Climate Climate & Energy

Thinking the unthinkable

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune wonders: The end of coal?

Animated map shows changes in a warming world

Gotta see it to believe it? Behold: Climate Change in Our World, a project from Google Earth and British environmental and meteorological offices that gives a visual representation of what we’ve got in store. Using NASA satellite images and medium-case climate scenarios, the project uses time-lapse animation to illustrate predicted planetary changes through 2100. Viewers […]

Agitprop, enemy of the human race edition

A nice roundup of the clean coal PR campaign over on Salon.

California concludes majority of emission reductions will come through regulation

No state has done more to study the nitty-gritty of reducing emissions than California, and the California Air Resources Board recently revealed some of its thinking on how to achieve the state’s ambitious emission goals. Its conclusions should spark some serious discussion among those who — like John McCain — think cap-and-trade is going to […]

Wind power: a core climate solution

Wind power is a key climate solution. It is one of the few zero-carbon supply options that can plausibly provide more than one of the 14 or so "wedges" we need to stabilize below 450 ppm of CO2 (see "Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 2: The Solution"). I plan to go through all of the major solutions this year.

The stunning new Bush administration report, 20% Wind Energy by 2030 (discussed here), convinced me it was time to write a long piece, which has just been published in Salon. The article -- "Winds of change: The U.S. can greatly boost clean wind power for 2 cents a day. Now all we need is a president who won't blow the chance" -- explains the more than 2,000-year history of wind power, how conservatives cost America the chance to be the world wind leader, and why the global industry is so successful in spite of our government's relative apathy:

What we don’t know (but think we do) about oil prices might hurt us

Predicting the future is hard. It's so difficult that even teams of analysts using fancy models get results like this:

This isn't back-of-the-envelope stuff. This is the U.S. Energy Information Administration's official prediction for oil prices, circa 2007. According to the "high price" scenario, oil may reach $100 per barrel some time around 2030. But wait: oil was at $127 last week. So, not only was the EIA projection wrong -- it was wildly and completely wrong.

Okay, everyone makes mistakes, even energy analysts. In 2008, the EIA cleaned up its act and produced this forecast:

The climate crisis cannot be solved without cost-benefit analysis

Lisa Heinzerling, a Georgetown law professor, has written an essay arguing against the embrace of cost-benefit analysis by environmentalists. She suggests that environmentalists enjoy nature in a very concrete and reverential manner that cannot be captured by economic analysis. I think this is a fairly substantial misinterpretation of the use of cost-benefit analysis. Heinzerling makes […]

Saudis/OPEC don’t control the price of oil any more

With Bush going to Saudi Arabia to beg -- again -- for lower prices, the media is gaga over a confrontation that has about as much significance as a Rocky Balboa fight.

Even the venerable NYT just published an article, "Bush Rebuffed on Oil Plea in Saudi Arabia," that opens, "With the price of oil hitting record highs, President Bush used a private visit with King Abdullah to make a second attempt to persuade the Saudis to increase oil production and was rejected yet again."

Unlike the 1970s and 1980s and even much of the 1990s, neither OPEC nor the Saudis any longer control the price of oil.

If any country had a million barrels a day of (sellable) spare oil capacity, they could make more than $100 million a day selling it, even if that much new oil dropped prices 20%, which it probably wouldn't.

Who would sit on that kind of money? Yes, the Saudis are selling over 8 million barrels a day, so they don't really need the money. But if they have any significant excess capacity, it is sour or high-sulfur crude (see the other experts on the full CNBC interview here). Such crude is not currently in demand: "Many refineries are not set up to process such crude because it is more difficult and expensive to refine into products."

‘Science’: nitrogen as important as carbon in climate change

Speaking of the troubles associated with industrial agriculture and its fertilizer regime, check this out: The public does not yet know much about nitrogen, but in many ways it is as big an issue as carbon, and due to the interactions of nitrogen and carbon, makes the challenge of providing food and energy to the […]

Five ways BC’s carbon tax shift can strengthen Cap and Trade

The Vancouver Sun gives some ink to a cluster of issues that I've been pondering of late: how BC's carbon tax shift fits with Cap and Trade. I'm famously infatuated with carbon tax shifting. I'm also a zealot for auctioned Cap and Trade.

The good news is that with careful policy design, Cap and Tax can be better than either Cap or Tax. The Tax toughens the Cap, the way steel rebar strengthens concrete. The bad news is that without careful design, the two could weaken each other.

The challenge for policy makers is gaming -- firms' aptitude for subverting market rules established with good intentions. Remember how Enron and its ilk manipulated the California electricity market in 2001? The interaction of a carbon tax in British Columbia with a regionwide carbon Cap-and-Trade system in the West could open channels for such profiteering. In the worst case, gaming could both undermine and discredit the policies, risking their political survival. Fortunately, such gaming is preventable, as I'll explain in a moment.

First, though, the upsides: