Paris Accord: Oil companies can come to our rescue

However ceremoniously an accord is signed, signatories should be brave enough to discard it, if it’s found to be yielding results in obvious contravention of its expectations. Unfortunately, we see the Paris Accord falling into this category deserving to be scrapped as soon as possible.

The objective of this article is to enumerate a few reasons as to why it should be scrapped at the earliest. It should be scrapped not for the sake of the signatories, but for the sake of their grandchildren, at least one of whom accompanied the grandfather to signing ceremony. Nor should it be saved for the sake of signatories when it is certain to bring nothing, but disastrous consequences to their grandchildren.

Background to the accord

The accord was signed more out of desperation – an important world leader was moving out after an eight-year term – than out of a clear-cut conviction of why climate change takes place and what is the most serious of its threats to mankind. The only climate parameter addressed was temperature and all other aspects were explained as being direct or indirect derivatives of temperature. When there are no anthropogenic perturbations, this is a reasonable explanation as then precipitation and wind will happen as a result of seasonal fluctuations due to planet earth orbiting around the sun in an elliptical path once a year and changes in temperature could be a predecessor to changes in precipitation and wind.

Even when anthropogenic perturbation was due to combustion of coal – a fuel very low in hydrogen and no additional water vapour from combustion of a hydrocarbon – whatever changes in precipitation would have only occurred via a change in temperature. The models that had been developed and research literature clearly indicates this approach. I have already written about CIMP-5 model as well as IGSM-2 Model to show that they have missed out on Newly Formed Water (NFW) vapour due to combustion of oil and gas. 

But the moment you start adding gas – CH4, methane – and oil – (CH2)n – to replace coal and reduce CO2, situation changes dramatically. Here we are using fuels which do not need to go through a temperature increase route to bring water vapour to initiate that havoc through climate parameters called precipitation and wind. Without any support from CO2 nor from temperature, products from these two fuels, gas and oil could bring about precipitation and wind. Unfortunately, this water vapour when in atmosphere will also increase temperature and bring more water vapour to aggravate the situation further. It is immaterial where this Newly-Formed Water (NFW) resides, in the atmosphere or coming down or on the ground, it spells out only disaster. It is not the water which has been in the global water cycle during the last one million years.

Then everybody got frightened and climate model numbers started clicking, convention numbers came closer to 24-24th hour should be avoided – and they decided to curtail the bad guy CO2 and his follower temperature increase to certain limits and wanted to put it down in black and white. And the only model fuel on the screen presumably, was natural gas, the best out of the three major carbon containing fuels, so while International Energy Agency is promoting the combustion of gas till 2030 and then reducing thereafter – only they know how to – world leaders signed up that historic Paris Accord agreeing to limit temperature increase above pre-industrial age level to 20C by 2100 by achieving a peak of greenhouse gas concentration in 2035 and reducing thereafter. And we signed this historic Paris Accord. And it is left to the individual signatory countries to decide how to achieve the set targets.

Impending misery

The question arises what those climate scientists attached to Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change and UNFCCC were doing till we have concluded 20 conventions. If these best of brains – climate science wise – could not identify suitable solutions to curtail GHG concentration and temperature increase and make recommendations to UN or UNFCCC or to world community during a 20+ year stretch, from whom are we expecting these solutions today? From officials in ministries of wildlife, environment, forestry in the individual countries. These IPCC scientists have messed up the understanding of climate change by concentrating on CO2 and temperature and when the situation is about to get out of control they want to hand over the problem to individual countries through this Paris Accord. 

No, what we say is this. You have wasted so many years only complicating things by remaining silent while coal is been replaced by gas and oil and NFW entering the atmosphere was creating havoc in Australia, Thailand, India, Texas, California, Sri Lanka – rather all around – you need to tell us what would help us to overcome the same today. 

So where are we today, 20 years closer to the real climate change menace – whether it comes from melted ice along the shorelines or from the atmosphere in the form of cyclones, hurricanes, etc. – left alone to look after ourselves. And we, the fools we are, have signed Paris Accord and agreed to find our own salvation and we may be paid some money for the purpose. Still they want us to be bound to their mantra – CO2, greenhouse gases and temperature – while they would promote us to use more gas and send more water vapour to the atmosphere.

We should request the United Nations to explain in simple terms how they want us to proceed from here rather than to say find your own salvation. At least they should answer the following questions:

(i) Does more consumption of natural gas lead to more water vapour in the atmosphere and is it not detrimental to mankind in respect of increased precipitation, hurricanes, etc.?

