Tag Archives: carbon

Economic Scene: A Paltry Start in Curbing Global Warming

by Myrna Posted on June 3, 2014

World leaders aren’t dealing with the limit of the planet’s carrying capacity when they weigh future growth against the need to deal with climate change. Original source: Economic Scene: A Paltry Start in Curbing Global Warming Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: Behind the Mask – A Reality Check on China’s Plans for a Carbon CapTaking Page From Health Care Act, Obama Climate Plan Relies on StatesObama to Take Action to Cut Carbon Pollution

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Economic Scene: A Paltry Start in Curbing Global Warming

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Don’t Believe the Doom Mongering About Obama’s New Carbon Regs

by AbbieBenes Posted on June 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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For deep coverage of President Obama’s decision to roll out new limits on CO2 emissions from power plants, I commend to you the fine folks who cover the environment for us. Their real-time reporting on today’s events is here.

For now, I’ll just make a couple of points. First, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy sure is right about this:

McCarthy said critics who warn of severe economic consequences of the rules have historically decried all environmental protections. She described them as “ special interests” who “cried wolf to protect their own agenda. And time after time, we followed the science, protected the American people, and the doomsday predictions never came true. Now, climate change is calling our number. And right on cue, those same critics once again will flaunt manufactured facts and scare tactics.”

Before the rules came out, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it would cost the economy $50 billion annually and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, from the coal-heavy state of Kentucky, called it “a dagger in the heart of the American middle class.”

You should basically ignore cries of doom from conservatives and business interests. They’ll be producing reams of data showing that the new EPA regs will cost untold billions of dollars, millions of jobs, and thousands of plant closures. This is what they’ve done with every environmental regulation ever proposed. In virtually every case, they’ve been wrong. The cost of compliance turns out to be a lot lower than we expect, as does the impact on jobs and energy prices. Roughly speaking, this is because capitalism really does work, something these fans of capitalism always forget whenever it becomes inconvenient. But work it does: we invent new ways of compliance and new ways of generating energy, and it all turns out far better than the doom-mongers expect.

But you probably knew that already. So here’s something else to ponder: What is Obama’s real goal in announcing these new regulations? The reason I ask is that today’s announcement is just the first step. We now have to go through the normal drafting and public comment phase, and this is a lengthy process—even if the courts don’t get involved, something I wouldn’t bet on. Obama may have directed the EPA to issue the final rule by June 2015, but that seems hopelessly optimistic to me. At a minimum, for a complex and powerful regulation like this one, I’d expect a minimum of two or three years.

In other words, it probably won’t go into effect during Obama’s presidency. And that makes me wonder if it’s as much a bargaining chip as anything else. Back in 2010, when cap-and-trade was being considered in the Senate, Obama warned that if it didn’t pass, he’d take executive action on his own. That wasn’t enough to scare Republicans into supporting the bill, but now he’s actually doing it, which means there’s a concrete regulation to compare alternatives to. And I wonder if that isn’t the main point: Produce something specific enough that it’s possible to get some Republican support for an alternative. Even now, I suspect that Obama would be much happier with congressional legislation than with an executive action.

I’m just noodling here, and I might be entirely off base. God knows Obama has no reason to think that anything short of Armageddon will provoke any serious compromising from Republicans in Congress. Still, the timing certainly seems a bit peculiar. It’s been four years since cap-and-trade failed. Why did it take this long to produce the EPA regs that he had threatened as the price of failure?

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Don’t Believe the Doom Mongering About Obama’s New Carbon Regs

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President Said to Be Planning to Use Executive Authority on Carbon Rule

by Myrna Posted on May 28, 2014

President Obama’s proposed regulation to cut pollution from coal-fired power plants by up to 20 percent would be the strongest action taken by an American president to tackle climate change. See the original post:   President Said to Be Planning to Use Executive Authority on Carbon Rule ; ;Related ArticlesGovernments Await Obama’s Move on Carbon to Gauge U.S. Climate EffortsAmericans’ Varied Views of ‘Global Warming’ and ‘Climate Change’Obama to Give Push on Climate ;

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President Said to Be Planning to Use Executive Authority on Carbon Rule

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San Francisco considers banning exports of coal and petcoke

by FrancinXYAO Posted on May 19, 2014

San Francisco considers banning exports of coal and petcoke

By

Chris Chabot

The city that kicked off a gay-marriage revolution, cracked down on Happy Meal toys, and battled bottled water is gunning for a new first. San Francisco wants to lead the nation in limiting fossil fuel exports.

