Sunday, October 31, 2021

Youth are 'wired' to push for change, researcher says about why they're climate choice influencers

'Intergenerational collaboration' key in pushing for change,

 says expert at Ontario's University of Waterloo

Antonia Reed · CBC News · 
Shakti Ramkumar, centre, shown during a climate strike demonstration, says her activism began with her family's move from India to Surrey, B.C., when she was eight years old. She'll be at the UN's COP26 climate change summit that starts Sunday in Glasgow. (Submitted by Shakti Ramkumar)

From decisions about what car to buy to what families eat, young people can have a big impact on choices their parents make, and that can benefit the environment, according to Canadian experts and young activists.

It's something Shakti Ramkumar discovered when she was growing up.

A climate activist most of her life, her journey began with her family's move from India to Surrey, B.C., when she was eight years old. Ramkumar said adjusting to a new life and seeing a new culture made her curious about the city around her, so in Grade 4, she did a science fair project about how public transportation could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

"It was really shocking to me that we had this global problem and I really wanted to help solve it," she said.  

Since then, she's been focused on finding solutions to the climate crisis, and that's extended to her efforts to influence the people around her. 

I would really urge adults who feel jaded maybe, or indifferent to the crisis, to see that young people are doing this out of a sense of fear. And also because we have hope that we can build systems that are so much better than this, that can be better for all of us.- Shakti Ramkumar, 25

As part of her job as director of communications and policy with Student Energy, a global and youth-led organization that aims to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy, she'll be attending the UN's climate change summit, COP26, in Glasgow that begins Sunday. 

"I would really urge adults who feel jaded maybe, or indifferent to the crisis, to see that young people are doing this out of a sense of fear. And also because we have hope that we can build systems that are so much better than this, that can be better for all of us," said Ramkumar, 25.

She said one of her big victories was convincing her parents, who were already vegetarian, to give up all animal-based products.

"I finally asked my parents to go vegan with me in Grade 12. It was actually after visiting Antarctica with an organization called Students on Ice and kind of seeing the effects of climate change first hand on this remote ecosystem," she said.

Her father, Ramkumar Perumal, said he'd tried going vegan before but couldn't get used to drinking his coffee black. At his daughter's urging, the family finally went all in.

"We had allowed ourselves the occasional consumption of dairy products when we were outside, like when we had to buy a sandwich or a bean burrito, or the occasional slice of vegetarian pizza, telling ourselves that it was just occasional," he said. "But Shakti decided that we had to stop even that because things were getting bad on the climate change front."

Kids' brains behind them thinking outside the box

Ilona Dougherty is a postdoctoral fellow and the managing director of the Youth and Innovation Project at the University of Waterloo, and has studied how young people can influence the adults in their lives.

  • Have questions about COP26 or climate science, policy or politics? Email us: ask@cbc.ca. Your input helps inform our coverage.

Dougherty and her group looked at how the brains of 15- to 25 year-olds are different from those of adults, and said the findings can explain why youth tend to be at the forefront of movements like the fight against climate change.

"Young people are literally wired to challenge the status quo, to think outside the box. Their brains are really amazing and they have a lot to offer us."

Ilona Dougherty, managing director of the Youth and Innovation Project at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and her group looked at how the brains of 15- to 25 year-olds are different from adult brains, work she says can explain why youth tend to be at the forefront of movements. (Lisa Griffiths)

Dougherty also looked back at the last 35 years of youth movements and found adults play an important role, too.

"Intergenerational collaboration is key," she said. When young people get together with decision-makers who have the power to change things, "that's when the magic happens."

And that change can start at home.

"In marketing research, we hear a lot about the 'nag' factor, you know a kid [or] young person bugging their parents to buy something. But it's interesting — there's actually some research that talks about how this can have an impact on the environmental behaviour of parents," Dougherty said.

A child or teen having an open and trusting relationship with their parents or caregivers can help start those conversations.

Dougherty offered this advice for young people: "Be curious about what your parents think, why they think what they think, how they form those views, open a dialogue with them and challenge their beliefs."

It can go both ways.

If children are raised in an environment where adults are concerned about environmental issues, it will have an impact on those young people, Dougherty said. 

"That's certainly my own experience. I have wonderfully engaged, activist parents and I grew up in the back of community meetings, so that's something that I have personally experienced."

Family can foster environmentalism

Shakti Ramkumar certainly credits her family for planting the seeds of her environmentalism — and not just her parents, but her grandparents and ancestors in southern India as well.

"I come from a rural background. My family are farmers and even now I see firsthand the changes and the challenges that they are facing because of climate change, and because of the changing expectation on what is profitable to grow and what they need to survive on this farmland so they're a huge influence on me and how I approach my work and my climate advocacy," she said.

