Figure 1: CO2 content of the atmosphere increases relentlessly with time while endless hand-wringing takes place in the background; NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography (click on for big). The unrelenting emphasis on carbon gas emissions by the science establishment is ironically undermining efforts to reduce these same emissions. Non-carbon forms of atmospheric pollution can be corralled at modest cost with very little controversy; doing so would indirectly effect reductions of carbon gases.

With prosperity, Americans have become poor problem solvers. Our initial tendency is to pretend problems don’t exist. Our greatest problem our unwillingness to discuss our problems … these balloon quietly in the background to become monstrous, frightening … then overwhelming Golems. The larger the Golems become, the deeper we attempt to bury ourselves in order to hide from them. This in turn allows the Golems to become larger still. Eventually our monsters become unmanageable … as climate has become for us now.

In our age of corporate media individuals are inundated with contradictory, mostly useless pseudo-information, marketing and/or outright propaganda. Anything worthwhile is buried under an avalanche of nonsense. Any content must be extracted from context within which information is presented rather from the information itself. That climate change is denied as a hoax on the floor of the Capital by sitting members of Congress is evidence of the immediate and pressing reality of climate change … much more so than the testimony of a regiment of climate scientists.

We have been trained to expect our perpetually self-regulating economies to provide solutions by way of the invisible hand without realizing that the economies and hands have gotten us into our mess in the first place. We convince ourselves that we will address our environmental problems when we become rich enough. With this rationalization fixed in place we cannot lose: good intentions are what matters not outcomes. If we fail to become rich the onrushing consequences are not our fault but rather ‘bad luck’. Should we possibly become rich enough we will hire Mexicans to solve the climate problems for us the same as we hire Mexicans to do everything else. The Mexicans will suffer in our places because that is what they do, they have a cultural role to play, to be placated with the promise of some minuscule bit of growth for their grandchildren … some time in a far distant tomorrow.

Hey, grandchildren, the joke is on you: what modern economies do is bring forward future resources. We assume our descendents will be clever enough to make do without the resources that we are busy squandering in their place; that they can turn common rocks into cheese. Along with the resources — which are future surpluses — our economy brings forward the associated costs. We are surprised when these costs appear because we continually expect others to bear them … up until recently, others always have.

At some point in our very near future there will be the reduction of climate gases, this is an absolute certainty. Mitigation will occur either as the outcome of rational policy and good management on our part or as the result of national bankruptcies and massive increases in poverty. Poor people strip hillsides of vegetation so that they might be able to cook, they do not own autos or import merchandise from China. What is underway in many vulnerable parts of the world such as Greece is ‘conservation by other means’ as the Greeks are reduced to penury and are unable to afford resources.

Climate change has become a behemoth assembled out of carbon. The scientists insist that we must cease emitting carbon gases, period. At the same time, our so-called civilization is built upon burning things which results in carbon emissions. Burning keeps us warm and powers our toys, we can do without most of the toys but not warmth, we have not developed alternative forms of activity to replace the burning. Other than making empty promises little is done. Carbon mitigation strategies are proposed but the costs of efforts are greater than what the economy is presumed to afford.

This is a rationalization, we can always borrow to reduce climate gases just as we borrow to create them. The need to turn the organic profit always emerges when demands are made of business to take actions that businessmen find unfashionable or cannot profit from directly.

As carbon gas emissions increase, the need to reduce them increases faster. Alternative approaches are pushed to the side or are given lip service, it is carbon or nothing, the greater the amounts of carbon the more intense is the focus on diminishing it and the greater the resistance to the effort by businessmen.

A better strategy would be to abandon the frontal assault on carbon and target non-carbon forms of pollution and by doing so mitigate carbon emissions indirectly. The strategy is to break the main problem into smaller components and deal with them in detail. For instance there are multiple polluting gases besides carbon dioxide; there are nitrous oxides, hydrofluorocarbons, methane- and related, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride: some of these emissions are controlled, others such as carbon gas emissions have been reduced to some degree in the US and Europe due to the poor economy.

