Last week, I discussed a new paper on methane leakage, to argue that “Natural Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere Absent A Carbon Price AND Strong Standards To Reduce Methane Leakage.” Last month, I wrote about a paper by climatologist Ken Caldeira and tech guru Nathan Myhrvold that came to a stronger conclusion: You Can’t Slow Projected Warming With Gas, You Need ‘Rapid and Massive Deployment’ of Zero-Carbon Power. I asked Caldeira to comment on the new paper. He slammed those who support a “fundamentally immoral” policy of delivering a hothouse climate to future generations, especially since avoiding the worst outcomes requires means redirecting at most 2% of our wealth. He expressed his views with a bluntness that is becoming increasingly common among climate scientists – JR.

Caldeira: “Basically, people are saying ‘If you don’t build this natural gas plant, we’ll build this coal plant.’ As the natural gas plant spews its CO2 into the atmosphere, we are supposed to be grateful that they didn’t shoot the dog.” [Apologies to National Lampoon].

By Ken Caldeira

1. Life-cycle analyses for natural gas.

Myhrvold and Caldeira (2012) presented a method for estimating climate consequences of energy system transitions. We used every Life Cycle Assessment study that we could get our hands on that provided the necessary level of detail. We also, in the Supporting Online Material that accompanied our paper, considered many cases with technological improvement. Our goal was to present a simple analytic framework that others could use to analyze energy system transitions in a physically defensible framework using numbers of their choosing. [See figure below.]

I am a climate scientist, not a power plant engineer. For the sake of discussion, I am happy to accept that 0.5 could be the ratio of emissions from a natural gas plant relative to those from a coal plant, and that something close to infinity could be the ratio of emissions from a natural gas plant relative to those from an intrinsically carbon-emission free technology (wind, solar, nuclear) constructed in a decarbonized economy of the future.

Under these assumptions, continued use of natural gas would delay but not avoid unwanted climate outcomes. Only the intrinsically carbon-emission free technologies can avoid these outcomes.

2. Overall framing.

Note: This is me speaking mostly as a human being, a moral and political animal, and not me speaking as a scientist. As a human being, I ask questions that are related to my values and my conception of what is right and wrong. As a scientist, I answer these questions as objectively as I possibly can.

Every CO2 molecule is the same to the atmosphere. The atmosphere doesn’t care whether that CO2 molecule came from coal or natural gas.

We are converting the climate of our planet to one that is similar to the hothouse climates that existed on this planet when dinosaurs were the top predators. To a first approximation, if we emit greenhouse gases half as rapidly as we do today, we will wind up in the same place but it will take us twice as long to get there.

Economists estimate that it might cost something like 2% of our GDP to convert our energy system into one that does not use the atmosphere as a waste dump. When we burn fossil fuels and release the CO2 into the atmosphere, we are saying “I am willing to impose tremendous climate risk on future generations living throughout the world, so that I personally can be 2% richer today.” I believe this to be fundamentally immoral. We are saying we want to selfishly reap benefits today while imposing costs on strangers tomorrow.

Would we like it today if the Romans had developed a modern technological society like ours, and their scientists told them that using the atmosphere as a waste dump for greenhouse gases would melt the ice caps, acidity the oceans, overheat the tropics, cause species extinctions, etc, and then they decided to go ahead and do it anyway, just because they were selfish and didn’t care about other people? Perhaps their economists too would do a net present value calculation that would tell them that selfishness is the way to go. Would we be happy to have all of this environmental damage comforted by the knowledge that they knowingly imposed these costs on us in order to be 2% richer?

All I am asking is that we follow the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This is fundamentally a moral issue, not an economic issue. Given what we know now, it is simply unethical to impose risk of grave damage on future generations just so that we can have a few more consumer products today.

The only ethical path is to stop using the atmosphere as a waste dump for greenhouse gas pollution.

As a political strategy, are we supposed to believe that somehow atmospheric CO2 concentrations will be lower in the future if today we expand fossil fuel industries that rely on using the atmosphere as a waste dump? Am I really supposed to persuaded that the path to lower future CO2 concentrations is by building more power plants with smokestacks that dump CO2 into the atmosphere?

If the problem is that we have too many power plants that dump greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere, I am highly skeptical that the way we are going to solve this problem is by building more power plants that dump greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere.

