Download to read offline
More Related Content
Similar to Ses Oxford Lecture
Editor's Notes
- #2 Quote from National Geographic 2004Picture from Apollo 17Dec 14th 1972 – the last day Man walked on the moonVery rare view of earth with none in shadow
- #3 30 years student in school, studying philosophy and economics, from post university through his career to nowHas worked in the food business, building supplies industry, oil business, procurement, facilities management.For the last 8 years has worked in consultancy advising companies in various sectors such as retail, media and finance. This has often involved:finding clarity amidst confusion, simplicity out of complexity, right action out of inaction.Time and again the same practices have been found to work:resort to simple principlemaking full use of the limitless capacity of the mind when quiescent and free of egoismBecame a climate watcher 18 months ago and has seen a world waking up to the problem but still unable to act decisively. His view is that there is an opportunity to mitigate a threat but also to consider how we have to exist more responsibly on a planet which is not infinite.
- #8 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change part of UN and World Meteorological OfficeYes, Energy CountsThis is a big experiment and we’re in the test-tubeWe can only do it once.WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE PIG PICTUREThis blog is dedicated to providing a framework for use by all: to understand climate change / global warming, or what I'm calling 'Climate Destabilisation'. to help to understand its root causes. to aid inventive searching for solutions to the problem to assess the potential benefit of proposed solutions.I’M GOING TO DRAW OUT 4 ASPECTS FROM MY BLOGWhat is this world that we are custodians of?What do we want energy for?The role of carbon?How we can curb our energy use and be successful custodians
- #11 Consider the picture of the earth, viewed from space on the last ever Apollo Mission. It shows that in cosmological terms our earth is minute. Most life takes place on the surface of this minute orb and extends a few 100s of metres above and below its surface. This biosphere is no more than a film on a tiny planet and extremely delicate. It is in constant movement and supports various cyclical processes which are highly balanced and interrelated. This is where life happensA delicate and isolated ecosystem....
- #27 Waste is an inevitable consequence of life. Before the industrial revolution waste was mainly bio waste and was manageable although not well managed. In other words, biologically produced waste materials could be handled by biological processes, and give or take a few urban excesses were kept in balance. Much of today's highly organised effluent processing relies upon these self same processes in sewage farms, septic tanks and digesters.Today's challenges are very much greater for the two reasons mentioned in previous posts.Firstly the level of activity and consumption, populations in the West, and increasingly the East, feel the need for, is increasing the level of waste they also produce. This results in, for example, at the UK domestic level in;less time to cook and therefore the need for pre-prepared, pre-packed, near instant meals,the need to be slaves to fashion and throw out perfectly functional garments or gadgets within months of purchasing them?Secondly the global population is higher than ever before and continuing to rise very fast at 200,000 per day. These incremental new populations aspire to the needs of the established cultures and add to the demand for goods and services and their associated waste.WasteI am going to avoid the cliché of how many earths we would need to manage the waste stream of the world if the world consumed at the same rate as the EU?, but it is more than one. The developed world is profligate and its current habits are not sustainable. However from my blog’s perspective I’m concerned about what this is doing to the climate. The carbon cycle keeps the consideration very simple. If we consume carbon from the biosphere and process it into useful things and/or waste within the biosphere then it is neutral, as it has always been. If we dig up subterranean carbon and introduce that to the biosphere then every atom is a net increase to the biosphere. Every time each atom cycles through the carbon cycle and spends time as a greenhouse gas it is making the climate warmer. So, given the fact that we are currently still extracting carbon from the subterranean layer what is the wisest thing to do? The waste hierarchy helps, as it shows where the most benefit comes from. If we can have an effect at level 1, then it has obviates the need for work at the lower levels. There is also an article in the Financial Times (26/04/08), which placed an acute eye upon the plastics and packaging industry, and shows how they can be considered at the various parts of the hierarchy. There will be an analysis of the article in the context of the hierarchy below in my next major post. The waste hierarchy is becoming more complex as novel technologies blur the edges of neighbouring levels, but it is still a useful way of looking at waste. The Waste Hierarchy1. Reduction.is probably the most fertile ground, and yet is the most difficult as waste reduction returns us to the question of what we really want and involves changing habits which are in themselves on a fast path towards ever greater excess (see post 4). For example, my children’s generation can easily become heavily influenced by ‘cheap chic’ fashion from shops like Primark and H&M which turn over ranges and ‘seasons’ remarkably rapidly. They