(ii) Does not road vehicular transportation using gasoline emit water vapour again and could not this also lead to increased temperature, precipitation and wind related disasters?

(iii) Their agency IPCC in their TAR 4 mentioned about different options for obtaining tractive power for road vehicular transportation and what is the most favourable option today?

(iv) In case they say that battery electric vehicles are preferred more in response to (iii) above, how would they recommend we obtain the electricity needed for the same?

(v) Do they believe that they have educated the government officials in different countries adequately so that these governments can work out their own routes of salvation from here onwards?

(vi) They have got climate scientists develop so many models covering all parts across the world from the stratosphere downward and studied them in so much detail, what guarantee on a 1-5 scale (1 – no guarantee, 5 – fully guaranteed) could you give different governments that their territories will not face a catastrophe, like what Puerto Rico faced, impacting 25% of the land space under that government’s jurisdiction before the year 2035?

Our approach to climate change

I started looking at climate change only in 2008, when our own President was concerned about how issues related to energy security might impact food security and devoted my full time to studying climate change and related issues. My interest was not to investigate all possible reasons for the climate change; but to identify a solution for the most significant reasons. When a patient came to my Ayurvedic physician father with an ailment, he never wasted time to identify all anomalies in the patient’s system. He could talk about thousands of such ailments and prescribe for those (he had read and had copies of both Charaka Sanhitha and Susrutha Sanhitha). But he always treated for the most obvious and predominant one and then only looked at the others. He of course, ensured that all connectivities the particular ailment had with other system components were understood and addressed and medicines given had a holistic effect on the patient’s total system.

We identified that climate change predominantly arises from the following three reasons: (a) Percentage of solar radiation reflected or converted to chemical energy is reduced by anthropogenic activities; (b) Energy is converted from one form to another during anthropogenic activities only while liberating a significant fraction as waste energy; (c) During such conversions and changes either greenhouse gases are generated or their absorption reduced which will reduce the waste or unutilised energy exiting from our atmosphere.

When one looks at Annual Radiation Budget at Top of the Atmosphere, one would notice that Reflected Shortwave Radiation (RSW) makes the biggest numerical contribution to the annual changes and this is the only item which had a statistically significant variation during 2010 to 2016 out of the three fluxes crossing the top of the atmosphere. Even CMIP5 has found that this net TOA radiative flux indicated a difference due to GHG emissions before a change in surface temperature is indicated. This clearly indicates the significance of item (a) given above.

Although CMIP5 model captures something similar to (a) and (c) above, it is not comprehensive enough. For example, the model has included under anthropogenic perturbations the following three only. (a) CO2 emissions, (b) Other gas emissions (NFW is not included) and (c) Land use. Under land use CMIP5 was considering changes arising from crops and pasture area changes. These changes would not change the quality of their contributions towards maintaining an equilibrated atmosphere. For example, the original vegetation, say grass, has an albedo of 0.26 and wheat would have an albedo of 0.20, both of them would absorb CO2 in the atmosphere during photosynthesis and might convert about 8% solar radiation to chemical energy. If original land cover was pine or oak, they have albedos of 0.14 or 0.18. To compensate for this lower albedo, they might absorb more CO2 per ha per year than grass.

Land usage for roadway construction is entirely different. Once deforestation/land clearing is carried out, the losses of (i) reflection of solar radiation, (ii) CO2 usage for photosynthesis and (iii) conversion of solar energy to chemical energy during photosynthesis are all permanent. And when the highway is paved with an asphaltic surface, the solar radiation is absorbed to an extent of 90% which energy is then reemitted as infrared long-wave radiation leading to global warming. This is one of the things which we identified in our root causes.

Where CMIP5 model considers water and energy exchanges, they are basically through the ORCHIDEE model and considers the transfers that take place only during photosynthesis. While the energy exchange may be due to solar energy been converted to chemical energy or latent heat associated with water coming from the ground to be emitted through stomata, it does not consider the waste energy generated during conversion of different forms of energy either to electrical or thermal energy as we had expressed in our item (b) in our explanation.