Ramkumar, 25, has been a climate activist most of her life. She decided to become a vegan after a trip to Antarctica. (Submitted by Shakti Ramkumar)

Her father said he is proud of his daughter's activism and believes it is critical that adults listen to young people.  

"I'm hoping that they will get more support from the rest of society so that we can move towards a safer situation and move out of this constant sense of crisis, because this can take a toll on people's mental health. It's not easy to be in a crisis-feeling year after year," Ramkumar Perumal said.

WATCH | What do young activists want to see Canada commit to at COP26?

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SPCA wants to end fireworks

BC SPCA wants Ottawa to make consumer fireworks illegal

 -  | Story: 350218

It’s a Halloween tradition in B.C. but, if the BC SPCA has its way, late-October fireworks won’t be around much longer.

The BC SPCA is petitioning the federal government to ban all consumer fireworks, as the celebratory explosives can be detrimental to animals.

The animal welfare organization helped write a petition to be put forward to Parliament by Victoria MP Laurel Collins.

The petition opened for signatures on Thursday and will close on Feb. 25.

Currently in Canada, consumer fireworks are regulated by a patchwork of bylaws that vary across the country — by province and municipality.

Though fireworks are permitted to be purchased and used during specific times of the year in B.C., some provinces, like Alberta, have banned consumer fireworks altogether.

This petition is asking the government of Canada to create permanent legislature that would apply to all provinces.

It also points to safety concerns around fireworks including pollution and fire risk, as well as the harm the explosives can do to animals.

BC SPCA chief scientific officer Sara Dubois said many humans and animals have lost their lives in mishaps and fires created by fireworks.

“Farm animals are particularly scared of fireworks and there's lots of reports from farmers who've lost animals as a result,” Dubois said.

“You think it's just one fun night for you, but it's actually having a significant harm on your community."

Dubois said she knows fireworks are a local tradition, but she believes residents can live without them.

“I think that that's traditions can change,” Dubois said.

“Traditions can evolve and, especially once you learn the consequences on others, I think we're learning more and more about how to be respectful of the community.”

Out of the 2,048 signatures the petition had as of Saturday evening, 1881 of them were from B.C.

The official government petition can be accessed here.

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Volcano Shoots Lava Bomb

Oct 30, 2021

Inside Edition

The volcano known as La Cumbre Vieja shot out a so-called lava bomb earlier this week. Lava bombs are masses of molten rock, ejected from volcanoes, that cool before they hit the ground. When this one finally came to rest, some intrepid observers got an up-close look. The ‘bomb’ was still red-hot inside. La Cumbre Vieja, which is on the island of La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands, has been erupting since September 19th.

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Beef's gassy problem

Beef a bigger challenge than oil and gas when it comes to tackling methane emissions


The Canadian Press -  | Story: 349839

As Canada doubles down on efforts to reduce harmful methane emissions, experts say one of the trickiest hurdles standing in the way is the burping cow.

Methane — a clear, odourless gas — accounts for just 13 per cent of Canada's total greenhouse gas emissions, but because it is better than carbon dioxide at trapping heat it is believed to be responsible for at least one-third of global warming recorded to date.

That makes it a high priority for governments seeking to live up to their climate change commitments. Earlier this month, Canada confirmed its support for the Global Methane Pledge, which aims to reduce global emissions by 30 per cent below 2020 levels by 2030. The initiative, led by the U.S. and Europe, will be launched at the UN climate summit in Scotland in November.

Forty-three per cent of Canada's total methane emissions come from the oil and gas industry, and the federal government has already put regulations in place to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas industry by 40 to 45 per cent over 2012 levels by 2025. Last week, Canada said its new goal will be to align with the International Energy Agency's recommendation that methane from the oil and gas industry must be cut 75 per cent from 2012 levels by the end of this decade.

But when it comes to agriculture, there are no regulations, or even federal targets, in place. This is in spite of the fact that the industry is responsible for 24 per cent of Canada's total methane emissions.

Methane is a natural byproduct of cattle digestion, meaning it is emitted into the atmosphere every time a beef or dairy cow burps or passes gas. And unlike in oil and gas — where existing leak detection and repair technology can go a long way toward reducing methane emissions — there is no obvious solution for the problem yet.

“I think the biology’s a bit more complicated on the agricultural side than it is on the oil and gas side," said Tim McAllister, a Lethbridge, Alta.-based research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. "A lot of the oil and gas issues I think can be handled by engineering solutions."

That doesn't mean scientists aren't trying. Around the globe, research is being done on everything from optimization of cattle diets to the addition of feed additives — everything from nitrates to seaweed — in an effort to reduce methane emissions.

Scientists are also looking into the possibility of a vaccine that could target the methane-producing microbes in a cow's gut. Some researchers are even experimenting with putting mask-like accessories over a cow's mouth to trap methane burps.

