Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the new chair of the House Science and Technology Committee, wrote an op-ed in Monday’s Washington Post that contains several misrepresentations of fact. He argued for increased fossil fuel production, against the scientific consensus that humans cause climate change, and for a “wait-and-see” approach to cutting carbon emissions.

Two years ago, the Washington Post’s Editorial Page Editor wrote that “The GOPs climate-change denial may be its most harmful delusion.” Apparently it is a delusion the Post is happy to spread. Below is a fact check of the seven worst parts of Smith’s piece:

Integrity of Climate Science

Smith opened with a general appeal for a clear discussion of the facts: “Climate change is an issue that needs to be discussed thoughtfully and objectively. Unfortunately, claims that distort the facts hinder the legitimate evaluation of policy options.”

However, with a look at his record, Rep. Smith did not have such a clear discussion in mind. After he became chair of the science committee, his first move was to schedule a hearing that aimed to take issue with the science of climate change. He has criticized “the idea of human-made global warming.” More dangerously, he has made headlines for authoring legislation that would politicize research conducted by the National Science Foundation. Of course, there is strong, 97%-grade consensus on human-caused climate change in the scientific literature, as a recent study confirmed.

Keystone Claims

With the House set to vote on Wednesday to force the approval of the Keystone tar sands pipeline, Rep. Smith argued that opposition to the Keystone tar sands pipeline hurts the economy and would not decrease carbon emissions. He said the “State Department has found that the pipeline will have minimal impact on the surrounding environment and no significant effect on the climate,” and would create “more than 40,000 U.S. jobs.”

This just isn’t true. The Environmental Protection Agency submitted a public comment on the State Department’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement, finding that, among other things, State needs to make revisions on the true impact of the project’s carbon emissions and about how dirty tar sands oil truly is. Additionally, tar sands oil extraction is not inevitable because transporting it by rail is not feasible — the pipeline is really their only option. Smith’s claims about 40,000 jobs are also quite inflated. The project would create just 35 permanent jobs, along with 51 coal plants’ worth of carbon dioxide each year.

U.S. Emissions

Smith went on to argue “that U.S. emissions contribute very little to global concentrations of greenhouse gas.”

In fact, annual U.S. carbon emissions rank just behind China’s, despite having only a quarter of China’s population. The U.S. is by far the world’s biggest contributor to global concentrations of CO2, the main greenhouse gas, since that depends on cumulative emissions.

Despite advances in energy efficiency and renewable energy, the United States remains a significant part of overall global carbon emissions. Domestic coal use is on the rise again in the U.S., and coal exports reached a record high last year, beating the record set in 1981. America is also the world’s number one fossil fuel subsidizer.

Recent Warming

Rep. Smith made the case that “global temperatures have held steady over the past 15 years, despite rising greenhouse gas emissions.”

This is simply not the case. The overall trend line shows continued warming. 2010 was the hottest year on record. Every year of the decades of the 2000′s was warmer than the average temperature in the ’90s.

Read more

A coalition of over 100 “clean air ambassadors” — including nurses, physicians, clergy members, labor leaders, tribal leaders, and social justice activists — descended on Capitol Hill Wednesday to call on Congress to protect children, the elderly, the poor, and other vulnerable Americans from the health threats of air pollution, smog, and rising carbon emissions.

They represented a range of groups from all fifty states, as well as Puerto Rico, all organized under the “50 States United For Healthy Air” campaign. They spoke this week with elected officials to call for several needed changes:

1) Finalize new carbon limits for new power plants, and establish limits for existing power plants. The regulations for new plants are in the works, driven by a Supreme Court ruling that the executive branch has the power and legal obligation to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. The Obama Administration hasn’t decided yet what to do about emissions from already existing plants, but the National Resources Defense Council recently came up with an impressive proposal. And this can all be done without the need for legislative approval from Congress.

As the “50 States United For Healthy Air” campaign notes, the rising temperatures driven by climate change intensify the damaging health effects of smog and other pollutants. On top of that, climate change can alter the spread of diseases and increase deaths due to heat waves, and all these effects fall harder on poorer and more vulnerable populations.

