Friday, November 24, 2017

Lighter than Air


Is Hydrogen the Fuel of the Future?


It's Friday. It's 24th November. I'm Anthony Day and this is the Sustainable Futures Report. Thank you for listening wherever you are in the world, and listeners to the last episode were in 40 different countries; predominantly the UK and the United States, but increasingly in Australia, (G’day - I’ll be there next month), regular listeners in Canada and a big hello to my one listener in the Cayman Islands. Maybe that's my bank manager on holiday. Thank you to my patrons. More about patrons at the end of this episode, and thank you to all those who have got in touch with suggestions and ideas.

This week I'm going to talk about hydrogen. The big question is, 

“Is Hydrogen the Fuel of the future?”

The first supplementary questions are, “What will the fuel of the future look like? What characteristics must it have? What are we going to use it for?”

What characteristics must our fuel of the future have? 
Undesirables
There are several undesirable characteristics of the fossil fuels that provide much of our energy at present, which is why we are considering moving away from them. The principal reason is pollution. Fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide when burnt; carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are leading to climate change, or what some would prefer to call the climate crisis. Fossil fuels also emit particulates, which is really a fancy name for soot: microscopic fragments which pollute the atmosphere, which we all inevitably breathe in and which can cause long-term lung damage and disease. 
Energy Density
There’s no doubt that fossil fuels have desirable characteristics which we would like our fuel of the future to share. For example, petrol and diesel are energy-dense, which means that just a small volume can contain enough energy to do a significant amount of work. It’s been calculated that one gallon of gasoline contains the energy-equivalent of between 2 days and 2 weeks of human labour, (depending on what the human is doing, and there is a very wide range of estimates - links on the blog.) Nevertheless, all that energy is concentrated in one container which anyone could carry. 

Cheap?
I hesitate to say that fossil fuels are cheap, but at least they are affordable. Our ideal fuel must compete on price or show very clear advantages to justify a higher cost. Our ideal fuel must not emit greenhouse gases, particulates or other pollutants like sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxide, and depending on the application, it must be at least as energy-dense and portable as fossil fuels.

What about storage?
Coal, petrol, diesel and gasoil can all be relatively easily stored at ambient temperature and ambient pressures. Of course the right sort of container is needed to prevent leakage, fires or explosions, but this is all relatively low-tech. Natural gas is more demanding in that it has to be delivered by pipeline at carefully controlled pressure, but the national gas grid is well established and runs safely and reliably without any of us thinking about it much.
Batteries
At this point I think we should talk about electric batteries which are becoming an increasingly important method of storing energy. There is a tremendous amount of research going in to improve batteries, but at the moment they are not nearly as energy dense as petrol or diesel. They also require conflict minerals in their manufacturer: materials that come from war-torn failed states, some of them with child miners guarded by child soldiers. And once the batteries reach the end of their lives there is much more than an empty metal tank to recycle. Let’s look at production and distribution. 
How will our ideal fuel measure up on that?
Oil
Oil has a long-established supply chain between refineries and consumers. Industries can be served by rail tanker or pipeline. Home heating fuel is delivered by road tankers. Petrol stations are far less numerous than they used to be, but most motorists live within a mile or so of their nearest one. The other side of the refinery, the upstream side, can be more problematic. Crude oil can be delivered to the refinery by ship or by pipeline but the ultimate source of the oil is increasingly controversial. While new techniques mean that more oil can be recovered from reserves than was previously possible, oil companies have been forced to exploit wells in increasingly hostile environments like the Arctic regions and the deep oceans. It's not always successful, and BP's Deepwater Horizon is only one example of things which have gone spectacularly wrong. 
Fracking
The oil and the gas markets have been revolutionised by the spread of fracking in the United States. By injecting high-pressure water into the crevices in shale and oil-bearing rock, producers have been able to extract oil and gas. Not without controversy. Many claim that there are risks of polluting the water table and drinking water supplies. They claim that fracking for natural gas can release fugitive methane emissions, and methane is a significantly more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. (Some say 20 times as bad, some say 120 times.) Some countries, like France and Scotland have put a total ban on fracking. In England preliminary drilling has taken place and protesters have been arrested. It is expected that the Secretary of State will shortly give approval for production to start. Apparently the decision has been held over, because it was not considered to be a good idea to announce the approval during the recent COP 23 climate conference in Bonn.
Our ideal fuel should not cause GHG emissions from the production process, and ideally should be distributed using existing pipelines and tankers.


Using it
According to Wikipedia, 20% of energy is used in residential and commercial buildings and a further 26% by transport. The remaining 54% is consumed by industry.
Our ideal fuel should serve all those needs.
How does Hydrogen measure up?

