Academic Eurocracy’s Green Paris Plan For Climate Change

The Paris Accord’s 195 Nations agreed to work to keep ‘global warming’ below 2°C!   1° of that warming has already occurred.

To achieve this lofty goal the world must do four things, well #5 actually since the first 4 elements are clearly far from presently possible or practical.

Hint: Restore the 72% of this world back to blue-green.

As reported, in a new paper just published in the Journal Science, a European academic team delves deeply into the fact that the world faces a staggering challenge to implement the green plan that is needed to meet the goals of the new Paris Accord. Here’s the plan with some liberties taken by this author to explain and add to it.

1. More or less ignore the trillion tonnes of yesterday’s CO2 already emitted into the air in all of the yesterday’s or the fossil fuel age, most of which has been emitted in the past half a century. It’s already the cause of all of the harm to date but it’s yesterday’s problem right??? So only work on ‘tomorrows’ CO2…. bzzzt.
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   Requisite CO2 actions – click to enlarge

2. Cut Global CO2 emissions from energy and industry in half each decade for the foreseeable future. But even though the world already spent 15 years preparing under the Kyoto Accord let’s give ourselves another short breather (choke choke) and start the first decade as of the year 2020. Come 2030 cut emissions of what remains in half again over that decade. When 2040 rolls around cut the CO2 in half again. The climate/carbon pundits are trying to declare this a “carbon technology law” reaching for an analogy to Moore’s law for technological development of computer chips which double efficiency every decade.
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3. Dramatically reduce emissions from land-use — i.e., from agriculture and deforestation — get this number to zero by 2050. Somehow this must happen even as the world population grows by billions who need food and other products from the land to survive (unless this is one of those sneaky sinister Malthusian ploys).
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4. Invent, deploy and scale up technologies to capture carbon dioxide that gets into the atmosphere in a massive manner so that we are reducing 5 gigatons of CO2 per year by 2050. The authors say that’s double what all the world’s trees do today and we all know that trees are not holding their own by the way. (Coming up is the 5th element which the authors refer to as ‘to be discovered transformative technologies’ and it is a curious omission of the authors to make no mention that said 5 gigatons is a fraction of the lost CO2 once managed by now dying ocean pastures or that natural sustainable ocean carbon capture can be restored to former health and abundance promptly and inexpensively.)

The above 4 elements are much more complicated than appears here as myriad measures will be required in each one. You know, ‘the devil is in the details.‘

“It’s way more than adding solar or wind,”
says lead author Rockström.
“It’s rapid decarbonization, plus a revolution in food production, plus a sustainability revolution, plus a massive engineering scale-up for carbon removal.

 5. Remember the mention of the 5th element above. Transformative technology will need to come to the world’s rescue….

Continue reading details of the ‘green plan’ or avoid some depressing reading and click to jump ahead to that ready to deploy transformative solution.

Starting this year 2017-2020:

All countries are to prepare for the seemingly insurmountable job by what means ….  let the trumpets begin to blare… growing climate bureaucracies in the form of a global climate governance system.

Rewrite the world budget, green plan style. First, cut $500 billion per year in global fossil fuel subsidies. Second stop investment in any new coal-fired power plants, especially in rapidly developing countries like India and Indonesia that have little oil or gas, only plenty of ‘dirty’ coal as domestic energy supplies, they’ll like that 😉

Next, introduce the ‘Green(back) Plan,’ NEW TAXES, all major nations must commit to having a zero carbon footprint by 2050 and to accomplish this they should institute climate/carbon taxes that tax into compliance any and all industries with noxious emissions. A trillion dollars per year or a bit more in these new taxes ought to suffice to begin, but come 2050 the tax bill will be nearing $4 trillion every year.

“By 2020,” the paper adds, “all cities and major corporations in the industrialized world should have ‘zero carbon footprint’,or at least effective strategies to do so, aka well staffed government programs and financial supports in place.”

2020-2030:

Today the price of climate-carbon is hovering around $5-$10 per tonne. But that’s no-where near a high enough price for the sorts of ‘strategies’ this green plan for the Paris Accord needs. Starting on January 1, 2020 the Paris revitalized carbon market presently driven by a floating, price for climate/carbon action will have a floor price set by the Paris Accord at $20 per tonne with a price escalator plan to drive the price to $50 per tonne by 2030, most pundits insist the price will be far to the north of $100 per tonne by 2050.

Coal power must be phased out in rich countries by the end of 2030 and should be declining sharply in the less developed world. Rich countries ought to no longer sell any cars fueled by internal combustion engines. As for airlines most of their short-haul flights are to be replaced by trains or perhaps Elon Musk’s hyperloops.

Clean energy R&D spending should increase by ten times what is being spent today.

Last, but not least, implementation of technologies to scrub carbon dioxide out of the air must start in earnest in this decade such that by the end of the decade 100-500 megatonnes of CO2 is removed from the atmosphere each year and these technologies must be in a form capable of being at least doubled in scale each subsequent decade.

The reforesting of degraded land will quickly fill the available degraded lands with slow-growing forests which leaves deploying technologies such as direct-air capture or bioenergy, aka carbon capture and sequestration, to employ ordinary stoichiometric chemical processes to fix and remove CO2 out of the atmosphere.

2030-2040:

If things go according to plan between now and 2030 the author-boffins bank on the world having developed and delivered into global practice all manner of major technological advances in clean energy, climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. Tiny wealthy countries like Denmark and Sweden, the European authors call them ‘leading countries’, are expected to have completely carbon-free electrical grids and have electrified virtually all of their transport, heating, and industry.

