Climate change and social justice in Greenwich: why targets matter

By Simon Pirani. Reposted, with thanks, from the Greener Greenwich Community Network web site.

The Greener Greenwich Community Network aims for our borough to achieve its decarbonisation target, in a way that makes life better for us all.

Lofty ambitions! But what does it mean here and now? In this blog post I try to answer some questions about the target, and what we can all do about it.

What is the target? Who worked it out?

The borough of Greenwich declared a “climate emergency” in 2019, and adopted the policy of becoming “carbon neutral” by 2030. Like many local authorities, and even the UK parliament, Greenwich felt moved to act by a huge wave of protest about the lack of action on climate change by groups such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion.

Looking over the Thames from Shrewsbury Park, Woolwich

The reasoning in the council’s declaration was sound: climate breakdown is already causing “serious damage around the world”; “all governments (national, regional and local) have a duty to act” – and local government “should not wait for national governments to change their policies”. Greenwich would create a local partnership to face the issue, and “use its lobbying power” to campaign at London and national level.

Inaction, the declaration stated, would lead to “higher energy and food costs”, and “increases in social injustice and inequality”. A draft of the council’s Carbon Neutral Plan (CNP) warned that, globally, rising temperatures would mean “more extreme weather and rising sea levels” that would lead to “growing risks to fresh water supplies, food security, economic prosperity and biodiversity”.

All this justifies the borough’s aim of being “carbon neutral”, i.e. of cutting the amount of greenhouse gases being added to the atmosphere to zero.

Decarbonising heating and cooling

Part 10 of Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, by Tom Ackers

Download the whole series as a PDF here

The importance of only building those buildings that are really needed was explained in part 8. Making sure that buildings keep out winter cold and summer heat – that is, improving their thermal performance – was dealt with in part 9.

Nevertheless, supplemental heating and cooling, hot water, and energy for cooking, will always be needed: this final part looks at how these can be provided without fossil fuels.

Installing a heat pump. Photo from the Phyxter web site

The most common sources of such energy are fossil fuels and biomass, for the most part directly combusted on site, in buildings. This results in high levels of emissions – and, in much of the world, hazardous fumes associated with cooking indoors. (See part 9 and Appendix 3, in the PDF version).

These emissions and indoor pollutants can only be dealt with by changing the energy source. Decarbonising cooking, hot water and space conditioning means switching out all of that fossil fuel and biomass for other, greener, sources of energy – ideally, relayed by electricity.

Notwithstanding recent findings on the toxicity of gas stoves, cooking with gas is much cleaner than cooking with biomass, and gas is widely pushed as a comparatively clean-burning “transition fuel” for poor countries. But in my view, the case for gas in such circumstances is often over-stated, with a view to providing fossil fuel companies with a new source of revenue. The best alternative to biomass is electricity – for example, in an electric pressure cooker or induction stove.

In this post, however, I will focus on space conditioning and hot water. I will outline the main alternative technologies: heat pumps (section 10.1) and district heating and district cooling (section 10.2). I will then assess the potential role of hydrogen (section 10.3). I will discuss how such technological changes can be approached in a socially just way (section 10.4). Finally there are some Conclusions (section 10.5), from both this part and the whole series.

Operational emissions and the thermal performance of buildings

Part 9 of Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, by Tom Ackers

Download the whole series as a PDF here

In this part, I cover the operational energy used in buildings – that is, mainly, the energy used for heat, light, cooking and electricity – and the greenhouse gas emissions from this energy use.

Installing thermal insulation

I will provide an overview (section 9.1), a focus on space heating and cooling, the biggest user of operational energy (section 9.2), and a note about the effect of global warming on that (section 9.3). Then I look at what determines the thermal performance of buildings, i.e. how well they keep out winter cold or summer heat (section 9.4), and end with some points about Passivhaus standards (Section 9.5), which forms a link to the tenth and final part on how operational greenhouse gas emissions can be cut.

9.1. The operational energy of buildings

The chart below shows the global built environment’s operational energy-related emissions for 2018.

This is an excerpt from the chart in part 5 that showed both operational and embodied emissions of buildings.  

Decarbonising embodied emissions

Part 8 of Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, by Tom Ackers

Download the whole series as a PDF here

There are two main ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions from construction, that will be covered in this part. These are:

a. Demand reduction: mainly, reducing the quantity of unnecessary new construction. This means extending the lifetime of buildings and infrastructure, and reducing waste.

Spraying hempcrete. Photo by fiberfort.com

b. Decarbonising construction: mostly, reducing the embodied emissions in construction materials. The prime targets here are the embodied emissions of cement and steel.

One way of decarbonising construction is to replace those existing construction materials wholesale, with alternative, lower carbon alternatives. I will consider some of those alternatives here, including so-called bio-based materials.

A second way to decarbonise construction is to engineer down the use of cement and steel – for example, by using them in conjunction with low carbon alternatives, and by using them more efficiently through changes in design and through waste reduction. A third method is recycling.  

Another approach to reducing embodied emissions in construction – unsurprisingly the dominant focus for capital-intensive industry – is to try to decarbonise the production of existing construction materials. The focus is on cement and steel, but other high-energy materials, such as glass, also need to be decarbonised.

