It's World Bee Day. This week, should the Guardian’s Carbon Bombs be defused? There’s a new report from the World Meteorological Organisation on the State of the Global Climate 2021, I learn about a country where supermarkets accept Bitcoin while IEMA warns about the energy cost of Bitcoin mining, and there’s a prospect of new pandemics.
World Bee Day
Yes, it’s World Bee Day. Did Albert Einstein ever say “If the bee disappeared off the face of the Earth, man would only have four years left to live”? Almost certainly not. Is it true? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be serious. Bees are pollinators and without pollinators many fruit crops would not produce fruit. We’d still have cereals and maize because they are pollinated by the wind. Root crops like carrots, potatoes and turnips, as well as cabbages and Brussels sprouts wouldn’t be affected, but apples and oranges and lemons and plums and strawberries and raspberries and gooseberries and all the rest would be scarce. And I’m not sure how we would get vegetable seeds unless we could let some vegetables flower and get pollinated.
Colony collapse disorder, where all the bees desert the hive for no apparent reason, seems to be less common now than a few years ago. However, apart from the varroa parasite and the Asian Hornet, the bees are having to deal with agricultural pesticides, principally neonicotinoids. These chemicals have been used in the past to deal with insects that attack oilseed rape and are also being used to protect the U.K.'s sugarbeet crop. Of course, they don't just affect the target insects, they also affect honeybees and other pollinators. Following Brexit the British government is able to ignore any EU ban on such pesticides and despite representations from beekeepers it seems to have decided that the sugarbeet crop is more important. What they don't seem to realise is that once a bee colony is destroyed it takes time, one or two seasons, to replace it. If the nation’s bees are constantly affected by pesticides they may never completely recover. While it may be relatively easy to calculate the cost of damage to the sugarbeet crop, the loss of fruit due to the loss of pollinators is much more difficult to identify, though likely to be very much greater.
As a beekeeper I urge you to plant bee-friendly plants, avoid most pesticides in the garden and add your name to any petitions urging the government to protect our pollinators. Find out more at buglife.org.uk , for example.
Carbon Bombs
Last week I commented on a special report from the Guardian newspaper which criticised the fossil fuel industry for continuing to exploit new reserves even while global emissions continue to rise. It quoted Antonio Guterrez, UN Secretary General, saying that “[The latest IPCC report] ] is a code red for humanity,” and that “Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.”
It reported that the International Energy Agency had concluded there could be no new oil or gas fields or coalmines if the world was to reach net zero by 2050.
Feedback
The feedback I had was that this was sensationalist and designed to whip up the Guardian readership in the same way that the Daily Mail panders to its readers over immigration. An attack on the oil companies was unjustified when some 70% of the projects were to be delivered by state organisations. In any case, there was nothing really new in the report as these investment plans have been known in the industry for years. And the fact that something is planned doesn’t mean it will happen.
Sensationalist
I think “sensationalist” is an appropriate term for declarations unsupported by evidence, but the information from the IPCC, the IEA and the UN is based on peer-reviewed scientific research, unlike the Mail’s anti-immigrant stories. Even if planned projects are not implemented, those under development will already assure a continuing growth of emissions. It doesn’t really matter whether this damage to the planet is being carried out by public or private organisations; the fossil fuel industry is responsible and by its actions is clearly rejecting the scientific consensus.
Transition
Of course, we continue to need fossil fuels and will do so for years to come. I think even Just Stop Oil would accept that. Almost every aspect of our lives in the prosperous West relies on fossil fuels. But we now know just how damaging they are and how urgent it is to phase them out. The fossil fuel industry should be required to put maximum resources behind the transition to clean and renewable energy as swiftly as possible. Governments should not be incentivising the development of new oil and gas fields. The classification of natural gas as “environmentally sustainable” by the UK Business Secretary, so as to encourage investment in new fields, is ignorant, perverse and dangerous.
World Meteorological Organisation
There is no lack of warnings about the seriousness of the climate crisis and how short the time is that we have left to take effective action. The State of the Global Climate 2021 Report from the WMO has these key messages:
- The global mean temperature in 2021 was around 1.11°C above the pre-industrial average.
- Global mean sea level reached a new record high in 2021
- The Antarctic ozone hole reached a maximum area of 24.8 million km2
- Greenland experienced an exceptional mid-August melt event and the first-ever recorded rainfall at Summit Station, the highest point on the Greenland ice sheet.
- Exceptional heatwaves broke records across western North America and the Mediterranean.
- Hurricane Ida was the most significant of the North Atlantic season with economic losses in the United States estimated at US$ 75 billion.
- Deadly and costly flooding induced economic losses of US$ 17.7 billion in Henan province of China, and Western Europe experienced some of its most severe flooding on record in mid-July.
- Drought affected many parts of the world
- The compounded effects of conflict, extreme weather events and economic shocks, further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, undermined decades of progress towards improving food security globally.
- Hydro-meteorological hazards continued to contribute to internal displacement, including more than 1.4 million people displaced in China.
