Another major study finds confirms natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere

A must-read new study by climatologist Ken Caldeira and tech guru Nathan Myhrvold (!) makes clear the world’s only plausible hope to avert catastrophic temperature rise this century is aggressive deployment of zero-carbon technologies and conservation.

The Institute of Physics news release explains:

… technologies that offer only modest reductions in greenhouse gases, such as the use of natural gas and perhaps carbon capture and storage, cannot substantially reduce climate risk in the next 100 years.

Delaying the rollout of the technologies is not an option however; the risks of environmental harm will be much greater in the second half of the century and beyond if we continue to rely on coal-based technologies.

Those are the bombshell conclusions from “Greenhouse gases, climate change and the transition from coal to low-carbon electricity,” in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters.

Many decades may pass before a transition from coal-based electricity to alternative generation technologies yields substantial temperature benefits. Panels above show the temperature increases predicted to occur during a 40-yr transition of 1 TWe of generating capacity. Warming resulting from continued coal use with no alternative technology sets an upper bound (solid black lines), and the temperature increase predicted to occur even if coal were replaced by idealized conservation with zero CO2 emissions (dashed lines) represents a lower bound. The colored bands represent the range of warming outcomes spanned by high and low life-cycle estimates for the energy technologies illustrated: (A) natural gas, (B) coal with carbon capture and storage, (C) hydroelectric, (D) solar thermal, (E) nuclear, (F) solar photovoltaic and (G) wind.

These results are not entirely news to people who follow the recent climate and energy literature, which I’ve written about at length — see “NCAR Study: Switching From Coal to Gas Increases Warming for Decades, Has Minimal Benefit Even in 2100.” The fact that natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere was first shown by the International Energy Agency in its big June report on gas — see IEA’s “Golden Age of Gas Scenario” Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change.

But what’s new is the first peer-reviewed analysis that “has predicted the climate effects of energy system transitions” with “a quantitative model … that includes life-cycle emissions and the central physics of greenhouse warming.”

What’s also remarkable about this study is the lead author, Nathan Myhrvold. You may recall Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft, from his anti-clean-energy and pro-geoengineering quotes in”Error-riddled book Superfreakonomics,” which I and many, many others debunked at length in 2009.

Myhrvold was quoted back then about the “carbon debt” of the clean energy build-out: “Eventually, we have a great carbon-free energy infrastructure but only after making emissions and global warming worse every year until we’re done building out the solar plants, which could take 30 to 50 years.“

Caldeira loves to do actual analyses of such hand-waving claims. What he and Caldeira show here is that in fact replacing coal with clean energy starts getting you off the warming path within two decades and sharply off within four decades. But not natural gas.

Myhrvold explained to Climate Central:

The bottom line that emerges from this “life-cycle analysis,” or LCA, said Myhrvold, is that by the time we could switch from coal to gas, there would already be so much more CO2 and methane in the atmosphere that we’d be much deeper in the hole. “It’s like living on a credit card,” he said. “It’s easy to get into a situation where it will take years and years to pay back.”

In fact, he argues, because CO2 stays in the atmosphere for so long once it’s up there, a switch to natural gas would have zero effect on global temperatures by the year 2100. “If you take 40 years to switch over entirely to natural gas,” he said, “you won’t see any substantial decrease in global temperatures for up to 250 years. There’s almost no climate value in doing it.”

It should be obvious that if you are just building new gas plants and not replacing coal power 1 for 1 — which is what we are doing today — then things are even worse for gas. And this doesn’t even count the opportunity cost of all that money spent on gas infrastructure.

UDPATE: Myhrvold explained to me in an email that “We only model ‘conventional’ gas, because we did not have good LCA [life-cycle analysis] studies for shale gas from fracking. However since our paper was accepted several have come out. This area is still controversial but people are coming in with higher emissions from shale gas than conventional gas.  That would tend to make any shale gas scenarios worse than the natural gas scenarios we cover.

Much of the media coverage of this study has been of the form, “Low-carbon technologies ‘no quick-fix,’ say researchers,” which is understandable since that was the headline of the IOP news release. But anyone who thought that even aggressive action today could substantially change our warming path before, say, 2040, wasn’t paying close attention to the literature (or reading Climate Progress).

Yes, replacing the energy infrastructure can’t be done instantaneously, CO2 lasts a long time in the atmosphere, we have a fair amount of warming in the pipeline, and the “ocean thermal inertia delays the climate benefits of emissions reductions,” as the study notes.

