by RL Miller
Like her formal name Cassandra, Hurricane Sandy brought to American consciousness what science has been yelling at us for years: climate change is real, it’s happening now, and it’s likely worse than models predict. The global economy fiddles away $500 billion each year — the cost of inaction on climate.
The dirty hippies at Pricewaterhouse Cooper warn that the previous goal of two degrees Celsius is virtually unattainable (pdf). Yet consensus for climate action in the United States in President Obama’s second term seems limited to Environmental Protection Agency actions nibbling around the edges of what power plants can burn.
There’s a better solution: keep the coal in the ground.
It’s time for a moratorium on Powder River Basin coal.
The Powder River Basin in eastern Wyoming supplies coal to the Midwest and, if the coal barons have their way, the Far East. The American coal market is declining, which Bob Murray blames on President Obama but those in the reality-based community attribute, mostly, to cheap natural gas. Thus, the coal barons are eyeing Asian markets through Washington and Oregon, but encountering stiff resistance from Pacific Northwest folk concerned about everything from longer waits at traffic signals to gigatons of carbon changing our climate.
Meanwhile, Powder River Basin coal, much of which is located on federal land, is auctioned by the Bureau of Land Management for obscenely low prices – Peabody Coal recently won the right to mine for $1.11/ton what is sold in China for $97 – $123/ton. The gap between what taxpayers receive and what Peabody sells means that United States taxpayers subsidize Chinese demand.
The current vogue in Washington speculation is for a carbon tax despite the minor detail of a lack of support from both the House and the White House. But will a $20/ton tax on carbon solve global warming? The Breakthrough Institute warns that carbon pricing will encourage natural gas more than renewables. We need to keep it in the ground.
Last week, I attended Bill McKibben’s Do The Math lecture at UCLA, in which he showed how the fossil fuel companies enable our addiction: the drunk knows that one beer is the safe limit, but the barkeeper keeps putting a dizzying array of products on the counter top. His math is pretty simple: to keep the world on pace to warm no more than two degrees Celsius, we need to keep 80% of the world’s fossil fuels in the ground.
Today, the wild eyed fanatics at the International Energy Agency backed up McKibben in the World Energy Outlook:
No more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050 if the world is to achieve the 2 °C goal, unless carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is widely deployed. This finding is based on our assessment of global “carbon reserves”, measured as the potential CO2 emissions from proven fossil-fuel reserves. Almost two-thirds of these carbon reserves are related to coal, 22% to oil and 15% to gas. Geographically, two-thirds are held by North America, the Middle East, China and Russia.
As with the Keystone XL pipeline battle, a Powder River Basin moratorium can be accomplished by executive order, without any need for Congressional action. There’s precedent – in 2009, the Obama administration suspended 77 Bush-era oil/gas leases in Utah, and last week drastically scaled back public lands available for oil shale leasing. The land can be studied for a Strategic Coal Reserve. A moratorium needn’t be forever – just long enough to calculate the true costs to the American taxpayer of mining and burning all that carbon, and pricing it accordingly.A $20/ton tax won’t deter the enemy of the human race. We need a plan to keep the coal in the ground. Start with the Powder River Basin, President Obama.
RL Miller is an attorney and environment blogger with Climate Hawks. This piece was originally published at Daily Kos and was reprinted with permission by the author.
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
It can only happen when individuals (A) walk away from fossil fuels and (B) shame everyone around them who does not.
In late capitalist societies based on insatiable greed, unbounded egomania and pervasive fear and dread of ‘the Other’ who might steal your cheese at any moment, shame has become a nonentity, a non-category, a distant memory of a day before yesterday. What politician or businessman ever feels shame any more? Some may occasionally, for tactical purposes, fake a certain contriteness, but shame? No chance.
If I were talking about POLITICIANS I would agree with you. However, I am talking about sister, brother, mother-in-law, coworker, neighbor, garbage man…..
Social science research tells us that peer presesure is very much alive, with a very strong ability to shape one anothers unconscious choices.
The maths is brutal… must hear episode.
Climate Portals shared a link on FB
5 minutes ago
Reality Ck 101… good luck folks…
The Radio Ecoshock Show: Kevin Anderson: What They Won’t Tell You About Climate Catastrophe
http://www.ecoshock.info
http://www.ecoshock.info/2012/11/kevin-anderson-what-they-wont-tell-you.html
As long as renewables – and especially the one technology with the ability to replace almost all coal and natural gas usage at affordable prices – electricity from wind turbines – remains unprofitable, mining the Powder River coal beds will continue. If you want to keep that coal buried in the ground, it’s pretty simple – make renewable elecicity production by wind economically viable, and just reasonably profitable (or obscenely profitable, though that would be a tough sell..).