may only wear a garment once before disposing of it. At best that garment gets reused in the UK and eventually through a ‘clothing recycling bank’ gets sent to the third world, probably whence it came, which is an irony in itself. For baby-boomers, who were brought up with post war rationing still having an effect, this is very difficult to understand and accept. The current western life is full of desire and the need for instant satisfaction – “I want it, and I want it now. If I’d wanted it yesterday, I would have told you yesterday….” Where does moderation, temperance, ‘make do and mend’ and self-sacrifice fit into this? In the words of Harold MacMillan in 1957, who was urging for restraint and common sense, “most of our people have never had it so good”. Is this not today’s problem too but magnified by another 51 years of increasing wealth, expectation and consumption? The material world has expanded enormously and made ‘once in a lifetime’ type purchases, mere commodities which get consumed and disposed of in rapid succession. This concept of succession will be referred to again in a later post. All this is fired by a national need for increased economic growth. In the book ‘Do good lives have to cost the earth?’ Adair Turner puts a strong case for a change of thinking here. Again a later post will look at my take on his very interesting thoughts. If we can’t manage to reduce our need for goods then we must drop down to reuse where the overall gain is less but the ease of implementation might be easier. 2. Reuse.has great virtue and many of us from the UK babyboomer generation still have an instinct to use it, if we can. The clearest example of it was the pinta - a glass one pint bottle sealed with an aluminium lid containing one pint of fresh milk delivered to our doorstep from an electrically powered milk float. An unwritten rule of the dairy was that each customer left their 'empties', washed out emptied bottles, ready for collection by the milkman at the same time as he delivered. So in theory if he started his run with 1000 'pintas' he would return with 1000 'empties'. The dairies would then clean and sterilise the bottles and reuse them to distribute more pintas to peoples doorsteps, and so the cycle continued. I'm not sure what the attrition rate of bottles was, but despite there being no financial benefit to make the bottles available for reuse, most did get preserved and recycled out of a sense of duty and a desire to keep the process economical.This process is reflected in northern Continental Europe where many carbonated drinks are bought in strong reusable bottles for which there is a significant charge made. There are both financial and legal incentives to bring the bottles back to a shop for eventual return to the bottler to reuse.No doubt there are arguments to suggest that today's milk supply chain allows a far better, long lived product to be sold and so less milk is wasted and the consequent carbon footprint is less, and these may well be right. However it is unarguable that if we still had the pinta delivered in glass bottles it would seem ludicrous for the perfectly serviceable empties to be smashed into pieces in a bottle bank. At best, this is what we in the UK are doing with our glass containers, whether it is wine and beer bottles or jam jars. In other words we are needlessly dropping down a level in the waste hierarchy and 'recycling' glass which, with enough imagination, could be reused. A consequence of moving our waste down the waste hierarchy is that it becomes less useful, less valuable and more likely to be dumped at level 6 in the hierarchy.3. Recycling and compostingThe term for broken glass is cullet. It has virtually no utility at all except perhaps as deterrent to intruders when embedded in a cement topping to a wall. In order for it to be recycled to make it useful it has to be worked on. If ground down, it apparently can be mixed with sand, which has does a have an absurd irony to it, if you think about it. Ground glass can also be dispersed within other building materials to provide some functional advantage but this is all pretty low grade in comparison to the shiny, fully serviceable receptacle from which it was derived. To make useful glass receptacles again, the cullet has to be sorted by colour, have impurities removed, and then heated to very high temperatures to melt and remould it. This does seem absurd too. I have read at http://www.glasscullet.com/ that part of the rationale for recycling cullet (level 3) to make glass containers is that it requires less energy than producing new glass. I don't disagree with that narrow view, but is that the only alternative? Why not preserve that glass container and reuse it (level 2), and only resort to level 3 when the receptacle has lost its utility?Returning to the pinta. Many a jam jar was 'reused' (level 2) as a receptacle to collect the aluminium caps to the milk bottles which were then ultimately recycled (level 3) back into the aluminium supply chain. The motivation for this purely financial - it was a fund-rasier for our school.Composting, in my opinion, has been elevated above its station. Yes, it produces a useful natural fertiliser and mulch, but it also produces CO2 and some methane, which contribute to greenhouse gas emissions for relatively little gain. Energy recovery can be a better option for the biosphere if the vegetable waste does not have to be transported too far.4. Energy recoveryThis is a posh way of saying incinerate rubbish and use the heat it produces in some way. Starting at the smallest scale first: garden waste often ends up on a bonfire where it is partially burned to produce