[Oz-envirolink] Dave Pollard's review of "Heat" (George Monbiot - UK)

[hugh spencer]

I was first introduced to George Monbiot about 10 years ago, after reading
his account of his travels in the Amazon. "Amazon Watershed" - he is a
British zoologist and now commentator on environmental issues and writer
for the Guardian newspaper on environmentally related issues. I have always
been impressed with his columns - and from this review - his 'non-aligned'
view will be an important reference point for us 'eco-doomers' (even if we
don't always agree with the long term message).

Hugh Spencer




Review of George Monbiot's "Heat"

by Dave Pollard
http://www.energybulletin.net/22176.html

(there is a nice summary diagram of carbon flows on the web page).

Other recent books like The Weather Makers explain what we're doing to
cause global warming and the catastrophes it will soon cause. George
Monbiot's book Heat is devoted entirely to answering the question What Do
We Do To Stop It. This is the first in a series of articles summarizing his
action plan.

>From the outset, Monbiot makes clear that he's not looking for a
subsistence solution: He doesn't believe any such solution can be 'sold' to
the majority of the people in affluent nations, so he doesn't propose to
try. We need to retain, he says, our creature comforts, our political and
economic freedoms, our right to health care and education and security and
freedom from fear.

 
The deadline for effective action to curb global warming, he argues, is
2030, and by then we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90%,
nothing less.

He prescribes the least difficult and least painful means to do so. This
includes:

* dramatically improved ways to build homes and other buildings

* the optimal mix of feasible renewable and non-renewable means of
supplying energy to those buildings

* radical changes to land transportation without significantly reducing
mobility

* a significant curtailing of air travel, since it is a major greenhouse
gas contributor for which no satisfactory way of reducing emissions by 90%
is available

* mechanisms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of the retail and cement
industries by 90%.

Monbiot quickly dismisses voluntary approaches to achieving these ends, and
asserts that "unfashionable" strict government regulation and compliance
enforcement will be essential to success. "By and large", he says,
"whatever our beliefs may be, we consume as much as our incomes allow". But
beyond the regulations absolutely needed to achieve these 90% reductions,
he insists that governments must maximize freedoms of citizens.

Monbiot is scornful of the 'light green' technophiles who believe (because
it's easy) that new technologies will allow us to innovate our way to
solutions to global warming. Micro wind turbines, for example, are "a waste
of time and money". He is equally scornful of the 'dark green' eco
neosurvivalists who rejoice at the idea of civilizational collapse, and
their cohorts who proclaim (as I have done) that it is already,
realistically, too late to hope that anything we could do will be enough or
in time.

So in his introduction he's already set himself against the global warming
holocaust deniers, the believers in using market forces, the technophiles,
the radical greens and the green fatalists. That's just about everyone. "As
always", he says, "I am destined to offend everyone". His goal in this book
is "to prompt you not to lament our governments' failures to introduce the
measures required to tackle climate change, but to force them to reverse
their policies, by joining what must become the world's most powerful
political movement".

The key mechanism for enforcement of Monbiot's solution is a carbon
rationing system, using a second 'currency' (Monbiot calls it 'icecaps' to
remind us of its purpose)allocated equally to each consumer on our
electricity, home fuel and transportation fuel usage. Individuals would be
allotted 40% of the national total carbon ration, and the remaining 60%
would be held by the government for its use and to auction to corporations
to the highest bidder. There would be a free market for the rations -- the
poor and efficient could sell what they did not need to the rich for
whatever the going market price turned out to be, so that the ration would
apply fairly to all yet also allow for income redistribution between rich
and poor. And the rationing system would also reward conservation and
innovation in energy efficiency.

The rationing system would have to be accompanied by a large, subsidized
system to encourage improvements in home appliance efficiency and
insulation, in public transportation, and in special subsidies during
extreme weather conditions (to buy more 'icecaps', not to exceed their
ration).

You can't fault him for ambition.

In upcoming parts of this review, I'll describe the other elements of
Monbiot's solution in more detail: Improving home energy efficiency,
optimizing the mix of alternative energy sources, improving the
transportation system, reducing our 'air miles', and improving the retail
and cement industries. In each case the improvement is towards the goal of
reducing emissions, not energy efficiency -- by decoupling these in our
minds and our markets he proposes to encourage and reward technologies that
are cleaner, without depending on them for success. And in his final
chapter, Monbiot tackles, and lays to rest, the four 'messiahs' that others
believe can or will make the need to tackle climate change moot: new fuel
technologies, new cleaning technologies, Peak Oil, and the market mechanism
of carbon offsets. Peak Oil in particular, he argues, could well make
global warming worse.

Stay tuned for Part Two. And go get the book.(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Part Two
This is the second part of a two-part review of George Monbiot's book Heat.

 In the first part I explained Monbiot's argument that a carbon rationing
system was needed - that voluntary, technological and free-market solutions
were not viable. Absolute caps in total carbon emissions, 90% less than
current emission levels, need to be accepted in every sector of the
economy. To the extent new technology reduces emissions they are welcome,
but one way or another, by 2030, we must be releasing no more than a tenth
of the carbon into the atmosphere that we are releasing now.