Between 1981 and 2011, the beef industry was able to reduce its total greenhouse gas emissions intensity by 15 per cent, said Brenna Grant, manager of Canfax Research Services, the research arm of industry group The Canadian Cattlemen's Association. Those improvements were largely due to improvements in feed quality and efficiency.

Grant said last year, the beef industry set its own target of reducing primary production greenhouse gas emissions intensity by 33 per cent over the next 10 years — a goal she acknowledged is ambitious.

"Let's just say it's going to be a stretch. And the thing is, we wanted to make it a stretch," she said. "We wanted it to be something we would really have to strive and work on."

Experts say even if a technology makes sense scientifically, it also has to make economic sense. No farmer is going to pay for a methane-reducing feed additive unless it somehow also improves his or her bottom line.

Guillaume Lhermie, director of the Simpson Centre for Agricultural Policy and Public Education at the University of Calgary, said so far, farmers have remained relatively unaffected by Canada's current climate policies. The use of on-farm fuels, for example, remains exempt from federal carbon pricing.

But Lhermie said the beef industry should expect to come under increasing regulatory and governmental pressure in years to come. He added that in order to avoid onerous emissions-related legislation and maintain greater freedom in production decisions, the sector needs to proactively tackle the issue.

"It is almost certain that there will be increasing pressure to reduce emissions from the agricultural sector," he said. "It could mean massive disruption for the sector."

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How fights over what's fair have stalled progress on climate change

At COP26, pressure to move past arguments about who's

doing what and step up


Lisa Johnson · CBC News · 
Over the years, countries with a lot of historical responsibility for climate change have often claimed efforts to act are unfair. Here, Oxfam activists wear papier mâché heads depicting the leaders of Germany, the U.S., Britain and Canada at a climate protest during the G7 summit in Cornwall, Britain, on June 12. (Phil Noble/Reuters)

Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This story is part of a CBC News initiative entitled Our Changing Planet to show and explain the effects of climate change and what is being done about it.

The feast has been grand, at least for those who arrived early on.

The early diners — call them developed countries — ordered advancements and luxuries without concern for the atmospheric price. Perhaps, at first, the cost wasn't clear.

Others joined the table, hungry for their turn and a taste of the same. Why should developing countries refrain from fossil fuels when some have been gorging for, well, more than a century?

But now, there's no doubt, it's time to pay up. 

Starting Sunday in Glasgow, the Conference of the Parties (COP) will meet for the 26th time in three decades trying to decide how to split the bill.

What's fair — a concept so fundamental that toddlers and chimpanzees have opinions about it — has been far from simple when it comes to global climate change negotiations. Claims of unfairness were part of the failure of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and one of the arguments used by President Donald Trump when the U.S. temporarily left the Paris Agreement.

This time, although science behind human-caused climate change is clear and damage is mounting, especially in parts of the world least responsible, success depends on wealthy, polluting countries coming to agreement.

"Fairness is always in the eye of the beholder," said Prof. Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, who has been at every annual COP meeting since they began in Berlin in 1995.

"When I hear these arguments [about fairness], I hear slave owners ... deciding who should sell their slaves or free their slaves first," said Huq.

"If you don't sell your slaves or free your slaves first, why should I? Nobody's asking the slaves."

The impacts of climate change, including sea-level rise and flooding, have been felt around the world for years. Here, a mother carries her baby as a child wades behind on a street flooded with sea water in Mayangan village in Subang, Indonesia's West Java province, on July 16, 2010. (Beawiharta/Reuters)

A 'bellicose forum'

The understanding that some countries are more responsible than others for climate change has been part of the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change (UNFCCC) since the start. 

That framework, enacted in 1994, includes a list of rich, industrialized countries — the United Kingdom, Japan, the U.S. and Canada among them. These "Annex I" countries are supposed to be doing more, "taking into account their common but differentiated responsibilities," according to the document.

"They accepted they were the bigger polluters," said Huq, who advises the caucus of least-developed countries at COP negotiations.

"The practice of that is where it became problematic."

The framework didn't include rules for making it happen, so for the UNFCCC's decision-making body — COP — to make any decisions, all 197 countries involved have to agree.

"You need unanimity. And of course, this is a recipe for the lowest common denominator," said Guy Saint-Jacques, a longtime former diplomat and Canada's chief negotiator and ambassador for climate change from 2010 to 2012.



With no formula to determine fairness, splitting the responsibility pie has been a key sticking point since the first COP in 1995.

"That really is one of the challenges," said Simon Donner, a climate scientist and professor of geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a member of Canada's net-zero advisory body.

"There's legitimate disagreement on what the most fair system would be because there's so many different things to take into account."

One approach would be laying the burden on developed countries, which have both produced and benefited from historical emissions — let the rich early diners start paying the bill.

