Climate Climate & Energy

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Crappiness

Navajo nation at odds over coal-plant plan Members of the Navajo nation are at odds over a plan to build a $3 billion, 1,500-megawatt coal-fired power plant on reservation land in New Mexico. Tribal leaders say the plant — whose juice would go to Las Vegas and Phoenix — will generate $50 million in much-needed […]

More great news from the climate

Nature has published another landmark study showing how the complex interplay of human-generated pollution with natural systems worsens climate change. Their news article (subs. req'd) explains:

Rising levels of ozone pollution over the coming century will erode the ability of plants to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a new climate-modelling study predicts.

Ozone is already known to be a minor greenhouse gas, but the new calculations highlight another, indirect way in which it is likely to influence global warming by 2100. High levels can poison plants and reduce their ability to photosynthesize, says Stephen Sitch of the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter.

Note this is actually a new amplifying feedback, since the hotter it gets the more ozone pollution is generated.

Below the fold is the rest of this article -- and for you hardcore science types, I'll end with the abstract of the original journal article.

A conversation with energy guru Amory Lovins

If politicians think in sound bites and intellectuals think in sentences, Amory Lovins thinks in white papers. His speech is studded with pregnant pauses — you can almost hear the whirs and clicks as an enormous mass of statistics, analyses, and aphorisms is trimmed and edited into a manageable length. I’ve talked to experts who […]

Yeah, coal again

Still more from James Hansen's email:

He thinks we’re too shallow to beat global warming

For the most part, the jackassery of Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson is background noise for me, easy enough to ignore. But when he writes about global warming, I can’t help but pay attention, despite the dyspepsia that inevitably ensues. Samuelson has one of his characteristically cranky, daft columns up, making an argument that Matt […]

Forthwith debunked

Every silver lining has a cloud -- or so we are told.

Climate analyst Jesse Ausubel is getting a lot of press with his new, controversial, deeply flawed study, "Renewable and nuclear heresies" (available here with subscription, but you can get the main points from this 2005 Canadian Nuclear Association talk and the accompanying PPT presentation).

He says ramping up renewables would lead to the "rape of nature." His study concludes:

Renewables are not green. To reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy, such as wind, water and biomass, cause serious environmental harm. Measuring renewables in watts per square metre that each source could produce smashes these environmental idols. Nuclear energy is green. However, in order to grow, the nuclear industry must ... form alliances with the methane industry to introduce more hydrogen into energy markets, and start making hydrogen itself ... Considered in watts per square metre, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors.

Uh, no, no, and no. Jesse popularized the notion that the economy has been decarbonizing for many decades (see Figure 2 of the PPT). This has led him to make a bunch of serious mistakes.

Making electricity visible helps reduce consumption

Here's what might be an ingenious idea, as reported by Wired:

Dumb arguments rear their heads yet again

A reader pointed me to a letter in the South China Morning Post, "Cold water on the warming debate" (subs. req'd). The writer, a senior research fellow of the HK Institute of Economics and Business, rehashes a number of mistaken arguments I hear all too often:

Many people fail to knit together these two strands - climate change and the exhaustion of fossil fuels. If they did, they would see that the energy crisis, which is predicted as a result of the exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, contains the seeds of the resolution of the global warming crisis. As fossil fuels become scarcer, their price is sure to rise. We see this already. Under market forces, this will accelerate substitution, largely towards nuclear energy. This will, in turn, redress the climatic concerns.

No. Conventional oil may be peaking, but the world has plenty of affordable coal, far more than is needed to destroy the climate (which is Hansen's point). The climate problem is not self-resolving. Indeed, peak oil may drive us to liquid coal, a climate disaster. The article continues:

Can’t we offset something other than carbon?

Lordy, this is getting out of hand: Under the agreement announced Wednesday, the Forest Service and the National Forest Foundation will allow individuals or groups to make charitable contributions that will be used to plant trees and do other work to improve national forests. … Under the new program, known as the Carbon Capital Fund, […]

New coal-fired plants are unlikely

This from the Wall Street Journal today:

From coast to coast, plans for a new generation of coal-fired power plants are falling by the wayside as states conclude that conventional coal plants are too dirty to build and the cost of cleaner plants is too high.

If significant numbers of new coal plants don't get built in the U.S. in coming years, it will put pressure on officials to clear the path for other power sources, including nuclear power, or trim the nation's electricity demand, which is expected to grow 1.8% this year. In a time of rising energy costs, officials also worry about the long-term consequences of their decisions, including higher prices or the potential for shortages.

As recently as May, U.S. power companies had announced intentions to build as many as 150 new generating plants fueled by coal, which currently supplies about half the nation's electricity. One reason for the surge of interest in coal was concern over the higher price of natural gas, which has driven up electricity prices in many places. Coal appeared capable of softening the impact since the U.S. has deep coal reserves and prices are low.

But as plans for this fleet of new coal-powered plants move forward, an increasing number are being canceled or development slowed. Coal plants have come under fire because coal is a big source of carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed for global warming, in a time when climate change has become a hot-button political issue.

For the full text, click here (and click soon, as the WSJ only gives free access for a few days).

This is more fodder in support of earlier Grist posts here and here.

It is also worth noting that -- notwithstanding WSJ's reportage -- this isn't really driven by new environmental considerations as much as by 30-year-old environmental considerations, when we effectively stopped building new coal plants but still had enough reserve margin in the system to keep increasing coal use without new construction.

Current increases in capital costs are largely to comply with the Clean Air Act -- which the old grandfathered plants were exempted from. Carbon control is clearly a big uncertainty moving forward, only likely to increase the costs further, but it is striking that we're seeing so much price increase and uncertainty in coal-derived power even without it.

This points out a larger issue with power plant regulation. Namely, these plants last a long time. The Clean Air Act was well intended, but it took three decades for it to start to impact the use of dirty coal, by virtue of the fact that it only impacted new facilities. Compare this to new vehicle regs, where the much shorter lifetime of cars means that we can get a quicker phase-out. Thus, we can eliminate leaded gasoline quickly, but can't really impact SOx and NOx from central plants for much longer.

This is precisely why the auction vs. allocation issue is so important for greenhouse-gas control. Every carbon cap-and-trade system that grandfathers in the old plants' right to pollute (witness Kyoto & RGGI as examples thereof) is going to face similar delays in carbon reduction -- delays that we cannot afford.