• The means to manage pollution are familiar and have been deployed successfully for decades, such as the regulatory requirement to produce and market diesel fuel without sulfur. This requirement is uncontroversial, there are no arguments against it. The means to produce sulfur-free fuel exist now and have been proven cost effective. Management is relatively simple because diesel fuel is the product of a relative handful of large, centralized industrial facilities which can be monitored. If the facilities don’t produce the correct diesel they are easily shut down. After the introduction of sulfur-free fuel there are visible benefits both in the form of lower fuel user costs and cleaner air, the diesel fuel producers’ margins aren’t effected.

 

• Administrative and technical tools to limit emissions can be perfected against more commonplace forms of pollution. Over time these tools can be improved enough to be effective against carbon emitters.

 

• As components of the climate problem are chipped away, the problem shrinks, it ceases to be overwhelming. The final reduction of the carbon problem becomes a relatively modest exercise.

There is low-hanging fruit to harvest by reducing smog in developing countries where it is considered to be a naturally occurring by-product of development. As Americans and Europeans discovered in the 1950s, the costs of smog can be unbearable. Clean air and non-polluted water are not luxuries but a basic requirement for a functioning country.

Once there are visible pollution ‘victories’ — whatever they might be — it becomes easier to produce follow-on victories. Right now there is nothing to the climate dilemma but one administrative failure after another.

• To do nothing is to allow resource depletion — peak oil — to sharply diminish fuel consumption which will in turn reduce the utility of all hydrocarbon fuels including coal. Mining coal on an industrial scale is no longer a pick-and-shovel operation but requires vast amounts of petroleum. The coal customer must bear these costs otherwise, the coal remains in the ground. Resource depletion is the default solution to climate problems and is underway. The only word one must be mindful of regarding depletion is cost.

 

• The more rapidly more suburbs, cars, developments, infrastructure, mines and oil wells are deployed around the world, the sooner carbon fuels become uneconomic, that is, too costly and valuable to waste. Cost is a hard school, but accelerated development is the most likely cure for climate ills because it is the most certain. The conjecture that billions of tons of fossil fuel resources are immediately available for conversion into climate gases is false, these resources are not affordable in a world visibly going broke.

 

West Robinwood Street in Detroit: Default climate gas management in action. Pollution is not emitted from these houses until they are burned to the ground … then no more.

• The best way to look at the peak oil dilemma is to ignore physical production — which has little to do with anything — and to consider the City of Detroit as the model customer for the world’s expensive, new crude oil. The shattered city filled with desperately impoverished people is somehow supposed to afford more costly fuel when it can barely afford what it has now.

 

• Scientists are overexposed in the media and elsewhere, they should step off the public stage. Questions about climate should be answered with a terse, “no comment”. Climate change should become a hip and trendy insider secret, accessible by only a privileged few. This is strictly a cynical marketing strategy: to allow the Neanderthal businessmen to discredit themselves by way of their own stupidity, for events and word-of-mouth do the heavy lifting. Ominous silence from the science community would be terrifying … perhaps enough to stir action.

 

• All climate scientists should get rid of their cars and other polluting luxuries: drive them to junkyard and crush them. The scientists are either serious or they are not. If not why should anyone else be? Is Al Gore paying attention?

 

• Focus on ‘other’ ordinary pollution culprits: ozone, nitrous oxides, volatile hydrocarbon photochemical smog, soot, methane and chlorofluorocarbon gases used in refrigeration, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride.

 

• Ordinary smog is reduced by the use of catalytic converters and fuel management systems. The components of smog are unburned fuel and nitrous oxides.

 

• The catalyst combusts the unburned fuel in the stream of engine exhaust gas. Unburned fuel, nitrous oxides in the presence of sunlight produces ozone which is poisonous to vegetation. This in turn accelerates the release of greenhouse gases from agriculture lands and forests. Attacking ozone is a tactic to attack carbon emissions indirectly.

 

• There is a long history or successful management of photochemical smog sourced from vehicles, this effort should be expanded laterally … to countries without effective smog controls … and vertically … to include all kinds of engines. This includes fixed sources of ozone producing pollution such as generators and industrial prime movers; ship power plants and aircraft engines.

