The Ryan Institute at NUI, Galway hosted a
‘conversation’ with Professor Daniel Schrag, Director of Harvard Centre for the Environment and
member of President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and Dr. Henrike Rau, a lecturer in
Political Science and Sociology at NUI, Galway and leader of the Ryan
Institute’s Socio-Economics and Policy priority research area on Thursday, the
14th of February 2013 in what was a very informative and pragmatic discussion
on the challenges that lie ahead in addressing climate change. Professor Schrag
was in Ireland to attend the Climate Gathering meeting hosted in the Burren College
of Art over the weekend of the 15th to the 17th of February. Proceedings
started with an introduction by Professor Colin Brown , who gave a brief
overview of the activites of the Ryan Institute and introduced Professor Schrag
and Dr. Rau. Professor Schrag then gave an overview of some issues that needed
to be considered when discussing climate change. He outlined three themes that
demonstrated the enormous challenges: the use of short-term versus long-term
targets; the ability to have a sustained political will to address climate
change and how this affects public attitudes and behaviour; the trade-offs to
be made when considering alternative solutions; and the understanding of
uncertainty.
Short-term versus
long-term targets
Professor Schrag believes that there is too much focus on short-term
targets. This manifests itself in thousands of hours wasted by eminent
scientists and politicians in trying to come up with target figures of 17 or 22
per cent by 2020 or 2030. Whether it is 17 or 22 per cent by 2020 has an
negligible effect on actually moving towards a zero carbon society. This sounds
paradoxical but is framed within a long-view of the effect of carbon emissions
as outlined by Professor David McKay in his excellent book ‘Sustainable Energy-without the hot air’. When trying to
identify who is reponsible for climate (and therefore who should pay for it
based on the ‘polluter pays principle’), Professor McKay points out that it is
not the rate of CO2 emissions that is important but the cumulative
total emissions because much of the emitted carbon dioxide (approximately 30
per cent) will hang around the atmosphere for at least 100 years (Professor
Schrag estimated even longer timeframes). This hightlights the need for us to
‘extend our time horizons’ as suggest by Sir Martin Rees, President of the
Royal Society and master at Trinity College, University of Cambridge in his
article in the fantastic book ‘This will make you
smarter: new scientific concepts to improve your thinking’ edited by John
Brockman. Professor Rees points out no astronomer could believe that we are the
culmination of evolution as it is plausible that we are only at the half-way
stage. Professor Schrag pointed out the difficulty with this long-term view by
suggesting that whatever measures we take today will not make any real measurable
difference until 2113 and beyond.
In response to these comments, Dr. Rau acknowledged Professor Schrag’s
reservations on short-term targets but still felt that they had a role to play in
‘shifting the discourse’. She cited 2008 Eurobarometer data, which suggests that
people are concerned about climate change (57 per cent respondents ‘concerned’)
but there is not reflected in the percentage of people who are willing to act,
demonstrating that attitudes do not directly influence or inform behaviour.
This directly relates to the next main theme of ‘how to develop a sustained
political will?’
Developing a sustained
political will to tackle climate change
Much of debate around the ethical and moral obligations of humanity in
regard to climate change can be diluted by the language used and how it is
interpretated resulting in the general population engaging with the issues or
distance themselves from the issues and responsibility. Professor Schrag illustrated
this point when discussing the climate change ‘adaptation and preparedness’
approach. The ‘adaptation’ approach would seemed to us to be a practical
intermediate solution based on the acceptance that climate change is happening
and we as a species will need to ‘adapt’ in some way. But put it in the context
of the George W. Bush’s administration, this term defined a strategy of
inaction informed by the belief of whatever is going to happen, we will be able
to ‘adapt’ to it using our human ingenuity, thereby surviving more or less
intact. Interestingly, recent extreme climate events in the US do seem to be
having an influence on general public opinion providing a basis for a political
will. The recent devastation of Hurricane Sandy in New York coupled with severe
droughts throughout the US and the recent blizzards conditions in many states
has come at a great personal and financial cost to a country still trying to
pull itself out of the curent economic downturn. Professor Schrag pointed out
that flood insurance in the US is subsidised by the government as the private
sector do not want to deal with it. This could be seen as subsidising
habitation patterns in areas under threat i.e. coastal communities and cities
but what other choice do they have? An interesting suggestion was that if
buildings are unfortunately affected by flooding and other extreme weather
events, then the rebuilding costs should be provided only if resilient
engineering strategies are implemented. This, then introduces the concept of
‘preparedness’ into these communities and may influence behaviour.
