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Wake of the Flood

2012-02-14T23:06:06Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

Shortly after I moved to New York last August the city was hit by an earthquake, a hurricane, and an October snowstorm. These kinds of things aren’t supposed to happen in the Big Apple (if I wanted to live in a disaster movie I could have moved to California).

But happen they did, causing many New Yorkers to joke about the End of Days—and some to prepare for them. That may be premature. There is no reason to think that earthquakes will become a frequent occurrence on the East Coast. Preparing for more floods, however, is a really good idea. (Snowstorms are likely to become less frequent, but heavy snowfalls may increase as our atmosphere warms, increasing its water-holding capacity. See Theo Spencer’s post on trying to ski without snow.)

Hurricane Irene caused extensive flooding, power outages, and property damage throughout the Eastern Seaboard and into Vermont, killing at least 44 people in 13 states. Many commentators called it a 100-year storm. New research shows that flooding like what we saw from Irene could become a much more regular occurrence as our climate changes and sea levels rise.

The study conducted by Ning Lin and Kerry Emauel of MIT with Michael Oppenheimer and Erik Vanmarcke of Princeton focused on the risk of flooding in New York City. The researchers simulated 5000 storms under historic climatic conditions to develop a flood risk baseline. They then simulated another 5000 storms under conditions expected if carbon pollution continues to accumulate in our atmosphere unchecked, changing our climate and raising sea levels. Their conclusion is well summarized by the headline in the MIT News story about the study: ‘Storm of the Century?’ Try ‘Storm of the Decade.’

Specifically, the study found that a storm surge of 5.7 feet or higher, which currently occurs an average of once every 100 years, would occur once every 3 to 20 years due to the effects of heat-trapping pollution. Given that the sea walls protecting lower Manhattan are only about 5 feet tall, this means the city has a lot of work to do if it is to minimize the damage.

Fortunately for New York, it has a leg up on most cities. Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA and Columbia University has for many years been studying the risks that our changing climate poses to New York and developing recommendations on steps the city should take to prepare. And the City is listening. Mayor Bloomberg wrote the forward to a 2010 report she edited, which was published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. New York’s subway system, the lifeblood of the city, is already taking steps to reduce the risk that its huge network of tunnels will flood during storms by, for example, raising some subway vents by six inches. The full preparedness plan could cost the cash-strapped transit system $15 billion according to Klaus Jacobs of Columbia.

New York has benefited from a unique partnership between its world-class research centers, home-grown philanthropies, and forward-looking City Hall, and it still has a long way to go. How well prepared is your city for the storm of the century to become the storm of the decade?

Thinking Fast and Slow about Climate Change

2012-02-08T22:18:58Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

Think fast.

What’s the first thought that comes into your mind when you see “climate change”?

What’s the first thought that comes into your mind when you see “car crash”?

If you are like me, “climate change” conjures a vague image of melting ice and perhaps an image of a forlorn polar bear on a shrinking ice floe, while “car crash” produces a vivid image of twisted metal and broken glass. I’m fortunate because in the specific crash that comes to mind my son totaled his car but walked away uninjured. For many people the image will be much more tragic. By contrast, I suspect few, if anyone, immediately associate “climate change” with a specific image of someone they know who was injured or killed.

Now think slow.

As someone who studies climate change I can produce a litany of statistics: The 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1998, more than 30,000 people died in the 2003 European heat wave, record floods in Pakistan displaced million of people in 2010. But this takes work. In fact, I had to look up each of these statistics to make sure that I remembered it correctly.

This fundamental difference between instinctive, intuitive, quick, “System 1” thinking and deliberative, analytical, slow, “System 2” thinking is at the heart of Daniel Kahneman’s brilliant book Thinking Fast and Slow.

Kahneman is a phsychologist, but he won the Nobel Prize in economics for showing that real humans simply don’t conform to the rational expectations model assumed in neoclassical economic theory. The book is an intellectual tour de force and a pleasure to read. It also has a raft of insights that are essential for climate policy advocates. I don’t want to say that it is a “must read,” but really, you want to read this book. It’s like a fine red wine: pleasurable and good for you too. Here is how the Guardian’s review summarized it:

It is an outstanding book, distinguished by beauty and clarity of detail, precision of presentation and gentleness of manner. Its truths are open to all those whose System 2 is not completely defunct…

The New York Times’ review was equally enthusiastic:

By the time I got to the end of “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” my skeptical frown had long since given way to a grin of intellectual satisfaction. Appraising the book by the peak-end rule, I overconfidently urge everyone to buy and read it. But for those who are merely interested in Kahneman’s takeaway on the Malcolm Gladwell question it is this: If you’ve had 10,000 hours of training in a predictable, rapid-feedback environment — chess, firefighting, anesthesiology — then blink. In all other cases, think.

Climate change policy is not a predictable, rapid-feedback environment, so we can’t expect our instincts to be much help. Our brains evolved to very quickly detect and react to immediate threats, which we recognize through associative memory using System 1. Understanding the threat from climate change, by contrast, requires complex analytic thought: heat-trapping pollution is building up in the atmosphere; the climate is changing as a result; this is increasing the probability of extreme weather such as the European heat wave and the Pakistani flood. Being able to do this kind of reasoning, the operation of “System 2” in Kahneman’s terminology, is a great human achievement, but it takes effort. Kahneman shows, through a series of cleverly-designed deceptively simple experiments, that humans are fundamentally lazy and will only engage System 2 when prodded to do so.

As a consequence people are really bad at understanding statistics and probability. System 1 jumps to conclusions based on associations, and it’s very hard for System 2 to break through. Kahneman shows that some types of rare events, such as plane crashes, are judged to be much more common than they really are because they are associated with vivid imagery which is readily available to System 1. Premature deaths from air pollution, on the other hand, are likely to be judged much less common than they really are because statistical deaths don’t have a human face. The risk of catastrophic climate change driven by amplifying feedback loops is likely to be ignored altogether because we have no experience with which to associate this risk.

So how can we use the insights from Thinking Fast and Slow to make progress on climate? I have only begun to scratch the surface of what this thought-provoking book has to offer, but here’s a start.

First, we shouldn’t be surprised that this is hard. Humans are capable of understanding the threat from climate change and responding appropriately, but it doesn’t come naturally.

Second, the way scientists are trained to communicate with each other is often worse than useless for communicating to the public (including scientists unless they are actively engaging their System 2). Scientists are trained to avoid anecdotal evidence, present statistics, and focus on uncertainties. Meanwhile, fast-thinking humans learn from stories and examples, and equate uncertainty with ignorance.

Third, real people don’t have stable well-ordered preferences as assumed by neoclassical economic theory. Decisions depend on framing and context as much as the specifics of the alternatives.

In other words, changing the way fast-thinking real humans view climate change can be a slow process. Thinking Fast and Slow really is a must read for those who want to try.

The Incredible Shrinking Carbon Pollution Forecast

2012-02-01T14:21:41Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

How about a little good news for a change?

Something strange happened after the failure of comprehensive climate and energy legislation in 2010. Projections of future carbon emissions went down.

Part of that is due to the Great Recession of course, but that is far from the whole story. In fact, a number of market, technology, and policy factors have combined to fundamentally change the official forecast of what will happen to carbon pollution rates in the absence of new policies.

