Week 13 - Chapter 20 - Ecosystem Interactions Flashcards
(34 cards)
Sources and sinks
Sources: Part of ecosystem providing resources
Sink: Part of ecosystem collecting undesirable consequences
The energy-economic system is still an open, nested system within the larger vessel of the global ecosystem, from which it draws resources (sources) and into which it puts the undesirable consequences of energy and economic transformations (sinks).
Biosphere
All of the places on Earth where life exists
Carbon cycle
scientific cycle which describes the movement of carbon throughout the biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and soils
(second major system in the biogeochemical cycle)
Supporting services
Part of ecosystem services
These services are foundational and provide the basis from which all other services arise, including the formation of soil, the physical operation of various biogeochemical cycles, and the ability to support the growth of both plant life and animal life. Damage to supporting services has substantial impact on biological activity and human welfare.
Provisioning services
When the conditions are right, the supporting services result in delivery of basic water, biomass, minerals, food, and fiber that supply resources to society and the economy.
Provisioning services represent the rate at which the ecosystem can provide these vital inputs. This rate may vary widely—quicker for naturally replenishing biological growth or kinetic energy sources and slower for forming minerals and fossil fuels. Freshwater can be either a fast replenishment (recharging) source or a slow one, including both nonrenewable and fossil groundwater sources.
Regulating services
Regulating services include the ability of a balanced ecosystem to maintain certain buffers or ranges of system activity, including balancing the amount of carbon emitted by animals and decaying plants with the amount of carbon absorption by plants, soils, and oceans.
Regulating air and water quality for supporting healthy ecosystem behavior and maintaining the balance of pests, predators, and food sources are also examples of environmental balance through regulating services.
Regulating services are often more complex and precarious than some of the basic supporting or provisioning services that have greater momentum. Changes in parts of the system can have cascading effects through other system operations, and exogenous factors like rising temperature can throw the regulation of whole ecosystems out of balance.
Cultural services
Finally, humans enjoy many cultural services from ecosystems, including recreational, scientific, and cultural benefits that help support a healthy human population. This is easy to see in the reverse, as loss of access to nature is often associated with a feeling of loss of personal or social quality of life.
Natural capital
Form of capital provided by nature, providing services that might otherwise be impossible or would need to be replaced by other forms of capital (i.e. water purification)
While many of these services support the healthy functioning of individuals and societies, they also provide essential economic transformations that would need to be replicated if the ecosystem were unavailable to do so.
From an economic system perspective, this natural capital exists to provide or facilitate other transformations in support of human industrial activity.
Water can be delivered from a wide basin to thirsty urban populations through both groundwater funneling into streams and underground aquifers.
Some of these methods also purify that water in the process in a way that would need to be replicated through physical and financial capital if the natural capital to do so were unavailable.
Environmental insult
The specific bad thing that is performed
Borrowing a term from the study of medicine, this injury is described in terms of an environmental insult, or just insult for short.
This insult can be increased levels of pollutants, absorption of water supplies above the recharge rate, or depletion of fuel stocks, for example.
Environmental impact
The outcome of the bad thing
When the ecosystem endures such an insult, a combination of direct and indirect environmental impacts affects the functioning of the overall ecosystem services, sometimes through multiple channels simultaneously. In the case of increased air pollution, the contaminated air is breathed by both humans and the surrounding plants and animals on which they rely, creating illness and disease and reducing their natural growth rates.
Products of incomplete combustion (PICs)
partially combusted hydrocarbons emitted from energy transformations
local air-quality degradation occurs through power plants and the emission of carbon monoxide (among other partially combusted hydrocarbons referred to as products of incomplete combustion, or PICs), contaminants, and particulates—the effects of which can be severe in regions with limited pollution control requirements and equipment.
Montreal Protocol
Protocol of 1987 that was key to the protection of the atmospheric ozone layer from damaging chemicals
The Montreal Protocol, which addressed chemicals that harm the ozone layer in the earth’s atmosphere, represents one of the great success stories in environmental regulation, as the world’s governments came together to develop a shared policy framework. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called the protocol “perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date.” Faced with mounting evidence that certain classes of ozone-depleting substances (or ODSs, including CFCs and HFCs described later in this chapter) were leading to a growing hole in the protective ozone layer, a UN treaty codified acceptable quantities for each pollutant, as well as a graduated reduction of emissions down to zero from 1987 to 1996. Faced with strict and clear emission quantity constraints, producers responded by finding the most cost-effective way to reduce these emissions over time, and met the phase-out requirements much more cheaply than originally estimated.