First of all - is it clean?
Hydrogen releases energy either in an internal combustion engine - like the engine of a petrol car - or in a fuel cell. The internal combustion engine is attractive, because it’s existing technology and only needs a modification to the fuel delivery system. There's a company in the United Kingdom which will convert to your road vehicle all your stationary engine to run on hydrogen. For some reason they're based in Shetland, equidistant from Scotland, the Faroe Islands and Norway. Hydrogen burnt in an internal combustion engine is very clean. The process produces pure water and very low levels of nitrous oxides.
The fuel cell is a completely different technology from the internal combustion engine. It is fed with hydrogen and produces electricity, some heat and pure water. The most important difference between the fuel cell and the internal combustion engine running on hydrogen is that the internal combustion engine is about 20 to 25% efficient, whereas the fuel cell is closer to 60% efficient. Carmakers BMW and Ford have produced internal combustion engined cars running on hydrogen but Toyota has chosen to go with fuel cells. A small company in Wales, UK, has developed a fuel cell car with some quite innovative ideas. I strongly recommend you watch the video. Search for riversimple hydrogen cars, or find the link on the blog at www.sustainablefutures.report.  
What about energy density?

Liquid hydrogen has a very high energy density. This is great for space rockets where it has been used successfully to blast them into orbit. The problem with using liquid hydrogen in other applications is that it boils at 20° Kelvin which is about -253°C. It takes vast amounts of energy to cool hydrogen to this level and masses of insulation to keep it cool.
Toyota’s Mirai fuel-cell car takes 5kg of hydrogen and needs to store it at 700 bar (that’s around 10,000psi) to reduce it to an acceptable volume. That gives a range of around 300 miles or just under 500 kilometres. Commercial vehicles; lorries, buses, trains can all use hydrogen. They can use bigger storage tanks which will still be much smaller in relation to the payload than that in a passenger car. Stationary engines or static fuel cells have far less constraint on space for fuel storage, so the tanks can be bigger and can operate at lower pressure.
Storing and distributing hydrogen  
Storage and distribution are an issue. There are only three public hydrogen filling stations in the UK at present, although more are planned. The existing infrastructure of tankers and pipelines used for oil and natural gas can certainly not be used for hydrogen. [Unless the iron gas mains have been replaced with plastic] According to Wikipedia, “Hydrogen poses a number of hazards to human safety, from potential detonations and fires when mixed with air to being an asphyxiant in its pure, oxygen-free form.[126] In addition, liquid hydrogen is a cryogen and presents dangers (such as frostbite) associated with very cold liquids.[127] Hydrogen dissolves in many metals, and, in addition to leaking out, may have adverse effects on them, such as hydrogen embrittlement,[128] leading to cracks and explosions.[129] Hydrogen gas leaking into external air may spontaneously ignite. Moreover, hydrogen fire, while being extremely hot, is almost invisible, and thus can lead to accidental burns.”
The US Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy publishes guidance on hydrogen storage and related challenges.

Hydrogen production
There are two main processes for the production of hydrogen. The first is extraction from natural gas. Natural gas is principally made up of methane and the chemical formula is CH4, which means one carbon atom to four hydrogen atoms. Stripping out the hydrogen leaves the carbon which reacts with oxygen in the extraction process and produces CO2 or carbon dioxide. Thus a hydrogen engine or fuel cell can be almost completely clean in operation, but the CO2 emissions have been released at the point of hydrogen production. It's a similar argument to electric power. Electricity is totally clean at the point of use, but it may have come from a polluting power station.
The other process is electrolysis, which involves passing an electric current through water. Water is H2O, two hydrogen atoms to one of oxygen, and the process splits them apart. There are no greenhouse gas emissions, but electrolysis is not very efficient and the hydrogen produced can contain as little as 40% of the energy in the electricity used. This may make sense where there is excess renewable electricity, but it is a very inefficient use of electricity produced by a traditional gas, coal or nuclear-power station.
What it costs
The currently UK pump price makes the fuel cost per mile comparable with a petrol or diesel car, although hydrogen is significantly more expensive than gasoline at the pump in the US. Are very few hydrogen cars on the road at present, but the Toyota Mirai is on sale at £65,000. That's about US$85,000. It's an expensive car although it's designed to be a luxury car and is still less expensive than the Tesla Model S, their pure electric vehicle. At this stage Toyota prefer to lease the Mirai rather than sell it outright. Interestingly the River Simple hydrogen car company in Wales is planning the same approach.
In summary,
How does hydrogen measure up?
  • It’s almost totally clean and emission-free at the point of use.
  • The cost of fuel is currently about the same per mile as petrol or diesel.
  • A hydrogen car can be refuelled as quickly as a petrol car and much faster than an electric car.
However,
  • Current methods of production are either very inefficient produce greenhouse gas emissions.
  • There is no distribution infrastructure at present, apart from three vehicle filling stations in the UK, and similarly small numbers in the United States and in some European countries.
  • Hydrogen cannot be distributed using existing tankers or pipelines. These must be built specifically for transporting hydrogen.
On balance, hydrogen doesn’t look like a good idea, but there’s a whole lot more to this story.
Hydrogen Council
Apart from Toyota; BMW, Ford, Mercedes, Nissan and many others are all working on hydrogen fuel cell cars. These companies are members of the Hydrogen Council and so are Shell, Total, Statoil, Mitsubishi and other major corporations. At COP23 in Bonn last week they claimed that hydrogen could power between 10 and 15 million cars by 2030. Clearly they expect the problems to be overcome. The Nikola Corporation is launching its hydrogen-powered Nikola One truck, with a million miles free hydrogen fuel. Do look at their website - nikolamotor.com/one - it’s very detailed.
Research
There is promising research into new methods of extracting hydrogen cleanly from natural gas. It has been known that metallic catalysts can trap the carbon and prevent it from reacting to become CO2. The problem is that the surface of the metal soon becomes coated with carbon and absorption stops. Now scientists have developed a process which involves bubbling natural gas through a molten metal catalyst. The hydrogen is released and the carbon floats to the surface of the metal as a solid.
Other researchers have developed a solar-powered electrolysis system using cheaper materials for the electrodes and incorporating super-capacitor storage. No data is available yet on the efficiency of this process.
In Japan researchers have found a compound which allows them to create hydrogen from water using near infra-red light.
Conferences
In January, in Brussels, Belgium, the Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Energy Summit takes place. Sadly I can’t go. Over two days, followed by site visits, they will be talking about
• Overview of the actual hydrogen and fuel cells market
• Latest technologies involved in the renewable sources
• Policy and regulations
• Power-to-gas solutions
• Decarbonisation of the energy sector
• Hydrogen storage improvements
• Security aspects in hydrogen production, storage and distribution
• Monetisation advice and partnership
• Hydrogen mobility applications
• Integration and standards

