11 March 2024. Carbon | Miners
Peat is the cheapest carbon storage out there. // The long dark history of the coal industry in songs [#551]
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1: Peat restoration is the cheapest carbon storage out there
Chris Goodall’s excellent newsletter Carbon Commentary devotes itself to terse and factual accounts of signs of emerging change that might make the post-carbon transition feasible. He tracks both changes in innovation practice and some of the academic literature, as well as commercial announcements by businesses, and applies some analysis to the numbers.
He’s written several books on routes to transition, and his next one, Possible, is due out later this month. It will look at sixteen challenges that we need to overcome if we are going to achieve a just transition. It’s probably a must-read if you’re interested in this area.
(Moorland Peat Bog near Loch na Faic. Photo by Andrew Tryon/ Geograph. CC BY-SA 2.0)
A short piece in the latest edition on carbon sequestration in peat is a good example of his approach. He rounds up some recent announcements about investments in peat sequestration and then does some sums to work out what the numbers look like:
Returning degraded peatland to a healthy state is a very cheap way of storing new carbon. Scottish entities gave us new details of two projects. One government body said it had restored 10,000 hectares of degraded land and expects to store almost 9 extra tonnes of carbon per hectare each year. Separately, Edinburgh University plans to restore about 800 hectares and will use this land to ‘offset’ the university’s remaining emissions.
The first of these two projects, by Forestry and Land Scotland, covered five sites at different locations across Scotland:
It is estimated when fully recovered the 10,000 hectares will permanently bring about emissions savings of 87,800 tonnes of CO2 per year – the equivalent of taking about 63,000 new petrol cars in the UK off the road for a year.
The second project is designed to cover emissions by the University of Edinburgh, such as flying, that need to be offset. It also produces other benefits:
Open areas will also be maintained to support the existing wildlife. The improved habitats will encourage more native species such as birds, red squirrels, butterflies and moths, the team say. Importantly, both locations will remain accessible to the public. Existing picnic spots and outdoor recreational spaces for walking and cycling will be maintained and new ones developed.
The leader of the Edinburgh University project, Yvonne Edwards, noted that peat restoration allows you to mitigate climate change and restore biodiversity loss at the same time.
Healthy peatland continues to absorb carbon “almost indefinitely”, and partly because the costs of restoring degraded peatland are fairly modest—between £1,000 and £2,000 per hectare, depending on whether or not you need to remove trees.
Peatland covers around a quarter of Scotland, and so there is a lot of scope for restoration.
The Scots government is planning to restore around 250,000 acres of degraded peatland, at a cost of around £250 million, or around £1,000 per hectare. At this scale, these are no longer trivial numbers. Chris Goodall runs the numbers this way:
This investment will reduce Scottish emissions by about 2.2 million tonnes a year, or around 6% of the national total... (T)hese actions are extremely inexpensive and may cost less than £10 per tonne of CO2.
Diving into some of the links in his piece, we find a somewhat technical Nature article that explains that peat bogs can store twice as muchcarbon as forests:
Considering that tree restoration and afforestation practices may be expensive and that the fertilization effect of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration on tree growth is negligible, greater consideration should be given to the conservation of peatland ecosystems, which naturally contribute to reaching climate mitigation goals.
There is a number of issues. One is that the information around the state of peatlands is patchy. One of the projects referenced in Goodall’s piece is simply creating a database that monitors evidence of restoration costs:
Another is that the virtues of peat haven’t been appreciated. Peat covers three per cent of the earth’s surface, but stores about a third of its carbon—the largest carbon sinks on land. About one-sixth of this has been drained, which immediately creates new emissions. Countries such as Germany have destroyed almost all of their peatland, and in parts of the global South peatlands are being encroached on by agriculture and other projects.
But as pressure increases to find ways to store carbon, this may change. £10 per tonne represents the cheapest credible carbon storage option out there at the moment. As Goodall says,
Nothing matches this in cost.
2: The long dark history of the coal industry in songs
I worked as a journalist during the 1984-85 miners’ strike, for Channel 4 News. I was a backroom boy, sometimes the lead writer, sometimes chief-sub, as it was called, responsible for getting the tone of the programme right as well as being accurate.
I think we did good work, and it was well-regarded afterwards. In this, we were lucky to have Ian Ross, the best industrial relations correspondent in British broadcasting—perhaps at the time in British journalism—working on the programme.
In the febrile political atmosphere of the time, laden with claims and speculation, Ian would need only to place a few calls to have the situation weighed up reliably.
But the attention paid to the 1984-85 strike because of the anniversary has in some ways eclipsed the far longer history of strike and struggle in Britain’s coalfields in a long fight for fair wages and better conditions.
The best introduction to this—or at least the most entertaining—is Alan Plater’s play Close The Coalhouse Door, based on the stories of the pitman-turned-writer Sid Chaplin, with songs by the Gateshead musician Alex Glasgow.
(Andrew Curry: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
The play works as a kind of revue, structured around the golden wedding party of a retired miner, with the same actors also playing historical characters, from Lloyd George to Harold Macmillan, and breaking into song from time to time.
Plater imagined the play as a “freewheeling musical based on community experience”, and took some inspiration from the pioneering work of Joan Littlewood at Stratford in east London.
