Inputs To Climate Change

Lloyd Alter is my go to person when I wish to pick up on learning more about the environment we live in, global pollution, and what he is seeing in the world today. This piece on Climate Change is an important addition alerting us to how humans are the cause of the change. I believe you will find it interesting.

Our planetary boundaries are being breached by cars and cows

Carbon Upfront

Lloyd Alter

It may be a simplistic view, but it seems that almost every critical process is affected by them.

I have spent the last five days marking 110 exams written by my students at Toronto Metropolitan University. I asked them to look at the nine planetary boundaries defined by the Stockholm Resilience Institute, explain what each boundary is, and what they think the solution to the problem is. And the more exams I marked, the less convinced I was about the separation of the nine boundaries, and the more convinced I became that almost all of our woes can be pretty much narrowed down to two things: cars and cows.

We are talking orders of magnitude and about boundaries in a different sense, as in a life-cycle assessment, where you decide what is in a calculation and what isn’t. I know some readers will criticize me for this, but I am spitballing here.

Climate change

Problem: (from Stockholm Resilience Institute) More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and more trapped radiation causes global temperatures to rise and alters climate patterns. This boundary is transgressed, and CO2 concentrations are rising.

Let’s look first at cars in Canada. The Government data say transport is responsible for 23% of emissions. But in Life Cycle Assessments, a boundary is where you decide what’s in and what’s out of the calculation, and it is drawn too tightly here.

The oil and gas sector accounts for 30% of emissions from extraction and refining, and two-thirds of that is used for transportation, so that’s another 11%.

Then there is the steel and aluminum used to make the cars. Most are not made in Canada, but on a consumption basis, we are responsible for them; that’s another 2%.

Then there is the ethanol that is produced from corn grown with nitrogen fertilizers, the manufacture of the concrete in the roads and the steel in bridges, and perhaps the biggest: the portion of the housing sector that can be attributed to sprawl made possible by the car; Chris Magwood and RMI found that single-family houses had 4.45 times the carbon emissions per bedroom than multiple-family housing. It’s all too hard to calculate the true impact of the car on carbon emissions, but it’s not just 23% in Canada; it’s north of 36%.

Then there are the cows. The equivalent of tailpipe emissions (enteric fermentation) accounts for 6% of global CO2-equivalent emissions. However, the FAO adds manure, feed production and processing, transportation, and refrigeration, bringing it up to 14.5% of global emissions. Xu et al, in Global greenhouse gas emissions from animal-based foods are twice those of plant-based foods add deforestation and land-use change-based emissions, bringing it up to 20%. of global emissions.

I know, I am adding Canadian car data and global cow data (I couldn’t find Canadian data), but together they account for 56% of CO2-equivalent emissions.

Freshwater change:

The alteration of freshwater cycles, including rivers and soil moisture, impacts natural functions such as carbon sequestration and biodiversity, and can lead to shifts in precipitation levels. Human-induced disturbances of both blue water (e.g. rivers and lakes) and green water (i.e. soil moisture) have exceeded the planetary boundary.

My students were asked to describe what can be done individually and collectively, and most said, “take shorter showers.” But according Mekonnen and Hoekstra in A global assessment of the water footprint of farm animals and animal products, raising beef consumes 15,500 litres of water per kilogram. My students would have to take 46 five-minute showers to use as much water as is embodied in one hamburger.

Irrigation alone is responsible for 70% of all freshwater withdrawals, and much of that is used to grow food for livestock.

There is freshwater change due to cars, mainly due to particulates and NOx emissions, but I cover them in other segments.

Modification of biogeochemical flows:

Nutrient elements like nitrogen and phosphorus are crucial for supporting life and maintaining ecosystems. Industrial and agricultural processes disrupt natural cycles and modify the nutrient balance for living organisms.

Cars and cows converge in the cornfields, where they consume 75% of the entire corn crop. As noted in Food prices are about to spike because we are feeding cars instead of people, The USA imported 27 million tonnes of fertilizer in 2024. 78% of nitrogen fertilizer is used on corn. Fertilizer runoff is one of the biggest sources of nitrogen.

Then there is the manure runoff, which contaminates water with nitrogen and phosphorus, along with biological contaminants; Canadians will remember Walkerton, when E. Coli from cattle manure contaminated the water supply.

Ocean acidification:

The acidity of ocean water increases (its pH decreases) as it absorbs atmospheric CO2. This process harms organisms that need calcium carbonate to make their shells or skeletons, impacting marine ecosystems, and it reduces the ocean’s efficiency in acting as a carbon sink.