 

• Catalytic converters should be retrofitted to older engines. Those that cannot be retrofitted should be removed from service and scrapped. A country-by-country approach or by way of the WTO, the setting of requirements for manufacturers; all of these approaches would be effective and non-controversial. Half of the world operates engines equipped with with these converters and does so at low cost, the use of them in the other half represents a manageable expense. The public benefit is cleaner air, fewer pollution-related health problems and less damage to agriculture. The private benefit is the sales of catalysts and replacement engines.

 

• Tackling smog particularly in developing countries would demonstrate that managing carbon emissions is possible.

 

• Soot- and soot-like particles are important components of climate change and is sourced from coal- and oil fired boilers, auto tire wear, diesel exhaust and from poorly performing gasoline engines, also from wood-burning and forest fires. Soot can be managed by using cleaner fuels, reducing open fires and using particulate traps on prime movers.

 

• Eliminate chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants that are produced and sold as ‘bootleg’ products in the developing countries. CFC’s are potent greenhouse gases: production and sale of bootleg refrigerants is a marginal activity whose loss would not effect national economies at all. Unlike narcotics and other contraband, CFCs are produced only in a few large factories which can be shut down or modified to produce non-destructive products. What is needed is the administrative impulse to do so.

 

• Institute a universal ban on 2-cycle engines which burn lubricating oil along with gasoline or diesel fuel. Unburned oil in the exhaust flow prevents to use of catalytic converters; the poorly combusted lubricating oil is also a source of soot. There are four-cycle alternatives that do not burn lubricating oil, that allow the use of catalytic converters. A short phase-in period would retire or replace all 2-cycle engines including outdoor equipment, chain saws, scooters and mopeds.

 

• Ban carburetors on gasoline engines. Carburetors are obsolete and generally only found in the US on smaller engines used off-highway such as portable generators and lawn mowers. Carburetors do not allow fuel to mix completely with the air and are a source of photochemical smog. Carburetors are replaceable with electronic fuel management systems such as fuel injection.

 

• End the export trade in older dilapidated vehicles and prime movers from the West to the developing countries. Obsolete vehicles are a large source of pollution. Ending this trade would be a step away from the proposal that every human is entitled to personal automobile transport without regards to the consequences. There are hundreds of millions of 2-cycle engines, carburetors and antiquated jalopies in the world, removing them would make a noticeable difference at very low cost or even provide a return as the use of these things is subsidized.

 

• Eliminate from trade incompletely refined and blended low quality fuels including but not limited to leaded gasoline and high-sulfur diesel. There should be an industry agreement regarding fuel quality; an international standard to meet. This standard would cost a modest amount of money to implement; like CFCs, fuels are the products of a few large factories that can be managed.

 

• Mandate the switch to low-sulfur fuels, gas scrubbers and catalytic converters on all ocean-going ships.

 

• Mandate only up-to-date electric generating plants which use low-sulfur fuels and pollution reducing technology … all of which is readily available. A schedule to update power stations should be agreed to reduce then eliminate non-carbon waste gases … doing so would indirectly reduce the carbon emissions. Non-performing prime movers would be scrapped even those that are relatively new. A fifteen year old thermal plant that produces excess waste gases can be scrapped the same as the fifteen year old merchant ship that falls into the same non-performing category. ‘Forced updating’ is cost-free as the new plant uses less fuel than what it replaces.

 

• Any sort of conservation policy is low-cost and highly effective. Conservation is the cheapest form of power generation as the plant not built represents billions of dollars of credit effectively earned.

 

• Eliminate fuel subsidies in all countries (.pdf warning). This would accomplish a number of goals; a) reduce sovereign expenses in countries currently being bankrupted by their fuel subsidies; b) fuel consumption would be reduced along with auto fleets. This is because subsidies are more useful to those with sub-standard vehicles, c) carbon emissions would be indirectly reduced as there would be less fuel consumed: fuel pricing is a form of rationing.

 

• Ending subsidies risks annoying drivers. Drivers and their entitlements will have to be dealt with one way of the other: the ongoing bailouts of drivers are unaffordable. Once government gains any sort of ascendency over drivers it becomes a far simpler matter to bring the hammer down on them with regards to climate gas emissions as well as fuel waste. The default strategy to constrain drivers is to do nothing: fuel shortages will do the dirty work.

