Author: chogan@directresearch.com

 

I just got back from a trip to Los Angeles. A business trip of sorts.

All other aspects aside, LA provided a stark reminder of just how long cars last, and how many miles they can travel, in the right climate.

That was just one of several observations suggesting that our current civilization is doomed by climate change.

Move north and build a bunker, like the rich folks are doing.  That, if you plan on being alive 30 years from now.  I’m beginning to think that’s the only sensible response to global warming that remains.

If nothing else, read this to understand why it makes sense that the Federal government seems to be pushing too hard to change the U.S. auto fleet.  They aren’t aiming for conditions today.  They’re aiming for conditions two decades from now, when half of today’s new cars will still be on the road.   If people today weren’t a little put out by it, the Feds wouldn’t be doing their job.

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Like a vegan at a barbecue

I wasn’t prepared for the social aspects of being in a crowd in an airport.  I rarely fly, and I’d forgotten what it was like.  In hindsight, putting it together logically:

1. airports attract people who like to fly, and
2. it’s noisy, so everybody talks loudly, and
3. they tend to talk about all the wonderful trips they’ve taken recently, and
4. the further the trip, the more noteworthy.

So there I sat, a Prius-driving, EV-purchasing eco-nerd, trapped in the middle of a crowd whose principal pastime was, in effect, bragging about how much they added to global warming for their amusement. I.e., who among us had recently taken the most exotic vacation or series of vacations.  And then giving each other oohs and ahhs for feedback.

The prize went to the elderly British couple behind me, who lovingly recited their recent adventures.  They had just flown into LA via Hawaii, after a brief trip to New Zealand.  And were now flying across the U.S., prior to flying across the Atlantic, for a brief stay at home, before their next jolly little jaunt.  Footloose and carefree, they were the most eco-heedless, old people with all the time and money in the world. 

After choking down the FOMO that naturally arises from being forced to listen to that, I did something else I rarely do:  I put on headphones and listened to music full-blast, just to drown out the conversations.

That seemed preferable to losing it in a full Jesus-vs-money-changers-at-the-temple scene.  That would have been completely inappropriate.  After all, what is an airport, if not a temple for those who worship the benefits high consumption of fossil fuels.

If nothing else, hunkering down with headphones, rather than causing a scene, maybe gave me a little more sympathy for those with mild autism.  But maybe it’s just condescending to say so.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m not quite as tightly wrapped as I used to be.

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Carbon offsets for air travel?  F*ck it.

In my last post, I figured that this quick trip for two would add about 1.2 tons of C02 to my household carbon footprint this year.

I was prepared for that.  Went into it with my eyes open.  Where I’d guess that the average person in that crowd didn’t give it a passing thought.

The issue isn’t the gas mileage of airplanes versus other modes of transport.   Modern jets get somewhere in the range of 80 to 120 passenger-miles per gallon (per the medium-haul table in this Wikipedia article).

The issue is simply the travel distance.  Any way we’d have chosen to travel, we’d have generated quite a bit of C02.  Two people in a Prius would have generated about a ton.  Two people in a small EV, at the U.S. average generating mix, would have generated about 0.4 tons.

Anyway, my plan was to come home, and see if I could identify some sort of carbon offset that offered true additionality.  That is, that would actually reduce global carbon emissions in proportion to the money I paid for it.

Meanwhile, the airline’s attempts at greenwashing got under my skin.  I don’t know how many time we heard about how careful they would be about recycling the trash generated on board.  All the while, I’m trying to do the arithmetic about a couple of ounces of plastic and paper my wife and I plausibly generated, versus the appreciable fraction of a ton of fuel that we burned, getting from A to B and back again.

I’m clearly not their target audience.  I was hamstrung by my ability (and willingness) to do simple arithmetic.  Whereas they were targeting people with a willing suspension of disbelief.  I just couldn’t get with the message that dealing with our used Kleenexes in an environmentally-sensitive fashion turned this whole excursion into a bit of simple harmless fun.

In any case, after marinating in that milieu for a while, pondering my place in the universe, while frying my eardrums with Jimmy Buffet, I came to the conclusion above.

Better to save my money.  Give it to my kids so they can build a better bunker.

