Dan Weiss, the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress, has written an excellent piece on why we can expect a series of inevitably flawed economic analyses of the Lieberman Warner Climate Security Act (S. 2191) in the coming months:
Many of these studies will likely predict that the reductions of greenhouse gases required by the cap-and-trade system will lead to huge hikes in electric rates, reductions in jobs, and all sorts of other economic havoc.
But these studies also have one other common element: They will eventually be proven wrong once the program is underway.
These studies base their cost assumptions on existing technologies and practices, which means that they do not account for the vast potential for innovation once binding reductions and deadlines are set. The Lieberman Warner Climate Security Act anticipates the need for innovation and creates economic incentives to spur engineers and managers to devise technologies and methods to meet the greenhouse gas reduction requirements more cheaply.
This isn’t the first time that pollution control studies have produced inaccurate predictions about the future. Remember what analysts predicted about acid rain controls from 1989 to 1990?
And the article continues on to review that history and then look at the important reports of McKinsey & Co and Nicholas Stern, which makes clear the cost of action is far, far lower than the cost of inaction.
If you’re interested in the IPCC’s take on this — they explain why the literature is clear that action is not costly — this post summarizes what they report.
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Some time ago, I began to think about how a transformation from a carbon based fuel system to a post carbon based fuel system might be paid for. I came to the startling conclusion that once secondary economic benefits and and normal replacements were factored into the equasion, not only was there not likely to be significant costs to be born by society, but our way of life might not change significantly. I made two assumprions. First that a conversion of the electrical system to 94% nuclear and 6% hydro power was possible by 2050. I assumed that the nuclear conversion was possible by mass production of reactors. Much of the cost would be paid for by the replacement costs of old fossil fuel plants that had come to the end of their useful life. A second source of compensation to the investors in new nuclear plants, would be the savings in fuel costs. Since nuclear fuel is less expensive than coal or natural gas, the fuel cost savings would help pay off the new plant investment. A third benifit which would be a form of indirect savings that would be broadly spread throughout societ, would be savings in healthcare cost. Health care costs to individuals, families, businesses, and government that are associated with pollution related health problems, would be mitigated. Even if the savings were not rebated to the el;ectric generator owners, the savings to society would be considerable.
In addition to the use of ordinary resources to pay for the transformation of the electric system, the surface transportation system can be largly transformed largely without unusual costs.. I will assume that some time between now and 2050 battery/ultra-capacitor technology will become mature enough to become the mainstay of the transportation system. Cars and urban freight haulers can be powered by stored electricity. Recharging can be overnight. Long distance freight hauling can be by rail. Hauling capacity freed up by the end of coal hauling can be used to take over the duties of long range trucking, which can be eliminated. Short and middle distace interurban trips can be handled by high speed electric rail. Rail electrification can take advantage of ultra-capacitor technology. It would not be necessary to run continuous electric lines along railroads. Instead, a line can be run along the track for distances large enough to insure recharge of the capacitor. Except fpr the rail electrification expenses, most of the expences related to the transportation system changeover would be born as ordinary replacement costs. The electrification of the transportation system would also create significant health care savings.
This is one of the reasons I’m still an optimist. Granted it’s hard to support such an opinion against the charge of wishful thinking.
It’s also a reason why I think getting some cap-n-trade system in place now, even if not perfect could be very beneficial. I believe that once all the corporate CEOs, entrepreneurs, inventors, etc. are really faced with a known quantity… an economic environment driven by forced CO2 reductions… cost effective solutions will probably start appearing faster than previously imagined. Once it becomes apparent the economic sky is not falling, then targets could be quickened and tightened. Maybe a two step approach gets us to the end more efficiently than accepting delays from fighting for an outright victory upfront.
Here is what Biopact states needs to be done:
http://biopact.com/ 2008/ 02/ why-lester-brown-strongly-supports.html
[sarcasm] I didn’t realize had investments in corporations… I didn’t realize CAP was a mutual fund” [/sarcasm]
To Charles- I must disagree with you regarding the prospects of nuclear and the cost. The fuel may be cheaper, but construction costs are heavy. As are disposal costs. Not to mention the jobs created would not be as high. Also, the potential for disasters (meltdown, terrorist).
