Goodbye to the Climate

by Robert N Stavens

The International New York Times

Smog trapped in the valley of Sandy, Utah. Credit George Frey/Bloomberg

Donald J. Trump once tweeted that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing noncompetitive.” Twitter messages may not be clear signs of likely public policies, but Mr. Trump followed up during the campaign with his “America First Energy Plan,” which would rescind all of President Obama’s actions on climate change.

The plan includes canceling United States participation in the Paris climate agreement and stopping all American funding of United Nations climate change programs. It also includes abandoning the Clean Power Plan, a mainstay of the Obama administration’s approach to achieving its emissions reduction target for carbon dioxide under the Paris agreement.

What should we make of such campaign promises? Taking Mr. Trump at his word, he will surely seek to pull the country out of the Paris pact. But because the agreement has already come into force, under the rules, any party must wait three years before requesting to withdraw, followed by a one-year notice period.

Those rules would seem to be mere technicalities. The incoming Trump administration simply can disregard America’s pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 26 to 28 percent below the 2005 level by 2025. That is bad enough. But the big worry is what other key countries, including the world’s largest emitter, China, as well as India and Brazil, will do if the United States reneges on its pledge. The result could be that the Paris agreement unravels, taking it from the 97 percent of global emissions currently covered by the pact to little more than the European Union’s 10 percent share.

In addition, Mr. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency probably will stop work on regulations of methane emissions (a very potent greenhouse gas) from existing oil and gas operations. Undoing complex existing regulations, such as the Clean Power Plan, will be more difficult, but a reconstituted Supreme Court will probably help President Trump when that plan inevitably comes before the court.

Also, the new president will most likely ask that the Keystone XL pipeline permit application be renewed — and facilitate other oil and gas pipelines around the country.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump promised to “bring back” the coal industry by cutting environmental regulations. That may not be so easy. The decline of that industry and related employment has been caused by technological changes in mining, and competition from low-priced natural gas for electricity generation, not by environmental regulations. At the same time, Mr. Trump has pledged to promote fracking for oil and gas, but that would make natural gas even more economically attractive, and accelerate the elimination of coal-sector jobs.

If he lives up to his campaign rhetoric, Mr. Trump may indeed be able to reverse course on climate change policy, increasing the threat to our planet, and in the process destroy much of the Obama legacy in this important realm. This will make the states even more important players on this critical issue.

Robert N. Stavins is a professor at Harvard, where he directs the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements.

The politicizing of the carbon management debate by monied interests has prevented thoughtful debate

by Jon Phillips

A critical topic for us, our children, their children and so forth for generations.

US carbon emissions in the energy sector have dropped since 2007 and will remain under the 2007 peak for the next few decades if projections on natural gas hold and exports fail to materialize. Historically cheap natural gas, enabled by hydro fracture drilling technology has granted a temporary reprieve through the economic destruction of the US coal generation industry.

The politicizing of the carbon management debate by monied interests has prevented thoughtful debate over optimal economic approaches to manage carbon such as tax and dividend with tariffs on trade. Instead, in a surprising SCOTUS decision, the Clean Air Act will be used to manage carbon through emission cap regulation. The problem is that it's a rather blunt instrument. With any luck, the new regulation proposed by the Administration will engage shortly. New coal plants will be constrained to operate with emissions comparable to small natural gas turbine plants. This implies that to build a new coal plant, you'll have to put ~40% effective carbon capture and sequestration on the plant or you can't get a license.

Declining power generation from coal, January 2007 to January 2012 (EIA)

There's really no more thermal efficiency that can be pulled out of new super-critical coal plants except by going to co-generation. Usually, the capital risk economics don't work out on that. The short answer is that this will likely block most new coal generation. Meanwhile, old coal plants are struggling to meet new emission limits on mercury and the cost of upgrades is not competitive against decommissioning and building a combined cycle natural gas plant. Old plants are retiring at a steady clip and new plants will be blocked. If this continues, in a couple decades, the coal era will end in the US. You can imagine the angst in the coal States.

Unfortunately, this won't solve our most serious threat. It won't even touch it. Non-OECD carbon emissions have doubled since 2005 and global emissions have gone up 50% in the same decade! Global emissions are set to rise another 40 to 50% by 2025 while OECD emissions remain essentially flat since 2007 (the US among them).

 If we can't drastically bend down the curve in the developing world, it's game over. They're now producing twice the carbon of the developed world and there's nothing suggesting that their explosion in emissions will retrench. The real question is how to get the developing world's house in order.