The Kyoto Protocol tried that, requiring major industrialized countries to meet emissions targets, but not developing countries like China, India or Brazil. The U.S. never ratified it, and Canada committed but then withdrew in 2011 under the Conservatives, arguing "all major emitters" weren't included.

"I concluded from my involvement in the negotiations … that this has become a bellicose forum where it will never be possible to achieve a meaningful agreement," said Saint-Jacques.

The U.S. never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which was part of its downfall. Twenty years ago, American students showed their support for U.S. President George W. Bush against the agreement as delegates negotiated how to implement it in Bonn, Germany, on July 18, 2001. (Reuters)

The Paris breakthrough — and problem

The Paris Agreement aimed to learn from that failure.

"One of the many breakthroughs of the Paris climate agreement," said Donner, "was the idea that every country submits its own voluntary contribution and sets its own emissions target," known as a nationally determined contribution or NDC.

"The hope was that this would shame countries into setting more stringent targets."

From left to right: Laurence Tubiana, France's special representative for COP21; UN climate chief Christiana Figueres; UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon; French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius; and French President François Hollande react during the final plenary session at the world climate change conference in Paris in 2015. (Kiara Worth/Earth Negotiations Bulletin IISD)

While this got buy-in — including from China and India — it's a little like everyone at the group dinner chipping in what they think they owe. You're likely to come up short, and that's what's happened — so far.

The Paris Agreement's goal is to limit warming to 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels, but the countries' NDCs to date put the planet on track for 2.7 — what the UN calls a "catastrophic" path.

A key part of COP26 — along with securing promised-but-not-delivered funding from wealthy countries to help poorer ones adapt — is pressuring countries to ratchet up those plans.

"That's really what Glasgow is going to be about," said Huq. "We have to do a hell of a lot more."

WATCH | Officials temper expectations ahead of COP26 :

What On Earth38:07Trust, fairness, and a $100B broken promise
Wealthy nations have failed to meet a $100 billion pledge to help developing countries tackle climate change. This week, a look at why trust is the 'most relevant currency of climate negotiations' and what can be done to restore it. 38:07

Eye of the beholder

Despite all the attention on the marathon negotiations to come in Glasgow, the true pressure is arguably what leaders receive at home — whether the public is demanding climate action and willing to pay for it.

A 2017 study tried to gauge how people perceive fairness, using an ultimatum game played online with real, albeit small, stakes.

Each participant, crowd-sourced using Amazon Mechanical Turk, was assigned some level of responsibility for climate risk and an amount of in-game currency. They met up with another random player, with one proposing a plan to pay for climate change mitigation and the other responding.

If they came to an agreement on who pays what, they'd avert disaster — and get a real cash payout on the order of a few dollars. If not, they'd risk a climate catastrophe that would wipe out wealth.

A screenshot of the experimental ultimatum game in a 2017 study published in Climatic Change. Players, assigned differing financial means (experimental currency units, or ECU) and responsibility for climate risk, were paired to come to an agreement — or not — on mitigating climate change. (Anderson et. al 2017)

The study, published in the journal Climatic Change, found players remarked a lot about what felt "fair," but with a closer eye on the other player's record.

"The proposer paid a lot of attention to what the responder had done ... how much they had emitted and how much sort of fictionalized capacity they had in terms of money," said lead author Brilé Anderson, now an environmental economist with the OECD in Paris.

"We definitely tend to downplay our own role. At least that's what the experiment suggested."

What now?

Despite our human failings and the checkered history of COP negotiations, many observers still feel optimism about current attempts to tackle what Donner calls "the biggest collective action problem in world history."

He'll be watching for solutions that come alongside or after the framework that Glasgow sets, including alliances to cut coal use and efforts in the financial sector led by UN special envoy on climate action and finance, Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England.

Saint-Jacques, who has lost faith in the UNFCCC process, sees potential in an idea that's been called a "climate club" of large emitters together enacting their own policies, including carbon tariffs on trade.

Students hold a Fridays for Future climate strike while environment ministers meet ahead of Glasgow's COP26 meeting in Milan, Italy, on Oct. 1. (Flavio Lo Scalzo/Reuters)

While Huq notes the fate of COP26 lies mostly in the hands of the biggest polluters — especially the leadership of the U.S. and China — he's buoyed by the public pressure to act led by youth climate activists. Anderson agrees.  

"I feel more optimistic now than I did," she said.

"OK, this generation is not going to stand for the same mistakes that the rest of us might have been sort of complacent in accepting."

Ahead of the COP26 climate change summit in Scotland, some officials, including U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. climate representative John Kerry, are tempering expectations about what will be achieved because of disagreements about what to do and how quickly. 2:10
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Green wave presenting major opportunities and risks for Canadian businesses

Brian Banks
Contributor

Friday, October 29th 2021, 9:00 am - Experts from the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices say many companies in Canada will see both wins and challenges as the world moves towards a low-carbon future.

