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They’re back! I’ve been bombarded by people wanting a comment on the new S&N L.A. Times piece, “The green bubble bursts.” How about “naive and dangerous”?

Shellenberger and Nordhaus get coverage in the media because they are green(ish) recyclers of rubbish. They take piles of garbage (i.e. Republican talking points) and repackage them with some green-sounding lingo and then put their green credentials behind them. I have been ignoring them for a while now, but this piece is high profile and even more outrageous than their typical attacks on the environmental community and Al Gore.

The recycling begins in the first paragraph:

Republicans stole the energy issue from Democrats by proposing expanded drilling — particularly lifting bans on offshore oil drilling — to bring down gasoline prices. Whereas Barack Obama told Americans to properly inflate their tires, Republicans at their convention gleefully chanted “Drill, baby, drill!” Obama’s point on conservation and efficiency was lost on an electorate eager for a solution to what they perceive as a supply crisis.

No, that wasn’t written by Karl Rove, although it sounds like it.

“Barack Obama told Americans to properly inflate their tires.” You must be kidding. That is precisely the GOP talking point — heck, the GOP even handed out tire gauges to mock Obama on this (see “Will GOP’s cynical lies destroy the chance for serious energy and climate policy?“).

Why would anybody claiming to care about progressive politics or clean energy repeat such a lie? In fact, Obama was asked by a voter what individuals can do to conserve. And Obama stated correctly that measures like proper tire inflation and tuning up your car can save more oil than coast drilling would provide.

To ignore Obama’s entire energy plan and suggest that somehow it can be summed up by “Obama told Americans to properly inflate their tires” is to be nothing more than a cynical GOP shill.

Obama has the most comprehensive energy plan ever offered by a Presidential candidate (see “Breaking news — A real energy plan for America: Efficiency now, 10% renewables by 2012, and one million plug-in hybrids by 2015” and a terrific climate plan (see “Obama’s excellent energy and climate plan“). In fact, his climate plan has so much clean energy in it that, to my great surprise, S&N took up my challenge from last year and endorsed it. But you’d never know anything about Obama’s plan from reading this piece.

Let’s continue with a stunning series of paragraphs, in which Shellenberger and Nordhaus reveal their policies to be all but indistinguishable from those of global warming delayers:

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The American Physical Society has released a major study on the crucial role that energy efficiency must play to achieving energy security and reducing global warming.

According to the APS, Energy Future: Think Efficiency “differs from other energy efficiency reports in its emphasis on scientific and technological options and analysis.” The report has three overarching conclusions:

• Improving energy efficiency is a relatively easy and inexpensive way to significantly reduce the nation’s demand for imported oil and its greenhouse gas emissions without causing any loss of comfort or convenience.
• Numerous technologies exist today to increase the efficiency of U.S. vehicles and buildings in ways that could save individual consumers money. But without federal policies to overcome market barriers, the U.S. is unlikely to capitalize on these technologies.
• Far greater increases in energy efficiency are available in the future, but realizing these potential gains will require a larger and better focused federal research and development program on energy efficiency than exists today.

The two biggest quantitative conclusions concern the transportation and building sectors:

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I have an article in today’s Guardian online, “Is the Chevy Volt just hype?” I argue that the key to the near-term success for plug ins in this country is government incentives and mandates, which in turn will critically depend on the outcome of the presidential election. But that should not be a surprise, since no country in the world has achieved significant market penetration of an alternative-fuel vehicle without major government incentives and mandates.

I noted that one alternative fuel vehicle expert told me that GM has “already sunk at least $1bn into the Volt and cannot reasonably expect a profit from a $45,000 new car in an economy which is imploding. The actual cost of the vehicle may be higher.” And that leads to two key, related points:

If this country doesn’t strongly embrace plug-ins, Europe may well become the leader. After all, gas prices are considerably higher in Europe, which means plug-ins will provide consumers there far larger fuel cost savings. Also, Europeans drive about half as much as Americans, so they may be able to avoid gas consumption almost entirely with a well-designed plug-in, perhaps one with a smaller all-electric range.

And this leads directly to the question of whether of the Volt is overdesigned:

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The goal of carbon capture and storage (CCS), also called carbon sequestration, is to take carbon dioxide that would have been emitted into the atmosphere from new or existing power plants (usually coal) and instead store it someplace, hopefully forever. It is an attractive idea across the political spectrum because it might allow us to continue using a major fossil fuel, but in a way that does not destroy the climate.

