[Stoves] Methane from char-makers

[Kirk H.]

Wow!

That is one long contribution, with lots of big words, convoluted sentences, and scornful zingers.  It is very intellectual sounding though (except for the zingers which sound petty)!  Could you simplify it into just a few words for us average people.  Something like:  People who care about the environment are misdirected, oil is obviously the way to go (this is just an example of how to write clearly, not necessarily what you meant).  Please just write clearly what you mean to say.

Kirk H.

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Nikhil Desai
Sent: Sunday, March 3, 2019 7:53 AM
To: d.michael.shafer at gmail.com
Cc: Kathleen Draper; Hugh McLaughlin; Schmidt, Hans-Peter; Crispin Pemberton-Pigott; Discussion of biomass cooking stoves
Subject: Re: [Stoves] Methane from char-makers

Michael:

I have taken the liberty to take this to the Stoves list now. I have an earlier partial draft about this, which I may not get around to finishing it but if I do and send it, there will be some repetition. I am accused of saying the same thing over and over again, so why not? 

Your questions gave me a chance to revisit some old literature and I found an excellent new one. In short, scientists do politics of pretense. They have to be caught like children with their hands in the cookie jar or killers wiping off blood from the chainsaw, because they will always pretend they didn't know what they were doing or that nobody had ordered them (both true, but irrelevant). 

I will write separately on biomass power, here is the first part of my reply about GWP of methane.

1. The issue between 20- and 100-year GWP is not moral but political and has immense importance to the policy debates and investment choices. It depends on discounting and globalizing of damages. 
a. Going back into the definition of GWP itself, the discount rate is one of the variables in integrating ToA forcing over a period. The 20-year GWP is roughly 13% p.a.and the 100-year GWP is roughly 3% discount rate. Economists can reasonably argue that a risk-adjusted cost of capital for the poor - specifically, the rate to be used in public expenditure decisions in poor countries -  is closer to 10% real (inflation-adjusted) whereas for the rich it is close to the US Treasury bond rate. As far as the actual discounting implicit in the decisionmaking by the poor is concerned, it is reasonable to argue that a hungry child has a discount rate of 100% per day and that a reasonably food-secure, loan-worthy household with the expenditure of $700 per capita per year has a discount rate of 20-30% per year. Choosing 100-year GWP means that investments in CO2 reductions get a relatively higher (relative to 20-year GWP) priorities than they would otherwise. Since fossil CO2 is the preferred demon of the climate actionistas, this is a convenient lie of "fighting warming" masquerading as a discretionary matter. 

b. The quick "warming" pulse of CH4 is due to ozone. Now, ground-level ozone is a health-damaging pollutant - magnitudes debatable - and a "non-well-mixed, short-lived" local pollutant whose concentrations and residence times are contextual. (I forget now, but ozone formation is dependent on other chemicals in the atmosphere, and wind patterns I suppose.) Such local pollutants are regulated under the EPA scheme of "criteria pollutants", and declaring groundlevel ozone as a climate-active species will not only complicate the modeling and regulatory design that was already in place in the US by 1980, it would not offer an opportunity to attack the fossil fuel industry with another blunt tool in the name of "global climate change". After all, the IPCC inventorying and modeling charade was in the name of long-term (100+ years) models of climate, to deflect attention from the annual or decadal variations in weather on the one hand and from the local health impact on the other. 

It was not for nothing that Kirk Smith called methane as "carbon on steroids" and pointed out that methane and NMVOCs had such high GWPs that (writing from memory), "If one were to put carbon in the atmosphere anyway, CO2 is the least harmful of all options, from both health and climate points of view." (Smith et al. 2000 ARE)

Amen. He also said, "Policy implications of this finding are profound." It wasn't really a novel finding. I had informally argued the same point with colleagues way back around 1991 when EPA contractors were putting together the IPCC beancounter tool-kit. But of course the policy implications were and are profound. The moment you introduce 20-year GWP, local health pollution becomes a more urgent issue even from climate action perspective. It also raises questions as to whether local temperature increase as measured are influenced by changes in local short-lived GHG concentrations; after all, GMST is just an average of the LOCAL temperatures, and local climates are affected by local, regional, and global GHGs and meteorological conditions. 

Shifting attention from the local to the global and from the near-term to the longer-term is critical to a worldwide hysteria against fossil fuels. This is the crux of climate politics taking over energy and environmental policies worldwide. It is a coup by what Trumpists call the Deep State. All I say is that not recognizing this politics of "profound" importance is a shame of science. 

Kirk Smith and Jim Hansen were the only two scientists of some standing who pointed out the importance of non-CO2 GHGs way back in 2000, soon after the Kyoto claptrap. I think both were attacked by the community of conspirators and cavalier policy dudes for saying anything that went against the dogma of attacking fossil fuels per se. 