2) Finalize federally enforceable coal ash rules. Coal ash is created whenever coal is burned, and generators often then dump the toxic residue in landfills — which have given way on more than one occasion, leading to spills that are hazardous to both the environment and human health. Meanwhile, the EPA’s regulations of coal ash have been stuck in limbo for years.

3) Strengthen standards limiting air pollution and smog. Along with carbon dioxide, the burning of fossil fuels emits all sorts of other pollution into the air we breath, driving up rates of asthma, heart and lung disease, hospital visits and premature deaths. Again, these harms fall hardest on children, the old, the poor, and minorities.

Estimates of new EPA rules to crack down on these pollutants suggest the limits could prevent 21,600 premature deaths, 12,540 hospitalizations, 199,000 asthma cases each year. The rules include standards for power plants and industrial emitters, as well as the still-being -developed “Tier 3″ standards for motor vehicles. But again, the rules are still awaiting finalization.

“50 States United For Healthy Air” includes representatives from the American Nurses Association, Earthjustice, the Hip Hop Caucus, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Council of Churches, the National Latino Coalition on Climate Change, and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

The U.S. Energy Information Agency’s new state-by-state report on carbon emissions shows some progress, but you sort of have to squint to see it. The paper, which came out on Monday, didn’t account for the last three years — it only has data for 2000 to 2010 — but it ran through several different ways of looking at the problem.

So here’s a drill down into what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong, and what we can do about it.

First, the good news. The total carbon intensity of the economy dropped 17.9 percent over those ten years. That’s how much carbon we release for every million dollars our economy produces. Our carbon emissions per person are also down 12.6 percent, and the amount of energy we use for every million dollars of economic production we crank out is down 15.2 percent. That last number is good news for energy efficiency, but it’s the headline number that’s really important. It means we’re getting better at producing jobs and incomes while doing less damage to the global climate. Here’s a breakdown of the economy’s carbon intensity by state:

PERCENT CHANGE IN CARBON INTENSITY OF ECONOMY 2000 – 2010

Remember, we want reductions, so the columns in the negative are good — and all but Missouri are. Unfortunately, while some of this is certainly more renewable energy (driven by state/federal policy) and cheap natural gas and tightened fuel efficiency standards, a lot of it is also the recession. A sluggish economy is forcing us to learn to do more with less. The real question is whether we can hold onto those lessons once growth picks back up.

Now the bad news. Total carbon emissions only dropped 4.2 percent. That’s what will determine whether we catastrophically destabilize the climate. The planet doesn’t care how efficiently we produce carbon, it just cares how much carbon we produce. Again, here’s a breakdown by state. Notice how fewer columns are in the negative:

PERCENT CHANGE IN TOTAL CARBON EMISSIONS 2000 – 2010

Right now our increased efficiency and lower carbon intensity is being swamped by America’s rising population and the sheer scale of its economy. And the carbon intensity of our energy — how much carbon we produce per unit of energy — is only down 3.2 percent. So we’re getting better at using energy more efficiently, but not so much at producing less carbon while generating that energy.

That’s a big problem. The International Energy Agency recently ran the numbers and determined that the carbon intensity of the United States’ energy sector has barely budged since 1990. Same for the carbon intensity of the world’s energy production. If those numbers don’t drop drastically by 2050, we’re headed for six degrees Celsius of global warming by 2100.

Read more

The latest report from NPD Solarbuzz — a market research firm based out of Santa Clara, California — projects that global revenues for the solar photovoltaic (PV) module industry will drop from $25.5 billion last year to $20.5 billion for this year. That 20 percent plunge, according to Solarbuzz, is a simple matter of overproduction.

The supply of potential solar PV capacity shot all the way up to 45 gigawatts by 2012, while end-market demand only reached 29 gigawatts. The cause was a precipitous drop of 50 percent in the average selling price of the modules, which is great for anyone who wants to buy, install, or use solar energy, but not so great for firms that supply it.

So now there’s an ongoing drop in revenues, and a lot of backtracking amongst firms to bring supply back into line with demand, according to NPD Solarbuzz Senior Analyst Michael Barker:

Share values of several publicly listed PV companies have been falling close to delisting levels, operating losses have been reported in the hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter, and many manufacturers are continuing to file for insolvency.

As CleanTechnica noted, the recent bankruptcy of then Chinese solar manufacturer Suntech Power is only the most high-profile example of the problem. (Though it looks like Suntech’s troubles also had a lot to do with bad financial management outside of any question of market fundamentals.) The good news is that the reckoning should be short. NPD Solarbuzz also projects revenues will start climbing again in 2014, and should clear 2012′s level by 2016.

Solar PV Module Supplier Revenues Forecast To 2017

There’s an argument to be made that the short-term culprit here is the contest between the United States and China, to see who can subsidize their respective solar industries the most (Hint: China is winning). On the other hand, finding the most economically efficient way to deliver energy — or finding the best “comparative advantage” roles for the U.S. and China in the solar market — is only the second most important goal of promoting renewables.

The most important goal is preventing worldwide ecological and civilizational catastrophe. And the entire way we currently conceptualize and measure economic activity doesn’t grapple with the damage we’re doing on that account.

Admittedly, tax and grant subsidies for renewable energy technology are an imperfect response to that problem. Building prices into the energy we get from fossil fuels that actually account for the ecological and social risks of carbon emissions would be far more elegant — and might help avoid some of these annoying overshoots and busts in the renewable energy market. But getting a price on carbon is proving to be a difficult political lift.

And in the meantime, simply sitting on our hands isn’t an option.

(h/t: CleanTechnica)

The global effort to produce less carbon-intensive completely stalled over the last two decades, according to a new report by the International Energy Agency. The paper put together a measure of carbon intensity — how much carbon is released per unit of energy created — and found its essentially been flat in the United States since 1990, while dropping slightly for Europe and rising for China

The combined result was that the carbon intensity of the world’s energy production dropped 6 percent from 1971 to 1990, but then flat-lined afterwards.

But because world energy consumption doubled between 1971 and now, that meant a massive increase in carbon emissions. If things continue as they have, the planet will be well on its way to warming six degrees Celsius by 2100. That would mean life-threatening sea level rise, extreme heat waves, extreme storms, extreme droughts, massive collapses in land and marine-based food supplies, the list goes on. If we’re going to get below two degrees of warming — the level scientists have cohered around as the bare minimum for avoiding catastrophe — world carbon intensity will have to be cut by 5.7 percent from its 2010 levels by 2020, and by over 60 percent by 2050.

This will not be easy, to put it mildly. The IEA report concluded that renewable power generation, taken on its own terms, was on track for the two degree goal — solar capacity grew 42 percent in 2012, and wind grew 19 percent, for example. Electric vehicle and hybrid vehicle sales doubled in 2012, and if they keep to that growth rate they’ll be on track for the two degree goal by 2020 as well. But for every other facet of the climate solution mix, the world is falling badly behind.

The opportunities for smart grid technology, more energy efficient buildings, more energy efficient industrial processes, better fuel economy standards, and for shifts to nuclear and natural gas power are all being badly underutilized, according to the IEA’s metrics. The biggest problem is the continued growth in coal use: half the coal-fired power plants constructed around the world in 2011 used inefficient technologies, and coal-based power generation overall increased six percent from 2010 to 2012. The coal sector is so large that this increase alone left its power production 28 percent higher in 2010 than all power production from non-fossil fuel sources combined.

The emerging and developing world is the big driver here: China and India alone accounted for 95 percent of the growth in global demand for coal between 2000 and 2011. In fact, while the carbon intensity of the United States’ energy sector remained virtually unchanged since 1990 — and Europe’s declined — it steadily rose for both China and India over the same time period.

This gets to one of the fundamental obstacles to reducing carbon emissions. Economic development is producing an astonishing reduction in global poverty, lifting hundreds of millions of human beings out of misery. But as a matter of technological necessity, this accomplishment has so far required a massive increase in carbon-intensive energy production. China and India — along with parts of Africa — are ground zero for this paradox.

That, in turn, gets to why America’s failure to put together ambitious climate change legislation is not just a political or policy failure, but a massive moral failure. Certainly, we need to reduce our carbon intensity for its own sake. But more importantly, as the world’s most advanced economy, with living standards that are already incredibly high in a global context, we can afford any disruptions from a wholesale shift off of fossil fuels and onto renewables. Indeed, we ought to show the rest of the world how to do it. And we have a moral obligation to do so as the biggest cumulative carbon polluter in the world.

Instead, thanks to our refusal to put a price on carbon, America remains the single largest subsidizer of fossil fuels in the world. Instead of doing the heavy lifting on renewables ourselves, we’re leaving the less fortunate of the world to carry the burden.

The recent bad news out of the state of New Jersey is that it’s proposed slashing its renewable energy budget to a mere $7.5 million in 2014. The good news is that this loss will be at least somewhat offset by a proposal to bulk up funding for energy storage specifically.

One of the key difficulties with renewable energy is that it often relies on an intermittent source of power — solar panels require sunshine, turbines require the wind to be blowing, etc. The result is often a mismatch between when demand for electricity is high and when electricity from renewables is available. (Power plants that rely on fossil fuel, by contrast, can be ramped up or down in response to demand.) But improved storage technology could go a long way towards solving this problem, since excess power generated when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing could be built up, and then provided during other times when needed.

So while New Jersey may be backing off funding for further development of renewables, the storage funding may allow it to get significantly more power out of the wind and solar installations it already has:

In a straw proposal developed in the Office of Clean Energy at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, the staff is suggesting that the state allocate between $5 million and $10 million over the next four years for energy storage. The proposal says it may award up to $2.5 million in state fiscal year 2014. Over four years, the total could rise to $10 million.

Power storage of course largely means batteries, but the technology is still trying to catch up with the growing needs of the grid, expanded use of renewables, and electric cars. But if New Jersey wants to help push the technology along, there are a few areas the state could choose from.

Lithium-ion batteries are the obvious go-to choice, and they’re already widely used in small consumer electronics. But at larger scales they’re prone to shorts and overheating — as Boeing found out when their new Dreamliner fleet had to be grounded after the lithium batteries on board two separate planes caught fire. But there’s a new technological approach being developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee that promises to overcome these safety issues, while making the batteries lighter and far more efficient in the process. It’s still embryonic though, so it could sue a boost.

Alternatively, Bill Gates and other investors recently announced they’ll be plowing $35 million into a new battery system by Aquion that relies solely on cheap and non-toxic materials like carbon, sodium, manganese, and good old fashioned salt water. The batteries are modular and thus can be grouped as a stack, making them applicable to large and small-scale projects, and they can even withstand a wide range of temperature extremes. Aquion is hoping to have production up and running at a manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania by the end of this year.

And if New Jersey wants to get really ambitious, they could take a cue from Belgium’s plan to build an artificial island to store power from wind farms. Excess power generated by the turbines would be used to pump water 15 meters up to a reservoir on the island, and then when electricity demand was up but wind was down, the water would flow back out for hydroelectric generation.

A new study published in Energy Policy, and flagged by Wired, suggests that a bold-but-not-extreme carbon price could make providing all of Australia’s electricity needs cost-effective by 2030. This would meet all of the country’s electricity demand as of 2010 (that demand will remain at that level is an optimistic, but not unrealistic, assumption according to the study) and would maintain the established reliability standards of the grid.

The current Australian government established a carbon tax in July of last year. Any firm has to acquire a permit to emit more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. The price of those permits — effectively, the price of carbon dioxide — currently stands at $23 per metric ton in Australian dollars, and the Australian Treasury expects it to gradually rise over the next four decades. The study ran a number of simulations — drawing on regional hourly demand, technology data, and weather data as of 2010 — to figure out when a national electrical supply provided entirely by renewables would become cheaper than one provided by fossil fuels.