Back in 2005 the Energy Information Administration (EIA), a semi-independent statistical branch of the Department of Energy, was projecting that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions would increase steadily for the foreseeable future (see chart). More SUVs driven more miles and more electricity made by burning coal was all the EIA could see. Overall, EIA projected a 37% increase in CO2 emissions between 2005 and 2025. This year EIA is projecting that emissions in 2025 will be 6% below what they were in 2005. Looking out to the end of the current forecast horizon in 2035 emissions are still projected to be 3% below 2005 levels.

And these forecasts are almost certain to be revised downward in the next few months. So far this year EIA has only issued its “Annual Energy Outlook Early Release,” which includes only a “Reference Case” forecast. By convention, EIA’s Reference Case only accounts for policies that have been enacted in final form. That means that even though the Obama administration has proposed aggressive new efficiency standards for automobiles which are almost certain to go into effect because the auto industry supports them, EIA does not include these standards in its forecast. Accounting for these standards will reduce emissions by another 2-3% in 2025 and about 6-7% in 2035. EIA has also not yet incorporated the effect of the power plant Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, which were finalized just before Christmas. Those standards are likely to reduce power plant emissions by at least a couple of percent as some generators choose to replace aging coal plants with cleaner sources rather than invest in the pollution controls needed to keep the old plants running. In combination with growing local opposition to coal burners and effective state energy efficiency policies not fully captured by EIA, the impact of the mercury standard and other recent air pollution rules could be much greater. And EPA is overdue to issue carbon pollution standards for power plants, which will push emissions still lower (EIA can’t be faulted for not including these carbon standards as EPA has not yet released any information about what they will do).

So what is going on? Fully decomposing the dramatic change in the carbon pollution forecast is more than I can attempt here, but let’s consider three major drivers: fuel markets, technology, and policy.

Fuel markets. Oil prices are up and natural gas prices are down (which are related trends because a significant amount of natural gas production is now being driven by the search for more valuable natural gas liquids, which follow oil prices). Somewhat counter-intuitively both of those factors actually decrease emissions.

Most oil is used in transportation, and higher prices reduce the number of miles people travel and encourage them to select more efficient vehicles.
Meanwhile, an increasing share of natural gas is used to generate electricity, where low prices encourage power producers to switch from coal to gas, reducing CO2 emissions (while increasing methane emissions). Low gas prices can also encourage greater electricity consumption and less investment in renewables, which tends to drive up emissions, but due to strong efficiency and renewable policies the coal-to-gas switching effect dominates, at least in EIA’s latest forecast.

Technology. The cost of building coal plants is up, while the cost of wind and solar are coming down. Moreover, advances in energy efficiency technology, such as L.E.D. lighting and super windows, keep replenishing the low hanging efficiency fruit.

Policy. While comprehensive energy and climate legislation failed in Congress, the Obama administration has forged ahead using its existing authority to set strong efficiency standards for automobiles and appliances, and strong clean air standards which will reduce mercury, sulfur, nitrogen and carbon emissions from power plants. Meanwhile the states are continuing to lead, with renewable energy standards in 29 states and increasingly effective energy efficiency programs spreading out from the coasts. In addition, California has finalized its global warming pollution cap and the Northeast is in the process of tightening up its cap on carbon pollution from power plants.

There is plenty of bad news about global warming, but the 40% reduction in the business-as-usual forecast we have seen in the last few years makes the 80% or more reduction in actual emissions we need by 2050 look a whole lot more feasible.

Cornell Crosstalk: Dueling Groups of Cornell Profs add Heat but Little Light to Natural Gas Fracking Debate

2012-01-23T15:42:12Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

Last Thursday two groups of Cornell professors fired dueling press releases across the gorges of Ithaca. Lawrence Cathles and colleagues released a summary of their commentary rejecting claims by Robert Howarth and colleagues that using natural gas produced through hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) results in more global warming than using coal. That was the conclusion of a report last April by Howarth et al, and on Thursday they shot back with a response standing by their original conclusion. Both commentaries are expected to be published in Climatic Change Letters later this year.

Unfortunately, these dueling critiques don’t add any real information to the debate. So, I’m sticking by my conclusion as stated in my post on the original Howarth study:

… NRDC has long advocated that energy efficiency and renewables should be our first choice, rather than gas or coal, because they are the fastest, cheapest and cleanest solutions to global warming. Howarth’s analysis certainly underscores that priority.

Ultimately, we need to move away from dirty fossil fuels altogether and transition to sources such as wind and solar that can’t leak, spill, pollute the air or run out. Until we get there, natural gas will play a role in our energy mix (but not a dominant one) and that's why it's so crucial for the industry to clean up its act.

Second, we need much better data about methane emission rates [from natural gas production] before firm conclusions can be reached about the climate impact of natural gas relative to coal. The good news here is that companies are now required to measure and report on these emissions, so we will have more accurate data in the years to come.

More importantly, we need stronger regulation of natural gas upstream operations to address the full array of harmful impacts from inadequately regulated production, including requirements for the use of best practices to minimize releases of methane and other contaminants.

Returning to yesterday’s releases, Cathles et al. raise three objections to Howarth et al.’s analysis: 1) Howarth et al. fail to account for the higher efficiency of natural gas power plants compared to coal plants; 2) Howarth et al. use too high of a global warming potential to convert methane emissions into carbon dioxide equivalent global warming impacts; and 3) Howarth et al. assume implausibly high methane leak rates from natural gas production, particularly gas production using fracking.

I discussed each of these issues in my previous post. Let’s review and see if anything new has been brought to light by the latest round of debate.

Electricity generation efficiency. There are no new arguments here and I continue to believe that efficiency needs to be taken into account. Howarth et al. counter that most natural gas isn’t used to produce electricity. True. The largest share is used to heat homes and offices. Going back to burning coal for that purpose would be both much less efficient and disastrous for public health. Just ask anyone who has visited China in winter.
Global Warming Potential. Again, there are no new arguments here. I discussed this issue at some length in my previous post so I will just reiterate here that there is no single right answer. A range of time frames needs to be considered. We can’t limit our time horizon to only 20 years when focused on methane emissions and then argue for looking out 100 years when considering carbon dioxide.
Methane leak rate. This is the heart of the matter and there is a little bit new to say about it. Cathles et al. argue that no business in its right mind would allow 7.9% of its product to leak away when it has the capability to prevent it. Howarth et al. respond that at low natural gas prices it just isn’t profitable to plug the leaks, and natural gas prices are in fact really low right now. Howarth et al. provide a useful set of new references in Table 1 of their new commentary. While Howarth et al. argue on the basis of these references that “most studies conclude that methane emissions from shale gas are far higher than from conventional gas” the table also shows that the highest estimate from the other studies is at the low end of the range given in the original Howarth et al. paper. The only way to settle this issue is for industry to report comprehensively on its actual emissions, rather than fighting requirements to do so. This is important because only at the higher end of the range is the global warming advantage of natural gas seriously in question, as I will discuss next for those who want to dig further into the analysis.

As they say on APM’s Marketplace, let’s do the numbers.

Rather than make another attempt to provide a best estimate of the overall global warming impact of electricity from gas versus coal, let’s ask the question another way. For a central estimate of the methane leak rate, how high would the global warming potential of methane versus carbon dioxide have to be to wipe out the advantage natural gas has at the power plant? The answer is very high. I come up with 107. That’s more than four times the GWP adopted by the international climate treaty and three times the highest GWP proposed for a 100 year time horizon. It’s even slightly higher than 20-year GWP favored by Howarth et al. Only a very short term focus (by climate system standards) can justify a GWP this high. (My calculations are based on EPA’s estimate for the methane leak rate (0.6 gC/MJ), which is the highest number in Howarth et al’s table other than the high end of their own range. I took emission factors for coal and gas combustion directly from EPA and assumed a 50% and 33% generation efficiency for natural gas and coal power plants, respectively).

We could also ask the question a different way: For a middle ground estimate for the global warming potential how high would the methane leak rate have to be to wipe out the advantage natural gas has at the power plant? Again the answer is very high. I argued in my original post on this subject that a middle ground GWP might be 42-56. Let’s take 50 as a nice round number. Then using the same assumptions on emission factors and efficiency, the methane leak rate would have to be more than 8% of production (1.3 gC/MJ), which is a little above Howarth et al.’s high end estimate and more than twice EPA’s estimate.

At the end of the day my hope is that this debate between academics becomes an academic debate. We can and must phase out the use of fossil fuels, and in the meantime we can and must reduce methane leak rates from whatever they are at present to well below one percent. That’s the way to protect our health in both the near and the long term.

Save Lives and Keep Extreme Weather in Check by Cutting Smog, Soot, and CO2 Pollution

2012-01-18T14:43:49Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

An important study published in Science last week shows that targeted measures to curb methane, black carbon, and carbon dioxide emissions would yield huge public health and environmental benefits. Pollution reductions from this strategy would prevent 700,000 to 4.7 million premature deaths each year, increase crop yields, and greatly reduce the risk of extreme climate disruption that lies beyond global warming of 2 degrees Celsius.

Drew Shindell of NASA and an international team of 23 coauthors made the most careful study to date of the global air quality improvements that could be achieved by systematically curbing emissions of methane (which increases ozone smog and traps heat) and black carbon (aka soot, which causes respiratory disease and absorbs solar energy). After initially screening about 400 pollution control measures, the team focused on 14 that showed the greatest promise of improving air quality and limiting climate change. Shindell and colleagues then analyzed the benefits of these measures in detail using global models that simulate both chemical and physical interactions to project changes in air quality and climate. Carbon dioxide emissions were based on the International Energy Agency’s scenario that stabilizes heat-trapping gas concentrations at the equivalent of 450 parts per million of CO2.

What kind of measures are we talking about? Mostly straightforward application of best practices, such as capturing, rather than venting, methane during coal, oil, and gas production and installing particle filters on diesel engines. More challenging measures include intermittent aeration of rice paddies and replacing traditional wood-burning cook stoves with cleaner versions or modern fuels. The full list is supplied in the Supporting Online Material (subscription required).

The black carbon reductions accounted for most of the projected lives saved based on the well-established link between breathing fine particles and respiratory disease. Both black carbon and methane reductions contribute about equally to the improved crop yields. Reductions in black carbon, methane and carbon dioxide are all needed to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (see figure). Black carbon and methane reductions make the most difference in the near term because they are relatively short-lived in the atmosphere, whereas CO2 reductions must start now to limit long-term warming because CO2 can stay in the atmosphere for more than a century. The study is actually very conservative in that it did not attempt to estimate the additional lives that would be saved from improved nutrition due to increased crop yields nor from reduced extreme weather, such as heat waves and flooding, due to reduced climate change.

Predictably the usual suspects seized on the study to push their pre-existing agenda of arguing that trying to limit carbon dioxide pollution is a fool’s errand. John Tierney’s article in the New York Times devoted more space to repeating the tired arguments of carbon regulation naysayers than explaining what the scientists actually found. This spin totally misses the point.

It makes a lot of sense to promote policies that reduce local health threats and global warming simultaneously, such as cleaning up dirty diesels and plugging methane leaks. Replacing coal-fired power plants with energy efficiency and renewable energy also produces multiple benefits, but the naysayers quoted by Tierney don’t mention this obvious measure. And is it really easier to replace traditional cook stoves with cleaner burning models in millions of villages around the world than it is to pursue smart growth development strategies that reduce oil consumption, carbon emissions, and obesity? I’m not sure. But I do know that we need to be working on all of these strategies simultaneously to save lives and keep extreme weather in check.

Shindell and his international team have significantly advanced our understanding of the benefits of cutting smog, soot, and carbon dioxide at the same time. Let’s not get distracted by a silly debate about which to do first.

Not-So-Permafrost Could Release as Much Heat-Trapping Pollution as Deforestation

2011-12-20T15:45:53Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

Scientists call them positive feedback loops, but this is not the kind of positive feedback you give your children when they do well at school. Vicious cycles would be a better term, and they have the potential to make global warming even worse than currently expected. I’m referring to processes in which global warming causes changes that amplify the original warming, which feeds back on itself and causes even more warming, etc., etc., etc….

Perhaps the best know of these viscous cycles is the “ice-albedo feedback loop.” This is a fancy way of saying that global warming melts snow and ice; dark ground and open ocean absorb more solar energy than white snow and shiny ice; that extra solar energy amplifies the initial warming, completing the feedback loop. This process is relatively straightforward to predict and is already accounted for in climate models. (It also shows that the existence of a vicious cycle does not necessarily mean there will be a runaway greenhouse effect; that depends on how much amplification occurs on each loop and whether the process is self-limiting. In this case, the earth would eventually run out of ice so the process can’t continue indefinitely).

Less well understood, but increasingly worrisome, is the “permafrost carbon feedback loop.” In this process global warming causes the arctic to warm up, which is occurring about twice as fast as the average for the earth as a whole; soil that had been permanently frozen starts to thaw out; once the soil thaws the carbon-containing organic matter in the soil starts to decompose, releasing carbon dioxide and methane; these heat-trapping gases cause more warming, completing the loop. This process is generally not included in climate models.

Scientists have known about it for many years (I published a paper on biogeochemical feedbacks back in 1989), but its magnitude is hard to pin down. As explained in a well-done New York Times article over the weekend, the gases released by melting permafrost don’t emanate uniformly from the tundra. Instead they bubble up in particular places and particular times as the physics and biology interact. These variations make it difficult to know whether scientists have obtained representative samples. This also means that the amount of carbon released can’t be predicted as a simple function of temperature—it depends on how the soil shifts as the permafrost physically collapses. Finally, the fraction of the carbon released as methane versus carbon dioxide depends on whether decomposition occurs in oxygen-depleted micro-sites (resulting in methane) or in aerated locations (producing carbon dioxide). This is critical because each carbon atom released as a methane molecule produces about ten times as much warming as it would if it were released as carbon dioxide.

One thing scientists do know is that a lot of carbon is locked up in the permafrost right now—about 1700 billion metric tons, which is about twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere and about three times as much as is contained in all the world’s forests. This estimate is more than three times as much as previously thought, primarily because it accounts for carbon stored below the top three feet of soil, the layer traditionally assumed to hold the vast majority of organic matter.

So we know that permafrost soils contain enough carbon to substantially amplify global warming caused by burning fossil fuels if it were released. The key questions are how much of that carbon will be released and what fraction of it with be released as methane rather than CO2. While scientists are working to develop better models to predict the magnitude of these releases, a recent paper published in Nature took a different approach. The authors surveyed scientists actively studying the permafrost and publishing in the scientific literature and asked them to render their best judgment about what to expect.

Their assessment is scary. These scientists expect that global warming could degrade more than half of the world’s permafrost by the end of this century. That would result in emissions of 230 to 380 billion metric tons carbon-equivalent in the form of CO2 and methane. This is more than would be emitted from deforestation if it continued at current rates throughout this century and is equivalent to about half the total carbon currently stored in forests. Even more troubling, this is equivalent to about 40 to 60 percent of the emission budget the world would have to live within to have a decent chance of keeping global warming below 2 C. And unlike emissions from power plants and factories there is no way to curtail emissions from permafrost once they get going.

