The green technology that could save us all

From The Guardian

So what do we do now? After 27 summits and no effective action, it seems that the real purpose was to keep us talking. If governments were serious about preventing climate breakdown, there would have been no Cops 2-27. The major issues would have been resolved at Cop1, as the ozone depletion crisis was at a single summit in Montreal.

Nothing can now be achieved without mass protest, whose aim, like that of protest movements before us, is to reach the critical mass that triggers a social tipping point. But, as every protester knows, this is only part of the challenge. We also need to translate our demands into action, which requires political, economic, cultural and technological change. All are necessary, none are sufficient. Only together can they amount to the change we need to see.

Let’s focus for a moment on technology. Specifically, what might be the most important environmental technology ever developed: precision fermentation.

Precision fermentation is a refined form of brewing, a means of multiplying microbes to create specific products. It has been used for many years to produce drugs and food additives. But now, in several labs and a few factories, scientists are developing what could be a new generation of staple foods.

The developments I find most interesting use no agricultural feedstocks. The microbes they breed feed on hydrogen or methanol – which can be made with renewable electricity – combined with water, carbon dioxide and a very small amount of fertiliser. They produce a flour that contains roughly 60% protein, a much higher concentration than any major crop can achieve (soy beans contain 37%, chick peas, 20%). When they are bred to produce specific proteins and fats, they can create much better replacements than plant products for meat, fish, milk and eggs. And they have the potential to do two astonishing things.

The first is to shrink to a remarkable degree the footprint of food production. One paper estimates that precision fermentation using methanol needs 1,700 times less land than the most efficient agricultural means of producing protein: soy grown in the US. This suggests it might use, respectively, 138,000 and 157,000 times less land than the least efficient means: beef and lamb production. Depending on the electricity source and recycling rates, it can also enable radical reductions in water use and greenhouse gas emissions. Because the process is contained, it avoids the spillover of waste and chemicals into the wider world caused by farming.

If livestock production is replaced by this technology, it creates what could be the last major opportunity to prevent Earth systems collapse, namely ecological restoration on a massive scale. By rewilding the vast tracts now occupied by livestock (by far the greatest of all human land uses) or by the crops used to feed them – as well as the seas being trawled or gill-netted to destruction – and restoring forests, wetlands, savannahs, natural grasslands, mangroves, reefs and sea floors, we could both stop the sixth great extinction and draw down much of the carbon we have released into the atmosphere.

The second astonishing possibility is breaking the extreme dependency of many nations on food shipped from distant places. Nations in the Middle East, north Africa, the Horn of Africa and Central America do not possess sufficient fertile land or water to grow enough food of their own. In other places, especially parts of sub-Saharan Africa, a combination of soil degradation, population growth and dietary change cancels out any gains in yield. But all the nations most vulnerable to food insecurity are rich in something else: sunlight. This is the feedstock required to sustain food production based on hydrogen and methanol.

Precision fermentation is at the top of its price curve, and has great potential for steep reductions. Farming multicellular organisms (plants and animals) is at the bottom of its price curve: it has pushed these creatures to their limits, and sometimes beyond. If production is distributed (which I believe is essential), every town could have an autonomous microbial brewery, making cheap protein-rich foods tailored to local markets. This technology could, in many nations, deliver food security more effectively than farming can.

There are four main objections. The first is “Yuck, bacteria!” Well, tough, you eat them with every meal. In fact, we deliberately introduce live ones into some of our foods, such as cheese and yoghurt. And take a look at the intensive animal factories that produce most of the meat and eggs we eat and the slaughterhouses that serve them, both of which the new technology could make redundant.

The second objection is that these flours could be used to make ultra-processed foods. Yes, like wheat flour, they could. But they can also be used to radically reduce the processing involved in making substitutes for animal products, especially if the microbes are gene-edited to produce specific proteins.

This brings us to the third objection. There are major problems with certain genetically modified crops such as Roundup Ready maize, whose main purpose was to enlarge the market for a proprietary herbicide, and the dominance of the company that produced it. But GM microbes have been used uncontroversially in precision fermentation since the 1970s to produce insulin, the rennet substitute chymosin and vitamins. There is a real and terrifying genetic contamination crisis in the food industry, but it arises from business as usual: the spread of antibiotic resistance genes from livestock slurry tanks, into the soil and thence into the food chain and the living world. GM microbes paradoxically offer our best hope of stopping genetic contamination.

The fourth objection has more weight: the potential for these new technologies to be captured by a few corporations. The risk is real and we should engage with it now, demanding a new food economy that’s radically different from the existing one, in which extreme consolidation has already taken place. But this is not an argument against the technology itself, any more than the dangerous concentration in the global grain trade (90% of it in the hands of four corporations) is an argument against trading grain, without which billions would starve.

The real sticking point, I believe, is neophobia. I know people who won’t own a microwave oven, as they believe it will damage their health (it doesn’t), but who do own a woodburning stove, which does. We defend the old and revile the new. Much of the time, it should be the other way around.

I’ve given my support to a new campaign, called Reboot Food, to make the case for the new technologies that could help pull us out of our disastrous spiral. We hope to ferment a revolution.

[George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist]

Source: Precision Fermentation: What exactly is it?

Another warning

By Adam Zyglis

 

Death by degrees

From The New Daily

Far from implementing the vision of COP26 in Glasgow, as intended, COP27 in Egypt signed the death warrant for 1.5 degrees.

That number was the ambition of COP21 in Paris: Keeping warming to 2 degrees above pre-industrial age global mean temperatures, and preferably 1.5 degrees.

Over the seven years since then, the world’s politicians and business leaders have been quietly slinking away from that while saying the opposite. It’s suicide by politics.


That has been exposed in Egypt with a deal on cash bribes to poor countries, but little else.

Keeping warming to 1.5 degrees now looks impossible, and according to David Karoly, one of Australia’s leading climate scientists, there’s an 80 per cent chance of 2 degrees, while 3 degrees is 50/50.

What’s more, says Karoly, given that the sea is cooler than the land, a global mean temperature rise of 2 degrees means at least 3 degrees on the land, where we all live. And 3 degrees global mean equals an unliveable 4 degrees on land.

Last year the Australian Academy of Science published a report co-authored by David Karoly, titled: Risks to Australia of a 3-degree Warmer World.

It makes confronting reading, especially considering this is now a 50 per cent likelihood.

So the question is: At what percentage likelihood of disaster, agreed by most scientists, should a government seriously prepare for it? Wait till it’s 100 per cent? How about 80 per cent? If you knew there was a 50 per cent chance of a cyclone hitting your house, would you at least board up the windows?

Australia’s exports of fossil fuels represent about 17 per cent of GDP and the tax revenue from the companies doing it would come close to paying for the defence budget, or the Commonwealth public service.

Over the next 20-30 years, this revenue will disappear as the world heats up and switches to renewables at the same time, with increasing urgency.


What is the plan to deal with the consequences of 2-3 degrees of warming, as laid out by the Academy of Science, along with the loss of one-sixth of the national GDP and a big chunk of government revenue?

The answer, apparently, is that Australia will be a “renewable energy superpower”, which Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been saying for a few years.

It is a meaningless slogan.

The only realistic prospect for renewable energy exports is hydrogen, and in that product Australia has nothing like the scale or competitive advantages it has in coal and LNG.

“Green hydrogen” is produced by applying renewable energy to water through electrolysis that separates the oxygen and hydrogen. It requires an enormous investment – a desalination plant, electrolyser and a machine to combine the hydrogen with nitrogen to produce ammonia for export, plus another machine at the other end to split the ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen again.

We have no greater access to water and nitrogen than anybody else, and while we have a lot of sunshine, that’s unlikely to offset the disadvantage of distance from the main markets.

The “green steel” industry that some are pushing for the Pilbara, using hydrogen to replace coking coal in furnaces, would cost between $700 billion and $1 trillion, according to a mining CEO who has done the numbers.

Australia urgently needs to start planning to replace 15-20 per cent of GDP over the next two decades, and it won’t be achieved by the repetition of a political slogan.

It will only be done through hard, sustained policy grind, detailed planning, careful focusing of taxpayers’ money and benchmarking Australia against its competitors, and then doing better than them in costs and tax.

Fundamentally, politicians can’t afford to think too far ahead. Australia’s ridiculous two- to three-year terms are shorter than most, but even four- to five-year terms are too short for the gap between political cost and the political benefit in dealing seriously with global warming, as opposed to appearing to.

But even leaving aside the reduction in GDP and tax revenue, the long-term cost of inaction is chilling, as set out by the Academy of Science last year.

Here are a few quotes from that report:

• “Under 1.5 degrees of global warming, heatwaves would occur three times a year with each event lasting on average 7.5 days. With global warming of 2 degrees, heatwaves would occur at least four times a year, on average lasting 10 days. At 3 degrees of global warming, heatwaves would happen as often as seven times a year, with events lasting 16 days on average.”
• “The average lifetime of a cyclone is likely to extend by 12-24 hours as global mean surface temperature increases from 2 degrees to 3 degrees of global warming.”
• “Fire risk (driven by record heat, dryness, and fuel, see case study, p.34) will increase by 30 per cent or more in south-eastern Australia.”
• “The majority (approximately 70–90 per cent) of the world’s tropical coral reefs are projected to disappear at even low levels of warming of 1.5 degrees.”
• “A 3 degrees global temperature increase would reduce yields of key crops by between 5 and 50 per cent, depending on crop and location”.

So, scientists are being quite specific about what we’re facing … with a 50-80 per cent probability.

It’s time to consider removing decisions about climate change from the short-term political cycle. Perhaps increase the funding of the Climate Change Authority and give it the power to make independent decisions like the Reserve Bank, or at least public recommendations.

An independent statutory body, perhaps the CCA, needs to be responsible for preparing Australia for extreme weather and more disasters, including the problem of flood insurance, or the lack of it, which is with us now.

As for developing a plan to replace Australia’s fossil fuel exports, that lies with Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic because money will be needed, as well as long-term planning.

To direct the spending, they should set up a process, perhaps a royal commission, to establish priorities and, yes, pick some winners.

After COP27, there is no longer any doubt about what’s coming.

Source: NOAA

Explosion of fossil fuel lobbyist numbers at COP27

From The Guardian

There are more than 600 fossil fuel lobbyists at the Cop27 climate conference, a rise of more than 25% from last year and outnumbering any one frontline community affected by the climate crisis.

There are 636 lobbyists from the oil and gas industries registered to attend the UN event in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. At Glasgow, the figure was 503, which outnumbered the delegation of any single country. This year the only country with a larger delegation is the United Arab Emirates, hosts of Cop28 next year, which has 1,070 registered delegates, up from 176 last year.

At Cop27, “the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists is greater than frontline countries and communities. Delegations from African countries and Indigenous communities are dwarfed by representatives of corporate interests”, said the group Kick Big Polluters out, which campaigns against the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists at the climate negotiations.

The data on lobbyists, compiled by the organisations Corporate Accountability, Global Witness and Corporate Europe Observatory, shows the growing influence of oil and gas interests at the climate talks. While many environmental groups hoping to encourage the transition away from fossil fuels say it can be beneficial to bring private interests to the negotiating table, these benefits risk being outweighed by the sheer size of the delegations and suspicions that lobbyists attend the talks to slow progress rather than discuss limiting their own industries.

Civil society groups fear that the increasing presence of fossil fuel lobbyists risks stymieing negotiations at an essential time, amid efforts to keep global temperature rises within the 1.5C of warming scientists agree is needed to prevent catastrophic climate change.

“The explosion in the number of industry delegates attending the negotiations reinforces the conviction of the climate justice community that the industry views the Cop as a carnival of sorts, and not a space to address the ongoing and imminent climate crisis,” said Kwami Kpondzo from Friends of the Earth Togo.

In a recent submission to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – the body that oversees Cop – to discuss the role of private business at the talks, a coalition of civil society groups said climate action would “continue to fail to meaningfully address the climate crisis as long as polluting interests are granted unmitigated access to policymaking processes and are allowed to unduly influence and weaken the critical work of the UNFCCC”.

What the COP won't touch

From The Guardian

There are just two actions needed to prevent catastrophic climate breakdown: leave fossil fuels in the ground and stop farming animals. But, thanks to the power of the two industries, both aims are officially unmentionable. Neither of them has featured in any of the declarations from the 26 climate summits concluded so far.

Astonishingly, the sectors themselves are seldom mentioned. I’ve worked through every final agreement produced by the summits since they began. Fossil fuels are named in only six of them. Just one hints at using less overall: the others propose only to improve efficiency (which, as we have known since the 19th century, can often paradoxically increase fossil fuel use), attempt technical fixes or, in the case of last year’s agreement in Glasgow, phase down “unabated” coal burning, while saying nothing about reducing oil or gas. Not one of them suggests extracting less. If fossil fuels are removed from the ground, they will be used, regardless of governments’ vague declarations about consumption.

The other omission is even starker. Livestock is mentioned in only three agreements, and the only action each of them proposes is “management”. Nowhere is there a word about reduction. It’s as though nuclear non-proliferation negotiators had decided not to talk about bombs. You cannot address an issue if you will not discuss it.