Professor Schrag pointed out that the climate change deniers lobby have
been very clever in associated climate change values to issues of ‘big
government’, increased taxes and the interference in people’s everyday lives.
This is an astute approach as some environmental experts believe that the proof
of President Obama’s commitment to tackle climate change during his inaugural
address will be in the introduction of a carbon tax. Of course, this has to
pass through Congress and President Obama does not control Congress so he does
not have the ability to deliver a carbon tax demonstrating the difficulties
that the President is facing. Despite this, Professor Schrag does believe that
America has a huge role to play in addressing world emission especially when
you consider the rise of China. US emissions are actually down about 9 per cent
to 16 per cent of world emission whereas China continues to increase. If you
put both the countries together, you may come up with around half of all the
world’s emissions. Professor Schrag believes that if America does not do
something to address their emissions, then China will do nothing. Following on
from this, he believes that if America and China did come together and
demonstrated a real willingness to reduce their emissions, then everybody else
would follow including the EU. This may be a parochial view but it is one with
some merit because if you can focus on the the big gains first then smaller
ones should follow with less effort. Of course, this is has a high degree of
complexity as climate change cannot be removed from issues such as global
health, poverty, equality etc. A lot of the political will is currently being
influenced by what alternative technologies are available.
Alternative Technologies
and Trade-Offs
The US has committed to provide 3000 GigaWatts of new electrification with
increased efficiency over the next 30 years. Professor Schrag points out that
this is a very ambitious target considering that 106 GigaWatts of power in US
is currently provided by nuclear energy, which is due to be exhausted by the
middle of the century. He mentioned the electrification of the transportation
sector as a plausible solution if technology improve considerably with some
potential in fuel cell technology. In fact, he believes the path to a zero
carbon economy will not be a steady progression and expects certain technology
peaks to occur. The coal industry in the US is coming under increasing pressure
from alternative technologies such as fracking and shale gas extraction. This
can be seen in the provision of electricity from coal-fired plants dropping
from approximately 50 per cent five years ago to 38 per cent today. His
discussion on fracking and shale gas
extraction was an interesting one as it focused more on public perception than the
technologies involved. Professor Schrag accepted that the extractive process is
a ‘dirty’ one but gave the example of Texas, where fracking has been taking
place for the past decade without any complaint. This is due to the fact that
Texans are used to the extractive industries. Fracking only hit problems when
it moved to areas that were not familiar with these processes, which in turn,
generated a groundswell of opposition against such technologies, which has now
developed internationally. In Professor Schrag’s opinion, it does provide an
alternative ‘cleaner’ option than traditiona coal-fired plants. This is
interesting considering the Irish situation, where the extraction of shale gas
would not be replacing coal-fired plants but would be replacing imported gas.
So it will be gas replacing gas, so it is not really providing a ‘cleaner’
alternative especially when you consider the environmental impacts of the
extractive process. But then a comparative analysis of the economic benefits
must be carried out to identify the potential trade-offs.
This was a theme running throughout the discussion, that Professor Schrag
took a very pragmatic view of potential solutions and nearly always grounded
them in economic terms. Other alternative technologies mentioned were carbon
capture and storage, a ‘clean’ nuclear solution (if one exists), the use of
solar technology especially photovoltaics, which have seen a dramatic drop in
cost over the past five years moving it towards being a viable alternative.
Returning to the issue of target timelines, one of the reasons Professor Schrag
is not a huge fan of short-term targets is that they distract attention (and
funding) away from technological solutions that need huge investment to achieve
long-term goals e.g. carbon capture and storage.