While this assessment is substantially higher than estimates produced by recent model studies it is by no means a worst case scenario. It assumes that only about 3% of the carbon is released as methane; a higher fraction is certainly plausible and could amp up the warming impact substantially. Moreover this is only one of many processes that can amplify global warming. Others include reduced carbon uptake by forests and oceans, increased emissions from temperate and tropical soils, and increased solar energy absorption as forests expand into arctic areas, shading the reflective snow cover. And multiple amplifying factors aren’t just additive—they amplify each other, making the overall impact much worse.

What do we do with this information beyond worrying about what the arctic has in store for us? We can and should refine our projections, but once permafrost melts the emissions will be what they will be and there isn’t anything we can do about it. What we can do is try to avoid crossing that threshold by reducing as rapidly as possible the pollution we can control.

Or we can continue pumping heat trapping pollution into our air and hope we get lucky. Forget about $10,000. Are you willing to bet the planet?

Connecting the Dots between Climate Change and Health

2011-12-14T14:28:36Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

You don’t need a weather man to tell which way the wind blows. But it would really help if weather men and women connected the dots between heat-trapping pollution, climate change, extreme weather, and health.

There is a huge gap between public perceptions of what climate scientists think and what the scientists themselves have actually concluded. This is most striking in the Yale/GMU Climate Change Communications research finding that as of November 2011 only 41% of Americans believe that “most scientists think global warming is happening” (up from 34% in 2010 and down from 47% in November 2008). In fact, 97% of climate scientists subscribe to this conclusion as does the National Academy of Sciences and every relevant scientific association, such as the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Physical Society.

Various explanations have been offered for this gap. Press coverage of the trumped up controversy over stolen emails probably plays some role, particularly among Fox News viewers, expanding a disturbing partisan divide. For most Americans, however, Jon Krosnick of Stanford has argued that the real anomaly was the relatively high level of public awareness in 2007-2008, following extensive press coverage of the Nobel-prize-winning work of the IPCC and the Academy-award-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth.

Delving further into the results of recent polls from Yale/GMU and Pew paints a more nuanced picture of public perceptions and attitudes toward climate change. At first blush the most surprising finding to me is that while only 41% of Americans think most scientists think global warming is happening, 63% themselves think so. Pew asked the question a little differently and also found that 63% of the public said yes to the question “Is there solid evidence the earth is warming?” A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll put the fraction of Americans who believe the earth is warming at 83% (question wording matters). Polls also continue to show strong majorities supporting policies to increase reliance on renewable energy (90%) and to regulate carbon pollution (73%). So at least 63% of Americans think there is solid evidence that the earth is warming, and even more support policies to reduce heat-trapping pollution, but only two out of five people think most scientists agree that global warming is happening.

What is going on here? Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised about this difference. After all, the media gives far greater coverage to controversy than to consensus. Think of the coverage devoted to the so-called climategate stolen email messages compared to coverage of the carefully considered consensus report of the National Academy of Sciences, America’s Climate Choices. From a media perspective, the Academy report wasn’t news—its findings were very similar to previous reports from the Academy as well as the IPCC. And when TV talk shows have a “discussion” about climate change they never have 97 scientists presenting the mainstream view while 3 dispute it. They almost invariably have one mainstream scientist and one representing the contrarians. To viewers this certainly looks like a lot of disagreement among scientists.

Meanwhile the effects of our changing climate are becoming so apparent that most people recognize the change, regardless of what they think scientists think. In the Yale/GMU survey 56% of respondents said they think that over the past several years the weather in the United States has gotten worse, while only 3% said it has gotten better. Asked whether climate change had made certain events worse, 67% agreed (22% strongly) that it had made record high summer temperatures in the U.S. in 2011 worse, and 65% (18% strongly) agreed that climate change had made the drought in Texas and Oklahoma worse.

This doesn’t mean that perceived disagreements among scientists are unimportant. Only 10% of Americans think that global warming will harm their family “a great deal,” with 24% saying “a moderate amount” (Yale/GMU Q63). Yet 47% of respondents said that their level of concern about global warming would increase “if 90% of climate scientists were to agree and state publicly that global warming is happening” (Q141a) and 74% expressed trust (24% strongly) in climate scientists (Q161). Of course, climate scientists have already done that through the IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences and their scientific associations, but most Americans remain unaware of that fact.

This is where weather men and women come in. While not as trusted as scientists, TV weather reporters are trusted by 58% of the public (6% strongly) and most people are far more likely to hear from weather reporters on a regular basis than climate scientists. Other trusted messengers include doctors (56%, 10% strongly) and public health departments (61%, 5% strongly).

The links between pollution, climate change, extreme weather and health may seem a little complicated to explain as part of daily weather reports, but they are actually pretty straightforward: More heat-trapping pollution in the air means more heat waves; more heat waves means more smog, which means more asthma attacks; and warmer air holds more water, which means more intense storms and droughts.

Last week NRDC released an interactive extreme weather mapping tool showing the record breaking events of 2011 that were likely made worse by climate change. Consensus scientific reports may not be news, but extreme weather events are. Each one is a learning opportunity…if we connect the dots.

Curbing Power Plant Carbon Pollution

2011-12-05T19:30:53Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

Willie Sutton is famously supposed to have said that he robbed banks because that’s where the money is (apparently this quote is apocryphal but it’s just too good to not keep using it). I have focused a number of recent posts on power plants because that’s where the carbon is (about 40% of the U.S. total). There is certainly no way to prevent even more dangerous changes to our climate without nearly eliminating carbon emissions from the power sector. That’s what makes a new report from the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) so important. It analyzes one promising idea for driving this transition: a “clean energy standard” (CES) as proposed by Senate Energy Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman.

According to EIA, which is hardly known for being optimistic about clean energy technologies, a CES combined with updated energy efficiency standards could reduce CO2 emissions from power plants 20% by 2020 while electricity prices fall by 7%. By 2035 CO2 emissions would be cut by almost half (see chart). By then EIA projects that electricity prices would be only 15% higher than in 2010, while per capita income would have increased by 49%. Of course, the cost of electricity 25 years from now depends on the pace of technological innovation and EIA tends to be quite conservative in making these assumptions. (My point of reference for all these calculations is 2010 levels as reported by EIA’s model. In its report, EIA generally compares a policy scenario with the CES in place to a reference case without it in order to isolate the effect of the policy, but the atmosphere and consumers will respond to actual emissions and prices.)

Before delving a little more deeply into the results of EIA’s analysis here’s some background on the CES policy. As Senator Bingaman specified it, the CES would require 50% of all electricity sales to come from “clean” sources by 2020 and 80% by 2035. As I have noted previously, “low-carbon” would be a far more accurate term than “clean”, and in fact Bingaman specifies that natural gas generation and generation from coal or gas with carbon capture gets partial credit based on its emissions relative to those of a supercritical coal plant. President Obama called on Congress to pass a Clean Energy Standard with these targets in his 2011 State of the Union address, although he never formally proposed detailed specifications. Joe Aldy subsequently proposed a CES with specifications similar to Bingaman’s in a Brookings Institution discussion paper.

