Carbon sinks

One point that could be made about relying on natural carbon sinks, such as planting trees, to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels is that because of climate change these natural carbon sinks may only be temporary – until the next major storm, flood, bushfire or prolonged drought. A temporary carbon sink is no carbon sink at all. The atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have been rising due to us removing hydrocarbons from long term geological sinks and then burning them as fuels. We also need industrial scale processes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to change it into a form that is not dangerous. That may be some time off because you couldn’t use fossil fuels as the energy source for such a process at scale. I think neither geosequestration nor nuclear power can solve this problem.

The price for petrol may be high now, and it could go quite a bit higher yet as was recently reported. I think the worse case scenario might be for those economies that will not keep up with the Jones’ (the EU and eventually the USA) with regard to renewable energy and energy efficiency systems. There is still a political incentive to keep petrol prices down now. Once renewable alternatives have a foothold in the advanced economies, they may be willing to let the price for petrol and fossil fuels including coal float as high as the market will let them go. Given the seriousness of global warming the advanced economies might, once they can see that alternative energy systems will work for them, even set up trade barriers to further increase the price of carbon-based fuels. To sell into an oversupplied market new petrol engine vehicles may also fall sharply in price and be dumped where ever they can be sold. Those countries with economies that don’t have suitable energy efficient and renewable energy systems in place may find themselves in a vicious cycle with high costs for transport and fossil fuel energy. The wide scale use of carbon-based fuels will be sunk, one way or the other.

Even if there will be a worldwide split between a totalitarian block content to continue using fossil fuels and the free world which is moving toward renewable energy systems, the West will still have to shoulder the burden of removing CO2 from the atmosphere to safe levels. The totalitarian block will eventually stagnate even if they initially think they are going to benefit by freeloading with regards to energy. That there is a US President that doesn’t quite know which side of the fence he sits on may confuse the situation temporarily. The neocon idea that the divide between East and West will be along lines set by religious ideology, fundamentalism and terrorism is, I think, a mistake. The neocons were distracted by a sideshow down an alley way. The long standing twentieth century Communist states were more concerned with totalitarian modes of production rather than the Marxist ideology per se. Communism didn’t take off in the industrialised societies as Marx predicted but it did bring large peasant populations into the industrial age at a rapid pace. Renewable and energy efficient systems will eventually change modes of production in the economies that develop those technologies. It would have been difficult to predict how the internet would change the use of information when the first networks were set up. I think it will be a similar situation with regard to renewable and efficient energy systems. Even if we can not see or imagine it now.