Why Small-Scale Biomass Energy Projects Aren't a Solution To Climate Change

Lasrick writes "Roberto Bissio has an excellent piece in a roundtable on biomass energy, pointing out that small scale biomass energy projects designed for people in poor countries aren't really a solution to climate change. After pointing out that patent protections could impede wide-spread adoption, Bissio adds that the people in these countries aren't really contributing to climate change in the first place: 'Why? Because poor people, whose carbon emissions these technologies would reduce, produce very little carbon in the first place. As I mentioned in Round One, the planet's poorest 1 billion people are responsible for only 3 percent of global carbon emissions. The 1.26 billion people whose countries belong to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development account for 42 percent of emissions. The rich, if they reduced their emissions by just 8 percent, could achieve more climate mitigation than the poor could achieve by reducing their emissions to zero. The rich could manage this 8 percent reduction by altering their lifestyles in barely noticeable ways. For the poor, a reduction of 100 percent would imply permanent misery.'"

Comments

Madagascar

[OglinTatas]

Poor people may not have much of a carbon footprint, but if there is no alternative to deforesting your island home, then the impact on the environment would be larger than just how much CO2 you produce.

Re:Madagascar

[Anonymous Coward]

See also: Haiti.

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8520/8578860427_9cb7a29b78_o.jpg

Re: Madagascar

[Eugriped3z]

Contrary to what seems to be your belief, deforestation is a choice and it's not made exclusively by the poor. Nor are the poor resposible for the vast majority of habitat destruction such as deforestation. But it is universally the institutionalized quest for wealth in the hands of the ecologically ignorant that leads educated people to sacrifice the natural world without consideration for the concern for the consequences. In the words of Michio Kali, "Classical economics (in the absence of valuation of natural systems) is a form of brain damage.

Re:Madagascar

[alexander_686]

And the main post also assumes that CO2 is the only driver in global warming. I have seen studies that suggest that soot from poor people's cooking stoves are just as much to blame. (Soot is very dark so is absorbs a lot of the sun's rays. Glaciers are shinny so they tend to reflect heat back into space. When soot lands on glaciers it darkens the glacier, causing them to shrink. A good example of a positive feedback loop. )

Re:Madagascar

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Poor people may not have much of a carbon footprint, but if there is no alternative to deforesting your island home, then the impact on the environment would be larger than just how much CO2 you produce.

That's what confused me about this piece: I don't think that I've ever heard anybody sell one of the various 'new, improved, not-dreadful, biomass heat/power device' ideas as being about CO2 emission. It's (1) generally the case that biomass is treated as 'carbon neutral' for accounting purposes, since its fuels all pulled their carbon out of the air, mostly within a few decades or less (indeed, some first-world burning of sawdust and other low-quality woody stuff in otherwise fairly conventional power plants is treated a 'green') and (2) it's common knowledge that desperately poor people simply don't have the capability to liberate much carbon. Really, with our material culture as it is, 'poverty' and 'can't afford fossil fuels in more than negligible quantities' are practically synonyms.

However, poor people do tend to source the biomass that they can afford from places that really can't take it (whether it be some ecologically fascinating and delicate patch of rainforest, or a fairly banal chunk of woodland that just can't supply charcoal for the two million slum dwellers who live nearby without turning into bare dirt and washing away). and their reliance on low-tech burning technology produces some truly brutal pulmonary and related mortality from particulate matter and incomplete combustion soot, generally in ill-ventilated housing, around which women and children spend too much time, in addition to overall poor efficiency.

You'd have to be really dumb to sell just about any intervention targeted at the bottom billion as a serious measure against atmospheric CO2 levels, they are just too poor to be responsible for much; but there are a lot of issues with their fuel sourcing and use that can plausibly be improved for not much money.

Re: Madagascar

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Poor people do do a lot of the grunt work of habitat destruction, though, whether it be slash 'n burn agriculture or illegal logging.

It isn't the guy who earns less in a year than a teak shower seat costs (and at Lowes, we aren't talking the luxury stuff here) who is 'responsible' for the illegal timber market in any serious way, he couldn't afford to drive the destruction of much of anything.

However, if he were incrementally less poor and powerless, he'd probably be a much more useful ally for protection, or at least exploitation with an eye to long-term value maximization, rather than a convenient pawn for smash and grab extraction.