One subtle, but important difference is that Aldy proposed allowing all existing low-carbon generation to produce clean energy credits, whereas Bingaman deducts generation from existing hydro and nuclear plants from the CES target. EIA has previously released an analysis of a CES that grants credits to these existing low-carbon sources at the request of Congressman Hall. As I explained in comments on that analysis, granting credits to these existing sources produces a windfall for them, while raising the cost impact of the policy. We now know by how much because EIA performed a sensitivity analysis on Bingaman’s proposal by changing just this feature. National-average electricity prices would increase 23% between 2010 and 2035 if credits are given to all existing hydro and nuclear plants, compared to 15% in the original Bingaman specification. Much bigger differences would occur at the regional level. Under Bingaman’s proposal EIA forecasts that regional electricity prices in 2035 would range from 5.9 cents/kWh (in Eastern Wisconsin) to 21.8 cents/kWh (on Long Island). With existing nuclear and hydro crediting the range would be 4.1-24.3 cents/kWh.

Turning back to Bingaman’s main proposal and assuming updated energy efficiency standards, how would electricity generators achieve the 47% reduction in CO2 emissions projected by EIA for 2035? First, electricity demand would increase by a total of only 12% between 2010 and 2035, compared to 24% in the reference case, mostly due to the updated standards. (Note that Synapse Energy Economics projects in its Transition Scenario, which has a similar CO2 emissions trajectory, that feasible energy efficiency measures could actually reduce electricity demand from current levels.) EIA projects that total renewable energy generation would increase by 250%, ending up with about equal contributions from hydro (which increases only 30% compared to 2010), wind, and biomass. (The Synapse scenario has a similar contribution from wind, but substantially more solar and less biomass.) Meanwhile, natural gas generation increases by 80% and coal generation falls by about 50%. (Natural gas generation does not increase nearly as much in the Synapse scenario, primarily due to lower overall electricity demand.)

One very controversial aspect of the CES as proposed by Bingaman (as well as Aldy and Hall) is that new nuclear power plants would count toward achieving the target. Of course that doesn’t mean that nuclear power would actually expand, given that it is much more expensive than other low-carbon options. In fact, with the Bingaman CES specifications and updated efficiency standards EIA projects that nuclear generation in 2035 would be lower than in 2010, although they do project 64 GW of new nuclear plants, offset by retirements and decreased output from the existing fleet. In the sensitivity case that grants credit to existing nuclear plants there is an incentive to keep them online and EIA projects that total nuclear generation would increase by about 40%. EIA has a history of being overly optimistic about nuclear power and that is likely to be the case here. Nonetheless, the analysis clearly shows that it’s possible to achieve the CES targets without expanding nuclear generation, contrary to claims by many nuclear advocates.

As I have discussed previously, the biggest drawback of a CES is that it requires Congress to actually pass legislation, something this Congress, at least, appears nearly incapable of doing. That’s not true of updating air pollution standards to limit carbon, mercury and other pollutants, nor of updating energy efficiency standards, nor of state energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, nor of local communities demanding that aging coal plants be replaced with cleaner options. EIA’s analysis provides a useful benchmark against which all of these efforts can be evaluated.

Cutting CO2 emissions 20% by 2020 while electricity prices decline would be a pretty good start.

Actually, the Heartland Institute is as Wrong about Economics as it is about Science

2011-11-28T20:52:40Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

Naomi Klein’s essay “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” which appeared on the cover of the November 28th issue of The Nation, starts with a withering critique of the climate science deniers who gathered at a recent Heartland Institute conference (kudos to Klein for sitting through this confab of reactionary anti-science extremists – I don’t think I could have physically stomached it). Too bad she didn’t stop while she was ahead.

Klein accurately analyzes the source of the Heartlanders’ scorn for reality: it interferes with their ideological worldview. If climate change is a real threat then it requires some form of governmental policy response. And the Heartland crew believes that any action the governmental might take would be a large step down the road to socialism. As Klein summarizes it:

Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will learn that Obama’s campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was really about “green communitarianism,” akin to the “Maoist” scheme to put “a pig iron furnace in everybody’s backyard” (the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels). That climate change is “a stalking horse for National Socialism” (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano, editor of the denialists’ go-to website, ClimateDepot.com).

Most of all, however, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”

After reiterating that “the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science,” Klein oddly goes on to conclude that they aren’t wrong about political economy:

But when it comes to the real-world consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our economic system, the crowd gathered at the Marriott Hotel may be in considerably less denial than a lot of professional environmentalists, the ones who paint a picture of global warming Armageddon, then assure us that we can avert catastrophe by buying “green” products and creating clever markets in pollution.

Klein is right that individuals can’t solve climate change on their own by buying “green” products (no professional environmentalist that I know believes otherwise), but she is completely wrong in suggesting that solving climate change is incompatible with capitalism. There may be a lot of good reasons to change the “underlying logic of our economic system,” but doing so is neither necessary nor sufficient to solve climate change. Here I’m afraid that Klein falls victim to the same problem as the Heartlanders: she substitutes her ideological worldview for fact-based analysis.

The fact is that there is nothing radical or anti-capitalist about the idea of the government enforcing limits on pollution. EPA has been doing so since 1970, and according to Harvard’s decidedly mainstream economist Dale Jorgenson, the Clean Air Act has resulted in a net increase of 1.5 percent in the conventionally-measured GDP. A more complete accounting of the benefits shows that they exceeded the costs by 30 to 1.

Republicans for Environmental Protection has compiled an extensive collection of quotes from conservative stalwarts to make the case that conservation is conservative™, including this one from Ronald Reagan:

If we've learned any lessons during the past few decades, perhaps the most important is that preservation of our environment is not a partisan challenge; it's common sense. Our physical health, our social happiness, and our economic well-being will be sustained only by all of us working in partnership as thoughtful, effective stewards of our natural resources.

Indeed it is a basic principle of Mainstream Economics 101 that markets can’t function properly if some participants are allowed to impose costs that they don’t pay for. Pollution is the classic case of a market “externality” that requires regulations or pollution taxes to “internalize” these external costs.

It’s true that climate change differs in scale from pollution problems we have faced in the past, but not in kind. The Supreme Court has ruled that carbon dioxide plainly meets the definition of air pollutant under the Clean Air Act, and EPA is making progress in establishing carbon pollution standards. Ideologues in the House have passed multiple bills that would block these standards, but so far none have made it through the Senate.

It’s not that all of Klein’s policy prescriptions are off base: we do need public investment in low-carbon transportation infrastructure and clean energy R&D, good planning to site renewable energy projects and build a smart grid to connect them to our homes and businesses, and above all, effective regulation of global warming pollution. (But shoot me now if “the ultimate symbol of OWS—the human microphone—is nothing if not a postcarbon solution.” I will take (I will take) solar powered amplifiers (solar powered amplifiers) over the human microphone (over the human microphone) any day of the week (any day of the week).)

It’s just that none of this requires a radical transformation of our economic system. It does require an effective check on the political power of corporate polluters who use their economic resources to block the necessary government actions. Here there is common cause with the message from the Occupy Wall St. movement: we, the 99 percent, must insist that our government acts to stop corporate abuse, whether that’s abuse of our atmosphere, our financial system, or our democracy.

What Will the Transition to a Clean Electricity System Look Like?

2011-11-23T13:20:32Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

Last Friday I attended a talk by Venita McCellon-Allen, the President of the Southwestern Electric Power Company (SWEPCO), at the Columbia University Energy Symposium. To hear her tell it, the only way to keep everyone’s iPhones charged up is to build more conventional coal and gas power plants. She dismissed renewable electricity sources as trivial in scale and didn’t say a word about energy efficiency. Her talk epitomized a business-as-usual view of the future of the electric power industry.

