Energy and global warming

Cate — one of the few to care

Steve Dunn outlines the latest thinking on climate change, then proposes some solutions:

Climatologist James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, predicts that if the temperature increase this century can be limited to 2°F or less, then the natural world will still be recognizable in 2100 . There will be higher species extinction rates and damamged ecosystems, but the basic fabric of life as we now know it will remain. Much beyond two degrees Hansen says and the natural world will fundamentally change. The same “two degrees is manageable” assumption underlies the carbon dioxide (CO2) reduction goals established in the Kyoto Protocol.

Emissions targets
Unfortunately, greenhouse gas emissions are already blowing right past Kyoto’s first benchmark that requires countries to reduce their 1990 CO2 emission levels 7 percent by 2012. Instead, U.S. emissions have increased 1.5-2 percent a year every year since 1990. Chinese and Indian emissions are growing far faster than was anticipated by Kyoto in 1998 and, even among the countries who signed the treaty, only the UK is close to being on target.

The recently passed California initiative to get 7 percent below 1990 emission levels by 2020, the best US effort to date, is still too slow.

The Intergovernmental Climate Change Panel’s (IPCC) February 2007 low-end temperature prediction for this century is a 3.6°F-increase, with a best guess of 5.4 degrees. Actual temperature increases over land will be greater than those over water, and uneven. The U.S. Southwest, for example, may see an eight- to twelve-degree surge.

The threat

The last time the planet was 5.4 degrees cooler than now we were in an Ice Age. Five degrees warmer might quickly change the natural world just as dramatically. With somewhere between a three- to five-degree increase, we’ll likely see the twenty-foot-plus ocean level rise depicted in An Inconvenient Truth from the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps, on top of the expected ten to twenty inches from thermal expansion and ongoing ice melt. Mix in stronger storms coming in over these new coastlines, unbearable heat and drought in the Southwest and elsewhere, a 20-30 percent species extinction rate (closer to 50 percent at a 5.4 degree increase), and-suffice it to say, we’re facing disaster.

The good middle and upper income folks who decide to shell out extra dollars to buy more insulation, better glass, efficient light bulbs, or a hybrid vehicle; the cities that plant trees and purchase low-emission fleets; the gritty carpoolers-what they’re doing isn’t wrong, just tragically inadequate. Ditto with recent laudable state initiatives to reach 10 or 15 percent of new electrical supply from clean renewable resources by 2015 or 2020. Despite a few shrinking carbon footprints here and there, global CO2 emissions continue to increase every year. Meanwhile, far from changing course, new coal power plants come on line every week, and mostly inefficient new cars rush to join the inefficient old ones.

Serious solution scenarios commonly require an 80 percent reduction in CO2 emissions by midcentury with major reductions (not slower increases) starting in less than ten years. No wonder IPCC scientists are throwing in the towel on keeping the temperature increase to two degrees or less this century. But wait-we can still achieve that goal and gain energy independence in the process.

THE SOLUTION: stop burning oil and coal.

Producing CO2 is overwhelmingly the largest contributor to global warming; burning oil (gasoline) and coal accounts for most ofthat CO2. My proposed solution has four components, and unless they move together like wheels on a car, we won’t get anywhere.

I . Transformation of the Energy Infrastructure

We’d need new energy sources for electricity and transportation even if there wasn’t a warming problem; the “peak oil” moment looms, creating economic and security reasons for ending oil dependence. And despite decades of legislation and billions of dollars toward development, coal power plants continue to cause growing health and environmental problems such as mercury poisoning and respiratory diseases.

The first step is to cut through decades of political stalemates that keep delaying our moment of energy reckoning. Right now the most effective and inexpensive option to reduce both CO2 and oil imports is efficiency. Plug-in hybrid technology is four to five times as efficient as today’s 21 mile-per-gallon average (mpg). Same miles driven, same functions performed, but without the imports or emissions. As much as efficiency helps, most of the remaining oil still needs to be replaced with clean biofuels. Nor can we wait for the gradual turnover of the auto fleet. Low-cost conversion kits must be created to improve the efficiency of today’s vehicles and allow more of them to run on biofuels. Wake up, American auto industry; there’s work to do.

Uniting end-use efficiencies with local renewable resources can reduce coal-burning. Just about every physical space has some renewable resource it can tap for producing electricity: Photovoltaics in the Sunbelt; wind offshore, in the mountains, and the Dakotas; micro-hydro power wherever there’s falling water; and waste-to-energy anywhere. (At our home in the mountains of Colorado, twelve photovoltaic panels on a tracker supply our electricity. In a new subdivision in California where solar collectors are rolled out on every roof, average electric bills are down 50 percent.)

Over the first ten years of transformation probably 80 percent of the CO2 cuts will come from efficiency gains as we capture low-hanging fruit like lighting and greater vehicle mpg. Electricity production from renewables will keep expanding, hydrogen or another new source may emerge, and perhaps clean coal and nuclear energy will finally prove out, so that by the end of the second ten years most oil and coal use will be obsolete. Efficiency and new energy sources combined act like a vise, squeezing oil and coal use out of the economy.

Pie in the sky, you say? Historical precedent, in fact, supports the potential of this approach. In response to the first energy crisis in the 1970s, the United States raised auto fuel efficiency standards from 17 to 27 mpg, passed the 1978 Energy Act promoting renewable energy, and established efficiency standards for construction, insulation, and appliances. As a result of these modest first steps, between 1978 and 1984 the gross domestic product grew 27 percent while energy use declined 17 percent, and overall the economy became 40 percent more energy efficient.