Even as national environmental protection laws continued to improve throughout the twentieth century across geography and scope, the issues became increasingly recognized as international in scope. Dealing with pollution becomes substantially more complicated when it crosses a sovereign legal boundary, as happens for many types of air pollution, water pollution, and nuclear contamination, as well as for climate change. Some of the first international agreements to deal with transboundary pollution were bilateral agreements between two countries across a single border, but, by the 1960s, the recognition of acid rain sources and sinks across much of northern Europe led to the signing of the first internationally legally binding instrument for dealing with transboundary pollution in 1979, called the Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP). This successful multilateral cooperation on environmental issues provided the foundation for expansion of this convention, as well as the establishment of other conventions and protocols, including the Montreal Protocol of 1987 that was key to the protection of the atmospheric ozone layer from damaging chemicals (see Economics Box on establishing markets for externalities later in this chapter for more detail), and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
Best system of emission reduction (BSER)
Process established in Clean Air Act requiring the EPA to identify approach to emissions reduction to limit airborne pollution. Created for each state based on four options (fossil fuel efficiency, using low-emitting power sources more, deploying new zero/low-emitting power, using electricity more efficiently)
Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act requires the US EPA to identify the best system of emission reduction (BSER) to limit airborne pollution, and this clause formed the legal basis of the Clean Power Plan (CPP).
Setting the BSER for fossil fuel sources is complex—the documents applying the CPP run nearly 2,000 pages—and many are concerned with the issues around identifying the appropriate BSER.
Technically, the emissions measurements and tests applied use net emissions calculated as pounds of CO2 and the denominator is net generation expressed in MWh, so the BSER is denominated in pounds of CO2/MWh. Establishing the current emission rate is required for targeting and measuring future reductions.
The EPA chose a state-determined and sectoral mix approach to creating a BSER for each state. The CPP contains four sector building blocks that individual states use in assembling a plan to meet their individual goals over the entire electricity generation portfolio within that state.9 These blocks are:
■ Making fossil fuel power plants more efficient—Targeting coal or natural gas generator heat rate improvement
■ Using low-emitting power sources more—Increasing the use of the more efficient plants currently in the fleet
■ Deploying more zero- and low-emitting power sources—Increasing deployment of solar, wind, and nuclear facilities
■ Using electricity more efficiently—Reducing demand for energy per unit of service provided
Greenhouse gases (GHGs)
gases that, when resident in the atmosphere, cause sunlight falling on the earth to be increasingly captured in the atmosphere as heat, functioning much as the glass panes of a greenhouse.
Main gases:
■ Carbon dioxide (CO2)—76% of CO2eq annual emissions—Carbon dioxide is the primary contributor to GHGs and climate change and is generated through both human fossil fuel combustion and other industrial processes and from forestry and other agricultural activities.
■ Methane (CH4)—16% of CO2eq annual emissions—Methane is a hydrocarbon (CH4) that is the main component of natural gas. It is released both from the fossil fuel supply chain in natural gas extraction and delivery but also has many anthropogenic sources of emissions through deforestation, soil degradation, and land-use changes. The anthropogenic volume of natural gas methane emitted from both of these sources is modest, but it has a high GWP of 34 over a 100-year period, and higher over shorter periods.
■ Nitrous oxide—6% of CO2eq annual emission—While large contributions of nitrous oxide, N2O, are emitted through normal biological processes, the anthropogenic sources of nitrogen oxide are primarily a result of land use, soil use, and nitrogen-based fertilizers and feeds that accelerate bacterial activity. About 20% of anthropogenic nitrous oxide comes from combustion.15 In addition to the damage caused by local air pollution and ozone formation described in the previous section, nitrous oxide has a very long lifetime in the atmosphere and, as a result, a high GWP.
■ Fluorinated gases (F-gases)—2% of CO2eq annual emission—These gases are industrial chemicals designed for use in refrigeration, insulation, and other thermal applications for consumer and industrial devices, including hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). CFCs were largely regulated out of use under the Montreal Protocol
GHG emission pathways
GHG emission pathways have been developed to show the potential future trajectories of the annual emissions, and these can be mapped to future CO2eq accumulations in ppm, and therefore average warming scenarios.
For ease of conceptualization, four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) outlined by the IPCC show various scenarios of future trajectories to GHG accumulation and, by extension, the annual emissions that define each of these pathways. (Specifically RCP 2.6, 4.5, 6.0, and 8.5 refer to the level of additional radiative forcing in W/m2 beyond pre-human levels.)
Because RCPs simply represent accumulations of GWP-weighted annual emissions, there are many potential pathways for achieving the same RCP outcome; however, they tend to cluster due to the substantial momentum in the capital infrastructure of the energy system.
Mitigation
Mitigation is the choice of preventing the problem ex ante—that is, before it happens. This involves any action that preempts the investment or use of capital that would otherwise emit GHGs.
Solutions could include marginal investment decisions in energy efficiency, replacing carbon-emitting options with a non-carbon-emitting primary energy supply, or other conservation efforts. Mitigation generally has the highest burden of action due to the need to make affirmative interventions in advance of any potential insult, impact, or damage, and uncertainty clouds the calculation of how much mitigation is required and the expected benefit of that mitigation effort. As discussed below, the cost of mitigation efforts can vary quite substantially, and many other potential market failures must be overcome to ensure successful intervention.
Adaptation
Adaptation is the choice to wait until impacts and damage are apparent and attempt to address them, cure them, or compensate those affected for the loss incurred. Choosing adaptation strategies has the advantage of circumventing many of the challenges of intervening in mitigation efforts.
