Tag Archives: carbon emissions

the Paris climate summit

Thomas Sterner at The Economist says that there really is a near-consensus among economists on how to reduce carbon emissions.

Economists keep on repeating: all you need is a price on carbon. This is true in one narrow sense: had there—by some (peak-oil or other) magic had there been a high price on carbon then the world economy would just adapt and we would hardly notice—just like we have “adapted” to expensive gold and titanium.

But the problems are practical and political.

The problem lies in how to design the institutions and instruments that create that high price when the market does not. Subsidies must be removed, fossil fuels taxed (or subjected to permit trade) and all countries need to agree on the details in a way that all find “fair”. In Copenhagen, people hoped for a treaty that kept warming below two degrees and an agreement that was generous in giving poor countries more of the remaining space.

One idea is for a decentralized system where individual countries each create carbon markets, then link them later.

The negative attitude to heavy UN negotiations is so strong that some welcome a more “decentralised architecture” of the climate negotiations and policymaking. Some claim we do not need an agreement. It is sufficient for each country to have an individual target and permit trading scheme and then all the permit schemes could be linked together. Linked permit markets would exhibit all the advantages to trade and circumvent the need for an international agreement.

It sounds like the strategy is to set relatively low, realistic expectations for this summit and then meet them. You can say that doing something is certainly better than doing nothing. You could also say that whatever we do will be too little, too late to solve the problem. Our deeply flawed species has failed this test and we are going to suffer the consequences.

carbon pricing

Here is Christine Laguarde on The Path to Carbon Pricing.

The transition to a cleaner future will require both government action and the right incentives for the private sector. At the center should be a strong public policy that puts a price on carbon pollution. Placing a higher price on carbon-based fuels, electricity, and industrial activities will create incentives for the use of cleaner fuels, save energy, and promote a shift to greener investments. Measures such as carbon taxes and fees, emissions-trading programs and other pricing mechanisms, and removal of inefficient subsidies can give businesses and households the certainty and predictability they need to make long-term investments in climate-smart development.

At the International Monetary Fund, the focus is on reforming its member countries’ fiscal systems in order to raise more revenue from taxes on carbon-intensive fuels and less revenue from other taxes that are detrimental to economic performance, such as taxes on labor and capital. Pricing carbon can be about smarter, more efficient tax systems, rather than higher taxes.

Carbon taxes should be applied comprehensively to emissions from fossil fuels. The price must be high enough to achieve ambitious environmental goals, in alignment with national circumstances, and it must be stable, in order to encourage businesses and households to invest in clean technologies. Administering carbon taxes is straightforward and can build on existing road fuel taxes, which are well established in most countries.

This is one of the few policies that probably almost all economists would agree on – taxing externalities. Instead of allowing businesses individuals to profit while imposing a cost or harm on others, you make them pay that cost as a tax. This has dual benefits – first, it creates an incentive to reduce the negative behavior, second it raises revenue that can replace a tax on work or income. It’s good for the economy, the environment and people.

We do have politicians from one of the two major U.S. parties talking about climate change, and we have a big international summit coming up. So there are opportunities. We should get something done, and then build on it by finding other harmful materials and behaviors we can tax, like fuels that cause air pollution, building materials that cause water pollution, packaging that is not designed to be recycled, and dangerous consumer goods like motor vehicles that kill a million people a year. This is not unprecedented – we did it with cigarettes. By the way, to get this done, we need a constitutional amendment making it crystal clear that a person is a human and a human is a person, and a corporation is not a person for the purposes of political speech.

 

making carbon fiber from atmospheric CO2

Here is some research on making carbon nanofibers directly from atmospheric CO2. Sounds like a good idea both because you are absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere and because you can make all kinds of light, strong materials from nanofibers, which would allow lighter, safer, more energy efficient vehicles among other things.

Licht estimates electrical energy costs of this “solar thermal electrochemical process” to be around $1,000 per ton of carbon nanofiber product, which means the cost of running the system is hundreds of times less than the value of product output.

“We calculate that with a physical area less than 10 percent the size of the Sahara Desert, our process could remove enough CO2 to decrease atmospheric levels to those of the pre-industrial revolution within 10 years,” he says.

“global renaissance of coal”

This article from the National Academy of Sciences says that although coal use is dropping in some developed countries and China, it is exploding in many developing countries.

