Is It Too Late For Climate Change?

Macleans has an article up on their website from last week's print edition - "Will Coal Bury Kyoto?" - which has me thoroughly depressed. Essentially, the article notes that, with Asian consumption of electricity and steel rising, once-unprofitable coal mines are being reopened all across the country, but especially in Nova Scotia and B.C. It is difficult to overstate how important coal is to China in particular - 75% of China's electricity is generated from coal, and consumption of electricity is likely to double in the next decade. This will make China by far the largest emitter of CO2 in the world, if Chinese coal consumption doubles along with electrical consumption. Currently, China is #2 at roughly (figures from memory) 15% of global CO2 emissions.

"Luckily", China's energy industry is among the least efficient in the world. I did a paper on this last term, but I'll spare you the ten pages of filler, and give you two pages of meat: China cannot meet any of its future economic growth through increasing energy consumption alone. It needs to - needs to, not "would be desirable to" - begin a major program to make the nation's industry, transportation and homes more energy-efficient. There are some good signs - for example, the government has recently introduced a plan to almost halve the amount of energy China uses per $1,000 of GDP in 15 years. Because China's energy use is so inefficient, they could see major gains extremely quickly.

For an idea of some of the ways energy can be recycled from industry, see this article (warning - large PDF file) about distributed generation, by the head of Primary Energy, a corporation that specializes in such things. Some of it is very interesting, though do take it with a grain of salt - they obviously have an interest in this.

The Macleans article has me depressed because it paints an all too plausible future - increasing shortages of oil and natural gas force us off the cleanest of carbon fuels, while forcing us back on to coal as a major source of electricity (and possibly even coal-derived liquid fuels for cars.) This means that despite any reductions by the EU, CO2 emissions from China, India, Brazil, and the US totally outstrip any gains we might make in combatting Climate Change.

Taken to the extreme - basically, we consume coal until it runs out - we could easily see a scenario where the Earth gets set in a positive-feedback loop (in this context, "positive" is bad) where an initial forcing from human-made CO2 forces a much larger cycle of CO2 emissions from the planet itself. Some theorize this may already be occurring. This scenario ends eventually with most of the western prairies as deserts, the great glacier-fed rivers of Asia running dry (and the three billion people who are fed by those rivers starving) and large parts of Europe and the Southern US underwater. If you thought hurricane season in Florida was bad, wait until the high tide reaches into Georgia, and doesn't go out again.

It's the possibility of this scenario which has forced me to moderate my stance on nuclear power somewhat in recent months - using "passive-safe" designs, nuclear power plants need not be any more dangerous to us than coal or natural gas, and the waste is far less problematic than CO2. So, if we are absolutely draconian about using renewables and especially efficiency, and we still find ourselves using coal as a fuel source, I would support building nuclear power plants to replace coal generation. However, I personally doubt that, using all the renewables available to us, we would still need coal (or any other non-renewable.)

So yeah, I'm depressed. On the plus side for Canada, the Northwest Passage will be the new hot resort destination for us all. Stan Rogers will played on all radios at least once every hour. By law.