Prescriptions for the Climate Crisis

By Simon Richards

When the fortunate among us feel very sick, we visit a doctor. If we are lucky, they will decide that the ailment is curable and issue us with a prescription. For some tablets, perhaps. Or something simpler, like rest. More often than not the problem goes away.

Our planet is sick, according to the scientists of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their prescription to humanity is clear: we must arrest the rising temperature of Earth’s surface, by reducing the concentrations of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. The symptoms won’t clear up unless we act, and even then there will likely be lasting effects.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Richards
• Release date: May 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005415037

Simon Richards

Simon Richards works as a commercial professional within the clean energy sector, and has always been fascinated by technology and the natural world. He holds a Master’s in Energy and Environmental Technology and Economics from City, University of London; and a Bachelor’s in business. Simon’s research in energy has been published by Elsevier. He lives with his wife and daughter in England.

Book preview

Prescriptions for the Climate Crisis

Copyright 2021 Simon John Richards

Published by Simon John Richards at Smashwords

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Terms

Chapter One − How We Move Around

Chapter Two − How We Power Our Lives

Chapter Three − How We Shelter

Chapter Four − How We Consume

Full List of Prescriptions

Afterword

Further Reading

About the Author

Connect with Simon Richards

Introduction

When the fortunate among us feel very sick, we visit a doctor. If we are lucky, they will decide that the ailment is curable and issue us with a prescription. For some tablets, perhaps. Or something simpler, like rest. More often than not the problem goes away.

Our planet is sick, according to the scientists of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their prescription to humanity is clear: we must arrest the rising temperature of Earth’s surface, by reducing the concentrations of the key greenhouse gases in our atmosphere: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. The symptoms won’t clear up unless we act, and even then there will likely be lasting effects.

When you think of the illness as Climate Change, or the more recent term that I prefer—the Climate Crisis—the prescriptions are quite straightforward. The chapters of this book will each explain a dimension of how we live and the related symptoms that are harming our patient (Earth), before examining a selection of the technologies and techniques that could provide cures. Then I’ll outline practical suggestions for what we can do ourselves to help lessen the crisis. Rather than bombard you with hard-to-navigate endnotes, each chapter ends with some further reading, should you wish to delve a bit deeper.

Some books on this topic are quite ‘doom and gloom’ about our prospects. It’s certainly true that as a society we’ve made some poor compromises, and some lasting damage will result. But there is hope that we can turn this around, while still improving life chances. Although I don’t want to underplay how ill Earth could become if we don’t change, this book highlights that progress is being made in key areas by many motivated and clever people.

The Climate Crisis is not the only environmental crisis currently affecting Earth. A further one is the Biodiversity Crisis, driven by habitat loss on land, and overfishing in our oceans, with its spillover onto sea mammals. Another is the Plastics Crisis. As its title suggests, this book is principally focussed on the Climate Crisis, because this is the most far reaching crisis that threatens humanity. Though the prescriptions in this book, if followed, could also reduce the scale of the other crises: rethinking our attitude to farming animals can reduce deforestation and overfishing; and by changing our attitude towards volume of items that we buy, and their packaging, we could drastically reduce the amount of plastic waste that we produce.

The climate economist Professor Lord Stern brilliantly summarised what humanity is facing, when he wrote that, solving the twin issues of climate change and poverty are the defining challenges of this century, and the choices that we make now will decide whether or not we succeed.

Simon Richards

England, February 2021

Terms

This isn’t meant to be a technical book, so I aim to minimise the use of jargon. I’m not a fan of acronyms, though when I use one to save on words I’ll spell it out first. I’m also mindful that some of the terms used when discussing energy or the Climate Crisis can overlap and different ones are used on opposite sides of the oceans, so here is a list of interchangeable terms that I will use:

electricity = power

natural gas = methane

carbon emissions = greenhouse gas emissions

boiler = furnace/water heater

petrol = gasoline/gas

oil/crude oil = petroleum

loft = attic

cling film = cling wrap = Glad wrap

cooker/oven = stove

hob = cooktop

maize = corn

prawns = shrimp

Chapter One − How We Move Around

We move around the planet in many ways. The methods with the lowest climate impacts are of course human powered, but once our destination exceeds a few miles distant we typically rely upon mechanised methods: road vehicles, vessels, planes and helicopters or even rockets. Together, moving ourselves and items around is one of the largest contributors to the Climate Crisis. But just how big? In the EU, carbon emissions from road, air and sea transport accounted for 29% of the bloc’s emissions in 2019, narrowly pipping energy production to the post. The trend is also important, given that the EU’s transport emissions increased in 2018 and 2019, in contrast to the overall downward trend of its carbon emissions. Unlike for energy production, transport’s share of carbon emissions is set to increase in the run up to 2035, even including the dip due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, the picture is fairly similar: transportation was the biggest single source of emissions at 28% for the most recently published figures (2018, again before COVID-19).

Transport is widely viewed as one of the toughest decarbonisation challenges, not just because of the scale of the sector, but also because it contains technically difficult areas such as aviation and shipping. Let’s now take a look at the three main ways we travel: by air, by water and by land.

By Air

Perhaps the obvious prescription is to minimise the amount that we fly. The Economist suggests that while air travel is responsible for just 2.5% of global emissions today, that is set to reach 9% by 2050 without radical change. It would be unjust to tell low income nations, as they industrialise, that they cannot allow their citizens to fly. High income countries have in part expanded their economies by brokering deals with others in far flung places, on the back of access to convenient air travel. Many of us have been lucky enough to experience foreign cultures that would have been simply inaccessible by another means. There are, however, steps that high income nations could take to dissuade the most casual reasons for air travel—after all, the most common reason for air travel is recreation—or at least redress the societal cost.

The most obvious, if least popular, is greater taxation. In many high income countries, air travel enjoys huge tax advantages. In the UK, you will pay Air Passenger Duty (APD) when you fly. Many people don’t realise, however, that this is the only major tax relating to flight. The airline adds it to the price of the air tickets that you buy in the UK, and passes on what it collects to the government. They neither, however, collect VAT (the UK’s sales tax) and nor do they pay the government themselves any tax on the flight itself. If their 250 tonne aircraft contains 10 passengers, then the airline hands over 10 lots of APD, but that’s it. Nor, amazingly, any tax on the huge quantities of the kerosene that they consume. Kerosene is refined from petroleum, the fossil fuel better known as crude oil. The taxi driver who takes me to Heathrow airport would pay more fuel tax when filling up their Audi than British Airways does filling up an Airbus.

On some routes there is no practical alternative to flying, of course, but this isn’t always the case. I have to admit to frequently flying for work between London and Manchester and London and Paris during the early 2000s. At some point I realised the environmental madness of this. In his excellent book ‘The Best of Times, the Worst of Times’, Dr Paul Behrens suggests that a passenger flying London-Edinburgh is responsible for emitting more carbon dioxide (CO2) than a Ugandan's entire annual footprint. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, due to the inefficient locations and procedures of airports, my door-to-door London-Manchester journey took no longer when I switched to train travel.

I would prescribe that airlines pay tax on the flight itself, rather than on a per-passenger basis. This would more directly recognise the pollution produced from flying sparsely populated flights, which is a common practise on full-service airlines.