ash, half burnt wood, lots of smoke, water, CO2 and some clear space where the bonfire pile was. On an individual scale this does little harm but a community's waste disposed of in this way does a lot of harm and, more importantly for this analysis, misses a major opportunity to recover the energy provided to the biosphere by photosynthesis in the plant life being burned. If the gardener were to put a kettle on the bonfire he might eventually boil enough water to make a thirst quenching cup of tea, which would have recovered a small part of the energy locked up in the garden rubbish and avoided him boiling an electric kettle.The real problem however is that the bonfire produces low grade heat which is very difficult to harness. There was a special design of mini-stove marketed that could recover the energy from one newspaper which would be sufficient to boil that kettle in a few minutes. This combination of good design matched with excellently prepared fuel was best described to me by an expert supplier of logs for use in Swedish wood-burning stoves. If the stove was stoked with logs which had been split and allowed to dry out completely the natural temperature of combustion was so high that they were self cleaning and the combustion so complete that a smoke flue was not required. This 'clean burning' recovers the most amount of heat possible and makes the most use of the carbon within the biomass burned. If you return to post 7, you will see that this is the near perfect means for energy recovery of biomass. It is this matching of the fuel to the method of incineration which is so importannt.Unfortunately the incineration and energy recovery of the general waste stream is not so easy - the waste is far less well defined and contains materials which do not burn cleanly. Much is made of the threat posed by dioxins which are a very harmful byproduct, but recent technology advances are ingeniously minimising this.5. Landfill with energyTaking most of the general waste stream and burying it in the ground is unsightly and space intensive and is an obvious sign of man polluting the biosphere and makes landfill look 'unenvironmental'. Nonetheless microbial and chemical processes within the rubbish do eventually break much of the waste down into simpler products which eventually settle and produce a base upon which topsoil can be placed. For example a local landfill site close to us is now a park with playing fields.From an energy point of view however, the heat released from breaking down the waste (the warmth naturally produced in a compost heap for example) is not recovered - it is effectively wasted. Of even greater significance is the by-products of this partial degradation of the waste - these are hydrocarbon gases such as methane and CO2. Methane is highly combustible and could provide plenty of energy if harnessed. This is not easy, as the gas is volatile and dilute and would escape easily - it is therefore not widely applied.A variant of this which is far more promising is the controlled biological digestion of waste streams in purpose built self-contained units.A further variant of this which is a hybrid with energy recovery (level 4) utilises two sequential chemical processes, pyrolysis and hydrolysis, to breakdown carboniferous material partially into higher molecular weight hydrocarbons which can substitute for gasoline - iebiofuels. 6. LandfillIf all else fails waste, as has always been the case, can be buried in the ground or dumped into water, both of which look terrible and have major negative consequences on the biosphere. Whilst I have seen how domestic waste is disposed of on the idyllic Greek island of Trizonia - simply pushed over and down a cliff eventually tumbling towards the sea only for some of it to reappear on the appropriately named 'Bottle Beach' soon after - of greater significance is the gases produced by landfill sites. These were mentioned in level 5, where at least they were captured and made use of. In a simple landfill site these will be CO2, which is a greenhouse gas, and methane which is also a greenhouse gas with 500 times the initial effect of CO2. So not only are we not using the calorific content of the methane we are wantonly allowing it to increase global warming. In summary:In considering the waste hierarchy, a focus on the framework with the carbon cycle at its centre, does provide incisive insights into how best we should manage the waste borne of ever increasing consumption.The higher the level, the easier it is to practice the wise thing, if we really want to, and achieve the greatest gains. How hard do we want to do the right thing?It is very tempting for us to drop down a level to make the practice easier and pass on the responsibility to someone else, but can we really continue to offset our responsibilities?We have got very confused between recycling and reuse and a return to 1950's thinking may well straighten this out.Energy recovery could be a highly beneficial way of reducing how much new carbon we introduce into the biosphere.
- #28 Adair Turner – former Chairman of the CBI, Law of diminishing marginal utilitiesAfter L1 there is local pollution which can be affordedL1 provides well being: female literacy, legal contraception, modest economic growth – end of population explosion
- #31 Quote from National Geographic 2004Picture from Apollo 17Dec 14th 1972 – the last day Man walked on the moon
- #35 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change part of UN and World Meteorological OfficeReceived Nobel Peace Prize in December 2007
- #42 ManagementPhilosophyEconomicsDemographyChemistryGeologyBiologyOceanographyClimate ScienceEngineeringPolitics