It is true that the Acid Rain forecasts overestimated the costs. It is also true that that experience has cuased the models to be greatly improved. What all the peer reviewed economic analysis shows is that implementing a program to reduce CO2 emissions will have a costs. A program this massive will not be “free.” Yes, jobs will be created in some areas, but there will be reductions in other. Yes, the economy will continue to grow, but it will grow slightly less than it would if we had no CO2 regulation (esp if we are talking about the period in the next 30 years).
Both the Stern and McKinsey studies have their own flaws. Neither were peer reviewed. Looking at the critiques, neither would pass that hurdle. Certainly the McK paper, relying as it does on “negative costs” shows itself to be little more than an advocacy piece. Economic actors are not “cost minimizers” as the article suggest, but they work to improve their lot. It is true that some efficiency gains are overlooked, but to claim as McK does that these make a program extremely low costs is misleading.
We absolutely must implement aggressive programs to reduce CO2 emissions. However, this must be done in an economically efficient manner (doing so allows you to get more reductions for your money). To preemptively dismiss wholesale the economic analysis being done to examine this issue, while referring to papers of dubious quality does not help form good policy.
David, I read the BioPact piece from your link.
It reminded me of the video game my son spent hours playing…Simm CIty. A mindless game where the players create a world of their imagination using key strokes and a mouse. The BioChar piece is a verbal rendition of Simm City.
John L. McCormick
To Charles- I must disagree with you regarding the prospects of nuclear and the cost. The fuel may be cheaper, but construction costs are heavy. As are disposal costs. Not to mention the jobs created would not be as high. Also, the potential for disasters (meltdown, terrorist).- Nick
Nick, if you think nuclear construction costs are expensive, you simply had not looked at construction costs for renewables recently. Nuclear construction cost are fat lower than solar or wind, when production capacity is thrown into the mix. You obviously have not stayed up to date on advances in nuclear safety. The latest generation of reactors are virtually melt down proof, and in the extremely unlikely event that a melt down were to occur, advanced safety feature are in place to prevent the escape of radioactive materials. Far more primitive safety measures prevented radiation casualties at Three Mile Island. Reactors are protected from terrorists by multi-layered passive and active security systems. Many of the security details are secret for obvious reasons. Terrorist threats are all about scary stories made up to frighten children. In the real world the idea of a terrorist threat to a reactor lacks credibility.
John L. McCormick — Each to his own, but the Biopact piece did offer some concrete suggestions which can rapidly be carried out.
David, What “concrete suggestions” did you find in that BioPact piece? Be honest. There is nothing real in that entire piece including, above all, its headline.
Maybe you put a higher societal value on ’suggestions’, with regard to diminishing CO2 atmospheric concentrations, than is justified.
I urge others to read that piece and offer their interpretation.
John L. McCormick
John L. McCormick — Did you read the part about biochar?
To John L. McCormick,
It’s a bit easy to call new concepts SimCity – a typical sign of a state of denial or ignorance, or both.
Biochar is being recognised by more and more researchers as a very viable and cost-effective technique to reverse climate change. The concept is new, which is why you should delve into the research a bit to understand its potential.
Trials by Australia’s New South Wales Department of Primary Industries’ (DPI) — that is not SimCity — shows biochar boosts crop yields and results in carbon-negative energy.
Research confirms biochar in soils boosts crop yields.
Biochar was presented at the UNFCCC in Bali, by Dr Christoph Steiner, who has done extensive trials in Brazil. The UNCCD gave it very good response and called it “revolutionary”. The UNFCCC / UNCCD is not SimCity.
Biochar and charcoal carbon capture at the United Nations Climate Change Conference – Bali, 3 – 14 December 2007.
Biochar is now seen as more viable than REDD/avoided deforestation/compensated reduction.
The World Food Program and the FAO are looking at it as well. I wouldn’t consider both institutes as spewing Virtual nonsense.
Add: there’s a bill in the U.S. calling for $120 million into biochar research.
S.1884 – The Salazar Harvesting Energy Act of 2007 [*.pdf], introduced July 26, 2007.
The International Biochar Inititative was recently launched, comprising credible soil and climate scientists from across the world.
In short, things are moving. So I find your blunt dismissal of a new idea a bit easy and infantile. Perhaps it’s because you don’t really grasp what it’s about.
