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From the Front Row: What can we do to fight climate change?

Published on October 21, 2022

 

In the second episode of our series on climate change, Anya and Radha welcome guest Dr. Charles Stanier from the University of Iowa College of Engineering. They discuss what we can do at the structure and systemic levels and even the individual household level to combat climate change.

Learn more about Dr. Stanier and his work at www.stanierlab.org/

Additional information about some of the topics in this episode:
humanrights.iowa.gov/dcaa/weatherization
energydistrict.org/2022/09/ira-con…es-fact-sheets/

Find our previous episodes on SpotifyApple Podcasts, and SoundCloud.

Anya Morozov:

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to “From the Front Row.” Last week we spoke with Dr. Peter Thorne about what climate change is, and how it impacts public health. In the face of such a large issue, the question that comes to many people’s minds, including my own, is: what can I do? That’s the question we are hoping to start answering today. If it’s your first time with us, welcome. We’re a student-run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they are relevant to anyone, both in and outside the field of public health. My name is Anya Morozov, joined today by Radha Velamuri, and today we are here with Dr. Charles Stanier, a professor in the University of Iowa College of Engineering, and a researcher in the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research. He has a long list of areas that his research focuses on, and today we will be discussing his research on household changes that can mitigate climate change. Welcome to the show, Dr. Stanier.

Charles Stanier:

Thank you for having me.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah. So to start off, can you please walk us through your background? How did you get to the College of Engineering, maybe what sparked your interest in climate change research?

Charles Stanier:

Yeah, so I always wanted to know how stuff was made, ever since I was a little kid and a teenager, and so, engineering was the right choice, and chemical engineering was the right choice. So I got a chemical engineering degree, and then I made stuff at International Paper. They’re big factory near Baltimore, and then I got into the environmental department of that factory. And that kind of took me towards more academic questions. I got my master’s degree in environmental engineering at Johns Hopkins, and then I liked that, so I got my PhD in chemical engineering with a focus in air pollution, and that was at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. And then I did a national academic search, and Iowa was a really good place for the environmental and health and climate and aerosol areas that I was interested in. So in 2004, I joined the faculty here and established a research group that’s been doing a combination of field work in air pollution and some modeling of both air pollution and energy systems.

Radha Velamuri:

We introduced the idea of climate change and all of this last week, but I want to hear about it from your lens. Can you give us a brief overview in your own words of how climate change works, and what causes it? Maybe talk a little bit about air pollution a little bit.

Charles Stanier:

Sure. So climate change is, at its heart, due to an energy imbalance. So we emit gases and aerosol particles into the atmosphere and those act a little bit like a blanket and prevent some of the radiation that would normally escape to space, gets trapped in the atmosphere, and that energy imbalance can only be relieved by the atmosphere and the land and the oceans heating up a little bit so that they can offset that imbalance. And a little bit is spread over the whole planet is a lot of energy. So right now the oceans are warming at about a third of a watt per square meter, and that’s added up to hundreds of zeta joules of extra energy in the ocean, which shows up in changes in currents and hurricane intensification, and more rainfall in coastal areas.

Radha Velamuri:

Yeah. Can you conceptualize that third of a lot for people who might not have that engineering background or even understand electricity that much, like myself?

Charles Stanier:

Yeah, so the average energy coming into the earth is about 240 watts per square meter. So the sun is the equivalent of having a… It’s what, 460 Watt light bulbs in every meter. A hula hoop’s about a square meter, so if you filled a hula hoop with 460 Watt light bulbs, that’s about how much energy is coming from the sun. The size of the imbalance is two-and-a-half watts per square meter, so it’s 1% increase. So you take those four light bulbs, and then you add one Christmas tree light bulb, and that’s the size of the imbalance. You add it up over all the square meters of the earth, and that’s a lot of Christmas tree light bulbs. And so, the size of the imbalance at the top of the atmosphere is two-and-a-half watts, and then the fraction that’s going into the ocean is the .38.

I don’t want to get lost in the weeds. The key thing is that most of the energy is going into the ocean. Climate change has been elevated from a theory to a scientific fact. So the latest IPCC assessment says it moved up from, “It’s highly likely that climate change is happening, and it’s attributable to mankind’s actions.” And then it went to “very confident,” and then “virtually certain,” and in the last assessment, they changed the language to, “It is now an established fact that climate change is happening, and that it’s attributable to mankind’s actions.” And then you say, “Well, where’s the evidence for this established fact?” And the biggest piece of evidence is in the oceans, because that energy imbalance can be measured, and it can be replicated in the large scale climate models. So the climate models are [inaudible 00:06:19] putting the right amount of energy into the oceans due to this well-documented imbalance.