At a hearing scheduled for Thursday, the San Francisco Environment Commission will consider a proposal to ban the bulk transportation of “hazardous fossil fuel materials,” such as coal and petroleum coke, within city limits. If the commission agrees, the proposal will be passed up to city and/or port leaders for further consideration. The proposed ban would also apply to crude oil, though crude exports are currently banned nationally — a ban that industry is fighting to overturn.

San Francisco isn’t acting alone in trying to stymie exports of coal and other fossil fuels to Asia. In February, the city’s lower-income neighbor, Oakland, rejected a bid by Bowie Resource Partners to use its port as a coal export terminal. And residents throughout the Pacific Northwest have been successfully campaigning against proposals to build hulking new coal terminals along their waterfronts.

Joshua Arce, president of the San Francisco Environment Commission, which advises city lawmakers, said West Coast cities and ports can work together to help bottle up the nation’s coal supplies and keep them in the ground, where they can do the climate and the environment no harm. He said they can also work to prevent petcoke, which is left behind after tar-sands oil from Canada is refined, from reaching export markets, where it can be burned to produce a filthy form of energy.

“There’s a widespread consensus that this is the right thing to do — to lay down a marker for the environment, and ban these hazardous fossil fuel materials forever in the City and County of San Francisco,” Arce said. “It’s not like we’re saying anything that’s not already the practice informally. Our port staff has said, time and time again, ‘no’ to coal. It’s time to make it an official policy.”

San Francisco’s port is perhaps best known for its cruise ship terminal along the city’s Disney Land-like northern waterfront, but the city’s southeastern waterfront has a long and heavy industrial history. A new bulk marine cargo terminal is included in southeastern neighborhood redevelopment plans. And the city is just a bay away from Richmond, which is home to Chevron’s explosion- and pollution-prone oil refinery. All of which makes city leaders nervous that their waterfront assets could one day be exploited by the nation’s fossil fuel merchants.

“The fossil fuel industry is never sleeping,” Arce said. “We never want there to be a day when a company that’s engaged in this aspect of the carbon economy makes an offer here that someone can’t refuse.”

—–

[Correction: This post originally reported that the Port of Oakland rejected a coal export proposal last week. In fact, it rejected it in February.]

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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San Francisco considers banning exports of coal and petcoke

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Climate Change Is Turning Your Produce Into Junk Food

by AgustinBaylebri Posted on May 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Climate skeptics like to point out that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stimulates plant growth—suggesting that ever-growing fossil fuel consumption will lead to an era of bin-busting crop yields. But as I noted last week, the best science suggests that other effects of an over-heated planet—heat stress, drought, and floods—will likely overwhelm any bonus from CO2-rich air. Overall, it seems, crop yields will decline.

And here’s more bad news: In a paper published in Nature this month, a global team has found that heightened levels of atmospheric carbon make key staple crops wheat, rice, peas, and soybeans less nutritious.

The team, led by Samuel Myers, a research scientist at Harvard’s Department of Environmental Health, grew a variety of grains and legumes in plots in the US, Japan, and Australia. They subjected one set to air enriched with CO2 at concentrations ranging from 546 and 586 parts per million—levels expected to be reached in around four decades; the other set got ambient air at today’s CO2 level, which recently crossed the 400 parts per million threshold.

The results: a “significant decrease in the concentrations of zinc, iron, and protein” for wheat and rice, a Harvard press release on the study reports. For legumes like soybeans and peas, protein didn’t change much, but zinc and iron levels dropped. For wheat, the treated crops saw zinc, iron, and protein fall by 9.3 percent, 5.1 percent, and 6.3 percent, respectively.

These are potentially grave findings, because a large swath of humanity relies on rice, wheat, and legumes for these very nutrients, the authors note. They report that two billion people already suffer from zinc and iron deficiencies, “causing a loss of 63 million life-years annually.” According to the Harvard press release, the “reduction in these nutrients represents the most significant health threat ever shown to be associated with climate change.” Symptoms of zinc deficiency include stunted growth, appetite loss, impaired immune function, hair loss, diarrhea, delayed sexual maturation, impotence, hypogonadism (for males), and eye and skin lesions; while iron deficiency brings on fatigue, shortness of breath, dizziness, and headache.

Wheat, rice, soybeans, and peas are all what scientists call C3 crops, characterized by the way they use photosynthesis to trap carbon from the atmosphere. C4 crops, which use a different pathway, include staples like corn and sorghum. Fortunately, C4 crops showed much less sensitivity to higher CO2 levels, the study found.