Here is a recent paper you may find of interest.  A quantitative approach to evaluating the GWP timescalethrough implicit discount rates  Earth Syst. Dynam., 9, 1013–1024, 2018 https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-9-1013-2018  It is an exposition of the issue of discount rates. It concludes that 

" These results provide support for the contention that 100 years is a reasonable timescale choice for the GWP given the assumption that the relative climate damage of pulses of different greenhouse gases is an appropriate means of valuation and that the 3 % discount rate is a reasonable measure of the value of the future. "
but also " We recognize the limitations of evaluating metrics by relying only on climate impact equivalencies without consideration of the economic and political implications of metric implementation. "

My problem with the paper that it is stuck in the muck of academic economic analyses of "damages" and fails to address the fact that all these "global" models are too aggregative, too "global", and independent of relevant contexts of individual and government decision-making. It obliquely refers to other serious deficiencies of such modeling - "Therefore, the question of timescale remains unsettled and an area of active debate. We argue that more focus on quantitative justifications for timescales within the GWP structure would be of value, as differentiated from qualitative justifications such as a need for urgency to avoid tipping points .." - and of course chooses to cater to academic modeling while ignoring the reality of "hear and now" and how this pretense panders to the hysteria against fossil fuels irrespective of combustion methods - the key point by Kirk Smith but not applied to fossil solids, because he is ideologically opposed to coal. 

I urge you to reflect on the parallels between the climate policy bean-counting and the WHO/EPA household solid fuels bean-counting. Abstracting from specific pollutants and instead focusing on a dubious indicator - PM 2.5 - with dubious correlations with diseases and death, and abstracting from actual timing of diseases such as in many respiratory ailments to the long-term average lifelong "burden of disease" parallels the climate modeling shenanigans. With science like this, who needs Trump's code language? 

Contexts matter. Academics don't. Bureaucrats and politicians know which convenient lies they need to pass as inconvenient truths. 

I found a presentation by Michael Hanemann on IPCC 2014 report (AR5) - 

In slide 4 he says, 
  • Ethical theories based on social welfare functions imply that distributional weights, which take account of the different value of money to different people, should be applied to monetary measures of benefits and harms in order to reach normative conclusions.
  • Few empirical applications of economic valuation to climate change have been well-founded, in terms of using distributional weights. 
True enough, but in practice this only means that distributional consequences of climate change and policy effects are shoved under the rug. It is not that scientists are not ethicists and refrain from ethical judements. Rather, in staying away from ethical issues is an ethic itself, an ethic of subservience to the conventions and ignorance that is applied for damaging policy advocacy - "Save the Planet, Kill the People." is my characterization of scientists that join the IPCC "consensus:"

In slide 5 on discounting, he says, 
 • A consensus of the literature suggests that a declining risk-free rate be used over long time horizons.
 • Ultimately, however, these are normative choices.  

Again, true enough, but begs the political question - who has the power to make the normative choice, and is that power ethically appropriate? What these scientists do is to take the 3% discount rate and then celebrate the groupthink - convention, consensus, blah blah. In effect they do politics. They refer to literature - the ultimate weapon of cite-o-logy against the less enlightened, lower degrees, lighter publication list - and carry on with their metaphorical murder of people. 

In slide 7, he has a list of alternative emission metrics; GWP is one. 
"• The choice of an emission metric depends on the potential application and involves value judgments.
• There is no consensus as to which metric is “best”. 
•In terms of aggregate mitigation costs, the Global Warming Potential with a 100 year horizon performs similarly to other metrics (such as global temperature change); however various metrics differ considerably in regional and industry level difference."

True enough, but again this is code-speak that misleads.  Why is there no consensus on what is "best"? Is that because that is contextual and begs the question best for whom? Armed with the enviable privilege of "science doesn't permit value judgement", this cabal of scientists does murder by consensus - ignoring, in their models and out in reality, the considerable differences across regions and industries. 
 


------------------------
Nikhil Desai
(US +1) 202 568 5831
Skype: nikhildesai888


On Sat, Mar 2, 2019 at 2:07 AM d.michael.shafer at gmail.com <d.michael.shafer at gmail.com> wrote:
My apologies to Nikhil for failing to know the backstory on the 20 v. 100 year GWP choice. My observation was meant as an entirely innocent observation about the actual practice in the field, not as a moral judgement about its rightness.

On a more general basis, I am very interested by Nikhil's story about biomass and prices in the Indian Punjab. This is new information for me. Knowing the story of biomass power in Central Thailand as I do, I find this story compelling but also incomplete. It may be true that farm gate prices for straw have risen because of brick kilns, but approximately 20 million tonnes of wheat straw burn annually after the harvest. If this is the case, it is obvious that the brick kiln market is not clearing and price gouging by farmers cannot be the whole story.

Here is what I don't understand. Bricks are heavy and low value. This suggests that they must be made relatively close to their end market. Biomass power, on the other hand, is far more "mobile" and its demand is very widespread. Together, these suggest that if there are, in fact, generous feed-in rates for biomass power, we ought to see multiple, biomass power plants outside of the radius of economically viable brick production where wheat straw is still largely burned. If we go not, then the barriers to biomass power lie elsewhere, not in the cost of feedstock.

