(This piece originally appeared as an editorial in Conservation Today. You can see/hear it elsewhere on this blog by clicking HERE.
Check out my latest editorial for Conservation Today for a more manageable (=edited) form of the Jones-Mootnick gibbon interview at the Gibbon Conservation Center in Santa Clarita, California.
Over Christmas, according to the Carbon Neutral Company’s online calculator, my wife and I were responsible for the release of 4.2 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere – our share of a 19000km round trip flight from London to Los Angeles. With two such flights a year, that makes our individual emission 4.2 tonnes, or nearly half the UK per person annual average of 9.51 tonnes.
To reel off excuses for this travel (my better half hails from the US, and we like to see the in-laws in the flesh occasionally) is to miss the point, which is that I, and many more like me, at least now have some awareness and quantification of the impact we’re making; our consciousness has been raised.
We’re all part of the problem, each with our own circumstances, and each needing a plan to address our impact. My plan might involve paying the Carbon Neutral Company’s recommended carbon off-set fee of £35.70 in support of a Chinese hydro-electric project. It won’t on this occasion, because while I support off-setting as one tool in the bag of control measures, I’ve chosen instead to donate to projects benefiting animals already affected by the complex interplay of climate factors – which I’m about to come on to.
Starting the year with a knowledge of your personal carbon footprint is only part of the story. While sufficient perhaps for the average citizen to act upon and make a difference, policy makers, industry leaders, NGOs, conservationists, educators, and the plethora of other stakeholders and interest groups directly involved in climate change issues, need the bigger picture.
This is the bigger picture I’ll be working to in 2009, and it comes from the UK Government’s former Chief Scientific Advisor – Sir David King. It’s been in my head, sparking ideas and resonating with a whole range of experience since I scribbled it on the back of a business card back in November. I saw Sir David at an environmental media awards evening organised by PAWS, where he used the diagram to illustrate the important challenges of the 21st Century, and their inter-dependency.
Examples of specific inter-dependencies are well represented in Conservation Today articles: from unpredictable climate induced pathogen interactions impacting biodiversity, to corporate actions influencing food production, to how health and education are changing the global population dynamic. King’s representation is helpful in encapsulating the whole smash; its something you can carry around in your mental back pocket. Away from specifics, it also for me informs at least three more oblique, but no less important, themes that I’ll now expand upon:
Don’t Generalise
I’ll illustrate how generalisations are dangerous with reference to two processes: desalination and GM crop growing.
Desalination is a process that has been criticised for its energy intensity and associated CO2 footprint. King referred to the Australian province of Victoria’s response to seven years of drought conditions, whereby a third of its water will in future come from new desalination capacity. Ultimately powered by Australia’s plentiful coal reserves, the plants will indirectly yield CO2, which will warm the planet, which will intensify the drought, which will demand more desalination plants. It’s a simplified picture – but you get the point; in this case technology is a short term fix to a grim spiral.
I’ve since though found a more positive example of ‘Green Desalination’ in the form of California’s Carlsbad Project. Here, a 50 million gallon per day desalination plant is being built to supply up to 8% of San Diego County’s water needs, involving co-location of the plant with a new power station at the coast. The encouraging part is that when completed in 2011, it promises to be the first US plant to have a net zero carbon footprint.
So why can the Americans do it but not the Australians? First off – don’t generalise – every situation is different; processes and power stations are not inherently evil. San Diego County currently imports 90 percent of its water from a distance of more than 800km, from Sacramento Bay Delta and Colorado River, and the electricity needed to deliver and treat that water is close to what the new plant will use. The mitigation of the remaining ‘CO2 gap’ will be achieved at the site through initiatives like green building design; on-site solar power generation; funding renewables; and acquisition of renewable energy credits. Further carbon dioxide will be sequestrated by creation of coastal wetlands and reforestation (we know how important those are, see here) – and that will impact biodiversity. See how our diagram is working here?
We also generalise when we impose the luxury of our western standards on to less wealthy societies. Increased desertification and flooding in some Asian regions is combining with a healthier, more educated, and therefore at least temporarily increasing, population, to demand that rice farming become more intensive. This means farming on land that may flood, requiring flood resistant rice strains – which are readily available as GM seeds. In practice though, farmers wishing to export product beyond their own needs refrain from using GM rice because of the negative attitude it attracts in the west. As a result, such farms may fail to meet even local food needs. Given my personal stance on GM crops, that amounts to a case of “one man’s lifestyle choice is another man’s starvation”.
