New project! Green Infrastructure As a Transformative Response to Climate Change

Photo Credit: Jerry Wong Creative Commons

 “Anyone who thinks that there is not a dramatic change in weather patterns is denying reality. We have a new reality, and old infrastructures and old systems.”

So stated New York Governor Cuomo in the days immediately following Hurricane Sandy, commenting on a challenge facing communities not just in the US but around the world. With some climate change already ‘locked in’ to the momentum of the climate system, human communities are facing an uncertain future. Finding those solutions that increase communities’ readiness for extreme events is a part of responding to climate change.

The promise of green infrastructure, which relies on wetlands, green roofs, rain gardens and permeable pavement, among other approaches, is that it can help communities deal cost-effectively with increased precipitation and storm water runoff while potentially bringing co-benefits, from good jobs to healthier air and cooler summer temperatures. Solutions like green infrastructure are a source of hope that, in responding to climate change we can also help our communities become healthier, more equitable, and more sustainable places to live and work.

That’s why we at Climate Interactive are thrilled to announce the start of a new project (thanks to the Surdna Foundation) which will, over the course of the next year, see us creating a prototype system dynamics simulation of green infrastructure that will allow for the same sort of ‘what-if’ scenario testing that has been so effective in our other models of global climate change, the transition to clean energy, and resilience to drought in eastern Africa.

The Youth Voice in the Climate Fight

Justin McCallum / The Tufts Daily

“As youth, we don’t have a voice in this fight. In the sense that, like, there’s no way that I can climb the government ladder and end up in a position of enough political power to save myself now. I’m never going to get that chance. And there are kids who are being born today, or born 10 years ago, they’re not really going to get that chance either, if we don’t start winning in the next couple of years.”

Those are the words of Alli Welton, a 20 year-old college student quoted in an excellent article in Grist by Wen Stephenson (The children: Why a generation is putting itself on the line for the climate). Stephenson’s article, and especially the strong clear words of the youth he interviews, can help us all see through the eyes of today’s youth climate leaders, who grasp the narrowing window of opportunity for strong and effective action on climate change and are mobilizing for fossil fuel divestment, against mountain top removal, and to block the Keystone XL pipeline in growing numbers.

At Climate Interactive, we are as likely to tell a story with numbers and graphs as we are with words. Our new CO2 Timeline Tool corroborates the point made in different ways by each of the young people interviewed by Stephenson; decisions about climate and energy that are being made today will reverberate, for better or worse, through lives of today’s children and youth. The long lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere guarantees that today’s fossil fuel pollution will warm the Earth for decades to come. And policy that keeps fossil fuels in the ground today, keeps more options open for young people’s futures.

A tenant of systems thinking is that responsibility for important decisions should be given to those who will feel the impacts of the decision. For that reason alone all of us should listen, really listen, to what young people are asking, and, increasingly, demanding. In that sense the CO2 Timeline Tool tells an ethical story, and a story that should make all of us, young and old alike, stop and think about who should have the strongest voice in the climate fight.

CO2 Timeline Tool: A New Tool for Youth Climate Leaders (and all the rest of us too!)

This view from the CO2 timeline tool allows student leaders to show the expected tenure of key administration leaders (in gold) along with possible milestones in the student leaders’ own lives (in blue) on a century-long timeline. The shaded grey bar at the bottom of the graphic shows how much CO2 from a pulse released during thee student’s four years in college remains in the atmosphere throughout the century.

Youth climate leaders rightly argue that it is they – not current-day politicians, executives, and administrators – who will have to live with the consequences of today’s decisions when it comes to fossil fuel use. As these young people mobilize in hundreds of fossil fuel divestment campaigns we are excited to release a new tool designed to help them make their case powerfully, creatively, and rigorously.

• With the CO2 Timeline tool, a first year student making a presentation to a board of trustees can show, with accuracy and confidence, that at the time she reaches the age of retirement around 65% of the CO2 released during her four years in college will still be in atmosphere, by which time the trustees she is addressing will be 90-120 years old.
• Another youth leader could use the tool to find out how much CO2 from his college years will still be in the atmosphere around the time he would start a career (93%) or become a grandparent (70%) and use those benchmarks to explain to his roommate or his uncle why the divestment campaign matters to him.

Carbon Dioxide Will Persist in the Atmosphere Long After Current Decision Makers Have Left Their Roles: On Ethical Grounds, Young People Should Have a Say

Even if today’s college students live to be 100 years old, more than half of the CO2 released into the atmosphere during the four years they are in college will still be present there at the end of their lives – warming the planet and contributing to extreme events, like droughts, floods, and storms all the while – long after the decision makers behind those investment choices will have left office. The college students across the US who are arguing that their education should not be funded by actions that diminish the health of the world in which their future will unfold have a strong case, supported by the basic physics of the climate.