Coal was central to the industrial revolution, but in the 20th century it increasingly was superseded by oil and gas. However, in recent years coal again has become the predominant source of global carbon emissions. We show that this trend of rapidly increasing coal-based emissions is not restricted to a few individual countries such as China. Rather, we are witnessing a global renaissance of coal majorly driven by poor, fast-growing countries that increasingly rely on coal to satisfy their growing energy demand. The low price of coal relative to gas and oil has played an important role in accelerating coal consumption since the end of the 1990s. In this article, we show that in the increasingly integrated global coal market the availability of a domestic coal resource does not have a statistically significant impact on the use of coal and related emissions. These findings have important implications for climate change mitigation: If future economic growth of poor countries is fueled mainly by coal, ambitious mitigation targets very likely will become infeasible. Building new coal power plant capacities will lead to lock-in effects for the next few decades. If that lock-in is to be avoided, international climate policy must find ways to offer viable alternatives to coal for developing countries.

 

June 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

Positive stories:

May 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

  • MIT says there is a critical long term decline in U.S. research and development spending, while spending is increasing in many other parts of the world.
  • Lake Mead, water supply for Las Vegas and several other major western U.S. cities, is continuing to dry up. The normal snowpack in Washington State is almost completely absent, while much of Oregon has declared a state of emergency. As the drought grinds on, recycled water (sometimes derided as “toilet to tap”) is becoming more common in Calfornia. This is not bad in itself – on the contrary it is an example of technological adaptation and closing the loop. It does have a cost in money and energy though, which are resources that are then not available for other things like education or infrastructure or whatever people need. In other words, drought makes us all a little bit poorer.
  • We’ve hit 400 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not just some places sometimes but pretty much everywhere, all the time.
  • There may be a “global shortage of aggregate demand“, and most countries are not dealing with it well. In many developed countries, increases in average longevity could lead to a trend of long-term deflation. This could eventually happen in almost all countries.
  • Climate change is going to make extreme weather more frequent and more damaging in U.S. cities. The 2015 El Nino could break records.
  • There just isn’t a lot of positivity or hope for better passenger rail service in the U.S.
  • Human chemical use to combat diseases, bugs, and weeds is causing the diseases, bugs and weeds to evolve fast.
  • Unfortunately there is no foolproof formula to make education work.

Positive stories:

  • Less leisure time could mean less sustainable outcomes, because people just have less time to think and act on their good intentions. I’m putting this in the positive column because although people in the U.S. and many other countries still work long hours, the trend so far is less work and more wealth for human population as a whole over very long periods of time. Obviously the transition is not smooth or painless for all workers all of the time.
  • I found a nice example of meta-analysis, which aggregates findings of a large number of scientific and not-so-scientific studies in a useful form, in this case in the urban planning field.
  • May is time to pull on the urban gardening gloves.
  • Melbourne’s climate change adaptation plan focuses on green open space and urban tree canopy.
  • Painless vaccines may be on the way.
  • The rhetoric on renewable energy is really changing as it starts to seriously challenge fossil fuels on economic grounds. Following the Fukushima disaster, when all Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down, the gap was made up largely with liquid natural gas and with almost no disruption of consumer service. But renewables also grew explosively. Some are suggesting Saudi Arabia is supporting lower oil prices in part to stay competitive with renewables. Wind and solar capacity are growing quickly in many parts of the world. Lester Brown says the tide has turned and renewables are now unstoppable.
  • Commercial autonomous trucks are here.
  • The UK may have hit “peak car“.
  • Seattle is allowing developers to provide car share memberships and transit passes in lieu of parking spaces.

400 ppm

Yes, we’re at 400 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, consistently now, everywhere. As a reminder, the pre-industrial number was something like 280.

For the first time since we began tracking carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere, the monthly global average concentration of this greenhouse gas surpassed 400 parts per million in March 2015,  according to NOAA’s latest results.

“It was only a matter of time that we would average 400 parts per million globally,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. “We first reported 400 ppm when all of our Arctic sites reached that value in the spring of 2012. In 2013 the record at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory first crossed the 400 ppm threshold. Reaching 400 parts per million as a global average is a significant milestone.

From a non-scientific sample of people I know, people who thought they were immune from seasonal allergies seem to be suffering them for the first time, and people who have always suffered them, which includes me, are reduced to slobbering insomniac messes. Could there possibly be a connection?

renewable energy

The renewable energy conversation is starting to change, with talk of renewables driving the market for more traditional energy sources, rather than the other way around.

The BBC on Japan:

Following the Fukushima disaster in March 2011 all of Japan’s 48 other nuclear reactors were shut down. The predicted blackouts did not happen, the country kept running just fine.

