1.5 billion ‘little volcanoes’ erupting
Woot-woot! I’m still a bit giddy over my experience in Buriram, Thailand last weekend. Covering an actual motorsport race overseas doesn’t come very often for me, and being subjected to all that action—the engines screaming, people cheering, seeing all those cars coming and going in a blur—does have an actual effect on one’s body. And so, after having arrived back in Manila literally the hour before Christmas, I spent the entire next day hibernating.
I was already fully awake, though, by the time the deadline for this piece approached. The adrenaline from the Chang International Circuit already wore off, my mind was rested, refreshed, and ready to look at the big picture.
Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that the Chang International Circuit, where the Idemitsu Super Endurance Southeast Asia Trophy 2023 was held, would be situated in Buriram, which has been known for its several extinct volcanoes. That got me thinking, what’s the connection here?
A little Internet sleuthing gave me some eye-opening numbers. I searched how much carbon dioxide a single volcano emits, and I was immediately directed to a June 2017 article in Forbes.com, titled “How Much CO2 Does A Single Volcano Emit?,” written by its senior contributor Ethan Siegel. In it, Siegel wrote: “When you realize that volcanism contributes 645 million tons of CO2 per year compared to humanity’s 29 billion tons per year, it’s overwhelmingly clear what’s caused the carbon dioxide increase in Earth’s atmosphere since 1750.”
He goes on to say, “It would take three Mount St. Helens and one Mount Pinatubo eruption every day to equal the amount that humanity is presently emitting.”
I then looked up how many cars in the world were currently running, and the answer from various sources was, more or less, 1.5 billion cars. This number accounts for 75 percent of the total global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions the world’s transport emits (and global transport systems account for 20 percent of all man-made GHG emissions). As we already know, carbon dioxide is a primary greenhouse gas. GHGs, in a nutshell, absorb the sun’s heat that radiates from the Earth’s surface, trap it in the atmosphere and prevent it from escaping into space. The more GHGs in our atmosphere, the more heat is trapped.
Simply put, humanity, and the transport and mobility network our species has created to supposedly enhance the quality of our lives, has played a key role in firing up a figurative man-made “volcano” that has been emitting much more greenhouse gases than all volcanoes on this planet combined.
“With great power comes great responsibility.” I know, it’s become a superhero cliché. But I can’t stress enough here how important of a role the world’s most prolific maker of cars plays in this life-or-death planetary game of “Balance your Global GHGs to Avert Climate Disaster.”
It’s truly admirable how Toyota Motor Corp. is donning its “superhero” cape and exerting efforts to study, like Dr. Strange, how all the numerous new energy vehicle pathways will play out. Its options are laid out—battery electric vehicles (BEVs), hybrids, hydrogen-powered, fuel cell EVs, carbon neutral fuels, biogas, etc, etc. Toyota promises to make “ever better” cars, and I assume that would mean “ever better” for the environment, for the mitigation of GHGs, and for less use of animal products in its materials.
TMC chair Akio Toyoda admits, however, that his company can’t do it alone. “It’s difficult for a single company to create a carbon-neutral movement and the future of mobility alone. I believe that if many people cooperate and take action, the number of like-minded partners will increase, and the landscape of the future will definitely change. I would like to live in a world where we all create the future together and support those who are working hard toward this aim.”
Toyota’s latest endeavor in motorsports here in Buriram saw it pit its most competitive hybrids and carbon-neutral fuel-powered cars with other sport-tuned but exclusively internal combustion engine (ICE) powered cars.
The results showed that Team Toyota and its NEVs fared well. All three vehicles—the GR86 CNF (carbon neutral fuel) concept, the GR Corolla H2 (hydrogen-powered), and the Prius CNF-HEV GR (hybrid powered by CNF)—completed the race, with no less than the 67-year-old Akio-san behind the wheel of both the Prius and the GR Corolla.
This result should inspire not just the ordinary motoring enthusiast, but also other car manufacturers and fuel producers to follow in Toyota’s footsteps. Even in motorsports, cars can now use less CO2-emitting fuels. The excitement of the races would remain, and we’ll be dealing with less climate-related consequences down the road.
I’d like to end today’s piece with some food for thought. For this, I’d like to generously quote science journalist Peter Brannen in his “The Deep History of Carbon Dioxide” article from “The Climate Book.”
“What would happen if, say, continental scale volcanoes, burning through kingdoms of carbon-rich limestone and igniting massive coal and natural gas deposits underground, injected thousands of gigatons of CO2 into the air—from exploding calderas and from steaming, incandescent expenses of basalt lava? This was the predicament for the hapless creatures alive 251.9 million years ago, in the moments before the greatest mass extinction in the history of life on Earth. At the end of the Permian period, 90 percent of this life would learn the fatal cost of a carbon cycle completely deranged by too much carbon dioxide.
“Carbon dioxide blasted out of Siberian volcanoes for thousands of years and nearly ended the project of complex life. All the normal guardrails in the carbon cycle buckled and failed in this, the single worst moment in the entire geologic record. The temperature soared by 10 degrees Celsius, the planet convulsed with lethally hot, acidifying oceans which pulsed with lurid blooms of algal slime that robbed their ancient waters of oxygen. This anoxic ocean instead filled with poisonous hydrogen sulphide as hurricanes roared overhead, taking on an unearthly intensity. In the aftermath, when the fever finally broke, one could travel the world without seeing a tree, the world’s coral reefs had been replaced by bacterial slime, the fossil record went silent, and the planet took nearly 10 million years to pull itself from oblivion. Thanks, in large part, to burning fossil fuels.
“The climate is not responsive to political sloganeering; it is not accountable to economic models. It is accountable only to physics. It doesn’t know, or care, whether the excess CO2 comes from a once-in-a-100-million-year volcanic event or from a once-in-the-history-of-life industrial civilization. It will react the same way. There is no reason we need to etch our names on this ignominious roster of the worst events ever in Earth history. But if the rocks tell us anything, it is that we are pulling the most powerful levers of the Earth system. And we pull them at our peril.”
