The Tipping Point: Issue 8
by Jess Spear
The Tipping Point is a regular column on recent climate and biodiversity news.
Wildfires & methane
“I wanted to be eaten by a dinosaur, Jurassic era, and in those days it wasn’t that hard— photons banged me, my four exposed connector electrons were all quivering tetravalently, hoping for a pick-up, and as it so often happens, I got interest from two suitors at the same time! and wham bang, I had been stuck simultaneously to two oxygen atoms, and I was in a marriage very convenient indeed, as carbon dioxide.”[1]
The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
When it comes to carbon emissions and climate change discussions, CO2 gets all the attention. That’s because, molecule for molecule, of all the greenhouse gases, it’s contributed the most to global warming. Essentially, it’s trapping the most heat. But this isn’t because it’s the best at trapping heat. If CO2 is a light jumper on a 20-degree day, making you a tad uncomfortable, methane is a winter parka. It has about 30 times more capacity to block heat from escaping to space than CO2. And yet, the CO2 jumper lasts a really, really long time. It’s like a hand-knitted one from the Aran islands, whereas the methane winter parka is coming apart at the seams about a week after you put it on. So, the heat-trapping potential of greenhouse gases is based not just on how much heat it can trap, but also its “lifespan”. CO2 is slow and steady, hanging about and trapping heat for around 300 to 1,000 years, whereas methane sprints out the gate and absorbs loads of solar radiation before breaking down after about nine to twelve years. It doesn’t break down to nothing, mind you. It becomes CO2.
Another factor is the sheer amount of CO2 versus other greenhouse gases. Just consider the volume units for CO2 versus methane. CO2 is measured in parts per million (ppm). Today the CO2 concentration is 417 ppm. So for every one million molecules of air, 417 of them are CO2. Methane, on the other hand, is measured in parts per billion (ppb). Because CO2 dominates, we’re all less familiar with the amount of methane in the atmosphere and how it’s increased over the last 250 years. Pre-industrial methane levels were around 700 ppb. Currently, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere is 1900 ppb, or to put it another way, we’ve almost tripled the number of methane winter parkas.
Article originally published in Issue 8 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
In Ireland, methane emissions have been a big part of the debate around sectoral emission ceilings because 1) agriculture is our biggest emitting sector and 2) our agriculture is dominated by methane burping cows and sheep. In fact, nearly 70% of agricultural emissions are in the form of methane.[2] Rapidly transitioning away from beef, dairy, and sheep and towards regenerative farming, with full supports for small farmers, is vital to meeting our climate targets, which already are too low and too late.[3] Delaying any further only adds more methane to the atmosphere, trapping more heat, causing more extreme weather events, and pushing us closer to the cliff edge.
To make matters worse, a new study[4] found that methane concentrations have been increasing more than expected over the last two years. When they investigated possible causes, they found that methane is essentially living longer than normal. This is because methane’s “lifespan” is largely dependent on the concentration of hydroxyl free radicals, which are highly reactive[5] molecules comprised of one oxygen bonded to a hydrogen, OH. They “scrub” methane from the atmosphere by combining with it and eventually creating CO2. But hydroxyl doesn’t just react with methane; it also combines with other gases, in particular carbon monoxide (CO). And, carbon monoxide concentrations have risen over the last two years from increased incidences of forest fires.
So to recap: increased temperatures from burning fossil fuels has increased forest fires which leads to more carbon monoxide, which uses up hydroxyl free radicals, increasing the lifespan of the second most important greenhouse gas, methane, which then leads to more warming and increased temperatures…Capitalism has effectively unlocked a new positive feedback loop.
Even the rain
"I'm not saying that we're all going to die of these effects. But we're in a place now where you can't live anywhere on the planet, and be sure that the environment is safe."[6]
In 1999, under threat from the World Bank, the Bolivian government attempted to privatise water in its third-largest city, Cochabamba. It sold the rights to water to Aguas del Tunari, a subsidiary of the US company Bechtel, and passed new legislation effectively giving them the right to eventually appropriate communal wells and water systems built by local cooperatives. Under the new law, even the rain could be privatised, with residents required to obtain a permit to collect it.
