http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/ 2008/ jun/ 08/ climatechange.greenpolitics

The report has a long list of new “technological breakthroughs” (the phrase that it uses) in its Annex C needed to achieve its costs estimates. Does your endorsement of its cost estimates mean that you also accept its assumptions that such breakthroughs are needed?

Also, the report assumes a spontaneous decarbonization of the global economy to 2050 of about 1.8% per year. This takes care of about 53 Gt CO2 in future emissions reductions, more than the 48 Gt it calls for. There is an order-of-magnitude play in the cost estimates as a function of assumptions of energy intensity decline. No one knows the future, but clearly, different assumptions could lead to different results.

see sciencepolicy.colorado.edu

None of this is an argument against action, but it is an argument against misleading people with rosy scenarios — if $45 trillion can be called “rosy”.

Second, your use of the word “spontaneous” continues to mislead. You label all changes beyond “frozen technology” as “spontaneous.” That makes no sense.

The issue is why the changes in energy efficiency and decarbonization occur in the IEA (and IPCC) scenarios beyond “frozen technology.” As the IPCC explains, “The range labelled ‘frozen technology’ refers to hypothetical futures without improvement in energy and carbon intensities in the scenarios.”

The key point here is that frozen technology includes existing technology that has not yet been deployed, as well as improvements to existing technology, as well as new technology. Is it somehow a mistake for the IEA and IPCC to assume that people will actually keep deploying existing technology that turns out to be economical, or that they will continue improving existing technology as they have for centuries, or that they will develop new technologies?

Of course not! Especially with energy prices as high as they are now unlikely to get higher in coming decades and especially if the world introduces a high carbon price (as the IEA recommends) and if there are new policies aimed at promoting technology deployment and removing barriers to things like energy-efficient technologies that are already cost-effective (as the IEA recommends).

Indeed, the higher the future energy prices, the more investments today save everybody large amounts of spending in the future.

Again, I don’t really understand the purpose of your analysis. If you were right, and if you want to avoid 6°C of warming, then the obvious conclusion is to start sooner. You always sound like you are trying to discourage people from taking action.

1. Semantics again — I am pretty sure that EIA’s 5 page list of needed “technological breakthroughs” has something to do with “technological breakthroughs” but perhaps you can parse that for us.

2. I’d be interested in hearing from you what actions will lead to future energy intensity declines resulting in the assumed decreases but ***that are not already on the EIA list for getting from the BASELINE to the BLUE scenario***.

Care to offer a few?

NOTE: There is already assumptions about “deploying existing technology that turns out to be economical, or that they will continue improving existing technology as they have for centuries, or that they will develop new technologies” — the EI declines require steps not on the mitigation list of actions — otherwise you’d be double counting.

No hand waving, just give me some specifics.

0) You mean IEA, not EIA.

1) A common mistake, Roger. I’ll get to this. But obviously one key area is that the IEA thinks we need hydrogen — and that requires multiple breakthroughs (cheap zero-carbon H2, H2 storage, fuel cells). Also, they believe we need a breakthrough in batteries. None of the experts I talk to believe that, and in fact, they all think we either have good enough technology now or will within 3 to 5 years. I drove a plug in that used ultracaps to bypass the need for any battery improvement.

2) Easy to do. Again, Roger, we’ve been through this. Energy intensity historically improves without climate policy. Frozen technology is not a rational base case since technology is not frozen. So let’s take two examples. First, compact fluorescent light bulbs. They haven’t reached full market penetration yet. You want to assume they never will do so on their own absent climate policies. I think that makes no sense.

Second, energy intensity gains have historically been HIGHER than assumed by IEA in their base case during times of high energy prices. Well, energy prices have gotten unbelievably high in the last two years, and we are already seeing a first every year over year decline in U.S. VMT.

Indeed, the best way to see the expected impact of this is to look at the U.S. EIA’s change in energy demand forecast from last year’s annual energy Outlook to this year’s, which just came out.

They dropped their annual projection of electricity demand growth from 1.8% per year through 2030 to 1.1% per year! And they are still assuming oil prices in 2030 considerably lower than they already are now!

Your “NOTE” makes no sense. Frozen technology assumes none of those things happen. Yet all of those happen even in the absence of climate change.

Sorry, increased deployment of compact fluorescent light bulbs (and other lighting technologies) are already part of the BLUE scenario, so you can’t use them for achieving the BASELINE (see pp. 546-548 in the IEA report).

Care to try again?

The report actually makes no value judgments on the cost of life. It does make clear the cost is not a high compared to the cost of doing nothing.

You have misread the report. In the baseline, energy intensity improves because there is some efficiency from better technology and also some saturation of residential energy demand. The non-baseline scenarios have a lot more efficiency penetration occurring a lot faster in them.

See for instance the “Baseline scenario results by sector and region” pages 528 to 534. ON page 530, the report states,
“in the baseline scenario, energy consumption in the building sector grew by 1% per year in the OECD countries between 2005 and 2050. This is slower than the growth in floor areas in both the service and residential sectors, implying a continuing improvement in the energy intensity of energy consumption in the sector to a mix of structural and efficiency effects.

On page 532, the report notes that China already has efficiency standards and that sales of some large appliances “are experiencing slower growth as they reach saturation levels. Appliance efficiency improvements are expected to offset part of the impact of rising claims ownership on residential electricity demand.”

