Matthew Henty

In Edge 298, an outline by Stewart Brand of his, “Egopragmatist Manifesto”. A good read, and some interesting points. Nuclear is green, greener than gas and coal certainly, and perhaps greener than leveling square kilometers of virgin desert in the name of energy production or building huge numbers of windmills. And cities are green, very green:

We now have over half the world living in cities. In terms of footprint this uses about 2.8 percent of the ice-free land area of the world. Pretty soon you will have 70-80 percent of the world living in cities. By then we might be up to three percent of the land area, which means that all the places that people move out of and they stop burning the wood for firewood and stoves and heating and so on. The woods come back. They stop killing the animals for bush meat. The animals come back. They stop drawing out of the ground and the aquifers come back. All of this happens as a byproduct of moving away from the country and moving into the city. So cities are pretty green.

A good story, but where are these cities going to be? The list of the biggest current cities on Wikipedia is here, and the ones that are likely to grow are in East Asia, Central and South America and Africa.

I have also just read Flood by Stephen Baxter (a good, quick, read, generally nicely plotted, but drags a bit too much at the end and not too sure about many of the characters) and it got me thinking about the predicted sea level rise resulting from climate change (rather than huge undersea resorvoirs!). The central IPCC estimate seems to be 18-59cm by the end of the 21st century. But beyond that, Wikipedia has this list of possible big sea level events:

If small glaciers and polar ice caps on the margins of Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula melt, the projected rise in sea level will be around 0.5 m. Melting of the Greenland ice sheet would produce 7.2 m of sea-level rise, and melting of the Antarctic ice sheet would produce 61.1 m of sea level rise.^[12] The collapse of the grounded interior reservoir of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would raise sea level by 5-6 m.^[13]

Clearly the big one would be the Antarctic ice sheet, leading to a big, big rise. What would that do to the geography of the world? What would that do to the 70-80 per cent of the worlds population, many of them in these big, big cities? Well, Mumbai is 14m above sea level, Shanghai 4m, Karachi 8m, Delhi 239m, Istanbul 100m, Sao Paulo 760m.

Some of the biggest cities will be first in the flooding line (incidentally, London is 24m above sea level) and some should be immune from anything but the most catstrophic science fiction scenario. That is still many people a bit too close to the sea for comfort.

Polly Toynbee “makes a case” for carbon credits in the Guardian this morning, while ignoring all the potential problems. Funny that she concludes that they are definitely a great idea.

The proposal:

…each year everyone gets equal carbon credits to spend on petrol, home heating or air travel. People exceeding their quota can buy more credits. People who use less can sell credits. It encourages home insulation, energy saving and less driving or flying. Since low earners use less – 20% have no car, 50% don’t fly – they can profit by selling to those with big houses, foreign holidays and gas-guzzling cars. It would be a powerful but voluntary agent for redistribution.

Here are some very simple questions Polly might consider:

• Who gets a carbon ration? Citizens, or residents too? What about visitors who hire a car in London and drive to Scotland, or do they buy from the expected surplus?
• If all residents get a carbon ration, where is the list of all residents to whom rations should be issued? Or will everyone have to apply for them, in order to generate this list? The lessons from low take up of pension credit would need to be learned and overcome.
• Will a central database of credits, balances and debits be held? Will this be tracked by name, by identity or just by some number? Will the database therefore provide yet another means for the mass surveillance of the population?
• Even if the database is anonymised somehow, how long would that last? I’m assuming the carbon ration will become valuable as carbon gets expensive (otherwise what’s the point) so the system will be targeted by fraudsters. It won’t stay anonymous for long.
• Who will manage the database? Will it be outsourced, who will have access?
• Why not just tax carbon, which requires no additional databases or additional tracking of the population?

Carbon credits may be a good idea. But they really are an idea ahead of their time – there are just too many questions yet to be answered, or even asked.