The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University
A new study in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences contends that the U.S. government significantly underestimated the social cost of carbon in 2010 in its effort to establish a unified cost of carbon for various agencies to use when formulating policy. The government arrived at a cost at $21 per ton of carbon, but the new study argues the “discount rate” was set too high, and that it the true social cost of carbon could be anywhere from $55 to $266 per ton.
Potential greenhouse gas policy, post-November, remains a murky picture. While candidate Mitt Romney has said he opposes a carbon tax, some of his economic advisers embrace the idea (subscription) as a means to tackle greenhouse gas emissions, especially in tight fiscal times. The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein frames the carbon pricing debate as a bargain between Democrats and Republicans, and a Slate piece offers that carbon taxes are good not only for the environment, but also for the treasury. Meanwhile, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross argues in The Atlantic that, given the national-security challenges the issue poses for the U.S., Romney and the Republican party are “ceding important ground by tolerating and encouraging denialism” of climate change. Ralph Nader says Obama and the Democrats are “running away from the issue” of climate change.
Climate Change in the Stone Age
Just like fossils, climate change leaves a trail in sediments, coral and buried pollen. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which used models to simulate climate conditions over the last 120,000 years, indicates changes in climate coincided with some of early man’s migrations through Asia, north to Europe and all the way to Australia and North America. “The study fills in many of the links that have only been assumed or guessed at,” said Rick Potts of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. It is the first time anyone has been able to explore climate’s power to facilitate human expansion, he added.
In the present day, humans’ expansion may cause urban areas to triple in size by 2030, placing more pressure on resources. Our everyday consumption could be linked to record melting in the Arctic, making highly sought-after oil, gas and mineral resources more accessible. Local pollution created by the oil and gas industry, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) says, may accelerate that thaw. “There is a grim irony here that as the ice melts … humanity is going for more of the natural resources fuelling this meltdown,” said Nick Nuttall, spokesman for UNEP. One need fueling this resource hunt: transportation. A new report says fuel consumption in new cars could be halved in less than two decades.
PBS Newshour has generated criticism for presenting “false balance” on the issue of climate change. Its Sept. 16 episode focused on the findings by “converted skeptic” Richard Muller that are consistent with the scientific consensus about climate change, but the show offered an equal-time rebuttal by climate change denier Anthony Watts—without disclosing his ties to the Heartland Institute, which has long promoted climate change denial. The New York Times’ Anthony Revkin called the interview with Watts “surreally softball.”
Country-Sized Emissions
Climate change may affect one ecosystem—covering 71 percent of the planet—most severely. As emissions continue to rise, ocean waters will rise with them, causing long-term degradation to about 70 percent of coral reefs by 2030. “Our findings show that under current assumptions regarding thermal sensitivity, coral reefs might no longer be prominent coastal ecosystems if global mean temperatures actually exceed 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level,” said lead study author Katia Frieler of the Potsdam Institute.
It turns out man-made emissions are not the only problem for our oceans. When disturbed, coastal habitats such as wetlands, mangroves and sea grasses, are also a huge factor in the production of greenhouse gases. Destruction of coastal wetlands, often as a result of urban development, aquaculture or farming, releases between 150 million and 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon per year with a central value of 450 million tons—10 times higher than previous reports. These coastal habitats could be protected and climate change combated, the study said, if a system were implemented that assigned credits to carbon stored in these habitats and provided economic incentive if they are left intact—much like what is being done to protect trees through reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). It would work similar to what the American Carbon Registry has just developed for wetlands in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released long-awaited greenhouse gas rules for new power plants this week. Using the Clean Air Act, the agency standard would set the first national limits on the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions new power plants can emit. The EPA proposed the rule after delaying it several times since July 2011.
Power plants are the largest source of CO2 in the nation, accounting for approximately 40 percent of these emissions, according to the Energy Information Administration. The rule basically requires new coal plants to emit the same amount of CO2 as an average plant fueled by natural gas—causing U.S. coal shares to slip following the announcement. While some in Congress already are threatening to nullify the rule, plummeting natural gas prices had much of the same effect, driving the decline of existing coal-fired facilities and giving way to power plants fueled by natural gas.
The news was met with mixed reactions. Some were calling it the “demise of coal-fired power generation” and a “job killer,” while others viewed it as a step in the right direction to fight climate change.
Energy: At What Cost?
The New York Times describes how technological breakthroughs in natural gas and oil extraction, coupled with efficiency, are “inching” the U.S. toward energy independence—but at what environmental cost? Nearly two years after an explosion on an offshore oil platform sent millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, deepwater drilling is picking up. But a leak on an oil rig in the North Sea prompted some to think back to BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon Disaster, the world’s worst marine oil spill. Although this leak doesn’t appear to be as serious as the BP spill, some are predicting it could take six months before the problem is fixed.