Monbiot explains three paradoxes that profoundly affect conservation
behaviours:

  The Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate: As energy efficiency improves, people can
afford more energy-intensive solutions, so improvements in energy
efficiency can actually lead to more consumption, not less. So if many
people buy hybrids, by lowering demand for gasoline they could make it
cheaper and encourage more SUV purchases and use as well.

  The Rebound Effect: As energy efficiency improves, personal energy costs
go down, allowing personal volume of use to go up with no net increase in
cost. So if home heating fuel costs drop, people will turn up their house
temperature, and if many people buy hybrids, they can afford to drive them
more often and further than they might have.

  Regulation Actually Enhances Personal Freedoms: Strict home building and
refurbishing codes, while increasing the cost of housing, frees the
subsequent owners of the homes of the need to expend money wastefully on
fuel and on short-term repairs.The first specific area that Monbiot applies
his rationing scheme to is home construction. He says the following
regulatory changes are needed to achieve 90% reduction in home energy
consumption:

  * Much stricter construction quality and insulation standards, and much
better enforcement of standards

  * Mandated use of heat exchangers

  * Better window design (appropriate size, south facing) and glazing standards

  * Mandatory appliance efficiency standards

  * Better hot water tank design

  * Prohibition of 'standby' modes on appliances

  * Mandated use of LED lighting

  * Mandatory use of vacuum insulation in fridges and freezers

  * Mandated use of 'smart meters' (that tell you how much energy you are
using and shut down non-essential energy use during peak use periods. One
of the challenges we face is the huge variability in demand for electricity
by season, time of day and other factors, and the need to have production
capacity 'reserves' to accommodate spikes in demand quickly. His solutions
to this problem:

 *  Stop using coal (heavy carbon dioxide creator) burning to provide this
variable capacity reserve, and use natural gas instead (including
substantially increasing our available gas reserves)

 * Use of carbon scrubbing and re-storage of scrubbed carbon in underground
aquifers

 * Much tougher nuclear power plant waste storage and disposal, plant
decommissioning, and security standards (and, because of the security and
waste disposal problems, zero net increase in nuclear usage - which puts
Monbiot at odds with a large new group of pro-nuke environmentalists such
as James Lovelock)

 * Development of high voltage direct current cables and transmission
systems -- Although initial loss of electricity of DC cables is higher than
for AC, there is no incremental loss of electricity as the length of the
cable increases, making it possible to build offshore wind farms in very
windy areas and transmit the energy over vast distances to areas with poor
wind regimes, and to combine wind generators from different areas to reduce
the impact of low-wind days and the need to use backup hydrocarbons on
those days

 *Use of new 'solar thermal electricity' technology (focuses solar energy
to produce steam). Theoretically, he says, we could produce all the
electricity we need, with 90% less carbon emissions, with a combination of
scrubbed natural gas burning generators and wind energy from high-wind
regime areas transported through high voltage direct current lines. The
problem, though, is that most of us heat our homes with furnaces that burn
hydrocarbons, not electrically. The solution to this, he argues, is to
install the new generator technology (similar to that now used to power
submarines) that produces heat and electricity at the same time. Greenpeace
has developed a proposal to use these generators in winter, and switch to
solar heating in summer (when home heating is not needed and the sun is
stronger). But to reduce the carbon from the furnaces, we would need to
convert to hydrogen-burning furnaces or hydrogen fuel cells in our home
heating and electrical systems. So the complicated solution, he says, is:

* A micro-generation system using solar panels and either hydrogen furnaces
or hydrogen fuel cells would supply home heat and electricity. Either they
could make their own hydrogen from electricity supplied by the grid, or
obtain it from a pipeline network... Everything comes on and goes off at
the flick of a switch, and works as smoothly as our heat and electricity
systems do today. Around half of our grid-based electricity could be
supplied by means of a few very large power systems burning methane, either
in the form of natural gas or the effluvium from underground coal
gasification [the only way to employ coal cleanly, he argues], and burying
the carbon dioxide they produce. The other half, if my meta-guess is
correct, could be provided by offshore wind and wave machines [carried by
high voltage DC power lines].In the process of coming up with this
solution, he reluctantly rejects as impractical or naive three technologies
that many environmentalists embrace:

 * Home-based micro turbines

 * Off-grid community-based energy 'internets'

 * Biofuel-based energy generation

He then turns his attention to the transportation system, another great
carbon producer. He points out the irony that the faster cars travel on an
expressway, the fewer cars the expressway can simultaneously accommodate
(because of the need to provide greater stopping distance between the
cars). So the 118-mile long, 6-8 lane UK M25 expressway can accommodate
53,000 car passengers (with an average occupancy of 1.6/car) traveling at
30 mph, but only 19,000 passengers traveling at 60 mph. If all cars were
replaced with buses, it could accommodate 260,000 passengers at once. His
answer, then, is to convert existing expressway lanes to bus-only lanes,
operate high-amenity buses (spacious, comfortable seating, work-stations,
food, beverage and media services) and run them, not in the cities, but in
the suburbs and country, from the peripheral subway and LRT stations of the
cities outward. Combined with carbon capping and rationing, and capping and
rationing of road space, he argues that this could reduce auto emissions by
90% with no significant drop in convenience, comfort or transportation
speed.

