Sierra and National Wildlife Federation is entirely about supporting wind, hidden from view is the fact that this tax credit also would subsidize more biomass and also garbage (municipal solid waste) incinerators -- dirty energy that should never be subsidized as "clean" or "renewable."]]> A 'Sustainable' Military? tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2239137 2012-12-04T15:35:31-05:00 2013-02-03T05:12:01-05:00 Rachel Smolker http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-smolker/ voted to strike language from the National Defense Authorization Act that would have limited military use of biofuels by requiring that they only purchase biofuels at costs comparable to petroleum fuels. Further, they amended the bill to allow defense spending on refinery construction, previously prohibited. That move included the $510 million in funding via an agreement between the Department of Defense, the USDA and the Department of Energy. Given the call to reduce military budgets, biofuels are at issue after hackles were raised following the revelation that the Air Force had paid out $59/gallon for biofuelled test flights, and the Navy's "Great Green Fleet" demonstration, using $26/gallon fuel, at a total cost over $12 million.

So the push for biofuelled warfare has taken a big step forward, much to the delight of the domestic biofuels industry, which is very hopeful that military demand and investment will serve as their lifeline, providing impetus, large infusions of finance and boundless guaranteed demand for fuels.

In an article in Biofuels Digest, the executive director of Algae Biomass Organization, Mary Rosenthal, states:

Federal support for nascent energy technologies is not without precedent. In fact, the natural gas revolution that has been unleashed by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) technology was originally funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. The military has led other energy revolutions as well; they pioneered the transitions from ships driven by the wind to those steaming with coal, then on to cruising with petroleum and nuclear reactors. By providing advanced biofuels with stable support for research and deployment the Department of Defense will be on the forefront once again. The military advantage is obvious, and the potential economic advantages cannot be ignored.


Indeed, from Mary Rosenthal's perspective, military interest in, especially, algae fuels, is her career lifeline. The title of her article "Support Our Troops" should more appropriately have been "Support My Career". Algae fuels have been pursued to the tune of many millions of dollars in subsidies and supports, ongoing since the early 1970s now, all to little avail. There still remains no commercial production and very significant barriers (high nutrient requirements, low productivity, intense water requirements etc). Making biofuels from algae is technically straightforward, but doing it in a manner that does not require more energy than is delivered by the fuels has so far proven elusive. Yet the promise of algae fuels continues to facilitate the ongoing development of other biofuels in spite of clear and evident harms.

The biofuels industry and its supporters are enthusiastically rallying around military biofuels, couched in what might be considered dangerously zealous and patriotic terms, as if not supporting military biofuels is on par with committing treason. Max Baucus, for example: "I call these freedom fuels, because they help get us off of foreign oil and help bring good paying jobs to Montana." The myth that we will gain "energy security" via the production of biofuels is patently absurd. The U.S. can only produce so much biofuel, even if we were to dedicate virtually all of our cropland and forests to the task. Just a day or two ahead of the senate vote, nobel prize winning photosynthesis scientist, Harmut Michel stated that "all biofuels are nonsense" -- based on the extreme inefficiencies inherent to converting solar energy first into chemical energy in plants via photosynthesis, and then into biofuel via various refinery processes.

This is why biofuels have such a massive "land footprint"-- very little energy from a lot of land area. Even if we were to devote every square inch of arable land and water to the task we would barely scratch the surface of current energy consumption. And meanwhile, we are already importing biofuels from outside our boundaries (as we also export coal and gas!) The U.S. imports Brazilian sugarcane ethanol, and exports corn ethanol to Brazil -- apparently the result of some determination that sugar ethanol meets higher emissions standards and can therefore be used towards meeting different requirements of the renewable fuel standard. A global economy is in place, and biofuels, like all other commodities, are traded as deemed profitable. So much for energy "independence".

The jobs argument is becoming a tired old saw -- at every turn these days we are threatened and bullied into complicity by the threat of unemployment. In this case, implicit to Baucus' statement is the idea that opposing military biofuels will lead to poverty and joblessness and is therefore "unkind." But the underlying cause of our economic hardships, and the real solutions to it, have nothing to do with creating absolutely any and all jobs without any consideration of the implications of the work they achieve or it's impact on the rights of other peoples to eat or live decently!

The U.S. military is the largest consumer of petroleum on earth burning through something on order of 300 thousand barrels of oil daily. That is 12,600,000 gallons of fuel per day or a whopping 4,599,000,000 gallons of fuel per year. Meanwhile, data on biodiesel production in the U.S. for 2012 from EIA indicate that in favorable months, we produce about 100 million gallons, so optimistically, 1,200 million (1.2 billion) gallons per year. There is no other advanced biofuel produced in any significant quantity, so biodiesel represents the vast majority of "advanced fuels" produced. Thus, if we chose to put every drop of biodiesel we produce towards military use, we could never offset more than a small part of the military demand.

