Climate Progress

I see no point whatsoever in passing a climate bill this year that includes a safety valve. I have blogged on this before, but it bears repeating as we appear to be getting to the endgame negotiations in the Senate on the Lieberman-Warner bill. Bottom line:

If you want to get a 60% to 80% greenhouse gas cut in four decades, you just can’t waste time with safety valves. We need to get to a price of $30 to $40 a ton for carbon dioxide as soon as possible — and if it needs to go higher than that because conservatives block the progressives and moderates from legislating aggressive technology deployment strategies that would keep costs low, well, as the saying goes, “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”

If you just want to pass a bill that makes it seem like you’re doing something while in fact doing little, then go for it! But surely a year’s delay (waiting for a somewhat wiser Congress and an infinitely wiser President) is better than a pointless bill.

In an article, titled “Sponsors of Senate emissions bill seek compromise on cost provisions,” Greenwire (subs. req’d) reports today:

Senate sponsors of a major global warming bill are trying to find compromise on the vexing question of how to cap U.S. emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases without damaging the economy….

Electric utility companies, labor groups and several senators who hold critical votes on the measure still want to set some type of price ceiling on the annual price of a carbon credit….

“There’s a really serious conversation going on in a lot of venues about how this doesn’t become that last issue standing, and it’s a take-it-or-leave-it for environmentalists,” said Tim Profeta, a former senior aide to Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.)….

Senate Environment and Public Works Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) opposes the inclusion of a “safety valve” in the climate bill originally drafted by Lieberman and Sen. John Warner (R-Va.)….

The safety valve is a favored concept among economists and business types who maintain that a set carbon ceiling gives them enough certainty that the new global warming program would not sink their businesses. They insist it can also help to assure nervous lawmakers about the limited economic effects of the legislation.

It is favored among people who simply don’t get how dire the situation is. You know, maybe 10 or 15 years ago we could have given a safety valve a chance, but you just can’t ignore scientists for three decades and then think it is going to be peaches and cream. We need the full dose of anti-biotics now, not some watered down dosage that allows the fever to fester.

In one bill introduced last year from Sens. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), carbon prices in the cap-and-trade system would not go above $12 per ton in the first year. After that, the ceiling would rise 5 percent per year above the rate of inflation.

I believe it was $12 per ton of carbon dioxide – $12 per ton of carbon would be utterly meaningless. If you doubled that safety valve, $24 per ton of CO2 and 10% rise per year above inflation, that would probably be the lowest safety valve that could be tolerable — but again, waiting a year would still be better than a safety valve.

Yes, as Greenwire notes, “Three Republican senators — Specter and Alaska’s Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski — crossed a major threshold by signing up as cosponsors for the bill in part because of the safety valve,” but as I blogged earlier:

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Last week, NYT climate Andy Revkin blogged about a federal laboratory that says it can take atmospheric carbon dioxide and turn it into gasoline:

One selling point with Los Alamos’s “Green Freedom” concept, and similar ones, is that reusing the carbon atoms in the captured CO2 molecules as a fuel ingredient avoids the need to find huge repositories for the greenhouse gas.

The only problem with that exciting statement is that it is almost certainly not true, a point I will come back to.

Now the NYT has published an article on the subject that also overhypes the technology:

There is, however, a major caveat that explains why no one has built a carbon-dioxide-to-gasoline factory: it requires a great deal of energy.

To deal with that problem, the Los Alamos scientists say they have developed a number of innovations….

Even with those improvements, providing the energy to produce gasoline on a commercial scale — say, 750,000 gallons a day — would require a dedicated power plant, preferably a nuclear one, the scientists say.

Hmm. Let’s see. Problem one: Motor gasoline consumption in this country is almost 400 million gallons a day. So we would need more than 500 nuclear power plants … just in this country … and just for gasoline (you’d have to more than double that to displace all the other petroleum products we consume, like diesel fuel). And that would probably require another 5 Yucca mountains just to store the waste, although I’m not sure the word “another” is right ’cause this country can’t even agree on one friggin’ storage site in the middle of nowhere.

Problem two: According to the Los Alamos “Overview of Green Freedom,” each 750,000 gallon a day plant (with accompanying nuclear reactor) costs $5 billion. So cutting under half of all petroleum use in this country would cost over $2.5 trillion (not counting this cost of uranium or disposal)!

