O2 post: Mauro,
That’s an excellent question. What you want is the ‘accumulative’ total effect, of the ‘choice’ being made, if what you want is to give people ways to decide what choices are better than others. The way you’re starting is just the right way, thinking it through far enough to begin to see the real complications. For me that leads to seeing the need for ways to simplify. What you want is to get the whole picture right, not just use up your energy fully detailing the first part of it you start with.
I don’t know of any effectively permanent carbon sinks other than the natural accumulation of carbon on the sea bed. The 2-300 year residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is so much longer than active most biomass sinks that I wouldn’t really count them at all. That greatly simplifies the calculation! Greatly simplifying the calculation also corrects for the strong tendency people have of spending time looking for offsets to excuse increasing their basic carbon production. That time and creative effort is better applied elsewhere I think, like to trying to understand why everyone is saving energy but energy consumption still multiplies…
The biomass issue that really caught me by surprise last year was figuring out that even the long term biomass carbon sinks consume land in a non-renewable way! That is a hidden but very major impact. Using forests to accumulate biomass does work, but only as land is set aside for new forests in perpetuity, and the resource for that is quite limited. To get a sense of scale, sequestering carbon with trees at the rate that normal spending produces CO2 you’d need to set aside new forest land at a rate (very roughly) of an acre for every $200k of GDP. For a small business with ten employees, that might mean obtaining and planting 10 acres a year, forever. The kick back, of course, is that this sort of thing is exactly where the world food crisis came from. There are all kinds of ways in which development permanently consumes food production resources, and we really need them.
No matter what the price is, food demand is going up and resources for food production are going down. That’s what really let the speculators in to run up the price. I think the take home message is that all these big reactions coming at once indicates nature is simply gagging on our proposed new relationship with her as a whole. In any new relationship being overly immature and aggressive in your approach brings on severe rejections, and observing sever rejections is a ‘sign’ of having missed all the earlier signs. We could learn about that as the natural way.
Responding to Mauro
Sent: Saturday, May 31, 2008 5:58 AM
Subject: co2eq lifespan
I was discussing about biomass carbon sink “ability” but I have a doubt in my mind I propose you.- consider any supply chain which is time and space oriented (i.e. the life cycle of any process evolving in space and time)
- several stages of the process are likely to contribute to GHG emissions.
- a period of time of years, decades or centuries may occur between the earliest and the latest stages.
- in order to quantify the kgCOeq2 emitted during the life cycle of the process, should people take into account that GHGs have different life time in atmosphere (so that an emission occurring in the latest stages could “replace” an “older” emission)? or we have to consider all the GHGs emission regardless their actual release time (simply adding all the emission occurring in the earliest and latsest stages)?Biomass
based products (i.e. energy, food and manufactured products) will necessarily emitte again the carbon that biomass soaked. Shouldn’t the only carbon sink be related to (positive) land use change?
I hope to have been clear enough and that someone could give me an enlighten answer or to address me to some relevant climate expert/study. Thank you very much for your time.
Best regards, Mauro Cordella