Meanwhile, in my post last week about the big National Climate Assessment and its finding on agriculture, I left out a key point on weeds. The report’s agriculture section notes that “several weed species benefit more than crops from higher temperatures and CO2 levels,” meaning that climate change will likely intensify weed pressure on farmers. And then it adds a bombshell: glyphosate, the widely used herbicide marketed by Monsanto as Roundup, “loses its efficacy on weeds grown at CO2 levels projected to occur in the coming decades.” And that means “higher concentrations of the chemical and more frequent sprayings thus will be needed, increasing economic and environmental costs associated with chemical use.”

In short, the era of climate change will hardly be the paradise of carbon-enriched bounty envisioned by fossil fuel enthusiasts. For a look at how farmers probably should adapt to these unhappy developments, see my 2013 profile of Ohio farmer David Brandt.

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Climate Change Is Turning Your Produce Into Junk Food

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No, New York Times, Keystone XL Is Not a "Rounding Error"

by slodka_elkra Posted on April 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tim McDonnell

The New York Times had an interesting story earlier this week that aimed to put the carbon footprint of the Keystone XL pipeline, widely derided by environmentalists as the coup de grâce for climate change, in a broader context. The main takeaway was that even if the pipeline gets built, the carbon emissions from the oil it will carry will be such a small slice of the global pie as to be practically negligible; one analyst quoted in the story dismisses Keystone’s carbon footprint as a “rounding error.”

The story is right about a couple things: For the Obama administration to take a strong stance on climate change, finalizing and enforcing tough new limits on emissions from cars and coal-fired power plants will likely have a much bigger impact than blocking this one pipeline (a final decision on the pipeline was delayed once again by the State Department last Friday). And in any case, according to the State Department’s latest environmental assessment, most of the Canadian oil that the pipe would carry is going to get dug up and burned one way or another, so blocking the pipeline won’t necessarily be a win for the climate.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that, as the chart above shows, the footprint of this one infrastructure project is much less than that of the entire US economy. But that doesn’t mean we should write off all that oil’s carbon footprint altogether. In fact, the Times story’s own such chart dramatically understates what that footprint will really be, using a statistic out of context that’s an order of magnitude lower than the latest official estimate.

The Times writes that the pipeline will be responsible for an annual 18.7 million metric tons of emissions, citing a 2013 letter from a top EPA administrator to senior State Department officials offering feedback on their environmental review of the pipeline. But in the letter, that figure isn’t presented as an estimate of the pipeline’s total footprint. Instead, it’s an estimate of how much greater the emissions will be as a result of the pipeline carrying oil sands crude, the exceptionally carbon-heavy oil that will run in the pipe, as opposed to an equivalent volume of conventional crude oil.

In other words, 18.7 million metric tons is only the difference between conventional and oil sands oil, the extra carbon boost that comes from using a dirtier fossil fuel, what the EPA letter calls “incremental emissions.”

The real number to look at is from the State Department’s final environmental analysis (last paragraph on page ES-15) released in January, and it’s much higher. According to that report, over its full lifecycle (from production to refinement to burning) the oil carried by the pipeline will emit 147-168 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions annually—more than the whole nation of Pakistan, according to Energy Information Administration statistics, and about as much as 41 coal-fired power plants.

The Times analysis is also problematic because it makes an erroneous apples-to-oranges comparison between country-level emissions data from the Energy Information Administration that counts only carbon dioxide, and Keystone emissions estimates that are given in terms of “carbon dioxide equivalent” and thus count other greenhouse gases like methane (although CO2 still accounts for the lion’s share). For a better apples-to-apples comparison, I only included the US in my chart (and not the other nations included in the Times chart), because an official estimate of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions is only available for that country.

Although even the State Department Keystone estimate is a small-ish chunk of total US emissions, it’s certainly nothing to sneeze at, especially when President Obama has repeatedly linked approval of the pipeline to a finding that it won’t have a major impact on climate change.

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No, New York Times, Keystone XL Is Not a "Rounding Error"

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Here’s Why the World Is Spending Less on Renewable Energy

by Gina72Ebzwtxbe Posted on April 8, 2014

Mother Jones

The United Nations climate folks think global investment in renewable energy needs to hit $1 trillion a year by 2030 to keep global warming to an acceptable level. So it might seem disconcerting that in 2013, investment dropped for the second year in a row, down 14 percent from 2012 to $214 billion, according to new data released by Bloomberg New Energy Finance at its annual confab in New York this week.