This supposedly yields a gasoline price of $4.60 a gallon, though the authors say with a couple more technological breakthroughs, that could drop to $3.40. How about if instead of assuming more breakthroughs, which hardly ever happen in the energy sector, we apply Romm’s Rule of Costs for Future Energy Sources.” Romm’s Rule says that for any new energy technology that is not yet commercial (and in this case we have a “concept” for which the patent was still pending in November), take the inventor’s highest projected cost and double it. Also flip a coin and if it comes up heads, the technology will never be commercialized — think fusion. And that’s generous — in reality, if the coin comes up head or tails (i.e. doesn’t land and balance on its edge) it will probably never be commercialized — remember the fuel cell was invented in 1839 and commercial fuel cells are just a tad more common than time machines. [Please note this rule does NOT apply to technologies that are already commercial.]

Problem three: Romm’s Rule of Energy Transformation. This rule, developed for analyzing hydrogen cars, says: You can probably make a sow’s ear from a silk purse if you try hard enough, but why would you do that? Zero-carbon electricity is arguably the most premium energy carrier you can make in a carbon-constrained world in part because electric motors are so efficient. Electricity can directly run a motor to move your electric car or plug in hybrid for under $1.00 a gallon, even using expensive nuclear power. You lose maybe one-fifth of the original electricity in the process. The entire Green Freedom process is so inefficient it probably throws away more than three-fourths of the original nuclear power (if not much more). Basically, after spending all that money and wasting all that premier power you are stuck with a low-grade (but conventional) fuel that has to be run through an inefficient gasoline motor. Why would you do that?

[Yes, we don’t quite yet have commercial plug ins, but they are straightforward extension of already commercial hybrids, we don’t need any technology breakthroughs, and multiple manufactures will almost certainly be selling them within three to five years. EVs will be common in other countries within the same time frame, as I’ve written. All of this will happen decades before “Green Freedom,” assuming it even proves feasible.]

Before coming to the last problem, let me complain about the NYT article, which, while skipping happily over the myriad problems with Green Freedom, bizarrely says of other alt fuels:

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In a bizarre twist, the conservative Washington Times, which would normally be critical of fuzzy environmental strategies like carbon offsets, is actually attacking the candidates for not offsetting all their campaign emissions. Opening with an absurd headline, “Green Crusades lot of talk,” the Times writes:

Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama have called for strict mandatory limits to control greenhouse gases but they aren’t leading by example — each has failed to pay for offsets to cover all of his campaign’s carbon emissions.

How does not taking (dubious) voluntary actions carry any implications about one’s commitment to serious mandatory limits? Advocating mandatory limits is based on an understanding that two decades of the voluntary approach has not reversed emissions trends. And again and again we’ve seen how offsets provide at best a limited environmental benefit (click on “offsets” category on right hand column).

Surely the WT can find more things stories to write about … I’ve heard it said Senator McCain has called for carbon limits that are in fact mandatory, but he refuses to call them mandatory … nah, no story there….

Anyone interested in oil should see There will be Blood, since it is a great film that tells a fascinating and detailed story of the early days of the oil industry in California.

Okay, it’s Oscar week. I try to see all the Best Picture nominees, which is much tougher now that I have a one-year-old daughter. I missed Atonement [so far], but my wife read the book, so half credit. And lord knows after seeing No Country for Old Men, I don’t need to see another downbeat movie — uhh, sorry for the spoiler but if you thought a movie titled No Country for Old Men (or Atonement) was upbeat, you get out even less than I do these days.

I don’t think “There will be Blood” is the best picture of the year — but it is very good. Certainly the performance by Daniel Day-Lewis should take the Oscar, and the cinematography and music are fantastic.

But as a depiction of the grueling work of producing oil, it has no equal. Assuming you’ve read The Prize by Daniel Yergin, this is a must see. Just leave five minutes before the end and you’ll be happy….

Andy Revkin of the NYT has a good blog post on one of the main problems with climate messaging by scientists, environmentalists, and the like. In short, it sucks!

One problem is the name “global warming” or “climate change.” It sounds like a vacation, not a crisis.

Indeed, one of the main reasons I titled my book Hell and High Water is that I thought it was a better term — more accurate of what is to come if we don’t act, more descriptive, more visceral — and I hoped (faintly) it might become more widely used. But other than being projected onto the Washington Monument by Greenpeace, nada!

Names do matter. As conservative message-meister Frank Luntz wrote a few years ago in an infamous memo that explains precisely how a politician can sound as if he or she cares about global warming but doesn’t actually want to do anything about it:

“Climate change” is less frightening than global warming. As one focus group participant noted, climate change “sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.” While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.

So you should probably use “global warming,” but probably not waste a lot of effort trying to rename something that is deeply embedded in both scientific and popular usage. Also, I don’t think the name is the main problem. Revkin cites a marketing expert who said,

If the problem were called “Atmosphere cancer” or “Pollution death” the entire conversation would be framed in a different way.