Meanwhile, 'Mericans scrabble with each other about how to go to lower numbers domestically, but the globe's pants are being pulled down in the developing world. The only solution is to quickly get serious, put our own house in order and launch a climate change "Marshall Plan." We have to go all in against coal. Otherwise it's the future until the climate is truly toast. But what does that mean? 

Renewables? Yes! Nuclear? Yes and lots of it! Natural gas? Yes! But to execute a Marshall Plan we need to disconnect the advantage of cheap coal in the developing world. In the first instance that means carbon tariffs on trade (perhaps the most important mechanism of all since we're the dumping ground of cheap products based on coal electricity). It also means getting our natural gas glut into the international market to get the price of electricity up high enough to convert the infrastructure.

Hopefully President Obama's big push on new LNG terminals will move forward quickly because of the Ukraine geopolitics. Monied interests, fat and lazy sucking down cheap US natural gas, and a few odd confused environmentalists lacking a global perspective, have battled the Administration all the way. We need low carbon technology. All of it at massive scale right away.
___________________________________
Jon Phillips, PhD, is a Senior Technology Expert at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, and is the Director of the Sustainable Nuclear Power Initiative at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Richland, Washington. The opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the IAEA or PNNL.

Compromise, Hell!

Wendell Berry | Orion Magazine

Oak Fork, Letcher County, Kentucky

"Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God?"

In Our Backyard (A Monsanto Introspective) from Namreblis Ekim on Vimeo.

Area to experience increased coal train traffic

Its been reported that our area here in Eastern Washington is one of the places in Washington likely to see significantly increased coal train traffic (Tri-City Herald, Sunday, 12/2/2012). No one’s showing much interest here. Public officials are said not to be too worried about delays at railroad crossings. “The frustration of the average motorist might be a little higher,” one official said.

Coal is the world’s dirtiest energy source. It’s dirty to mine, to transport (check out the video), to burn, and to dispose of. Burning coal is adding millions of tons of greenhouse gases (GHG), the primary driver of global warming, to the Earth’s atmosphere. And we’re talking about delays at railroad crossings?!

Doc Hastings (R-WA4), the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee promoted a “Stop the War on Coal” bill that recently passed the House. It would block the EPA’s ability to regulate GHG emissions from power plants and other sources, prevent rules on the storage and disposal of coal ash, and limit Clean Water Act rules. Fortunately, the bill has no chance in the Senate.

Republicans have argued that as long as China is building new coal-fired plants, why should the US take “unilateral” action to reduce GHG emissions. Want to guess where we’re exporting all that coal transiting the Tri-Cities?

Coal terminal on the Columbia River (from Columbia Riverkeeper)

Going Extinct

In what seemed to me a bizarre encounter in the second presidential debate, the incumbent president and his challenger argued over which of the contenders for leader of the free world was more supportive of coal -- America's dirtiest energy source, and the country's leading source of pollution. No one following climate change developments could take any joy from the exchange, especially those fearing the earth is already experiencing what would be its sixth mass extinction.

Human activities are causing the earth to warm. There are no national or major scientific institutions anywhere in the world that dispute the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Not one. And we are already seeing the effects: longer, more intense heat waves, extreme drought, increased incidence of wildfires and longer fire seasons, loss of Arctic sea ice, and ocean acidification, among other things.

It will get worse, perhaps catastrophically so. Why? Because: (1) carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary driver of human-caused warming, takes centuries to dissipate in the atmosphere and global CO2 emissions continue to rise; and (2) many of the drivers of global warming produce positive feedbacks -- they are self-reinforcing -- and thus amplify the effects of global warming.

An example of positive feedback is the melting of Arctic sea ice. When sea ice melts, open water takes its place and being less reflective than ice, absorbs more solar radiation. This causes more warming, which in turn causes more melting.

To those who admit to anthropogenic global warming, but are content to wait it out, I suggest that their complacency, as well as being shamefully self-centered, may well be misplaced. Why? Because there’s the potential for a catastrophic climate destabilization.

Destabilization is an abrupt change in climate that would trigger dramatically shifting weather patterns, producing coastal flooding and torrential rains in some regions, and extreme drought in others, as well as an increasing incidence of hurricanes and tornadoes. These weather phenomena could occur in areas not normally accustomed to such events, such as the tornadoes that touched down in New York City in September of 2012, and super storm Sandy, that devastated the East Coast in October of that same year. In short, destabilization would lead to climate hell today, not in 2050.

Aftermath of Super Storm Sandy, Queens NY, 10/30/2012

Is this science fiction? Not at all. Paleoclimate records indicate that climate changes of this size and speed have occurred many times in the past. Furthermore, studies of the earth’s past five mass extinctions, including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago (mya), have shown that a buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide is a concomitant, if not the driving factor, in extinction events. The most devastating extinction in earth’s history, the Permian mass extinction, which occurred 252 mya, has been linked to a massive release of CO2 and/or methane.

