Three Links

From Common Energy UVic

Three Links and service web are being developed by Common Energy as tools to guide climate change planning.

[edit] Three Links

The Three Links are a conceptual tool that CE has developed in order to design integrated climate change strategies. Like everything else we are reporting on in this document, it is a work in progress. The Three Links represent the relationships between the four things that are at the core of the problem of climate change. The four things are society, economic growth, energy use, and C0₂ emissions. They are linked together by the following three relationships:

First, society has been organized to maximize economic growth, by increasing material prosperity measured in monetary terms by market transactions, commonly distilled into measures of gross domestic product, GDP.^[1]

Second, as the economy grows the demand for energy for the manufacture, transportation, and use of the goods and services that are being exchanged on the market increases. Increasing the efficiency of converting energy into GDP has only increased the total amount of energy being used over time.^[2]

Third, supplying the increasing demand for energy has caused ever-increasing CO2e emissions. This is the case whether one considers the aviation fuel required to power vacations, the methane burps of cattle raised to satisfy demand for hamburgers, or the C02e emissions from forests chopped down for printer paper (and the loss of their ability to absorb CO₂ as ecosystems are destroyed).^[3]

So, societies have been organized to maximize growth, growth has required vast sums of energy, and supplying that energy has caused enough CO₂e emissions to roughly double atmospheric concentrations of C0₂e since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Avoiding catastrophic climate change will require weakening or decoupling these links so that our societies create their prosperity with a small fraction of their current CO₂e emissions.

The process of applying the Three Links model is anchored by establishing the “climate budget” for the entity in question. This number is based on the total amount of CO₂e that can be emitted per person per year to without increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO₂e to catastrophic levels. That number informs the hard target of absolute emissions reductions that our energy use, economic wealth, and social organization, must be fit within. The existence of a climate budget based on a measurement of the per person per year CO₂e emissions that can be sustained indefinitely without causing catastrophic climate change is based on the following assumption: that all people are equally entitled to the sky, and that over time our use of it must converge to an approximately equal and sustainable level to allow for a foundation of prosperity for all people.^[4]

Given the scale of this challenge and the uncertainty in choosing the right path, efforts must be made to weaken all three links. Strategies to decouple energy and emissions focus on developing new technologies like renewable sources of energy and systems to capture CO₂e emissions and sequester them. Efforts to weaken the link between growth and energy focus on increasing the energy efficiency of the economy. Efforts to weaken the link between growth and society focus on cultural change and developing more comprehensive approaches for creating prosperity. Many ideas will weaken more than one link, while some ideas can weaken all three simultaneously.

The Three Links model is particularly good at exposing weaknesses in climate change strategies that do not take a systematic approach. For example, it shows that intensity targets are obviously inadequate. Intensity targets are aimed at reducing the amount of CO₂e emitted per unit of economic output or dollar of market value. A company facing intensity targets would have to either weaken the link between its economic activity and energy use, between its energy use and emissions, or both. However, since intensity targets do not stipulate absolute reductions in emissions (which are necessary in wealthy countries to fit within a climate budget), then the emissions per unit of the company's output could decrease while the total amount of output increased so much (as society drives growth) that absolute emissions still increase! In other words, efforts to weaken on link are overwhelmed by the dynamic of another link. The Three Links model makes it clear that if growth is to be maintained then the links between growth and energy, and energy and emissions, must be weakened proportionately so that absolute emissions are still reduced to levels within the climate budget.

The Three Links model emphasizes the importance of an interdisciplinary and integrated approach to climate change. Moving from society to emissions, the links shift in the disciplines that they primarily emphasize from the humanities and social sciences to the natural sciences and engineering, with business particularly concerned with the middle link between growth and energy. However, this is just a shift in proportion as opposed to a shift in kind. Even the seemingly purely technical questions of renewable energy and carbon capture and sequestration involve significant questions about who will pay for these technologies, how best they can be encouraged, and what level of social and ecological risk societies can tolerate as they are deployed at scale. Furthermore, efforts to weaken the links must be considered as part of a comprehensive strategy to be effective as these relationships are interdependent. For example, the cost of renewable energy to society is determined by how we measure prosperity. If we include the cost of climate change in the price of fossil fuel energy, then its price will increase substantially relative to renewable energy. Ultimately, this is a political decision based on how we, as a society, choose to organize ourselves.

To put that differently, avoiding catastrophic climate change requires technology, efficiency, and effectiveness. Researching, developing, and deploying technology on a massive scale will weaken the link between energy and emissions. Increasing the efficiency of our society, through strategies that include mass urban transit, innovative business models, closed-loop production processes, and a host of regulatory and policy changes on everything from consumer labels to urban planning, will weaken the link between growth and energy. Finally, increasing the effectiveness of our social organization for delivering things that people need and want through more comprehensive approaches to prosperity and security will weaken the link between society and growth. Moving from technology to efficiency to effectiveness the strategies become more vague because they are more fundamental to the way that we have organized ourselves. The challenge is that while it may be easier to imagine technological solutions, they may not be possible. For that reason, we must work to improve all three, and there is work for just about everyone at a university in this.

