I put that one together with another great sand poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley for this vignette:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said -- "two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert ... near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lips, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Two great sand images, with two startling different presentations of the world. One, our footprints in the sand reflecting not just our own weight, but the weight of the problems that we bear (and create). And we may hope -- and pray -- that, when the weight of our problems gets too great, a savior will lift us up and carry us to safety.
The other image suggests that the footprints we make with our "vast" legs and feet may not be as grand and glorious as we hope; that the wonders that we have wrought may end up in the trash-heap of history, fading back into the sand....
Could the fate of Ozymandias be our fate as well? Could it happen to us, to our civilization? The footprints that we collectively leave today will tell. At the moment, the carbon footprint of the average American, the average industrialized person, is fantastically large. You can calculate yours at various websites, but the Nature Conservancy's is probably particularly reliable (and then they kindly allow you to donate to offset your footprint!).
Now there's a phenomenally interesting idea: that you can "offset" your carbon footprint. The idea is simple, really: if you put carbon into the atmosphere, you should be finding a way to take it out somewhere else. And the obvious way to do this is planting trees (or other plants) that suck carbon right out of the air. Take an airplane ride? Offset the contrails. Burn coal for electrical generation in your state? Offset your use. Run your car 12,000 miles per year, at 24 miles per gallon? Offset the carbon from burning 500 gallons of gasoline this year.
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Dr. James Hansen has a better idea, which he calls "Fee and
Dividend". Here's how he describes it:
Under this approach, a gradually rising carbon fee would be collected at the mine or port of entry for each fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas). The fee would be uniform, a certain number of dollars per ton of carbon dioxide in the fuel. The public would not directly pay any fee, but the price of goods would rise in proportion to how much carbon-emitting fuel is used in their production. All of the collected fees would then be distributed to the public. Prudent people would use their dividend wisely, adjusting their lifestyle, choice of vehicle and so on. Those who do better than average in choosing less-polluting goods would receive more in the dividend than they pay in added costs. For example, when the fee reached $115 per ton of carbon dioxide it would add $1 per gallon to the price of gasoline and 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour to the price of electricity. Given the amount of oil, gas and coal used in the United States in 2007, that carbon fee would yield about $600 billion per year. The resulting dividend for each adult American would be as much as $3,000 per year. As the fee rose, tipping points would be reached at which various carbon-free energies and carbon-saving technologies would become cheaper than fossil fuels plus their fees. As time goes on, fossil fuel use would collapse. |
The effect of this would be to encourage people to conserve carbon. Its cost would increase because of the fees, but, if you didn't use any, you would bank the fees. The consumer would be strongly encouraged to avoid using carbon.
Of Landfills:
I recently toured the new landfill in North Bay, Ontario, and Michelle Allard, Landfill Operations Co-ordinator, was deservedly proud of her modern facility. They were even capturing the methane created during the decomposition of the garbage. This is important, because methane (CH4) is about 25 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2, molecule for molecule. The old landfill didn't collect and use its methane, but rather let it be released to the atmosphere. One strike against the old, one halo for the new.
But wait a minute: computing carbon footprints is a little trickier than that. The new landfill is also 26 kilometers out of town. The old one was right in town. The materials are delivered to the landfill by truck. Michelle estimates that trips from the city now require an extra 40 kilometers of driving. The average diesel garbage truck gets about 5 km/gallon, so trips costs an extra 8 gallons of fuel. The EPA estimates that each gallon of diesel burned produces about 10 kilograms of CO2 (gasoline produces about 9 kilograms of CO2). Hence each trip costs an additional 80 kgs of CO2; 12.5 trips produces an additional metric ton of CO2.
Score one for the old landfill. Here are some more (and better) details on the new landfill, obtained after I'd gone through the exercise above.
Eating Locally:
Footprints must be carefully calculated, and no costs may be "externalized" (that is ignored and eventually paid by someone other than the perpetrator). That makes them a little tricky to calculate (but the calculations must be made....).
My son is raising rabbits for meat production, and I was talking to him about externalized costs. When we bought his breeding pair of rabbits they were only $20 ($10 per rabbit). But it took a gallon of fuel to go look at them, and buy them. I didn't charge him the $5 for fuel, oil, mileage, wear-and-tear, etc. on the car (and no one charged us for the 9 kilograms of carbon we poured into the atmosphere). Now those rabbits are producing new rabbits (as rabbits are wont to do), mostly without any additional transportation or carbon costs (we can buy their food at the same time as we buy other necessities, so we piggyback the transportation costs in with other costs). This minor portion should really be added in as well, however, to give an accurate accounting of the footprint of our rabbit meat versus the rabbit we'd buy in a supermarket (imported, perhaps, from 500 miles away).
