Submitted to Marlborough Express but not published.
Tom Powell I got an email through the Climate Karanga Marlborough website the other day. It read: “from Google: a 10kg dog would be the equivalent of 240kg of CO₂ emissions per year. In response to the Stuff article showing a photo of two people and a dog” The photo was of me, my partner and our dog, and accompanied an article I’d written for the Marlborough Express. For context, 240kg CO2 is about the emissions from two tanks of petrol in a small car. The intent of the email was clear: I was someone who claims to be a climate activist but who owns an emissions-generating plaything. I was being seen as a hypocrite! It got me thinking about the bigger picture. Climate sceptics accuse us of being hypocrites when we don’t “walk the talk” and we accuse them of wantonly spewing CO2 into the atmosphere for continuing to live an emissions-intensive lifestyle. You’ve all heard of “flight-shaming”, I presume. But, does this tit-for-tat battle get us anywhere? Climate scientist Michael Mann argues the polluting companies have traditionally focused on the role of personal responsibility when addressing pollution, so as to keep the focus away from themselves. As long as we are pointing the finger at each other, we aren’t pointing the finger at the real source of the problem. There is a bigger issue here, however, when thinking about the weather disasters we can expect with continued global warming. Some years ago I was working in The Philippines where I met a woman who told me of a family member who was stealing from other family members. I suggested she might want to kick that person out of the family. She said, “oh no, you can’t do that! You never know when you might need their help when the next typhoon comes!” You see, The Philippines is a country that experiences regular disasters – earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and typhoons - essentially cyclones like the ones we get here, but much more frequent. They’ve learned that they need one another to get through these disasters. There is a lesson here. In order to best get through the turbulent times ahead, we need to stick together. I was out in the Sounds when the July 17th, 2021, weather bomb hit. The road was flooded in one direction and blocked by a slip in the other. The power, telephone and internet were all out. Blocked drains and raging streams were tearing the place apart. It was a scary scene! Thankfully, it wasn’t long before neighbours appeared. Diggers were out clearing the slips and people were up our driveway checking to make sure we were OK. It was a wonderful relief and I was very grateful we were all on the same team. Individual lifestyle changes, while helpful and welcome, aren’t going to be enough to solve the climate crisis. Surveys show that climate ranks third among most people’s concerns, behind cost-of-living and healthcare. Not everyone is ready to transition to a low-emissions lifestyle just yet. So, I would urge you to forgive the emissions of those around you. You just might need their help when the next weather bomb hits. What will make a difference is collective action – government action. It will be through government regulation, policies and legislation that we will find the fairest way to share the burden of the transition to a low emissions economy. The best thing you can do right now to arrest our steadily deteriorating climate is to vote for climate action. Study the different political party’s policies and proposals, and vote for the ones who promise to continue to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. Our children and their children will thank us for it.
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submitted and published in the Marlborough Express
Tom Powell It seems every day there is a new technology announced that will help us in the fight against global warming. These stories spark our imagination and give us hope. But as time has gone on, we sadly learn that each basket of new technology contains fishhooks – unexpected problems and side-effects. Sometimes we only find these fishhooks when we dig really deep into a promising basket, which makes them all the more disappointing when we find them. Electric cars are a good example. They give us almost all the convenience of the petrol cars we’ve come to know and love. But, as we’ve come to learn, the minerals used in the batteries come at an environmental and human cost - child labour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to mine the cobalt for the batteries. Sure, we can avoid the greenhouse gas emissions of petrol vehicles, but there is still an environmental and social cost. It is a painful trade-off. The latest example of a promising new technology is green hydrogen. It is a highly energetic fuel that can be created from nothing more than electricity and water and when passed through a fuel cell to create electricity, makes only water again. Finally, we think, a clean and easily created fuel that can power our trucks, ships and planes! Yet, just as our government is approving a $100 million subsidy for green hydrogen development over the next 10 years, we come to find some fishhooks. It turns out, hydrogen is an intense but indirect greenhouse gas. Hydrogen released into the atmosphere readily reacts with hydroxyl radicals, short-lived gas molecules generated by sunlight. We depend upon those same hydroxyl radicals to remove methane and ozone from the atmosphere, both intense greenhouse gases. So, releasing hydrogen into the atmosphere, through leaks and upsets, will slow the natural removal of other harmful greenhouse gases, increasing global warming. The overall effect is still under study, but hydrogen is estimated to have a warming potential of approximately 100 times that of carbon dioxide over a 10 year period. And, hydrogen is a notorious leaker. Being a very small molecule, it leaks through nearly everything, including carbon steel and the high pressure carbon fibre tanks used for fuel storage and in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Engineering work on stemming those leaks has focused mainly on preventing leaked hydrogen from reaching flammable concentrations (i.e., more than 4% in air), but it is unlikely that we will be able to stop leaks altogether. It is estimated that 2.7% of global hydrogen production in 2020 leaked into the atmosphere. As hydrogen use becomes more widespread in the world economy and hydrogen production increases, The International Energy Agency estimates hydrogen leakage of between 2.9% and 5.6% by 2050. This amounts to nearly 30 million tonnes of hydrogen per year in the high-risk case. And then we find that transportation has the highest leakage rates, with fuel trucks and storage estimated to account for 5% leakage with another 2.3% coming from the actual hydrogen usage. So, here we face another painful trade-off, but in this case, it is trading one source of global warming for another. Do we risk prolonging the already intense warming of methane in the atmosphere (84 times the warming potential of CO2 over 20 years) in order to move people and goods with hydrogen fueled transport? In the end, there are no easy trade-offs. Our only really effective strategy is to stop – stop driving and flying as much, stop buying things from far flung places and stop trying to engineer our way into a low emissions lifestyle as convenient as the one we’ve enjoyed until now. The planet’s climate is changing and so must we. |
Authors
These are a collection of opinion articles principally written by CKM member Tom Powell for the Marlborough Express. Tom is a retired geologist who came to New Zealand in 2004 to work in the geothermal industry on the North Island, is a New Zealand citizen and now lives in Blenheim. Some articles have been written by other CKM members, and their names appear with those articles. Archives
December 2023
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