The New York Times has a front page article about the growing number of student-led campaigns at colleges and universities across the US calling on board’s of trustees to divest of investments in fossil energy companies. According to the article, some college administrations are listening to the students and taking steps to eliminate fossil fuel companies from their investment portfolios. Others are, so far, not agreeing with the link the students are making: that fossil fuel investment undermines the very future colleges and universities seek to prepare young people for.

As students around the US find their voice and begin to insist that their generation’s stake in the long-term future be taken into account in investment decisions at educational institutions, we, as we like to do on timely issues at Climate Interactive, ran the numbers, asking a simple question:

Just how long will the fossil fuel related decisions made by college Presidents and Board of Trustees today continue to impact the lives of current students?

Copenhagen Goal Within Reach, But Only With Global Action Far Beyond Today’s Most Ambitious Actions

Even if the world also has sustained success eliminating deforestation, reducing emissions of non-CO2 greenhouse gasses and improving energy efficiency, new investment in fossil fuel infrastructure can’t occur much beyond 2015 in order to maintain a 50% chance of limiting temperature increase to 2°C in 2100.  Having a higher probability of achieving the 2°C goal or keeping these even odds of meeting the goal but delaying the end of the era of fossil fuel investment would require additional measures such as shutting down already-constructed fossil-fuel-using infrastructure before the end of its useful lifetime, further reducing energy demand, or achieving so called negative emissions, where CO2 is removed from the atmosphere and sequestered.

The goal of the Copenhagen Accord – to limit temperature increase to 2°C is still in reach – but the actions to get there are far beyond what we see being implemented around us today.

A thought experiment with our En-ROADS global energy model makes this clear.

What if, in 2015, we eliminated any new investment in fossil-fuel-using infrastructure, anywhere in the world?  En-ROADS shows a surge in creation of new low-carbon energy sources, and an improvement in the global temperature by 2100 compared to ‘business as usual’. Rather than the 4.5°C of temperature increase under ‘business as usual’, the scenario results instead in 3.2°C of warming.

In this thought experiment using the global energy system model En-ROADS, there is no new investment in fossil fuel using infrastructure after 2015, but the long lifetime of the existing infrastructure means that fossil fuel use continues well into the century.

Eliminating new fossil-fuel-using power plants, automobiles, and factories just a few years from now sounds very drastic, of course, so why don’t we see more impact on the global temperature? The figure to the left helps explain why: even though no new infrastructure is built after 2015, the existing infrastructure lives on (and continues to produce CO₂ emissions throughout its lifetime), only fading away in the second half of the century. (See the black wedge of energy from coal and the red wedge from oil in the figure).

Young People Need to Be Heard at the Earth Summit

Ellie (center) speaks with Jonathan Pershing of the US State Department at the COP17 climate change negotiations

Faithful readers of this blog will notice that many of the latest posts have been authored by Ellie Johnston, Climate Interactive’s intern. Ellie’s passion for a sustainable future has her working hard not just at Climate Interactive, but also within networks of youth leaders on climate change and global sustainability. We thought that a recent article Ellie wrote about the role of global youth in the Rio +20 Summit next month would be of interest to many readers of this blog. Our last post was about some of what Climate Interactive is planning for the Earth Summit. Ellie’s article, below, paints a broader picture of this important event and suggests key avenues for participation and influence.

Speak up! Young people need to be heard at the Earth Summit

Published on Grist May 2, 2012 By Ellie Johnston

 

Next month, the United Nations will hold a mega-conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — the Earth Summit, aka Rio+20. In addition to being an international Who’s Who of over 130 heads of state and leaders in sustainable development, it will also be a chance for young people to assert the urgency of the challenges we face and seize the opportunities presented to our generation to address them.

UNFCCC Submissions Due February 28th: C-ROADS Assistance Available!

In anticipation of the Feb. 28th deadline, modeling and simulation analysis is available from Climate Interactive to support parties and observers who are preparing submissions with suggestions for increasing the level of ambition of the global climate negotiations.

Last December when the  Durban Platform was agreed to at COP-17 it included a call for negotiating parties and observer organizations to  submit “their views on options and ways for further increasing the level of ambition” in the global climate negotiations.

As one of many organizations around the world highlighting the scientific imperative for increasing that ambition we were pleased to see that solicitation, and now, with the deadline for submissions less than one month away, we are happy to announce that, during the month of February, Climate Interactive’s analytical team will be setting aside some time to assist those parties and observer organizations who are preparing submissions where scenario modeling could help clarify the submission or add rigor to the argument.

We can either help get your organization or delegation set up with the latest version of our freely available C-ROADS simulation in order to run your own analysis or, for a limited number of cases, we can provide customized analysis to support your submission. To see some examples of the types of questions that can be asked and answered with C-ROADS, take a look at our Climate Scoreboard pages, or some of our analysis of the Durban talks themselves.