On coupling bioenergy power plants to carbon capture and storage (CCS), that’s an older concept, sanctioned by the IEA and the IPCC.
Several concrete projects are already in the pipeline:
-the NREL/USAF’s coal-biomass-to-liquids+CCS project
-ADM’s ethanol+CCS cogen plant
-Aker’s Bio-Capture technology being implemented in a CCS plant
-China is implementing biomass power plants coupled to CCS (a collaboration between a group of Australian and Chinese universities.
All our reporting on the matter is based on concrete projects and research results.
So if you call this SimCity stuff, I think most readers will understand that either you haven’t grasped the basics of why researchers are working on these concepts. Or there is another, more likely reason: you would be out of business when these technologies were to be implemented.
The real SimCity is people like you and Lester Brown: you sell doom and gloom books and push fear mongering messages but when concrete solutions are being developed, you call them nonsense. They’re obviously a threat to your business. Quite frankly, that’s your problem.
Best,
Jonas Van Den Berg
“Hell and High Water” – Buy the Book.
Sorry, sir, I won’t buy the book. I’m tired of your clique’s attempts to instill fear in people. It’s green fascism. It doesn’t work on me. And luckily, more and more people are beginning to see through it.
Jonas,
I’d say you’ve got a huge chip on your shoulder. If people give you criticism about something you feel strongly about, that’s because they are bad people, but of course if you give criticism, it’s because you are at the height of greatness and goodness of all. Maybe you should give people a little bit of a break, some of us are just trying to work thru this and if they think something doesn’t seem right about something, your jumping all over them should be beneath a professional. I was taken back at all the attacks of Lester Brown in the article I read and all he did was the crime of not having heard of it before.
I do have one question about it. Apparently you partially burn biomass until you get to carbon and then bury the carbon. What if instead of doing what you are doing, you fully burned this biomass in a power plant, but instead not fully burned coal in a power plant and then burned the coal that was left over from that, what’s the difference? Is a ton of unburned biomass carbon different from a ton of not fully burned carbon from coal? (except I realize the not fully burned coal has more chemicals in it, sulfur, etc) By not fully burning the biomass, you leave energy that has to be made up somewhere else, or am I missing something?
I’m trying to understand the process, so come down on me a little easier, please.
Here is a biochar web site:
http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/
By the way, Mr John L. McCormick, there already is a biochar project recognized as a Clean Development Mechanism project.
Now are you telling us that the CMD and the UNFCCC are a joke? A pubescent game?
How can you humiliate your own sector and instruments so much?
Biochar reminds me of a previous post about using topsoil as a carbon sink.
Ronald, I don’t think I have a chip on my shoulder. It’s just that when someone pretends he has read an article, then feels he has understood it enough to call it bogus, showing he clearly hasn’t understood even the beginnings of the basics of the concept – then I get seriously pissed because then I just wasted 5 minutes of my precious time on that person.
Now to answer your question. The two systems are basically the same in principle: you remove CO2 from the atmosphere by sequestering the carbon from renewable biomass, after you’ve used it as an energy source.
The difference is in (1) the technology, (2) the CO2 offsetting cost, and (3) the environmental benefits that differ considerably for the two systems.
1. Bioenergy with Carbon Storage (BECS) – that is capturing and storing CO2 from biomass burned in IGCCs or other plants – is large scale, requires efficient capture technologies (lots of research money going into this) and needs a geosequestration infrastructure (CO2 transport and storage sites).
Now in theory, BECS is more interesting than CCS applied to fossil fuels, because you can decentralise all aspects, making it possible to sequester CO2 in smaller geosequestration sites than would be possible with fossil fuels.
On this particular advantage, see:
S. Haszeldine, “Deep geological CO2 storage: principles, and prospecting for bioenergy disposal sites” (5MB pdf), Abrupt Climate Change Strategy Group.
2. The biochar approach can be far smaller in scale, but is especially attracting increasing interest from soil scientists and biogeochemists because of the interaction of the char in soils, especially acidic, nutrient poor soils (oxisols, ferralsols, etc…). Around half the world’s potentially arable land is made up of such acidic soils.