Next month, the small city of Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, 75 kilometres west of Winnipeg, will celebrate the grand opening of the largest pea protein plant on Earth.

Roquette Canada, a division of the French food giant Roquette, built the 200,000-square-foot plant at a cost of $600 million, to capitalize on skyrocketing North American demand for alternative proteins.

That demand is surging, in part, because production of plant proteins — key ingredients in an array of products, including high-profile foods like Beyond Meat — typically emits much less carbon than animal sources.

While the plant’s 120 permanent full-time jobs are an obvious boon for the city of 14,000 and surrounding communities, investments like Roquette’s are needed in all parts of Canada — in all kinds of different sectors — if this country is to prosper and successfully transition in a world economy moving rapidly towards a low-carbon future.

That’s the key message in a just-released, first-of-its-kind report, called “Sink or Swim,” prepared by a multidisciplinary team of experts for the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices.

It’s also especially timely, coming just days before the start of the COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference, where Canada and other countries will reaffirm accelerated 2030 emissions reductions targets to help meet the goal of reaching global net zero carbon by 2050.

“The green wave is coming fast. Big changes in global markets bring big opportunities, but also big risks,” the report states.

 
Sunset over biogas capture wells in an open meadow section of Frederic-Back Park, Quebec. (Alain Beauchesne/ iStock/ Getty Images Plus)

THE WORLD IS MOVING

Rachel Samson, one of the report’s lead authors, emphasized in an interview with The Weather Network that while the science on climate change is strong and clear, this is about recognizing the reality of an economic transition, first and foremost.

“The rest of the world is moving on this,” said Samson. “Investors are taking action to reduce emissions. Policies are changing. Technological costs are coming down. Within that context, Canada really needs to act in order to maintain its competitive position in the world.”

The report’s aim wasn’t to identify low-emissions sectors and activities — for the most part, those are known. Instead, researchers wanted to find out how well or poorly Canadian companies in different sectors are positioned to succeed in the low-carbon transition and to use those findings to guide investment and policy decisions.

What they found was concerning.

“Canada is not ready,” the report states. “Big investments are not happening at the scale needed. Businesses are vulnerable to sudden changes in global markets or investor sentiment. Promising companies that could drive future growth struggle to attract financing. And there are limited plans to protect and empower workers and communities most affected by change.”

COMPANY STRESS TESTS

Different sectors require different strategies and solutions. To help get a clearer picture, researchers ran “stress tests” on all publicly traded Canadian companies under future carbon-cutting policy scenarios, then grouped them into three categories — demand creation, carbon costs, and demand decline — according to which of those “drivers” most affected their profit.

The first category includes companies in sectors like electric batteries and energy storage, which primarily need to create more demand to succeed. The second, which includes companies in mining and heavy manufacturing, saw profits cut by rising carbon costs; to succeed, they need to reduce emissions. The third, which includes oil, gas, and coal companies, face declining demand and must shift into new business lines.

In a real highlight, authors were then able to use these results to identify specific companies and communities at greatest risk across the country.

“It’s the first Canadian report that does this, so I think it’s very, very important,” Lisa DeMarco, a senior partner and CEO of Resilient LLP, a Toronto law firm specializing in climate and clean energy, told The Weather Network.

Most striking about those results? No province or territory is exempt. And so, while those heavily reliant on oil and gas have the highest proportion of workers in transition-vulnerable sectors (Alberta is first at 9.1 per cent), a province like Ontario, with more workers and a big reliance on the transportation sector, also has many thousands of workers exposed (5 per cent).

“For workers, the stakes are particularly high in terms of what businesses and governments do to manage the transition,” Samson added.

GETTING IT RIGHT

Samson emphasizes that there are also areas where Canada is getting it right, particularly in sectors where the transition opportunities are strong. She points to General Motors of Canada’s $1 billion investment in its plant in Ingersoll to start making electric vans there in 2022.

Likewise, international miner Vale has invested $150 million to extend the life of a nickel mine in Manitoba in response to demand from makers of electric vehicle batteries. And in Quebec, aluminum manufacturers Alcoa and Rio Tinto have struck a partnership called Elysis, which recently began making low-carbon aluminum, using a technology that eliminates all direct GHG emissions from the smelting process.

The problem, Samson said, is there aren’t more examples like this. “Our analysis shows it’s clearly not [enough] yet.”

The report emphasizes that the onus is on businesses and private sector capital to make the critical investments — much like Roquette Canada’s example in Portage la Prairie. But it also details how supportive government policy, mandated climate-related disclosure rules for public companies, and targeted, strategic investments are key.

“Government has a role to play in mobilizing that investment and channeling it in the directions needed for Canada’s success,” Samson said.

That not only means doing more, but doing it quickly — which would also align with the federal government’s updated goal to cut Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40‑45 per cent by 2030.