Reducing the carbon intensity of cement and steel is challenging: their production emissions are considered “hard to abate” – especially process emissions that comprise two-thirds of cement production’s footprint. This area is full of technological innovators seeking to insert themselves into essential supply lines of construction.

Embodied emissions

Part 7 of Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, by Tom Ackers

Download the whole series as a PDF here

In this part, I give an overview of the problem of embodied emissions, i.e. those emitted in the construction of buildings and infrastructure (section 7.1); then some details about concrete and steel (section 7.2), and cement recarbonation (section 7.3); and about roads (section 7.4). 

7.1. Overview

This graphic shows the sources of the built environment’s embodied CO₂ emissions for 2019, including emissions from steel manufacture.[1] Each row represents a different breakdown of the same total – the 6.6 GtCO2 of embodied, energy-related emissions. The second row, unlike the other two, also shows the process emissions from the production of steel and cement.

Sources: * IEA (2020); △ Robbie M. Andrew (2022); § IEA / UNEP (2020), IEA / UNEP (2021)

The vast majority of the built environment’s embodied emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels during the manufacture of building materials.

For example, in the case of buildings construction, in 2019 just 0.13 Gt CO₂ emissions globally came from the buildings construction stage – a comparatively tiny proportion of the roughly 4.45 Gt total embodied emissions.[2] The rest came from the manufacture of building materials prior to construction.

The Seagram building in New York. Source: Creative Commons

Of the carbon footprint of those materials that went into buildings construction, around 60% of emissions came from cement and steel manufacture, and 40% from the manufacture of other buildings materials. For the construction sector as a whole, the ratio is something like 50:50 cement and steel emissions to other emissions.

This underlines the point, emphasised in part 3: steel and cement (and concrete made from cement) are the high-energy ingredients of choice for fossil-fuelled global construction.

Sand and gravel are also major inputs. Indeed, the construction sector is driving an impending sand crisis. The main emissions cost of these is the energy of extraction, processing and transport.

In addition, construction consumes 26% of global aluminium output and 19% of all non-fibre plastics.

The levels of embodied emissions in common construction materials can be seen in the “Construction Material Pyramid”, shown below, designed by the Centre for Industrialised Architecture in Denmark. The values given are averages that include direct and indirect emissions footprints by point of sale (cradle-to-gate).

At the base of the pyramid are materials that have a low emissions intensity, i.e. that typically require just a small input of energy or other sources of emissions in their production: rammed earth walls, plywood, construction timber. (Wood here even gets a negative value as a material that “sequesters” carbon, although I think that framing can be misleading. See section 8.4 below.)

Cut motor traffic. Live better lives. Tackle climate change

By Simon Pirani

The borough of Greenwich, south east London, plans to cut car traffic by 45% by 2030 – but even that will produce less than half the greenhouse gas emissions reductions that climate scientists say are needed.

The proposal to cut back traffic is a good start to a conversation about transforming urban transport, I argued this week in a response to the council’s draft Transport Strategy. But only a start. (Download the full response here.)

Copenhagen. But coming to south east London soon. Photo by heb@Wikimedia Commons

Better still would be to set carbon budgets – limits on the amount of greenhouse gases that can be emitted during specific time periods – and use them as a framework for transport and other policies.

Such budgets can concentrate minds on policies to improve people’s lives, while contributing to tackling climate change at the same time. Better, cheaper public transport and support for non-car ways of travelling, e.g. bikes and walking, all help.

Transport is the second-biggest cause of greenhouse gas emissions in Greenwich; heat, electricity and cooking fuel for homes and other buildings is the first. 

In 2019, Greenwich was one of many local authorities that declared a “climate emergency” in response to school pupils’ strikes demanding action on climate, and Extinction Rebellion’s direct action campaign. Even the UK parliament claimed to recognise this emergency.

Calculating a fair carbon budget for the UK

Here PETER SOMERVILLE provides more detail on how a UK carbon budget could be set, and discusses some problems with the Climate Change Committee (CCC) budgets. This is the second of two articles, the first is this overview of the CCC’s Sixth Carbon Budget  

Download these articles on carbon budgets, as a pdf

A global carbon budget is the total amount of carbon dioxide emissions that human activities across the world can be allowed to generate, in order to avoid excessive global warming.

Budgets vary, according to the degrees of temperature increase that are judged to be allowable, and according to how sensitive the climate is judged to be in response to carbon emissions: the greater the sensitivity, the smaller the budget has to be.

School students’ climate protest, 2019

Unfortunately, we do not know exactly how sensitive the climate is to carbon emissions, so budgets are calculated across the range of possible sensitivities.

The IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees provided a range of figures for the remaining global carbon budget in 2018 (Table 2.2 on page 108).

On the basis of the median climate sensitivity, the budget to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels was stated as 580 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (580 GtCO2). That means the world has a mere 50:50 chance of staying below 1.5°C.

Arguably, however, a higher level of climate sensitivity is required, to give the world at least a 66% chance of reaching the 1.5°C target. At this level, the carbon budget in 2018 was 420 GtCO2.

