Climate Progress

One of global warming’s most immediate and devastating effects comes from the melting glaciers. From Bhutan to Peru, glacier melt is accelerating. As the Melting Andean Glaciers Could Leave 30 Million High and Dry puts it:

Loss of glaciers in the Andes mountain range is threatening the water supply of 30 million people, and scientists say the lower altitude glaciers could disappear in 10 years.

What’s happening to those most closely tied to the glaciers?

His community can no longer can seed indigenous potatoes in fields located at lower levels, because sufficient water does not flow there any longer. “We must seed them to greater height. But every year that happens, also we have less earth in mountains, Felipe says. “In few years more, no longer we will have no place to seed these potatoes.”

Maybe they should move to the cities? But wait:

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Bush blames Congress’s failure to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for high gasoline prices (here). The Administration’s own Energy Information Administration found otherwise in a 2004 Congressional-requested “Analysis of Oil and Gas Production in ANWR“:

It is expected that the price impact of ANWR coastal plain production might reduce world oilprices by as much as 30 to 50 cents per barrel [in 2025].

Don’t spend it all in one place, American public! [Note to Bush: There are 42 gallons in a barrel.] EIA continues:

Assuming that world oil markets continue to work as they do today, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries could countermand any potential price impact of ANWR coastal plain production by reducing its exports by an equal amount.

Curses, foiled again!

Then again, it’s laughable of the EIA to think OPEC (or anyone else) will have any spare capacity in 2025 (see “Peak Oil? Bring it on!“). But that’s the EIA for you.

Now, in “fairness” to the EIA, they did report at the time that the 30 to 50 cent per barrel price is

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This post will explain why some sort of massive government Apollo program or Manhattan project to develop new breakthrough technologies is not a priority component of the effort to stabilize at 450 ppm.

Put more quantitatively, the question is — What are the chances that multiple (4 to 8+) carbon-free technologies that do not exist today can each deliver the equivalent of 350 Gigawatts baseload power (~2.8 billion Megawatt-hours a year) and/or 160 billion gallons of gasoline cost-effectively by 2050? [Note — that is about half of a stabilization wedge.] For the record, the U.S. consumed about 3.7 billion MW-hrs in 2005 and about 140 billion gallons of motor gasoline.

Put that way, the answer to the question is painfully obvious: “two chances — slim and none.” Indeed, I have repeatedly challenged readers and listeners over the years to name even a single technology breakthrough with such an impact in the past three decades, after the huge surge in energy funding that followed the energy shocks of the 1970s. Nobody has ever named a single one that has even come close.

Yet somehow the government is not just going to invent one TILT (Terrific Imaginary Low-carbon Technology) in the next few years, we are going to invent several TILTs. Seriously. Hot fusion? No. Cold fusion? As if. Space solar power? Come on, how could that ever compete with CSP? Hydrogen? It ain’t even an energy source, and after billions of dollars of public and private research in the past 15 years — including several years running of being the single biggest focus of the DOE office on climate solutions I once ran — it still has actually no chance whatsoever of delivering a major cost-effective climate solution by midcentury (see “This just in: Hydrogen fuel cell cars are still dead“).

I don’t know why the breakthrough crowd can’t see the obvious — so I will elaborate here. I will also dicusss a major study that explains why deployment programs are so much more important than R&D at this point. Let’s keep this simple:

• To stabilize at 450 ppm, we need to deploy by 2050 at least 14 stabilization wedges (each delivering 1 billion tons of avoided carbon) covering both efficient energy use and carbon-free supply (see Part 1).
• Myriad energy-efficient technologies are already cost-effective today — breaking down the barriers to their deployment now is much, much more important than developing new “breakthrough” efficient TILTs, since those would simply fail in the marketplace because of the same barriers. Cogeneration is perhaps the clearest example of this.
• On the supply side, deployment programs (coupled with a price for carbon) will always be much, much more important than R&D programs because new technologies take an incredibly long time to achieve mass-market commercial success. New supply TILTs would not simply emerge at a low cost. They need volume, volume, volume — steady and large increases in demand over time to bring the cost down, as I discuss at length below.
• No existing or breakthrough technology is going to beat the price of power from a coal plant that has already been built — the only way to deal with those plants is a high price for carbon or a mandate to shut them down. Indeed, that’s why we must act immediately not to build those plants in the first place.
• If a new supply technology can’t deliver half a wedge, it won’t be a big player in achieving 450 ppm.

For better or worse, we are stuck through 2050 with the technologies that are commercial today (like solar thermal electric) or that are very nearly commercial (like plug-in hybrids).

I have discussed most of this at length in previous posts (listed below), so I won’t repeat all the arguments here. Let me just focus on a few key points. A critical historical fact was explained by Royal Dutch/Shell, in their 2001 scenarios for how energy use is likely to evolve over the next five decades (even with a carbon constraint):

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They titled their piece, “Bush rhetoric on energy strays from the facts.” Some people might call that making stuff up, but who can complain about a story that begins:

President Bush put politics ahead of the facts Tuesday as he sought to blame Congress for high energy prices, saying foreign suppliers are pumping just about all the oil they can and accusing lawmakers of blocking new refineries.