“There’s a reason we called the report ‘Sink or Swim,’ because it really depends on the choices that businesses and governments make over the coming decade,” Samson said. “If they take the actions that we recommend, if they make the investments that are needed, then it will be very positive for Canada, with new sources of economic growth, and new sources of jobs.”

Thumbnail credit: Maryna Terletska/ Moment/ Getty Images
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The environmental impact of rocket launches: The 'dirty' and the 'green'

If the environment was your priority, which rocket would you choose?

By Tereza Pultarova 
SPACE.COM
Europe's Ariane 5 uses solid rocket boosters to get off the ground. 
(Image credit: Arianespace)

When it comes to their environmental impacts, not all rocket fuels are equal. Which are the industry's 'dirty secrets' and which technologies might satisfy even Greta Thunberg?

Here's a look at commonly used rocket propellants and their impact on the environment. The research is limited and experts caution that not enough data has been gathered to precisely assess the impacts of various types of rocket propellants and rocket engines on the climate and the environment. So keep that in mind in our rocket fuel analysis below.

UDMH: "Devil's venom" poisons the soil for decades

The good thing about UDMH, short for Unsymmetrical Dimethylhydrazine, is that in the west it's only used in those parts of space systems that don't come in contact with Earth. This fuel, dubbed Devil's venom by Soviet scientists, is responsible for turning a vast area of a Kazakh steppe into an ecological disaster zone, according to a report by the United Nations Development Program cited in a comprehensive review of the environmental impacts of space launches published in the Journal of Cleaner Production last year.

Highly carcinogenic for humans, UDMH spills from first and second stages of Russia's popular Proton rockets as they fall from the altitude of 25 and 60 miles (40 and 100 kilometers) respectively. Since 1965, Proton has successfully launched hundreds of government and commercial satellites. As a side effect, it soaked the Kazakh soil in poison. Very little has been published about the environmental impacts, but scientists believe that UDMH and the byproducts of its transformation can stay in the soil for decades, the review stated.

UDMH also powers the first four generations of China's Long March rockets (generations 2 to 4 are still being used).

"In Western countries, this kind of propellant is only used for satellite propulsion and for the very upper stages where it doesn't come in contact with the atmosphere," Filippo Maggi, associate professor of aerospace engineering at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, who studies rocket propulsion technologies, told Space.com. "There are advantages to UDMH. It doesn't need a source of ignition, you can store it in ambient temperature and it provides a lot of energy."

Still, Maggi added, researchers are looking for possible replacements for the toxic UDMH even in those less risky technologies.

Russia said in 2018 that it would discontinue the production of Proton and replace the launcher with a new rocket called Angara, which uses Rocket Propellent 1 (RP-1), a refined version of aviation fuel kerosene.

Solid Rocket Motors: Particle factories that produce acid rains, ozone holes

Solid rocket motors (SRMs) help many heavy-lift rockets off the ground. Most well known are possibly the solid rocket boosters of NASA's space shuttles, which burned a mixture of aluminum and ammonia, and were not exactly an environmental win.

Some rather strange occurrences were reported after space shuttle launches. The massive cloud generated during liftoff contained rather reactive chemicals such as hydrochloric acid and aluminum oxide. These substances got mixed up with water from the deluge system that cooled down the launch pad and the rocket. This cloud then spread in the surrounding environment, affecting soil and water quality, and damaging vegetation, according to the review.

After several space shuttle launches, large amounts of dead fish were found in nearby water bodies, a study cited in the review reported. Scientists then experimented with open, closed and partially closed buckets with water that were left near the launch site during liftoff. They found that as stuff from the space shuttle cloud rained into the buckets, the water inside turned into a mild acid. Fortunately, in nature, the water PH quickly returned to normal (although not quickly enough for the dead fish).

In the 1990s, scientists flew high-altitude planes through the space shuttle exhaust plumes. They wanted to know what the chlorine from the exhaust did to the ozone layer. They indeed found local ozone holes in the rocket's wake, David Fahey, the director of the Chemical Sciences Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who led the research, told Space.com in an earlier interview. But the holes healed quickly after each launch and were not large enough to affect the ozone layer globally. At least not at the frequency of launches at that time.

But there are still other components of the SRM exhaust that scientists still don't fully understand and are concerned about. The aluminum oxide from the exhaust forms particles that might reflect sunlight and thus change how much heat reaches Earth's surface. These particles get injected into the otherwise pristine upper layers of Earth's atmosphere, the stratosphere and the mesosphere, and potentially trigger temperature changes.

Martin Ross, of the U.S. Aerospace Corporation, a leading expert on atmospheric effects of rocket launches, who was part of the ozone-measuring campaign in the 1990s, told Space.com that the team did measure aluminum oxide particles at that time but did not focus on how much they scatter or absorb light. At that time, the scientists were interested in the particles' contribution to ozone depletion.