One of the conference partners is Hydrogenics, a Canadian company with branches across the world. They were also involved in last week’s Hydrail Symposium staged in Toronto. The Ministry of Transportation and rail operator Metrolinx invited industry leaders to take a look at how hydrogen fuel cell technology could potentially electrify the entire Ontario rail network. Without overhead wires. There was a live web cast of the event and the archive recording is still available on the website. Links to this and many other things that I've covered in this episode are on the blog at www.sustainablefutures.report as always.
The Hydrogenics company offers a whole range of energy solutions involving hydrogen. A link to their website is below.
And finally,
And this is a very important part of the hydrogen story. I'm coming closer to home, to Leeds in West Yorkshire in United Kingdom.
Leeds City Gate - H21 is a plan to establish a hydrogen economy in Leeds. 
Let me quote from the Executive Summary of the report:

“The H 21 Leeds City Gate Project is a study with the aim of determining the feasibility, from both a technical and economic viewpoint, of converting the existing natural gas network in Leeds, one of the largest UK cities, to 100% hydrogen.
The project has been designed to minimise disruption for existing customers and to deliver heat at the same cost as current natural gas to customers.
The project has shown that:
  • The gas network has the correct capacity for such a conversion
  • It can be converted incrementally with minimal disruption to customers
  • Minimal new energy infrastructure will be required compared to alternatives
  • The existing heat demand for Leeds can be met via steam methane reforming and salt cavern storage using technology in use around the world today
The project has provided costs for the scheme and has modelled these costs in a regulatory finance model.
In addition, the availability of low-cost bulk hydrogen in a gas network could revolutionise the potential for hydrogen vehicles and, via fuel cells, support a decentralised model of combined heat and power and localised power generation.”

Now that’s a vision!
Is hydrogen the fuel of the future? 
What do you think? 
I certainly wouldn’t rule it out.


And that's it for another week. I'm Anthony Day. Thank you for listening to the Sustainable Futures Report. By the way, I told you last week that I was going to commission some researchers to write articles for this podcast. I asked them to write about hydrogen. You should have seen the rubbish I got. It might have suited an encyclopaedia. Come to think of it, that's probably where they got it from. No, as usual, I have written and researched all this myself. If you like it please get in touch and let me know. If you don't like it please get in touch and tell me why. mail@anthony-day.com 
Next week we are in December and next week’s Sustainable Futures Report will be devoted to another element: this time it’s copper. The week after that, 8th December, we have an interview with George Monbiot which you certainly shouldn't miss. After that I'm going to take some time off until after Christmas. I expect you'll want some time off too.
If you're thinking of Christmas presents, well why don't you sign up as a patron of the Sustainable Futures Report? Just go to patreon.com/SFR  where you’ll find all the details. I'm grateful to all my current patrons and their contributions to covering the expenses of running this podcast. You know who you are. Thank you all - wherever you are in the world.
And yes, that is it for this week. Have a great week.
 I will catch up again on 1 December. 
This is Anthony Day. 
That was the Sustainable Futures Report. 
That's all for now.


