Climate Climate & Energy

Since when is regulation optimal?

I like Jeffrey Sachs, and I generally agree with what he has to say about poverty, health, and the obligations of the rich to look after the poor. But he gets it dead wrong in the current Scientific American:

Even with a cutback in wasteful energy spending, our current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy.

Says who? Why can't we find ways to dramatically lower our primary energy use per dollar of GDP? Not because we're already so perfectly balanced. And not because the electric industry (amounting to 40 percent of U.S. GHG emissions) has done a damn thing to increase their energy efficiency in the last 50 years.

Even if every industrial facility in the country had optimally designed their factories for energy efficiency (they didn't), we still would need to confront this reality: an optimal capital allocation when natural gas was $3/MMBtu, coal was $1/MMBtu, oil was $20/bbl, and electricity was 6 cents/kWh looks pretty suboptimal when natural gas is up to $10, coal is pushing $3, oil is north of $100, and electric is running towards 9 cents.

Yes, technology is good. But we have to get beyond the idea that regulation is optimal, all capital is optimally deployed, and there are no significant opportunities for energy efficiency.

Not looking good for ice shelf in the Antarctic

... over there:

While the area of collapse involves 160 square miles at present, a large part of the 5,000-square-mile Wilkins Ice Shelf is now supported only by a narrow strip of ice between two islands, said CU-Boulder's Ted Scambos, lead scientist at NSIDC. "If there is a little bit more retreat, this last 'ice buttress' could collapse and we'd likely lose about half the total ice shelf area in the next few years."

No American-made car meets China’s fuel standards

The Toronto Star reported an alarming factoid earlier this month:

No gasoline-powered car assembled in North America would meet China's current fuel-efficiency standard.

That's mainly because:

1. Currently, their standard is much higher than ours.
2. Their standard is a minimum-allowable efficiency standard rather than a "fleet-average" standard like ours.
3. Our lame car companies don't make their (relatively few) most efficient vehicles in this country.

As for our much-hyped new 35-mpg (average) standard -- in 2020, it will take us to where the Chinese are now (but not even to where Japan and Europe were six years ago). If we don't rescind it, that is.

So whether you believe in human-caused global warming or peak oil, America remains unprepared to capture the huge explosion in jobs this century for clean, fuel-efficient cars.

Oh, and by 2010, China will be the world leader in wind turbine manufacturing and solar photovoltaics manufacturing. No worries, though: our TV and movie sales overseas still kick butt. For now.

Giant Antarctic ice chunk collapses

A 160-square-mile chunk of ice — that’s seven times the size of Manhattan — has collapsed off of the Wilkins ice shelf in Antarctica. The entire ice shelf, which is approximately the size of Connecticut, is “hanging by a thread,” says climate scientist David Vaughan: “We’ll know in the next few days or weeks what […]

Independent financial analysis finds that coal is a stinker of an investment for Kansas

We’ve been following the ongoing battle over coal in Kansas closely. (The latest is that Gov. Sebelius vetoed a bill that would have moved the plants forward and prevented her KDHE secretary from blocking future plants.) Today brings an interesting development. A new report from a leading financial research firm, Innovest, comes to a blunt […]

Climate change may cloud Lake Tahoe’s waters, study says

Climate change will likely cloud Lake Tahoe’s famously clear waters within a decade, according to a new study by researchers at the University of California at Davis. Warmer temperatures are likely to alter and eventually shut down the lake’s deep-water circulation, eventually turning the waters a murky green, researchers said. “A permanently stratified Lake Tahoe […]

The blind alley of more coal

Thomas Homer-Dixon, whose book I adore, has written an op-ed in The Globe and Mail arguing in favor of large government investments in carbon capture and sequestration technology. His advocacy of CCS has long confused me -- my reading of his book suggested (to me, anyway) that large-scale CCS was precisely the kind of technology we should avoid like the plague.

To recap: Homer-Dixon builds on the work of Joseph Tainter, who argues that societies respond to pressures and challenges by investing in complexity. But these investments come with increasing costs as time goes on, until society finds itself investing more in complexity than the challenge/pressure actually costs. In Tainter's example of the Roman Empire, it eventually became more expensive to run the Empire than it was worth to the local peasant, whose taxes had gone nowhere but up for the previous century, so the peasants didn't put up much of a fight when the Goths came through. Paying tribute to the barbarian was less of a burden than paying taxes to Rome, so the Empire imploded -- not because the Empire was militarily weak, but because people had been living in a system of negative returns.

Homer-Dixon's book argues that when we start getting to negative returns on increasing complexity, the proper response is new, more resilient systems, less about "efficiency" than resilience, withstanding the inevitable shocks that face any system.

We are at a pretty crucial decision point, or indeed past it: Do we keep investing in fossil fuels and the systems required to sustain them, or do we invest in the more resilient energy system of the future? Prof. Homer-Dixon and I agree that the grid of the future should be more renewable and resilient, but he argues in his op-ed that the scale of the climate crisis means we need to be using CCS now. But the two futures are not compatible, and I think we need to understand some pretty fundamental flaws with industrial CCS:

Plans for Indiana BioTown face obstacles, but sputter on

In 2005, Reynolds, Ind., was deemed the world’s first “BioTown,” as agricultural officials unveiled a plan to power the 550-person burg entirely with corn, hog waste, sewage, and other energy sources in ready local supply. Three years and many obstacles later, the ambitious proposal is far off track. A significant private investor dropped out; construction […]

NASA’s Hansen responds to NYT’s Revkin

This post ends with an exclusive look at James Hansen's response to NYT journalist Andy Revkin's piece commenting on Hansen's (draft) article on why we need a CO2 target of 350 ppm. But first the backstory.

Revkin used me as the "balance" for his piece:

Some longtime champions of Dr. Hansen, including the Climate Progress blogger Joe Romm, see some significant gaps in the paper (it is a draft still) and part ways with Dr. Hansen over whether such a goal is remotely feasible.

I complained directly to Revkin about the first part of that characterization. I was going to let it go at that, but then I got e-mails from people directing me to a media interview of Hansen (and Mark Bowen, whose new book is Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming). The reporter cited Revkin's quote directly to Hansen to argue the paper is "controversial."

Well, obviously, the reporter should have called me directly, rather than taking some hearsay characterization from another member of the media. But that just isn't the state of journalism today. [Note to media: You don't need to cite me in order to call a paper saying we need to go back to 350 ppm "controversial" -- it's kind of obvious, given that we're at 385 ppm, rising 2 ppm a year, and not currently doing anything to stop emissions from rising, but I digress.] Anyway, at that point, I felt obliged to write Hansen an email titled "I don't see 'significant gaps in the paper'":

No (Dutch) nukes

The Netherlands is opting for carbon sequestration and renewables over nuclear power. What does this mean? Why, clearly it reinforces what you have always said!