Meanwhile a new survey says 63 percent of Americans think it’s possible to develop shale oil reserves without harming the environment. But it appears the controversial drilling method may undermine attempts to store carbon dioxide underground.
Energy and environment also took center stage in Santa Barbara as CEOs of industry and environmental organizations converged at the Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics conference. Repeated throughout the conference was the idea that public policy is inadequate to the task of tackling the world’s energy challenges. Yet when pressed, Tesla Motors founder and clean tech notable Elon Musk said public policies such as a carbon tax are “ideal.”
Carbon Caps: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
In California, where the nation’s only economy-wide cap-and-trade program is moving forward, officials announced plans to postpone the program’s first allowance auction from Aug. 15 to Nov. 14. The later start date will give California more time to link its program with that of its Western Climate Initiative (WCI) partner, Quebec. WCI just appointed Anita Burke as organization’s first executive director. Forward progress will be challenging because of a lawsuit challenging the cap’s use of offsets, or reductions outside the cap. The lawsuit alleges that offsets represent reductions that would have occurred with or without public policies.
Meanwhile the U.S. airline industry dropped its unsuccessful lawsuit against Europe’s cap-and-trade program. The European Union emission trading scheme seeks to bring airlines taking off and landing in Europe under its emissions cap. Airlines would be required to purchase allowances at auction. The move comes as European Union Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard quietly visited Washington this week to discuss transatlantic climate issues, including U.S. airlines’ opposition to the program.
In dueling opinion pieces, the Washington Post renews calls for a carbon tax or cap-and-trade, while the Wall Street Journal says models cannot pin much to climate during the past decade. The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has attempted to more accurately model the future impacts of climate change.
Extreme weather—the same that may be bringing bats to Texas and causing birds to adjust their ranges—is linked to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, according to two reports. In fact, climate change is amplifying risk of storms, rising seas and floods—particularly in small island states and poor regions. Reports such as these have spurred an effort to identify trees that could thrive as climate change develops. Human-caused climate change may also further the spread of Chagas’ disease and potentially worsen autoimmune disease such as multiple sclerosis, impairing cognitive function, according to new studies. The latter study found that warmer temperatures lower mental processing speeds and memory recall.
The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University
Although Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard had promised before to not enact a carbon tax, floods, bush fires, heat waves, and drought reawakened discussion about putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions.
This week, Australia’s House of Representatives narrowly passed a carbon tax, sending the bill to the country’s Senate, where observers say it is almost certain to pass. Supporters say Australia’s setup would have several advantages over Europe’s carbon-trading system, including a fixed price for the first three years while the fledgling system gets going, which could allow Australia to claim it is the world leader on climate legislation.
However, Australia is currently one of the biggest emitters per capita, with 80 percent of the country’s electricity coming from coal. Australia is also the world’s biggest coal exporter, and as such has the coal industry reacting fiercely to the proposed law.
Buying Sunshine
Debt-wracked Greece is launching a plan—with Germany’s help—to attempt to boost its economy out of recession by building huge solar power installations. “Project Helios,” named after the Greek god of the sun, is designed to attract 20 billion euros in foreign investment—and a large portion of the electricity produced may leave the country, headed to Germany.
However, the plan for exporting the electricity has some snags, critics say—including the need for billions of euros of investment in Greece’s power grid. Nonetheless, the president of the Hellenic Association of Photovoltaic Companies said the plan is more realistic than Desertec, a proposal to supply Europe with electricity from huge solar power farms in North Africa.
Energy for All
In preparation for 2012—which the United Nations has named the Year of Sustainable Energy for All—the International Energy Agency released its first assessment of the cost of ending energy poverty. The price tag: $48 billion a year—about 3 percent of the yearly global energy investment, and about five times as much as is spent now trying to bring energy to the world’s poor.
Expanding electricity to about 1.5 billion people who lack it now would add less than 1 percent to the world’s emissions, the report estimated, and the spread could be driven by the private sector, with the proper incentives from governments, said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Pipeline Proceedings
The proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry diluted tar sands from Canada to Texas, faced raucous opposition at a public hearing in Washington, D.C. Protests against the project outside the White House dwindled in September, but the project remains a political headache for the Obama Administration.
Nonetheless, many industry insiders surveyed by National Journal, as well as Canada’s natural resources minister, said the administration is likely to approve the pipeline.
More Nuclear Zones
Notwithstanding the retreat from nuclear power in Germany, Switzerland, and perhaps Japan, the world is still headed for a nuclear renaissance, said a report by Britain’s Royal Society. However, the report argued there should be more emphasis on controlling proliferation of nuclear materials and better storage of spent fuel to avoid accidents like that at Fukushima.
A new bill in Berkeley, California, is questioning the city’s long-time stance as a “nuclear free zone,” which uses no nuclear power and lets no nuclear weapons pass through it. But one of its city council members says the 1986 law causes more problems than it is worth and should be repealed.
The Climate Post offers a rundown of the week in climate and energy news. It is produced each Thursday by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