At over 390 ppm, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere currently is unprecedented, at least in the last 400,000 years. At the same time, we are seeing the release of methane (a greenhouse gas 60 times more powerful than CO2) from thawing permafrost, as well as from the Arctic sea bed, and from unstable water bound deposits all over the world. The release of methane is a self-reinforcing process. A runaway methane release will very likely trigger abrupt climate change, and bring earth’s sixth mass extinction event to its apogee, and the destruction of most life on earth.

If we can go by the record of past mass extinctions, the earth will, over a few million years recover from this human-caused extinction event, but earth’s newly evolving tree of life will develop in whatever way the environment dictates. The chances the tree will include a homo sapiens limb is slim to none, which is probably for the best. We had our chance, and blew it.

Let's Burn More Coal, NOW!

The United States has the biggest reserves of coal in the world. We have so much coal we can ship it off to other countries. That's right. We are a net exporter of the dirty rock. And here we are wringing our hands over our dependence on foreign oil, peak oil, and high gas prices (okay, not half as high as Europe, but higher than Americans want to pay). Why don't we convert our vehicles to run on coal?

Okay, I'll grant you that according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, burning coal is a leading cause of smog, acid rain, global warming, and our toxic air. In an average year, a typical coal plant generates:

• 3,700,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), the primary human cause of global warming--as much carbon dioxide as cutting down 161 million trees.
• 10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide (SO2), which causes acid rain that damages forests, lakes, and buildings, and forms small airborne particles that can penetrate deep into lungs.
• 500 tons of small airborne particles, which can cause chronic bronchitis, aggravated asthma, and premature death, as well as haze obstructing visibility.
• 10,200 tons of nitrogen oxide (NOx), as much as would be emitted by half a million late-model cars. NOx leads to formation of ozone (smog) which inflames the lungs, burning through lung tissue making people more susceptible to respiratory illness.
• 720 tons of carbon monoxide (CO), which causes headaches and place additional stress on people with heart disease.
• 220 tons of hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds (VOC), which form ozone.
• 170 pounds of mercury, where just 1/70th of a teaspoon deposited on a 25-acre lake can make the fish unsafe to eat.
• 225 pounds of arsenic, which will cause cancer in one out of 100 people who drink water containing 50 parts per billion.
• 114 pounds of lead, 4 pounds of cadmium, other toxic heavy metals, and trace amounts of uranium.

Peace negotiations with a coal seam

I say “so what!” Who listens to scientists, anyway (certainly not Republicans). Our energetic Republican Congressmen hurriedly passed a "Stop the War on Coal" bill (H.R. 3904) just before adjourning so that America can continue to enjoy the benefits of coal without all those burdensome EPA regulations (you know, the ones that protect air and water quality). Of course, the Senate won't pass the bill, and President Obama has promised to veto it in any case, so the House bill is for naught. But it's the thought that counts, right? [So what the fuck are they thinking?]

Our Republican congressional representatives, who some people have the temerity to accuse of being obstructionist, have voted an astonishing 302 times this year to hamstring the Environmental Protection Agency, weaken clean water and air rules, undermine protections for public lands  and coastal areas, and block action to address global warming – all while seeking to make the regulatory climate as favorable as possible for the oil, gas and coal industries. And why not? It’s these folks who are paying "their" congressmen to watch out for their interests.

Robert Semple reports in the September 20th edition of the Washington Post that Russell Train, a lifelong Republican and one of the country’s foremost conservationists of the last half-century, died this week at the age of 92. He served Richard Nixon as the first chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and later as administrator of the fledgling Environmental Protection Agency – helping shape landmark statutes like the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. His death serves as a reminder of the G.O.P.’s historic tradition of environmental stewardship, a tradition stretching as far back as Teddy Roosevelt, which the party has now repudiated.

Indeed, it's hard to associate today's Republican Party with anything remotely responsible in so far as the environment is concerned. These Republican heroes are all about job creation and job creators (those are the people who buy their votes). If those "purple mountains" have to have their tops removed to get at coal, so be it. If coal ash removal is a problem, don't remove the shit, just store it behind dirt damns and pray for the best. If acid rain is turning forests brown, it's time to clear cut. And please don't even mention global warming; what a hoax!