The call to stop farming animals should be as familiar as the call to leave fossil fuels in the ground. But it is seldom heard. Livestock farming, a recent paper in the journal Sustainability estimates, accounts for between 16.5% and 28% of all greenhouse gas pollution. The wide range of these figures is an indication of how badly this issue has been neglected. As the same paper shows, the official figure (14.5%), published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, is clearly wrong. Everyone in the field knows it, yet few attempts have been made to update it.

Even if the minimum number (16.5%) applies, this is greater than all the world’s transport emissions. And it is growing fast. In the 20 years to 2018, global meat consumption rose by 58%. A paper in Climate Policy estimates that, by 2030, greenhouse gases from livestock farming could use half the world’s entire carbon budget, if we want to avoid more than 1.5C of global heating.

An analysis by Our World in Data shows that even if greenhouse gas pollution from every other sector were eliminated today, by 2100 food production will, on its current trajectory, bust the global carbon budget two or three times over. This is largely because of animal farming, which accounts for 57% of greenhouse gases from the food system, though it provides just 18% of the calories.

This issue has become even more urgent now we know the heating impact of methane is rising. Livestock farming is the world’s greatest source of methane released by human activities. Yet there is no mention of it in the global methane pledge launched at last year’s climate summit.

Governments have not ignored these issues by accident; they have resolutely looked away. A new analysis for Chatham House finds that only 12 nations name emissions from farm animals in their official climate commitments, and none seeks to reduce livestock production. Only two nations (Costa Rica and Ethiopia) mention dietary change: arguably the most important of all environmental actions, as animal farming is also the world’s greatest cause of habitat destruction and wildlife loss.

What accounts for this determined silence? I think there are several reasons. The livestock sector’s cultural power greatly outweighs its economic power. Our connection to food is more personal than our connection to energy sources. Most fossil fuel is consumed at a distance. When we use electricity, for example, we don’t think about where it comes from, as long as the lights stay on. But we think and feel a great deal about the food we eat. And, by comparison with the denial sponsored by the fossil fuel industry, the misleading claims of the livestock industry have scarcely been challenged in the media.

A scandal broke last week about an academic centre at the University of California, Davis, which turns out to have been founded and funded by livestock lobby groups. It has downplayed the impact of livestock farming, in ways that other scientists have described as highly misleading.

But this is just one aspect of the problem. Like the fossil fuel industry, livestock corporations have been ploughing money into public persuasion, using tactics first developed by tobacco companies. Some of this greenwashing has been highly effective, especially the industry’s claims about “regenerative ranching” and the false assertion that pasture-fed meat farming sequesters more greenhouse gases than it releases.

In reality, grass-fed meat is by far the most damaging component of our diets, as a result of its massive land requirement, greenhouse gas emissions, and carbon and ecological opportunity costs. Despite a plethora of claims, there is no empirical evidence that carbon storage in grazing land can compensate for the greenhouse gases livestock produce, let alone for the carbon stocks destroyed when wild ecosystems are converted to pasture.

A paper in Nature Sustainability found that if permanent livestock pasture in just the rich nations were returned to wild ecosystems, their recovery would draw down 380bn tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, equivalent to 12 years of global carbon emissions. The UK government’s Climate Change Committee reports that, in England, “transitioning from grassland to forestland would increase the soil carbon stock by 25 tonnes of carbon per hectare … This is additional to the large amounts of carbon that would be stored in the biomass of the trees themselves.”

Slowly and painfully we have become energy-numerate. Large numbers of people have begun to “do the math” on fossil fuel emissions. Now we need to become food-numerate. An extraordinary feature of this debate is that when you present data, your opponents respond with pictures, generally bucolic images of cows or sheep.

Popular food writing is dominated by a disastrous combination of aesthetics and elite tastes. Famous authors propose that everyone eats the food that they like, promoting diets that couldn’t be scaled unless we had several planets and no space on any of them for wild ecosystems. They urge us to use a Neolithic production system (grazing) to feed a 21st-century population, with catastrophic results.

We urgently need to put these foolish things aside, to follow and understand the science, and press our governments to focus on the major causes of the climate crisis. They had two jobs, and have so far mentioned neither of them.

If you really care about saving the world from climate catastrophe, this analysis makers it clear that the biggest thing you can do is become vegetarian or vegan.   

CO2 & temperatures just keep on rising

 From a Tweet by Peter Kalmus

So far, 27 years of COP meetings have been a complete failure; you can't argue with physics. Anyone saying otherwise has fossil fuels or books to sell.