References
Hydrogen Production
Energy Density
Cars and road vehicles

Storage

Fuel Cell v Internal Combustion Engines


Organisations, Conferences and Plans

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Friday, November 17, 2017

Baby it’s Coal Outside!


Hello

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Sustainable Futures Report. Yes it's Friday already, Friday, 17th November and somebody told me that it's just over 40 sleeps until Christmas. If you stay awake for the next 20 minutes or so I'm going to talk about COP 23 in Bonn, the future of coal, the Disruptive Innovation Festival, rising levels of CO2 and messages from the Alliance of World Scientists and from the South Pacific.
Research
I'm recruiting researchers to help me produce the Sustainable Futures Report because it does take a lot of time, but I know that a lot of people all over the world like to listen to it regularly. Thank you sincerely for your support. Maybe I'll meet some of you one of these days - at least some of you that I haven't already met. I'll be in Australia in December, so if you live in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide or Perth and you’d like to chat about sustainability, do get in touch. mail@anthony-day.com. And if you don't live in any of those places please get in touch anyway and tell me about the things that you think I ought to be talking about. Eric in Canada got in touch recently. Thanks for the suggestion, Eric, we’ll have an episode on hydrogen very soon.
Thanks as always to my patrons who donate as little as one dollar a month, and in some cases considerably more, to help cover my expenses. I'd be delighted if you would join them and if you do I will send you the unique Sustainable Futures Report enamel badge. Find out more at patreon.com/sfr. 
Free
Whether you sign up or not, the Sustainable Futures Report will always be available to you completely free of charge and apart from my patrons it has no subsidy, sponsorship or advertising. The blog, where I give links to the sources of my stories, is at www.sustainablefutures.report 
All Change
There is no doubt that the world is changing and there is no doubt that a sustainable world will be a different world or at least a world in which we do things differently. The scare stories about wearing sackcloth and living in caves, a favourite of denialists, are pretty thoroughly discredited. Some of the foundations of sustainability, such as renewable energy, are based on the very latest technology. Technology will ensure that we will continue to enjoy a good standard of living, possibly even a better standard of living, as we move towards a low carbon future. That said, don't just assume that technology will work away in the background and everything will be wonderful. There are undoubted challenges, not least the rise in CO2 which I report this week, which demand urgent and international action.
Second Warning
Calling for such action is The Alliance of World Scientists (AWS). They say: 
“The AWS is a new international assembly of scientists, which is independent of both governmental and non-governmental organisations and corporations. We submit, that in order to prevent widespread misery caused by catastrophic damage to the biosphere, humanity must practice more environmentally sustainable alternatives to business-as-usual. Our vital importance and role comes from scientists' unique responsibility as stewards of human knowledge and champions of evidence-based decision-making. The main goal of the AWS is to be a collective international voice of many scientists regarding global climate and environmental trends and how to turn accumulated knowledge into action. Other organisations do laudable work toward this goal, but to our knowledge, AWS is the only independent, grass-roots organisation comprised of scientists from around the world committed to the well-being of humanity and the planet.”
They describe their paper as a Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice. It runs to just 1,000 words, can be read in 6 minutes, and outlines some of the world's most pressing environmental concerns. It starts off: 
“Twenty-five years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists and more than 1700 independent scientists, including the majority of living Nobel laureates in the sciences, penned the 1992 “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” These concerned professionals called on humankind to curtail environmental destruction and cautioned that “a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided.””

In their manifesto, those scientists showed that humans were on a collision course with the natural world, citing a decline in freshwater availability, unsustainable marine fisheries, ocean dead zones, forest losses, dwindling biodiversity, climate change and population growth.

In this latest paper the Alliance of World Scientists concludes:

“To prevent widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss, humanity must practice a more environmentally sustainable alternative to business as usual. This prescription was well articulated by the world’s leading scientists 25 years ago, but in most respects, we have not heeded their warning. Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out. We must recognize, in our day- to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that Earth with all its life is our only home.”

More than 15,000 signatories from all ends of the Earth have signed this article. As far as is known, this is the most scientists to ever co-sign and formally support a published journal article.

So you’ve been warned. If you have a spare six minutes read the article at https://academic.oup.com/bioscience. You’ll probably be thinking about it for a lot longer than 6 minutes.