As investment fell, so too did the total amount of renewable energy being installed worldwide. That’s down nearly 7 percent from 2012 to 2013.

But don’t worry—at least not too much. Even though fewer renewable power systems (excluding large hydroelectric projects, which BNEF doesn’t count in this analysis) were installed last year, we were using more of it: Renewables accounted for 8.5 percent of all the power generated worldwide in 2013, up from 7.8 percent in 2012. BNEF estimated that renewables saved 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, equal to keeping 252.6 million cars off the road.

There are two forces at work behind the dropping investment figures, one a good news story and the other not so much. The good news is that 80 percent of the investment decline came thanks to the falling cost of renewable energy technology, primarily solar panels, according to BNEF Advisory Board Chairman Michael Liebreich. The cost of a rooftop solar system in California, for example, which is a good barometer of national trends, has fallen by a third just since 2010. The remaining 20 percent was due to a drop in actual construction activity, thanks to the uncertain fate of government subsidies and general economic sluggishness, especially in Europe.

Still, Liebreich told the clean energy CEOs and investors gathered here this morning that Bloomberg’s proprietary data about future investments suggest annual clean tech installations worldwide are likely to jump 37 percent to 112 gigawatts—a record level—by 2015. Even last year, renewables accounted for more than 40 percent of all the new power installations (including coal plants, nuke plants, etc.) built in 2013. In other words, any time a new power system gets built, it’s increasingly likely to be renewable and not something dirtier.

“This is about a future that’s structured differently than the past,” Liebreich said.

The global trends weren’t spread evenly across countries. Even though China’s overall investment dropped, it still managed to surpass, for the first time ever, the sum spent by all of Europe, where a stagnant economy led countries like Spain and Bulgaria to cut spending on clean energy subsidies. China is the world’s top renewables investor, spending $56 billion on it in 2013 (the US is at $35.8 billion).

In the US, the dip in investment hid a couple other important milestones: Last month California, the nation’s biggest solar market, broke its all-time solar power production record twice on two consecutive days. And in January, the US got an all-time record 4.8 percent of its power from wind turbines, according to BNEF.

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Here’s Why the World Is Spending Less on Renewable Energy

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Exxon Has 25 Billion Barrels of Fossil Fuel and Plans To Extract it All

by alka24 Posted on April 2, 2014

Mother Jones

ExxonMobil has 25.2 billion barrels worth of oil and gas in its current reserves, it’s going to extract and sell all of it, and isn’t expecting any meddling climate regulations to get in the way.

That’s the main takeaway of a report the company released this week to its investors, examining the risk that greenhouse gas emissions rules in the US and worldwide might pose to its fossil fuel assets. Exxon made headlines a couple weeks back when it promised to issue the report after facing pressure from shareholders led by Arjuna Capital, a sustainable wealth management firm.

If stricter limits on carbon pollution or high carbon taxes force energy companies to keep their holdings buried underground, the thinking among environmental economists goes, it could topple the companies’ value and leave investors holding the bag. The result, economists warn, would be a collapse of the so-called “carbon bubble.”

Some big energy companies (including Exxon) have already nodded to this problem, by building a theoretical carbon price into their projected balance sheets. But this report is the first time a large oil and gas company has published a detailed assessment of its own climate risk exposure, according to the New York Times.

The report doesn’t present a very optimistic view of the prospects for aggressive climate action by world leaders.

“We are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become ‘stranded’,” the report says. “Stranded assets” is a term climate economists use to refer to fossil fuel reserves that could be stuck in the ground if countries around the world implement sufficiently stringent carbon regulations to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—a threshold agreed to at the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen. The amount of carbon humans can release without exceeding this limit—roughly 485 billion metric tons of carbon beyond what we’ve already emitted—is often called the “carbon budget.”

Exxon’s report suggests that its planners don’t believe serious carbon limits will be on the books anytime soon, leaving the company free to burn through its reserves of oil and gas. That’s a disconcerting vision to come just on the heels of Sunday’s new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which predicted a nightmarish future if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t slowed soon.

“The reserves are going to be able to turn into money, because they’re assuming there isn’t going to be a policy change,” said Natural Resources Defense Council Director of Climate Programs David Hawkins. “They’re definitely saying that no matter how bad it gets, the world’s addiction to fossil fuels will be so overwhelming that the governments of the world will just suck it up and let people suffer.”