And since you didn’t dispute my point on oil prices, I’ll also take that as an agreement on that point.

Let me note that the report rather absurdly assumes “the oil price has been capped at USD 65/bbl for the period 2030 to 2050″!!!! Indeed, they seem to think the price in the baseline will be flat until 2030. Apparently the authors of this report didn’t read the other recent IEA reports on oil I have blogged on. Absent any strong climate policies, oil prices will be much higher — I will come back to this point in a later post.

So I think we can move beyond this particularly quibble.

I was having the same thought. Personally I don’t care about the cost of saving our race. The way I see it, it all boils down to a metaphor.

Some guy walks up to you and says he’s going to kill everybody you care about including you, unless you give him all your cash.

Seems like an easy answer. Let’s get busy.

I can see why you’d like to gloss over this point.

You write, “In the baseline, energy intensity improves because there is some efficiency from better technology and also some saturation of residential energy demand.”

Can you humor me my explaining what ‘better technologies’ you are referring to that are not already used in the mitigation scenarios that result in an energy intensity reduction of 1.8% per year for 45 years? Put another way, I need 15 wedges worth of emissions reductions to even get to the BASELINE. Or are they just going to occur automatically?

Did you bother to even read the report? It has VERY detailed technology timelines as to what is in the baseline and what isn’t.

Here are a few examples from the report. This is all in the baseline (please note this isn’t everything — I do have useful things to do other than reading the report for you).

* 160 GW of Generation III+ nuclear plants by 2050.
* 400 GW of wind
* Huge amounts of efficiency in electricity and buildings (since “technologies already commercial”) — “improved thermal performance of new and existing dwellings,” “appliance efficiency improvements”
* Improvements in heat pump technology that increase energy efficiency and carbon footprint by 5%.
* 650 GW of solar space and water heating
* Huge amounts of efficiency in transportation — 10% to 25% lower fuel use in 2050 from LDV fuel economy improvements. 5-15% market share of hybrids in 2050
* 1000 Mtoe of 2nd generation biofuels

I think that is enough, don’t you?

Except for Jack Benny (Caveat: Comment requires cultural relevancy.)

jc

You continue to show that you do not understand the meaning of a BASELINE scenario. The numbers that are provided in the report (or by you) do not add up to reductions of 53 GtCO2. Consider:

*Solar makes almost no contribution to the BASELINE (p. 367) [Once again by including solar in the BASELINE you confuse the BASELINE and MITIGATION scenarios]

*Wind contributes 2% to the BASELINE (p. 343), and thus cannot by definition provide a large contribution to reductions implicit in the BASELINE

*Nuclear increases by very little (1 TW/yr) (p. 284), and similarly cannot produce a large contribution to EI declines

*Assumed decreases in fuel use are exactly the problem — they are just convenient assumptions, how will they occur separately from the ? (p. 428) How will vehicle miles traveled be limited to a tripling as the global economy increases by a factor of 4? Such assumptions are convenient, but they influence the conclusions in significant degree.

You have provided maybe 3-4 GtCO2 (1+ wedge) worth of reductions in your list above, even including the unsupported assumptions. Is that enough? No, it is not. You need about 10-12 more wedges.

When we are talking about the accuracy of a $45T price tag is it a waste of time to see if it is an accurate estimate?

It is amazing that you endorse the results of a report that (a) calls for a range of technological breakthroughs requiring massive new investments in RD&D, (b) requires 90% penetration of fuel cell vehicles (for its $200/ton marginal cost estimate), (c) has 15 GtC of built-in wedges (but not explanation for the majority of these).

Also, I wonder if you’ve looked at Promoting Energy Efficiency Investments — Case Studies in the Residential Sector, 324 pages, which also looked interesting.

This is one of the problems we don’t seem to want to accept. Consumerism will always (for the foreseeable future) generate by products that are not good for the environment. Unless we step down a large notch in our standard of living, based on ‘a material world’ then were suckered. Things are coming to a head here because we are reaching the limit of available resources base on our current population, technology and intellect.

A more serious concern is who is to bear these costs. Cann’t be those trying to live on $1–2 per day.

I would say throwing out “$45 trillion” without explaining what it means as is nicely done here is pretty misleading, as is failing to account for the tremendous economic benefit that will offset most of the initial investment, independent of the long-term economic benefit of global environmental protection. It’s also not a rosy scenario to assume strong technological advancement over decades, especially when signficant market incentives are introduced and R&D is ramped up significantly. Progress under these market environments may be underestimated.

A similar analysis could be done with coal and natural gas. While capital costs (initial investments) are high with renewables and nuclear, fuel costs make up a much higher proportion of costs for fossil fuel power plants. Nuclear fuel is lower in cost and renewables are essentially free.

100 million Twh in Greenland and 1000 million Twh in the Antarctica.

In any case the bushian BAU melts these icemasses into the high sea and you find yourselves drowned and so on. Take the ice and ship it for fresh water around the world. Energy and water and no climate catastrophe any more.

As I have commented before, the clear responsibility of someone in Roger’s position of no little influence, is constant, unremitting, passionate advocacy of avoidance of dangerous human interference in the climate, providing of course that he believes such interference is likely. If he doesn’t believe that, he should be honest and let us know that he is at odds with nearly every respectable climate scientist. If he believes it, and fails the advocacy test, he’s a delayer 1000 in my book.