 

• Implement a world-wide moratorium on forest clear cutting. This is another easy fix that is practically cost free except to gangsters/Chinese who traffic in bootleg lumber. Commandos could earn their keep by killing loggers who would be otherwise paid not to log. Implementation would suggest a hard limit: this and no more! Forest removal and followup agricultural exploitation add only the smallest marginal additions to national GDP at the same time the costs to the environment and ability of the biosphere to absorb carbon are extraordinarily high. Deforestation by itself is a greenhouse gas emitter.

 

• Implement and fund a world-wide program of re-forestation, wherever possible. The cost would be modest, the returns would be felt in areas where deforestation has led to degrades soils and watersheds. Reforestation can also be a jobs-providing platform.

 

• Reforest in ways that increase diversity making forests less susceptible to pests.

 

• Implement more effective forest-fire fighting efforts. The costs would be modest measured against the increased climate costs of forest fires.

 

• Put out coal mine- and coal seam fires. This is more low-hanging fruit.

 

• End gas flaring from oil wells, refineries and terminals. Not only do the flares produce carbon gases but they are also tremendously destructive of insect life.

 

• Eliminate ‘incidental’ methane leakage from oil and gas wells. Most oil and gas wells do not leak, those that do should be denied connection and ordered plugged immediately at drillers’ expense. Given a few such expensive duds, there would soon be no methane leaks from hydrocarbon wells.

 

• Eliminate tax advantages and subsidies for fuel use in the US, the world’s greatest waster of fossil fuels. Accelerated depreciation, depletion allowances for ‘business vehicle’ purchases, favorable royalty rates and low cost access to public lands, access roads by the state(s), borrow-and-spend highway subsidies, mortgage interest deduction, favorable treatment of capital gains, etc. Reforms would not cost anything but would reduce costs, the obstacle is politics.

 

• Reform agriculture. CAFO’s — concentrated animal feeding operations or very large feedlots — provide utility the CAFO operator only. These operations with their confined animals contaminate water supplies with animal waste; they also produce massive amounts of climate gases. Shutting down CAFO’s would be a low-cost tactic that indirectly reduces climate gas emissions.

 

• Reform agriculture, make wider use of biochar.

 

Figure 2: Warming scenarios from the IPCC; the U.S. Global Change Research Program by way of Climate Central): When the IPCC calculated the potential temperature ranges in 2001 they did not anticipate the effect of China’s boomtown economy.

• End biofuel subsidies. Feeding cars and feeding humans together at the same time means that ultimately neither get fed. Biofuels are barely net-energy neutral and subsidy dependent, the beneficiaries are a handful of biofuel tycoons who would ‘lose’ with the elimination of subsidies.

 

• Implement a world-wide moratorium on road- and highway building. This is yet another easy fix that is cost free, both it and the moratorium on logging are easily enforced by way of satellite surveillance. A parallel step is to eliminate World Bank subsidies for logging, road building, dam building and other environmentally destructive policies that also produce climate gases or reduce the ability of the biosphere to sequester carbon.

 

• Electrify railroads and increase both freight and passenger capacity.

 

• Ban land-grabbing in undeveloped countries by 3d parties. Much of the so-called ‘new’ farm land becomes biofuel plantations, cash crop industrial monocultures that produce climate gases.

 

• Provide incentives — pay people — not to consume energy or other resources, not to have children, not to own or drive cars. Subsidizing the non-purchase of autos provides a direct capital return on investment that remains with the recipient. Subsidizing resource consumption leaves a consumer without the resource … without the subsidy either. He’s older … and poorer even if his consumption suggests otherwise.

Keep in mind, the only effective tool is good management. Individuals can effect small scale changes on their own but managing industrial processes and mandating engineering approaches can only be done by governments with the will to take action. In a way, government activism saves the tycoons from themselves: left to their own unrestrained cruelty and greed, the tycoons’ self-serving activities will continue to price resources beyond the reach of their customers. Eventually, point both the resource problems and the tycoons themselves are ‘solved’.

With a bit of effort it is not hard to think of other, indirect forms of action against carbon gas emitters. The benefit of these alternatives is that they would not cost very much or would provide economic gains. Meanwhile, the carbon monolith is deflated by a thousand cuts leaving (hopefully) descendents to wonder what all the fuss was about.