Articles by Joseph Romm

Ex-Im to finance more clean energy exports

The appropriations omnibus bill just passed through Congress "recommends that the Export-Import Bank provide 10 percent of its financing capacity to promote the export of clean energy products and services." This was a recommendation by many groups, including the Center for American Progress:

Having supported more than $400 billion dollars of U.S. exports during the past 70 years, the Export-Import Bank is one of the most powerful tools at the U.S. government's disposal for spurring innovation and economic growth.

But in yet another backward-looking strategy typical of this administration:

Cogeneration and ethanol production

I am not the biggest fan of corn ethanol. But I am the biggest fan of cogeneration, also known as combined heat and power, or CHP (well, maybe the second-biggest fan). It is probably the single most overlooked strategy for sharply cutting greenhouse-gas emissions while reducing overall energy costs.

Now a new EPA report finds that running an ethanol plant on natural gas CHP can, with the right design, result in negative net CO2 emissions (click on figure to enlarge).

Important caveat: "Impact of Combined Heat and Power on Energy Use and Carbon Emissions in the Dry Mill Ethanol Process" (PDF) does not examine the energy consumed (or emissions generated) from growing and harvesting the corn or from transporting the corn or ethanol. Still, with CHP, corn ethanol can actually generate significant CO2 reductions compared to gasoline.

If Congress is serious about promoting ethanol in a manner that actually reduces GHGs, they should require all new ethanol plants to cogenerate.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Sea levels may rise five feet by 2100

A recent Nature Geoscience study, "High rates of sea-level rise during the last interglacial period," ($ubs. req'd) finds that sea levels could rise twice what the IPCC had project for 2100. This confirms what many scientists have recently warned (also see here), and it matches the conclusion of a study (PDF) earlier this year in Science.

[As an aside, in one debate with a denier -- can't remember who, they all kind of merge together -- I was challenged: "Name one peer-reviewed study projecting sea-level rise this century beyond the IPCC." Well, now there are two from this year alone!]

For the record, five feet (PDF) of sea level rise would submerge some 22,000 square miles of U.S. land just on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts (farewell, southern Louisiana and Florida) -- and displace more than 100 million people worldwide. And, of course, sea levels would just keep rising some six inches a decade -- or, more likely, even faster next century than this century.

What is the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2?

The nation's top climate scientist, NASA's James Hansen, apparently now believes "the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is no more than 350 ppm," according to an op-ed by the great environmental writer Bill McKibben. Yet while preindustrial levels were 280, we're now already at more than 380 and rising 2 ppm a year!

Like many people, in the 1990s I believed 550 was the target needed to avoid climate catastrophe -- but now it's clear that:

1. 550 ppm would lead to the greatest disaster ever experienced by human civilization -- returning us to temperatures last seen when sea levels were some 80 feet higher. This is especially true because ...
2. long before we hit 550, major carbon cycle feedbacks -- the loss of carbon from the tundra and the Amazon, the saturation of the ocean sink (already beginning) would almost certainly kick into high gear, inevitably pushing us to much, much higher CO2 levels (see here, here, and my book).

Exactly when those feedbacks seriously kick in is the rub. No one knows for sure, but based on my review of the literature and interviews of leading climate scientists, somewhere between 400 and 500 ppm seems most likely. It could be lower, but it probably couldn't be much higher.

So I, like the Center for American Progress and the world's top climate scientists, now believe 450 ppm is the upper bound. That said, I have spent two decades managing, analyzing, researching, and writing about climate solutions and can state with some confidence that:

1. Staying below 450 ppm is technologically doable, but would be the greatest achievement in the history of the human race, by far. It would require a global effort sustained for decades, comparable to what the U.S. did for just the few years of World War II (the biggest obstacle is not technological, but political -- conservatives currently would never let progressives and moderates pursue such a strategy).
2. If 350 ppm is needed (and I'm not at all sure it is) then the deniers and delayers have won, since such a target is hopeless.

In 2008, I will devote a fair amount of ink bits to laying out the solution (there really is only one), but to understand why 450 is so hard, and 350 all but inconceivable, let's look at the odd way McKibben describes the solution: