July 2023 Networker:
Restoring Our Climate |
| Clover Hogan, the 24-year old founding executive director of the Force of Nature—an organization that helps young people “turn climate anxiety into action” and works with leaders “to drive intergenerational solutions”—recently gave a speech to 1,200 people on the role of activism. Hogan described the latest phase of the fossil fuel industry’s communications maneuverings in their “decades-long war against humanity,” carried out with “the collusion of those around them.” Now that the industry can no longer deny the climate impact of its products, it turns to deflection and distraction, proffering false solutions and deriding climate activism. “They want you to give up,” Hogan said, “to become disillusioned.” She invoked heroes who came before us to help resist this tactic: |
| The changemakers who came before us, they knew pain. They knew grief. But they also knew tremendous courage. They dared to imagine a more just and beautiful world, especially when it felt impossible. We are here today not because we’re staring down the barrel of a grim future, but because every person who struggled before us struggled so that we might have this chance. |
| We cannot and will not give the fossil fuel industry and their accomplices the satisfaction of our backing down and, more to the point, we cannot and will not do that to Clover Hogan’s generation, let alone to the generations to come.
SEHN Fellow Peter Montague is a meticulous, deeply analytical writer and a dedicated champion of future generations. In this edition of The Networker, Peter contemplates the possibility of a federal government that remedies the climate crisis by mobilizing society and its resources on a scale reminiscent of the allied efforts in the Second World War. In his “Goals for Ending the Climate Emergency: A Letter to My Friends,” he provides details on how this might look and why it is imperative to take this approach. Indeed, Peter’s writing and documentation make this feat imaginable.
In this month’s rePercussion Section, Sandra Steingraber’s “On Fracking and Food, Part 2: Green Hydrogen and Green Ammonia,” keeps our eye on the ball amid the distractions of false solutions. In this case, she shows how when digging below the surface of the “no CO2 emissions” promotion of green hydrogen and green ammonia, there are serious red flags. These relate to land use, water use, and the fact that ammonia-based synthetic fertilizers, no matter how their hydrogen atoms are sourced, “are major pollutants of both air and water and are a proven cause of oceanic dead zones.”
Here at SEHN, we’ll continue to do the comprehensive thinking that both contributes to real solutions and warns against the false ones, with the data to back it up.
Thank you to all who contributed to our June fundraising campaign. If you missed those missives, please look here, where you can learn about our recent successes, and lend your support. Wishes for a beautiful and healthy remainder of summer,
Carmi Orenstein, MPH CHPNY Program Director, SEHN |
Goals for Ending the Climate Emergency: A Letter to My Friends |
| By Peter Montague, SEHN Fellow |
| President Biden’s climate plan aims for “net zero by 2050,” which means every ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted into the air will be canceled out by a ton removed from the air. If the plan succeeded, we wouldn’t be adding any CO2 to the atmosphere after 2050. Many other countries share the “net zero by 2050” goal, as do many large corporations. On the other hand, many environmentalists call, instead, for “real zero”—true zero emissions from fossil fuels, requiring no removals. If they work as advertised, will “net zero” or “real zero” by 2050 stabilize the climate? Unfortunately, no. Not at all. What is causing climate instability? It is the legacy CO2 that humans have pumped into the atmosphere since 1750. As James Hansen has said, “CO2 is the principal determinant of the Earth’s climate state, the radiative ‘control knob’ that sets global temperature.” In round numbers, since 1750 humans have added one trillion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. (See the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, Table 5.1, pg. 699.) According to NASA, even if we humans cease all new emissions, those trillion tons of CO2 will remain in the air for somewhere between 300 and 1000 years, keeping the Earth dangerously warm, melting glaciers, eliminating ice from the Arctic, the Antarctic and Greenland, continually raising the sea level, causing new floods, droughts, crop failures, massive wildfires, larger and more frequent storms, the death of forests, heat waves that make working outdoors dangerous or impossible with temperatures reaching 125°F in places like the Middle East, North Africa, the American South, Southwest and Midwest, causing mass migrations of a billion or more people seeking food, water, and cooler temperatures, naturally creating conflict… all together imposing the cruelest harm on the people who are least responsible for creating the problem. In short, a colossal injustice. |
| Worse, there is a real (though not yet quantifiable) probability that continued elevated global temperatures will initiate one or more “tipping points”—meaning a series of events that cause global heating to become self-reinforcing, a positive feedback loop running beyond human control. One such “tipping point” might entail melting of permafrost in the Arctic and Antarctic, releasing billions of tons of methane gas and CO2, causing further warming, melting more permafrost, causing further warming—an unstoppable, self-reinforcing doom loop. Permafrost holds twice as much carbon as the atmosphere presently holds and it has already started to melt. According to the 2023 report from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), to avoid catastrophic and irreversible damage from climate change, we must cut global carbon emissions 45 percent by 2030 and fully by 2050. Given that emissions are presently rising year after year, this is a daunting prospect. Continue Reading |
The RePercussion Section: On Fracking and Food, Part 2: Green Hydrogen and Green Ammonia |
| By Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist |
| This essay is the second of two on climate change and the fertilizer crisis. See Part 1 here. In my last column, we looked at how food and fracking ended up getting married. That story began with naval blockades of Chilean saltpeter (sodium nitrate) during World War I that created a national fertilizer shortage in Germany.
Enter the Haber-Bosch process. By harvesting hydrogen atoms from natural gas (methane), German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch were able to turn nitrogen floating around in the atmosphere, which is not available to help crops grow, into ammonia, which is, and so obviated the need to mine and import naturally occurring deposits of saltpeter from South America.
Atmospheric nitrogen travels as tightly bonded N2 molecules and refuses to react with other atoms. By contrast, ammonia is highly reactive NH3, which easily converts into nitrates sought by photosynthesizing plants. (Indeed, ammonia can be violently reactive. Not coincidentally, ammonia was also used by Germany to make bombs.)
Hence, with the introduction of Haber-Bosch into the global economy after the end of the war, agriculture became dependent on a petrochemical. More than a century later, Haber-Bosch is still the dominant method for making fertilizer all over the world. And this fact is why the price of food rises and falls with the price of natural gas.
To put a finer point on it: almost all commercial nitrogen fertilizers currently on the market are created using natural gas as a hydrogen feedstock. And, in North America, the dominant method for extracting that natural gas out of the earth is fracking, which is inherently leaky and invariably pours prodigious amounts of heat-trapping methane into the atmosphere. North American fracking operations are a big driver of the global climate crisis, and the demand for fertilizer is one of the big drivers of fracking.
Also, in addition to all the upstream methane leakage, the process of freeing hydrogen atoms from fracked gas for ammonia production requires immense pressure at 500 degree temperatures and releases into the atmosphere nearly two tons of carbon dioxide for every ton of ammonia manufactured. Making ammonia from natural gas is, all by itself, responsible for about 1.4 percent of global carbon emissions. It’s hard to name a more climate-destructive industry than Haber-Bosch fertilizer manufacturing.
As a spoils-of-war technology, Haber-Bosch fertilizer has probably done more to entrench fossil fuels and wreck the climate than any other wartime invention, including nylon.
There is an alternative: replace natural gas with water and use electricity sourced from renewable energy to split off the hydrogen atoms via electrolysis. Voilà! Green ammonia made from green hydrogen sourced from good old H20 with no carbon emissions at all.
And yet, vexing fundamental problems remain. Continue Reading |
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