Global Warming and Non-polluting Fuels Roger D. Masters* Received at www.allaboutenergy.net September 13, 2020
Although there’s unmistakable evidence of Global Warming, Donald Trump called it a “hoax” and, now echoed by others in his Administration and Congress, still denies that carbon dioxide emissions have created a “Greenhouse Effect” warming our entire planet. Despite scientific reports by experts, most recently by the Global Climate Project (New York Times, Dec. 6, 2018, pp. A1, A8), the media generally cover climate change as an “issue” to be debated in words. It’s time to LOOK at visual evidence of these changes and act accordingly. Remember the old saw: “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”? Figure 1 is a NASA image of the ice cap at the North Pole on Aug. 26, 2012 with a line showing the area covered by this ice cap in 1979. It's estimated that the area of sea-ice that melted in just 33 years is at least 300,000 square miles. As a result, according to scientists from NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center. the area of sea-ice covering the North Pole is now at the smallest extent ever recorded over the last three decades of satellite measurements, (Source: http://climatekids.nasa.gov/ polar-temperatures). . Other photos tell the same story. Figure 2 shows the West Rongbok Glacier in the Himalayas, which was frozen solid in 1921, but now a flowing river under snow in 2009 (some recent pictures show it as open water). Figure 3 shows the area of ice and snow on Greenland that melted in one day (September 15, 2017), Since Figure 1 shows melting sea-ice on ocean water, Figure 2 shows a melting glacier and melting mountain snow in the foot of Mount Everest in the Himalayas; and Figure 3 is melting snow and ice on the earth’s surface on Greenland, these pictures show Global Warming from sea level and low-lying land to the highest point on earth. Many other photos confirm that this rapid melting of vast areas of ice and snow in the Polar regions and glaciers cannot be due to natural causes. It’s time our journalists openly challenge politicians who deny Global Warming to explain these images. Such a denial should be as much a news item as a member of Congress claiming the earth is flat. The melting sea-ice illustrated in Figure 1 is of domestic as well as global concern. Earlier this year melting sea-ice produced the rising sea levels responsible the sea surge from hurricanes that caused the flooding of Miami and Houston (which American media almost never linked to Global Warming even though such disasters were hitherto unknown). Although in recdeng months more detailed coverage in American media has begun, public awareness and political action is still far more advanced in Western Europe than on our shores. Because climate change is an urgent problem for the entire human species, in the U.S. it should not continue to be political issue like the Affordable Care Act. Global warming is mainly caused by carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels 1
(oil and coal), transparent gas which has produced the Greenhouse effect. China and the United States are the world’s principal sources of these carbon dioxide emissions. In 2007, China’s annual emissions were 6.028 Billion tons of CO2, while U.S. emissions were 5.769 Billion tons. No other country emitted more than Russia’s 1.587 billion tons of CO2. China’s emissions have been virtually all from coal, but they’ve now begun a major campaign to lower emissions, replacing coal with wind power or natural gas. U.S. emissions have been roughly 40% from coal and 40% from oil (principally to fuel our vehicles), with about 20% from natural gas. Despite sharing principal responsibility for Global Warming, over the last decade this fact has been surprisingly little discussed in our media and largely ignored by our politicians (who usually treat it as a domestic issue). Most important, President Trump has explicitly said that he does not “believe” in Global Warming. This condition cannot be allowed to continue. New York Times’ front page coverage on December 6, under the headline “EMISSIONS SURGE, HASTENING PERILS ACROSS THE GLOBE,” made it clear that CO2 is a global issue for which all major industrial countries are responsible. To date, while use of solar panels and wind have begun to increase, Congress hasn’t even discussed a national policy to replace coal and oil with solar energy, wind mills, and hydrogen fuel – all needing more efficient, large scale battery storage. To reach the era of Zero CO2 fuels, the U.S. needs a new energy strategy in which a substantial portion of a major portion of our energy is locally generated (not produced in distinct areas like those where coal and oil are extracted from the earth and processed before long distance shipping to consumers). Such a strategy needs substantial investments in order to lower the cost of this transition, speeding development of zero CO2 vehicles, increasing their efficiency, and to creating production facilities to manufacture these vehicles as well as the national infrastructure for their use. This transition