Archive for the 'Climate Change' Category

Climate Pragmatism in the White House

Published April 10, 2013 Climate Change 4 Comments

This is good news. The American administration appears to have been reading the Hartwell Paper [PDF] and The Climate Fix. My science policy mentor Roger Pielke Jr. discusses the implications of the newly released Obama advisors’ PCAST report on climate policy. Roger has very good reason to be pleased with the shift towards effective policy:

(…) Overall, while there are a few differences in tone and nuance, the report of PCAST represents an emerging, pragmatic perspective on climate policy that has been years, if not decades, in the making. Perhaps our efforts have contributed in some small ways to helping shape that agenda. Of course, good ideas are the offspring of many proud parents.

“Many proud parents” indeed. Now there’s just the small problem of implementation – which depends on leading the world away from the failed Kyoto-style feel-good policies towards attention to the Kaya Identity and  spending a tiny fraction of GDP on energy innovation to foster what Bill Gates terms “energy miracles”.  

Do read Roger’s whole essay. And if you’ve not already read the Climate Fix I can’t recommend it highly enough. As I wrote a while back in A Primer on How to Avoid Magical Solutions in Climate Policy, “Kyoto is not one of these policies”.

Economist: Environmental lunacy in Europe, Wood – The fuel of the future

Published April 6, 2013 Climate Change Closed
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In its various forms, from sticks to pellets to sawdust, wood (or to use its fashionable name, biomass) accounts for about half of Europe’s renewable-energy consumption.

One has to ask “What the hell were they thinking?” Clearly, instead of thinking, the EU political elites were seduced by Greenpeace, FOE and similar activists. The EU defines “renewable” to include wood (biomass) but excludes nuclear power. This upside-down perspective has led Germany (via subsidies) to spend more than $350 per ton CO2 avoided by mass harvesting of forests around the globe.

The Economist has done a real service by detailing this bizarre EU policy.  I hope that we can rely upon “Herbert Stein’s Law,” which he expressed as “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop”. Or my shorthand “What can’t continue won’t”.

So we know the EU energy policies are not the future. But we don’t know how long this fantasy can persist. Merkel faces re-election in September – can we hope for a shift towards evidence-based energy policy?

Here’s a few excerpts from The Economist:

(…) By far the largest so-called renewable fuel used in Europe is wood.

In its various forms, from sticks to pellets to sawdust, wood (or to use its fashionable name, biomass) accounts for about half of Europe’s renewable-energy consumption. In some countries, such as Poland and Finland, wood meets more than 80% of renewable-energy demand. Even in Germany, home of the Energiewende (energy transformation) which has poured huge subsidies into wind and solar power, 38% of non-fossil fuel consumption comes from the stuff. After years in which European governments have boasted about their high-tech, low-carbon energy revolution, the main beneficiary seems to be the favoured fuel of pre-industrial societies.

(…) But if subsidising biomass energy were an efficient way to cut carbon emissions, perhaps this collateral damage might be written off as an unfortunate consequence of a policy that was beneficial overall. So is it efficient? No.

Wood produces carbon twice over: once in the power station, once in the supply chain. The process of making pellets out of wood involves grinding it up, turning it into a dough and putting it under pressure. That, plus the shipping, requires energy and produces carbon: 200kg of CO2 for the amount of wood needed to provide 1MWh of electricity.

This decreases the amount of carbon saved by switching to wood, thus increasing the price of the savings. Given the subsidy of £45 per MWh, says Mr Vetter, it costs £225 to save one tonne of CO2 by switching from gas to wood. And that assumes the rest of the process (in the power station) is carbon neutral. It probably isn’t.

(…) As another bit of the EU, the European Environment Agency, said in 2011, the assumption “that biomass combustion would be inherently carbon neutral…is not correct…as it ignores the fact that using land to produce plants for energy typically means that this land is not producing plants for other purposes, including carbon otherwise sequestered.”

Tim Searchinger of Princeton University calculates that if whole trees are used to produce energy, as they sometimes are, they increase carbon emissions compared with coal (the dirtiest fuel) by 79% over 20 years and 49% over 40 years; there is no carbon reduction until 100 years have passed, when the replacement trees have grown up. But as Tom Brookes of the European Climate Foundation points out, “we’re trying to cut carbon now; not in 100 years’ time.”

In short, the EU has created a subsidy which costs a packet, probably does not reduce carbon emissions, does not encourage new energy technologies—and is set to grow like a leylandii hedge.

Highly recommended!

Roger Pielke Jr on climate action advocates who forget about energy poverty

Published December 4, 2012 Climate Change , Energy Policy Closed
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Of course not all mitigation advocates forget about the poor, but there truly is a strong tendency for the FOE and Greenpeace crowd to focus on the “feel good” activities rich countries can afford. Sadly that activism typically ignores the “elephant in the room” of emissions growth by China, India, Brazil, etc. 

Further, the “feel good” activism relegates the energy-poor to stay just where they are – miserable. Roger covers this issue in some depth in his post Against “Modern Energy Access”. I just want to highlight one elegant graphic that Roger produced from IEA data:

When ‘energy access’ is used by organizations like the IEA, they mean something very different than what you, I or my students might take the term to mean in common parlance. (And note, this is no critique of the IEA, they have done excellent work on energy access issues.) The graph above provides a comparison of the 500 kWh per year household threshold for ‘energy access’ used by the IEA to a comparable number for the United States (both numbers are expressed in per capita terms, so 100 kWh per person from IEA and data on US household electricity consumption here and people per household here).

A goal to secure 1.3 billion people access to 2.2% of the electricity that the average American uses might be characterized as a initial start to more ambitious goals, but it is not a stopping point (and again, IEA recognizes that energy access is a process, but this gets lost in broader discussions).

We do not label those who live on $1 per day as having ‘economic access’ — rather they are desperately poor, living just above the poverty line. Everyone understands that $1 a day is not much. Very few people get that 100 kWh per year is a pitifully small amount of energy. Therefore, I suggest that we start talking in terms of  ‘energy poverty’ measured as a percentage of the average American (or European or Japanese or Australian or whatever energy rich context youd prefer as a baseline, the results will be qualitatively the same). To use the IEA numbers, one would be in ‘energy poverty’ with access to less than 2% of the energy access enjoyed by those in the rich world.

It is bad enough that the energy poor are largely ignored in our rich world debates over issues like climate change. It is perhaps even worse that our ‘success stories’ often mean creating scenarios where the energy poor attain just 2% of the access to energy that we enjoy on a daily basis. The frustrating irony of course is that the issues that rich world environmentalists most seem to care about might be best addressed by putting energy poverty first, but that is a subject for another time.

Do read the whole essay. And if you’ve not already read the Climate Fix I can’t recommend it highly enough. Unless you just want to feel good. As I wrote last April in A Primer on How to Avoid Magical Solutions in Climate Policy, “Kyoto is not one of these policies”.

The Nanticoke Energy Centre: Ontario’s hub of clean electricity, motor vehicle fuel, and high value chemicals

Published November 29, 2012 Climate Change , Nuclear Power Closed

A smart article by Steve Aplin: how to convert the Nanticoke coal-fired generating station into a low-carbon source of both electricity and synthetic fuel (which releases the captured carbon when burned). Here’s an excerpt outlining the concept:

(…) The answer: turn Nanticoke into a clean energy centre, which produces low-carbon electricity, zero-carbon hydrogen, low carbon motor vehicle fuel, and low-carbon chemicals. This would involve the following three things.

  1. Convert the eight generators at the plant to fire using the oxy-fuel process. This burns coal in the presence of pure oxygen (not air, which is mostly nitrogen), resulting in a concentrated stream of CO2, which is then far more easily and cheaply captured than current CO2-capture processes, which must separate dilute CO2 from nitrogen.
  2. Make hydrogen by splitting Lake Erie water using the energy from a high-temperature gas-cooled nuclear reactor, such as Areva’s ANTARES, which is similar to the HTGR that is the technological basis for the Next Generation Nuclear Plant. Water-splitting produces both hydrogen and oxygen; the oxygen would be used in step 1, above.

    The Next Generation Nuclear Plant, which runs on graphite-moderated enriched uranium and is cooled with helium gas, can generate outlet temperatures above 800 °C, ideal for converting carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide

  3. Use the captured CO2 and manufactured hydrogen to make carbon monoxide (CO). On its own, CO is an extremely valuable precursor chemical; when mixed with hydrogen to form a synthesis gas, it is the carbonaceous raw material for the manufacture of Fischer Tropsch fuel, including gasoline and diesel.

The foregoing would represent the biggest, most ambitious, and most innovative application of the Three Rs—reduce, reuse, recycle—the world has ever seen. Ontario would become the centre of a new fuel manufacturing industry, one that is tied not to the world price of petroleum but to the price of coal and water.

Please read the entire article. And the well-informed comments. This is the kind of thinking that can make a real difference – so different from the familiar twaddle that comforts the political elite who favor “Well that didn’t work, so let’s do more of it”. More of the same feel-good policy is absolutely is going to produce the outcomes described in the PricewaterhouseCoopers report.

Roger Pielke: Hurricanes and Human Choice

Published November 20, 2012 Climate Change Closed

Don’t miss Roger Pielke Jr’s discussion of how the severity and damage of Hurricane Sandy stacks up in the broad history of extreme weather events. Hint — it isn’t even close to the big destructive events, and no we cannot “link” Sandy to global warming. But there are many ways to craft much better public policy so we get better future outcomes from storms and flooding. Roger begins with this: 

Hurricane Sandy left in its path some impressive statistics. Its central pressure was the lowest ever recorded for a storm north of North Carolina, breaking a record set by the devastating “Long Island Express” hurricane of 1938. Along the East Coast, Sandy led to more than 50 deaths, left millions without power and caused an estimated $20 billion or more in damage.

But to call Sandy a harbinger of a “new normal,” in which unprecedented weather events cause unprecedented destruction, would be wrong. This historic storm should remind us that planet Earth is a dangerous place, where extreme events are commonplace and disasters are to be expected. In the proper context, Sandy is less an example of how bad things can get than a reminder that they could be much worse.

In studying hurricanes, we can make rough comparisons over time by adjusting past losses to account for inflation and the growth of coastal communities. If Sandy causes $20 billion in damage (in 2012 dollars), it would rank as the 17th most damaging hurricane or tropical storm (out of 242) to hit the U.S. since 1900—a significant event, but not close to the top 10. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 tops the list (according to estimates by the catastrophe-insurance provider ICAT), as it would cause $180 billion in damage if it were to strike today. Hurricane Katrina ranks fourth at $85 billion.

To put things into even starker perspective, consider that from August 1954 through August 1955, the East Coast saw three different storms make landfall—Carol, Hazel and Diane—that in 2012 each would have caused about twice as much damage as Sandy.

While it’s hardly mentioned in the media, the U.S. is currently in an extended and intense hurricane “drought.” The last Category 3 or stronger storm to make landfall was Wilma in 2005. The more than seven years since then is the longest such span in over a century.

Flood damage has decreased as a proportion of the economy since reliable records were first kept by the National Weather Service in the 1930s, and there is no evidence of increasing extreme river floods. Historic tornado damage (adjusted for changing levels of development) has decreased since 1950, paralleling a dramatic reduction in casualties. Although the tragic impacts of tornadoes in 2011 (including 553 confirmed deaths) were comparable only to those of 1953 and 1964, such tornado impacts were far more common in the first half of the 20th century.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that drought in America’s central plains has decreased in recent decades. And even when extensive drought occurs, we fare better. For example, the widespread 2012 drought was about 10% as costly to the U.S. economy as the multiyear 1988-89 drought, indicating greater resiliency of American agriculture.

There is therefore reason to believe we are living in an extended period of relatively good fortune with respect to disasters. A recurrence of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake today, for example, could cause more than $300 billion in damage and thousands of lives, according to a study I co-published in 2009.

So how can today’s disasters, even if less physically powerful than previous ones, have such staggering financial costs? One reason: There are more people and more wealth in harm’s way. Partly this is due to local land-use policies, partly to incentives such as government-subsidized insurance, but mostly to the simple fact that people like being on the coast and near rivers.

Even so, with respect to disasters we really do make our own luck. The relatively low number of casualties caused by Sandy is a testament to the success story that is the U.S. National Weather Service and parallel efforts of those who emphasize preparedness and emergency response in the public and private sectors. Everyone in the disaster-management community deserves thanks; the mitigation of the impacts from natural disasters has been a true national success story of the past century.

But continued success isn’t guaranteed. The bungled response and tragic consequences associated with Hurricane Katrina tell us what can happen when we let our guard down.

(…) 

Continue reading for Roger’s proposed smart policy options.

The German energy train wreck increases coal burning 5% (already)

Published August 25, 2012 Climate Change , Energy Policy , Nuclear Power 1 Comment
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Barry Brook tweeted the link to this Yale360 digest which sums up the awful impact of Germany’s no-nuclear policy. Since the 1970′s it has been proven repeatedly, when the growth of nuclear is blocked (e.g., by Greenpeace), the result is more coal burning. The choice has been either nuclear or coal. That is true once again for Germany because they have rich deposits of lignite with a cost per thermal unit lower than natural gas. In other regions the substitution for nuclear today might well be natural gas. 

The German government’s decision to phase out all of the nation’s nuclear power plants following the 2011 Fukushima disaster has led to an increase in coal-burningwithin Europe’s largest economy. Coal consumption in Germany has grown by 4.9 percent since Chancellor Angela Merkel announced plans to shift away from nuclear power over the next decade, according to a Bloomberg News report. While German leaders intended the new policy to strengthen the nation’s reliance on renewable energy, Germany’s largest utilities have built coal plants instead of cleaner-burning natural gas projects because coal plants are cheaper. The collapse of the European Union’s carbon permit costs also means that there is little penalty for burning coal. “Angela Merkel’s policy has created an incentive structure which has the effect of partially replacing nuclear with coal, the dirtiest fuel that’s responsible for much of the growth in the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions since 1990,” Dieter Helm, an energy policy professor at the University of Oxford told Bloomberg News. Worldwide, the amount of coal burned increased 5.4 percent last year and accounted for 30 percent of global energy production.

Shunning Nuclear Power
Will Lead to a Warmer World

Shunning Nuclear Power Will Lead to a Warmer World

Physicist Spencer Weart argues that if we allow our fears of nuclear energy to block the building of a significant number of new nuclear plants, we will be choosing a far more perilous option: the intensified burning of planet-warming fossil fuels.
READ THE e360 REPORT

Yes, natural gas is less damaging than coal, but it is not zero – which is what we need: zero-carbon substitution for all power generation.

Arctic Sea Ice Poised for a Record Low in September | Climate Central

Published August 15, 2012 Climate Change Closed

Here’s a update on the mass/volume of article sea ice by by Michael D at Climate Central

The melting season is now fully under way in the high Arctic. Months of relatively warm temperatures and nearly continuous sunshine have taken their toll on the ice that blankets the Arctic Ocean. By mid-September, the sea ice will reach its low point for the year, before starting its annual re-freeze. All of this is normal, but the conditions scientists are seeing this year are anything but normal. “Right now,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., in an interview, “we’re on a record pace for ice loss. If the melt stopped today, we’d have the fourth lowest ice coverage on record.”

Whether this year’s ice loss ends up being worse than the melting in 2007 isn’t the most important question. “What is worrying,” said CryoSat-2 mission scientist Mark Drinkwater in an email, “is the reductions in volume and mass of the sea ice.” The reason is simple: if you’re just looking at how much of the Arctic Ocean is covered by ice, a thin layer is just as good as a thick layer. But a thin layer can melt much more easily, whether buffeted by storms or not, and decades of summer melting have thinned the ice dramatically. “Perhaps most disturbing,” Drinkwater said, “is the fact that current models would appear to be significantly underestimating the true values.”

In short, the new data confirm what scientists have been seeing for several years now: the ice is thinning a lot faster than climate models originally predicted it would, and while no one knows for sure when the first truly ice-free summer in the Arctic Ocean will come, it could plausibly be within years, not decades. That would be terrible news for seals and polar bears, but it could also accelerate the warming of the entire planet.

 

This Is Your Global Food Supply On Climate Change

Published August 12, 2012 Agriculture , Biotechnology , Climate Change Closed
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I think that Steve Savage expresses the climate change connection about right. We won’t know for twenty years if the 2012 weather extremes are expressing a climate change signal. Regardless, the extremes are signaling how important it is to make the global food supply more robust under the stress of combined extremes of heat and drought.  Here’s a snippet from Dr. Savage:

OK, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think that this year’s climate extremes are linked to human-caused climate change.  We might not really have the definitive answer on whether that is true for 20 years, but I would like nothing better than to be proven wrong about the linkage I’m making today.  From a global food supply perspective, the effects of weather on 2012 food production is problematic no matter what its cause.  As bad as it seems, it might just be a ‘shot over the bow’ relative to what me might expect in the future. The unfilled corn cob pictured above is a relatively decent example of what the US corn crop is yielding this year.

How Hot Is It?

This isn’t just about low rainfall.  There is a recent graph about temperature extremes on the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency) site that is striking. The 2012 difference from average is off the chart!

 

When it is both hot and dry, our dominant, rain-fed crops suffer the most.

Please do read Steve’s complete analysis.

Oxford Physics: The Trillionth Tonne

Published July 31, 2012 Climate Change , Climate Science , Global Warming Closed
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This is the most concise presentation of the math of climate change – by the physics department at Oxford University. I’m surprised I don’t see more references to this site. Click on the “Find out more…” button for the background. At the bottom you’ll find the scientific references behind the numbers.

The face of climate change should be the poor (not polar bears)

Published July 8, 2012 Climate Change Closed
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Steve Savage’s latest on global food prices led Steve to emphasize that technology is our primary tool to double food production by 2050. That essential tool is being fought by rich and powerful NGO’s and by the wealthy European states. Here’s a snippet from “Should “Charismatic Megafauna” be the “Face” of Climate Change“:

Unfortunately, there is continued resistance to “GMO” crops even after 13 years and billions of acres of safe implementation. Of course if we fail to grow enough food, it won’t be the risk-averse, affluent people of Europe and Japan that will suffer. Even though their own farms are less productive than they could be, they will be able to afford to import food at prices that put it out of reach for the poor. They may also continue to be able to block other countries from growing GMO wheat or rice without suffering much for it, but the suffering will occur somewhere else. I highly recommend Robert Paarlberg’s book, “Starved for Science” which documents how European influence has influenced agricultural policy in Africa to reflect the precautionary leanings of their former colonial masters rather than what is needed to feed poor people.

This is why a polar bear is not an appropriate image of what will happen if we don’t respond properly to the challenge of climate change. We need to envision hunger, starvation, political instability, and mass migration. Climate change consequence needs a human face.

Steve’s book recommendation is available in a Kindle edition: Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa. I just ordered for our iPads. UPDATE: Paarlberg’s book is truly excellent. I’ve already sent a Kindle gift book to a UK friend.

Polar Bear photo from Flickrfavorite.

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