The imperative for interdisciplinary and international cooperation
Inter-relating challenges demand an increased coordination of the political, infrastructure, research, and educational aspects associated with each. Global warming is possibly the defining example of a need for innovatory thinking combined with an imperative for pan-disciplinary co-operation; not only across the sciences, but involving engineering, medicine, commercial, and policy elements. The slow progress made at recent climate summits suggests the required international policy infrastructure just does not exist. So where are the rays of hope? The world has high hopes of Obama, and his promised global energy forum could be part of a more mature future; remember this:
“In addition I will create a Global Energy Forum—based on the G8+5, which includes all G-8 members plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa—comprising the largest energy consuming nations from both the developed and developing world. This forum would focus exclusively on global energy and environmental issues. I will also create a Technology Transfer Program dedicated to exporting climate-friendly technologies, including green buildings, clean coal and advanced automobiles, to developing countries to help them combat climate change”
And closer to home, encouraging exemplar organisations have emerged, such as the University College London’s Environment Institute, who are developing a pan-disciplinary approach to global warming; and King’s own organisation, the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford, which aims to help governments, companies, and individuals meet future environmental challenges in the context of the bigger picture.
An opportunity for business and an alternative to rampant consumption
I could easily have overprinted the big picture interactions diagram with a giant $ sign, given that all our challenges are inescapably embedded in an economic and political web of capitalist growth imperative, feeding on consumption and wealth generation. Question is – has that web, via the present financial crisis and to a background of increased environmental awareness, had a wake up call in any positive sense?
I’m going to stick my neck out and take an upbeat, even optimistic, tack on how business and the capitalist monster can become our greatest assest in tackling the century’s environmental challenges. How come? Because I believe there will be a significant shift of attitudes in (a) business awareness of the opportunities from environment related projects (like the Carlsbad desalination scheme), (b) increased government investment in such projects, both as a way of countering recession and addressing the underlying environmental need, (c) a less predictable re-think on the part of private individuals about the role of consumption – particularly excessive consumption in the west – on their well-being. I’m most optimistic about (a) and (b), precisely because the required technologies and management practices are at present so underdeveloped. I’m less sure about the form of, or optimistic about how we might achieve, the revised international infrastructure needed to moderate individual nation’s interests.
Increasing demand for electric vehicles and portable electronic devices is driving a parallel need for environmentally friendly batteries.
But combining improved performance with safe, eco-efficient, operation is a tall order. Michel Armand and his team from the Universite de Picardie Jules Verne in France showed that a sustainably sourced organic version of the ubiquitous lithium-ion battery could provide the answer (Nature Materials, DOI:10.1038/NMAT2372).
Armand’s battery, built around a novel lithium-hydrocarbon anode, delivers up to three times the typical minimum energy capacity needed for practical applications but is environmentally friendly too.
The organic acids used to make the electrode are readily synthesised on a sustainable basis from abundant recycled plastics. They also appear as a metabolic by-product when bio-organisms act on common hydrocarbons like benzene.
The team say their device generates less heat and is more thermally stable compared with conventional Li-ion batteries with titanium or pure carbon electrodes. That makes it an attractive option for hybrid vehicles, where the presence of petroleum fuels alongside electricity makes battery meltdown unthinkable; w e glimpsed the consequences of thermal instability in 2006, when a manufacturing defect in Sony laptop batteries caused some devices to burst into flame.
Lithium-ion batteries must not show memory effect, so they retain their capacity when recharged from a partly charged condition. In the tests, performance of the organic battery dropped off only slowly during repeated recharge cycles, indicating a desirable reversibility of the chemistry. Before-and-after-charge x-ray diffraction measurements confirmed the structural stability of the electrode.
The team also say their device is lighter, the novel chemistry allowing replacement of heavier copper components with aluminium ones elsewhere in the battery. That makes all the difference in an electric vehicle where every gram counts.
I wasn’t very environmentally friendly over the Christmas holidays.
A CO2 emission of 2.1 tonnes, my share of a return flight to the US, represented about a quarter of the average UK person’s total yearly emission of 9 tonnes.
I used this fact recently as a topical lead-in for another article, adding that I once flew light aircraft as a hobby (=double criminal for sure). But that presumption stuck in my head and prompted some research into the impact those little private planes really have in the big picture of global warming.
‘General Aviation’ is the name used in its broadest sense to include all non-scheduled corporate aviation plus private and sport aviation. Take out the corporate jets, and we’re left with the ‘Piston GA’ category of the sort covered by my license, and including familiar planes like the four seat Cessna 172.
USA emissions data fell most readily out of Google, with the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) pointing to EPA data showing GA’s contribution of less than 1% of all US GHG emissions from the transport sector, and Piston GA only 0.13%. They argue that this is small potatoes compared to other sources more worthy of the regulator’s attention (see table) .