And then both the measurements and the models are consistent, and there’s 200 zeta joules extra energy since 1850 in the oceans now, but we’re going to have 2000 zeta joules by the end of the century, so we’ve only experienced one 10th of the ocean warming that we’re going to experience by the end of the century, depending on how much we emit between now and then.

Anya Morozov:

Wow, that’s a lot of warming. And I like how you kind of emphasized that it’s a scientific fact, at this point. It’s not really up for debate that this is happening. We are actually spending a future episode talking about kind of adaptations and mitigating what’s going to happen based on the warming that we’re already probably going to see, but today we kind of want to focus on solutions and some ways to lower the amount of warming that we see. So kind of moving towards those solutions, what would be some of your top household changes that people could make to reduce carbon emissions?

Charles Stanier:

So for most households, the top three things that cause emissions are also things that can be changed. And so, it’s good that they align. The things that emit a lot are also things that we have some leverage to change, and those are the vehicles that we drive and the emissions from those, and the reduction method for that is moving to a vehicle that has a higher miles per gallon, or moving to something that’s using more electricity, and whether that’s all-electric or a part-time gasoline and electric. And the financial, I mean, they’re expensive. These vehicles are more expensive, but there are now incentives for them. This new $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles should help with the purchase cost of those. And that has been there, but it’s been strengthened a lot in the recent Inflation Reduction Act. So that’s the vehicle. So driving less, driving more efficient vehicles, moving towards electric vehicles.

The number two big source of emissions is heating and cooling of the homes, and that’s an area where weatherizing your home. So more insulation, stopping the air leaks, making sure all the doors and windows seal properly, and then when you upgrade your furnace or your air conditioner, moving to electric heat pumps. And you can choose whether you want a natural gas backup for the coldest days, since electric heat pumps struggle on the coldest days that we have in Iowa. But again, there are tax credits to help with the extra expense of those systems, but a lot of them, depending on how you do it, you will save on your monthly bills, and your home will be more comfortable, and you can improve the indoor air quality of the home at the same time by putting the correct ventilation and filtration and humidification and controls in those newer systems versus the older systems that were a little more basic and just kind of blew hot air, or didn’t, and there was no consideration of filtration or having the right amount of fresh air to keep your air from getting stale.

And I think the pandemic kind of woke a lot of us up to thinking not only about the energy efficiency of household furnaces and air conditioners, but also how well do they provide clean, fresh air so that if you have one person who’s sick in a home, does everyone get sick because you have lousy ventilation?

The third area is what we buy. And so, all the consumer products that we purchase, whether it’s online or a trip to the mall or a trip to the grocery store, all of those have emissions sort of embedded in them. And so, either buying less by reusing, recycling, repurposing things, sharing with a neighbor instead of each having the item, or using labeling systems to try to find the greener products that have been made with renewable electricity, or in other environmentally friendly ways. That can be pretty time consuming. And so, my recommendation is, save that sort of research and due diligence for your big purchases.

So don’t sweat the $5 purchases and try to make… Which disposable set of cups for this party is more environmentally friendly? Many everyday purchases that we make, it can just be exhausting to beat yourself up over, “Did I take the sufficient time and do sufficient research and buy the best product?” It’s the things that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars that often have a lot of energy embedded in them, and those are the things that you should be researching.

Radha Velamuri:

I definitely get where you’re coming from for the whole… it being exhausting to be environmentally conscious statement that you just said, because I definitely have gone through phases where I was like, “Oh, I’m going to be the most environmentally conscious, and I’m going to buy these spoons instead of these spoons,” and you get worn out from all of it, and you lose that motivation, so I completely get where you’re coming from, and maybe small steps, focusing on the larger purchases first, and then making your way down, maybe, if you have the stamina for that. I definitely think that’s a good approach to it. And then you talked a little bit about the financial barrier to some of these solutions, and we are a public health podcast, so that’s something we like to think about. We like to think about the barriers that people might have to utilizing these solutions, or being able to make the purchase to better the ventilation in their household, or buy that electric car. So a lot of those things, they’re all financial barriers. Can you think of any other barriers that people might face to taking these actions?