Re:Madagascar

[kraut]

Positive in the negative sense ;)

Having better cooking facilities can improve the lot of people in poor countries in lots of other ways. More efficiency => less time spent gathering fuel. Less smoke and soot => fewer health problems. Etc. etc.

Re:Madagascar

[kraut]

If you think 2 or 3 trees on an American-sized plot of land makes a forest? Have you ever seen a forest?

Re:Madagascar

[TapeCutter]

The contribution of soot to climate change is dwarfed by our GHG and aerosols emissions, however it would have been much higher in the mid 20th century before clean air laws were instituted throughout the western world. Some soot lands on ice and speeds up the melt as you describe but most of the soot falls directly into the ocean which absorbs the extra heat it is carrying. The ocean is a gigantic heat sink, it is steadily warming due to our efforts, it's temperature defines the type of climate we have. Due to it's sheer size it has an immense thermal inertia, even without humans it will continue to warm for at least another 50yrs just to reach thermal equilibrium with the current +/-ve climate forcing from humans. The rise in ocean temps over the next 50yrs will represent the human induced climate forcings of the last half of the 20th century.

The economic equation is fairly simple, spend the next 50yrs replacing the vast bulk of the dirty energy infrastructure built over the last 50yrs with clean infrastructure solar/wind/nuke/tidal/geothermal/did I leave someone's pet project out?). By mid-century we are no longer changing the climate, by the end of the century the climate has reached a new stable thermal equilibrium, which, all things being equal will slowly cool down to pre-industrial temps in a millennia or two by absorbing the extra carbon into the Earth's crust.

The ability of the Earth's crust to absorb the extra carbon would be severely curtailed if the oceans became too acidic for shellfish to grows shells, but at that point the Earth's surface will look like an overworked goat farm and it will make little difference to the goat herders who survive the rapidly accelerating "sixth great extinction" we are experiencing today.

Sure it will cost a gazillion dollars to replace that infrastructure but we've already spent that building the current infrastructure, and since coal plants don't last forever we will be doing it all over again in the next 50yrs anyway. Civilization has outgrown coal like we outgrew the horse and cart, it's time to push the luddites, vested interests and useful idiots back into the political wilderness where they belong. It's time to put engineers in the driver's seat, preferably arrogant showmen like Edison, Jobs, Gates, who can assemble other people's inventions into a viable industry.

My personal favourite is hydrogen fuel cells for most portable energy needs such as cars, you could also use you car to supply several homes with electricity, or just build a fuel cell generator into the home, we can get rid of a lot of the fragile wiring that blocks out the modern sky, no more wide area blackouts every time the wind changes direction. But there's not much point doing that unless you can produce bulk hydrogen cleanly cheaper than you can produce it the dirty way. Doing it with sunlight or wind is a great example of a closed loop. H2O + energy => H2 + O2 => H20, the troposphere is more or less chemically saturated with H2O so it simply falls back into the ocean within a week or two. So if we are really lucky the 22nd century will be warm and damp and the mass migrations inland will have ceased.

Re:Madagascar

[Half-pint HAL]

And, considering that the area would be semi-desert without water being brought in from hundreds of miles away, those trees couldn't survive without human intervention.

Ah, so pumping millions of gallons of water out of rapidly diminishing aquifers is now good for the environment, is it?

The Rich

[Anon-Admin]

Right, the rich. That is EVERYONE reading this.

The poorest 1 billion people on this planet do not have computers to read slash dot. As such they will not be taking part in the following discussion.

Re:The Rich

[Nrrqshrr]

i don't think that the richest 1 billion people on the planet read /., either...

where rich $5K / year

[raymorris]

It should be noted that TFS uses "rich" in the global context. Here, "the rich" very much includes US beneficiaries of taxpayer subsidies such as aid to families and dependant children. If you're reading this on your phone, you are the 1%.

Why it doesn't matter that OP is right

[LF11]

I do not think there is a single answer to global energy needs. We need many answers, not just one magic answer. If this technology helps some people, then it is absolutely worthwhile. We need every bit of help we can get. If it's only a small fraction of a percent, that is fine; the technology is helping people and helping the earth. The least you could do is support it.

Dismissing ideas because they won't replace fossil fuels is foolish. Replacing fossil fuels is going to take a combination of ideas, probably in combination with production decentralization.

ideological blinders

[minstrelmike]

Most people have ideological blinders on. In politics, it is easy to see. The conservatives rail against the high cost of government (perhaps true although talking only about cost without considering benefit seems stoopid) yet spend their time complaining about the NIH or some silly program that is .000001% of the budget.

Same with energy solutions and climate change. Some folks think batteries are going to save us because apparently their thinking about energy generation stops at the electric plug.

One reason the cost of solar has yet to catch up to the cost of oil is because every time the price of oil goes up, there is more oil available. When the cost goes up, it is profitable to drill deeper and to keep marginal wells and refineries open longer. Basic economics.

We need affordable energy today. I think giving the poor people who need energy today a cheap and hopefully sustainable solution is addressing the issue (instead of increasing it by giving them oil wells and SUVs) but it doesn't address the big sunk costs of dams which are silting up or transmission wires which are growing old or energy generating plants which last for 40 or 60 years.

Same old same old. Most of the folks who present solutions can't even accurately describe the problem and the current situation.

you are almost certainly one of them

[raymorris]

Do you live in India or China? If not, you're probably in that top 20%. I see you have a computer or mobile device , so that almost guarantees you're in the richest few hundred million.

I make at least $50K, so I'm in the top 0.5% and I'm on Slashdot.

another but....

[TheCarp]

> 'Why? Because poor people, whose carbon emissions these technologies would reduce, produce
> very little carbon in the first place. "

So far, haven't poor, third world countries, which were ramping up their industrial capacity, been among some of the larger sources of Carbon? I mean, its clear that we wealthy nations produce the lions share but.... isn't looking for ways to decentralize and get the poor of today thinking about green development.... isn't that part of getting ahead of easily predicted future compounding of the problem?

I mean, is it really fair to say to them "hey you know what...we need to cut our emissions so much that you....you can't have new technology"? Is it realistic to assume that those who have no carbon footprint today, will be happy continuing that way tomorow?

Is this a solution? No likely not, but, I don't think there is going to be A solution aside from embracing the power of "AND".

14%, says the EPA. Electricity and cars are 68%

[raymorris]

The EPA says industry accounts for 14% .
Electricity is 38% and automobiles are 31%.

You can reduce the emissions by cars primarily by increasing the production of electricity, while at the same time increasing other pollutants, so there's not much benefit working with cars until you have clean electricity.

You can get about 8% of your electricity cleanly through hydro and wind. That does mean you'll have to put up with windmills in your backyard.
Massachusetts had a big problem there - they wanted wind power, but refused to have windmills.

So where are you going to get the other 92% of your energy? Natural gas is cleanER.
Nuclear is really scary to the uninformed, but by FAR the cleanest. It produces an incredibly tiny amount of really nasty stuff and small amount of safe stuff that's scary because like our own bodies, it's "radioactive". Sun light is a billion times more radioactive, but for decades the "green" PR was so anti-nuclear that they are having a hell of time turning that around.

Re:14%, says the EPA. Electricity and cars are 68%

[rahvin112]

Electricity is easy to clean up. It's fuel neutral, ie you can produce it any of a hundred different ways. Centrally run it's efficiency can approach theoretical limits. Because of it's massive point source it's easier to install scrubbing to clean the emissions and dramatically reduce the pollution. And it doesn't even have to be carbon based.

Cars on the other hand are hugely inefficient, you have a fuel stock that's being used primary to generate waste heat with very little kinetic energy output (as a percentage of stored chemical energy in the gasoline). If we switched all our cars to electric and used the gasoline to generate electricity we would need about half as much.

We could easily reduce carbon emissions in the west by making driving expensive. The dramatic rise in gasoline price that happened during Bush's second term has reduced US carbon output dramatically. Cars are now more efficient and we're driving less. In total this has reduced gasoline consumption dramatically to the point that the US is now exporting gasoline because we have so much refinery capacity built up in the run-up to the decline in driving.

Carbon?

[nospam007]

Getting free Biogas for cooking, lighting or produce electricity plus a better fertilizer is nothing to sneeze at.

Basic falacy

[Daetrin]

He's right that, on average, the people in poor countries aren't the immediate problem. He's also right that we should be doing something about the immediate problem.