To learn more and discuss what might be possible please contact CI co-director, esawin(at)climateinteractive.org

Can a Graph Be a Call to Action?

A new article,  2011 Climate Change in Pictures and Data: Just the Facts, shares, in just two pages, seven of the most important graphs on the planet. The datasets are striking, and  author Peter Gleick draws clear conclusions in a very tightly worded piece:

• ” CO₂ in the atmosphere continues its inexorable rise.
• Higher concentrations of greenhouse gases leads to a hotter planet
• A hotter planet means an intensification of the hydrological cycle
• A hotter planet means disappearing glaciers and ice, especially in the Arctic.
• A warming planet also means more extremes of climate.”

I wish policy-makers, business leaders, and citizens around the world had these conclusions, and the datasets behind them, more deeply in mind. Most of the time, these trends aren’t in the headlines, though. They are crowded out by emergencies that feel more immediate, or by stories that feel more entertaining. Our planetary life-support system is changing quickly, but our collective awareness of that fact is slow to catch up with reality.

Is there anything to be done about that?

Cheap Natural Gas Has the Potential to Weaken a Critical Feedback Loop Needed for the Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy

Early adoption of renewable energy helps jump start the transition to a low-carbon economy via a reinforcing feedback loop. Anything that diminishes early adoption of renewable energy – including competition from ultra-cheap fossil fuels -  slows down this  transition.

Recent reports that unusually low natural gas prices in the US may be weakening homeowner’s enthusiasm for investing in solar panels are  a cause for concern, especially considering a dynamic we have begun exploring with En-ROADS (our interactive scenario-testing tool that explores the dynamics of creating a low-carbon economy). In En-ROADS, just as described in the latest news accounts, when there is a lot of cheap gas around the growth in renewables tends to be slower.

On the surface, these reports seem to be telling the tale of a one-time event: cheaper gas this year means fewer new solar installations this year. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story.

Consider the  virtuous cycle shown in the diagram above: with more units of solar  installed there is more learning by doing. Costs  of solar fall, leading to greater attractiveness of solar and even more units of solar installed, and so on.

But here’s the glitch – if the falling cost of natural gas makes  the attractiveness of solar decline, then the early installations that launch the virtuous cycle falter, and the whole reinforcing process can lose momentum.

The impact of cheap gas is NOT  just a smaller number of new installations this year; it’s a future loss in the speed at which solar becomes more affordable. Think of money not invested in a retirement account; it’s not just that the balance is lower, but that a lower balance earns interest more slowly.

Transparent, Real-Time Analysis Works

Climate Interactive is a small team with big goals.

One of our founding goals was to offer rapid turnaround analysis of the most important climate and energy issues, and to make that analysis available ‘open source’. In doing so, we reasoned, we’d be boosting the effectiveness of the many, many parties –- from negotiators to civil society leaders — who are calling for climate policy ambitious enough to be consistent with the latest science. And, if such groups found our analysis helpful and clarifying, we assumed they would share it with their networks and constituencies, reaching more people than our small team ever would on its own.

Over the years, from Copenhagen to Cancun, this has been a productive formula for us, and it paid off again in Durban, where we analyzed the impact of waiting until 2020 to increase the ambition of pledges.

• The Washington Post covered our analysis on Dec 6th: U.N. climate talks move slowly as new studies urge more dramatic emissions cuts;
• Out of dozens of side events offered that day, the analyses from our team was included in the ECO – the Climate Action Network handout, widely read across the COP;
• In a youth briefing Jonathan Pershing was asked: “The current commitments that are on the table put us on a trajectory to around 4.3°C according to analysis by Climate Interactive.  Are you suggesting that the commitments that have been put on the table are good enough and we should now look at 2020 and beyond?”;
• Civil society groups 350.org and Avaaz organized a global online petition drive that got 700,000 signatures in 48 hours. The petition said: “The world cannot afford delay on climate action. I urge you to abandon your proposal to postpone a binding global agreement until 2020, and stand with vulnerable countries around the world by stepping up your ambition and accelerating your timeline for bold climate action.”;
• The “Climate Progress” blog of Joe Romm reposted our findings; and
• Our analysis was shared within the TckTckTck network (a global alliance of more than 300 civil society groups). It also was included in a joint press release from Greenpeace and WWF.

While celebrating our role in these remarkable events, we also soberly acknowledge that, in the end, Durban did not increase the ambition of 2020 pledges to be in line with a feasible 2°C pathway. Our efforts helped the world to see, without any illusion, what was being decided, but we didn’t get a better deal.

So, we’ll be keeping at it, in 2012 and beyond.  We’ll be ‘adding up’ current pledges, and we’ll be offering analysis of the ‘how-to’ of the  transition to a low carbon economy, which is, after all, the fundamental re-orientation needed to deliver a liveable climate. As long as there are leaders out there calling for policy that matches the science, we’ll be doing what we can to offer analysis that helps them make their case.