"We need to understand on the science side what these particle components do," Ross said. "How do they change the temperature of the stratosphere? But we also need to understand what exactly is being emitted, how much of it is being emitted. Right now we don't know. We are more or less guessing, based on general principles of rocket engine combustion."

The space shuttle may long be retired but SRMs are still in use, helping off the ground Europe's Ariane 5 as well as the upcoming Ariane 6 rocket, which are using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as their main fuel. NASA will use longer versions of these polluting boosters to help propel its new Space Launch System megarocket for the upcoming Artemis moon missions.





Hybrid rocket engines, such as those used by Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, produce a lot of soot (Image credit: Virgin Galactic)

Hybrid rocket engines: the not so clean newcomer

Hybrid rocket engines burn solid fuel with liquid or gaseous oxidizer. Most famously, this technology is used by Virgin Galactic in their suborbital SpaceShipTwo space planes, which take tourists for short flights to the edge of space and back.

These engines are relatively simple and safe to operate, but scientists are not impressed with their environmental side effects.

"Hybrid engines can use different types of fuels, but they always generate a lot of soot," said Maggi. "These engines work like a candle, and their burning process creates conditions that are favorable for soot generation."

Soot particles, or black carbon, just like particles of aluminum oxide, can affect how the atmosphere absorbs heat. Just like the aluminum oxide, the soot particles get injected into the higher layers of the atmosphere where they might remain forever. And as their concentrations gradually increase over decades, their effect might set in rather stealthily.

According to Maggi, the soot particles generated by hybrid rocket engines are extremely small and light-weight. In fact, when he and his colleagues tried to measure the soot output of hybrid rocket engines in a laboratory, they couldn't reliably do it with precision because of the particles' minuscule size.

"We were able to measure the particle output from solid rocket motors," Maggi said. "These are about a micron in size, and there [are] a lot of them. But because they are large, they fall to the ground more quickly. In hybrid rocket engines, we were not able to collect the soot from the plume because it's extremely fine, a few nanometers in size."

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket burns RP-1, which is similar to aviation fuel kerosene. This fuel tends to produce a lot of soot particles when it burns.
(Image credit: SpaceX via Twitter)


Kerosene: Reliable, but sooty

Rocket Propellant 1 (RP-1) is a popular type of rocket fuel similar to aviation fuel kerosene. Stable at room temperature and not too explosive, kerosene provides enough energy to lift rockets off the ground even without the help of additional solid rocket boosters.

RP-1 powered the first stages of NASA's famous Apollo-era Saturn V. Today, it propels SpaceX's Falcon 9.

Just like hybrid rocket engines, RP-1 fueled rockets produce soot. Martin Ross cautioned that the amount of pollution released might not depend just on the fuel but also the construction of the engine itself. To say which rockets are dirtier than others is therefore currently impossible.


"Even for the same propellant, rocket engines with a different combustion cycle will have different amounts of black carbon emissions," Ross said.


RP-1 fueled engines also produce carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas responsible for human-induced climate change. Scientists are, however, currently not concerned about the effects of the carbon dioxide emitted by rockets. That's simply because all other sources of greenhouse gases dwarf the overall contribution of global spaceflight.

According to Martin Ross, the amount of fossil fuels burnt by the space industry is only about 1% of that burned by aviation.

Smaller rockets, such as Blue Origin's Blue Shepard, can run entirely on the clean liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.
 (Image credit: Blue Origin)

Liquid oxygen/Liquid hydrogen: Green but weak fuel that can't do it on its own

From the perspective of the environment, it can hardly get better than liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen (LOx/LH2). This fuel's exhaust is almost entirely made of water vapour, the effects of which in the atmosphere have been extensively studied. The impacts? Zero, Martin Ross said. Even Greta would approve.

While LOx/LH2 is rather explosive, this problem can be solved with careful handling. It also has low energy density — to lift a rocket off the ground using just LOx/LH2 would require enormous tanks. That's why large rockets such as ESA's Ariane 5 and 6 and NASA's SLS have additional solid boosters to overcome the initial pull of Earth's gravity. Smaller rockets, such as Blue Origin's suborbital New Shepard, can run just on LOx/LH2.

The space shuttle's three main RS-25 engines used to run on LOx/LH2, which was supplied from a giant external tank that was dropped when empty and disintegrated in the atmosphere.

"Water vapor emissions, that's the one area of rocket emissions that is very well known," Ross said. "We have done modelling studies in 2017 that looked at the water vapor emissions at all the different altitudes as the launch vehicle goes up through the atmosphere. We found that the net effect is very very small."

The small effect, however, might be noticeable to observers on the ground. Space shuttle launches frequently triggered formation of spectacular mesospheric clouds. These clouds that can occasionally form in the mesosphere, the otherwise dry layer of the atmosphere at 31 to 53 miles (50 to 85 kilometers) of altitude, glow at night as the sun, already hidden below the observer's horizon, still illuminates them.