needs to be completed before rising sea levels due to global warming flood America’s low-lying coastal cities (thereby making this year’s flooding of Miami and Houston into mere forerunners of frequent national disasters). While massive federal funding will be needed to speed the transition from fossil fuels to zero CO2 energy, this funding will generate a boom economy to implement the transition. Moreover, since the federal funding will be targeting to a highly profitable private sector of our economy, all such funding should take the form of low interest loans to be repaid from the inevitable profits. What’s needed is a totally new mind-set in order to produce a rapid transition to the energy strategy required by environmental change (especially because it also entails ending dependence on Middle Eastern oil, which is the only way to end the economic inequalities that have produced such instability in that region. There’s striking evidence that this transition from fossil fuels to zero CO2 fuels has already begun in the market economy, even though it’s virtually unknown to the American public and ignored by both mass media and our politicians. All the 2
world’s major automakers are in advancing rapidly in the process of converting auto plants from vehicles running on gasoline motors to those building cars with electric motors fueled from batteries with expanded storage capacity or hydrogen fuel (either alone or combined with electricity which can come from solar panels). In fact, the Toyota “Mirai” is already on sale in California, where there is already a network of hydrogen fueling outlets. Yet when General Motors recently inactivated a production plant, Trump attacked GM from taking jobs away from American workers (as if the transition from gasoline to solar energy wouldn’t create any new jobs). → Cars running on electricity have a long history. A first vehicle dates as early as 1828. For their history, see: https://www.google.com/search?q=electric+car&ie=utf-8&oe=utf8&client=firefox-b-1-ab. After the first gasoline models were tested in 1908, over the next decade gradually replaced electric vehicles. For the following century, the word “automobile” was virtually synonymous with a gasoline car. In 2010 a transition back to electric vehicles began. To implement this transition, General Motors (with Honda the first to test prototype electric cars in 2010) has just announcing closing of a plant manufacturing gasoline vehicles. Politicians, led by the President, immediately protested vigorously, challenging GM with depriving workers of their jobs (as if GM made a decision solely to increase its profits). What’s been striking is that our media has been silent on the facts of this decision. Perhaps more important, the President’s apparent ignorance of the impending changes – while probably reflecting the influence of the oil industry on his actions – hasn’t been newsworthy either. There is a difference, however, between the reactions of our media and of our President. Our media focuses on immediate events, with surprisingly little input from industrial planners or academic researchers who are not dependent from their economic dependency of market forces including the powerful oil industry. It’s notd that our oil industry doesn’t know the facts described above: for example, the New York Times recently reported the Shell Oil had just invested in the emerging electric energy systems for vehicles. What seems more likely is that there are executives in our oil companies for whom their business motto is borrowed from Maxwell House Coffee: “GOOD TO THE LAST DROP.” A good example was the oil industry’s attempt to get federal funding for XL KEYStONE :PIPELINE, opening oil reserves in the Northwest. Equally significant, the Trump administration has just “detrailed its plandto open nine million acrs to drilling and mining by stripping away proten=ctions for the save grouse an imperiled ground-nesing bird the oil industry has ong considered an obstqcle to some of the richest deposits in the American West. (NewYoprk Times, Dec. 7, p. 1). industry is te oil industry’s While relying market sources for all funding could well be of hard to justify given the current declining cost of crude oil, once the transition to electric vehicles is occurring, importing middle-eastern 3
oil will become increasingly undesirable and unnecessary. Our oil companies’ domestic reserves seem likely to suffice for the continued demand from our current fleet of gasoline powered vehicles. As was the case for the transition from horse-and-buggy to gasoline vehicles, such technological transitions usually take 40 years (or four generations of new users who adopt the new fuel from their first vehicle). For autos, it was 20 years from 1908 the first gasoline vehicle, one per household and epitomized by the Ford Model T to the widespread adoption of a single car built by three major manufacturers (Ford, GM and Chrysler), a transition that was effectively ended by the depression in 1929). The next generation (1930 to 1950) saw the transition to the generalization of two cars per family (in part