But if that were true, how did the incredibly unsexy and unscary name “ozone depletion” drive international action to proatively ban chlorofluorocarbons, even winning the support of Ronald Reagan, nobody’s idea of an environmentalist? The answer is that “ozone depletion” actually leads directly to cancer and not in the distant future (and Reagan had had skin cancer).

Global warming was always going to be a tough sell, given its long timescale and mostly indirect impacts on human health, even without the incredibly effective disinformation campaign that has been waged for the past decade. Words do matter, though, and I will be publishing a detailed article later in the week that will delve into one of the biggest language mistakes I think scientists and climate activists have made….

“The coal industry says it can trap its global warming gases and put them back in the ground where they came from - a process called carbon capture and storage. But the federal government just pulled the plug on the biggest carbon capture project, Futuregen. Living on Earth’s Jeff Young reports on the big questions about carbon capture and coal’s future.”

It is always worth remembering what we are fighting for: the next generation!

For some reason I can’t embed this video, so you’ll just have to watch it at YouTube.

I actually am an American Idol fan, but It’s Academic and Jeopardy it ain’t.

Okay, so that is a rhetorical question, thanks to today’s business story, “Silicon Valley Starts to Turn Its Face to the Sun.” Perhaps people will stop claiming that blogs are the place where information is presented with no context. Some day.

Anyone reading the NYT article would be left with the decided impression that solar power has been waiting on the sidelines for Silicon Valley to make it a success:

… some of the valley’s best brains are captivated by the challenge, and they hope to put the development of solar technologies onto a faster track.

A faster track? As BP notes, the “Ten-year average annual growth rate was 31%” for photovoltaic capacity. Growth exceeded 40% in 2004 and 2005. The only power source with growth that is even comparable is wind power.

I have great hopes that Silicon Valley can help keep PV on this fast track, but solar is already le train a grande vitesse, n’est-ce pas? Pardon my French.

While technology development is critical — and the US Federal Government has played an important role here for decades — most of the PV generation capacity growth has been in Japan and Germany, driven primarily by government incentives that are scarce in this country.

The article, which is somewhat informative for solar newbies, unfortunately ends by saying

The fear of a solar bubble is legitimate, but … solar energy may gain traction [!] because of a simpler rule than Moore’s Law: where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Yeah, solar may gain traction … some day … if people have the will….

NOTE to NYT: Solar has gained traction already. And futher growth won’t be driven by “will,” it will be driven by, uhh, the growing consensus on the need to price carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming and, uhh, record high energy prices that will no doubt be even higher in a decade, coupled with technology improvements and mass production techniques, some (but probably not most) of which will come from Silicon Valley. But I guess the real story is not sexy enough for the Gray Lady.

Investors Eye Climate Role at UN - Associated Press. “Hundreds of investors controlling $20 trillion in capital were set to gather Thursday for talks on financial risks and opportunities from limiting carbon emissions that scientists blame for global warming.”

Exchanges merge to create spot market for carbon - Reuters. “Two European carbon trading exchanges are merging their platforms to offer spot trading in European Union and United Nations credits, they said on Thursday.”

Asia’s tigers eye nuclear future - Asia Times Online. An interesting regional review of nuclear power’s growth in East and Southeast Asia - the only part of the globe where the nuclear power industry really is rapidly growing to meet energy needs. This article is mostly historical (not political), but notes some difficulties with nuclear we don’t face as regularly - like safety breaches caused by earthquakes.

Late last week the American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE), made up of over 500 organizations (including Fortune 500 companies like Google, universities, non-profits, etc.), presented a letter to Congress encouraging them to extend the Production Tax Credit and Investment Tax Credit for renewable energy.

As we’ve noted, the tax credits are at risk to lapse, which would just be a generally bad idea - for the economy, for renewable industries, for the potential job creation, and for the greenhouse gas reductions that the impacted projects could be making.

Pulling a few points from their letter:

That in addition to the 116,000 wind and solar jobs at risk.

ACORE points out in its article an invasion I’d also like to emphasize - the first week of March, Washington, DC hosts WIREC - the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference. The utility and attendance of the event I could hardly begin to describe. DC will be flooded with information and opportunity on renewables, and there will be so much to do (between panels, exhibits, side events, etc.), I don’t know how one could begin to create a schedule.

That is the same feeling our Congress should feel - overwhelmed by the interest and opportunities of the future. Hundreds of companies and utilities have expressed their desire to see regulatory global warming legislation. And now hundreds more have signed on to encourage the solutions. Yet we still can’t seem to extend these credits - not even pass something new, just extend something that’s been around the last 7 years of this administration and beyond!

It is no joke that the missing ingredient is political will, and it’s spoiling untold amounts.

– Kari M.