By Jo Nova

Quick! Set up a trillion dollar market and figure out the science later

We got it wrong for so long

Methane is supposedly 80 times more powerful as CO2 over the short term, and we are already feeding our cows seaweed and dubious additives like Bovaer® to reduce it, and we’re trying to make steaks in labs, and create burgers out of crickets. But it turns out, the experts were wrong, yet again, and trees are absorbing more methane than they emit. So just like that, there is a major new sink to remove methane from the air, and it’s been there all the time.

The funny thing is that for years everyone was measuring the air at the bottom of the tree trunk and finding methane emissions, but when Vincent Gauci et al measured further up the tree, not only did the methane emissions shrink to nothing, the gas started to disappear from the air around the trunk. Apparently bacteria under the bark were dining on the methane.

The team looked at trees in Brazil, Panama, United Kingdom and Sweden and estimate that all the worlds trees might be absorbing as much as 50 million tons of methane, about as much as” is coming out of all the worlds landfill sites”.

Scientists got this wrong, every way they could

Researchers used to think trees did nothing much with methane, but around 2006 some scientists were surprised to discover that trees emitted methane, especially in swampy areas.  In 2017 a paper showed wetland trees gave out a lot of methane, “like a chimney”:

““In the seasonally flooded part of the Amazon, the trees become a massive chimney for pumping out methane,” says one researcher.“

The bad news back then, was that most of the world’s estimated 3 trillion trees emitted methane at least some of the time. If it had have been Porches instead, we’d have heard all about it.

Since methane is supposedly responsible for a quarter of global warming, you’d think the science industrial complex would have been all over this so they could save the world. Apparently forest scientists even used to entertain students by setting fire to the gases hissing from the trunks in the Amazon, so it’s not like “nobody knew”. Everyone knew, but apparently no one really wanted to announce bad news about their forest friends and give the deniers ammunition to cut down a tree, so people didn’t want to look.

Among the first was Vincent Gauci, then at the UK’s Open University and now at Birmingham University. “When I was first working on this, it was poo-pooed,” he says. When Pangala, then also at The Open University, made her first measurements of trees emitting methane in the swamps of Borneo, she had the same experience. Despite finding that the trees increased standard estimates of emissions from the swamps sevenfold, “it took 18 months to get it published,” she says. “We were rejected by several journals. They just weren’t interested.” — e360Yale

So prejudice and politicized funding stopped humans from figuring what trees were really doing for ages.

The same Vincent Gauci went back and did the study higher up the trees only to find the exact opposite of what they expected and had read in peer reviewed papers:

By Laura Allen, ScienceNewsExplores

Trees, too, were known to release methane, especially those growing in wet soils. These trees take up the gas from soil and emit it through their trunks.

Vincent Gauci studies methane emission from trees. He’s an environmental scientist at the University of Birmingham in England. Gauci knew trees in wet places, such as the tropics, give off methane from their trunks. Next, he wanted to study its release from trees in drier soils. He expected these upland trees would give off methane, though less than those at wetter sites. But that’s not what he found.

“We were surprised to see the exact opposite,” says Gauci. The trees were actually taking in methane. Think of how many trees there are on the planet, he notes. That could add up to a lot of methane being removed from the air.

Very little is known about these microbes, says Gauci. In fact, little is known about gas exchange in tree bark and branch surfaces. And those surfaces add up to a huge area. “If we were to unwrap all the trees and roll them flat, they would basically cover the entire Earth’s land surface,” he says.

This discovery may have doubled the amount of methane that the land absorbs (that we know about).

This research is important and eye-opening, says Kazuhiko Terazawa, a forest ecologist. He studies trees and methane at the Hokkaido Research Organization in Japan. The study’s estimates for how much methane trees might take up surprised him. If correct, he says, this means the land absorbs nearly twice as much methane as people had thought it did.

Not surprisingly, the methane was taken up a lot faster in the tropics than in colder places like England and Sweden. What took just a few minutes in Panama took 20 minutes in Europe. Naturally, bacteria work faster in the warmth. It follows then, though no one said as much, that in a warmer world, methane will be removed from the atmosphere even faster.

Using data from the four sites, the team estimated how much methane all the world’s forests may be absorbing. It might be as much as 50 million tons, they calculated. “It’s a sizable chunk,” says Gauci. That’s about as much methane as wafts from all the world’s landfills.

The world’s cows supposedly emit 100m tons, so we’d have to plant a lot of trees, except the climate models are wrong, and herds of 50 million bison may have roamed North America emitting methane for thousands of years without reaching a “tippint point”, turning Earth into Venus or causing the sixth mass extinction.