Biochar amendments have shown to boost crop yields because the nanoporous structure of the char interacts in a very beneficial way with soil microorganisms and nutrients. It:
-improves cation exchange capacity
-improves microbioal activity
-improves water retention capacity
-increases Ph (important in acidic problem soils)
-reduces leaching of nutrients
-reduces N2O emissions (important emissions from agriculture)
That’s the key to biochar. Not only is it a stable and manageable carbon sink (biochar stays inert for hundreds, possibly thousands of years – in contrast to humus or organic matter in topsoil, which mineralises in a matter of years), it also improves the soil biochemistry.
So with this in mind you can solve several problems, for which there are carbon credits under the CDM:
1. you can reduce deforestation dramatically by transiting from slash-and-burn to slash-and-char (slash-and-burn results in the typical nutrient poor soils, which forces farmers to move on to new land every two to three years); as you know, deforestation is responsible for 20 to 25% of anthropogenic emissions. -> here you receive a carbon credit (additionality rule OK)
2. you can improve food security amongst some of the world’s poorest people considerably, because the acidic problem soils they cultivate become far more fertile, leading to impressive yield increases. Biochar trials with high inputs have shown increases of up to 800 percent in tropical acidic soils (trials in less problematic soils and in a highly developed country – Australia – using highly advanced inputs, can push yields that already are very high, up by 200 to 300 percent – see the NSW DPI trials). Normally mineral fertilizer applications get washed away because of the heavy tropical rains – this is a basic problem encountered in tropical agriculture; biochar keeps the nutrients locked up and active. -> here you receive a carbon credit because you reduce fertilizer needs (additionality rule OK)
3. you can provide access to modern bioenergy to some of the world’s most underserved, because biochar can be made efficiently via pyrolysis; pyrolysis processes can be maximised for syngas and char production, while eliminating the tar fraction. -> so here you get a carbon credit because you change primitive biomass use to modern bioenergy (rural electricity, efficiently generated) (additionality rule definitely OK)
So the main differences between the two approaches to carbon negative energy come down to a matter of scale, cost and socio-environmental benefits.
BECS can remove far more CO2 from the atmosphere via one single point (a large IGCC for example): you can remove around 1000 tons of CO2 per GWh. (Note: on an LCA basis coal gives +800tons; coal+CCS gives +100 tons or so; solar PV gives +100 tons; wind gives +30 tons; biomass gives +30 tons; nuclear +20 tons; hydro +10-20 tons; micro-hydro +10 tons; biomass+CCS gives -1000 tons, that is *minus*).
Whereas biochar can be implemented across the tropics with relatively simple means to serve smaller communities. Its potential:
“Thus, pyrolysis of 1 Gt of biomass C would provide energy equivalent to about 0.3 Gt of fossil C and could be used to offset that amount of fossil C, while sequestering 0.5 Gt as biochar. Of the 60.6 Gt/yr of biomass that is fixed in usable form, we estimate that perhaps 10% of it (6.1 Gt/yr) could become available in one form or another (crop and forestry residues, and animal waste) for pyrolysis. This level of pyrolysis would offset 1.8 Gt/yr of fossil C, and sequester 3.0 Gt/yr as biochar, enough to halt the increase and actually decrease the level of atmospheric C by 0.7 Gt/yr. Even at half this level (i.e., 5% of annually fixed biomass), pyrolysis would be sufficient to decrease the global C cycle imbalance by 2.4 Gt/yr and in combination with other sequestration options help to achieve the minimum goal of C neutrality. Clearly, the potential contribution of biochar technology is large, perhaps large enough to mitigate climate change alone.”
Amonette, J.; Lehmann, J.; Joseph, S., “Terrestrial Carbon Sequestration with Biochar: A Preliminary Assessment of its Global Potential”, American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2007, 12/2007
A good start for biochar is the Soil Fertility Management and Soil Biogeochemistry unit of professor Lehmann at Cornell University:
http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/index.htm (Check both biochar and terra preta (under “featuring”)).
While a good starting point for BECS is the Abrupt Climate Change Strategy group: http://accstrategy.org/ (Check under draft papers and presentations).
Alternatively, the IEA’s Bioenergy Task Forces have good info on BECS as well.
Hope that answers your question.
You should take a look at this. These guys seem to have found a
Global Warming Solution