Unfortunately, CCS has four fundamental problems that have reduced enthusiasm for it recently and limited its likely role:

1. Cost: Coal plants with CCS are very expensive today. The total extra cost for this process, including geological storage in sealed underground sites, is currently quite high, $30 to $80 a ton of carbon dioxide, according to the Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy, “Carbon Sequestration R&D Overview.” And that is on top of the cost of new coal plants, which have become very expensive. In the future, it seems rather unlikely that CCS would be a low-cost solution. The modeling work done for the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) on how to comply with the AB32 law (California’s Global Warming Solutions Act), online here, puts the cost of coal gasification with carbon capture and storage at a staggering 16.9 cents per kWh. Energy efficiency along with lots of low-carbon generation sources beat that easily now or will very soon.
2. Timing: The world does not even have a single large-scale (300+ MW) coal plant with CCS anywhere in the world. The first moderate-sized (30 MW) pilot plant with CCS just started up this month in Germany. Earlier this year, President Bush dropped the mismanaged ‘NeverGen’ clean coal project. In the past year, most governments and most U.S. utilities have scaled back, delayed, or cancel their planned CCS projects (see below). As Howard Herzog of MIT’s Laboratory for Energy and the Environment said in Feburary “How can we expect to build hundreds of these plants when we’re having so much trouble building the first one?“
3. Scale: We need to put in place a dozen or so clean energy “stabilization wedges” by mid-century to avoid catastrophic climate outcomes — see “Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 1.” For CCS to be even one of those would require a flow of CO2 into the ground equal to the current flow of oil out of the ground. That would require, by itself, re-creating the equivalent of the planet’s entire oil delivery infrastructure, no mean feat.
4. Permanence and transparency: If Putin’s Russia said it was sequestering 100 million tons of CO2 in the ground permanently, and wanted other countries to pay it billions of dollars to do so, would anyone trust them? No. The potential for fraud and bribery are simply too enormous. But would anyone trust China? Would anyone trust a U.S. utility, for that matter? We need to set up some sort of international regime for certifying, monitoring, verifying, and inspecting geologic repositories of carbon — like the U.N. weapons inspections systems. The problem is, this country hasn’t been able to certify a single storage facility for a high-level radioactive waste after two decades of trying and nobody knows how to monitor and verify underground CO2 storage. It could take a decade just to set up this system.

The bottom line is that we should continue to pursue CCS research, development, and demonstration in a serious effort to turn this long-term strategy into a medium-term one. But efficiency, wind, solar PV, and baseload solar are where we should be placing the big deployment dollars right now (see “Is 450 ppm possible? Part 5: Old coal’s out, can’t wait for new nukes, so what do we do NOW?“)

For those who want to become more knowledgeable on CCS, the rest of this post will cite and excerpt a dozen or so of the recent articles and studies on the subject below.

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Installed U.S. capacity of baseload geothermal power is 2958 MW. Our geothermal power is set to double over the next several years, according to “U.S. Geothermal Power Production and Development Update,” by the U.S. Geothermal Energy Association.

The following table gives the power currently on-line, in Phase I (secured rights, exploration drilling), Phase II (confirmation being done), Phase III (final permits), and Phase IV (production drilling underway, facility under construction):

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[Climate Progress has covered the Pickens Plan many times since Memo to T. Boone Pickens: Your energy plan is half-brilliant, half-dumb. Here Earl Killian makes a strong analytical case that the "half-dumb" part of the plan is in fact a wasteful, wildly impractical -- if not outright absurd -- distraction.]

Thomas Boone Pickens is a billionaire who made his money in oil and corporate takeovers. He began investing in natural gas in 1997, and in wind power in 2007. In 2008, he went public with the Pickens Plan via a website and a well funded advertising campaign. Here we analyze the Pickens Plan, as presented here, which begins by correctly observing:

America is addicted to foreign oil. It’s an addiction that threatens our economy, our environment and our national security.

The Pickens Plan as presented consists of two parts:

1. Take the natural gas that we currently use to generate electricity in the U.S., and use it to fuel transportation instead, and
2. Build wind power to produce the electricity lost in step 1.

The Plan As Presented — CNG vs. Electricity

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