The climate fight is about the post-2040 world.  If we act aggressively now, we can keep global warming close to 3.6°F (2C). But if we delay we face the real prospect of 7-9°F (4-5C) global warming in the second half of the century, with substantially higher warming over most of the United States. That is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e.  4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level),” according to Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain (see here).

That’s why the authors conclude that if you want to get “substantial reductions in temperatures relative to the coal-based system” you need to act now to shut down coal plants and replace them with very-low-carbon systems or conservation:

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By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The “battle over energy exports is intensifying” and at the same time we have no coherent national export policy were the primary takeaways from an event called “Power Play:  Fossil Fuels and U.S. Export Strategy” held this morning at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.  Coal, refined petroleum products from tar sands, and natural gas are currently being exported to hungry overseas markets, and the event was designed to look at the implications of these decisions.

Panelists Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA)  bemoaned the fact that the United States does not have a national strategy on exports.  Wyden accused the country of being “on autopilot” to an energy export policy, which could have tremendous economic, social, and environmental consequences.  He expanded:

So I have been somebody who’s been expansionist on trade and think that we ought to have freer trade, have fairer trade, but we also need to have smarter trade.  And allowing energy producers—we haven’t really touched on this—to trade away our international competitiveness and our energy independence by exporting the resources right now without thinking through the implications here of what it means for consumers and our companies doesn’t strike me as a smart trade policy.

Watch it:

As the price of natural gas continues to plummet, pressure to export it as liquefied natural gas has increased, and last year the U.S. was a net exporter of refined petroleum products for the first time since 1949.  As well, the coal industry is preparing to significantly increase exports of American coal overseas.  In response to these trends, the members detailed four critical areas that could be impacted by exports, which they believe need more careful consideration:  domestic energy, national security, consumer prices, and environmental impacts.

A second panel addressed different perspectives on coal exports.  Panelists represented the energy finance industry, Pacific Northwest residents impacted by coal export traffic and terminals, landowners concerned about the impacts of mining, and a labor and environmental alliance.

Markey, who released a report at the event entitled “Drill Here, Sell There, Pay More,” summed up the need for serious thinking on exports by saying:

We should first decide what we want to do for the United States of America.

As international tensions and Wall Street speculation move the national gas price average closer to $4, Republicans have charged that Obama is “intentionally” raising prices. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said the “single biggest obstacle to greater domestic energy production is the Obama administration.”

But, as Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal points out, attacks that claim we’re “not expanding our domestic energy capacity” like Cornyn’s “couldn’t be more misguided.”

With gas price misinformation everywhere, a few facts on oil production stand out:

– Under the Obama administration, domestic energy production is at its highest level in eight years.

– The U.S. has more oil and natural gas drilling rigs than the rest of the world. The number of rigs have exploded in the past three years to 1,272.

– “After declining to levels not seen since the 1940s, U.S. crude production began rising again in 2009,” writes the Houston Chronicle.

– The Energy Department confirmed yesterday that the U.S. exported more oil-product than imported for the first time since 1949.

– The five oil giants benefited from $200 million more profit for every penny rise in quarterly gas prices. Yet the industry still benefits from $40 billion in subsidies.

Clearly, we’re producing more oil:

Strangely, Buzzfeed argues this chart by the Obama administration “demonstrates how to play politics with statistics.” The main reason that our import mix is declining is that production has increased while we move to reduce oil dependence altogether with clean energy investments and new fuel efficiency standards that cut carbon pollution and more than $2.2 million barrels of oil per day.

by Richard W. Caperton

The barrage of dirty energy bills being introduced in Congress is dizzying. With extreme policymakers looking to force the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, cut funding for public transportation and dismantle EPA air quality regulations, the situation is bleak.

But there was some positive movement on clean energy in Congress today.

This morning, Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) introduced a bill that would create a federal clean energy standard.  His bill, the Clean Energy Standard Act of 2012, would increase the amount of low-carbon power produced in the United States to 80% by 2035, while providing the policy certainty that’s essential to growing the clean energy economy.

In introducing his bill, Bingaman was joined by fellow Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Al Franken (D-MN), and Chris Coons (D-DE), each of whom praised the bill for providing a path forward on fighting climate change.