We have already assumed that cars are about 36% of CO2 emissions, but nitrogen oxide emissions from cars combine with atmospheric water to form nitric acid, which is was responsible for about a quarter of the acid in what we know as acid rain, which seriously affects lakes in Canada, which have little buffering capacity. The biggest source of acid was from coal-fired power plants, but as they are closed or scrubbed, the nitric acid from cars is still acidifying our landscape.

Novel Entities

Technological developments introduce novel synthetic chemicals into the environment, mobilize materials in wholly new ways, modify the genetics of living organisms, and otherwise intervene in evolutionary processes, thereby changing the functioning of the Earth system.

My students mentioned PFAS, microplastics, and even straws, but as Paul Hormick notes in The Green Dispatch, “Recent research found that a single tire will slough off between two and fourteen pounds of rubber particles during its lifecycle. Globally, that amounts to six million tons of tire particles added to the environment every year.” Tires also contain a chemical, 6PPD-quinone, which prevents rubber from degrading from ozone exposure. It induces mortality in salmon and “is implicated in causing fish mortality in urban streams entering Lake Ontario and waters adjacent to urban centers in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario.”

Another novel entity comes from cows: antibiotics, antibiotic residues, and antibiotic resistant bacteria, all of which are spread through the environment through runoff, and manure application. The NRDC notes that 73% of antibiotics are fed to livestock instead of people. According to a study, “Antibiotic resistance (AR) is a complex, multifaceted global health issue that poses a serious threat to livestock, humans, and the surrounding environment.” I have been writing for years that Antibiotic resistance will change the way we live.

Land system change:

The transformation of natural landscapes, such as through deforestation and urbanization, disrupts habitats and biodiversity and diminishes ecological functions like carbon sequestration and moisture recycling.

My students talked about urbanization, but this is a cow story. According to Our World in Data, “Every year, the world loses around 5 million hectares of forest. 95% of this occurs in the tropics. At least three-quarters of this is driven by agriculture – clearing forests to grow crops, raise livestock, and produce products such as paper.” 41% of deforestation is due to creating pasture for cows. The next biggest driver is soy production, 77% of which is fed to cows. Then there is palm oil, a major cause of deforestation in Asia, which is (illegally) fed to cars in Europe, which will be another post.

Atmospheric aerosol loading

Changes in airborne particles from human activities and natural sources influence the climate by altering temperature and precipitation patterns.

I have been writing about particulates for years, summarized in Particulate Pollution Is Worse Than We Knew, and Is Damaging ‘Every Organ in the Body’, noting that cars are the source of almost 50% of particulate emissions. I concluded that post by blaming cars: “Who really wants to accept that their kid is going to be born underweight or that they are going to die of COPD, cancer or dementia because they wanted to drive their giant Denali? This isn’t some vague future event, it is happening every time you breathe.”

Stratospheric ozone depletion

Ozone high in the atmosphere protects life on Earth from incoming ultraviolet radiation. The thinning of the ozone layer, primarily due to human-made chemicals, allows more harmful UV radiation to reach Earth’s surface.

This is the one boundary where we have been doing well, with international agreements that have limited the use of ozone-destroying refrigerants. However, their replacements turned out to be significant greenhouse gases, and we are emitting a lot more than we thought because of the cold chain, which moves a lot of beef.

Biosphere integrity

The diversity, extent, and health of living organisms and ecosystems affects the state of the planet by co-regulating the energy balance and chemical cycles on Earth.

One really doesn’t know where to start here. After reading The global burden of disease from motorized road transport I wrote:

“it is beyond shocking. 1.5 million killed every year, more than die from HIV, tuberculosis or malaria. And no, switching to electric cars will not solve the problem; Air quality is a major factor and the source of 200,000 of those deaths, but 1.3 million of those deaths are due directly due to road crashes. 455,000 of those deaths are pedestrians getting hit by cars. There are 78 million injuries needing medical care.”

And then there are all the other living creatures we have killed with cars, or with degraded and divided habitats, air pollution and more. And then there are the cows, driving habitat destruction and pollution. Ultimately, everything connects in this category.

Why the Planetary Boundaries matter

I taught my students about planetary boundaries because I realized I was too carbon-brained and wasn’t giving them enough information about many of the other problems we face. But after a week of thinking about them, I realize how interrelated they all are, and they almost all come back to the problems caused by cars and cows, both of which are directly or indirectly products of the fossil fuel economy.

I know it is a simplistic view of things, but we may see it play out in real time if this stupid war continues and the cars have no fuel and the cows have no feed.