However focusing _solely_ on quick fixes to the immediate problem is exactly how we got into this problem in the first place. If we focus only on reducing the carbon output of the rich, then by the time we've got that under control we'll find that those poorer nations have developed the same kind of ecologically unfriendly economies that the rich nations have now, and we'll have to go through the whole fight against the same entrenched interests all over again.

Unless of course he's proposing that the poor nations should not or can not become economically developed, which i just don't believe to be the case. (If we want any kind of long term peace and stability on this planet we're going to have to bring everyone up to about the same economic level, but that's an argument for another post.)

He's making the same mistake that many a slashdotter does when a story comes up about someone spending time and money on the "wrong" thing. (Most frequently "on space" rather than "fixing stuff here on Earth.") We are not in some giant 4x game where we have to focus all our research and all our industry on a single project at a time. We can invest on improving the efficiency of developed nations while at the same time improving the capacity of poor nations in an ecologically friendly way.

Disagree

[Solandri]

Bissio adds that the people in these countries aren't really contributing to climate change in the first place: 'Why? Because poor people, whose carbon emissions these technologies would reduce, produce very little carbon in the first place.

That's an incredibly short-sighted and static viewpoint. Which two countries increased their greenhouse gas emissions the most in the past few years? China and India - both developing countries. Unless you intend to keep these poor countries poor for the foreseeable future, they're going to modernize at some point. The logical way to proceed is to get them hooked on clean energy from the onset is to prevent growth in carbon emissions in the future. If you just say they don't pollute enough to matter, you're eventually going to arrive at a state where the rich nations drop their carbon emissions to near zero but global emissions are still increasing because those formerly-poor nations are now burning coal.

There's a tremendous opportunity here in developing nations. Like many of them skipped landline phone networks and jumped straight to cellular, they can skip the coal and oil plants and jump straight to hydro, nuclear, wind, and eventually solar.

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[bill_mcgonigle]

he buys offsets to bring that number down to zero so that he can claim that he's not actually polluting.

TFTFY. The accounting on carbon offsets is totally bogus.

A windmill should not be able to credit any offsets until its manufacturing and operation costs are netted out, which can be 15 years of operation or more. Solar panels have only gone over unity in the past few years. etc.

People are getting credits for growing forests *that they were going to grow anyway*. No new behaviors are being created in these cases.

The primary value of carbon credits at this point are as an essential ingredient in greenwashing solutions. An honest market in carbon credits could exist (and there are probably a few small extant examples of this), but their primary purpose, currently, is not fulfilled by honest accounting.

Re: False premise.

[kraut]

If you think that Ayn Rand is philosophy, and that having read Ms Rand makes you "very well read in philosophy", we can only hope for your sake that you're only 15 and you'll grow up in a few years time.

In the meantime, you seem to be using an awful lot of words that don't mean what you think they mean. "Liberal", "censoring", the aforementioned "philosophy", and "fuck". Oh, and "statist".

You may want to politely enquire with your English teacher about the possibility of borrowing a dictionary; if it's not to "statist" or "liberal" for you, your local library may have one.

Now get the hell off my lawn!

Not so fast, fella

[Tokolosh]

Why are we even discussing this before we have sufficient evidence that reducing carbon emissions is the optimal strategy?

In someone's imagination. France has cheap nuclear

[raymorris]

France sells billions of dollars of power they generate to other countries. Their energy cost is among the lowest in the industrialized world, and it's nuclear.
The infographic you linked where someone is imagining what-if scenarios is nice and all, but in the real world, the actual cost that is really paid is low for nuclear.
France has been doing nuclear in a big way for almost 40 years, they aren't imagining what they think it might cost.

Re: False premise.

[Zontar The Mindless]

Rand's works are not philosophy so much as they're extremist pseudo-intellectual quasi-anti-Bolshevik shit-fits.

She basically tried to do with political philosophy what Aleister Crowley tried to do with religion.

It also bears noting that Rand died poor and virtually friendless after screwing over most of her own inner circle in one way or another over the previous couple of decades.

Re:Tell Al Gore to give up his mansion and car fle

[Alioth]

The energy payback of a wind turbine is 3-6 months *not* 15 years. A solar panel will pay back in 6 years or less.

The EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) of a wind turbine is about 18:1 (conservative, other sources say 25:1), the EROEI on a solar panel is about 6:1. By comparison the shale oil in the US only has an EROEI of 5:1.