From the press release: Trees act like a chimney…

REFERENCES

Barba et al (2024) Methane emissions from tree stems – current knowledge and challenges: an introduction to a Virtual Issue, New Phytologist, https://ift.tt/zrwGc9H

Bark-dwelling methanotrophic bacteria decrease methane emissions from trees, Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22333-7

Gauci, V., Pangala, S.R., Shenkin, A. et al. Global atmospheric methane uptake by upland tree woody surfaces. Nature (2024). https://ift.tt/IeXd4Ha

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Prime Minister,

I was for many years a Labour Party member, and during some of that time I was a committed activist working hard for the party. However, I didn’t vote Labour at the last general election, and your performance as Prime Minister to date has amply vindicated that decision.

I realise that you won’t be interested in my advice, but I offer it anyway. Although you will almost certainly never read this, I will feel better for getting it off my chest. Here are a few thoughts that I’d like you to take on board.

Think before you act/speak/commit yourself to writing

In 2018, the current Foreign Secretary had some pretty choice things to say about then (and soon to be again) President Trump, calling him, inter alia, “a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath” and “a profound threat to the international order that has been the foundation of Western progress for so long” as well as a “tyrant in a toupee”. Mr Trump is soon to become the President of the United States for a second term. I suspect that I am no fonder of Mr Trump and many of his policies than are you or Mr Lammy, but if I had aspirations one day to become the UK Foreign Secretary I am pretty sure I would have been more circumspect in my choice of language, especially as at the time when the comments were made there was always a chance (some might say a risk) that Mr Trump would serve more than one term as President. Suffice it to say that I think anyone seeking to be Foreign Secretary (a role which involves careful diplomacy) who used such undiplomatic language, is in the wrong job.

Shortly before the 2024 general election you gave an interview in which you referred to a visit to Dewsbury and complained about the awful choices pensioners were having to make because they couldn’t afford to heat their homes. Your precise words were:

She told me that she doesn’t get out of bed till midday, because she didn’t want to turn the heating on. And then when she did get out of bed, she had this sort of thermal jacket that she just wore all day long, so she didn’t have to put the heating up very high. That’s an awful position to put a pensioner in and there are just too many of those stories.

The video of the interview ends with the words “Change. Vote Labour Thursday 4 July”. This was no casual interview, the words you used were carefully chosen as part of an election campaign in your (successful) bid to become Prime Minister. Indeed, the Labour Party manifesto issued ahead of the general election features a video of an old age pensioner, called Gary, who said:

Energy bills have shot up so much. I’ve lived in this house all my life and I’ve never struggled this much to keep warm. I can only afford to heat one room with a small portable heater. Sometimes I sleep in my armchair to save money. It’s no way to live. Labour is the only party with a proper plan to cut energy bills for good and get us back on track. The savings people will get through things like Great British Energy will make a real difference to me. No question.

I suspect that he’s right that Great British Energy will indeed make a real difference to Gary – no question – but not in the way that he hoped. More on that below. The point I seek to make here is that in the light of the above, for your government then to go on and remove the winter fuel allowance from the vast majority of old age pensioners is simply unacceptable. You may not have told lies, but you were certainly economical with the truth.

Similarly, when in opposition, you and many of your Cabinet (including Angela Rayner, Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall, Ed Miliband, Wes Streeting, Lisa Nandy and Peter Kyle) backed the campaign run by the so-called WASPI women, and many of you have happily been photographed alongside WASPI campaigners. You personally went so far as to sign a “pledge” on their behalf. Presumably you thought this would help to improve your chances of being elected to form the government. Now that you are in government, it seems that a pledge isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. I don’t have a dog in these fights. I am not a WASPI woman and I am not in receipt of a winter fuel allowance. I can see the arguments against WASPI compensation and for the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance, but that’s not the point. You personally went out of your way to create a firm impression that if in power you would do one thing, but as soon as you achieved power, you have done the opposite. Trust in politics and in politicians was at an all-time low before the general election. Yours is a staggering achievement – you have managed to reduce those levels of trust still further.

The green hole

You and your Chancellor of the Exchequer have repeatedly said that you are making “difficult choices” because the previous administration left behind “a black hole” in the nation’s finances, and that this came as such a surprise to you that your careful budgetary plans were overturned. However, I struggle to accept that this is true. As Paul Johnson has written:

The chancellor cannot honestly announce a series of tax rises in her October budget, blame them on this hole that she has just discovered, and claim that she couldn’t have known pre-election that tax rises would be needed to maintain public services. That fact was obvious to all who cared to look.