Charles Stanier:

There’s early adopters, and there are late adopters, so a lot of these technologies are newer technologies. And so, to adopt a new technology, for some people, is fun, is sort of a hobby. It’s something that brings them joy to be the early adopter and show their friends and neighbors, and put it on social media that, “I have this new thing,” and there’s other people who that’s not their thing. They want to do the tried and true thing because it’s going to be less stress for them, less worry, and that saves their mental bandwidth for the other things they want to focus their time on. So I see a lot of that, in that you have people like me, or engineers who are motivated to try to solve this problem, and we’re pushing these new technologies, and there are people that just… they just want to buy the most common version that has a good rating and that won’t cause them a lot of time and energy to fiddle with it if it doesn’t work, like many new products don’t always work as expected.

On the financial barriers, I think those are very real. I mean, improving the insulation in a house, replacing windows, replacing a furnace, if you do all of those things in a moderate-sized house, you’re talking 20, 30, $40,000. And so, yeah, it might pay back over a 20, 30-year period. Your energy bills and comfort will be better, and it’s worth it, but not many people have that much money sitting around. And so, now how can it be financed, and on what terms? And it’s not my area of expertise. I know there are nonprofits that are working to try to make this more approachable for everybody, whether you’re at the top of the income distribution, the middle or the bottom. And I wish I had the list of organizations that specialize in that, but I don’t.

Anya Morozov:

Maybe we’ll see what we can do about finding a list for this episode, but yeah, that makes me think of a lot of things. First of all, yeah, just the financial barriers, and also when I think about my own apartment I’m renting, I’m not going to replace the furnace, ever. And I was actually looking in there, just out of curiosity, for something for my global environmental health class, and you can see the little flame in there, so it’s definitely a gas furnace. So that just adds another layer of nuance to the cost aspect, is how do you get larger housing units to make that investment for their property overall when they, maybe, have tenants in the property?

Another thing I was thinking about was, when you talk about early and late adopters, here in the College of Public Health, we’ve been talking about early and late adopters a lot in terms of vaccinations, and it just made me think about, yeah, this idea of, with this type of green infrastructure, almost, there’s also an issue of communication and kind of getting the word out about what’s available and making it kind of seem like an easier choice through financial things, and also just making sure people know that the green option is out there.

Charles Stanier:

Your story about apartments and multi-family house brings it up to me, in general, that it’s not all about personal responsibility. There’s a huge societal structural issue in that we have chosen a lot of high emitting infrastructure and set up a lot of policies and incentives that kind of continue that high emitting infrastructure. So a lot of your emissions aren’t from your house, they’re from your workplace, and all the stores that you visit, and all the entertainment venues. That’s part of your carbon footprint, but you can’t control it. You can’t control what the latest concert venue, how it’s heated and cooled, and whether it’s energy efficient, and whether they’re using renewable electricity. Those are much bigger policy sort of economy-wide issues. And that’s where these corporate pledges come in. If the company that owns that entertainment arena has their own pledge to reduce their admissions by 40%, and takes that seriously, then you don’t have to worry so much about that because every year, they’re going to have to replace stuff, and do it in a way that emits less than what they had before.

I think there’s a lot of skepticism about those corporate pledges and how much reduction actually happens versus how much of it is just a public-facing kind of greenwashing.

Radha Velamuri:

Yeah, it also makes you think about the temporality of the decisions that we’ve made in society, like for planting trees, for example. The trees that were planted 20, 30 years ago are now the ones that are large, or the big parts of our environment. And I’m from Des Moines, and something that we’ve noticed is that a lot of ash trees were planted a long time ago because they were the cheap tree to buy then, and that was a decision a lot of people made, but now with the emerald ash borer, 30% of the foliage is not going to be there in the next few years because all those trees are going to get cut down because they’re dying, so it just makes you think about the decisions that are taken now, and how that’ll impact us in the future.

And you mentioned those pledges and all of those things and how those are going to shape not our society now, but our society 20, 30 years down the line. So our action is important now, but we have to be conscientious of steps taken in the past and how our steps we’re going to take today will affect our future.

