Waypoints
The Weather of Climate Mitigation
Prediction is difficult, especially when it relates to the future. We make predictions all the time. And, outside of some simple, deterministic systems – the motions of the planets being an obvious example – we fail miserably. Consider a single, solitary wind turbine...
Black Swans Traversing a Black Sky
Black is the new blue. Blue sky thinking applies innovative solutions to difficult problems. Black sky thinking, a phrase borrowed from the space industry, goes even further in terms of imagination, speculation and conjecture. And where better to start than with...
Is it a bird, is it a plane…?
Renewable supergrids had their moment in the sun – sadly, more metaphorically than literally – in the early 2000s, when Desertec fever was at its height. The notion of a network of long-distance, high-voltage lines ferrying renewable electricity far and wide – from...
Climate Mitigation Rocks
There exists a fascinating, if admittedly niche, strand of scientific enquiry that attempts to answer the counterfactual question: what would the surface of the Earth look like if life – plants, animals, humans – did not exist? Would weathering and erosion rates be...
You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure
The sources of greenhouse gas emissions are well understood and can be dissected in a number of ways. Thinking about them sectorally, and decomposing them into sub-sectors, sub-sub-sectors and so on, offers one way of identifying mitigation opportunities. This is the...
Identity Politics: Kaya, Red Queens and a Dash of Climate Croutons
Appearing in the earliest IPCC reports, the Kaya Identity is a venerable feature of climate change discussions. Based on the earlier IPAT approach developed by Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich and others during the 1970s debates on resource exhaustion, the Kaya Identity –...
Climate Mitigation Isn’t Rocket Science. Perhaps It Should Be.
The numbers are clear. We are pumping 50 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent into the atmosphere each year. At current rates of emissions growth, the world will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of human-induced warming within the next 30 years. The impacts will not be pleasant....
The impermanence of permanence: why longevity still isn’t what it used to be
[This is the second part of a two-part piece about permanence. Part 1 can be found here.] Permanence is a concept that’s easily grasped but not well understood. Arguably, that didn’t much matter when questions of permanence were confined to forestry and other LULUCF...
The impermanence of permanence: why longevity isn’t what it used to be
Even within the climate community, permanence – the longevity of a carbon pool – is hardly a mainstream topic of conversation. Typically the province of forestry and LULUCF specialists, it occasionally receives an airing in debates about carbon capture and storage...
In search of transformational change (part 2)
Article 6 of the Paris Agreement opens up opportunities for international collaboration on emissions reduction. Article 6.2 allows Parties to engage in “cooperative approaches”, whereby international transfers (Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes, ITMOs)...
In search of transformational change (part 1)
There is an ambition gap at the heart of the world’s mitigation efforts. This is most clearly evident in the gap between the emission reductions pledged in countries’ Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and the emission reductions required to hold global...
Carbon pricing: yes, but not in isolation
For all of its ‘wickedness’, solving climate change is actually conceptually straightforward: reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and enhance carbon sinks. Yes, albedo, aerosols and black carbon have roles to play, but climate change mitigation is primarily a gas...
Exploring the climate landscape
Rather belatedly, after two earlier blog posts, I’d like to devote some time to explaining the purpose of Waypoints. The tone of this particular blog is light-hearted, but hopefully the underlying message – that we all benefit from occasionally escaping from our silos...
The Quiet Revolution Needs to Deafen
30 June 2017 There are essentially 3 entry-points for climate action. The first involves reforms to the real economy – for example, through support to renewable energy and energy efficiency, and changes in agricultural and forestry practices. The second involves the...
Negative Emissions: Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees
1 June 2017 Amidst all the discussion – often very technical discussion – of emissions trajectories and carbon budgets, one simple fact is often under-appreciated: reducing greenhouse gas emissions will, on its own, not be sufficient to keep temperature rise below...