Message from Fiji
As you know, COP23, the annual UN climate conference is talking place in Bonn. This year it is being chaired by Fiji, a chain of some 300 islands in the Pacific. This is their message:
“We, the Pacific Climate Warriors, are weary from waiting for world leaders to take the necessary action to create a Fossil Free world. So we are taking matters into our own hands, and we need you with us.
Along with people representing 12 Pacific Island nations, we’ve launched the Pacific Climate Warriors Declaration on Climate Change, outlining what needs to be done to avoid further climate catastrophe. We are asking you and people around the world to show your solidarity with the Pacific by signing our Declaration.
This year, Fiji holds the Presidency of COP23, the UN Climate Talks. So, it is a key time to highlight Pacific leadership on climate action. Rising seas and weather changes are already taking a heavy toll in my region, but Pacific Climate Warriors will be in Bonn to make our message clear: we are not drowning, we are fighting.
Pacific Islanders were some of the leading voices to advocate for the commitment to 1.5 degrees of warming in the Paris Climate Agreement. We know that living up to Paris means countries must keep their fossil fuels in the ground and rapidly transition towards a Fossil Free world where everyone has equal access to renewable energy.
That’s why we Pacific Climate Warriors, representing grassroots, indigenous, and frontline communities across the Pacific region, have penned this Declaration calling for world leaders to end the era of fossil fuels and instead build a 100% renewable future for all.
The Warriors and I will be in Bonn to publicly deliver our Declaration and these key demands at the COP23. You can follow our trip and all the action at COP23 here and help us to amplify our voices as part of the #HaveYourSei campaign. A sei is a flower worn behind the ear, and represents the beauty and resilience of Pacific peoples and cultures in the face of climate change. (…)
#HaveYourSei in the global fight for the climate and support the Warriors in our call for a #FossilFree world.”

More  CO2
Carbon emissions are the big issue, of course, as far as climate change is concerned. I reported last week that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had reached record levels but you may remember that Martin Baxter from IEMA pointed out that if we continue to emit carbon dioxide year on year inevitably the concentration will rise. The worrying news this week is that the annual global emissions are likely to be some 2% higher for 2017 than for the three preceding years. It seemed as though the level of emissions had reached a plateau and would start to decline. Not so. 
According to Carbon Brief the major emitters are China, India, the US and the EU, and the increase in the global emissions is clearly linked to increasing emissions from China. China is still a major user of coal for generating electricity and when economic activity increases China's emissions increase as well. Denialists sometimes say that if China is opening a new coal-fired power station every week then anything we do to cut emissions is a waste of time because we will be totally out-polluted. That's no longer strictly true. Yes, China does use a lot of coal and is now the biggest GHG emitter in the world. However it is also the biggest user of renewable energy in the form of wind and solar power, and this is increasing. China intends to phase out coal, but in a vast country where many people still live in poverty, economic growth is a constant imperative. At least the Beijing smogs are a constant reminder to the government that change is vital.
COP 23 - more coal?
COP 23, the United Nations climate summit currently running in Bonn, is a vast event with a wide range of speakers and topics from all over the world. This last Monday, for example, there were 48 separate side events. During the week topics included Enough is enough: Stopping the Violence Against Environmental Defenders; A transformative response to climate change: Applying the principles of Laudato Si’ (that’s the Pope’s encyclical - his statement to the faithful about climate change); Time for a diet shift: Plant based diet for climate change mitigation; and hundreds of others. One that caused controversy was The Role of Cleaner and More Efficient Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Power in Climate Mitigation. This was the Trump administration using its only public forum at COP 23 to promote fossil fuels and nuclear energy. 
"This panel is only controversial if we choose to bury our heads in the sand and ignore the realities of the global energy system," David Barks, special assistant for the White House, said in his opening speech.
The theme of the presentation was that we are likely to be dependent on coal for some time yet, so let’s look at clean coal and ways of minimising its impact. Preferred option is carbon capture and storage (CCS), which involves extracting the CO2 from power station emissions and pumping it away into permanent storage under the sea or into exhausted oil wells. The problems with this are twofold. First, no-one has yet made CCS work on a commercial scale. The second problem is that the extraction and pumping process will require significant amounts of energy, reducing the efficiency of the generating plant and increasing the cost of energy to users.
There was certainly a lot of scepticism at the session. Some protestors were thrown out of the meeting while former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg compared it to a tobacco company addressing a cancer conference.  California governor Jerry Brown, found it simply ridiculous.
"I think the federal government is treading water. They've kind of become like Saturday Night Live, or a comedy programme," he said.
"They're bringing in a coal company to teach the Europeans how to clean up the environment.” 
Meanwhile, a report released on Monday from the California Public Utilities Commission shows that California will get half of its electricity from renewable energy sources, including wind and solar, by 2020, a full decade ahead of schedule.