What could make the system even better, he argues, would be the use of
imagination and innovation in transportation system design and options -
new technologies like cellphones, GPS, vehicle tracking and smart tagging
could offer exciting and efficient new ways of getting from A to B without
major new investment.

While hydrogen is feasible in home power generation, it is not feasible, at
least not in the 2030 time horizon, for powering automobiles and other
hydrocarbon-based transportation, he argues. This argument, like those he
makes against micro wind turbines, off-grid energy internets and biofuels,
is complicated - too much so to meaningfully appreciate without reading how
Monbiot made the long journey from enthusiast to skeptic on these
technologies, in his own words. He's also dubious about the limits of
telecommuting and home-based enterprise - while he certainly encourages
these developments as energy conserving, he makes a compelling case that
less than 20% of work trips could practically be eliminated by them.

He offers no solutions to reducing air travel emissions by 90% short of
grounding 90% of flights - he reviews and dismisses each of the popular
ideas for making air travel more efficient or less polluting. A single
London-to-NY round trip flight would exhaust a person's entire 1.2 tonne
annual budget for transportation emissions under Monbiot's rationing scheme.

His solution to reduce the extravagant amount of carbon that comes from
retail operations is simple - all stores whose customers reach them
principally by private vehicles would be forced (by the limits of the
rationing scheme or by direct regulation) to convert to online
warehouse-based delivery-to-home operations. Savings would accrue not only
from reduced electricity and square footage but from saved customer fuel
and reduced need for packaging. Of all his solutions, I think this is the
most problematic. George doesn't appreciate that going to the mall is a
social experience now embedded in western culture, not just a method for
buying stuff.

His suggestion for replacing the highly-polluting Portland cement and
concrete production process with geopolymeric cements, which is also
squeezed into the penultimate chapter, is far more compelling.

The book's final chapter deconstructs the arguments that new fuel
technologies or new carbon scrubbing technologies will save the day by
2030. "To succumb to hope of this nature", he says, "is as dangerous as to
succumb to despair." Monbiot loves technologies and has studied dozens in
the search for the easiest way to meet his 90% target, and in the process
learned much about the discovery and commercialization curve, even when it
is accelerated by urgency. Likewise, he dismisses the argument that the
economic and fuel-consumption crash that Peak Oil will precipitate will
solve the problem for us. It will actually make it worse, he says, as
governments yield to the temptation to reintroduce dirty coal and other
environmentally devastating fuels to stave off massive shortages and
spiralling prices. He also dismisses those who would rely on "the market"
to automatically self-correct our insatiable hunger for energy. "Buying and
selling carbon offsets is like pushing the food around on your plate to
create the impression you have eaten it", he says. What is needed is
absolute, immediate, equitable and universal reductions in emissions, and
this cannot be done without regulation and rationing.

The problem, of course, is that regulations require governments with the
courage to enact and enforce them. It took a horrific and unprecedented
depression to push even the enlightened administration of FDR to switch
from a laissez-faire to a highly regulated modus operandi. By the time the
impacts of global warming hit home (and they will punish the
disenfranchised and powerless poor of the world first) it will be too late.
Monbiot concludes his book by trying to convince us to get off our
collective butts, stop reading and chatting about the unfolding crisis, and
do something. But his prescription is mostly actions for government, and we
know too well how little our collective citizen/consumer voice counts in
the minds of governments wined and dined and bribed to do the exact
opposite by the most wealthy, powerful and organized corporatist lobby in
history.

The ultimate irony of Heat is that his prescription is probably the only
one that can save this planet from the scourge of global warming, but that,
as simple, direct and painless as it is, this prescription has about the
same likelihood of actually coming about as a snowball's chance in hell.
Or, perhaps I should say, a snowball's chance on Earth after Monbiot's
brave, well-researched, and ingenious ideas have been forgotten.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~energybulletin Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dave Pollard has done an outstanding job of summarizing the message of
Monbiot's new book and has given Energy Bulletin permission to post his
review. Originally published in two parts: Part 1 / Part 2

Additional points from my reading of Heat:

  Monbiot's approach is serious and comprehensive - more so than other
thinkers.

  The level of technical detail is good for such a small team (Monbiot plus
a few assistants), but one would want to investigate individual topics more
thoroughly.

  Monbiot cites references, so each proposal and assertion can be checked.

  His suggestions could be modeled in a spreadsheet. Other numbers and
proposals could be substituted for Monbiot's.

  The book would benefit from graphs to help visualize the figures and trends.
Dave Pollard is a prolific blogger at How to save the world. He describes
the blog as:

Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers
and essays.

In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better
understanding of how the world really works.-BA

Originally Published on 3 Nov 2006 by How to Save The World. Archived on 10
Nov 2006.   http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/10/30.html#a1690