And the reality is that the modest saving achieved by abolishing winter fuel allowance payments to the majority of old age pensioners might even be outweighed by those pensioners who were eligible to do so, but who hadn’t previously done so, deciding that now is the time to apply for pension credit. It seems to me that you have chosen to stake your credibility on a minor issue, and in doing so have picked a fight with a vocal, well-organised and politically active section of the community. I simply cannot credit what passes for your reasoning on this subject.

More importantly, perhaps, you are betting the house on net zero and the acceleration of the planned decarbonisation of the national grid. This is a ruinously expensive policy choice, regularly justified in terms of “saving the planet” and supplying “energy security”, yet the reality is that it will achieve neither. Your Secretary of State for the oxymoronic Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, when Energy Secretary in a previous Labour administration, signed the 126 page long Impact Assessment to the Climate Change Act 2008. He should, of course, have read it all, before signing it off, given its importance. Inter alia it said (and this is of critical importance):

It should be noted that the benefits of reduced carbon emissions have been valued using the social cost of carbon which estimates the avoided global damages from reduced UK emissions. The benefits of UK action will be distributed across the globe. In the case where the UK acts in concert with other countries then the UK will benefit from other nations reduced emissions and would be expected to experience a large net benefit. Where the UK acts alone, though there would be a net benefit for the world as a whole the UK would bear all the cost of the action and would not experience any benefit from reciprocal reductions elsewhere. The economic case for the UK continuing to act alone where global action cannot be achieved would be weak.

In other words, unless the rest of the world is in lockstep with the UK, there is little justification for the passing of the Climate Change Act. Sixteen years later, it is all too apparent that the rest of the world is not following the UK’s much-vaunted “lead” as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise globally. Only this week the International Energy Agency (as reported by the Guardian) has warned that:

…consumption of the fossil fuel [coal] is now on track to rise to a new peak of 8.77bn tonnes by the end of the year – and could remain at near-record levels until 2027…Coal demand in China is expected to grow by 1% in 2024 to reach 4.9bn tonnes, which is another record, according to the IEA. India is expected to see demand grow by more than 5% to 1.3bn tonnes, a level previously reached only by China.

It is therefore obvious that the Climate Change Act should be repealed. Instead your government is doubling down on this monumental folly. I suppose I must assume that a ministerial signature on an impact assessment carries about as much weight as a Prime Ministerial pledge to WASPI women.

The art of the possible

The 19^th century Chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, famously said “politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best.”Wise words. Yet you and Mr Miliband seem determined to ignore that advice, with the full backing of your Cabinet and many of your backbench MPs. The party’s pre-election manifesto ackowledged that:

British industry is also held back by high electricity costs, which has often made investing here uncompetitive

Yet the reality is that the UK has some of the highest electricity costs in the world while having some of the greatest reliance on renewable energy in the world. This is no coincidence. Statistics clearly demonstrate a correlation at a global level between high wind penetration and electricity prices. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Renewable energy is inherently unreliable, while fossil fuels provide reliable baseload. Although the marginal cost of some renewable energy might be lower than the marginal cost of fossil fuels, the same is not true of whole system costs, as the government’s own Levelised Cost of Electricity paper acknowledges. This is inevitable. Renewables need back-up, which fossil fuels don’t. In the absence of adequate back-up from large scale battery storage (expensive and in its infancy), that back-up has to be supplied by gas plants, whose costs are increased massively by being forced to ramp up and down on demand in an inefficient way. The recent dunkelflautes, affecting much of western Europe, which sent prices soaring, should have given you pause for thought, but it seems not. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that if wind is generating precious little electricity, then having four times as much wind generating capacity won’t resolve that difficulty.

Which leads in to my point about the art of the possible. Before the election, you and Mr Miliband declared massively unrealistic targets for the increase in the UK’s renewables in the form of solar, onshore wind and offshore wind. Having not had a plan to achieve this, Mr Miliband commissioned the newly nationalised NESO to come up with one. Most people reading the cautious response describing the targets as “challenging” would interpret that as meaning “unachievable” (in much the same way as Sir Humphrey would tell his Minister that a decision was “bold” – meaning “foolish”). Mr Miliband, however, took to the Guardian to declare that he was right and the doubters were wrong (“defeatist critics should take note”, he declared):

It is conclusive proof that clean power by 2030 is not only achievable but also desirable, because it can lead to cheaper, more secure electricity for households, it breaks the stranglehold of the dictators and the petrostates, and it will deliver good jobs and economic growth across this country in the industries of the future.

That strikes me as massive hubris. In my experience, hubris often leads to nemesis, and I have little doubt that will be the case here. I see you’ve already backed off from your pre-election claim that you would achieve a permanent £400 per household saving in energy bills, and even Mr Miliband has retreated, saying “up to” £300 when talking about savings, without offering any commitment as to when that miraculous day might arrive. We seem to be living in age when politics have become the art of the impossible.