But there has been a cost. Prior to the Fukushima disaster nearly 30% of power came from nuclear. That has been replaced by burning lots more coal and gas – Japan is now the world’s biggest importer of liquefied natural gas…

Following the Fukushima disaster, the Democratic Party government enacted a “feed-in tariff”.

Anyone could put solar panels on their roof, connect up to the grid and the power companies would be required to pay them a generous 40 Yen per kilowatt.

The response was dramatic. Money poured in to solar, and not just on people’s rooftops. In 2011 Japan had just 4.9 gigawatts of installed solar capacity. Just three years later, at the end of 2014, that had leapt to 23GW. It put Japan ahead of Italy as the number three solar energy producer in the world.

They go on to suggest that the government may turn the nuclear plants back on, and that may slow down the renewable revolution. But still, renewables were competing favorably with fossil fuels in the meantime.

Meanwhile, NPR actually suggests that renewables may be helping to drive down the price of oil.

“What the Saudis could see was new forms of renewable energy consumption — windmills, tidal power, solar power and the Tesla,” Verleger says.

He says in the longer term, electric cars and those other technologies could mean less demand for oil. Shorter term, the global economy has slowed and that means less thirst for oil right now. At the same time, with fracking the U.S. is now rivaling Saudi Arabia as an oil superpower…

So he says the Saudis now want cheaper oil, in part to slow down the fracking revolution in the U.S. — and to signal to the developing world: Don’t worry — you don’t need to invest in alternative energy. You can buy cheap oil from us.

This is very different than a couple years ago, when we were arguing that renewables were competitive only because of high oil prices.

April 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

Positive stories:

  • Mr. Money Mustache brought us a nice post on home energy efficiency projects. This was a very popular post.
  • Biotechnology may soon bring us the tools to seriously monkey with photosynthesis. (This is one of those stories where I struggle between the positive and negative columns, but clearly there is a potential upside when we will have so many mouths to feed.)
  • Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, is retiring. That might sound bad, but his ground-breaking ideas are continuing on and actually seem to be going mainstream.
  • Lee Kuan Yew, who took Singapore “from third world to first” in one generation, passed away (in March, but I wrote about it in April. Let me be clear – I am an admirer and it is his life I am putting in the positive column, not his death.)
  • Donella Meadows explained how your bathtub is a dynamic system.
  • Robert Gordon offers a clear policy prescription for the U.S. to support continued economic growth.
  • I explain how a cap-and-trade program for stormwater and pollution producing pavement could work.
  • Joel Mokyr talks about advances in information technology, materials science and biotechnology.
  • Some U.S. cities are fairly serious about planting trees.
  • Edmonton has set a target of zero solid waste.
  • Saving water also saves energy. It’s highly logical, but if you are the skeptical type then here are some numbers. Also, urban agriculture reduces carbon emissions.
  • Peter Thiel thinks we can live forever. (positive, but do see my earlier comment about mouths to feed…)
  • A paper in Ecological Economics tries to unify the ecological footprint and planetary boundary concepts.
  • Philadelphia finally has bike share.

urban agriculture and carbon emissions

Here’s an article from Landscape and Urban Planning making a connection between urban agriculture and greenhouse gas emission reductions. It makes sense – any food that comes from nearby will reduce transportation energy use, air pollution, and carbon emissions. We could either decide to do this for ethical reasons, or we could build more of those external costs in the price. It probably makes sense to do some of each.

The expansion of urban agriculture assists in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions not only by producing food but also by reducing the amount of food transported from farming areas and therefore reducing the food mileage. This study seeks to estimate “the expected GHG reduction effect” in the case of a revitalization of urban agriculture. For this purpose, this study first calculated the area available for urban farming by targeting the metropolitan area of Seoul and then calculated the production per unit area by focusing on “the crops suitable for urban agriculture”. Using this estimated value, the study estimated crop production, the resultant food mileage decrement, and the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that could be obtained if the Seoul metropolis introduced urban agriculture. The results estimated that if the Seoul metropolis implemented urban agriculture in a 51.15 km2 area, it would be possible to reduce CO2 emissions by 11.67 million kg annually. This numerical value is the same amount of CO2 absorbed annually by 20.0 km2 of pine forests and 10.2 km2 of oak tree forests that are 20 years old. From the perspective of GHG reduction effects in the transportation sector, urban agriculture is expected to produce a considerable effect in diverse aspects such as the habituation of green growth, self-sufficiency, and food security.