Michael Bloomberg - less coal?
Michael Bloomberg, who is now UN special envoy on climate change, this week announced a $50 million fund to extend the battle against coal to Europe. He has already invested more than $164 million to fight coal in the US since 2010, especially through Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. The European campaign will be administered by the European Climate Foundation, which is led by Laurence Tubiana, France’s climate change ambassador during the COP21 negotiations in Paris. Mrs. Tubiana commented: “Europe still relies significantly on coal for power generation, but the rapid pace of development in cheap renewables offers a great opportunity”.
“Together with Bloomberg Philanthropies, we can help change the course of history and drive Europe’s shift to a cleaner, healthier and more prosperous future”.
Bloomberg told The Guardian: “Coal is the single biggest polluter. If you could just replace coal with any other fuel, you would make an enormous difference in the outlook for climate change”.
Michael Bloomberg also revealed that he is eager to expand the campaign against coal to Asia and that he is currently seeking for partners to proceed. Let’s hope he can make a friend of Xi Jinping, president of the People’s Republic of China.
Disruption!
I said earlier that a sustainable future implies change and doing things differently. Once again the Ellen MacArthur foundation is promoting the annual Disruptive Innovation Festival. It runs for three weeks and has already covered things like Furniture That Changes to Fit Your Life, How The Circular Economy Can Disrupt the Development Paradigm, New Definitions of Food Packaging in the Circular Economy and Will Automation Spell the End of Education As We Know It?  There are links to all of these on the blog at www.sustainablefutures.report . 

The Disruptive Innovation Festival runs until the end of next week and you can catch it live or find the archive on the DIF website [ DIF on Demand. ]
And Finally…
And that is it's for this week. I’m Anthony Day and that was the Sustainable Futures Report. There will be another next week. I aim to make every episode new and interesting so please get in touch and tell me what interests you. mail@anthony-day.com As I said to start with, I'm now using researchers to help me prepare these episodes and that should allow me to go into greater depth on the topics I cover. Wait and see if you can tell the difference. The main difference to me is that it will cost, so if you've not already signed up at patreon.com/SFR then I’ll be delighted if you do so because your contribution will help defray my expenses.
Once again, thank you for listening wherever you are in the world. Let's work together to protect that world, to make our political leaders are aware of the urgent fragility of our world and the need to protect it not just for our great-grandchildren, our grandchildren and our children, but for ourselves too.
Have a good week, and if Thanksgiving is something you celebrate have a really good one this year.
I'm Anthony Day.
That was the Sustainable Futures Report.
Bye for now-.


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Friday, November 10, 2017

A Fair COP?

This Week

COP 23, the annual climate conference, is running in Bonn, Germany. We have a report from a man on the ground. The US is not participating, at least not in a positive way; the UN is warning of an emissions gap while levels of CO2 and methane are racing ahead. Should we be driving electric cars? They’re clean, aren’t they? Some claim that they are just as dirty as combustion engined vehicles. Client Earth is still trying to get the UK government to clean up the air, water fountains are fizzing in Paris, Juliana seems to have new friends and how precious is plastic?

Hello. Yes, once again it's me, Anthony Day. And here's the Sustainable Futures Report for Friday, 10 November. I hope you enjoyed last week’s report. It's a change for me to be interviewed rather than doing the interviewing. Having said that, at the conference that I was running last weekend I was interviewed by another podcaster and if you're really interested - it’s nothing to do with sustainability - you can find a link to that here. 
Remember that the blog is at www.sustainablefutures.report  and I try to include as many links as possible so that you can find exactly where I've got my stories from. Let me take a moment to remind you about patreon.com/SFR . You can sign up there to support my work from as little as a dollar a month. (Yes I know, but it’s an American site.) I'm very grateful to those patrons who already support me, from the UK, from the Netherlands and from Canada, among other places.

Let's start today with the Fourth National Climate Assessment issued by the US government last week. Let me quote from the Executive Summary:
“The climate of the United States is strongly connected to the changing global climate. The statements below highlight past, current, and projected climate changes for the United States and the globe.
“Global annually averaged surface air temperature has increased by about 1.8°F (1.0°C) over the last 115 years (1901–2016). This period is now the warmest in the history of modern civilization. The last few years have also seen record-breaking, climate-related weather extremes, and the last three years have been the warmest years on record for the globe. These trends are expected to continue over climate timescales.
This assessment concludes, based on extensive evidence, that it is extremely likely that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases, are the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”
Later on it says:
“Global average sea levels are expected to continue to rise—by at least several inches in the next 15 years and by 1–4 feet [around a metre] by 2100. A rise of as much as 8 feet [around 2.5 metres] by 2100 cannot be ruled out. Sea level rise will be higher than the global average on the East and Gulf Coasts of the United States.
“Changes in the characteristics of extreme events are particularly important for human safety, infrastructure, agriculture, water quality and quantity, and natural ecosystems. Heavy rainfall is increasing in intensity and frequency across the United States and globally and is expected to continue to increase. (…)
“Heatwaves have become more frequent in the United States since the 1960s, while extreme cold temperatures and cold waves are less frequent. Recent record-setting hot years are projected to become common in the near future for the United States, as annual average temperatures continue to rise.”
It goes on:
“Humanity’s effect on the Earth system, through the large-scale combustion of fossil fuels and widespread deforestation and the resulting release of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, as well as through emissions of other greenhouse gases and radiatively active substances from human activities, is unprecedented. There is significant potential for humanity’s effect on the planet to result in unanticipated surprises and a broad consensus that the further and faster the Earth system is pushed towards warming, the greater the risk of such surprises.”
The Donald Disagrees
All this, of course, is in conflict with President Trump’s rejection of climate science. He has already said, and subsequently confirmed, that the United States will withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Only two countries originally rejected the agreement: Nicaragua and Syria. Nicaragua’s objection was on the basis that the agreement didn't go far enough, but it changed its mind and has now signed up. At COP 23, the climate conference taking place this week in Bonn, Syria announced that it would also sign up. That leaves the United States on the outside, as soon as it can extricate itself. Unsurprisingly, President Trump is the only world leader not invited to the climate conference which will take place in Paris later this month, after COP 23.
According to the Independent, some are calling for the US to be excluded from COP 23 altogether. 