On another front, we're canning our own beans from the garden; but we have to run our stove for about two hours to can seven quarts of beans (10 pounds or so). How much electricity have we used? It takes about a million Joules of energy to get three quarts of water to boil from room temperature. A gallon of gasoline contains about 125 mega Joules (so we could do it 125 times on a gallon of gas, if we could get every Joule out of it! That's not possible, and physics prof Tom Murphy at UCSD suggests in his Burning Desire for Efficiency blog post that we might be just 30% efficient, rather disappointingly). Then we have to keep the water boiling for 25 minutes, which costs perhaps the same. So we might be able to do 20 cannings on a gallon of gas -- although that sounds a little optimistic. So maybe we're canning at about 200lbs per gallon. That sounds pretty good!
When I discussed climate change with one group of students, local food production was on their minds. Why do we eat apples out of season in the US? Because they can be carted up from South Africa, or Chile. That's a long way for an apple to travel, and it requires a fair amount of carbon to get here. Perhaps my most infuriating example of "distance food' is "FIJI Water". We help bring water from Fiji, thousands of miles away, while Fijians don't have access to clean water.
Ironically, the makers of FIJI water claim that their product is even greener than tapwater, because they're offsetting the carbon they use, they put the water on container ships that would run empty otherwise, etc., etc. Isn't it ironic that a product could be green, if the manufacturers blow a bunch of carbon, but then plant a lot more trees to suck that carbon -- and then some more, perhaps -- out of the air? It seems tragically inefficient, at any rate....
Another issue is that of fertilizers and pesticides, some of which are fossil fuel-derived. Wouldn't it make better sense to use local fertilizers? Ironically, humans themselves produce enough nitrogen fertizer in their urine to fertilize and produce an additional 160 cabbages per year (read my The Uses of Human Urine and Faeces in Agriculture: Guidance for Future Experiments). At the time I wrote that I was not aware of another exciting possibility: burning horse manure for fuel and fertilizer! I hope to have a horse soon, and I'll give it a try.
Manure from large factory farms is frequently a local problem. It could be turned into a local solution if we would only return to saner agricultural policies, like those outlined in Gene Logsdon's wonderfully titled book, Holy Shit.
Furthermore, urine makes a wonderful (and inexpensive) deer repellent for your yard, as I can personally attest. Just save it up, then spray it on your flowers and plants. Deer shy away (so do my family members, by the way!) -- but if you hate deer eating your garden, use it as a deer fence.
That has me worried, naturally, but the situation is even grimmer for North Bay (the town of 55 thousand people that's forty minutes away). They get their water from Trout Lake, and the same pipeline will be carrying the dilbit past their water supply. The particular danger of dilbit is that it's diluted with many nasty, toxic chemicals that you wouldn't want to drink. Furthermore, unlike ordinary crude oil, which floats, diluted bitumen sinks. So a spill into Trout Lake could ruin the drinking water supply of 55,000 people for a very long time.
| Diluted bitumen from Alberta is the same material that caused a billion dollars of devastation to the Kalamazoo River (so far), the largest land-based oil spill in U.S. history. It also was the material that spilled in Mayflower, Arkansas. What could be more American than a town with the name of "Mayflower"; and what could be worse than to have your home "tarballed" with chocolaty-peanut-buttery stuff like this? |
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The National Transportation Safety Board issued a report on that spill. Any guesses as to what caused it? As to how attentive the company was to making sure that such problems would never arise? Allow me to quote extensively from their report:
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determines that the probable cause of the pipeline rupture was corrosion fatigue cracks that grew and coalesced from crack and corrosion defects under disbonded polyethylene tape coating, producing a substantial crude oil release that went undetected by the control center for over 17 hours. The rupture and prolonged release were made possible by pervasive organizational failures at Enbridge Incorporated (Enbridge) that included the following:
- Deficient integrity management procedures, which allowed well-documented crack defects in corroded areas to propagate until the pipeline failed.
- Inadequate training of control center personnel, which allowed the rupture to remain undetected for 17 hours and through two startups of the pipeline.
- Insufficient public awareness and education, which allowed the release to continue for nearly 14 hours after the first notification of an odor to local emergency response agencies.
Contributing to the accident was the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration's (PHMSA) weak regulation for assessing and repairing crack indications, as well as PHMSA's ineffective oversight of pipeline integrity management programs, control center procedures, and public awareness. [my emphasis]
Contributing to the severity of the environmental consequences were (1) Enbridge's failure to identify and ensure the availability of well-trained emergency responders with sufficient response resources, (2) PHMSA's lack of regulatory guidance for pipeline facility response planning, and (3) PHMSA's limited oversight of pipeline emergency preparedness that led to the approval of a deficient facility response plan. [my emphasis]
The same company would be in charge of the pipeline literally in my back yard.... How would you feel about that?