PROGRESS REPORT ON THE PARIS CLIMATE
AGREEMENT PART 15
2022 APRIL ISSUE
By Andrew Sia
In this report we wrote about peatlands that can be used to store carbon emissions which we only come to know recently. The deforestation in Brazil has been used in businesses, and one of them is cattle raising, and from the cattle raising it derived leather. Leather has been used extensively in fashion and it is only recently that Leather Exchange has tried to track it processes under to become more sustainable.
We leave the writeups about nuclear waste and the wind power for you to explore.
Everything We Need to Know About Peatlands
Peatlands make up about 3% of land on Earth. They come in different forms—from wetlands’ bogs and fens, to tropical peat swamp forests.
Although they take up only 3% of the land on Earth, they store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined. It is the world’s best carbon sinks.
Peatlands are composed of sphagnum moss that were trapped in ground and could not decompose, and layer after layer pressing those beneath into a thick, and muddy mass called peat. They have been in existence for millions of years and because they are so soggy that even the dead shrubs can’t be fully decomposed. It is not just the plants but other animal bodies for instance that were trapped and prevented from being decayed.
For thousands of years people wandered on Earth and unable to find the benefit of peatlands. It was until recently we found out that they are one of the most effective carbon storage facilities on Earth. Over the years a mossy landscape lived and died, but it did not decay. Unlike the dead plants that died and sent the carbon back into the atmosphere.
We have already drained 15% of the world’s peatlands for our land uses. But this is dangerous as we are spewing the carbon that we trapped inside the peatlands and releasing it back to the atmosphere. It is already known that the drained peatlands emit about a dizzying two billion tons of trapped carbon back in the atmosphere every year.
We have to know about this and not to forget that peatlands are the best carbon sinks. They are surprisingly resilient, and can be revived to store carbon again.
In the meantime, new peatlands continued to be discovered. We have found in Peru a swamp forest, in Congo Basin a tropical peat swamp larger than England, and forest fens in the Rocky Mountains that have been around since the Ice Age.
It is best for us to leave the peatlands alone and let them play the nature’s champion against climate change. We know that planting forests with spawning plans to plant a million trees, even a billion trees, but to leave the nature alone where it can take care of itself if we can stop to damage our nature.
Deforestation in Amazon Rainforests
Since Jair Bolsonaro became the president of Brazil, he vowed to develop the business in Amazon rainforests instead of protecting it. At this time, the country has lost a forest area bigger than Belgium since he took over office in 2019.
We are going to point out something that has never been discussed before, that is raising the cattle to use the land cleared from the forest. Brazil is known for the meat industry, but the “byproduct”, the hide is a business of $1.1 billion for the Brazilian slaughterhouses for last year, is more of a “co-product” to be exact.
Actually leather is used extensively in fashion industry. According to UN Comtrade, a trade statistic database, Brazil was accounted for 19% of tanned leather export globally for 2020. China was accounted for 41% and Italy was for 36%. The three of them cornered the world. The leather processing companies are serving companies like LVMH, Zara, H&M, VF Corporation, Nike, Prada, Adidas, Tapestry, Coach, Vans and Timberland.
This has caught the attention of the activists and conservation-focused non-profit organization Stand.Earth and its research arm, Stand Research Group (SRG) who used customs data to illustrate how leather came out from the deforested Amazon and made the connections.
Leather is often treated as a commodity, and sorted by the processors by the quality of the hide rather than the country of origin, it is difficult for brands to know its full story. Not to mention that the tannery is one of the most polluted industry and the harm that it can do to the Earth. The Leather Working Group (L.W.G.) was founded by companies like Nike, Adidas and Timberland, are focused on certifying tanneries based on their environmental responsibility practices.
There is also the Responsible Leather Roundtable under the Textile Exchange is focusing on materials to use that would have a lower impact to the environment.
We must admit that the fashion supply chains are too extensive to keep track. Farming, slaughtering and tanning can happen in different countries. Selecting the grades of the leather and use it for different applications, not counting where to assemble, is sometimes very difficult to enforce the corrective action. Not to mention that leather can also be used in the upholstery for the furniture, home and office furnishing and not to forget the leather in luxury cars.
Wind Farm Development in the United States
Lately, Biden administration successfully auctioned the lease sales of 488,000 acres for offshore wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean between Cape May, NJ and Montauk Point, NY. It netted a record $4.37 billion for six offshore leases for the wind farm.