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Exxon Has 25 Billion Barrels of Fossil Fuel and Plans To Extract it All

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Aussie farmers to be paid to store carbon in soil

by Aaron Doolsey Posted on March 20, 2014

Aussie farmers to be paid to store carbon in soil

By

Haydyn Bromley

Climate protection is getting down and dirty Down Under.

Soil serves as a great reservoir for carbon, yet it’s often overlooked in climate protection efforts. That’s changing in Australia, where farmers will soon be able to earn cash for projects that store carbon in the soil — such as tree plantings, dung beetle releases, and composting. Aussie farmers are already eligible to make money by reducing greenhouse gas pollution from livestock, manure, and rice fields.

Australia’s environment minister announced Tuesday that farmers could start applying for payments for soil carbon storage in July.

The government considers the replenishment of carbon in soil to be one of the cheapest and best ways of reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions — although federal scientists recently concluded that it could only provide “low levels of greenhouse gas abatement.”

The money for payments to farmers will come from the country’s Emissions Reduction Fund — which is climate-denying Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s planned replacement for a nascent carbon tax. Having the government pay for projects that reduce CO2 might be a nice idea, but not when it comes at the expense of having polluters pay for their emissions. And the emissions reduction fund has been criticized by experts as a potentially ineffective corporate handout.


Source
Graziers now able to tap carbon farming, Reuters
Soil carbon storage incentive, The Land

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Big polluters tell Supreme Court they’re worried for Chinese restaurateurs

by Gaberilla Eve Posted on February 25, 2014

Big polluters tell Supreme Court they’re worried for Chinese restaurateurs

By

Thomas Hawk

The country’s worst climate polluters don’t want to have their carbon dioxide emissions reined in by the federal government. They’ve already tried and failed to convince the Supreme Court that the Clean Air Act doesn’t apply to CO2. So in court on Monday, they claimed to be worried that the EPA could, theoretically, crack down on CO2 produced by everything from Dunkin’ Donuts stores and Chinese restaurants to high school football games. And that would be crazy, so the EPA’s authority to regulate CO2 should be curbed.

The attorney representing conservative states, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and major polluters argued before the Supreme Court that the Obama administration erred when it set up a regulatory framework under the Clean Air Act for stationary sources of carbon dioxide, deciding to regulate emissions from major polluters like power plants and factories but not from tens of millions of small operations. The conservative coalition contends that a correct interpretation of the law should see smalltime polluters subjected to the same rules as big polluters — which everyone agrees would be absurd. So the polluters’ attorney told the Supreme Court that Congress should be called on to set new CO2-pollution rules — that it shouldn’t be up to the EPA to decide who is and who isn’t subject to such rules.

The Clean Air Act dictates that facilities need permits from the EPA if their air pollution exceeds 100 tons a year, or 250 tons in some cases. But, as The Christian Science Monitor explains, “The problem with these thresholds when applied to a greenhouse gas (like carbon dioxide) is that greenhouse gases are emitted at much higher volumes than traditional air pollutants. One hundred tons per year of sulfur dioxide is the rough equivalent of 100,000 tons per year of carbon dioxide, experts say.” So the EPA set a higher threshold. For CO2 pollution to be regulated under the Clean Air Act, the EPA decided that a polluter must pump out more than 75,000 or 100,000 tons a year.

The New York Times reports on some of the absurdity from Monday’s hearing:

Jonathan F. Mitchell, the solicitor general of Texas, which challenged the regulations along with other states, said a faithful interpretation of the statute would require that its permit requirements be imposed “on the corner deli or the Chinese restaurant or a high school building.” …

Justice Breyer and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wondered if the law might reach high school football games.

Why are polluters so focused on these trivialities? As Grist’s Ben Adler explained, these hardcore global warmers had attempted to convince the court to hear a variety of more far-reaching challenges to the government’s regulation of carbon dioxide, but the vast majority of those challenges were rejected. Pretending to care about a hypothetical EPA crackdown on climate-changing Chinese restaurants and local sporting events is the best shot these guys have left.

The Times reports that at Monday’s hearing “the justices seemed divided along ideological lines over whether [the EPA’s approach] was a sensible accommodation or an impermissible exercise of executive authority.” A ruling in this case, called Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, is expected in June.


Source
For the Supreme Court, a Case Poses a Puzzle on the E.P.A.’s Authority, The New York Times
Supreme Court takes up challenge to Obama and the EPA, The Christian Science Monitor
Carbon Copy: Understanding What Is, and Is Not, At Stake in the Latest Supreme Court Climate Case, NRDC’s Switchboard

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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