Charles Stanier:

Yeah, and in the built environment, almost everything is built to last, certainly apartment buildings and office buildings and educational facilities and schools. And so, there has been a tendency to really focus on the current year. They make an estimate of, yeah, if we install this high efficiency system, lighting, windows, furnace, whatever it is, they calculate the savings based on the current electricity prices and the current gas prices. And as we’ve seen, those are really volatile. And so, what happens is, during periods of cheap gas and expensive electricity, like we had over the last five years until the war in Ukraine, the gas prices, natural gas spiked, but before that, electricity was getting relatively more expensive and natural gas was getting cheap. And so, people all over the place in the Midwest are installing significant amounts of natural gas infrastructure and the electric alternatives that emit less now appear less favorable, based on that calculation that was done for year 2020.

And there’s no good tools out there to help people who are investing in these buildings think out the 30-year horizon. And it’s anticipated that electricity costs will either go back down, in real terms. They’ll probably keep going up. Electricity, for consumers right now, is 12 cents a kilowatt hour. And yeah, 10 years from now, it’s not going to be lower than 12 cents per kilowatt hour, but when you adjust it for inflation, it should be fairly close to current prices, or even cheaper. However, natural gas is forecasted, long term, to increase in price. So if you extend these horizons and use those assumptions just on a cost basis, then all the electrification efforts that reduce emissions are good. And then if you throw in the environmental benefit, climate benefits specifically of those electrification options, then they’re kind of a slam dunk, even though they’re a little expensive, and we already talked about that, how you need some upfront assistance with the initial install and purchase costs.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah, so it sounds like there’s a lot that just maybe needs to be done around seeing greener infrastructure or things that rely less on natural gas as an investment, which I think happens to an extent, but it’s like there’s early adopters and late adopters, and getting more people to be early adopters by showing the benefits of incorporating this now for the future is a pretty common theme throughout this episode. So next, just kind of changing gears a little bit, you mentioned the Inflation Reduction Act a little bit earlier. Can you talk a little more about some of the highlights of that policy and its impacts on climate change mitigation?

Charles Stanier:

Yeah, I’m not an expert, so I’ve been reading a little bit, studying up, and some of the key things… I mean, there’s one that’s important in Iowa, particularly because of the pipeline controversy right now, the Inflation Reduction Act has a substantial financial benefit for burying carbon underground, also called carbon sequestration. And right now, it’s not felt that it’s suitable from a geologic standpoint to do it in Iowa. So therefore, if it’s going to be done, there need to be pipelines to take CO2 from Iowa to the injection sites in Illinois and in the Dakotas, and this been in the news a lot because people don’t want additional pipelines buried on their land, but we generate a lot of CO2 from both ammonia production and from ethanol production. And in both of those cases, the CO2 that’s generated is pretty pure, and it’s easy to purify all the way to pure CO2 and then compress and put in these pipelines and put underground.

So I think the subsidy in the Inflation Reduction Act is large enough to pay for all the costs of building the pipelines, separating the CO2, compressing it, injecting it, and have plenty of leftover for a profit for people who are doing this. So there’s a strong financial incentive through the Inflation Reduction Act to make this happen now. It will reduce emissions, a lot of uncertainty associated with it. So at the injection sites, how much is going to leak out? Will there be any groundwater impacts? If there are seismic impacts, who’s going to monitor that? If someone’s home is damaged from an earthquake at an injection site, and who pays for that? And then the leakage problem is a leakage problem over decades. So you do something now, and then you have to monitor it for centuries, really, decades or centuries of monitoring to see if the CO2 is leaking out.

And the companies that are taking the subsidy now for the injection, if it leaks out in 20 years, do they have to pay the subsidy back? Will they still be an entity that you can find and go after, at that point? So there’s a lot of issues around these carbon pipelines, but I think the Inflation Reduction Act is going to make them happen. I think more on what we were talking about about households, the 30% tax credit for energy investments in your home, the weatherization and the heat pumps and the more efficient air conditioners and the windows and ceiling of doors and air gaps, that is all subsidized now, 30% in the Inflation reduction Act. And then there’s a $7,500 tax credit for new electric vehicles. And so, that can help with individual consumers, carbon footprints.

And then I think it’s just there’s billions of dollars in the Inflation production Act that will be directed economy-wide at green infrastructure. And so, that ties back to all these places that you go and purchases that you make for entertainment and education and shopping. Those are going to be lower carbon in the future because of investments that those builders and companies are making that are tied back to the… So you don’t have to think about it as a consumer, but the way the law is structured, their decisions as energy consumers are going to change.

Radha Velamuri:

Yeah, so I kind of want to switch gears just a little bit more before we wrap up. I want to talk about a project that you’re working on, which is the Decarb 2040 project in Iowa. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? I know you talked about things that people can do, and then just some of the highlights of the Inflation Reduction Act, but I think this is kind of like your bread and butter.