Planning reform/human rights

You are a former human rights lawyer. I find it all the more disappointing, therefore, that your government seeks to ride roughshod over the rights of the British people in order to try to achieve your ridiculous and unachievable targets. You have declared that NIMBYs won’t be allowed to stand in the way of your ambitions. However, I would remind you that the European Convention of Human Rights (incorporated into UK law in Schedule One of the Human Rights Act 1998) says (via Article 8):

Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

Very many people living near existing or proposed wind and solar farm developments must now be left wondering what has happened to their rights. Their homes are being devalued, their peace destroyed, their health damaged. So much for human rights.

Conclusion

As Aditya Chakrabortty said in today’s Guardian:

...an old theme…[is] the idea that the main leftwing party in Britain, headed by a self-described socialist, will not use the full-blast powers of the state for the people on his side. Brown used the state to bail out bankers. Starmer will use it for developers and big infrastructure companies. And each time, Farage and his donors can point out how the party of the left won’t stick up for ordinary people, for workers, for the hard-pressed. Look at this lot, they’ll say, loading themselves up with free suits and specs and tickets to see Taylor Swift. Just wait until they are handing out contracts to their mates to throw up pylons and expensive flats.

In short, having achieved an unprecedented Parliamentary majority (unprecedented in the sense that it is not remotely commensurate with the popular vote) you seem destined to throw it away, having led the country down an expensive and self-destructive blind alley. Under your leadership, Labour is likely to be out of power for decades, and deservedly so. You are letting the British people down, and I will never vote Labour again so long as you are its leader. I hope you meditate on your many failings before it is too late – for you, but most importantly, for our country.

Essay by Eric Worrall

A new twist in European Genetically Modified Food politics?

Christmas dinners saved by climate change resistant roasties 

Date Wed 18 Dec 24

Christmas dinners of the future have been saved by scientists after they created climate-change resistant roast potatoes.

A team from the University of Illinois and University of Essex has developed a heatwave-surviving spud.

With the adapted plant growing 30% more potatoes when under extreme stress in the field – a milestone achievement.

It is hoped this will help families dependent on the staple crop and safeguard its future in a changing world.

The project is a collaboration from the international Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) project, led by the University of Illinois.

…

The potatoes were adapted by tweaking a process called photorespiration, a photosynthetic process that has been shown to reduce the yield of soybean, rice, and vegetable crops by up to 40%.

…

Read more: https://www.essex.ac.uk/news/2024/12/18/christmas-dinners-saved-by-potato-research

Potatoes are already versatile and resilient. Maine potatoes which grow in chilly Maine grow equally well in subtropical Bundaberg in Australia.

So why describe high yield potatoes as “climate resistant”? A 40% jump in yield seems an incredibly valuable achievement in its own right.

There is an obvious possible explanation for spinning high yield GM crops as “climate resistant”.

…

Almost all soya beans, cotton and maize now planted in the US are genetically modified, often to resist pests or deal with herbicide use, according to the FDA. 

Alongside feeding people, GM maize and soya beans are frequently used to feed animals. More than 95% of livestock and poultry in the US eat genetically modified crops, the FDA says.

In the EU and other parts of the world, GM crops are not widely grown. The EU’s rules require GMO foods to be labelled as such for consumers and permit individual EU countries to ban genetically modified crops, if they choose. Most EU countries do not grow GMO crops. 

The EU’s GMO rules still apply in the UK. But, in 2023, the rules in England were eased to allow the development of plants that are genetically edited using modern methods such as Crispr.

Further laws are needed to allow these gene-edited plants – and, later, animals – to be sold in England. The legislation for plants is set to be brought in this summer. 

…

Read more: https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-the-evolving-debate-about-using-genetically-modified-crops-in-a-warming-world/

In Britain, Europe and Australia, GM food has been subject to a relentless multi-decade fear campaign. GM food is characterised as “Frankenfood”, an unholy conspiracy by uncaring and untrustworthy big agriculture and biotech companies to inflate their profits at the expense of our children’s safety.

But many of the same British and European people who distrust government and big tech assurances about the safety of GM food paradoxically trust government claims that we are in the midst of a climate crisis.

So why not combine the two narratives to see what happens? Obviously we’ll need super crops to survive the mythical coming age of deadly weather extremes and climate change disasters. Perhaps GM is the answer to saving our children’s future.

I could be reading too much into this. Potatoes which grow faster likely are more resistant to heatwaves and other stressors. But it is going to be fascinating to see if mixing GM with climate change narratives leads to greater British and European acceptance of GM.