Planting Trees is Miscellaneous

On Earth Day, I announced I’d be be spending some time thinking about a ’sexy’ vision of the (bright green) future. When Jamais Cascio blooged about Feedback, Tipping Points, and Hard Choices I asked him about a better vision than the one offered by Monbiot. He pointed me to Joseph Romm’s Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 2: The Solution.

Romm builds upon Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies. I don’t particularly like Romm’s proposal, and since he asks dissenters to read the Stabilization wedges paper before critiquing him, I gave it another read.

Now, the first time I read about stabilization wedges, the idea was very exciting. By breaking down the problem of carbon emissions into smaller, tractable problem, the authors gave us a credible, positive vision. While no single element or ‘wedge’ could solve even half the problem, any 7 of the many they proposed could do so.

The 15 proposed wedges are summarized on the Carbon Mitigation Initiative’s website, broken down into the four categories of Efficiency, Decarbonization of power, Decarbonization of fuel and Forests and agricultural soils

David Weinberger’s excellent book Everything is Miscellaneous has made me suspicious of such neat classification systems. It is one of those deceptively profound books that will permanently warp the way you see the world. Now I read about climate policy and think about the Dewey decimal classification system, or Linnaean taxonomy.

These classification systems not only fail at classifying important things (the inevitable ‘miscellaneous’), they also imply a certain worldview, which has political consequences.

Here’s a miscellaneous: sometimes planting a tree is not simply a mechanism for CO2 sequestration, but also a way to cut air conditioning costs. Does that fit under “Forests and agricultural soils” or “Efficiency”?

Another unclassifiable wedge is population. Yes, it’s a politically sensitive issue, yet right now there are governments encouraging higher birth rates, and others not giving women access to contraceptives.

There are other problems with the wedges. As the authors put it, wedges can not be combined willy-nilly:

Because the same BAU [business as usual] carbon emissions cannot be displaced twice, achieving one wedge often interacts with achieving another. The more the electricity system becomes decarbonized, for example, the less the available savings from greater efficiency of electricity use, and vice versa.

The wedge concept assumes linearity:

A wedge represents an activity that reduces emissions to the atmosphere that starts at zero today and increases linearly until it accounts for 1 GtC/year of reduced carbon emissions in 50 years. It thus represents a cumulative total of 25 GtC of reduced emissions over 50 years.

Of course, wind and solar have been growing at rates above 30%: not exactly linear.

Along with linearity, the very classification and sheer size of wedges, as well as the examples given favour bureaucratic solutions and state intervention. In fact, bureaucracies often can’t handle solutions like planting trees which have multiple benefits for health, environment, water management and energy use.

There’s a lot to like in Pacala and Socolow’s original paper: breaking down the problem into manageable chunks, insisting on stabilization with existing, ready technologies and a framework with which we can more sanely compare the cost of strategies.

What would be useful now is a way to think about solutions from the bottom-up. Maybe there’s a way to account for strategies with non-linear and multiple benefits.