The discount rate — the economic term for how much we worry about future costs — also had an effect. A lower discount rate means greater concern over the future costs of carbon emissions, and a higher rate means lower concern. The study ran its models at a rate of both 5 and 10 percent.

The study concluded that at a 5 percent discount rate, 100 percent renewables become cost-effective between 2030 and 2034, with a CO2 price of $50 to $60 in Australian dollars (U.S. dollars are roughly equivalent). At a 10 percent rate, its between 2035 and 2045 with a CO2 price of $70 to $100.

The path of the carbon price itself is what the Australian Treasury thinks would be necessary to keep the country’s emissions in line with goal of stabilizing global carbon emissions into the atmosphere at 550 parts per million. It should be said the International Energy Agency has estimated a much higher carbon price ($120 in 2035 compared to the $74 estimated in this study) to hit the lower goal of 450 parts per million. Australia’s carbon price was also recently linked to that of the European Union, and the latter hasn’t exactly behaved reliably as of late. So whether these projections for the path of Australia’s carbon price hold is open to debate.

The standard assumption is that CO2 emissions should be priced around $25 per ton at the moment, though various studies have pegged the number as high as $85, or even $266 per ton.

Wind power is the most technologically mature form of renewable power currently in operation, and when that’s combined with Australia’s climate and geography, the study found it would provide around half of the electricity generation. Much of the rest would be provided by both residential and commercial solar power, with limited use of hydroelectricity and biofuels filling in the remaining gaps. And it turns out wind power is already cheaper in Australia than coal or natural gas, even before considering the carbon price.

All told, this is good news for Australians and an added incentive for the country to keep pushing forward with renewable energy, given that climate change hasn’t been kind to them recently.

Between directly lowered prices, tax breaks, and the failure to properly price carbon, the world subsidized fossil fuel use by over $1.9 trillion in 2011 — or eight percent of global government revenues — according to a study released this week by the International Monetary Fund.

The biggest offender was by far the United States, clocking in at $502 billion. China came in second at $279 billion, and Russia was third at $116 billion. In fact, the problem is so significant in the U.S. that the IMF figures correcting it will require new fees, levies, or taxes totaling over $500 billion a year, or more than 3 percent of the economy.

The most significant finding is that most of the problem — a little over $1 trillion worth — is the failure to properly price carbon pollution. Global warming is the ultimate example of a “negative externality” — a market failure in which one market actor enjoys the benefits of an exchange while another actor pays the costs.

When we burn gasoline to power our cars or coal-fired electricity to run our homes, we enjoy the benefits of that energy use. But someone else — a farmer facing increased drought, coastal populations facing rising seas, or the global poor facing food supply disruptions — shoulders the burden of the added carbon pollution we’re dumping into the atmosphere. It’s the global ecological equivalent of tapping into your neighbor’s electrical wiring so that they wind up paying your utility bill.

The world’s advanced economies consume huge levels of fossil fuels, so the failure to properly build pollution costs into the consumer price of fossil fuel use — through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade-style system, or some other policy — is what makes these economic giants the biggest contributors to worldwide fossil fuel subsidies. Emerging and developing economies in Asia (which mainly means China) come in a decent second. “Pre-tax” subsidies, which are breaks built into the tax code along with other policies, contributed another $480 billion, mostly from countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The pre-tax subsidies of the advanced countries were negligible.

Finally, lots of countries have a national consumption tax called a VAT (or value added tax), and often offer breaks through it for energy purchases. The IMF had to calculate those separately for methodological reasons, and found they contributed several hundred billion dollars more, again largely from the advanced countries.

It’s worth noting that western Europe has an (admittedly troubled) carbon pollution reduction program, so the big externality subsidy created by the advanced economies can likely be blamed mostly on the United States.

In calculating the value of the externalities subsidy, the IMF assumed the global warming damages of carbon emissions at $25 per ton. They then went through the policies of various countries to see who is and isn’t making an attempt to work that price back in through taxation, and to what extent. But the report notes that various studies have pegged the price as high as $85 per ton — and other studies have put it much higher than that — in which case the size of the externality subsidy would be much larger. Beyond global warming, the IMF also attempted to account for other externalities, particularly the pollution and health effects of coal burning.

