Tag: fossil fuel

Support for greening the economy

It’s been interesting to see some NZ Herald articles bearing on the Green Party’s “100,000 green jobs” policy which I discussed a few days ago.

John Armstrong shared my view that the Green’s jobs policy deserved more than the “ritualistic slagging” offered by John Key and Steven Joyce.

National might still claim the Greens do not understand economics. The purpose of yesterday’s policy release was to demonstrate the Greens do understand – and are deadly serious about remedying the economy’s structural weaknesses, though not in a fashion National would favour. Continue reading “Support for greening the economy”

Climate Change and Global Energy Security

Academics Marilyn Brown and Benjamin Sovacool, who have impressive credentials in the field of energy policy, are co-authors of the recently published Climate Change and Global Energy Security: Technology and Policy Options, a substantial and detailed study of a very wide range of technologies covering both the promise of those options and the obstacles to their effective employment.

I was deeply depressed by the time I got to page 64 of the book. That was where the tale of five challenges ended. The authors had enlarged the energy and climate change scope of the book somewhat to identify five challenges threatening the prosperity of future generations: electricity, transportation, forestry and agriculture, waste and water, climate change. They do it thoroughly, and it seemed well-nigh impossible that the growing population of the world could possibly cope with these problem areas. But the reader is counselled in the final paragraph of the chapter not to give up in despair, as the issues can be broken down into more manageable challenges to which technology and policy solutions are readily available. Continue reading “Climate Change and Global Energy Security”

The Lesson from China

Environmentalist Lester Brown is a competitive long-distance runner even into his late seventies. There’s something of the dogged persistence of that sport in the way he keeps delivering the message that humanity must change course, and backing up what he has to say with masses of data.  The latest email I received a few days ago from his Earth Policy Institute underlined that message yet again, along with stark figures. It’s a short article headed Learning From China. I was taken with its directness and simplicity and thought it worth sharing here. He reflects that for as long as he can remember his own country, the US, with 5 percent of the world’s population has consumed a third or more of the earth’s resources. But today China consumes more basic resources than the US does. China uses a quarter more grain than the United States. Its meat consumption is double that of the United States. It uses three times as much coal and four times as much steel.

That’s national consumption. What if per capita consumption in China were to catch up with the US? That will happen by 2035 on the conservative assumption that China’s economy slows from the 11 percent annual growth of recent years to 8 percent.

If the Chinese spend their income more or less as Americans do today, then things get pretty well impossible. Continue reading “The Lesson from China”

Hansen: shelter from the storm

James Hansen has long been a leading climate scientist and he is also an excellent communicator of the science to the public. What he had to say about the scientific picture in his recent interview with Bill McKibben, a different aspect of which I highlighted in yesterday’s post, is of interest for its clarity and for the bluntness of its affirmation of how CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be returned to safer levels. The book Hansen refers to in the course of the interview is his Storms of my Grandchildren. The interview is an addition to the latest paperback edition.

McKibben opens by asking about the large number of new national high-temperature records this year. Hansen replies:

“What we see happening with new record temperatures, both warm and cold, is in good agreement with what we predicted in the 1980s when I testified to Congress about the expected effect of global warming. I used coloured dice then to emphasize that global warming would cause the climate dice to be ‘loaded’. Record local daily high temperatures now occur more than twice as often as record daily cold temperatures. The predominance of new record highs over record lows will continue to increase over the next few decades, so the perceptive person should recognize that climate is changing.”

 

It doesn’t need big hikes in average global temperature to cause major changes.

“The last time Earth was 2 degrees warmer so much ice melted that sea level was about twenty-five meters (eighty feet) higher than it is today.”

He recognises the strength of weather variability and warns that it will be increased by global warming:

“But remember that weather variability, which can be 10 to 20 degrees from day to day, will always be greater than average warming. And weather variability will become even greater in the future, as I explain in the book, if we don’t slow down greenhouse gas emissions. If we let warming continue to the point of rapid ice sheet collapse, all hell will break loose. That’s the reason for ‘Storms’ in the book title.”