Paradoxically, in both the electricity and transportation sectors, greater efficiency resulted in oversupply, which begat low prices for two decades that in turn encouraged inefficiency. We can’t make that mistake again, but how do we avoid it? How do we get off the rollercoaster where OPEC lowers oil prices just enough to prevent serious development of alternatives, then raises them again? How do we get people and businesses to shoulder the upfront costs of efficiency improvements when the payback time is too long? How can hybrids and all the other efficiency options be made affordable for the middle and lower classes?

2. Government “Leveraging”

All economies are mixed economies, part public and part private. Even North Korea has local markets of buyers and sellers, and near the other end of the spectrum, even the United States supports public sector regulation of markets. In fact, our government has “leveraged” private behavior throughout our history. By a wide array of means we have always taxed what we wanted less of and subsidized what we wanted more of while still fundamentally leaving production in private hands. Markets are good at responding to short-term supply and demand, but blind to longterm national interest. The purpose of leveraging is to align short-term economic self-interest with long-term national and global interest.

In order to further the national goal of westward expansion in the nineteenth century, the government offered “40 acres and a mule” to Americans hungry for opportunity, and vast tracts of free land to railroads and telegraph companies. To help infant industries it placed tariffs on imports. In the twentieth century hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies of all kinds were lavished upon the oil, coal, and nuclear industries and still are in order to build the platform that supports modern life. We passed the G.I. BUl and federalized student loans to grow wealth among citizens and increase training capacity for the country. We tax tobacco and alcohol to modestly promote health, subsidize agriculture to retain food independence, and so on. Leveraging doesn’t require large bureaucracies, just smart nudges to the ebb and flow of money so that the waters of self-interest carry the general wellbeing to a better future.

To achieve a rapid transformation of the energy infrastructure we must cleverly apply the following principle: the more efficient and clean something is, the greater the subsidy (incentive); the more inefficient and polluting, the greater the tax (disincentive.) A case in point is “fee-bates,” an idea hatched by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, whereby for each class of vehicle a line would be drawn, say 40 mpg for passenger cars. For each mpg above the line a rebate would be given, and for every mpg below the line a fee would be collected, thus making the right choice the best buy. (Today we do the opposite.) The same leveraging technique can be applied to appliances, building permit fees, or gasoline (clean U.S. biofuel priced lower than the imported oil). The fees largely pay for the rebates, and we can free up billions of dollars annually by terminating the existing counter-productive subsidies to the energy lords of yesterday. Simply letting energy prices reflect true costs will give an enormous boost to the competitiveness of biofuels and renewables. In short, it’s time to relevel the playing field in a direction that encourages less warming and less oil dependence.

Still, efficiency carries upfront costs and energy conservation is labor intensive. (Leveraging can make an efficient bulb attractive, but someone still needs to screw it in.) To transform quickly enough we need more than price signals; we need action. Where can we find a large, inexpensive, educable, and fit work force to help make the transformation happen?

3. National Service

I join those who propose two years of service from every American between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six. But let them decide whether to join the National Guard, or the “Natural Guard.” There’s plenty to do for everyone: those inclined to join the Natural Guard should be highly motivated since it’s their own future they’re saving. This group can install insulation and lighting, roll out rooftop photovoltaics, erect the new generation of small wind generators under development, retrofit cars, plant trees, clear excess forest fuel loads, and send them off to biofuel plants. They can do restorations, reintroductions, and adaptations to help endangered natural systems.

Imagine this: trained Natural Guards spread throughout U.S. neighborhoods doing energy audits, first in the middle and lower income areas that have the most room for energy improvement and the greatest economic need. They strike deals with home and business owners: “If you let us come in and do this list of things to improve your energy efficiency and exploit any renewable energy potential, we guarantee that your monthly electric bill will go down by x” It’s a campaign ripe with possibilities for public and private partnerships and corporate sponsorships.

Sound technological choices, smart leveraging, and mobilizing abundant labor can transform the United States, but that still doesn’t solve the global problem.

4. International Agreements

Rather than assembling 170-odd countries to painfully construct another Kyoto-like edifice of rules, exemptions, timetables, and conditions, a bilateral agreement should be forged between the United States and China, the two largest CO2 producers, and built from there. Here too, immediate national self-interest must be made to align with long-term global interest. The cutting edge of the solution for climate change should come from the countries causing most of the problem, but advances must then be shared with the developing world, presumably by NGO-driven technology transfer and training. Transformation is more likely to succeed with leading nations setting an example than from contorted, unenforceable treaties.

These are the four wheels of a solution, but of course the key to making them actually move is politics. Here in the United States the issue is ripe for the picking. Aside from the late 1970s, neither party has done anything about energy independence for the last forty years except beat their chests in speeches. Neither party has anything to brag about regarding global warming either. Both issues fester ominously while we wait for leadership, yet there’s nothing ideologically poisonous to either party in the use of leveraging.

Among society’s interests, the dangers of warming are less worrisome to some than the economic risks of highpriced, vulnerable oil or national security dangers. In a recent survey of several thousand U.S. national security experts, 78 percent said that the single most important thing the United States could do to fight terrorism would be to reduce its oil dependence on the Middle East. Control over the flow of oil is a potent weapon to aim at the world’s economies and, more than any other source, oil finances terrorism.

Whether one’s priority is climate, the economy, or security, the solution is largely the same: to make energy independence a top-tier issue in the coming election. I urge citizens of all political persuasions to pressure any candidate for national office in 2008 to make this pledge: “I will support measures to ensure that by 2012 the United States will be reducing greenhouse gas emissions and importing less oil.” (This doesn’t mean a slower rate of increase; it means fewer tons ofCO2 emitted and fewer barrels of oil imported in the last year compared to the current year). This is achievable, understandable, and verifiable. Let’s elect leaders in 2008 who will stop making the same costly errors, and instead lead the world’s energy transformation.