Climate Letter #975

Posted on August 8, 2017 by Carl Campbell
What is the true cost of burning fossil fuels?  There are people who try to measure it in terms of things like damage to the environment and damage done to human health and life expectancy, translated into monetary values.  These values are designated as subsidies, effectively awarded to everyone who burns the fuels and benefits from their use without having to pay extra for the damage done to others.  Those who do the most burning indeed share some of that damage themselves, but only a small part of it.  Those who do little or no burning personally suffer most of it without a corresponding benefit, and are in that way subsidizing the big burners.  The total monetary value of this subsidy is calculated at about $5 trillion per year.  Basically, the ones who pay are the world’s poorest while those who receive, because they in fact do the most burning, are the world’s most wealthy, which makes the situation doubly unfair.  Whether or not $5 trillion is the right number can be argued, but there is no doubt that the real number is enormous, and there also exists a different set of costs to be borne by future generations, which James Hansen keeps nagging about, that should not be overlooked.  Here is a report on the subject from John Abraham:

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An update from Ethiopia.  The number of people requiring immediate food assistance is at least 8.5 million, nearly half of whom will have a sustained need for the rest of the year, and the numbers keep rising.  Recovery from the devastating 2016 El Nino drought conditions has been disappointing.
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How cities in Germany are responding to the challenges of climate change.  Their problems in today’s summers involve extreme heat and humidity plus high amounts of flooding from excessive rainfall.  Some of the solutions are quite creative.
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Yet another of humanity’s new set of problems calls for a quick solution.  This one is BPA contamination, which you can read about here.  There is apparently a solution in the works, just as there is for climate change, but here again there is no time to be wasted in putting it into effect.
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An argument for completely getting rid of all diesel engines.  This was written mostly with reference to diesel cars, where the solution is fairly straightforward and not too difficult, but that still leaves us with the problem of dealing with trucks, buses and other large engines where the damage is perhaps greater and the answers not so easy.
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What does the future of lithium supply look like?  This is a vitally important question if electric cars are going to be ramped up in the desired numbers and if lithium batteries are not fully overtaken by other ways of meeting other kinds of power storage needs.  This story has an overview of plans being laid for how availability may be met, at least for awhile.  Newcomers that could expand the field are currently troubled by the lack of experienced chemical engineers.
Carl

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