The issue here is that while ORCHIDEE looks at water and energy components already in the current system or received from the Sun – Earth has systems to handle energy we receive from the Sun, at least it will dump it in the ocean – we talk about water and energy components that are new or rather water and energy that had been packed up for millennia for our use or misuse today. There is a role for this extra energy in this explanation could be seen from the fact that Kiehl & Trentberth in establishing their Mean Energy Budget were not able to balance the energy flows without bringing in that 24 Wm-2 due to thermals – calculated by carrying out an energy balance for the system. They had already considered the latent heat of vaporisation arising from annual precipitation. So both my reasons a. and b. do have a significant role to play in explaining climate change. Reason c about greenhouse gases is well established and accepted, the only difference would be that I would bring NFW also into the picture as it is generated almost all the time along with that bad guy CO2 who could retain more water vapour in the atmosphere.

Is there a solution?

So now we have identified the three main reasons for climate change and we are in a position to look at/for solutions. In looking for solutions we identified three guidelines to be given due consideration as they will help us to reduce the climate change the most with the least effort and as fast as possible. These aspects are as follows: (i) We will design a system which could influence all three environmental aspects we mentioned earlier, (ii) Our solution will bring about the maximum benefit with the least effort, (iii) We will not bring undue pressure on the current environmental balance. And fortunately for the luck of mankind, we found a solution like that and we call this solution highway solarisation to support Battery Electric Vehicles. 

Highway solarisation is defined as follows: A dedicated infrastructure to generate electricity for powering battery electric vehicles or the grid using solar energy collected by PV solar panels installed along and above the highways as a solution for climate change.

We identified transportation as the segment which needs the immediate attention for a few obvious reasons. Would you need 20 years to identify this? (i) It is transportation which leads to most amount of waste energy per unit of energy actually used. Maximum benefit with the least effort. Environmental aspect (b) helped us in this. It is also transportation which emits most amount of greenhouse gases per unit of energy actually used. Environmental aspect (c) helped us on that. These two imply that by substituting for transportation with a cleaner and less energy expensive fuel we can bring about the most beneficial impact from a unit of energy developed already.

Of course looking at alternative sources of energy our focus fell on solar energy for the obvious reason that in 1989 we developed a method of drying coir dust using solar energy and it is this development and our fixing a price of Rs. 21 per kg of coir dust (price of sugar at that time) which helped it to be Rs. 2 billion a year foreign exchange earner to-day. But we were mindful of environmental aspect (a) and we did not want to disturb the atmospheric balance more in respect of solar radiation reflection, conversion and absorption. This drove us to look for a developed area to lay the PV solar panels and our awareness of highways been the most damaging out of all developed areas in respect of climate change issues, we selected it as the most suitable place to lay the solar panels.

Once we identified the highways to be the best place for laying PV solar panels, more and more advantages of the arrangement came to our mind and we have written many articles on the same.

In 2011, global electricity generation had been about 25,000 TWhrs out of which 70% would have been from fossil fuels. About another 10,000 TWhrs for transportation would have been obtained from oil. So this 27,000 TWhrs is what is required from renewable sources if fossil fuels is to be completely avoided. With about 200 billion square meters of paved roadways been globally available and more been added almost every day, phasing out fossil fuels using highway solarisation would be the ideal solution for climate change due to fossil fuel combustion to obtain energy to generate electricity and for transportation.

How oil companies could help

Oil companies could take the lead in this transition from oil energy to energy from Highway Solarisation and automobile companies are already pursuing the transition to BEVs by setting very specific targets in this respect. In fact in September, 2014, UN Climate Summit suggested three objectives for controlling climate change as follows: (a) 30% of vehicles sold in cities in 2030 should be battery electric vehicles, (b) these should be powered by renewable energy and (c) deforestation should be reduced to 0% by 2050 – and there is no gap between that and highway solarisation.

Oil companies I am sure, have carried out many SWOT analyses and scenario planning, etc. and learnt how to convert threats to be opportunities. But I don’t think they have ever experienced a conversion of a threat to an opportunity of this magnitude. When they are threatened of losing their mission of powering global mobility to power producers they can turn it upside down by indulging in highway solarisation and carving out a significant part of main grid power also into their plate.

Oil companies – right at the top of Fortune 500 listing – are the best suited for this transition and be the real saviours of mankind and can keep on supplying petrochemicals at a slower rate to make those plastics which are an important ingredient of modern-day living. Then they would have a greater serving on their plates – polymers industry, transportation, main grid electricity and they would be driving the global energy system in its truest sense. With enormous resources at their disposal, they could bring about this transition the fastest and the world would be a more pleasant place to live in, thanks to the oil companies.

(The writer is Managing Director of Somaratna Consultants Ltd.)