The difficulties arise in ex post damage assessment from impacts, and assurances that access to adequate resources will be available when damages ultimately arise. Other problems with the strategy involve concerns about the magnitude and irreversibility of some damages, for which adequate or cost-effective adaptation may not be available. Should damages turn out to be less than originally estimated, adaptation may prove to be a cost-effective strategy, but the scientific consensus on climate change issues suggests that this is not likely. Regardless, adaptation may be the only choice available when ex ante mitigation is not elected.
Suffering
Finally, if neither mitigation nor adaptation is chosen, people and economies will have to suffer the damages. Suffering requires no ex ante or ex post action but simply requires enduring the loss of life, health, and economic activity that results from the impacts of climate change. Increases in disease, loss of ecosystem services, loss of coastal property, and reduced farm productivity may simply become the status quo in future populations. Under suffering, people are simply poorer and sicker, with fewer resources to rely on, than they otherwise would have been.
Solar radiation management (SRM)
Form of geoengineering focused on mitigating solar radiation. This could be conducted at many different atmospheric altitudes, including:
- marine cloud brightening by injecting large volumes of saltwater spray into the lower atmosphere to create additional cloud cover and resulting sunlight reflectivity.
- introduction of sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere, similar to the effects of a volcanic eruption, has a similar reflectivity and documented cooling effect on the planet.
- Launching space shades or dust to block some incoming solar radiation has also been proposed.
The main problem with these strategies includes a lack of scientific data on the efficacy of these methods or the potential risks. Plus the strategies fail to address many of the repercussions of high carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, such as ocean acidification.
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR)
Geoengineering approach to remove carbon from the atmosphere
- Some of the more benign versions of this technology include increased forest cover (afforestation or reforestation) or capturing carbon in biochar, a charcoal product that can be used to simultaneously sequester carbon in soils and improve agricultural productivity in some areas.
- More exotic versions of this technology involve iron fertilization of oceans, which relies on iron to increase biological activity and uptake of carbon dioxide before it sinks to the bottom, but little real scientific study has been done verifying this approach.
- Finally, air capture technologies involve both biological and chemical routes for capturing carbon dioxide from ambient air and sequestering it.
While these pathways can simultaneously reduce carbon dioxide and the negative impacts it creates, achieving sufficient scale, cost, and safety of these capture technologies and ensuring long-term sequestration of the captured carbon dioxide remain significant unaddressed challenges.
Decarbonization
Success in avoiding the damage due to climate change will require a full decarbonization of the entire energy and economic system, industry, and AFOLU to the point where they roughly operate at zero global net carbon emissions (gross emissions from all sources minus any carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies described in Chapter 6 and the natural absorptive capacity of the planet’s environmental systems).
Business-as-usual (BAU)
Pathways where we do not significantly change behavior / do not focus on mitigation.
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Perversely, the total direct economic cost of mitigation is substantially lower than either adaptation or suffering by a wide margin, and may even be lower than today’s costs of operating the energy system.
Further, depending on the baseline chosen and the period over which the analysis is conducted, the outcomes for the energy system suggest that the costs and the risks of delivering higher volumes of energy would be lower under heavy mitigation scenarios than under no-mitigation, business-as-usual (BAU) pathways.
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These calculations do not include indirect benefits, and including the nonmonetary benefits and lower risk of mitigation pathways would further improve the economic argument for pursuing them. These benefits come from many different constraints or risks identified throughout this comprehensive examination of the energy system, including:
(1) improved energy security;
(2) reduced energy dependence;
(3) reduction in air, water, and land pollution;
(4) preservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services;
(5) improved human health and welfare;
(6) reduction of capital investment requirements through resource productivity; and
(7) broader and more equitable access to energy solutions, particularly at the lowest income levels.
Any reasonable accounting of these benefits would dramatically increase the value of mitigation or, alternatively, reduce its net cost.
Bradford Rule
This assessment relies on an important principle in capital-intensive systems, the Bradford rule perhaps, which is that capital-intensive systems are primarily altered by changing the flow of capital into (and out of) them.
(Not defined as part Bradford’s Rule, but these are the three main takeaways from decarbonizaiton pathways - which connect to the rule a bit)
Step 1: Use less
Step 2: Rotate primary energy supply from carbon emitting to carbon free
Step 3: Alter the flows of new capital in the system to meet those goals
Cap-and-trade
This is where a jurisdiction or group of jurisdictions will limit aggregate emissions and then allow producers to trade those emissions.
Allowable emissions can be either initially allocated to existing producers or made available for purchase by all potential emitters equally, with some implications on the revenue for host jurisdictions. Once the allowable emissions are in the marketplace, emitters can buy and sell them based on their relative ability to reduce their emissions and the cost-effectiveness of doing so.
Some of the most notable attempts to do this included the tradable exchanges set up as part of the Kyoto Protocol, including the EU’s Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) and a similar one in Australia. When established in 2006, prices in the ETS started out at US$25 to $35 per ton of CO2eq, but they have fallen dramatically to under $5 recently.