USGCRP, 2017: Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I [Wuebbles, D.J., D.W. Fahey, K.A. Hibbard, D.J. Dokken, B.C. Stewart, and T.K. Maycock (eds.)]. U.S. Global Change Research Program, Washington, DC, USA, 470 pp, doi: 10.7930/J0J964J6.


The Paris Accord demonstrates a near universal acceptance of the need to manage carbon emissions. However, in its annual review, the UN says the gap between carbon cutting plans and the reductions required to keep temperature rises below 2 degrees Celsius is "alarmingly high”. It re-iterates the point that current pledges are insufficient to keep within the temperature limits agreed in the Paris climate pact.
More Emissions…
According to the BBC, emissions from human activities involving burning fossil fuels have stalled since 2014, caused by a reduction in coal use in China and the US, as well as the rapid rise of renewable energy sources. Nevertheless, concentrations of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere surged to a record high in 2016, according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Last year's increase was 50% higher than the average of the past 10 years.
Researchers say a combination of human activities and the El Niño weather phenomenon drove CO2 to a level not seen in 800,000 years, and they say this risks making global temperature targets largely unattainable.

The World Meteorological Organisation reports that levels of methane and nitrous oxide are also at record levels. You’ll remember that methane is a greenhouse gas many times more potent than CO2.

…can mean More Ill Health
Medical journal The Lancet added its concerns about climate change to the debate this week. It says:
“Climate change is commonly discussed in the context of its future impact, but the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change by Nick Watts and colleagues, published on Oct 30, exposes the urgency for a response as environmental changes cause damaging effects on health worldwide now. The comprehensive Review describes the first results of a global initiative, which will annually report on indicators of climate change and its effects on health. One alarming finding is how rising temperatures have influenced the transmission of infectious diseases. Vectorial capacity of Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus [I think those are mosquitoes] has increased since 1990, with tangible effects—notably, the doubling of cases of dengue fever every decade since 1990.”
Find the full text at: 
What to do?
The eternal question - what should we be doing about it? Well maybe we should cut our personal emissions by all driving electric cars. But it’s not as simple as that. Some people questioning whether electric cars are truly cleaner than conventional internal combustion vehicles.
The Dirt on Electric Cars
The Financial Times (FT) reports that a large electric car can have much greater emissions than a small conventional car. This of course is taking into account life-cycle emissions. In other words the emissions involved in the manufacture of the vehicle and its final disposal, as well as any emissions created during its operational life. Low emission cars are commonly defined by the volume of emissions coming out of the exhaust pipe. Electric cars don't have an exhaust pipe so they are classed as 100% clean. The study quoted by the FT takes into account the emissions involved in creating the electricity to charge up electric cars. If this is coming from coal there are significant indirect emissions. The other major source of emissions is the actual production of the vehicle. Producing the battery for the electric car leads to emissions and there are also ethical doubts about the source of materials for the batteries. We have already spoken about conflict minerals such as cadmium and tantalum which come from mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: mines which are defended by child soldiers. Remember falling whistles? Go to fallingwhistles.com and maybe donate something for Christmas.
Tesla's gigafactory in Nevada plans to rely on wind and solar alone to provide all the energy needed for its battery production. A serious problem with electric cars is range anxiety. The majority of people drive short journeys, rarely more than 80 or 100 miles per day. Nevertheless they want to be able to do those occasional longer journeys, which is why a 200 mile range is rapidly becoming an industry minimum standard. This means bigger batteries, more conflict minerals, more emissions in the production process and more weight for the car to carry around.
According to the American Union of Concerned Scientists 42 percent of US households could use a battery-electric or plug-in electric vehicle, and all households could use a hybrid-electric vehicle. Doing so would save drivers billions in fuel costs and greatly reduce the amount of global warming pollution emitted.
In fact, widespread adoption of electric cars and trucks could save 1.5 million barrels of oil a day by 2035. To get there, the US needs smart government policies that incentivise investment in clean vehicle technology—helping move America toward a cleaner, safer, future.
The on-line journal Shrink That Footprint firmly defends electric cars in a detailed report. You can find it at shrinkthatfootprint.com. The authors do admit, however, that the key factor is the source of the electricity and that in some places an electric car is no cleaner than one that runs on conventional fossil fuels.
Scientific American magazine gets in on the debate as well, with the headline: “Electric Cars Are Not Necessarily Clean”
Some manufacturers are clearly aiming for the greenest of the green. The body of BMW’s i3 electric car is made from carbon fibre using hydroelectric power in Washington state. It is assembled at a wind-powered plant in Leipzig, where it is fitted with seats made from recycled bottles and coloured by dye from olive leaves. The door panels and dashboard are made from kenaf plants and eucalyptus wood. Even the key is made of castor beans. (Kenaf? Yes, I had to look it up too. It’s a vegetable fibre like jute.)
The overall consensus seems to be that it's a good thing to drive an electric car as long as it's a small one and you recharge it from your solar panels or from another source of renewable energy.