So that’s 2.4 million tonnes of CO2 from relatively small piston engined aircraft (a Tg or tera gram is one million metric tons, or tonnes) . FAA data on the number of private licenses suggests this emission is associated with 200,000, of the 600,000 or so total pilots in the US.
In the UK, there are far fewer private pilots overall (around 35,000 license holders), and Piston GA in particular has a much smaller role in the economy.
We can estimate C02 from an assumed fuel consumption for the Cessna 172 of 8.6 US gallons per hour, producing 2.3kg CO2 per litre, equating to 75kg CO2 per hour. Estimating the average recreational pilot is flying less than 50 hours a year equates to 3.7 tonnes CO2, which for 35,000 licensed UK pilots is 130,000 tonnes CO2.
Having a low relative impact is not an excuse to do nothing in this case. Two efforts to reduce emissions further are exemplified by the Carbon Neutral Plane Programme, which arranges for aircraft owners to offset their aircraft’s emission through financial support of CO2 reduction projects, and technology incentives like the Green Prize competition run by CAFE and reported here. Technical innovations include engine modifications within existing airframes, such as the introduction of Full Authority Digitial Engine Control (FADEC) – for 15% fuel savings, the substitution of a single, high-efficiency jet in place of two piston engines, and more radical solutions such as electric powered aircraft.
In summary:
I guess we all need to decide which of our carbon burning activities are the more unnecessary and decadent – it’s not obvious. And while I sense some unreasoned prejudice against it, my point is not to defend GA or any other position, but to illustrate the importance of understanding in general on CO2 issues: (a) impact per unit activity, (b) absolute impact, and (c) the opportunity cost of not putting your time, financial, intellectual, management, and emotional resource where it can do the most good.
(Update 4th November 2011. We were very sorry to hear of Alan’s death earlier today. A fantastic guy and unmatched friend of gibbons. Rest in peace Alan.)
What better way to spend Christmas than in the company of your favourite gibbons? That’s exactly what my wife Erin and I did on the 26th December 2008, on our second visit to the Gibbon Conservation Center at Santa Clarita, California – home to some of the world’s rarest gibbons.
As well as catching up with gibbon families first met in September and described in this earlier post, I recorded the gibbons singing, and an extended interview with the Founder and Director of the Center, Alan Mootnick.
Much of what Alan has to say about working in gibbon conservation with various institutes, authorities, and peoples around the world, and particularly in Asia, is also relevant to other species.
Each recording lasts between 3 and 10 minutes, with the entire interview as one edit included at the end.
An early morning tour ends in a noisy chorus.
Alan introduces the aims of the Center, the various gibbon genera and species, and gives a disturbing account of the threats facing wild gibbons.
Alan describes the breeding program for the Javan gibbon – of which only 4000 remain in the wild, the Center’s collaboration with zoos – including in the UK, and the challenges of finding gibbons for study in the wild.
Gibbon genomics, taxonomy, and a showcase of mistaken identity. The challenges of moving gibbons and their DNA around the world, and the role of faeces in working out bloodlines.
Including apparent similarities with man, and discussion around gibbon song and brachiation (swinging arm to arm). The highlight is Alan’s empirically supported theory of hostile genital or anal presenting – ‘gibbon mooning’ in other words.
Including the possibility of joining the Center from the UK.
Discusses issues around land management and deforestation in Indonesia, the illegal trade in gibbons, and the impact that’s having on the gibbon population. Also some tips on how to work to best effect when dealing with zoos in Asia.
And this is the entire interview as a single edit:
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60Mb. Approx. 1 hour. Copyright, all rights reserved, 2009, Tim Jones communicatescience.com
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If you enjoyed hearing about – and hearing ! – the gibbons of Santa Clarita, and would like to make a donation, you can do so here.
(Update 4th November 2011. We were very sorry to hear of Alan’s death earlier today. A fantastic guy and unmatched friend of gibbons. Rest in peace Alan.)
What better way to spend Christmas than in the company of your favourite gibbons? That’s exactly what my wife Erin and I did on the 26th December 2008, when we made our second visit to the Gibbon Conservation Center at Santa Clarita, California – home to some of the world’s rarest gibbons.
As well as catching up with gibbon families we first encountered in September, and described in this earlier post, I made some sound recordings during this visit, including an extended interview with the Founder and Director of the Center, Alan Mootnick.
I hope you’ll find the resulting podcast, which you can stream or download below, gives an in-depth, candid, yet often humorous insight into the mission of the Gibbon Center, the plight of the gibbon, and the work of a dedicated scientist and hands-on conservationist.