Solar headlights?

Cars with internal combustion engines should have become rarer than donkey carts on roads worldwide.

Aircraft will be almost entirely powered by carbon-neutral miracle fuels.

New buildings will have zero carbon footprints achieved through the use of new construction materials and zero-carbon technology for electricity, heating, and cooling.

Most of all the authors are betting everything on new “radical new energy generation solutions that they say will have to enter the market.”

Don’t forget we now need to be scrubbing an extra 1 to 2 gigatons of CO2 from the air each year, with a potent and productive R&D effort to further expand that scrubbing. (Almost as much as what all the world’s forests do today and they aren’t part of that 1-2 gigatonnes.)

2040-2050:

Early in the 2040s, the major European countries should be very close to carbon-neutral, and the entire rest of the world must match that goal by the end of the decade.

Electricity grids everywhere are nearly entirely carbon-free: “Natural gas still provides plenty of back-up energy for when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun not shining, but Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) should be in place to reduce the natural gas carbon footprint to a small albeit very expensive size. Nuclear reactors will surely remain part of the energy mix.”  Poorer countries will still be using fossil fuels, and the environment will still be having to manage a net billion tonnes of anthropogenic CO2 in 2050.

In 2050, we’d need to be scrubbing more than 5 gigatons of CO2 per year from the atmosphere. That’s double what all the forests on Earth do today and there is little room for more treeplanting. This where the authors begin to paint a more sobering view and state that this simply may not be possible.

We need a guidebook and more, some transformative breakthrough

The paper also notes that the precise details of any road map such as this one will be tentative. The nature of technological change means it’s difficult to say what the world will look like in 2030 or 2040 or 2050. They plan for the future, their future, by saying ‘policymakers’ will need to meet regularly, take stock of where they are, and revise as needed. The conference of the parties in Paris in 2015 is said to have involved some 40,000 participating ‘policymakers’ in such a ‘meeting.’

This road map, aka green plan, is meant to be startling even staggering according to the authors. The crisis is very real and they advise that little short of such an ambitious to-do list is realistic. They do hope that transformative technologies will emerge to make saving the world not such a daunting task.

The Fifth Element – Transformative Technology

Restoring The Oceans To Historic Health And Abundance

They are after all the largest living blue part of this blue planet that in area extent cover 72% of our world, in terms of the volume of Earth where life is possible the oceans make up 99% of available space.

This blue planet of ours is mostly ocean, 72% of its area is ocean, of the remaining 28% much of that 28% is barren ice caps and rock, just 17% of Earth is habitat for humanity and all the rest of terrestrial life.

Our planet’s carbon management system Earth, Air, and Oceans. Trying to make major changes to the small systems makes little sense when tiny changes to the large system is better, faster, cheaper!

So what is going on in the rest of the world? You know the blue part of this world of ours that is in such a warming crisis that some of us frogs have begun to notice our watery pot is getting hotter and hotter.

Where might we best address, redress the problem of our diurnal and nocturnal emissions? That’s easy and is an obvious matter of scale, the earth and atmosphere manage 5,000 billion tonnes of carbon while the oceans manage 60,000 billion tonnes.

The oceans are this blue planet’s most important “carbon management system”, helping manage both natural CO2 and those emissions from human activities, let’s begin to restore our blue planet to health there!

Restoring Ocean Plankton Pastures To Save The World: It Just Works!

The simple fact is that the oceans have become and are becoming ever more desolate blue deserts. This is happening because the vital mineral micro-nutrients they require for their ocean pasture grass to grow, their phytoplankton, is missing as dust in the wind has been drastically reduced due to global greening effects of our high and rising CO2.

click to read more

As we return and replenish the mineral-rich dust our fossil fuel age has denied the ocean pastures they return immediately to historic health and abundance. Fortunately in a fraction of the time it has taken our industrial age to create the global CO2 crisis by restoring ocean plankton cooling capacity to recent levels of health and abundance we will save our world at a cost of mere millions per year instead of trillions.

Tragically this transformative methodology and technology that can restore and replenish the largest part of Nature, the 99% that is oceans, at such low-cost is anathema to those seeking their role in managing and share of the trillion-dollar per year terrestrial solutions that cannot cure the crisis.

The ocean solution it turns out is perfectly safe, sustainable, fast, and incredibly low-cost – I like to say it is ‘dirt cheap’ as dirt is the single magic dust that the oceans are dying for lack of.

The cost will be a scant few millions of dollars per year, easily affordable by the just a very few of we common people. The ocean pastures will return to historic health and abundance when, with our help, they repurpose billions of tonnes of CO2 into fresh ocean life, that is the simple scientific fact of photosynthesis. By restoring ocean pastures in the World’s Seven Seas billions of additional fish will every year fill fishermen’s nets to overflowing providing sufficient food to help end world hunger. When ocean pastures return to health and abundance it takes only a few years, 2-5, for these billions of additional fish to be providing nutritious food for all.

In 2012 with just 10 shipmates I took a modest fishing boat out to sea in the NE Pacific. We carefully spread 100 tonnes of mineral dust on a dying ocean pasture. The cost of that blessed dust is less than $50,000 (fifty thousand dollars). The ocean pasture turned from being a blue desert into a lush green pasture. The very next year the fish came back, hundreds of millions of additional salmon.

My 2012 ocean pasture restoration project worked so well it brought back record salmon returns to Alaska the very next year where 50 million fish were expected to be caught instead 226 million were caught ( final tally). click to read more

Join me on the new Voyages of Recovery.