In the midwest wind zone, 20 year PPA’s for wind farm electricity were going for less than 3.5 cents/kw-hr this years, and that included the ITC/MACRS tax avoidance subsidies that add up to 2.8 c/kw-hr (20 yr basis). But at those prices, the ecomonics don’t work, and wind farm owners are being asked to PAY for the privelege of investing hundreds of millions of dollars so that they lose money and in effect subsidize electricity consumption. And that is just not happening…
The approach most enviros and especially this site have been hawking is to raise the cost of pollution based electricity, like the stuff made by the $12/ton coal from Powder River. But that electricity is incredibly cheap (2c/kw-hr in Wyoming and Nebraska) and you need to raise electricity prices to close to 7 cents/kw-hr (no subsidy basis) just make wind competitive. You need to add 40 to 60 c/kw-hr for solar PV, and that is just not going to happen, either. Call it Cap’N Trade, CO2 pollution taxes, Carbon fees, cap’n dividend, the idea is to raise the price of pollution based electricity up to the point where more expensive renewables are price sort-of competitive.
But the approach that has actually worked world wide is Feed-in Tariffs (FITs). In return for a stable price based on the cost to make this electricity plus a reasonable profit, you get priority grid access for renewables. No need for subsidies, no need to bribe rich people and big corporates to invest environmentally sensibly. So why no call to use what works, and that way keep the coal buried in the foothills of the Rockies?
Sometimes, enviros appear to be their own worst enemy, stuck on what does not work, and unwilling to admit how much the cost of coal and below cost natural gas generated electricity have to be raised before even the lowest cost renewable approach (wind) is up to break even. See http://www.wind-works.org/Solar/NowRe-electedPresidentObamaShouldExamineUSRenewableRank.html
The investment need to convert our electricity in the USA to non-pollution mode is around $3 trillion. That could be lots of jobs, but not if it is a money losing operation. Getting FITs made possible in the US would
be really easy – just a 132 word insert into Section 210 of the 1978 PURPA law (using Section 102 of the Waxman-Markey ACES bill, and junking the rest of it). No tax increase, no loss in tax revenue, just really simple.
Maybe that, and the lack of a “moral punishment” on the vast majority of non-rich Americans for using the cheapest electricity made (coal, old nukes, below cost fracked natural gas) is why so many enviros don’t bother with what works (FITs). But if you want to chase wind mills, don’t look for new ones, at least in this country, as the one technology that can actually threaten coal, nukes and Ngas (wind) gets put out of business on Dec 31 of this year, and the Koch fiends are rumored be be holding their paid for conress-critters to the task of keeping wind out of the elecicity biz in te US via stopping the barely effective Production or Investment Tax Credits. But what the PTC and ITC can do pales in comparison to what FITs could do. BTW, FITs can also deliver a lot more CO2 pollution avoidance than can CO2 pollution fees -the presence or absence of CO2 pollution fees is irrelevant to the effectiveness of FITs. But how to get that across the thick enviro skulls? There is the really important question…. And the answer to that one determines whether the coal stays buried or buries us in a world with a climate control system gone crazy..
You clearly have a lot of knowledge here, Dave, but I’m not sold on FIT’s as an alternative to a rapidly accelerating carbon tax. For one thing, these FIT’s are negotiated with utilities, who have a mandate from their state or region to produce clean energy. That means that places like Utah and Texas will have no motivation to get off coal, since not enough of their utilities’ customers care.
Your figures for the wholesale price of the various power sources do not at all correspond with the ones I researched several years ago, from three sources. Thermal solar, for example, was estimated at $.16 by 2015, and coal at $.10. Even if, as you say, Powder River coal can deliver power for $.02 (not levelized, I assume), environmental costs make that figure far higher.
Why should we let Arch, Peabody, and Koch supported frackers, who spew their waste for free, determine the market? Also, as you have noticed, we are in a climate crisis. We should not build an energy policy based on pleasing investors and designing incentives built on absurdly cheap fossil fuels.
Mike,
You need to read up on FITs, especially those in Germany, where they seem to have worked them out the best. Utilities are required to buy renewable electricity at standard rates, and to use any available renewable electricity before using pollution based electricity. The prices a technology and scale dependent, and are based on the average cost to produce this electricity plus a socially specified average rate of return. They work great, deliver more energy at lower cost to consumers and they do it in a more socially democratic manner than any other pricing system tried to date.