(Please note, a later edit with the interview split down into six shorter sections can be found here)
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60Mb. Approx. 1 hour. Copyright, all rights reserved, 2009, Tim Jones communicatescience.com
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If you enjoyed hearing about – and hearing ! – the gibbons of Santa Clarita, and would like to make a donation, you can do so here.
It’s never too early to plan for next Christmas, so here is my insightful and environmentally friendly recommendation for next year’s christmas tree.
Without calculating the detailed carbon footprint of that temporarily living piney off-cut standing beglittered in your lounge, or the plastic alternative you picked up for £20 at Woolies’ terminal sale, it’s probably safe to say both are more environmentally harmful, more expensive, and probably less attractive than the alternative – a living christmas tree.
From my experience this Christmas, I can happily recommend the arboreal company of a Norfolk Island Pine, a handsome 7ft tall in its pot, and supporting all the lights and trimmings you could want. Cometh twelfth night, this tree can, unlike its temporary cousins, be returned to the garden until next year. Or, if you don’t enjoy the favourable climate of Southern California, just keep it indoors like a regular potted plant. Either way – low maintenance, low hassle.
Starting next year, make one part of your family.
We can all take action to help combat global warming. Here is something for the gardeners amongst you to think about.
Direct man-made CO2 emissions are problematic enough, but they are only part of a complex interplay of sources and sinks for greenhouse gases that is still beyond our full understanding. For example, there has for some time now been concern over frozen peat bogs thawing and releasing stored up methane, locked away for millenia, and far worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
But peat is our friend too; and you can help by leaving it where it is.
Why? Because peat is largely made up of dead plants, rich in captured carbon that has been prevented, due to the moist air-free bog environment, from fully decomposing back to CO2. Drain the bogs, distrurb or harvest the peat, and the carbon recombines with oxygen in the air, taking us back to square one.
The National Trust are at the forefront of public consciousness raising about peat in the UK, illustrating the issue with numbers that are far from intuitive. For example, the Trust estimates there are 100kg of carbon locked in every cubic metre of peat; which in CO2 terms is like driving a car for 2000 miles. In their report, Natures’s Capital, we learn peatlands are the UK’s single largest carbon reserve, amounting to around 3 billion tonnes, or equivalent to 20 years’ worth of man-made CO2 emissions. Across the globe, although peat covers only 3 per cent of the global land surface, the amount of carbon stored within it is enormous – equivalent to twice that of all the world’s forests combined.
As well as dead plants, peat contains so-called ‘Black Carbon’; that is carbon captured following moorland burning. In the UK, The British Geological Survey are researching how this and other soil carbons behave, and their likely impact on climate change. Only last month, a fascinating paper in Nature Geoscience highlighted how inaccurate knowledge about the ratio of soil black carbon to organic carbon in Australia – with implications on the global scale – can result in significant (almost 25%) over-estimation of CO2 release from global warming feedback mechanisms. On a planet-wide scale, the possible swings are massive.
So – back to what we can do. First, don’t forget its not just about climate change. Peat bogs in the UK are also an important habitat for wildlife and a source of colourful diversity for us humans. I’ve passed many a happy hike literally bouncing along on Peak District peat.
You might like to get involved in one of the remediation efforts run by the National Trust. And if you’re a domestic gardener – as a group consuming seventy percent of horticultural peat in the UK, and all from drained bogs that are killed in the process of its extraction – you can make a direct impact by simply not using it. And, as the UK accounts for 8% of the world’s northern peatlands, collectively holding 30% of all soil-based carbon, you have the potential to make a real global impact in your own back garden – as it were. The golden rules are:
Lastly, if you want to get more involved on the policy and campaigning side, get in touch with The Peatlands Campaign Consortium, who have been a major influence on the government in setting targets for reduced peat use.
Well maybe that’s overstating things. But I don’t know of another one, and from small acorns do mighty oaks grow; I’m quite proud of my new land investment in Second Life.
The plot, which has great sea views, already hosts a nice cherry blossom and one high resolution gibbon – complete with gibbon song environmental sound.
This is all part of an effort to explore and get to grips with virtual worlds as a vehicle for science communication. Having bought the land, I now have somewhere to practice building and scripting. Second Life uses a Java type coding language, but as the last coding I did was of a thermodynamic model for energy minimisation in silicate slag systems – in FORTRAN77 – I’m on a learning curve.
Watch this space…….
(I took the gibbon photo at the Santa Clarita Gibbon Conservation Center run by Alan Mootnick – hereby acknowledged and to which you are welcome to make a donation 🙂 )
Update January 2009 – Zoonmian’s Second Life presence can now be found at this location.