You’ll find links below to an introductory video from the Secretary-General of the WMO, to an interactive presentation of the main points of the report (well worth a look) and to the report itself.
Potential Pandemic
Zoonotic Spillover is not a phrase you come across very often, but Bloomberg warns that this is one of the greatest threats that humanity is facing. An article in Nature defines zoonotic spillover as a mechanistic link between global environmental change and disease emergence. Apparently there are some 100,000 virus species which have the capacity to infect humans, but at present, the vast majority are circulating silently in wild mammals. The consequences of climate change and changing land use could alter this. By 2070 the authors foresee cross-species transmission of animal viruses an estimated 4,000 times, with bats once again playing a major role. They find that this ecological transition may already be underway, and holding warming under 2 °C within the century will not reduce future viral sharing.
Crypto
Last Wednesday’s interview with Anthony Day (that’s Anthony J J Day) was about blockchain, cryptocurrencies, NFTs and so on. I mentioned a programme on BBC Radio 4 called How To Get Rich Off Crypto Alone with Sunil Patel. It looked like a comedy program, and was quite lighthearted, but there was some interesting and serious information in there.
El Salvador
The programme revealed that while you are not going to get very far with buying your everyday needs in UK if you only have bitcoin to spend, El Salvador, the country with the highest murder rate in the world, has just adopted Bitcoin as an official currency. Each citizen received the equivalent of $30 in Bitcoin and every business is required to accept Bitcoin. You can go into a supermarket and buy your groceries with Bitcoin, although market traders and small businesses are staying away from it.
Gamble
This seems to be a gamble by the president and people interviewed in the country admitted they didn't really understand the concept. Many of them had simply used the $30 windfall to pay off debts. There's a fundamental problem with the idea, in that less than 20% of the population have smartphones which are essential for managing cryptocurrency. Even those that do may not be in an area where they can get an Internet signal.
Mining
The government of El Salvador has announced plans to start mining in a scenario which sounds like something out of a James Bond movie. Because Bitcoin mining demands so much electricity they are going to build their mine on the slopes of a volcano and use geothermal energy to produce the electricity required. Detailed plans are scarce present. The IMF seems sceptical and has warned that El Salvador may default on its international loans.
Bitcoin Mining
Transform, the journal of IEMA, has an article on Bitcoin mining in its latest issue. It talks mainly about Bitcoin, although other crypto currencies are available, many of which use far less electricity to maintain their blockchains. The journal warns that while some mining datacentres use renewable energy, others are attracted to locations which produce cheap electricity from coal. China has outlawed this, but miners have moved into places like Kazakhstan where there are no such restrictions. Fossil fuel power stations are also being brought back into use in the US to support mining, and the 3rd Global Cryptoasset Benchmarking Study estimated that in 2020 only 29% of Bitcoin mining was powered by renewable energy.
E-waste
Another side to this is electronic waste. As the stock of bitcoins becomes increasingly scarce and the search becomes more intense, more and more powerful hardware is needed to run the algorithms, and more and more hardware is discarded, often after as little as 18 months. This kit is very specialised and cannot be repurposed easily. It is often discarded in countries which may have cheap electricity but have few regulations about recycling or dealing with e-waste. It has been estimated that Bitcoin’s e-waste footprint totals 32.8kt annually.
Potential
We learnt from Wednesday’s interview that blockchain offers highly secure record storage on a cooperative basis: in other words cannot be controlled by governments or corporations. It can provide money transfer services to people who do not have access to banks and it can verify the authenticity of materials all along the supply chain. Arguably we have so far seen very little of its full potential. The question is whether the trade-off between that potential and the environmental impact, balances in our favour.
And that's it for today. Thank you once again for listening to the Sustainable Futures Report, and thank you for supporting the podcast if you are a patron. If you're not, you can join that exclusive band at patreon.com/SFR .
There will be another interview next Wednesday and another podcast the following Friday. In the UK we start June with a four-day weekend to mark the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee so there is unlikely to be an episode on 3rd June, but I will probably be back to normal the following week.
For the moment, have a great weekend, and your next interview will be next week.
I’m Anthony Day.
That was the Sustainable Futures Report.
Until Wednesday!
Sources
World Bee Day
https://www.un.org/en/observances/bee-day
https://www.gov.si/en/registries/projects/world-bee-day/
https://www.buglife.org.uk/campaigns/pesticides/
Guardian on Fossil Fuels
https://www.energyvoice.com/oilandgas/north-sea/411626/kwasi-kwarteng-natural-gas-north-sea/
World Meteorological Office
State of the Global Climate 2021
Interactive Presentation
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/bbe6a05f6dae42f2a420cfdd7698e4b1
Full Report
https://library.wmo.int/doc_num.php?explnum_id=11178
An Idiot’s Guide to Cryptocurrency
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0017chs
Bitcoin Mining
https://www.iema.net/articles/mining-disaster-energy-consumption-in-cryptocurrencies?t=0 (available only to iema members)
Cross-species viral transmission
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04788-w
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-16/zoonotic-spillover-is-one-of-the-greatest-threats-humanity-is-facing