McKibben then asks about “climategate”, to a robust response from Hansen. An excerpt:

“The NASA temperature analysis agrees well with the East Anglia results. And the NASA data are all publicly available, as is the computer program that carries out the analysis.

“Look at it this way: If anybody could show that the global warming curve was wrong they would become famous, maybe win a Nobel Prize. All the measurement data are available. So why don’t the deniers produce a different result? They know that they cannot, so they resort to theft of e-mails, snipping private comments out of context, and character assassination.

“IPCC’s ‘Himalayan error’ was another hoax perpetrated on the public. The perpetrators, global warming deniers, did a brilliant job of playing the scientifically obtuse media like a fiddle…

“IPCC scientists had done a good job of producing a comprehensive report. It is a rather thankless task, on top of their normal jobs, often requiring them to work sixty, eighty, or more hours per week, with no pay for overtime or for working on the IPCC report. Yet they were portrayed as incompetent or, worse, dishonest. Scientists do indeed have deficiencies—especially in communicating with the public and defending themselves against vicious attacks by professional swift-boaters.

“The public, at some point, will realize they were hoodwinked by the deniers. The danger is that deniers may succeed in delaying actions to deal with energy and climate. Delay will enrich fossil fuel executives, but it is a great threat to young people and the planet.”

Asked about whether we can stop the process of increasing warming and the tipping point dangers it brings with it, whether we can stabilize the situation, Hansen responds:

“We can estimate what is needed pretty well. Stabilizing climate requires, to first order, that we restore Earth’s energy balance. If the planet once again radiates as much energy to space as it absorbs from the sun, there no longer will be a drive causing the planet to get warmer. Restoring planetary energy balance would not immediately stop sea level rise, but it should keep sea level rise small. Restoring energy balance also would prevent climate change from becoming a huge force for species extinction and ecosystem collapse.

“We can accurately calculate how Earth’s energy balance will change if we reduce long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. We would need to reduce carbon dioxide by 35 to 40 ppm (parts per million) to increase Earth’s heat radiation to space by one half watt, if other long-lived gases stay the same as today. That reduction would make atmospheric carbon dioxide amount to about 350 ppm.”

There are additional reasons for the 350 ppm target, one of them being ocean acidification; Hansen refers to ocean biologists concluding that for the sake of life in the ocean we need to aim for an atmospheric carbon dioxide amount no higher than 350 ppm.  However Earth’s energy balance is the criterion that provides the most fundamental constraint for what must be done to stabilize climate.

McKibben remarks that his organisation, 350.org, meets opposition from some activists who demand an even lower target of 300 ppm or the pre-industrial 280ppm. But Hansen replies that all we can be sure of at present it that it should be ‘less than 350 ppm’, and that is sufficient for policy purposes:

“That target tells us that we must rapidly phase out coal emissions, leave unconventional fossil fuels in the ground, and not go after the last drops of oil and gas. In other words, we must move as quickly as possible to the post–fossil fuel era of clean energies.

“Getting back to 350 ppm will be difficult and will take time. By the time we get back to 350 ppm, we will know a lot more and we will be able to be more specific about what ‘less than 350 ppm’ means. By then we should be measuring Earth’s energy balance very accurately. We will know whether the planet is back in energy balance and we will be able to see whether climate is stabilizing.”

He goes on to explain that it is difficult to specify at this stage an eventual value for CO2 because there are other human-made climate forcings. Methane and tropospheric ozone in the air are among them, and realistic reductions of those gases would alleviate somewhat the amount by which we must reduce CO2.The cooling effect of atmospheric aerosols is likely to be lessened as we improve air quality. It would be foolish to demand a CO2 reduction to 280 ppm at this stage of our understanding.

One of the things Hansen says we must do in our scaling back to 350 ppm is not to go after the last drops of oil and gas. It was rather deflating, therefore, as I was preparing this post to see that today’s NZ Herald carries an upbeat report on the prospects for petroleum exploration in New Zealand waters as the price of oil rises. All the more depressing to see the comments on how exploration-friendly the NZ government is regarded as being.

A Merrill Lynch spokesperson, describing New Zealand as a “sweet spot” for exploration, said the royalty regime in this country was attractive.

