How to deal with CO2, causes quite a bit of confusion. (See also earlier [1]) No wonder, considering that focusing on an effect rather than a cause leads to such confusion, but more on that in a moment. I was once again triggered by the debate about Carbon Credits.
For example, who gets the real carbon credits if a bio-based house is built in which CO2 is captured in the building material? The farmer who produces the fibers? The contractor who uses them, the homeowner? Or the investor who buys the credits at a current (subjective) price?
But what happens to those carbon credits if a house burns down? The owner of the credits doesn’t know, and thus they become phantom credits. Quite the opposite result, nothing is stored, and emissions have even increased. You can’t claim with a straight face that there are still credits left.
Another problem: if you consider the credits separately from the owner, a farmer could profit twice: first from the material and a second time from the credits he sells separately from the material, without considering the impact caused by his farming methods (the CO2 on the input side, which is ignored and in most cases very large. [2])
Therefore, it makes sense that the owner of the actual stored CO2 is the only one who can claim the credits. And they can also lose them if, for example, the storage burns down. (And only for the net CO2 after deducting the input CO2!)
In other words, the credits should always correspond to the net yield and to the person who physically possesses the actual carbon storage: from farmer, to factory, to homeowner. Hence, they are not tradable.
Apart from the input, there is still the ongoing discussion: is there really any storage? At t=0, certainly not yet… [3] It’s dynamic, and only fully realized after 1 to 50 years, depending on the compensation and harvest claim: land use is involved after all, and only when the harvest has regrown is there genuinely extra storage.
Time
Moreover, storage is a dynamic story: immediately after the harvest, there is no (extra) CO2 storage. Only after the re-growth of the harvest does this happen: take a tree, for example: the CO2 is already fixed in that tree. If you cut it down for wood, nothing changes in terms of storage; only when that tree has regrown after about 40 years is there full storage. [2] And that tree naturally takes up space:
Space
With annual crops, it’s the same, though it happens faster: it is compensated and fixed a year later. Like flax, or straw fibers. Therefore, the credits are also time-bound. For example: you can also recover wood in one year by only taking the annual growth of a forest. That introduces landuse, because that requires a much larger forest area. It comes down to length or breadth, a matter of space-time: the growth of one year over a large area or clear-cutting a small forest area and the regrowth in 50 years. And the same with annuals like flax or straw: you need the harvest of 1 hectare for 50 years long, or the harvest of 50 hectares in 1 year, so to speak. Moreover, the regrowth must also be ‘insured’, see my book ‘Post Fossiel Leven’ for the three conditions that must be met. [4] (translation later this year)
That land is then no longer available for, for example, food. You can look solely at CO2, but it’s actually not about CO2 but about land use in time for all production; that’s what you should be looking at! Logical too, because CO2 is a consequence, not a cause, and just one of the many consequences of our resource use.
If we eliminate fossil fuels, we are entirely dependent on what the land produces, in food, material or energy. Ultimately, we can only use our land once per time unit. (some small exceptions). (We need a land budget, see [5]).
We can show how that can be calculated via a CO2 route and comes down to the same thing: we continue using fossil fuels but compensate for that by capturing CO2. Thus, fossil fuels are not gone, but land use has increased: we can only burn as much fossil fuel as can be recaptured through all the land. Assume, for the Netherlands, we use all land productively for biomass storage (and not for grass for livestock, which releases greenhouse gases through cows, via the much more dangerous methane, the cow is actually a multiplier), then you can roughly calculate what that “implies” very roughly calculated you can make 800 liters of diesel from 1 hectare of rapeseed (although there are higher figures circulating). But if we take that as a starting point, then a maximum of 1440 million liters of biodiesel can be produced with (all agricultural land in the NL: 1.8 million hectares of agricultural land). Or 80 liters per person in the Netherlands, one full tank.
So thinking back: that is approximately the maximum amount of fossil fuel you can consume, whose CO2 emissions can then be recaptured and stored through bio-agriculture in materials. It’s a bit roughly calculated (others can do that better), but it’s about the proportions. The relationship between resources, space, and time.