I guess she hadn’t read the new report, Toward a Sustainable Future for the U .S . Power Sector : Beyond Business as Usual 2011, released earlier in the week by Synapse Energy Economics. Synapse demonstrates that a much cleaner, healthier future is not only possible, but very affordable.

In the Synapse “Transition” scenario carbon dioxide emissions are cut 25% by 2020 and 80% by 2050 as energy efficiency, wind, and solar replace coal and hold natural gas use to below current levels until after 2030 (gas use by the power industry increases from about 8 Quadrillion Btus (Quads) in 2010 to between 9 and 10 Quads in 2050, which represents 29 percent less gas consumption than in the business-as-usual scenario).

By 2050 Synapse envisions a little more than 40% of electricity coming from non-hydro renewable energy sources, primarily wind and solar. The study accounts for the additional investments in transmission capacity and energy storage needed to integrate this high level of variable resources into the grid. Synapse notes that this job is made somewhat easier by the fact that inflexible coal plants have been phased out, leaving natural gas combined cycle and combustion turbine plants, which can be ramped up and down much more quickly to balance load. (As the California study I discussed previously notes, relying too heavily on natural gas for load balancing does not reduce carbon emissions enough to be considered truly sustainable in the long-term. It would be good if Synapse considered a broader array of grid flexibility options, including more zero-emission load balancing technologies in its next iteration of this report).

Synapse goes further than many long-term scenarios analyses by attempting to estimate the net cost of following the Transition scenario compared to Business-as-Usual. Their surprising conclusion: The reductions in carbon dioxide and other pollutants that would result from the transition scenario can be accomplished at a net savings over the 40 years considered in the study, even without counting the value of the reduced emissions. This comes about because added investments in energy efficiency, demand response, transmission and energy storage are more than offset by reduced electricity generating costs. The lower generating costs themselves are a net difference between savings from generating fewer kilowatt-hours and higher costs per kilowatt-hour, particular for solar.

One significant short-coming of the Synapse analysis is that it assumes that about half of the fleet of coal power plants is allowed to delay compliance with EPA pollution regulations for up to a decade. Such a delay shouldn’t, and I believe, won’t be allowed. (The authors told me that this assumption was in no way intended to indicate that they endorsed such a delay. Rather they were trying to be conservative in their definition of the business-as-usual scenario).

Complying on schedule may mean that some power plants have to install pollution controls by 2015 even if they are going to shut down by 2030. That’s worth doing because the health benefits from sticking to the legally-required schedule far outweigh the economic savings from avoiding these retrofit costs. Synapse counts a savings of $12 billion in 2030 by assuming that these pollution control costs can be delayed and then avoided by shutting the plants down, but even without the savings from avoided environmental controls the Transition scenario would still cost less than business-as-usual, again without counting the value of reduced emissions (and there would still be some avoided environmental control costs for plants that shut down prior to existing clean up deadlines).

Synapse also doesn’t discuss the policies needed to ensure that we follow the Transition scenario. I will leave a detailed discussion of that to another day, but there is good reason to believe that we can get there through strong national pollution standards for mercury, sulfur, nitrogen oxides, and carbon, combined with federal and state energy efficiency and renewable energy policies, plus rising local opposition to dirty coal plants.

The Transition scenario is certainly more attractive than the bleak business-as-usual world that SWEPCO seems to be stuck in.

The Atmosphere Doesn't Lie

2011-11-15T22:42:09Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

The United States, along with just about every other country on earth, has committed to the objective of stabilizing the amount of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere in order to prevent dangerous changes in our climate (see article 3 of the climate convention). How’s it going?

Not well.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) monitors the concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere more-or-less continuously and compiles an annual summary of the combined effect on the earth’s energy balance. NOAA released the results from 2010 last week. As you can see from the key figure reproduced here, the atmosphere doesn’t seem to have noticed the climate convention. In fact, the heating effect of atmospheric pollution has increased by 29 percent since 1990, the year international climate negotiations were initiated.

Method

NOAA provides an explanation of its measurements and analysis here, but despite having developed the “Annual Greenhouse Gas Index” to provide a “normalized standard that can be easily understood and followed” its explanation is rather technical (Note to NOAA: If you are trying to write something that is easily understood, try saying “increase in heat trapping” rather than “perturbation to direct climate forcing (also termed “radiative forcing”).”

Nonetheless, the basic approach is pretty straightforward. Since 1979 NOAA has been monitoring the concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, CFCs and other gases that absorb heat energy coming from the earth’s surface (infrared radiation). The heating effect of these gases is calculated by comparing their measured concentrations to natural background levels, which are taken to be IPCC’s estimates of what they were in 1750 (CFCs didn’t exist in 1750 and concentrations of the other gases are estimated by analyzing old air trapped in ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica). The AGGI for any year is defined as the combined heating effect of the “long-lived” gases relative to what it was in 1990 (just as the consumer price index is the combined cost of a given market basket of goods relative to the cost in a specified base year).

By “long-lived” NOAA means gases that stay in the atmosphere for at least several years so that their concentration is similar throughout the lower atmosphere. They do not include ozone or aerosols, which also influence climate, but only last a few weeks and vary drastically in concentration from place to place.

Individual Gases

The results for individual gases include some good news and a mystery that may be bad news. While the concentrations of carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide have been rising quite steadily, that isn’t the case for methane or CFCs. In fact, the concentrations of CFC-11 and CFC-12 are actually falling, having peaked around 1993 and 2002, respectively. This is the good news result of the Montreal Protocol to protect the stratospheric ozone layer. Had CFCs not been regulated the AGGI would have increased by even more, and might have increased by 43 percent from 1990 to 2010, rather than 29 percent.

Methane provides the mystery. Its concentration grew quite steadily until 1999, when it leveled off for seven years before starting to increase again in 2007. The reasons for this pattern are unclear, but there is some evidence that climate change itself may be one reason for the renewed growth in methane concentrations over the last few years. Warmer temperatures in the arctic enhance methane emissions, creating a bad news feedback loop that amplifies climate change.

Bottom Line

As negotiators and non-governmental organizations from around the world prepare to converge on Durban, South Africa for the 17th Conference of Parties to the climate convention, let’s hope they keep the original objective of the convention in mind. Unless their efforts ultimate show up as a stabilization of the amount of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere they have not succeeded.

Thanks to NOAA, we can all keep our eyes on the bottom line.

Important Steps toward Curbing Dangerous Carbon Pollution

2011-11-11T13:37:28Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

This has been a good week for clean air (not so good for the Euro or Penn State).

On Tuesday the White House announced that EPA has submitted a proposed New Source Performance Standard (NSPS) for power plant carbon pollution for interagency review (see NRDC president Frances Beinecke’s post here). Yesterday the State Department announced a delay that could spell the end for the Keystone XL dirty oil pipeline (see Frances’ post here). Also yesterday, the Senate rejected measures that would have blocked essential clean air safeguards (see NRDC executive director Peter Lehner’s post here). This crucial victory means that EPA can continue to update clean air standards to protect our health and welfare.

Power plants are the largest source of carbon pollution in the United States, responsible for about 40 percent of the total. Right now there are no limits on how much dangerous carbon dioxide they can pump into our atmosphere, so following through to set strong standards for both new and existing plants is now the most important global warming decision before the administration (see Jake Schmidt’s post here). In this post I will discuss what strong power plant carbon pollution standards could achieve.