SpaceX's megarocket Starship burns methane, which is efficient and clean. 
(Image credit: SpaceX)

Methane: A promising fuel that can leak on the ground

Methane-based rocket propellant is an upcoming technology that might in the future help the spaceflight industry to wean itself off the more polluting SRMs, Maggi said. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. But it burns more cleanly than RP-1 and provides more energy than LOx/LH2, according to Maggi.

"Methane might soon replace hydrogen in launchers," said Maggi. "Liquid methane and liquid hydrogen can provide high thrust in a launcher that is still relatively compact."
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Despite being a very potent greenhouse gas, methane as a rocket fuel also seems to be quite environmentally friendly because of its burning efficiency.

"If you produce a good propulsion unit, the efficiency of that unit can be as high as 99.5%," said Maggi. "That means that the residues of methane would be basically zero. You might have some carbon monoxide released instead of carbon dioxide. But that would be very little."

Ross added that methane engines, theoretically, should produce less soot than kerosene.

"That's an expectation, again, based on general principles," Ross said. "We do need to actually get up there and measure the emission indexes as the rocket flies to have a complete understanding of all these problems."

Some studies, however, point out that methane, frequently transported in the form of gas, might leak into the atmosphere from gas pipes. 80 times more warming than carbon dioxide, the leaked gas then accelerates the climate change.

SpaceX's superheavy rocket Starship burns liquid methane in its Raptor engines and so does an experimental engine called Prometheus, which is currently being developed by the European Space Agency.

Biofuels: A little explored dark horse

Several rocket start-ups are experimenting with sustainable alternatives to RP-1 made from waste products or biomass. All of these technologies are in their early stages and so far, we only have the word of the proponents to gauge the merits.

U.K. company Orbex that builds a 3D-printed micro-launcher Prime that runs on biopropane recently commissioned a study that found that the technology might produce 86% less emissions compared to a similar-sized RP-1 fuelled rocket. Most of these reductions come from the negative carbon footprint of the fuel production rather than by the rocket emitting considerably less. Interestingly enough, the study concluded that the biopropane-fueled Prime should produce much less soot than rockets burning RP-1. Soot particles, unlike carbon dioxide emissions, do worry scientists because of their possible effects on the temperature of the higher layers of the atmosphere.

Another U.K. rocket startup, Skyrora, experiments with an alternative to RP-1 called Ecosene, made from non-recyclable plastics. The company, too, says that burning this fuel would produce less emissions, up to 40%, including carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, soot and sulfur.

In February this year, American start-up bluShift Aerospace flew its first stage rocket prototype Stardust 1.0, which uses proprietary solid biofuel made from agricultural waste. The test rocket reached less than one mile in altitude.

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Big oil says up to governments at climate talks to rein in demand

Published OCTOBER 29, 2021

FILE PHOTO: Dust blows around a crude oil pump jack and flare burning excess gas at a drill pad in the Permian Basin in Loving County. Photo: Reuters

LONDON - Leaders of Europe's biggest oil and gas companies said political leaders attending U.N. climate talks that start this week must make carbon markets more effective and that only governments can effectively curb fossil fuel demand.

Oil majors will be among the big companies conspicuous by their absence at the COP26 meeting that begins in Glasgow, Scotland, on Sunday to attempt to agree ways to limit the planet's warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

Ben van Beurden, the chief executive of the world's biggest fuel retailer Royal Dutch Shell, told reporters this week that, as oil and gas companies, "we were told that we were not welcome" at COP26.

European oil majors have set much more ambitious emissions cutting targets than their U.S. rivals, but they also have to fend off accusations that, over decades, they hid the role that their products played in heating the planet.

They have long supported carbon pricing as a business-friendly way to engineer a transition to a cleaner economy, but agreement on the role of carbon markets has proved a major sticking point at climate talks.

"This carbon credits market is currently unorganised, unregulated and therefore dangerous," TotalEnergies Chief Patrick Pouyanne said this week, but he reiterated his support in principle.

"Our positions are well known, we are in favour of carbon pricing," he said.

Shell's van Beurden in a LinkedIn post on Friday, echoing previous comments by BP Chief Executive Bernard Looney, said oil companies alone could not control demand for fossil fuels.

"Let’s say Shell switched the products we sell overnight. Instead of petrol and diesel, motorists at our service stations could only get hydrogen, or recharge their electric cars. It wouldn’t make people buy a hydrogen or battery electric car. They would simply drive down the road and fill up at one of our competitors," van Beurden said.

"So governments will have to play an essential role in helping to shape demand, using mandates where needed, creating the right climate for investment, and helping steer society towards low-carbon and renewable energy." 

REUTERS

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