Also, try this one on for size:
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/take/beyond-carbon-policy-a-national-feed-in-tariff/231
Sounds like you are arguing between the carrot and stick.
Carbon tax: The stick
Feed in tariffs: the carrot
If people had to pay a tax to consume coal/gas electricity….
but they received a check to generate solar/wind electricity….
would more people make the switch?
Nice piece, but quoting the Breakthrough Institute as part of a claim that a carbon tax won’t help was puzzling. The fact that such a tax will drive a move to natural gas is irrelevant. Carbon taxes will start small, and accelerate to the point of making gas also too expensive. BTI is a stealth fossil fuel organization, and they oppose any real action on climate change. Their mantra is the same as Exxon’s: “more research”.
Besides, stopping coal production on public lands is only one piece of the puzzle. There are plenty of fossil fuels on private land here and overseas. Keeping them in the ground can only be achieved by confronting the fossil fuel companies, charging them for externalities, and implementing carbon taxes.
I was at UCLA Sunday night too, great show by McKibben and friends, including the music. Everybody who has a chance should attend the upcoming stops if they can.
If carbon (dioxide) taxes start small, then the demand destruction (on electricity consumption and especially pollution sourced electricity) they do is also small. It’s also a step function -until you raise the price of electricity (by raising the price of the fuels that make the (present) bulk of the electricity more expensive than renewables), no one is going to be installing renewables. CO2 pollution taxes/fees become a regressive sales tax that falls disproportionately on poor and middle class consumers of electricity. If the “Cap’N Dividend” approach is used, where is the Demand Destruction, since users get a refund based on the sales taxes (CO2 taxes) based on how many people are in their family?
It’s about $10/ton of CO2 per 1 c/kw-hr for coal, and about 0.5 c/kw-hr for natural gas. That means you need to raise generated electricity prices by roughly 4 to 5 c/kw-hr in windy areas and close to 10 c/kw-hr in not so windy regions to initiate replacement of fossil based pollution fuels. Do you seriously think that subsidies to renewables will be continued if CO2 pollution taxes of significance get imposed, or that the electoral backlash against the recession initiated by higher electricity prices (of several hundred billion dollars per year) will not happen, especially when no jobs to replace this pollution based electricity happen until the price of electricity is raised by 5 to 10 c/kw-hr and renewables (finally) become profitable?
Instead of raising ALL elecicity prices via CO2 pollution taxes/fees, FITS raise electricity prices for only those renewables under FIT contacts. These also depress coal, Ngas and nuke based electricity prices via the Merit Order Effect for “competitive” electricity systems (casino pricing of electricity), and they lower the price on natural gas used for heating throghout the country by lowering the amount of natural gas used to make electricity. They (FITs) work, and are proven to work. CO2 taxes have never been tried at prices needed to make renewable electricity profitable, and until the “ante” is hit (raising electricity prices by several cents per kw-hr), renewables are still money losers compared to pollution based electricity, which is really bad. If money cannot be made on the hundreds of billions of dollars (only $120 billion for wind in the US to date) and eventually trillions of investments needed to install renewables at the scale needed in this country, they are just going to remain as figments of peoples imagination, and a source of cyniscism and derision with respect to “green jobs”. FITs make green jobs happen better than any other system tried to date. Without those jobs, we will never have the political, social and financial clout needed to make renewables a happening thing.
‘More research’??!! I’ve known for fifteen or so years that we are on the Highway to Hell, and I’m a numbskull. I strongly suspected it for years before that. The dimension that is sadly neglected in the understanding of this auto-genocide is the spiritual one. Those knowingly driving humanity to annihilation are spiritually evil, and to fluff about as if they had valid differences of opinion, or are motivated by different sets of values or any other such guff is moral insanity. Stopping them dead in their tracks has become the paramount spiritual, moral, ethical and practical necessity in all of human history.
I’ve done the math. Successfully driving down the price of solar and wind, by whatever means, keeps the oil in the ground worldwide and forever. On the other hand, driving up the price of mining fossil fuel in one country doesn’t affect the worldwide production of fossil fuel very much. That’s the math. Product development and actual deployment to customers wins.
When you hear that the government long knives are all out for killing solar product development as dead as possible, an alarm should go off in your head. Instead, cognative dissonance kicks in and you say to yourself, “Oh, my government would never do THAT to help the fossil fuel industry out.”
Thats why an international agreement is vital and the vast majority of countries recognize this, ME