Politicians wired to campaign cash from those with a vested interest in not accepting reality will undoubtedly scream that EPA is overstepping its bounds and assert that any carbon pollution standards will cost jobs, or even make it impossible to keep the lights on. Indeed, the House of Representatives has already passed multiple bills that would keep this standard from ever seeing the light of day if they were enacted. The truth is that EPA is simply following the law and the science to set long-overdue standards, as I told EPA in public comments back in February. And by law EPA must base its standards on pollution control techniques that have been adequately demonstrated. Strong standards will stimulate innovation and investment to modernize our outmoded electricity infrastructure, creating jobs, not costing them.

So what could power plant carbon pollution standards accomplish (assuming that efforts in Congress to prevent EPA from doing its job continue to be held in check)?

EPA’s draft proposal addresses new power plants. It won’t be made public until sometime early next year, when a 90 day interagency review is completed. A strong rule is needed to ensure that no new dirty coal plants are built. As a report out Wednesday from the International Energy Agency shows, we simply can’t afford to lock into multi-billion dollar investments that would spew uncontrolled quantities of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere for decades. For example, a typical 500 MW coal plant would release more than 160 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air over a 50 year lifetime (and many existing coal plants have already been operating for more than 50 years).

A standard that blocks new dirty coal plants shouldn’t be too hard for power companies to accept (of course that doesn’t mean some won’t scream bloody murder anyway). After all, the latest Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecast projects that only about four new coal plants (2.3 GW) will be built through 2035 beyond the crop of plants (11.5 GW) that are under construction and expected to be completed by 2012.

That doesn’t mean the new plant standard isn’t important. The current forecast is based on low natural gas prices and an expectation that they will stay that way due to large increases in production using fracking. Just three years ago EIA was projecting that 200 new coal plants (100 GW) would be built by 2030. So getting a strong new source standard on the books is an important hedge against going back to that future if circumstances change again. It would also send an important signal to the international community that dirty coal plants are obsolete and the U.S. is willing to set enforceable standards to back that up.

As important as a good new source standard is, an effective standard for existing sources—also required by law—will be essential to reduce carbon pollution from power plants quickly enough to reduce the risk of catastrophic global warming. We simply can’t count on enough old coal plants retiring anytime in the foreseeable future, even in the face of strong standards for mercury, sulfur, and other pollutants (other than CO2).

The history of the Clean Air Act is replete with exemptions for existing plants based on the expectation that they would soon retire. An expectation that hasn’t been met, over and over again. EPA is finally poised to require existing coal plants to clean up their mercury emissions. Some of the oldest and least efficient plants will decide to retire rather than install mercury controls to come into compliance, but these plants don’t run very much now and in the absence of carbon pollution limits generation could simply shift to other, slightly less old, coal plants. Indeed EPA’s analysis of the effects of its proposed mercury and air toxics standards projects that these standards will only reduce CO2 emissions by one to two percent from otherwise expected levels in 2020 and 2030.

Devising an existing source standard for carbon pollution under the Clean Air Act is more complex than writing the new source standard, and EPA is still negotiating a revised schedule with NRDC and other parties that had sued to enforce the Clean Air Act’s requirement to establish these safeguards. In the meantime, we can develop a benchmark for EPA to aim at by looking at a recent analysis of a “Clean Energy Standard” (CES) similar to the one proposed by President Obama in his last State of the Union address.

The president proposed requiring that 80% of electricity come from “clean” sources by 2035. There are plenty of reasons to argue with his use of the term “clean” (he included nuclear power and partial credit for generation with natural gas), but the proposal would nonetheless drive significant reductions in carbon pollution. EIA’s analysis of a CES set at 80% by 2035 (with detailed specifications requested by Representative Hall) shows that it would reduce CO2 emissions from power plants 24% by 2020 and almost 60% by 2035 relative to EIA’s reference case projection. (Hall specifies several assumptions that drive up the cost of achieving these reductions—no banking of clean energy credits is allowed and existing hydro and nuclear plants are awarded windfall credits—but these assumptions probably don’t affect the emission results very much. Senator Bingaman has requested a similar analysis from EIA, but with more sensible specifications. I will post an update on the Bingaman analysis when it becomes available, which should be sometime in the next couple of weeks).

EIA’s analysis suggests that the CES proposed by President Obama would dramatically reduce carbon dioxide pollution from the power sector if it were enacted. Unfortunately, the chances of that happening in this Congress are approximately nil. But a well designed set of carbon dioxide standards for new and existing sources under the Clean Air Act could achieve similar results. Combined with the strong vehicle pollution standards that the administration has already announced and strong standards to reduce other major sources of heat-trapping gases (including methane and hydrofluorocarbons), plus effective federal and state energy efficiency measures, there is a pathway for achieving serious reductions in total U.S. global warming pollution over the next decade or so without new legislative authority.

This won’t happen unless the public demands it and rallies to defeat Congressional attempts to roll back or block clean air safeguards. At least for now, this seems a lot more winnable than trying to get anything constructive through Congress.

What if California Cut Its Global Warming Pollution 80% and No One Noticed?

2011-11-04T18:48:51Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

OK, California hasn’t cut its emissions that much yet, but in May the California Council on Science and Technology published an important study of how California could reach the 80% reduction target first set by The Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005. No one seemed to notice.

Then last week, Jane Long, one of the study committee co-chairs, published her take on the report’s findings in a short essay in Nature and Andy Revkin picked up the story from there in his blog. Unfortunately, Revkin gave short shrift to the report’s finding that California could achieve a 60% reduction by aggressively deploying existing technologies and chose to focus on the report’s conclusion that “significant innovation and advancements in multiple technologies” would be needed to push the reductions from 60% to 80%. Revkin compounded the problem by asserting that California was a best case scenario, when the opposite is true. (To his credit, Revkin posted a note from Alan Nogee pointing out that it’s harder to achieve an 80% reduction in California than in other states because it is starting from a relatively low-carbon baseline. I would add that California’s population is growing much faster than the national average, compounding its challenge. See Figure 1 from the report).

Rather than pile on to the rancorous and somewhat silly debate about whether the California study supports a “deploy, deploy, deploy” strategy or an R&D strategy (isn’t it obvious that we need to do both?) I would like to try to return attention to the original study.

The report, called “California’s Energy Future: The View to 2050,” deserves our attention because it carefully constructs scenarios (the report calls them “portraits”) for what a low carbon energy system could look like. In doing so it is careful to avoid double counting and to consider interactions between sectors (you can’t reduce the same ton of carbon both by switching from gas to solar and by switching from incandescent bulbs to L.E.D.s; similarly you can’t use the same ton of biomass to produce electricity and liquid fuels). This approach produces a number of important insights. Here are three that stood out for me:

Strategies to achieve deep reductions sometimes differ significantly from strategies for more modest near-term cuts. For example, in the short run switching from electric resistance space and water heating to natural gas reduces carbon emissions significantly because it is far more efficient to burn the gas directly for heat than to burn gas in a power plant and use the electricity to heat up a wire. In the long run, however, the emissions from all of those individual gas burners can’t be captured and would make it impossible to achieve an 80% reduction target. One solution is to decarbonize electricity production and use the electricity to drive high efficiency heat-pumps. Replacing natural gas with bio-methane or solar hydrogen could also work.
In the long run we can’t rely on natural gas generation to “firm” intermittent renewable electricity sources. (This is a special case of number 1.) In the short term we can expand reliance on renewables and rely on the grid to balance supply and demand. This includes demand side management (e.g. using “smart” devices to shift electricity demand to reduce peaks) and dispatching power plants that can follow the load--primarily natural gas plants as of now. The California study, however, shows that relying on natural gas power plants for load balancing could bust the 2050 target, assuming this means generating 20% of 2050 electricity from gas (without carbon capture). The report recommends more attention to developing “zero emission load balancing” approaches. This could include some combination of carbon capture at natural gas plants, energy storage, and smart grid enhancements.
Emission reductions from transportation must look beyond the light duty fleet. One of the bright spots over the last few years has been progress in setting fuel efficiency and carbon pollution standards for passenger vehicles starting with the historic “clean car peace treaty” between EPA the Department of Transportation and California for 2012-2016 model year cars. Those agencies are now in the process of setting standards out to 2025 which should cut average emissions from new vehicles by about half. As plug-in hybrid and pure electric vehicles are being introduced on the market the pathway to near-zero emissions from passenger vehicles is emerging: Electrify as much as possible (recharging with renewable electricity) and use sustainably produced biofuels for the remaining liquid fuel demand. The challenge for aviation and long-distance trucking is much harder. Electricity simply isn’t an option. Fuel options include biomass-derived drop-in replacements for diesel and jet fuel and hydrogen, but significant innovation is needed to make either pathway sustainable and economically viable. Another possibility worth exploring is integrated production of electricity and fuels from a combination of biomass and fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage to produce net zero-emission fuels. Also, more systematic changes to transportation infrastructure (such as high speed rail integrated with electrified short-haul delivery vehicles) could potentially reduce truck and air miles much more significantly than considered in the study.

One of the really cool things about the California Energy Future study is that its analysis is fully transparent. In fact, they made their spreadsheet freely available for download. So if you don’t like their assumptions or “portraits,” or the ideas I sketched out here, you are free to substitute your own. The spreadsheet will help make sure you aren’t double counting or ignoring interactions between sectors.

This study deserves more serious attention. And not just in the form of spin battles.

Excessive Heat Warning

2011-07-21T15:10:21Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

The National Weather Service has made it official. It’s dangerously hot out there. At least 22 deaths have already been attributed to the heat wave, the New York Times reported today. More are expected as much of the densely populated East Coast faces temperatures close to 100 degrees and a heat index over 105, the threshold for issuing an “excessive heat warming.” Especially dangerous is the fact that nighttime temperatures are staying very high—above 80 degrees in many areas—meaning vulnerable people (particularly the elderly) are unable to cool down and get relief from the stress of the daytime heat, as NRDC discussed last summer.

What the New York Times failed to do is connect the dots between this extreme heat wave and global warming. The story reported that Bismarck North Dakota reached a high of 95, but didn’t even ask the question of whether this excessive heat could somehow be related to excessive heat-trapping gases in our atmosphere. Would it have been that difficult or inappropriate to mention the fact that the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide has increased by one-third primarily due to burning coal, oil, and natural gas?

Scientists are always cautious about attributing any specific extreme event to pollution-driven climate change, but new research is beginning to tease out how global warming contributes to extreme weather. We are not just loading the dice, we are upping the ante, or as Steve Sherwood puts it in an excellent three-part series published by Scientific American, "it is more like painting an extra spot on each face of one of the dice, so that it goes from 2 to 7 instead of 1 to 6. This increases the odds of rolling 11 or 12, but also makes it possible to roll 13." In the same series, Deke Arndt of NOAA explains the link between climate and extreme weather this way: "Weather throws the punches, but climate trains the boxer."

Extreme weather turns climate change from an abstract concept about remote events, such as melting ice and drowning polar bears, to a concrete, often calamitous, experience for many Americans. Unfortunately, despite the vast amount of air time and pixels devoted to covering heat waves, floods, storms, and wildfires in recent months, there has been very little discussion of the increasingly clear links to climate change. No wonder only about half of Americans understand that global warming is making heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires worse, according to the latest Six America’s survey.

Scientists will continue to debate the details, and ideological deniers will continue to debate the facts, but more and more communities across America are getting on with preparing to deal with the reality of climate change. Issuing excessive heat warnings and establishing cooling centers is one example. Equally important, we need to do everything we can to stop making the problem worse. Public health officials understand that with climate change, as with other health threats, we must take a two-pronged approach by focusing both on prevention and preparedness. Or as John Holdren, the president’s science advisor, has said, it’s time to confront climate change by “managing the unavoidable and avoiding the unmanageable.”

President Obama is Writing the Climate Legacy of his First Term Now

2011-06-29T19:22:44Z

Dan Lashof, Program Director, Climate & Clean Air, Washington, D.C.

Al Gore’s essay about climate change in Rolling Stone last week was mostly about how the news media have utterly failed to be an effective referee of the phony debate over science, but most of the attention it generated (predictably) focused on his criticisms of President Obama’s handling of climate policy. Gore encapsulated the conventional wisdom: Obama failed to use his bully pulpit to educate the public about climate change, failed to deliver comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation, and failed to deliver a strong international agreement in Copenhagen.

True enough, but it’s not the end of the story. Neither the fate of climate legislation nor Copenhagen was entirely within the president’s control. No doubt President Obama could have done more to push the Senate and the international negotiations, but whether that would have changed the outcomes is impossible to determine.

On the other hand, President Obama stood up to House Republicans and some Democrats to successfully defend EPA’s authority to regulate global warming pollution in the April budget deal to fund the government through the end of this fiscal year. The Supreme Court has reiterated that it is EPA’s job to set standards to limit heat-trapping pollutants. And the president’s chief of staff, Bill Daley, recently reiterated the administration’s determination to veto any legislation that would undermine EPA’s ability to protect public health.

Now the question is what will the Obama administration do with its authority. The administration is currently developing standards addressing the two biggest sources of global warming pollution: Power plants and cars. Together these standards address about 60% of U.S. CO2 emissions and they have the potential to reduce overall U.S. emissions significantly. Both of these standards (for power plants under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act, and for passenger vehicles under Section 202) are being drafted right now and will be proposed in September and finalized next spring.

When it comes to reducing emissions from power plants and automobiles using the Clean Air Act the president is master of his own (and our) fate. The climate legacy of his first term can still be very positive if he delivers strong standards and defends them.

Recent reports about the administration’s proposal for vehicle standards, which will increase the fuel efficiency and reduce heat-trapping pollution from model year 2017-2025 vehicles, make my colleague, Roland Hwang, cautiously optimistic that the final rule will continue the significant progress currently being made by the automobile industry and bring the average fuel economy of new cars close to 60 miles per gallon by 2025.

No details have been reported about the administration’s approach to the power plant rule, but during his State of the Union Address this year the president called on Congress to pass a “clean energy standard” to ensure that at least 80 percent of America’s electricity will come from low carbon sources by 2035. There is no evidence that this Congress will heed that call. Fortunately, power plant pollution standards under the Clean Air Act can set us on a path toward that goal, and all Congress has to do is stay out of the way. As with automobiles, the power plant standards simply need to continue the progress we have seen over the last few years: Between 2005 and 2010 emissions from the electric sector declined by 6 percent (this is not primarily due to the recession—GDP is 5 percent higher than it was in 2005 and total electricity generation is 2 percent higher).

Here’s the bottom line: The jury is still out on President Obama’s climate record. The verdict depends on the power plant and automobile standards the administration is writing now.