“People believe that if you find stuff the Government won’t try and screw them over with an unfriendly tax arrangement.”

Indeed the Government is pro-actively formulating a petroleum action plan to encourage more drilling. It appears to be pursued with a good deal more purpose than any plan to encourage renewable energy development.

What does the government reply to Hansen when he says the world must not go after the last drops of oil and gas?  That these are not the last drops? That we don’t believe you? For that matter in possibly allowing the development of the Southland lignite fields what is it saying to the even more pressing need, in Hansen’s view, to rapidly phase out coal emissions?

We should keep pressing such questions on the NZ government. We must not allow them to thumb their noses at the science.

China: ready to pay the price

ames Hansen was in China when the American midterm elections were held, and he reports that while the rest of us were feeling pessimistic he was becoming optimistic. Not because of what was happening in the US, but because of China. He found two reasons for optimism, the first of which he has explained in a poston his website. The second will follow, but there’s enough in the first to warrant notice here.

In the activist dimension of his life – which he always makes clear is an expression of personal opinion and in this respect differentiated from his scientific work – Hansen opposes cap and trade approaches to limiting carbon emissions as ineffective and instead advocates a steadily rising carbon fee collected from fossil fuel companies and returned to the public on a per capita basis to allow lifestyle adjustments and spur clean energy innovations.

 

He considers there are signs that China is ready to consider a rising carbon price as part of a clean energy transition. At the Beijing Forum he attended he was impressed by what he described as the focused rational approach to dealing with the challenges, epitomized by Dr. Jiang Kejun (pictured), the lead speaker in the session “Global Environmental Policies and National Strategies”.

“Jiang Kejun laid out sector-by-sector projections of transitions to low-carbon and no-carbon energies and improved energy efficiency that would allow CO2 emission growth to be slowed and then reversed over the next few decades. Technology development is supported, and, when lower carbon technology becomes available, efficiency standards are promptly ratcheted downward. Most encouragingly, there is recognition that this strategy requires a rising carbon price for most successful results. The Chinese authorities appear to grasp that rapid attainment of the tipping points at which clean energies quickly displace dirty energy requires an economic incentive.”

Hansen remarks the advantages of the scale of manufacturing in China. It is so great that the unit price of new technologies can be quickly brought down, putting China in a position to sell carbon-efficient technologies to the rest of the world.

He compares the prevention of effective legislation by vested interests in the US with his impression that China has the capacity to implement policy decisions rapidly. He notes that the leaders seem to seek the best technical information and do not brand as a hoax that which is inconvenient. The power of fossil fuel interests is not as strong as in the US.

Hansen’s earlier view was that global action to stem climate change required agreement between China and the United States for a rising carbon fee. He acknowledges this is not realistic as the dysfunctional Congress would not approve such a treaty.

However, he sees a way around that. He envisages China finding agreement with other nations such as the European Union to impose rising internal carbon fees. And here’s the crunch:

“Existing rules of the World Trade Organization would allow collection of a rising border duty on products from all nations that do not have an equivalent internal carbon fee or tax.”

And the consequence:

“The United States then would be forced to make a choice. It could either address its fossil fuel addiction with a rising carbon fee and supportive national investment policies or it could accept continual descent into second-rate and third-rate economic well-being. The United States has great potential for innovation, but it will not be unleashed as long as fossil fuel interests have a stranglehold on U.S. energy policies.”

Nicholas Stern doesn’t share Hansen’s impatience with emissions trading schemes, but it is worth noting that he sounded very similar trade warnings in Auckland in September where he was delivering the Douglas Robb lectures. The world is embarking on a “new industrial revolution” of renewable energy and cleaner innovation, he told the Herald. Countries which don’t embrace it will find other countries reluctant to trade with them. Ten or fifteen years from now, those that produce in dirty ways are likely to face trade barriers.

However it is obtained, a rising price on carbon is an essential element in the transition to clean energy, and trade concerns may well play a part in making it global. Hansen insists that only a tax can achieve it, but there are indications that China is also considering a cap-and-trade system. Either way contributes to the seriousness Hansen discerns in China’s planning towards the transformation of its currently carbon-dependent economy.