The Clean Energy Standard Act also has the support of the energy industry. In addition to usual suspects like the American Wind Energy Association and the United States Clean Heat and Power Association, GE Energy and NextEra Energy Resources are supporting Bingaman’s approach.

In previous work, the Center for American Progress has laid out criteria for what a successful clean energy standard would look like:

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Former president Bill Clinton, husband of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has embraced construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, which will transport eight billion tons of greenhouse pollution over its fifty-year lifetime. Speaking at the Department of Energy’s Energy Innovation Summit, Clinton advised that TransCanada should reroute the pipeline around Nebraska’s Sand Hills so that the risky project could start making oil company profits as quickly as possible:

The extra cost of running it is infinitesimal compared to the revenues. I think we should embrace it and develop a stakeholder-driven system of high standards for doing the work.

Clinton’s support for the pipeline is in line with the public stance of the Obama administration, which just endorsed TransCanada’s plan to build the southern leg of the project. The Oklahoma-to-Texas line would ship tar sands crude to Gulf Coast refineries for tax-free export to the foreign market.

After more than 17 years at the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, President Stephen L. Miller is stepping down.

So where will the organization find the ideal candidate to continue its mission of trying to polish coal’s image? Why, Craigslist of course!

It appears someone beat them to the punch. I had to chuckle when I saw this fake ad from someone at the Sierra Club posted yesterday:

Job Title: President, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity

Job Description:

Are you a motivated go-getter who hates to let facts stand in the way of profits? Are you good at making something out of nothing? Do you sleep soundly at night, no matter what you’ve done? Do you reject the global anti-capitalist “science” conspiracy? Are you comfortable around unicorns, centaurs, and other so-called “mythical” creatures? Do you have experience in the tobacco industry?

If you answered yes to those questions, we want to hear from you. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity is seeking a new President of our trade association to continue our work promoting a product that doesn’t actually exist: clean coal electricity. The ideal candidate would be able to alter the long-standing ironclad laws of chemistry to create clean coal (through magic or otherwise), but we’ll settle for someone that can say it exists with a straight face.

Key Responsibilities:

• Pretending Clean Coal exists during meetings with the media, government officials, and citizens
• Denying climate change over and over again.
• Really, really hating clean air and really, really loving making a few of your friends a lot of money
• Wining and dining politicians
• Spending lots of money lobbying politicians
• Accurately filling out expense sheets and legal documents outlining our activities, expenditures and…ha, just kidding – we don’t have to do that. Thanks, Supreme Court!

Preferred Candidate Would Have the Following Attributes:

• Willful or Natural Ignorance of Reality
• Experience in various East European propaganda ministries, the Tobacco Industry, or sales of miracle cures and/or snake oil
• Basically, we need you to be friends with a lot of politicians
• Doesn’t hurt if you are rich
• Ability to sleep soundly after helping poison air and water nationwide and undermining our Democracy

Benefits:

Compensation: A lot. Look, let’s just say you’ll be in that 1% those hippies are always talking about and Mitt Romney will not be uncomfortable around you.

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The top funders of anti-science disinformation in this country, the Koch brothers, are fighting in court to seize control of the Cato Institute. The Washington Post’s Allen McDuffee broke the amazing story this morning. Politico further reports:

Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch, the deep-pocketed conservative activists, launched a court fight yesterday over control of the Cato Institute, one of the nation’s best-known free-market think tanks. The Washington-based public-policy group was founded in 1974 as the Charles Koch Foundation. The name was changed to Cato in 1976, with the Koch brothers as longstanding contributors. The group had four shareholders until last year: Charles Koch; David Koch; Edward H. Crane III, Cato’s president; and William A. Niskanen, who died in October.

You can read the Kochs civil filing here.

Koch officials tell Politico that the brothers think the shareholder agreement is clear that there should now only be three shareholders, while Crane thinks Niskanen’s 25-percent control should go to his widow, Kathryn Washburn. “We’ve proposed a stand-still agreement and third-party mediation,” said Wes Edwards, deputy general counsel of Koch Companies Public Sector LLC. “We feel that we’ve been refused. … We haven’t alleged any wrongdoing or sought any damages. This is not about money. We view this as a matter of shareholder rights.”