Scintillating Paris
There’s news this week that the city of Paris plans to install sparkling water dispensers in every one of its 20 arrondissements. Sparkling water will be freely available to all. There have been eight dispensers in the city since 2010 but this expansion comes in order to keep the citizens of Paris hydrated and to discourage the use of plastic bottles. Will your city follow where Paris leads?

Precious Plastic
Talking of plastic bottles, how precious is plastic? I've just come across a website called preciousplastic.com . The aim of the organisation behind it is to build neighbourhood plastic recycling units in old shipping containers which can be installed almost anywhere in the world. Some are already up and running and they take scrap plastic donated by the public, sort it, shred it and recycle it. They can make filaments for 3-D printers, they can make poles and bars, they can make hand grips for climbing walls, they can make plates and dishes. All this from material which otherwise would be burnt or landfilled as rubbish. The website goes into great detail to explain exactly how to site a container and to set up your own plastic recycling plant. Looks quite tempting to me. I'll find out more and keep you informed.
Clearing the Air
Another organisation trying to clean up is Client Earth. I’ve mentioned Client Earth before. It describes itself as “activist lawyers committed to securing a healthy planet.” Client Earth is taking legal action against the UK Government for a third time over its persistent failure to deal with illegal air pollution across the country. Anyone following UK politics will probably not be surprised that the government has not been effective on this issue. With a minister having talks with a foreign government and keeping them secret from both her own department and the prime minister, (whoops -she’s just resigned!) with the foreign secretary making unguarded remarks which could double the sentence of a UK subject imprisoned abroad on political charges, with the defence minister forced to resign for sexual impropriety and open disagreement in the cabinet over the approach to Brexit, it is surprising that anything gets done at all. That doesn't change the importance of the air-quality issue. 40,000 people die prematurely in the UK as the result of bad air quality. I reported recently on the T-charge introduced by Transport for London as a surcharge on the congestion charge to be paid for older and dirtier vehicles entering the central area. I commented at the time that Transport from London had used the phrase, “London's dangerously polluted air.” They are certainly taking it seriously. Client Earth firmly believes that the government is not. It is a matter of concern that the judicial system can issue an injunction against the government and the government can simply choose to ignore it. If the government does not respect the law how can it expect others to do so?
Juliana’s new friends
Do you remember the Juliana case? It’s been rumbling on for some years now. It's an action against the US government by a group of children and young people who want to hold it to account for prejudicing their life chances by allowing industries such as the coal industry to create dangerous pollution. Ruling on the next stage of the action is expected early next year. Meanwhile other litigants are following a similar path. 
Two Philadelphia-area children are suing President Donald Trump and two of his climate skeptic cabinet members, Energy Sec. Rick Perry and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt, to try to stop them from rolling back existing environmental protections including the Clean Power Plan.
The plaintiffs, ages 7 and 11, are backed by the Clean Air Council, Philadelphia's oldest environmental non-profit. The complaint alleges that the Trump administration's reliance on "junk science" to undo climate regulations are a threat to the young plaintiffs and other U.S. citizens. 
This one too, will probably run and run. Didn't somebody once say that justice delayed is justice denied?

COP23
As I mentioned earlier, COP23, the UN climate conference started this week in Bonn, Germany. Martin Baxter, chief Policy Advisor of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment is there and he told me what's been going on. This interview was done by phone. Apologies for the sound quality.
[audio only - sorry, no transcript this time]
And that's it for another week. 
I’m Anthony Day, that was the Sustainable Futures Report . Thanks again to my patrons and if you're not yet a patron just go across to patreon.com/sfr and sign up.
There will probably be another Sustainable Futures Report next week but as we go into December I may reduce the frequency. This is partly because I've got a lot on, and partly because I'm sure you'll have a lot on as we run up to Christmas. 
Anyway, thanks for listening to this episode. 
That was the Sustainable Futures Report, 
I'm Anthony Day 
and that's it for now.


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