Climate Climate & Energy

A possible consensus perspective on the tax vs. cap debate

Last revised: 07/10/2008

In his recent Congressional testimony, James Hansen talked about a "perfect storm" of climatological tipping points that may soon converge to yield global cataclysm. But another kind of perfect storm is brewing: a technology storm that could rapidly displace fossil fuels and restore global climate sustainability.

Effective regulatory policy could provide the kind of incentives and stable investment climate that are needed to facilitate the clean-energy revolution. Unfortunately, the "caps and standards" approach that is currently in vogue cannot provide the economic backbone for a rapid and orderly transition to a sustainable global economy. Emission caps and performance standards are rarely if ever set at levels that represent true sustainability, and are generally biased toward extreme cost conservatism. Regulators try to second-guess markets in setting targets and schedules, while markets try to second-guess regulators; the instability and unpredictability of carbon prices deters long-term investment in clean energy.

A carbon tax like the one advocated by Dr. Hansen and many economists would provide price stability, and could theoretically be five times more cost-efficient than cap-and-trade, but taxes are politically verboten. Industry interests oppose taxes because of their alleged high regulatory costs and cap-and-traders won't let go of their hallowed "environmental certainty."

So the tax-versus-cap debate goes round and round, never resolving and never converging on a credible climate stabilization strategy. But the debate could be resolved if policy makers -- and the economics profession -- could put aside their dogmatisms and recognize several basic principles of climate policy:

A review of Fields of Fuel

Fields of Fuel, directed by Josh Tickell, is visually compelling and technically polished, which unfortunately bestows a veneer of legitimacy the film does not deserve.

Promotional films are stereotypically one-sided, ignoring or glossing over negatives while exaggerating and or fabricating positives. That is to be expected, but what set this film apart from your generic promotional film is Tickell's success at manipulating viewers' emotions.

Satellite images show rapid deforestation in Papua New Guinea and Amazon

The following post is by Ken Levenson, guest blogger at Climate Progress.

Pushed from center stage by the expected record arctic ice and permafrost melt, tropical rain forest destruction has been elbowing its way back through the smoke and into view. This Mongabay article, "Papua New Guinea's rainforests disappearing faster than thought," is one such look:

Previously, the forest loss was estimated at 139,000 hectares per year between 1990 and 2005. But now?

Using satellite images to reveal changes in forest cover between 1972 and 2002 ... Papua New Guinea lost more than 5 million hectares of forest over the past three decades ... Worse, deforestation rates may be accelerating, with the pace of forest clearing reaching 362,000 hectares (895,000 acres) per year in 2001. The study warns that at current rates 53 percent of the country's forests could be lost or seriously degraded by 2021.

Stunning. Adding insult to injury -- the good news as reported last Thursday in the New Straits Times:

Penguin declines don’t bode well for the rest of us

Penguin populations are declining, which is bad news not just for the tuxedoed birds but for, well, the world in general. A new scientific review published in the journal BioScience shows that everywhere they live, penguins are suffering from a combination of climate change, ocean pollution, overfishing, tourism, and development. “Many penguins we thought would […]

New global warming denier article in Salon

That's the title of my new article in Salon. I had proposed "The political fight of the century," but the editors wanted a stronger headline -- and subhead:

Americans must not allow global warming deniers to block the policies needed to avert catastrophic climate change. Our future is at stake.

Now that the relevant science is settled -- namely that failing to quickly embrace strong greenhouse gas reduction policies would be the greatest act of self-destruction in human history -- the fight to save a livable climate will indeed be the greatest political fight of our times. As the piece concludes:

Landmark ruling halts Georgia coal plant on basis of CO2 emissions

A Georgia coal plant cannot go forward until it receives an air-pollution permit limiting its carbon-dioxide emissions, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore ruled Monday. The ruling marks the first time a judge has used the Supreme Court’s classification of CO2 as a pollutant to regulate emissions from an industrial source. Moore’s […]

Did I say darndest? I meant stupidest

From Deltoid, Tim Lambert provides this exchange between Tim Flannery (climate realist) and Adam Shand (climate skeptic) from an Australian TV show:

Tim Flannery: No one can predict the weather three months ahead, that's absolutely true. But if I asked you if January next year was likely to be warmer than June this year, what would you say?

Adam Shand: I'd have no idea!

TF: You'd say yes because that's what we always see. Summers are warmer than winter. And in terms of predicting general global trends, that exactly the sort of science that we're doing. It's not like predicting the weather on a certain day three months out, it's like predicting whether January is likely to be warmer than June.

AS: But that's just an assumption, we sort of assume that summer is hotter than winter.

More than half of today’s electricity, more than 16 percent of today’s energy

Enough sunlight strikes unshaded U.S. rooftops to replace all the coal and some of the natural gas we use to make electricity. Backup via ground source heat pumps, and smart grid technology would allow this variable energy source to displace base-load coal with today's technology. Whether this is the most cost effective way to displace coal is another question. Also rooftop solar is a silver BB rather than a silver bullet: Even after massive efficiency improvements we will need to get many times the power from non-rooftop sources than from rooftops.

According to a 2003 study by the Energy Foundation (PDF), solar PV that converts 15 percent of sunlight to electricity could produce 710,000 Megawatts on rooftops that will be available in 2050. Doug Wood thinks that with concentrating PV using advanced aerospace quality cells we could convert solar at 30 percent rather than 15 percent efficiency. Scaling back to rooftops available today (using 2003 numbers from the same study and extrapolating forward) we could produce around 1.05 billion megawatts today. We normally assume 22 percent capacity factor (PDF) for PV. So that would give us about 2.3 billion megawatt hours, or around 56 percent of today's electrical production -- more than coal provides.

Further, waste heat from this process could provide much of our heating and cooling needs as well. The EF study I cited suggests that about 65 percent of commercial roof space is unshaded compared to about 22 percent of residential roof space. Since some commercial scale chillers run on low to medium temp heat today, with enough storage solar CHP could provide close to 100 percent of commercial heating and cooling. But that much storage takes a lot of capital for a small incremental gain. So more realistically, we would put 16 to 24 hours of low temp Phase Change Material storage and use ground source heat pumps to provide the other 15 percent of low temp needs. As a side effect, the overnight storage would let us run those heat pumps when the electricity was cheapest -- which will prove more important than it might appear at first glance.

The sequestration pony

Nice critique of carbon sequestration at Low Tech Magazine.

What drove the dramatic retreat of arctic sea ice during summer 2007?

Funny you should ask. That is the title of an analysis published this month in Geophysical Research Letters ($ub. req'd) by four scientists from the Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Laboratory, College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle. What did they conclude?