February 2008

From Prometheus Blog, Roger Pielke, Jr.

Andy Revkin has an interesting post up about per capita emissions in various countries around the world. What countries have a per capita emissions level consistent with an 80 percent reduction from the world's current total emissions?

The answer, as can be seen above in an image that I use in lectures (data from US EIA), is Haiti and Somalia. If everyone in the world lived as they do in these two countries, we'd have the emissions challenge licked.

What about the eco-sensitive UK? Sorry, if everyone lived as they do in the UK global carbon emissions would be more than twice the current world total. What about everyone lived as they do in eco-friendly Sweden? Sorry, emissions would be about one and a half times the current world total. United States? Don't even ask. China? just slightly below the current world total (and growing fast).

Bottom line? No country, save Haiti and Somalia, is currently producing emissions at a level even remotely consistent with levels consistent with an 80% reduction in the world's totals. Hence, all of the finger pointing and debates in political negotiations are based on relative hypocrisy ("We're doing relatively less bad that you are!") or faith-based assumptions in the efficacy of future policies ("Our targets are more aggressive than yours!").

There remains huge hurdles to achieving emissions reductions of the sort called for in current political debate. Until we see evidence of it actually occurring, somewhere, we should be very cautious about picking what policies will ultimately achieve results. Instead, we should try a diversity of approaches and see what works.

Posted on February 15, 2008 10:39 AM

Citizens in Florida are outraged as they discover their power company’s true motivations for windmills and the costs to themselves. About Florida Power and Light’s wind turbine proposal Julie Zahniser writes in her local paper,

“This one is about corporate tax avoidance through massive tax subsidies lobbied for by Enron, which was the largest wind developer in the United States before its demise and which pioneered the tax shelter as a commodity. FPL Group paid zero federal income tax in 2002 and 2003 despite more than $2 billion in profits, largely because of the wind projects of its wind subsidiary, FPL Energy, according to Citizens for Tax Justice.

But, now it has gotten so bold that it is proposing putting wind turbines where we don’t have sufficient winds to get close to the 30 mph required to reach the turbines’ rated capacity.”

When the government chooses “winners and losers” in energy markets, consumers always lose.

You have probably heard that China is building new coal-fired power plants at the rate of one every week to 10 days. In late 2004, The Christian Science Monitor reported that three countries—the United States, China, and India—had plans to build nearly 850 new coal plants, “which would pump up to five times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce.” These new plants would “bury” Kyoto. The Monitor elaborated:

By 2012, the plants in three key countries – China, India, and the United States – are expected to emit as much as an extra 2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide, according to a Monitor analysis of power-plant construction data. In contrast, Kyoto countries by that year are supposed to have cut their CO2 emissions by some 483 million tons.

That was the situation in 2004. What has happened since?

Well, there’s been a lot of agitation to stop new coal plants from being built in the United States. In some cases, like TXU’s proposal to build 11 new coal-fired power plants in Texas, the anti-coal campainers carried the day.

But China and, to a lesser extent, India and other developing countries still dominate the big picture. The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday carried a front-page story on China’s booming demand for coal. China’s electric generating capacity increased 18% just from last July to December, almost all of it fueled by coal.

Chinese demand for coal is surging so fast that, for the first time, the country has become a net importer of coal. Also, just as China’s industrialization was a key cause of rising oil prices from 2004 to the present, so China’s electrification is now pushing up world coal prices. Coal mines in the United States and elsewhere are revving up to meet this surging demand.

Energy analysts interviewed in the WSJ article all foresee even greater demand for coal in China and other developing countries in the foreseeable future. Kyoto’s sustainability looks dimmer than ever.

Senator John McCain (R-Az.), now the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party, said this week in an interview with Darren Samuelsohn of Greenwire that he had shown stronger leadership on global warming than the two leading Democratic Party presidential candidates, Senators Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY).  He noted that both Obama and Clinton are now co-sponsors of his climate bill, S. 2191, the Climate Security Act.  Then he gave a quite extraordinary description of how his bill would work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  According to the Greenwire story, McCain said: “It’s not mandatory caps to start with.  It’s cap and trade.  That’s very different, OK, because that’s a gradual reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions.  So please portray it as cap and trade.  That’s the way I call it.”

McCain is technically accurate in that if the Lieberman-McCain bill were enacted, it would not require mandatory reductions immediately.  But it does put a cap on future emissions and that cap is mandatory.  It’s what used to be called energy rationing.  During the Second World War, the federal government gave people coupons each month which would allow them to buy a certain quantity of gasoline.  If you wanted to buy more gas, you had to trade someone else for his coupons.  That’s how cap and trade works.  We just don’t call them rationing coupons any more.