It is worth sharing Plater’s succinct 1960s view, from his introduction, of the history of the coalfields:
The historical material fell conveniently into a three-act pattern. The nineteenth-century oppression was the obvious Beginning: the between-the-wars chaos the inevitable Middle: and the post-Nationalisation non-Utopia the ambivalent End. In academic terms Proposition, Exposition and Resolution; in more appropriate music-hall terms, Information, Feed and Tag.
Alex Glasgow’s repertoire mixed what would have been called “topical songs” on housing, racism, and arts festivals, with some satire, as well as songs from the North-East’s music halls. (He rescued Joe Wilson’s song Sally Wheatley, later covered by the Dubliners, by giving the broadsheet words a new melody, for example).
The songs in the play capture both the ups and downs of the history of the coalfields—more down than up—and the profound mixed feelings that anyone should have about working underground. It’s dirty, dangerous work, and it kills people, slowly or quickly.
But for many, for the best part of 150 years in Britain, it was the best work they could get.
I’m not sure this has ever been expressed as well as it was in Alex Glasgow’s title song for the play, which opens it and is heard again, in part, at the end. The best version of Close The Coalhouse Door is probably by Frankie Archer, who brings the right tone to it.
But the songs also conjure the hardships of the strikes down the years. Twenty Long Weeks is about the five month strike in 1844, during which the coal owner Lord Londonderry evicted an astonishing 35,000 men, women and children across Durham and Northumberland from their tied housing as he forced them back to work.
Here’s Alex Glasgow’s own version of the song.
It would be easy to get depressed, but the spirit of music hall keeps breaking through. So a song like the The Socialist ABC has good jokes and a good punchline, and was once sung by the North-East MP Dave Clelland on a record of music from the region.
When It’s Ours, which is sung as the story gets to 1947 and the coal industry is finally nationalised—a victory at last—is punctuated by frankly terrible (deliberately terrible) music hall jokes:
So Lord Londonderry had this dream He dreamt he was making an important speech in the House of Lords, and when he woke up, he was.
Or:
Did you to see Newcastle play on Saturday?
No… well, they didn’t come to see me when I was bad.
Here’s a version of the song by Bob Fox and Benny Graham, on their record How Are You Off For Coals?
One of the things that gets written out of the miners’ story in the focus on industrial conflict is the spirit of self-help and self-improvement that made the pit communities work, and which is one of the reasons why they stayed out for so long in 1984-85. For example, the Miners’ Institutes and Welfare Halls that are found in many communities were paid for by contributions from the miners’s pay packets, and were in effect community assets that included libraries as well as bars and meeting areas.
But no-one ought to work underground.
In the play, an Expert (a recurring character) pops up to tell them that their pit is going to close:
THOMAS: No, listen... You're not shutting them because it's a terrible job that kills men and makes widows and orphans...
EXPERT: We're simply taking the broad view.
WILL: You're not closing them because of the broken backs and silicosis...
EXPERT: We're simply re-assessing our priorities...
WILL: You're not closing them because you want us and our children to have a cleaner, safer, better life...
EXPERT: Not in so many words.
One of the consequences of the defeat of the miners in 1984-85 was that the government’s brutally won victory opened the way for the privatisation, deregulation and financialisation that has scarred Britain ever since. It was one of the 1980s ‘sliding doors’ moments.
But mostly, it was the right thing done for the wrong reasons in the worst possible way, with significant violence and with terrible consequences for the communities. Research done in 2019, 35 years after the strike, found that the main former coalfield areas still have weak economies, high levels of social and economic deprivation, and a high incidence of poor health.
And this also has policy consequences that echo down the years. When you talk to the energy unions about the post-carbon transition, they are understandably reluctant to trade their skilled and well-paid work for other work without some guarantees, because they can remember what happened to the miners. John Harris wrote about Robert Gildea’s book of oral history of the strike, Backbone of the Nation, when it came out last year:
“Many former miners moved from industry to industry and from job to job with no stability,” he writes. “They were regularly condemned to doing ill-paid, largely unskilled jobs as caretakers, refuse collectors, delivery men, taxi drivers, warehouse or call-centre staff and petrol-pump attendants.” The climate crisis underlines the fact that the end of coalmining was sooner or later going to arrive; what was never inevitable was the absence of economic help for places left bereft by pit closures,
Because: the pits were closed, but hardly anybody got a better life.
Update: AI
Just a thought: what if AI is an existential risk, but not for the reasons the tech bros think it is an existential risk? What if it is an existential risk because of the volume of resources that it consumes at a time when we need to reduce resource use in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss? I touched on this the last time I did an update on AI, When I mentioned the vast energy use. But it is also hungry for other resources. In a recent Guardian/Observer column John Naughton mentioned both its energy use and its water consumption, pointing to an article by Kate Crawford in Nature. Here’s an extract from that article in Nature:
Generative AI systems need enormous amounts of fresh water to cool their processors and generate electricity. In West Des Moines, Iowa, a giant data-centre cluster serves OpenAI’s most advanced model, GPT-4. A lawsuit by local residents revealed that in July 2022, the month before OpenAI finished training the model, the cluster used about 6% of the district’s water… In a (preprint), Facebook AI researchers called the environmental effects of the industry’s pursuit of scale the “elephant in the room”.
j2t#551
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