Finally, a caveat must be added to the model for it to be truly useful. In general, in order to weaken these links we must build new patterns of relationships between the services that we decide are valuable (society) --> and the ways we organize our society (growth) --> to use businesses and technology (energy) --> to extract and process materials and energy from natural systems (emissions) to provide those services for us. Given the scale of our energy and materials consumption, all technologies and energy sources will have adverse impacts on life and societies. For example, if United States switched to domestically grown corn ethanol to replace all the oil it uses then more than twice the land currently under cultivation would have to dedicated to fueling cars.^[5] This would have enormous impacts on wildlife habitat and the price of food. Therefore, to create sustainable societies we must both fit our emissions within that climate budget, and do so in a way that develops sustainable relationships between societies and the living world. This will require creative approaches the reshape the Three Links.

[edit] Service Webs

Consider the services that you use during the course of an average day. Those services have been provided by an economic network that has converted energy and materials that were extracted from nature. For example, eating toast engages an economic network that connects through the retail store to the bakery to the farmer to the soil, sun, seed, and rain. Transportation systems, pesticides, and fertilizers are mixed in by our industrial agriculture system to link those natural sources to your plate. It also engages a network that connects through chemical companies to an oil field for the plastic bag, another dense series of networks that produced the toaster, and finally, the energy network that provided the heat that toasted the bread. Each of these process in each of these networks have social and ecological impacts.

Those networks have grown steadily more complex and long-distance over the past few decades as economic systems have become more globally integrated. As the toast example suggests, the networks that are engaged by the consumption of an average person during an average day in a wealthy country form a dense web with links around the globe. This service web stretches outwards from each of us. To take an example particularly relevant to climate change: how much of the incredibly harmful coal that China is extracting and processing to drive its economic growth is being used in factories that are producing goods that will be manufactured and shipped to North America for consumption? How deeply integrated are our service webs with the dirtiest economic practices in the world?

We are developing the service web as a tool to apply the Three Links model to a particular agent, whether that agent is a person, a corporation, a city, a university, or some other actor seeking to increase its sustainability. The model places the actor in the centre of a dense web of Three Links. This connects the actors through their demand for a service to the economic networks that process and transport energy and materials that have been extracted from natural sources. Throughout these economic networks there are varying social and ecological costs. These costs are often hidden, the energy embodied in the services that we use is rarely accounted for.

The service web concept is rooted in the observation that we consume things, like new cars, not because we want their energy and materials but because we want the services those energy and materials provide. In the case of the car, those would include transportation and social status. And, there are many ways that those services could be provided, indeed, there are many services that we simply do not need to effectively provide a high quality of life. We have based much of this work on the models for understanding energy systems developed by the Integrated Energy Systems Institute at the University of Victoria (IESVic). The following diagram shows relationships between sources of energy and the services that they are used for:

The following image shows how many different pathways can be followed to provide a service:

We are all hubs in service webs, if you imagine energy and materials constantly flowing through economic networks to meet demands for their services, then you are one of the places those flows concentrate. However, the service web of a large institution like a university makes an individuals' service web seem insignificant by comparison. An enormous flow of energy and materials satisfies the demand for services from a university. This can be a depressing realization because it makes our personal actions seem futile. Indeed, the service web shows us that the decision to live a sustainable lifestyle is a collective decision because it requires transforming the economic webs that provide our services. From that perspective, the service web becomes a map that we can use to guide a plan of action.

The service web leads to four basic questions that mirror the questions from the Three Links model. First, what does my service web look like, what social and ecological damage am I causing? Second, are there alternatives to consuming goods and services brought to me at high social and ecological cost? Third, how can I get the services that I want more efficiently from the goods and services that I consume? And finally, do I really need this service at all, is it effectively contributing to my quality of life? Similar questions apply to a group looking to transform the service web of their corporation, university, city, or state. The next question for them is: who do I need to engage to create a network of people that can transform this service web?

The service web provides us with another way of understanding the beyond climate neutral goal and turning it into operational strategies. The University of Victoria's service web is deeply interwoven with those of Victoria and the broader region. To move beyond climate neutral, the University of Victoria will have to both reduce the net-impact of its own service web to zero, and reduce the impact of the region's service web to move beyond climate neutral. This means developing new patterns and relationships in these tightly interwoven service webs. To return to our example from a previous section, as the University of Victoria improves its own transportation system and the region's it is reshaping both of their service webs.

[edit] References

1. ↑ Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 edition (first published in 1944) p. 42-44
2. ↑ Energy Information Administration. "Annual Energy Review 2005 - Energy Perspectives,(EIA, 2005) "http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/ep/ep_frame.html (accessed May 21st, 2007)
3. ↑ Michael R. Raupach, Gregg Marland, Philippe Ciais, Corinne Le Quéré, Joseph G. Canadell, Gernot Klepper, and Christopher B. Field. Global and regional drivers of accelerating CO₂ emissions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. May, 2007. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0700609104v1, (accessed May 24th, 2007)
4. ↑ This is similar to the principles that underpin the Contraction and Convergence model for a global response to climate change based on the convergence towards an equal and set amount of CO₂e emissions per person per year.
5. ↑ Vaclav Smil. “21st Century Energy: Some Sobering Thoughts,” (OECD Observer, 2006), http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil/pdf_pubs/oecd_observer.pdf, (Accessed May 24th, 2007)
6. ↑ D.S Scott, "The Energy System", Int. J. Hydrogen Energy, vol.19, pp. 485-490, 1994.
7. ↑ D.S Scott, "The Energy System", Int. J. Hydrogen Energy, vol.19, pp. 485-490, 1994.