[I think that as a climate-saving strategy geoengineering is largely somewhere between a dead end and a hoax -- why would you choose chemotherapy that might make you sicker if your doctors told you diet and exercise would definitely work (see "Geoengineering remains a bad idea")? In retrospect, that analogy isn't perfect. The "diet and exercise" the country and the world needs is more like what the winner of the reality show "The Biggest Loser" undergoes. And the chemotherapy is actually more like an experimental trial for a combination of chemotherapy and radiation therapy, where you have no idea at all if the treatment will work, as opposed to kill you outright, and you might be on the placebo. I have been planning to do a longer series on geoengineering, and Bill Becker's post seemed like a good place to start.]

I do not plan to make a career out of beating up on geo-engineers, but they were back in the news recently in articles published by the on-line magazine Yale Environment 360 and by The Economist.

For those of us who believe that engineering the Earth’s life-support systems is a wild and dangerous fantasy, there was good news and bad news.

The “good news” was reported by The Economist: Two new studies conclude that geo-engineering is not as promising an answer to climate change as some in that budding discipline hope.

If you are not yet familiar with geo-engineering, I will attempt to define it in non-technical terms before offering a few observations on the new research:

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As the Wonk Room has discussed, the Senate version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act adds $2.2 billion to the House’s generous allocation of $2.4 billion for the development of “carbon capture and sequestration technologies” (CCS). Furthermore, the Senate language adds a dangerous loophole that changes a potentially green investment into subsidy for a dirty industry:

Awards for such projects may include plant efficiency improvements for integration with carbon capture technology.

This “improvements for integration” provision is a major loophole, allowing the funds to be spent not just on the actual development and deployment of CCS, but anything else a power company can argue is related. These include the kinds of improvements plant and factory owners are already obligated to make to clean up their mercury, soot, and acid rain pollution. Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, tells the Wonk Room:

It sounds like they’re trying to get free money for what they’re supposed to do anyway.

As yet, the Congressional negotiators hammering out differences between the House and Senate versions of the recovery plan have not announced what the coal funding provisions will end up being.

Below is a chart and table explaining the differences in the House and Senate versions of the recovery plan for advanced coal funding:

Coal Fund Comparison in the Recovery Plan

The coal-industry public relations group, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, is crowing over the Senate’s insertion of billions of dollars of coal pork in the recovery plan. The Senate plan added $2.2 billion to the House’s generous allocation of $2.4 billion for the development of “carbon capture and sequestration technologies.” ACCCE is celebrating this “$4.6 billion in clean coal technology funding” in an email to its supporters, claiming the “funding is important because”:

• It contributes to energy independence, allowing us to use coal that is right here in America
• It stimulates the economy and could create almost 7 million job-years of employment and over $1 trillion in sales
• It will help fight climate change and aid other environmental goals by promoting technologies to reduce carbon dioxide and major air pollutants

Only by a gross distortion of industry-friendly estimates could $4.6 billion for coal technology really “create almost 7 million job-years of employment and over $1 trillion in sales.” The “7 million job-years” figure comes from “Employment and Other Economic Benefits from Advanced Coal Electric Generation with Carbon Capture and Storage,” a BBC Research report commissioned by ACCCE. In fact, the report says only that the construction of 100 gigawatts of advanced coal plants — about 200 plants over a fifteen-year span — would generate that much job activity. The construction expenditures for a single plant with CCS is estimated at “approximately $2.0 to $2.1 billion.” So the $4.6 billion in the Senate plan is enough for the construction of only two plants and about 6,000 construction and manufacturing jobs. Two hundred plants would cost a staggering $393 billion. The ACCCE email “is a bit confused,” Doug Jeavons, the author of the BBC report tells the Wonk Room:

The nearly 7 million job-years estimate is associated with full scale development of about 100 gigawatts of advanced coal CCS capacity, not just the proposed $4.6 billion in the stimulus plan.

Furthermore, the technology to build such plants does not yet exist. As NV Energy announced when they indefinitely postponed the construction of a coal-fired plant in Ely, Nevada:

The company will not move forward with construction of the coal plant until the technologies that will capture and store greenhouse gasses are commercially feasible, which is not likely before the end of the next decade.

To make CCS technology commercially viable, the federal government needs to do more than throw billions of dollars at the coal industry with lax provisions. As the Center for American Progress recommends, there should be a federal greenhouse emissions performance standard put in place for new plants, and a cap-and-trade system to make polluters pay for their emissions.

Once again, the office of Denier-in-Chief (DIC) Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oil) has put out a press release riddled with misstatements. This one has a twist, though: a Valentine’s love letter to denier-eq. Roger Pielke, Jr.

The DIC’s last two releases were notable for their outright lies and distortions [see "Inhofe and Morano keep making stuff up, this time utterly misquoting Revkin on Hansen" and Scientist: "Our conclusions were misinterpreted" by Inhofe, CO2 -- but not the sun -- "is significantly correlated" with temperature since 1850.]

So it’s no surprise that the DIC’s pre-Valentine’s Day missive is one big disinformation-fest, starting with the headline:

Climate of Change: UK Met Office Issues ‘Blistering Attack on Scientific Colleagues’ For ‘Apocalyptic Climate Predictions’

You will not be surprised to learn that the UK Met Office issued no attack on scientific colleagues for “apocalyptic climate predictions.” Dr. Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office did write a column for the UK’s Guardian that begins:

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The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation hearing with Dr. Jane Lubchenco, nominated run NOAA, Dr. John Holdren, nominated to be Obama’s science advisor, is being webcast here.

Please post your thoughts below.

A final deal was reached on a $789 billion stimulus plan (see NYT here). One of the best pieces of news is that the $50 billion in fraudulent budget gimmickry on behalf of the nuclear industry was axed, as I posted last night.

There’s also a 3-year extension of the production tax credit for wind and other renewables, which will be crucial to Obama meeting his goal to “double the production of alternative energy in the next three years.” And there’s an expanded tax credit for plug in hybrids, which will be critical for Obama to meet his goal of one million plug-ins by 2015.

The conferees did put back $400 million for DOE’s ARPA-E program, which in normal circumstances would be mostly duplicative of existing DOE R&D programs (see “Note to media on ARPA-E“). But it is new money, and will give Steven Chu something to chew on quickly.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has distributed a fact sheet on the conference report on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Here are the details on what’s green in ARRA (and I’ll also post the science and tech stuff):

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Part 1 noted that the U.S. Geological Survey’s stunning December report found

The coal reserves estimate for the Gillette coalfield is 10.1 billion short tons of coal (6 percent of the original resource total).

Although the report didn’t get much media attention, it was a shocker because the Gillette field, within Wyoming’s Powder River Basin “is the most prolific coalfield in the United States” and in 2006 provided “over 37 percent of the Nation’s total yearly production.”

Now Clean Energy Action has issued a new report, Coal: Cheap and Abundant … Or is it? that goes beyond the analysis in the USGS study and concludes:

It appears that rather than having a “200 year supply of coal,” the United States has a much shorter planning horizon for moving beyond coalfired power plants. Depending on the resolution of geologic, economic, legal and transportation constraints facing future coal mine expansion, the planning horizon for moving beyond coal could be as short as 20-30 years.

A top priority of Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the Obama Administration must be a detailed mine-by-mine analysis to resolve the issue of the U.S. coal resource. The imminent reality of peak oil production should be clear to all by now (see “Normally staid IEA says oil will peak in 2020“). If we are running short of coal, the urgency of jumpstarting the transition to a clean energy economy is all the greater — and the possibility that coal with carbon capture and storage will be a major contributor to greenhouse gas reductions would be greatly diminished.

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