When turbines are built, they are expected to generate up to 7,000 megawatts, which is enough to power two million homes. It is a positive sign to see that there is the enthusiasm of developing the clean energy economy. This is to tackle the climate crisis and it is encouraging for the government to see that the leases were sold at $10,700 per acre, which previously was only at $1,000 per acre.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an arm of the Interior Department oversees offshore activities and designed the New York Bight a priority offshore area in March 2021. The bureau has plan to review 16 plans to construct and operate commercial offshore wind facilities by 2025 that would represent more than 22 gigawatts of clean energy.
Dilemma of Nuclear Waste
The war staged by Russia inside Ukraine and the taking over of Chernobyl has caught the world’s attention. We don’t know the military intention behind but its accident in 1986 has led many governments from across the world to move away from this technology. In 2012, the Fukushima nuclear disaster caused by the tsunami has caused panic across the world once again for the nuclear power. Germany announced that it would close all its nuclear plants by 2022 and Belgium said the same by 2025.
However, the world has a renewal plan because of the moving away from fossil fuels to clean energy has becoming more desperate. The governments of the U.S., China and India have all recently come out with the intention of building new nuclear plants in the coming future.
Rystad Energy is an independent energy research and business analysis company for oil and gas industry with its headquarters in Oslo, Norway has said that the investments in nuclear are expected to be $45 billion in 2022. It was $44 billion in 2021 and $46 billion planned for 2023. There is an uptrend in the investments with 52 reactors at present under construction in 19 countries worldwide.
The appeal of nuclear power is its consistence, unlike the other energy sources such as the wind and solar power. The European Commission recently included nuclear power under the “green taxonomy” for its sustainable finance.
But at the moment there is challenge for the nuclear reactors to come off from their service as they have reached their 50-year lifespan. This would involve huge costs and complexity of dismantling the plants but there is no satisfactory solution for the disposal of thousands of tons of high-level nuclear waste. We have to know that they can remain radioactive for up to 300,000 years.
There are a quarter-million tons of spent fuel rods that are believed to be spread across 14 countries worldwide. They are mostly collected in cooling pools inside the closed-down nuclear plants. The maintenance cost for these sites can be extraordinary as take for instance Sellafield in the U.K. which was closed in 2003 but it remains the biggest employer where more than 10,000 employees continue to undertake a colossally expensive clean-up that would expect to continue for more than 100 years and cost above £90 billion.
Chooz A reactor in France where its facility was shut in 1991. Within three years the most highly radioactive materials had been evacuated to La Hague in the north-west of France. The French way of handling is different to the rest of the world, the most highly radioactive elements of a plant, its fuel and rods, should be removed immediately. Some of these products have since been recycled which is a new process pioneered by France and many of the uranium, plutonium and fission chemicals have been reprocessed into new fuel . The wasted chemicals cannot be reused have been vitrified for short-term storage in shallow sites underground. The 23,000 tons of spent fuel repossessed a La Hague are enough to power for 14 more years, but the repossessed fuel can only be reused once. It will bring more radioactive waste and there is no long-term solution yet.
The dismantle of the rest of Chooz A began in 2007 which will last until 2024 at a total cost of €500 million. But the most hazardous waste removed from the site will remain radioactive for centuries and perhaps millennia to come.
Ideas have been explored, such as ejecting such waste into space or burying it deep under seabed, all are deemed to be either impossible or too dangerous.
Perhaps there is only one long-term solution for consideration, which is the deep geological repositories that can be safe and feasible. To let the radioactive material store several hundred meters below ground in formation of clay, rock salt and granite that have been there for millions of years already.
We have to ask us for question whether this nuclear energy can outweigh by its potential benefits as a cost-effective way of cutting carbon emissions. My concern is the cost of the decommissioning of the nuclear plant, not just the cost that we can always built-in for our consideration, but the fatal risk that is going to haunt our many generations to come. Any leaking or the shifting of the ground beneath us would create disasters that we are unable to deal with. We have also to worry about the terrorist organizations who may lay their hand on those nuclear waste.
Right now at this moment we have already a war criminal in Kremlin, as Putin is threatening the world that he would use the nuclear weapon which is more direct than the nuclear waste that we are talking about.
My verdict is that we should distant ourselves from nuclear power as it is the witches’ brew.