All told, the analysis found that eliminating all externality subsidies entirely would reduce carbon dioxide emissions as much as 13 percent, along with having lots of positive ripple effects by reducing fossil fuel demand and increasing investment and jobs in clean energy.

Read more

This video produced by the Climate Reality Project featuring Reggie Watts demonstrates the argument that because carbon pollution costs us money, the world should put a price on carbon.

It’s important to remind viewers that it should be the polluters paying for what their products cost all of us — that they should not simply pass on the costs to everyone else. These companies already know carbon emissions will affect their bottom lines. But it’s difficult to ask consumers to pay double for fossil fuel addiction when these large companies and utilities slow-walk toward renewable energy. Especially when polluters’ products cause so many dangerous and expensive impacts.

So what’s the answer? The Center for American Progress has a report detailing what a carbon tax should look like, including ways to “minimizing harm to vulnerable consumers and businesses, growing the economy with investments in clean energy infrastructure and other infrastructure that makes communities more resilient in the face of climate change, and reducing the deficit burden on future generations.”

What do you think a price on carbon should look like?

According to a new cost-benefit analysis by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS), a switch from burning oil for heat to burning switchgrass biomass would cut down on both energy costs and carbon emissions for homes in the northeastern United States.

What’s especially significant is that study’s accounting of carbon emissions considered the entire life cycle of switchgrass, from crop planting, to growing, to harvesting and production. It still found switchgrass pellets yield a significant reduction in carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions compared to both heating oil and natural gas, as well as a cost saving of just under $7 per gigajoule of heat compared to oil:

[T]he researchers calculated that using switchgrass pellets instead of petroleum fuel oil to generate one gigajoule of heat in residences would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 146 pounds of CO2e. Using switchgrass pellets instead of natural gas to produce one gigajoule of heat in residences would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 158 pounds of CO2e.

Substituting switchgrass pellets for fuel oil for home heating would also save money. Totaling all costs associated with installing an appropriate residential heating system and fuel consumption, Adler’s team concluded that each gigajoule of heat produced using switchgrass pellets would cost $21.36. Using fuel oil to produce the same amount of heat would cost $28.22. The savings would be less in a commercial facility, because capital costs for a commercial biomass boiler, storage, and fuel-handling equipment are five times greater than the costs for components that use fuel oil.

According to the team’s calculations, heating with switchgrass pellets would continue to be less expensive even if switchgrass production costs rose 200 percent and the price of fuel oil dropped 70 percent.

There some important caveats, to this as Clean Technica points out: First, the cost savings apply primarily to properties that are replacing old and outdated heating equipment, and thus will be investing in new equipment regardless. As noted above, the capital costs will significantly diminish savings for commercial rather than residential properties, though they won’t obliterate them. Second, the point applies to heating oil specifically — replacing gasoline with switchgrass biofuel would be difficult to justify currently, and replacing coal with switchgrass for electricity generation would significantly drive up energy costs. Third, the finding is specific to the Northeast region only.

But for the Northeast specifically, the ARS cites research indicating that by 2022 enough sustainably harvested biomass will be available to compensate for the entire regions demand for heating oil. That would save consumers something in the range of $2.3 to 3.9 billion in fuel costs per year, and cut the region’s carbon emissions by 5 percent. The finding also dovetails with President Obama’s “Better Buildings Initiative,” which aims, among other things, to take advantage of buildings and infrastructure with existing upgrade needs in order to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy bills. Finally, unlike other more widespread biofuels based on corn, for example, switchgrass has the economic and moral advantage of not doubling as a food source for humans.

So those caveats shouldn’t be interpreted to dismiss the importance of ARS’s analysis. The market is a huge and complex system, and how different people in different areas meet their energy needs are organic and myriad — how they move those needs from fossil fuels to renewable sources will be equally diverse. For the American Northeast, switchgrass for home heating looks like a compelling part of the mix. Every bite at the apple counts.