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Air travel is just the tip of the iceberg

Source:  U.S. Congressional Budget Office.

That’s probably a bad choice of metaphor, given the topic.  But what I mean to convey is that U.S. air travel accounts for less than 4% of U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions.  It’s 10% of transportation emissions, which in turn are just under 40% of total U.S. emissions.

Instead, what got me into a truly dark mood about the future was a few things that really hit home in my brief visit to LA.

Now, in terms of the physical environment and the people, it couldn’t have been a nicer trip.  Mild temperature, beautiful landscaping, and uniformly friendly people.  That’s mostly what I take back from this trip.

But, to get that:

1. You fly over hundreds of square miles of tightly-packed single-story bungalows.
2. Everybody drives everywhere.
3. Most people drive very nice cars.
4. Almost all those cars were old-fashioned straight-gas vehicles.
5. There’s an excellent public transportation system …
6. … that is used exclusively by tourists and the poor.

In that city alone, millions of people have invested their life savings in property that only functions in that car-centric way.

We visited the Getty Villa, a museum situated on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Coast.  As it turned out, the easiest way to get there and back was to take the bus.  (Cell reception is so spotty that it’s all-but-impossible to hail an Uber from that location).  So we did, and we were pleasantly surprised with how nice the buses were, and how nice the bus drivers were, as we asked for directions on what to do next.

And, really, how nice all the drivers were.  Both my wife and I noted that in all the traveling we did in LA, we did not hear a car horn honk, even once.  And that drivers seemed to be quite cautious and courteous around pedestrians.  I can attest that both habits are absent in typical traffic in the DC suburbs.

What really drove it home was driving around with my wife’s cousin.  The idea of driving ten miles to hit up a nice restaurant didn’t phase her a bit.  That’s just business-as-usual there.  She was driving a beautiful nearly-new near-SUV (a “crossover”).  We got to talking, and this thing that appeared to be a nearly-new car had 135K miles on the odometer.  And not a speck of rust or blemish on the car’s finish.  That’s what can happen, in a place that rarely rains.  Cars can last a long time.

But I also noted that the mix of traditional, hybrid, and electric cars on the streets looked absolutely no different from the DC suburbs.  If anything, I noted a lower proportion of hybrids and electrics there than I see around town in Vienna VA.  Which would make sense, if what you’re looking at is generally older, but nice-looking, stock of vehicles.

In the U.S., we look to California to take the lead on all things environmental, at least in so far as they pertain to cars.  That’s why CARB — the California Air Resources Board — has such a nation-wide reach.  Any U.S. region that chronically violates EPA air pollution standards can adopt CARB rules as a way of not having to gin up its own plan to try to get air pollution levels below the health-based EPA standards.

Anyway, what really matters for C02 emissions is housing and transport.  LA — and all the cities like it — are locked into a bunch of long-lived investments (the housing stock) that requires massive amounts of vehicle travel, using a fleet of long-lived vehicles.  Basically, using the vehicles that might have made sense two or three decades ago, but are now just a dead weight as we try to preserve the livability of the planet.

Admittedly, with the generally nice weather, the buildings don’t consume anywhere as much energy per square foot as buildings on the East Coast do.

But the cars?  Cars just keep getting more reliable and longer-lived.  I’m guessing that most of the cars I saw on the road this past week will still be drive-able a decade from now.  And that a quarter of them will still be drive-able two decades from now.

And nothing is going to change that.  There’s no to wean that area off fossil fuels.  At least not over any time span I’m capable of imagining.

To be clear, the DC ‘burbs are largely in the same situation.  But the scale of it here isn’t nearly as obvious as it is in the flat, low-rise terrain of L.A.  Plus, here, cars will eventually rust out, buildings rot, and most of the construction is fairly new.  So while the DC ‘burbs feel ephemeral, to my eye, in L.A., it seem like the shabby post-WWII low-rise buildings that fill the blocks now would likely be there forever.  L.A. is a timeless sprawl, whereas DC feels like this is just a passing phase.

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Conclusion

Source:  Ultimately, Dante’s Inferno.  The image is off YouTube.

