Recycling and Biodegradeable are bad for the climate

When we burn wood in a very hot, low oxygen, environment, then the resulting charcoal is mostly the wood's carbon, and it is in a convenient form to sequester if stored so that the carbon doesn't have the opportunity to combine with oxygen.

Yes, it is more natural, and normally better for the environment, to allow the wood to rot, but that puts the carbon back in the air. Plastic, and nearly all non-metal stuff we use, is mostly carbon. The biosphere is good at getting at that carbon for structural and energy needs, so it will all degrade eventually. Biodegradeable stuff breaks down faster. When we get on top of climate change then that will be good. For the moment it is bad. Storing old plastic so that it doesn't combine with oxygen is sequestration. While we're getting on top of climate change, that is what we want.

Recycling doesn't automatically put more carbon in the air, since it might avoid the need to get more out of the ground. However the recycling processes are energy intensive because the old plastic is in a much less convenient form than new material. As with many activities, we need to evaluate recycling plans. For the next few decades it might well be better to store the waste, sequestering the carbon.

Another easy source of sequesterable carbon is agricultural, forestry and more general plant waste. Traditionally it has been burnt to get it out of the way. If instead we can treat it so that it breaks down more slowly then that will sequester carbon. Farmers might get some incentive income from this, to compensate for the space taken up.

While the pros and cons would need to be assessed, these ideas should be considered to try to reduce the impact of climate change while we await advanced energy options that will allow us to manage the climate.

Addressing the Climate Emergency

Low carbon now, renewable later

We need to keep CO2 levels down over the next 30 years. We also need to be ready to start pumping CO2 out of the atmosphere with advanced energy technology in the second half of the century.

The first thing that needs to stop is chopping down forests and burning wood chips. This might be "sustainable" over a 100 years, but short term it puts a lot of CO2 in the air for each unit of energy. Also big trees are much better at taking CO2 out of the air than the saplings that follow. This source of energy is a crime against the world.

A wind turbine might only last 25 years, but the concrete base and transmission lines last 3 times longer, so we only need to count a third of the emissions needed to make them? Wrong. This is technology that has no chance of being competitive in 25 years time.

These are just examples. Evaluating massive expenditure for new energy needs to pick solutions that are low carbon quickly.

It is also correct to address CO2 levels in a temporary way that cannot, or should not, be continued indefinitely. Enhancing the productivity of the oceans is almost certainly one of the best options, Apart from fertilisation, which might not need much more than iron ore, there are some clever ideas for providing artificial support structures for creatures, such as oysters, that like to attach to something. 

Human-induced Climate Change is not a subplot

We are failing to correctly address climate change because many people have been seduced into thinking it is a subplot of some bigger problem, and that all we need to do is address that bigger problem. Even if this were true, the time frame is wrong. We need to get on top of climate change over the next 30 years and the supposed bigger problems can not be sanely addressed in that time.

One claim is that it is all a symptom of excess population. Indeed there is an evil subset of the environmental movement that is perfectly relaxed about the prospect of billions of people starving to death. This would, for example, be a likely effect of stopping the production of artificial fertiliser.

In fact we are rapidly developing the technology to produce a lot of food using much less land. This will enable a significant population increase. However the arrival of prosperity and contraception brings a rapid decline, and often reversal, in population increase. Encouraging prosperity is the reverse of the plan that the degrowthers have for addressing the rise of the population.

The second claim is that we need to live "sustainably" with renewable energy and recycling everything. This body of opinion doesn't actually want to kill people, though the effect of their policies would likely be the same. Since nuclear energy uses less artificial ingredients than an equivalent energy source of wind or solar, it is obvious that renewability is not the prime objective of the anti-nuclear greens. Indeed the proponents can be heard, at times, to say that the real problem they are trying to solve is the high consumption society. Making the food for 8+ billion people consumes a lot of resources. So the extremists in this camp have a high overlap with the extremists in the overpopulation camp.

In my next post I'll detail the approach we should be taking to address the climate emergency.

crackpot idea #2: spacetime creates matter

I just saw a video where Brian Cox said "there is exactly the right amount of matter to make spacetime flat".

An obvious explanation is that matter is created by the desire of spacetime to be flat. The idea would be that the curvature of space without matter has energy which converts to matter at the standard rate as spacetime smooths out.

And we see spacetime deformation without matter in gravity waves. These do carry a small amount of energy. So maybe you can scale that up to the size of the observable universe and see that the matter we see pouring into the visible universe from all directions is just what is needed to counteract some natural harmonic gravitational oscillation of spacetime.