Climate Progress

Another continuation of the “It’s Easy Being Green” series from the Center for American Progress:

Good news: Anyone looking for more environmentally responsible options now has choices. Green alternatives are turning up all over these days–from children’s toys to weddings.

Families concerned with all the reports in the last year of toys tainted with lead paint will be happy to hear there’s a new market for toys that bypass lead and other potentially harmful chemicals completely.

Branch, a San Francisco-based sustainable design company, makes children’s toys out of natural wool and bamboo. Nest and ChildTrek are similar companies offering natural toys made out of wood and other sustainable materials. Sensing the growing consumer demand, even Toys ‘R’ Us has “gone green,” launching a new line of natural wood toys and dolls.

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The Brookings Institution and Google have started a two-day conference on plug-in hybrids elective vehicles you can listen to here. Needless to say for Climate Progress readers, PHEVs are a core climate solution and probably the best way of significantly reducing US oil consumption (see “Plug-in hybrids and electric cars — a core climate solution“).

Lots of great speakers — here is the agenda.

Part 1 discussed the basic conclusion of the new International Energy Agency report — cutting global emissions in half by 2050 is not costly. In fact, the total shift in investment needed to stabilize at 450 ppm is only about 1.1% of GDP per year, and that is not a “cost” or hit to GDP, because much of that investment goes towards saving expensive fuel.

In this post I will discuss the basic solution IEA is proposing. I will also start to look at how the report is too pessimistic about renewables, and thus it overestimates costs. In their business-as-usual baseline, neither solar thermal nor solar photovoltaics are ever commercially competitive. Part 3 discusses IEA’s very dubious assumptions in the transportation sector. The IEA assumes the price of oil is half of current levels and is frozen at $65 a barrel from 2030 to 2050. I kid you not. That is a key reason their marginal price of CO2 is so absurdly high.

My central argument in recent months has been that stabilizing at 450 ppm requires about 14 wedges – carbon mitigation strategies deployed over a few decades that ultimately each prevent the emission of one billion tons of carbon annually [see “Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 2: The Solution“]. The IEA comes to almost exactly the same conclusion, and has relatively similar wedges, so I view this report largely as a vindication of my analysis.

THE SOLUTION IS SOME 13 WEDGES STARTING BY 2015

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[UPDATE: Link fixed. Picture is frame capture. It does not go to a video.]

I just want to draw your attention to a new website, www.coal-is-dirty.com. You can find an extensive overview on “clean coal” by Jeff Goodell (here).

And if you get bored or have some non-progressive friends, send them to www.coal-is-clean.com.

And while we are talking coal, Sean Casten at Grist has a very good (and long) discussion explaining that “coal is no longer cheap.”

When the normally conservative International Energy Agency (IEA) agrees with both the middle of the road IPCC and more … progressive voices like Climate Progress, it should be time for the world to get very serious, very fast on the clean energy transition. But when the media blows the story, the public and the policymakers may miss the key messages of the stunning new IEA report, “Energy Technology Perspectives, 2008″ (Exec. Sum. here).

You may not have paid much attention to this new report once you saw the media’s favorite headline for it: “$45 trillion needed to combat warming.” That would be too bad, because the real news from the global energy agency is

1. Failing to act very quickly to transform the planet’s energy system puts us on a path to catastrophic outcomes.
2. The investment required is “an average of some 1.1% of global GDP each year from now until 2050. This expenditure reflects a re-direction of economic activity and employment, and not necessarily a reduction of GDP.” In fact, this investment partly pays for itself in reduced energy costs alone (not even counting the pollution reduction benefits)!
3. The world is on the brink of a renewables (and efficiency) revolution. Click figure to enlarge.
   

I do feel vindicated that the IEA’s 450 ppm ’solution’ is quite similar to the one I proposed (here), though I do have some differences with them–they think hydrogen cars are part of the answer!

“RADICAL AND URGENT” CHANGE NEEDED TO AVOID CATASTROPHE

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McCain said tonight he is the candidate of change. How is billions of dollars in subsidies to build hundreds of nuclear power plants change?

Here is everything you need to know about McCain’s understanding of both energy and climate issues: He doesn’t care enough about the climate to support even a so-so bill like Boxer-Lieberman-Warner unless their are giga-subsidies for nukes beyond the $100 billion or so the industry has received to date.

Q: Can you tell us your position on the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill?

JOHN MCCAIN: Yeah. I still have not seen in the Warner Lieberman bill, the emphasis and the way to facilitate nuclear power into active operation and use in the United States of America. That’s my concern about Warner Lieberman. And I feel that nuclear power is such a vital aspect of any real meaningful action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that I have withheld support for it, because I really want to see, and I am told there will be some amendments on the floor, that will dramatically increase the nuclear component of it. So far, it’s not enough for me.