Bush renewed his call for drilling in an Arctic wildlife refuge, but his own Energy Department says that would have little impact on gasoline prices.

And then goes on to compare Bush’s “spin” with the facts. Kudos to AP’s H. Josef Hebert, who has been at this game a long time.

George W. Bush — dark green? I kid you not. Here’s what he said in his press conference today:

One thing I think that would be — I know would be very creative policy is if we — is if we would buy food from local farmers as a way to help deal with scarcity, but also as a way to put in place an infrastructure so that nations can be self-sustaining and self-supporting. It’s a proposal I put forth that Congress hasn’t responded to yet, and I sincerely hope they do.

I have no idea what he’s talking about — what proposal did he put forward to Congress about local food? But I’m sure the 100-Mile Diet folks are on the phone with the White House right now.

What’s next for Bush — composting?

Bush had a press conference this morning (see here) to blame Congress for soaring energy and food prices: ”Unfortunately, on many of these issues, all they [Americans’ are getting is delay.”

What does non-delayer Bush propose. Well, of course, new technology — what else is new old? (see here and here). Heck, he even said the long-term answer was hydrogen. [Not!]

Oh but he did offer some “short-term” solutions. His anwer to rising electricity prices — nukes:

As electricity prices rise, Congress continues to block provisions needed to increase domestic electricity production by expanding the use of clean, safe nuclear power.

[Pause for laughter.]

Bush seems unaware of the soaring prices for nukes (see “Power plants costs double since 2000 — Efficiency anyone“). I am preparing a major analysis on this topic. Suffice it to say for now that a new nuclear power plant would probably not be able to deliver power substantially below $0.15 a kilowatt hour (not counting transmission and distribution costs)! Nuclear power is about the last form of electricity you would turn to if you care about price — or if you cared about delivering power in a hurry, for that matter.

High oil prices? That’s any easy one. It’s Congress’s fault for not opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, says the President.

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[Bill Becker says that a better stimulus than a rebate check would be vouchers for energy-efficient products.]

This is the week that all patriotic Americans will begin hitting the malls to rescue the U.S. economy — a redo of the Bush Administration’s appeal after 9-11 that we boost the economy by going shopping.

By the end of this week, nearly 8 million taxpayers will find rebates automatically deposited in their bank accounts. By July, the Treasury Department will distribute 130 million more rebates by mail — typically $600 for each individual taxpayer, $1,200 for couples filing jointly and $300 for each child. The talk in Congress is that another round of rebates may follow later this year.

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Someone else who makes Climate Progress and most everybody else into optimists, relatively speaking.

“In the new world order, energy scarcity will dominate our lives — determining when we drive, if we travel, and what we eat” — so says Michael T. Klare, Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies.

Klare is in the Kunstler school of energy dystopia, not a view I share (see “Why I don’t agree with James Kunstler about peak oil and the “end of suburbia“).

He writes in Salon (here):

What this adds up to is simple and sobering: the end of the world as you’ve known it. In the new, energy-centric world we have all now entered, the price of oil will dominate our lives and power will reside in the hands of those who control its global distribution.

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Because this series has turned out to be so popular, I’m going to expand it to cover more issues relevant to The Question of the Century Millenium in the headline. This post will lay out the full series as I now envision it, and the final post, probably sometime next week, will include a revised version of “The Solution,” the 14 wedges, based on recent input I have received

I am definitely open to being lobbied on the final 14 wedges. But only by people who take the trouble to go back to the original Princeton analysis (and my comments on it) and present seriously-calculated wedges that save 1 gigaton of carbon by 2050 and that don’t double count (i.e. don’t save carbon already saved by existing wedges).

That said, don’t waste your time trying to convince me there is more than one wedge of biofuels, nuclear, or coal with CCS. Too many smart people I know think those choices are already way too optimistic. [BTW, I would NOT use much of the biofuels wedge for car and light truck travel. I would use it for things like air travel and long-distance trucking.]

Here is how the series will unfold:

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The nation’s top climate scientists, James Hansen, has just published a general-audience article, “Tipping Point,” in “2008-2009 State of the Wild,” from Island Press. It is well worth sending to folks who don’t like all the math. His key points:

We are at the tipping point because the climate state includes large, ready positive feedbacks provided by the Arctic sea ice, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and much of Greenland’s ice….

Prior major warmings in Earth’s history, the most recent occurring 55 million years ago . . . resulted in the extinction of half or more of the species then on the planet….

In my view, special interests have undue sway with our governments and have effectively promoted minimalist actions and growth in fossil fuels, rather than making the scale of investments necessary.

You might also like this figure on “cumulative fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions by different countries as a percent of global total”:

China has a long way to go to catch up to this country — let alone the entire industrialized world — on cumulative emissions (though they are obviously trying as hard as they can).