Let’s remember who the Kochs are — billionaire brothers who have done more to spread anti-science, pro-pollution disinformation than any other people on the planet:

• A 2010 report found Koch Industries now outspends Exxon Mobil on climate and clean energy disinformation
• We have video proof David Koch pulls the strings of the Tea Party extremists
• We know Koch-fueled Americans for Prosperity takes credit for bullying GOP lawmakers into climate denial

Of course, the Cato Institute has been a bastion of anti-science, pro-pollution disinformation for a long time, with research fellows like Patrick Michaels, who is a serial deleter of inconvenient data. This power grab would just make it official that Cato is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries.

Related Posts:

• From promoting acid rain to climate denial — over 20 years of David Koch’s polluter front groups
• New Yorker exposes Koch brothers along with their greenwashing and whitewashing Smithsonian exhibit

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) — the coal-industry front group that greenwashes coal pollution and fights climate action — is seeking a new president. After 17 years at the helm, president Steve Miller is retiring a millionaire.

On Craigslist, a job posting for Steve Miller’s replacement to be the president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity has appeared:

Are you a motivated go-getter who hates to let facts stand in the way of profits? Are you good at making something out of nothing? Do you sleep soundly at night, no matter what you’ve done? Do you reject the global anti-capitalist “science” conspiracy? Are you comfortable around unicorns, centaurs, and other so-called “mythical” creatures? Do you have experience in the tobacco industry?

If you answered yes to those questions, we want to hear from you. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity is seeking a new President of our trade association to continue our work promoting a product that doesn’t actually exist: clean coal electricity. The ideal candidate would be able to alter the long-standing ironclad laws of chemistry to create clean coal (through magic or otherwise), but we’ll settle for someone that can say it exists with a straight face.

The apocryphal job posting continues with “key responsibilities” like “denying climate change over and over again.” Compensation? “Look, let’s just say you’ll be in that 1% those hippies are always talking about and Mitt Romney will not be uncomfortable around you.”

Miller was paid $1.65 million in 2010 as the group spent $45 million on lobbying, ads, Astroturf efforts, and campaign contributions. ACCCE spent $10.5 million lobbying Capitol Hill on climate in 2008 — more than any other organization solely dedicated to the issue. ACCCE’s accomplishments under Miller include clean coal carols, impersonation of veterans’ groups, and fomenting Tea Party disruptions of town hall meetings.

Download a copy of the parody “job posting” for ACCCE’s next president.

“The average thickness of the Arctic sea ice cover is declining because it is rapidly losing its thick component, the multi-year ice. At the same time, the surface temperature in the Arctic is going up, which results in a shorter ice-forming season,” explains NASA senior scientist Joey Comiso.

The bright white central mass shows the perennial sea ice while the larger light blue area shows the full extent of the winter sea ice including the average annual sea ice during the months of November, December and January. Credit: NASA

– A NASA News Release

GREENBELT, Md. — A new NASA study revealed that the oldest and thickest Arctic sea ice is disappearing at a faster rate than the younger and thinner ice at the edges of the Arctic Ocean’s floating ice cap.

The thicker ice, known as multi-year ice, survives through the cyclical summer melt season, when young ice that has formed over winter just as quickly melts again. The rapid disappearance of older ice makes Arctic sea ice even more vulnerable to further decline in the summer, said Joey Comiso, senior scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and author of the study, which was recently published in Journal of Climate.

The new research takes a closer look at how multi-year ice, ice that has made it through at least two summers, has diminished with each passing winter over the last three decades. Multi-year ice “extent” – which includes all areas of the Arctic Ocean where multi-year ice covers at least 15 percent of the ocean surface – is diminishing at a rate of -15.1 percent per decade, the study found.

There’s another measurement that allows researchers to analyze how the ice cap evolves: multi-year ice “area,” which discards areas of open water among ice floes and focuses exclusively on the regions of the Arctic Ocean that are completely covered by multi-year ice. Sea ice area is always smaller than sea ice extent, and it gives scientists the information needed to estimate the total volume of ice in the Arctic Ocean. Comiso found that multi-year ice area is shrinking even faster than multi-year ice extent, by -17.2 percent per decade.

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When did “innovation” become a dirty word in American politics?

I suppose it was right about the time when college aspirations became snobbish, when electing a presidential candidate could magically reduce the global price of oil, or when environmental protection became a “phony theology.”

Welcome to the 2012 campaign circus, arguably the most bizarre in history.