Nuclear is, right now, among the most expensive zero-carbon options, with new generation coming in at $6,000 to $8000 per kilowatt, which would generate electricity for $o.15 a kilowatt hour, which is about 50% higher than current US electricity prices (see “The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power, Part 1“).

A mature technology, with 20% market share and $100 billion in subsidies since 1948 whose liability in case of a major accident is limited by federal law (with the full liability burden falling on taxpayers) hardly deserves more subsidies.

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If you are looking for a shorter, more readable version of my study, “The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power,” I’ve got just the thing. Salon has published my article, “Nuclear bomb: Nuclear energy, the sequel, is opening to raves by everybody from John McCain to a Greenpeace co-founder. Don’t be fooled. It’s the Ishtar of power generation.”

As the article points out, back in May 2001, the Economist (subs. req’d) explained that nuclear power had fallen out of favor because it simply was “too costly to matter.” Today, nuclear power is nearly three times the price it was when the Economist wrote that.

My analysis on nuclear power for the Center for American Progress Action Fund is finally finished and online here. I think you will find it useful because it has many links to primary sources and tries to avoid the typical discussions by nuclear proponents and opponents, focusing instead on the rapidly escalating cost of nuclear power.

My point in this paper is not to say nuclear power will play no role in the fight to stay below 450 ppm of atmospheric CO2 concentrations and avoid catastrophic climate outcomes. Indeed, I even include a full wedge of nuclear in my 14-wedges “solution” to global warming here — though as will be clear from the study, “The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power,” achieving even one wedge of nuclear will be a very time-consuming and expensive proposition, probably costing $6 to $8 trillion.

Fundamentally, the large and growing risks from climate change, particularly the real danger that failure to act NOW means we will approach a horrific 1000 ppm by century’s end (see here), means two things:

1. We must seriously entertain any strategy that can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
2. We must focus on the lowest-cost options first, because we simply don’t have an unlimited amount of capital.

My primary point in this paper is to shatter the widespread myth among conservatives — and others — that nuclear power will be a dominant solution to global warming. No. It is extremely unlikely to even be 10% of the total solution. This is particularly true in the United States, where we have so many more cost-effective alternatives NOW, as I explain in the paper, including energy efficiency, wind power, solar photovoltaics, and concentrated solar power.

Here is the executive summary of the report:

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While wind and solar get the media attention of a sexy starlet, good old geothermal power is treated like an aging character actor.

But geothermal energy is, in fact, sizzling hot these days. Big-time investors from Warren Buffet to Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley to Google have begun investing:

In 2007, private equity firms invested more than $400 million in geothermal energy, which is derived from hot water under the Earth’s surface and can be used for space heating or generating electricity

Why the interest in a form of energy that President Bush repeatedly tried to zero out of the Department of Energy Budget? One reason is the soaring cost of conventional power, like coal and nuclear. Another is the growing awareness of just how much is zero-carbon electricity will need in coming decades.

But perhaps most important for this reemerging technology, in the 2005 energy bill, Congress finally extended the renewable energy tax credit to geothermal “which at 2 cents per kilowatt hour for the first ten years, can account for a third of the cost of a project” — and which will expire in December unless Congress gets its act together (see here)!

The U.S. currently has 3 gigaWatts (3000 megaWatts) of geothermal, one third of the world’s capacity, generating $1.8 billion electricity sales. What is the ultimate potential?

The US Geological Survey estimates the US could generate 150,000 megawatts.

A major 2007 study by MIT on Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) found that it could be a provider of substantial baseload (24/7) power:

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The list of very knowledgeable folk who still are pushing no-till farming as a greenhouse gas mitigation strategy even though science passed them by a while ago include:

• Sen. John McCain (see “Relying on offsets = Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic)
• Princeton University*
• The Chicago Climate Exchange
• The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions

I buried the science in the McCain post, but it deserves higher visibility. As a major review article from Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, “Tillage and soil carbon sequestration–What do we really know?” concluded:

In essentially all cases where conservation tillage was found to sequester C[arbon], soils were only sampled to a depth of 30 cm or less, even though crop roots often extend much deeper. In the few studies where sampling extended deeper than 30 cm, conservation tillage has shown no consistent accrual of SOC [soil organic carbon], instead showing a difference in the distribution of SOC, with higher concentrations near the surface in conservation tillage and higher concentrations in deeper layers under conventional tillage.… Long-term, continuous gas exchange measurements have also been unable to detect C gain due to reduced tillage. Though there are other good reasons to use conservation tillage, evidence that it promotes C sequestration is not compelling.

[Conservation tillage is “broadly defined as any tillage method that leaves sufficient crop residue in place to cover at least 30% of the soil surface after planting.]

This is actually not especially new research. The review article went online in June 2006, and, of course, as a review article, it was based on even earlier research — including a 1981 (!) study that came to the same exact conclusion:

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