All economic and other human activity in the world currently emits approximately 40 GtCO2 per year, so the remaining budget today in 2021 is closer to 300 GtCO2. At this rate the budget would be fully spent before 2029.

The task here is then to calculate what might count as a fair share of this budget to be allocated to the UK.

The first problem is that the global budget is for carbon dioxide only: other greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as methane and nitrous oxide are calculated separately.

Methane has minimal long-term effect on the climate, but it is a powerful greenhouse gas in the short-term, which needs to be reduced to zero as soon as possible in order to minimise its contribution to peak warming (see CCC Sixth Carbon Budget report, page 372). Arguably, therefore, a fair carbon budget for the UK should take account of all GHGs.

The contested present, versus the populationists’ ‘ghastly future’

The false narrative that population growth is a key driver of ecological crisis “accus[es] and put[s] the onus on” people in the global south who bear the brunt of that crisis, Jevgeniy Bluwstein and others write in Frontiers in Conservation Science, an academic journal, this month.

They argue that, instead of drawing a straight line from rising population and affluence to ecological disaster, scientists “should help expose the structural causes and drivers of inequality, overproduction and overconsumption”.

Bluwstein and his colleagues are responding to an article that re-presents a populationist narrative, in a new version for the 2020s, “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future”. Its authors include Corey Bradshaw, an Australian ecologist, and Paul Ehrlich, a leading advocate of “too many people” arguments since the 1970s.

Protests against a new mining project in Chile. Photo from No A La Mina web site

Bradshaw, Ehrlich et al outline three linked crises – biodiversity loss, the sixth mass extinction and climate disruption – and suggest that scientists’ social responsibility is to “tell it like it is”: to adopt “a good communication strategy” to undercut human “optimism bias” that ignores expert warnings.

China’s coal-fuelled boom: the man who cried “stop”

Download this article (and the linked one) as a PDF

“We can no longer act on nature with impunity.” The “classic” model of economic development “poses a threat to humanity’s very existence”. China needs a new development model, based on renewable resources used effectively and sustainably, that will be built on the old model’s ruins.

Deng Yingtao, a high-profile Chinese economist, made this call to action thirty years ago in his book A New Development Model and China’s Future.[1] Its message was ignored by the political leaders it was addressed to. In this review article, I will consider why.

In the 1990s, the Chinese Communist party leadership prioritised expansion of export-focused manufacturing industry. The industrial boom really took off in the 2000s, fuelled by mountains of coal – the classic unsustainable resource.

In every year since 2011, China has consumed more coal than the rest of the world put together;

Steelmaking is one of China’s coal-hungry industries

more coal than the entire world used annually in the early 1980s; and more than twice what all the rich countries together used annually in the mid 1960s, during their own coal-fired boom.[2]

The primary beneficiaries of this economic model are not China’s 1.3 billion people. The big fuel users are in China’s giant east-coast manufacturing belt – which produces, in the first place, energy-intensive goods for export to rich countries: steel bars, cement, chemical products, agricultural fertilisers and electronics products. Household fuel consumption remains extremely low.

This level of fossil fuel use can not go on, not in China and not anywhere else, without courting the most horrendous dangers brought about by global warming.

Deng Yingtao made a compelling argument against going down this road, BEFORE the decisions were made.

In the Introduction to his book, he pointed to the yawning gap between rich and poor countries; the multinational companies’ rising power; and the damage done to the global south by capitalist boom-and-bust.

The “classic” development model had led to “a world economy dominated by the developed West

China: reform economists who sought the road not taken

Download this article (and the linked one) as a PDF

Deng Yingtao, who in the 1990s called on China to reject the western-oriented industrial development model, was neither a dissident nor an environmentalist. As a senior economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, he first made his mark in the late 1970s, in debates about reforming agriculture. (See MAIN ARTICLE about Deng’s work here.)

Deng’s father, Deng Liqun, was high up in the Chinese Communist party. He joined it in 1936, and served as a military leader, both before the revolution of 1949 and in the suppression of revolts in western China in the 1950s.

In the 1970s, during the cultural revolution, Deng senior, like many leading and middle-ranking Communists, was sent to the countryside. He worked in Henan province. There his son Deng Yingtao

Farmer with buffalo, 2007. Photo: Andy Siitonen / Creative commons

met Chen Yizi: their discussions about how the collective farm system obstructed the development of agriculture started a long collaboration.

Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, the purge of the Maoist “gang of four” that followed, and Deng Xiaoping’s emergence as the undisputed party leader in 1978, marked a big political turning-point. The cultural revolution was repudiated.

A “Beijing spring” was declared, allowing open political discussion that had been impossible under Mao. The “four modernisations” (economy, agriculture, science and defence) reform policy was adopted; the use of market mechanisms and some opening-up to capitalism were key elements.

At the top of the party, Deng Xiaoping sidelined Hua Guofeng, Mao’s obvious successor. In the ranks, intellectuals and officials who had been sent to the countryside returned to Beijing – including Deng Yingtao and Chen Yizi.[1] Along with Wang Xiaoqiang, Deng and Chen became central figures in a group of reform economists who in 1979 began to meet on weekends in parks and empty offices in