And now, adding to the long list of oddball attacks, Republican politicians and media pundits are launching an assault on President Obama’s offer of $14 million for research on algae-based biofuels — calling for a “pond scum czar” and offering the President “the algae in my fish tank” for this “goofy gas.”

Really? Yes, really. A $14 million grant for an innovative, abundant fuel that could potentially displace 17% of petroleum use in the country is now the focus of a coordinated political attack. It seems innovation is now becoming a politically untouchable word.

Well, not completely. Innovation just means different things to different people.

For those concerned about finite resources and maintaining a liveable planet, innovation means finding entirely new, clean sources of energy. And putting $14 million toward research that could spur revolutionary changes in our fuel use is a complete no-brainer.

But those concerned with preserving the status quo — particularly those who don’t believe that global warming is a problem — see innovation within an entirely different context. To them, innovation means tar sands, oil shale and unconventional gas. Indeed, due to the rising price of conventional oil and the changing economics of these unconventional fossil resources, there are a lot of advances taking place in these sectors.

And that is why the Obama Administration is getting hammered on algae. By talking about these technologies from an innovation and jobs perspective and failing to address them within the context of global warming, Obama sets himself up for criticism from those who simply want to access more unconventional fossil fuels. They ask: what’s wrong with innovation in oil and gas?

This presents a serious contradiction in messaging that needs to be remedied.

Severin Borenstein, co-director of the University of California Energy Institute, recently published an op-ed piece that illustrated this point well:

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Soaring Domestic Production Has Failed to Ease Pain at the Pump

by Michael Conathan

In an introductory economics class, the first thing the teacher sketches out on the blackboard is a strikingly simplistic graph: two curves making a swooping “X” between the two axes—the economic model of supply and demand. The basic underlying principle is simple: The point at which the supply curve and the demand curve meet will determine the price of the commodity. Increasing supply when demand remains constant will cause prices to fall.

This fundamental concept is widely understood by anyone who has sat through those Econ 101 lectures, and anyone who’s ever noticed a parking lot near a major sports venue jack up its prices on game day can easily relate. The concept is also the driving force behind the 2012 conservative reincarnation of Michael Steele and Sarah Palin’s favorite 2008 campaign slogan: “drill, baby, drill.”

If the solution were so simple, then the problem of rising gasoline prices wouldn’t exist—we’re already drilling like crazy in the United States. And yet prices have continued to spike. As my colleague Daniel J. Weiss explains, the reasons for the recent price increase are myriad and include political instability in the Persian Gulf, the influence of financial speculators, and increasing worldwide demand as economies recover.

Yet many conservatives are dusting off their old bumper stickers and touting more drilling as the sole solution to high prices at the pump. One Republican presidential contender, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, is on the campaign trail promising that if elected he’ll get the price of gasoline back to a nationwide average of $2.50 per gallon. Yet even in a 29-minute infomercial-style speech, he couldn’t find the time to address any of the reasons why more drilling will not lead to lower prices.

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March 1, 2012, 9:30am – 11:30am

Watch this Event Live Here

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Other stories below: Court Likely to Uphold EPA CO2 Rules; GE solar investments top $1.4bn in the last year

Bloomberg News: Keystone Oil Pipeline May Raise U.S. Gas Prices

TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s Keystone XL oil pipeline, a project backers including Republican Presidential candidate Rick Santorum say will create cheaper U.S. gasoline, instead risks raising prices as much as 20 cents a gallon in the Midwest, Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Photo: Bloomberg

The line would create a new way to carry Canadian imports outside the Midwest and reduce an oil surplus that’s depressing prices in the central U.S. Spot gasoline was 55 cents cheaper in Chicago than in New York on June 1, the second-highest ever. Nationwide, retail gasoline set its highest February average at $3.55 a gallon, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Philip Verleger, principal of PK Verleger LLC. said “the Canadian plan was to use their market power to raise prices in the United States and get more money from consumers.”

The purpose of the $7.6 billion Keystone is to move 830,000 barrels of oil a day from landlocked Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast, obtaining new customers and a higher price for heavy Canadian crude, Canadian regulators said in a 2010 report. The oil sold for $23.38 less per barrel in 2011 compared with heavy grades of Mexican crude, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“The Canadian plan was to use their market power to raise prices in the United States (UNG) and get more money from consumers,” Philip Verleger, founder of Colorado-based energy consulting firm PK Verleger LLC, said in an interview. Prices may gain 10 to 20 cents in central states, he said.

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