Months of mass protests and a four-day general strike eventually forced the Bolivian government to withdraw from the contract and repeal the legislation allowing water privatisation. We too had our battle over water privatisation, most recently in 2014-2016 and before that, in 1997. We were told that “private companies will invest in the necessary infrastructure” or “charging for water will lead to conservation”. Nevermind the evidence just across the Irish Sea showing that 30 years of privatisation had not led to the necessary infrastructure improvements. Investment in pipes, sewage systems and the like has actually fallen.[7] Instead, billions in collected fees have been paid to shareholders and companies have been illegally dumping raw sewage.[8]
In Bolivia and Ireland, people could clearly see that private investment would restrict access to a basic human necessity and, therefore, should be opposed by any means necessary. But what do we do when the water has been poisoned before it even reaches our shores?
Not content to pollute our lakes, rivers, and streams, chemical companies have now succeeded in poisoning the rain. Yes, you read that right. The rain is poisoned. There is nowhere on Earth one could collect rainwater, whether privatised or held in commons, and not get a mouthful of plastics. Not even in Antarctica.
A recent study[9] looked at the levels of what are known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) in rainwater, soil, and surface water. PFAS are manufactured - meaning they do not occur naturally - and are known as “forever chemicals” because they were deliberately made to be quite durable and resistant to water, oil, and heat. They are used in all kinds of products, from your stain-resistant carpet and sofas to shampoos, water-resistant clothing and microwave popcorn bags.[10] Their persistence in the environment allows the “chemicals to spread out over large distances, [cause] long-term, even life-long exposure, and [lead] to higher and higher levels in the environment as long as emissions continue.”[11]
One of the scariest aspects of this study is that there is no known method for removing PFAS from our environment. Even if they all washed into the ocean, they can be transported back to land via sea spray aerosols. In other words, they can be thrown back up into the air and transported virtually anywhere through the rain. Further, the authors note that the guidelines they used to determine whether their samples were contaminated are continually revised downwards. That means things could actually be worse than we realise simply because we don’t yet know enough about how PFAS impact our bodies, nor the millions of other species with which we share this planet.
Endnotes
1. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (London, 2020), ch. 66.
2. ‘Methane’, Teagasc, https://www.teagasc.ie/environment/climate-change--air-quality/methane/
3. Des Hennelly, ‘Plan to fail - the government’s climate action plan’, Rupture, no. 7 (Spring 2022), pp. 52-59.
4. Chin-Hsien Cheng & Simon A. T. Redfern, ‘Impact of interannual and multidecadal trends on
methane-climate feedbacks and sensitivity’, Nature Climate Communications, (2022) 13:3592 | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31345-w.
5. If you remember your chemistry, a free radical is highly reactive because it has an unpaired electron.
6. Matt McGrath, ‘Pollution: “Forever chemicals in water exceed safe levels’, BBC, 2 August 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62391069
7. Gill Plimmer and Elle Hollowood, ‘England’s water groups slashed investment in sewage network in recent decades’, Financial Times, 22 December 2021, https://www.ft.com/content/86ac79f2-1169-4c2e-b28c-b18ff74aac10
8. Tim Adams, ‘Swimming in sewage: how can we stop UK water firms dumping human waste into our rivers and seas?’, The Guardian, 14 November 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/14/swimming-in-sewage-how-can-we-stop-uk-water-firms-dumping-human-waste-in-our-rivers-and-seas
9. Ian T. Cousins, Jana H. Johansson, Matthew E. Salter, Bo Sha, and Martin Scheringer, ’Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS)’, Environ. Sci. Technol. 2022, 56, 16, 11172–11179.
10. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, ‘Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) and Your Health’, https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/pfas/health-effects/exposure.html
11. Ian T. Cousins*, Jana H. Johansson, Matthew E. Salter, Bo Sha, and Martin Scheringer, ‘Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS)’, Environ. Sci. Technol. 2022, 56, 16, 11172–11179.