I would also point out to Nordhaus that Gore has had a huge effect internationally as well as in the US. You only have to look at the shift in media coverage, as well as the furious response that he has engendered.

The ‘invisible hand’ of the market is settling the matter for at least biofuels.

No one has yet confronted the BI argument that, for maximum deployment, it is better to reduce the cost of alternatives than to raise the price of fossil.

Other, even more efficient, biofuels will be on the market in a few years. The biomass for these processes can be grown on lands unsuited to either agriculture or forestry.

It appears you took the 1.3 cents from 50/tonneC, scaled to 132/tonneC to get 3.4 cents per kWh, and then used that to calculate a percentage. However that is not the correct way to do the calculation, because coal is not 100% of the U.S. grid (it is approximately 49%).

After 49% coal, the next fossil is natural gas at 20%, and the next petroleum at 1.6%, and other gases at 0.4%. I think we can ignore anything but the natural gas, and adding in 1.3 cents per kWh and weighting by the shares, I get 1.9 cents per kWh, or just a 20% increase.

Joe is correct that this is unlikely to drive residential and commercial efficiency. The way to drive that is well trodden. We just need to implement California’s energy efficiency policies at the Federal level to get a 43% decrease in per capita energy usage.

However, 3.4 cents per kWh is probably enough to make most traditional new coal power plants uneconomic.

By the way, the 2006 cost of electricity in the most efficient state, California, was 12.82 cents per kWh, 44% higher than the U.S. average of 8.90 cents per kWh. However, at 7032 kWh/Californian vs. 12,347 kWh/American, that means that Californians pay 197 less per person per year than the rest of the country.

Adopting California efficiency policy at the Federal level would save enough electric energy that we could shut down 80% of our coal power plants if the grid were perfect. A regional analysis would be required to figure out what would happen given regional needs. Please note that this 80% reduction requires only 1970s thinking (that is when California started on its efficiency binge); no breakthrough needed for this piece.

It’s not clear to me why there is so much skepticism from Joe Romm and others about the Pielke paper in Nature. From a policy analysis/planning standpoint, you have to do a detailed analysis of what the likely possible futures are. In the water business, we typically assumed ONE baseline future and compare all planning options against that one future. This is completely inadequate because any future scenario implies assumptions about actual human decisions and these decisions are driven by markets, politics, policies, and a host of other drivers. We water planners are getting better at considering multiple possible future baselines and analyzing what those multiple futures mean for current decisions.

The same is true for climate policy. It’s reasonable to point out that future trends embedded in IPCC scenarios may not materialize. To assume a certain trend of technological change (and therefore emmissions reductions), implies assumptions about human decisions in politics, policy, markets etc. These things aren’t going to happen magically, they will happen only if human decisions result in them happening. To acknowledge that fact and consider possible impacts of future trends going a different direction is responsible policy analysis and planning. The only thing certain about these kinds of problems is that our projections are almost always wrong. Considering the uncertainties and developing robust solutions given those uncertainties is a must if we are to end up with desirable outcomes. It complicates things, but, as has been stated repeatedly, this is an incredibly complicated and difficult problem.

So why the original controversy? Is it just old fights resurfacing in new ways? Either way, this is fascinating and I look forward to reading more.

and here:
http://www.wind-works.org/articles/feed_laws.html
and here:
http://terraverde.wordpress.com/ 2008/ 03/ 17/ the-renewable-electron-economy-xiv-renewable-energy-finance-and-feed-in-tariffs/

Effective feed in tariffs are wholesale electric generation rates priced at cost plus reasonable profit and then scaled down to drive efficiencies in the manufacture of RE generators. I have proposed that a subset of feed in tariffs can be used to incentivize the building of RE generators that can emulate the electrical output of coal and natural gas generators, thus allowing the phase-out or partial mothballing of fossil generators. You could call them “climate protection tariffs”.

We need to start finding out asap. The longer we leave it the harder it will be.

http://jcwinnie.biz/wordpress/?p=2815

As for the cost of carbon dioxide, about $200–300 per tonne of CO2 suffices to bury the carbon content back in the ground. Potentially CCS is maybe $60–100 per tonne of CO2.