associated with the spread of a new suburban ring of communities around major cities) was associated with the transformation of our highway network (the introduction of the interstate highway system). It’s worth noting that the first introduction of an electric car as a potential consumer good fits this generational model. Hydrogen (H2) can be separated from water (H2O) with an electric current from solar panels. Emissions of hydrogen hit oxygen to reform water vapor: a cycle with ALMOST ZERO EMISSIONS OF CO2. Hydrogen prototype autos have existed since 2008 (a Honda), and in 2010 a GM tested an “Equinox” as well as Honda ‘Cllaity”successfully road-tested these vehicles in California. Toyota’s first commercial hydrogen models (“Mirai”) are planned to come off production lines and go on sale in 2016. Western Europeans are getting ready for the coming fuel transition: for example, Angela Merkel has already outlined the plan to put hydrogen fueling stations along the German autobahns. Since GM has tested prototypes (and has an agreement to produce hydrogen cars in Germany with Audi), and both Ford and Chrysler have also tested prototypes, the technology is being readied. What’s lacking in the U.S. is public information and governmental leadership. Conclusion: If the current oil industry continues to show a lack of interest, it’s time to remind those firms of the facts of life. If need be, the U.S. could provide interest free loans (ultimately repaid from profits) to speed implementation of the technology to produce and distribute hydrogen fuel and cars with electric motors (hybrid solar and hydrogen fuel). Following the lead of Toyota, hydrogen should probably be in fuel cells, easier to ship and install than explosive hydrogen liquid or gas. If we don’t get busy, it’s predicted melting glaciers in both North and South polar regions (as well in high mountains like the Himalayas) will cause the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to rise 8 or 9 feet in the next decade. Storm surges have already inundated Miami and Houston. Without action to shift our principal fuels from oil and coal to hydrogen, solar, and wind, it’s predicted that in two decades the southern one-third of Florida will be under water (not to mention other low lying cities like Washington and major port facilities such as New York). The costs of such disasters are hard to predict, but could well be in the $trillions. 4
*Nelson A. Rockefeller Prof. Emeritus, Dept. of Government, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755 FIGURE 1: POLAR ICE MELT (LAST 30 YEARS)
Over the North Pole, white area is present mass of a relatively thin layer of sea-ice (which melts from the bottom when water warms higher than 29ª to 31ª); the yellow line is average ice mass 30 years ago. Calculations of the area of sea-ice that melted due to warming have varied between 300,000 and 480,000 square miles. Around the continent that covers the South Pole (whitest area), there are lengths of an ice-shelf (about as tall as a four story building) down to the sea. This contact creates cracks in the ice-shelf which leads large slabs to break off from the continent and float out to sea, where it melts. In 2019, one slab that broke away was about the size of the State of Delaware. . The image of melting ice at sea-level, as published in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is also reproduced on p. 53 of Kendall Powell, “Cold Case,” Discover Magazine, 5
April 2015, pp 46-53. Powell’s article (p. 48) also has two graphs with data on global temperature changes that explain huge areas of melting polar ice and should definitively end any claim that current global warming is part of a slow long-term process of natural climate change.
FIGURE 2: GLOBAL WARMING IN HIMALYAS (TIBET) WEST RONGBUK GLACIER, 1921 MOUNT EVEREST
WEST RONGBUK GLACIER, 2009 MOUNT EVEREST
Source: http://more.glacierworks.org/glacier/west-rongbuk-glacier Photography 6
The West Rongbuk glacier joins the Main Rongbuk glacier just North of Mount Everest in Tibet. During the 1921 British Reconnaisance Expedition, photographer and explorer Major E. O. Wheeler captured this breathtaking image of the West Rongbuk Glacier after enduring several days of inclement weather. 88 years later, not only has much of the glacier melted, but so has snow on the mountainside including Mt. Everest (highest point on earth). 1921 Photograph: Major E. O. Wheeler, Royal Geographical Society 2009 Photograph: David Breashears, Glacier Works
FIGURE 3:GREENLAND’S SNOW & ICE MELT IN ONE DAY (2017)
7
This image shows the extent of the daily melt of the Greenland ice sheet for 15 September 2017. Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center/Thomas Mote, University of Georgia Surface melt spiked in mid-September in southern Greenland. A surge of warm air from the central Atlantic fueled the late melt event, which was confined to the southwestern and southeastern coasts and peaked on 15 September 2017. The late season spike is one of the largest to occur in September on satellite record (since 1978). The event was not related to recent hurricanes.
8