Coal ash sludge flood at Kingston plant in TN

Unfortunately the Republicans war on the environment (can I use that term?) makes some people mad, like Philip Bump, who wrote that, "The Republican leadership in the House of Representatives could not care less about the legacy it is leaving for its party, its districts, or the United States. They can’t draw a straight fucking line between the worst drought in decades and the coal plants that, day in and day out, belch out pollution." Now, now, Philip. Try to look at it from the other side of the aisle. If the fossil industry was paying your salary, wouldn't you say and do whatever they told you to? Damn right! Well, unless you had integrity, that is. No worries. We're talking about Republicans.

Purple Mountains Majesty
Mountain top removal coal mining -- there ain't any majesty to it

Mt. Rainier -- What If?

It took a concerted effort of scientists and conservationists to establish Mt. Rainier National Park. Lands within what is now the park boundary had been granted to the Northern Pacific Railroad Company. Northern Pacific, which later became a proponent of the park (because they hoped for tourist traffic on their railroads), employed a geologist, Bailey Willis, in the 1880s, to search for coal deposits on the north slope of Mount Rainier. Imagine if coal had been discovered.

Mountaintop Mining in West Virginia

New "Old" Coal Plants Under Construction

Sixteen large coal-fired plants have fired up since 2008 and 16 more are under construction. These are old-style plants – they do not capture and sequester carbon dioxide. They will generate about 125 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, equivalent to putting 22 million additional automobiles on the road.

The expansion, the industry's largest in two decades, represents an acknowledgment that highly touted "clean coal" technology is still a long way from becoming a reality and underscores a renewed confidence among utilities that due in large part to their lobbying activities, proposals to regulate carbon emissions will fail.

American Power Act

On October 24, Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), joined NOAA representatives at a kickoff event for the Fisher Slough Marsh Restoration Project in Fisher Slough, Washington. NOAA awarded The Nature Conservancy $5.2 in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to restore Fisher Slough Marsh, critical to Chinook, Chum, and Coho salmon, in the Skagit River floodplain.

June 4, 2010

The Honorable Senator Maria Cantwell

825 Jadwin Avenue, Suite 205

Richland, WA 99352

RE: Energy and the Environment

Dear Senator Cantwell;

I am writing to urge you to support legislation to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, reduce America’s dependence on fossil fuels and foreign sources of oil, and encourage the development of alternative, i.e., “green” sources of energy, including nuclear power.

There are currently no alternative energy sources – solar, wind, nuclear, or what have you – that, as things stand, are more economical than fossil fuels, because, as you know, their true costs are not reflected in the price we pay for electric power, gasoline, or the many other petroleum-based products we consume. Those costs are familiar to anyone who pays attention: catastrophic health effects, including death; constraints on our foreign policy options; degradation and destruction of the environment; and a real and growing threat to the livability of our planet due to global warming. Even nuclear energy, which many consider a green alternative, has unresolved cost, indemnification, and waste disposal issues.

We seem only to pay attention when 29 coal miners die in West Virginia, or massive amounts of oil spew into the Gulf, but the sad fact is that the long-term consequences of our profligate, wasteful, and just plain stupid use of resources has seriously and perhaps irrevocably degraded the environment and, in turn, our quality of life.

Until the true cost of fossil fuels is reflected in their price, there will be no inherent, and therefore sustainable incentive for the development of alternative sources of energy in the U.S. Other countries, including China, are investing in green energy sources and technology, and leaving the U.S. behind in what will become a green revolution. We must move forward on intelligent and far-reaching energy legislation NOW.

The Kerry-Lieberman “American Power Act” isn’t perfect, but it’s a start. Please work for its passage.

Sincerely,

 / s /

Richard V. Badalamente

Kennewick, Washington

Clean Coal

Much of America’s coal is mined by blowing the tops off of entire mountains and then dumping the rubble in streams and valleys. Not clean.

We know coal is dirty at the stack, and right now CCS technology is not being used to handle GHG emissions. Not clean.

The coal lifecycle doesn’t end at the smokestacks. Even after coal is burned, we’re left with billions of tons of coal ash and liquid coal slurry/sludge that must be stored and disposed of all across the country. The stuff is toxic, containing elevated levels of heavy metals like mercury and arsenic. Not clean.

Images are from Melange, at Wordpress.

For information on the threats that coal slurries pose, see this New York Times story from 2008. You can also read articles from major American newspapers on coal mining by mountain top removal here.

Coming in 2009 -- Increasing World Energy Demand

Total world consumption of marketed energy is projected to increase by 50 percent from 2005 to 2030.

Coal will continue to dominate as the fuel of choice for electricity generation over the next two decades.

The recent increase in concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the result of human activities, mainly the burning of fossil fuels. As the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased, so has the average surface temperature of the earth.