This is an important issue for me because I am about to begin work on an anti-smoke planning effort in the Pakistani Punjab. If there is a hidden factor that I completely do not see, I would like to be informed about it now. I can easily factor in the prospect of rising straw prices with new demand, but what else is lurking?

To Nikhil's criticism about scale, the problem, I think, is more complex. It is absolutely true, as Nikhil argues, that in areas of huge biomass production where centralized processing and production are possible, "macro" solutions are necessary. (The Indian Punjab near major cities where immense farms prevail, for example.) The issue, however, is that most places even in India, biomass occurs in small, highly distributed amounts that defy cost-effective collection and scale processing. This being the case, millions of stoves or tens of thousands of trenches may be the only way to go.

M

Michael


Michael Shafer
www.warmheartworldwide.org
www.twitter.com/warmheartorg
http://www.facebook.com/warmheartworldwide


On Wed, Feb 27, 2019 at 7:48 PM Nikhil Desai <pienergy2008 at gmail.com> wrote:
Crispin:

A side note for the moment; will write more on the Stoves list when time permits. 

Michael said, "Everyone I know and all of the articles with which I am familiar use the 100 year standard. "

I want to clear the impression that this matter of convention is simply discretionary. Not at all. It is a political choice pushed by the global environmentalists at the expense of the local environment and hence, indirectly, contrary to the interests of local living things. 

This is because the reason for short-term forcing due to methane is ground-level ozone, which is otherwise regulated as a criteria pollutant in the rich countries. 

Ever since this deceit began 30 years ago, I have preferred to use 20-year GWP. I rationalize it by saying "People before Planet."

Those who say "Planet before Profit" essentially mean "Profit before People." 

N 

On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 4:32 PM Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <crispinpigott at outlook.com> wrote:
Greetings Friends
 
Regarding the incentive not to burn agriwaste badly: farmers in Hebei province (which surrounds Beijing) burn a huge amount of biomass each year to get rid of it and to put the minerals back. The only interest they have in selling it is if the price is high enough to justify the cost of collection, and in some cases, delivery.
 
When there is zero economic incentive (like having a saleable product) no one will bother with such an arduous task. To be frank, the government is not really concerned with the burning, it is all about the air pollution. If you want to burn it without smoke (which is not difficult) no one cares. Leaving on the ground means it rots to methane, either on top or as mulch.
 
As I have mentioned before, the Hebei Province has several factories that produce char from agriwaste and make liquid fertilizer on a large scale. It is not used locally, but exported to other nearby provinces because the product is subsidised at those destinations so the producers get a better price.
 
Some of the raw material is put into methane digesters and piped in to the local gas network. The opportunity to do that at a much larger scale is ever-present, but the cost of collecting it exceeds the gas value benefit.
 
Regards
Crispin
 
 
Han-Pieter,
 
No apologies required. This is a sensitive subject and the discussion has proved very informative. Thank you, in particular, for clarifying a number of points here that were previously missing in the discussion. First, the 20 time horizon. Yes, the GWP of methane declines rapidly over time, starting much higher than 25 and falling to 25 as the "at 100 years standard." I think that it is very important to make the short-term time scale of these calculations clear because I have never encountered them before. Everyone I know and all of the articles with which I am familiar use the 100 year standard. Second, there is your contention that TLUDs and Kon-Tikis operate in the same universe. I think that they do not. In our TLUDs, the rising gases, including of course, CH4, meet the air arriving at the gap above the barrel and instantly ignite. As they flame up the stack and above, they reach very high temperatures. Thermal gun measurements have reached almost 1,000 C. I do not believe that at this temperature we are throwing off much CH4. Our one closed room rest did not register any. Our troughs and trenches, like all Kon-Tikis and flame-caps, are another matter. Not having any data on temperature, James Joyce's comment, I do not know what the temperature is or whether it rises above 690 C.
 
Finally, with crop waste fires producing 5.82 kg of CH4/tonne of biomass burned and using the GWP multiplier of 25, CH4 from crop waster burning is a big issue, especially when combined with the other primary emission, NOx at 3.11 kg/tonne and a GWP multiplier of 298. When there are hundreds of billions of tonnes of crop waste that cannot be collected for high tech pyrolysis, this means that for every one of those hundreds of billions of tonnes, 1.073 tonnes of eCO2 is being emitted. Because this stuff can be charred only using loc-tech, the loss in the methan component of eCO2 calculations is very hard on anyone trying to find a way to engage the rural poor of the developing world in charring not burning. Profit margins are razor thin already and the potential of carbon sales at present offers the only hope that sustainable business models can be found.
 
You may be correct, but if so, there are a huge number of small farmers who will have no incentive not to burn.
 
M 

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