Charles Stanier:

So this was a team that I pulled together of researchers from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, from urban and regional planning, from engineering and from the Tippie College of Business. And so, the group of us said, “What are the most challenging and interesting problems in decarbonization, we and our students that we work with, would like to take on?” And so, the three problems that we took on are all this decarbonization activity, how will it affect rural communities and agricultural producers in rural communities, and are there things that can be done now to help those rural communities move ahead and see this as a positive way of staying robust and healthy places to live and work, and not as a way for the cities to leave rural places behind? The laws and regulations aren’t always written thinking about these lower population density areas with… It’s a different way of longer driving distances, longer runs for utilities to get anywhere, more onsite energy through propane tanks and diesel tanks.

So that was one of the challenges, was impacts on rural communities. The second area that we looked at was the barriers for adopting electric systems in homes, heat pumps in homes, and we learned a lot about natural gas, electricity relative pricing and consumer behavior. The third area is a solar adoption, and the psychology of solar adoption, so “Bodi” Vasi in the Department of Sociology and also in Tippie has been looking at both residential and big stores, box stores, how do they decide whether or not to do solar? So it was a one-year seed grant project that ended September 1. And so, now the seven of us are writing proposals to federal and state agencies to continue researching and trying to move the needle on those three areas. There’s also some Decarb spinoff projects. One of them is, Professor Fatima Toor in electrical engineering is working on systems that generate electricity from waste heat, and Shaoping Xiao in mechanical engineering is looking at combining machine learning to learn nitrous oxide greenhouse gas emissions from farms.

Anya Morozov:

Wow. Well, it sounds like it’s all really important work, and I like that it’s very interdisciplinary. Here at the College of Public Health, we tend to be really interdisciplinary, so I really hope that those grants get funded so that you can continue that work because it sounds like it’s really needed right now to kind of think about how we go forward. And as we wrap up here, I’m going to ask one last question that we ask to all of the people who come on the show, what was one thing you thought you knew, but were later wrong about?

Charles Stanier:

The thing I thought I knew, and I was later wrong about was the trajectory of green electricity in Iowa. People were considering, 20 years ago, should we be building natural gas-powered… really, natural gas-heated buildings, or should we be putting in electric heat pump-heated buildings? And at the time, 20 years ago, that electricity was mostly made from coal in Iowa, and my view was very cynical, and I thought we weren’t going to move away from that coal because of just the inertia of the system. Those coal plants are built, they’re cheap to run, no one’s going to take them offline. And I was wrong. We moved from 1,750 pounds per megawatt hour to 750. So having our emissions in Iowa from electricity would’ve been to take it to about 800. We took it to 750, so emissions dropped by a hundred percent, or 50%. I don’t know how you want to do that math.

Anya Morozov:

But yeah, a lot.

Charles Stanier:

But I was right in my cynicism because if you look at Wisconsin or Missouri, Wisconsin only dropped by a quarter, Missouri only dropped by 10%. And so, it was really MidAmerican just decided to do it. They crunched the numbers and felt that it was more profitable to invest in wind than to continue to run the existing… I mean, they’re still running some of their coal plans, but they switched a lot of generation to wind and made Iowa the number one per capita wind state. And definitely of all the Midwestern states were the shining star in terms of the right rate of improvement of our electricity portfolio in terms of making it green.

Anya Morozov:

Wow, I didn’t realize that Iowa was kind of leading the charge like that, and I hope that someone can share those lessons with other states to get that level of improvement across the board, and not just in Iowa. Do you have any other thoughts before we wrap up?

Charles Stanier:

No, I think I’ve talked way too much.

Radha Velamuri:

It’s all good.

Anya Morozov:

It’s been really interesting. I’ve learned a lot from what you’ve said. I didn’t know that much about the Inflation Reduction Act before you said it, and yeah, just a lot of things in the episode. This was very eye opening for me, so thank you so much for taking the time today to share those lessons.

Radha Velamuri:

And we’re glad you brought your engineering perspective to us public health students.

Anya Morozov:

And that’s it for our episode this week. Big thanks to Dr. Charles Stanier for coming on with us today. This episode was hosted by Radha Velamuri and me, and written, edited, and produced by me, Anya Morozov. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook, and our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in public health. Have a suggestion for our team? You can reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.