Ironically, even as Congress is voting to support military biofuels, a new report from the New England Complex Systems Institute, discussed in National Defense magazine this week, argues that "U.S. Energy Policy [biofuels] Fuels Global Insecurity". The report refers specifically to the impact of corn ethanol on food prices, and the resulting social conflict where hungry people resent and rebel. The US currently dumps on order of 40 percent of its corn crop into ethanol production, contributing a miniscule portion of our overall transport energy (and oxygenating fuel). So we are faced with the deeply twisted situation where our demand for biofuels is generating social conflicts, and we therefore need more biofuels in order to fuel the military that is supposedly "protecting" us.

We are told over and over that "advanced biofuels", especially cellulosic fuels made from inedible plant parts and wood, will save us from the problem of food competition and thus the threat of escalating social conflicts resulting. But, first of all, most biofuels classed as "advanced fuels" in the U.S. now produced (biodiesel from soy and corn oil) are not made from cellulose. They are soy and other oil biodiesel, sugarcane and other non-corn starch based ethanol. These certainly do have impacts on land use, food and fiber markets that ripple throughout the economy. More fundamentally, the distinction between food and non-food biomass is nonsensical, because of course underlying all plant biomass growth, is the soil, water and nutrients that are essential to plant growth, and are increasingly in short supply. There is a tacit assumption that land use is somehow static, but farmers, foresters and landowners base decisions on what to plant and/or harvest largely on economics. If converting a corn field to grow genetically engineered poplars for cellulosic fuels is profitable, farmers will very often choose to do so, and hence direct competition with food production does not magically dissappear. Of course all of this is somewhat moot because so far basically nobody has succeeded in producing cellulosic "non-food" fuels on commercial scale, in spite of the mandates and an ongoing flow of subsidies that have supported its development. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of people around the globe are faced with hunger as we continue to use the future prospect of non-competing fuels as an excuse to continue with misguided policy and practice.

Sadly, even supposedly "environmental" groups, like NRDC support the development of biofuels for military use. Their "affiliate", Environmental Entrepreneurs published a report entitled "Economic Benefits of Military Biofuels," claiming lots of jobs would be generated, for farmers and others working in the supply chain. Jobs are a good thing, but not if they kill people and/or the planet, so before we jump on that bandwagon let's at least think through the implications of employment clearly. Groups like NRDC are supposedly concerned about the environment. Alongside many in industry, they talk a lot about "sustainability", assuring the public that biofuels can and should and will be produced as such. The word is inserted into every other sentence almost as if sheer repetition of the term will cause sustainability to happen. But there is no agreed definition of the term. In fact, for those concerned with economics and the company's bottom line, sustainability refers specifically to the balanced inflow and outflow of profits, and has nothing at all to do with environment or social justice. NRDC seems oddly reluctant to outright reject anything (biofuels, fracking) and so instead they refer to "doing it right" (i.e. sustainably). The underlying assumption is that it is in fact possible to produce such massive quantities of biofuels "sustainably". But the problem is that it is the scale of demand itself that is unsustainable. No "greenhouse gas accounting" or list of lofty hopeful "sustainability principles", and no amount of repetition of the word can avert the consequences of a huge new demand for land, soil, water and nutrients. Sustainability standards are especially meek in the face of massive federal subsidies and a near religious fervor over the concept of "energy security", which tends to entirely over-ride environmental concerns.

In the end, there is only so much "biomass" available on the surface of the earth. We have an expanding human population (and dwindling nonhuman population) to feed and house, and there is the very dangerous expectation that we need to fuel an ever-growing, limitless economy. This is all in the context of escalating catastrophic impacts of climate change including severe droughts, wildfires, forest dieback and disease, water shortages and desertification of soils, all of which impact "biomass." There is no question that halting deforestation, better stewardship of soils, restoration of natural systems all would provide a critical line of defense against the coming storms, but instead it appears we are on track to convert what is left into "biomass" in order to fuel the machinery of warfare.

In the end, one has to question not the "sustainability" of biofuels, but of the military itself. The environmental (including climatic) and human rights impacts of U.S. military activities is the "elephant in the room" -- undisclosed and unreported -- likely not even mentioned at the current UNFCCC meeting in Doha. As delegates from developing countries fight for meaningful investment to help them survive the consequences of climate catastrophe, the U.S. refuses to rise to meet its obligations, instead dumping trillions into military budgets (including more investment in military biofuels). In the not too distant future will we witness biodiesel fueled wars fought against hungry enraged peoples over access to soybean fields instead of oil fields?]]>