People who don’t want to adapt to the new reality often point to the fact that most of the truly horrific changes from global warming are predicted to be a half-century or more in the future.  Things like the shutdown of the Gulf Stream, or the dust-bowlification of the interior of the North American continent.

But you lose sight of low long it will take us to change.  If every new car sold in LA were magically made into an EV, given how long cars last, you’d still have a big presence of gas-burning vehicles two decades from now.  And the houses?  Nothing is going to change the fact that L.A. consists of low-density housing as far as the eye can see.  Every house with a natural gas furnace is likely to be burning natural gas for heat for the rest of this century.

That’s set in stone.  Or wood and steel and pavement.  Or, ultimately, by zoning and property rights.  And every year where the majority of new cars are old-fashioned gas powered vehicles is another year where that’s set in stone.

Not to mention that, from the standpoint of a human lifetime, your fossil-fuel emissions today are very close to permanent.  About half the C02 you emit today will still be in the atmosphere warming the climate 200 years from now.  Even out to a time horizon of a millennium, something like a third of the C02 you emit today will still be around, warming the climate.  And that assumes that the current natural “sinks” for C02 — like the oceans, which currently absorb C02 — continue to function.  Which they won’t.  At some point, if we get the planet hot enough, Nature as a whole turns from a C02 sink to its own C02 source.

It’s not clear that it’s even worth trying to explain the disinformation that is spread about how long-lived our C02 emissions are.  But let me just tackle one actual fact that gets misstated all the time. 

You’ll read that, on average, every year, Nature absorbs about half of our annual C02 emissions.  That’s both correct and incorrect.  It’s correct in that every year, we emit about 10 gigatons of atmospheric carbon, and on average, every year, nature absorbs about five.  But those figures are completely unrelated to each other. 

On average, per year, Nature absorbs five gigatons a year out of the ~150 gigatons of excess carbon we’ve built up in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.  It’s that excess amount that (e.g.) drives C02 into solution in the ocean. 

And, completely unrelated, we still manage to emit another 10 gigatons of carbon each year. 

Nature would absorb 5 gigatons if we emitted zero.  Nature would absorb 5 if we emitted 100.  (On average, it varies quite a bit across years.)  And, purely by chance, right now, the amount Nature absorbs each year works out mathematically to be half of what we emit each year.  But there’s no cause-and-effect.  That’s just two unrelated numbers. 

The problem with that sound bite (Nature absorbs half) is that it makes it sound like all we have to do is cut back a bit, and Nature will clean up our mess.  Instead, when you do the detailed modeling — how quickly the various natural sinks are filling up, and so on — if we successfully got onto a path of zero C02 emissions by, say, mid-century — at best, it will take literal millennia for atmospheric C02 to return to the pre-industrial level.

There are other commonly-spread canards in this area, but that’s the only one that even knowledgeable people misstate, in a way that minimizes the problem.  From the standpoint of a human lifetime, our C02 emissions are more-or-less permanent.   It’s not that half of what you emitted, last year, got re-absorbed.  It’s that a few percent of the cumulative total excess emissions got re-absorbed by Nature last year.  That long “tail” of the C02 we emit today is just one of the many reasons why most people who have an accurate grasp of the underlying science tend to be more than a bit freaked out about the problem of global warming.

The lyrics that I borrowed for the title of this post are more than a half-century old (reference).  By all appearances, if you live in L.A., you’re going to live that same 1960s L.A. lifestyle now and for the indefinite future.

For however long this relic of the past lasts.

Even with one foot in the grave, I’m not about to start jet-setting.  It’s just not who I am.  But I think I’m done with trying to go the extra mile with reducing my carbon footprint.

So maybe I’ll look around for some carbon offsets that plausibly have true additionality.  But these days, I have to view that as a form of amusement, instead of anything of practical value.  I think most of us are now on the right path, but collectively, it’s going to take us far too long to get there.

 

I hate flying.  And yet, my wife and I will soon be taking a flight on a Boeing 737-Max-9, from Virginia to the West Coast and back.

To get in the right mood for the flight, I’m going to calculate just how much this adds to my carbon footprint for the year.   And then start on the path to doing some penance for it.  If that’s even feasible. Continue reading Post #1953: Penance for flying?