Thanks for these posts. I am a TCP climate change presenter (sorry I missed you at Lise Vansusteren’s house last year) , and I am folding your stuff into my presentation. I am hoping you will consolidate the posts so we can access the whole easily.

Thanks, again,

Norm Mosher

Keep your mind open to new information, then make your judgments, which should always be tentative and ready to accommodate innovation and improvement.

You have one wedge for cars at 60mpg, and then just below that you say most cars are electric or plug in hybrid. I’m somewhat confused about this, because if most cars are electric or can go at least 40 miles on zero carbon electricity, won’t cars average a whole lot more than 60mpg? If I analyse my families driving, and we live in suburbia, drive our kids to school every day etc, we’d get a lot more than 60 mpg with a plug-in hybrid, or an electric car with a 100 mile range. We’d almost never have to use petroleum.

I also think that if applied engineering skill to greater gas mileage as opposed to acceleration, did something about reducing weight in cars, increased battery quality etc, all of these would make a substantial difference.

I know this isn’t very technical and doesn’t have a lot of numbers, but its my effort to ask you to consider electrication of vehicles as possibly more than 1 wedge.

http://www.newscientist.com/ blog/ environment/ 2008/ 04/ even-homeless-have-large-carbon.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=specrt10_head_Big%20footprints

The wedge is “reducing emissions from the consumption of greenhouse intensive commodities”. This would be from both reducing consumption of these commodities (possibly substituting less greenhouse intensive commodities), and using technologies that reduce emissions associated with their production (e.g. aluminium recycling).

I believe I have a wedge because just three commodities: beef, aluminium, and cement, use over a GtC for their production. I am not including the land use change associated with beef production (land use change emissions from livestock are approx. 2.4 billion tons of CO2), because that could possibly be included in another wedge: “Reduced deforestation, plus reforestation, afforestation, and new plantations.” (Wedge 14, Pacala and Socolow, 2004).

I am assuming that one wedge is a billion metric tonnes of carbon, which is 3.66 Gt CO2-e. I am also using 100 year IPCC AR4 global warming potentials for methane and N2O. I estimate that cement is presently responsible for 1.0 Gt CO2, aluminium is responsible for 471 Mt CO2, enteric emissions from beef are 65.8 Mt CH4 (1.646 Gt CO2-e), methane emissions from cattle manure are 7.49 Mt (187 Mt CO2-e), N2O emissions from cattle manure are 2.05 Mt (611 Mt CO2-e). These add up to 3.915 Gt CO2-e, slightly more than one wedge.

There are other commodities that I have not included, such as other meats such as lamb, newsprint, steel, fertilisers, sugar, chemicals, and so on. The emissions from aluminium production are mainly from electricity so there could be a small amount of overlap with wedges that decarbonise electricity generation, but other commodities such as lamb and steel have significant emissions that are not electricity related. A policy that would suffice to drive emissions down by one wedge by 2050 would be a sufficiently high carbon price that covers emissions from as many sectors as possible.

The figures for emissions from beef are from the FAO “Livestock’s Long Shadow” report: http://www.virtualcentre.org/en/frame.htm; I estimated the emissions from aluminium production by using aluminium production figures from http://www.indexmundi.com/ en/ commodities/ minerals/ aluminum/ aluminum_table12.html, and an emissions intensity figure of 17.01 t CO2-e/t from http://www.account2001.scb.se/Poganietz.PDF; the cement production figure was obtained from ‘Emissions in the Platinum Age: the implications of rapid development for climate change mitigation’ by Ross Garnaut, Stephen Howes, Frank Jotzo and Peter Sheehan at http://www.garnautreview.org.au/ CA25734E0016A131/ pages/ reports-and-papers.

Cheers

Peter

I calculate energy for whole the world for a century (10 million TWh) from Greenland generators as electricity and tenfold of the Antarctic icemass.

And fresh water for all cities and dry areas. Forget all other energy making, that is enough.

There is 3 million cubic kilometers ice in Greenland, and 500 000 km3 of it above the level 2500 m. First the upper level, and later the second best 2200 m and so on. You leave, of course, the downmost 500 meters there for albedo.

The Greenland ice is melting away in any case, why let it melt into the sea and rise the sea level 7 meters? Makes no sense. Take the world-saving energy and ship the ice for water, no more climate catastrophe.

Our new high voltage direct current cables have only 3% loss per 1000 km, so the cables connect USA, EU and China neatly in this electric grid.

And hydrogen economy, that is there. Make hydrogen in Greenland (read The Antarctica), or in the far end of the cables where ever.

This is the real wedge, and I am very surprised about the cleverness of our
scientists when missing this simple solution for energy.