CO2 as a Consequence
But yes, all well and good, this CO2 focus, but CO2 is still just a consequence, and just one of many. You still have an enormous energy and material demand as the cause. And material stocks are finite (even for building a renewable energy network), nothing more comes to this island in space, except for some (marginal) space dust [6]. With CO2, you try to solve one thing, but that’s mopping with the tap open.
No wonder we see that everything in the world continues as usual, except for some marginal CO2 reduction in some richer countries: biodiversity loss, decline in water quality, dwindling drinking water supplies, environmental pollution, deforestation, land degradation to name just a few. All consequences of uncontrolled energy and material use, accelerated by the use of fossil stocks formed and stored over millions of years. Accelerated yes, because even without fossil fuels, we would have run into problems. The forests, as the main source of energy and material, [7] would also have all been used up with a growing world population, for example. And then the bio-ecological system would also have collapsed. The fact that forest loss has been the main cause is shown by countless examples of earlier cultures that declined as a result. The depletion of these resources was also the trigger for the fossil revolution (in: Post Fossiel Leven [4]). Fossil fuels have only postponed this and simultaneously accelerated and magnified the effects.
The real problems are being avoided, and CO2 is a smokescreen for the underlying causes. It is actually quite simple. As soon as money is converted into products (and repeatedly), there is an energy and environmental burden. And more money means more turnover and thus more environmental burden. That’s how it is set up after decades of liberal capitalist deception. CO2 policy doesn’t help as long as you continue to aim for growth at the same time. We have entangled ourselves with all our regulations, laws, and assumptions, also in assessment systems [8]. It even works against us… By thinking that we need to tackle CO2, it seems that everything is solvable by building large-scale renewable energy sources and renewable materials. But that only strengthens the actual cause: it’s reasoning in a circle from which you can’t escape.
And suppose we solve CO2, then we are still left with large-scale overburdening of the resource system, then we have to keep building wind turbines forever, then we are still left with polluting processes, biodiversity degradation, drinking water shortages, land degradation: all because we only looked at CO2. And let’s be honest, we are already so deep in the CO2 swamp that people no longer see the real causes due to everything that has already been put in place.
Anyway, all I wanted to say is : (I) Refuse to calculate in CO2… [9]
*Urgenda Report
It doesn’t go far enough for me, but an excellent report has just been released by Urgenda, in which land use is central: ‘Land Insight’ The start of an annual land budget…? (in Dutch, but watch the youtube video its understandable). https://www.urgenda.nl/visie/landinzicht/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtCEu3KumCg
PS: Trouble: New Zero Emissions Building Definition EU
Another good example of how things go wrong when you focus on an effect instead of the cause: the new focus in the European approach (EPBD) is zero emissions buildings (was zero energy). In other words, it doesn’t matter how much energy you use, as long as no CO2 is released. So you buy shares in a wind turbine, and off you go. Everything on renewable energy, so swimming pools, air conditioning, electric SUVs, saunas, go ahead. Ignoring the material impact, and that all renewable energy is generated with CO2-produced technology, is conveniently forgotten. The market will solve that. Right?
[1] see before: https://www.ronaldrovers.com/co2-should-not-be-traded/
[2] input agriculture:https://www.ronaldrovers.com/eroi-and-land-use-of-potato-crop-a-pilot-12/
[3] co2 storage: https://www.ronaldrovers.com/carbon-storage-in-wood-timber-12/
[4] book: ( in Dutch, end of year in English): Post Fossiel Leven, leven van land en zon, ofwel ruimte-tijd als maat voor waarde. Isbn: 9789083144160, https://www.ribuilt.eu/product/post-fossiel-leven/
[5] landbegroting: https://www.ronaldrovers.com/we-need-yearly-a-land-budgetting/
[6] dust: Space dust falling on earth : around 5,200 metric tons of micrometeorites fall to Earth every year.- Which seems significant , but when spread per km2, 510 million km2 , it results in 10 gr per km2 or 0,1 gr/hectare-year.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X21000534?via%3Dihub
[7] on trees and forests: https://www.ronaldrovers.com/trees-versus-humans/
[8] evaluation methods:https://www.ronaldrovers.com/building-evaluation-should-change/
[9] no CO2 calculations: https://www.ronaldrovers.com/lca-is-not-for-practice-we-need-absolute-energy-indicators-22/