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by Elisa Wood, via Renewable Energy World

The electric industry is good at building things. That’s how it solves problems. Is there a threat of blackouts? Develop a new natural gas-fired plant. Worried about climate change? Build wind and solar power. Does electricity cost too much? Install a transmission line to import cheaper power.

But build-to-solve represents only half of the equation in the new world of smart grid. The other half, the part that stumps the industry, is solve-without-building.

Rather than adding more energy, smart grid tries to wring maximum efficiency out of the system by changing the way we consume electricity.  But it turns out, trying to direct human energy behavior makes cat herding look easy. To get people to pay attention to their energy use, utilities and private companies are experimenting with alluring gadgets and social motivators.  So far, success has been minimal.  Thomas Edison’s light bulb has been such a smashing success for the last 100 years, none of us want to turn it off.

So what will it take?

The Edison Foundation recently looked outside the industry for some answers, inviting Dan Pink, best-selling author of “DRIVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” to speak at last month’s Power the People 2.0 conference in Washington D.C.

Consumer motivation has become a common conference topic. But Pink’s talk was different. He stepped back and took a broader view and asked: How do we motivate the people who are trying motivate the consumer? Pink calls this “the science of how people do extraordinary things.”

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by Barbara Fraser, via the Daily Climate

Karina Pinasco watched in dismay as flames on a hillside at the edge of town lit up the sky one night in October 2010. A farmer had intended to clear a few hectares of land to plant coffee bushes, but the fire – set during an unusually hot, dry spell – quickly got out of hand.

Propelled by winds and high temperatures, it burned for 10 days, charring more than 250 acres of land.

“We realized we weren’t prepared,” says Pinasco, a biologist who heads Amazónicos por la Amazonía, a local environmental organization. “The firefighters weren’t trained. It was the rain that finally put it out.”

Scientists used to think the rainforest, especially in the western Amazon, was too wet to burn. But major fire seasons in 2005 and 2010 made them reconsider.

Fires are a major source of carbon emissions in the Amazon, and scientists are beginning to worry that the region could become a net emitter, instead of a carbon sink. New findings link rising ocean temperatures off the northern coast of Brazil to changing weather patterns: As the Atlantic warms, it draws moisture away from the forest, priming the region for bigger fires.

“We are reaching a tipping point in terms of drought, beyond which these forests can catch fire,” says Daniel Nepstad, international program director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Brasília, Brazil.

Once-a-century no more

The 2005 drought – considered a once-in-a-century event – resulted in unprecedented wildfires in Acre, the western Brazilian state bordering Peru. Flames scorched the tree canopy, and at one point the front face of the fire stretched nearly seven miles. As many as 1.2 million acres of forests were affected in Acre and the neighboring regions of Pando in Bolivia and Madre de Dios in Peru. Officials estimated upwards of $100 million in economic damages.

But the forest loss wasn’t the only concern for the Acre state government, said Foster Brown, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center and a professor at the Federal University of Acre in Rio Branco, the state capital. Choking smoke spiked respiratory ailments in the region and canceled flights.

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by Ann Mesnikoff, via Sierra Club’s Compass

What does parking have to do with our addiction to oil? Quite a bit, it seems, once you dig into the issue.

Americans are said to love their cars, and along with that is a love, or really, an expectation of parking – whether that’s free or cheap parking — it’s a lot of parking.  And so we have policies in place that encourage parking. Take for example current federal tax policy allows commuters to deduct $240 a month from pre-tax income to pay for parking for your commute, but only $120 per month for using transit.

The parking issue is hot in Seattle where Mayor Mike McGinn proposed to let developers who are building housing within 1300 feet of transit decide how much parking to provide for residents. The Seattle Times was appalled – calling it “utopian” to think residents will drop the car.  Streetsblog notes that “[m]inimum parking requirements are, essentially, a tax on development meant to encourage driving.”

Parking is a frequent issue among Sierra Club transportation activists, most recently in our own debate over the New York Times invitation to readers to respond to a letter posted by Randy Salzman on the need to change our car culture.

It so happens that Sierra Club’s San Diego Chapter transportation chair Mike Bullock is a parking expert, so I asked him a few questions about how changing parking policies can help reduce driving and our addiction to oil.

How does so called “free” parking feed our addiction to oil?
Well, of course it’s never free. It’s very expensive to provide parking. And we pay those costs, as employees, as residents, and as consumers. The “addiction feeding” comes from hiding those costs and making them essentially mandatory. If we had the free choice to not drive, once in a while, and save some of the money we are losing because of “free” parking, we would in fact drive less.

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