The new analysis by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is a classic good news, bad news story, summed up in this chart:

The good news is that merely by extending existing energy policies, the United States could keep energy-related carbon dioxide emissions flat through 2040.

That’s also the bad news — for two reasons.

First, the anti-science, anti-government crowd has a stranglehold on federal policy for the foreseeable future, whereas the Extended Policies case assumes the Congress actively extends key policies including “the continuation of the production tax credit for wind, biomass, geothermal, and other renewable resources, and the investment tax credit for solar generation technologies.”

Second, as CAP’s Dan Weiss noted on CP in December, flatlining CO2 “would be an epic disaster for the United States and the rest of the planet”:

Such an outcome would certainly condemn the United States and the world to the most devastating impacts from climate change, including more fatalities and damages from increasingly ferocious and frequent extreme weather, more deaths and illness from smog, tropical diseases infecting people in northern latitudes, and the disruption of the world’s food production system.

It bears repeating that a 60% reduction by 2050 vs. 1990 levels is the target that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says the rich countries (Annex I) should adopt if the goal is to stabilize at 550 ppm CO2-eq.  I discussed the science underlying this at length in 2009.

Here’s the key chart from the full Working Group III report (Box 13.7, page 776):

The 550 ppm CO2-equivalent is about 450 ppm CO2 (because of the warming from the other greenhouse gases). It means ultimately “stabilizing” at 3°C (5.4°F) above preindustrial levels using the “best estimate” of climate sensitivity — see the IPCC’s Synthesis Report “Summary for Policymakers” (Table SPM.6). And that “stabilizing” assumes no major carbon cycle feedbacks, like, say the thawing permafrost, which will likely add 0.4°F – 1.5°F to total global warming by 2100.

Thus, in the real world, 550 ppm CO2-equivalent is likely to be devastating to modern civilization, leading to widespread Dust-Bowlification and an ice free planet. So even a 60% reduction in U.S. emissions by mid-century isn’t sufficient.

A non-suicidal species would pursue something closer to 450 ppm CO2-eq or less — and that means taking U.S. emissions down more than 80% from 1990 levels by 2050. That would require us to be near 1 billion metric tons of CO2 around 2040, rather than flatlining at over 5 billion.

Through 2020, Obama can put the U.S. close to the sane path without Congress, by using the executive authority under the Clean Air Act — a plan spelled out in detail by the Natural Resources Defense Council. To stay anywhere near the 450 ppm path post-2020, we’d likely need a sane Congress, too.

The Energy Information Administration (EAI) projects that the United States will fall far short of its commitments to greenhouse pollution reductions, putting the future prosperity of human civilization at risk. To give humanity a chance of keeping climate change at levels compatible with modern industrial civilization, global emissions need to peak before 2020, with the developed world peaking well before.

In its 2012 Annual Energy Outlook, the EIA forecasts that natural gas consumption will surge as coal and oil use remains strong. Greenhouse gas emissions fell by 8 percent from 2005 levels in 2009, but that progress will reverse. The EIA projects that climate pollution will start rising again, leading to only a 7.5 percent reduction in 2020 and a 3.2 percent reduction in 2035:

The White House website, describing how President Obama’s leadership is allowing the United States to “meet the climate change challenge,” writes how President Obama negotiated the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 to limit greenhouse gas emissions. In that document, the United States committed to cutting its greenhouse pollution by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels.

In 2011, climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing said the United States was still “committed” to the 17 percent target, but “cannot yet tell you how close we are to meeting the 17 percent reduction levels.”

“The United States takes seriously the commitments first made by our Leaders in Copenhagen and reaffirmed in Cancun,” US climate envoy Todd Stern declared at the international climate talks in Durban, South Africa last December. “We are making progress toward our target of reducing emissions in the range of 17 percent by 2020 through an array of domestic efforts.”

According to the EIA, the United States will lose ground already achieved when the pledge was made, and fall 56 percent short of its 2020 target. This year’s projection is more optimistic than the 2011 report, which estimated an 80 percent shortfall.

The United States is nowhere close to meeting even the insufficient target set by the administration. Without major, immediate changes in national policy, human civilization will be locked on a path of catastrophic global warming. The White House would do well to be honest about that reality.

Our guest blogger is Frank Ackerman, director of the Climate Economics Group at the Stockholm Environment Institute-US and senior research fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute of Tufts University.

Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) has asked the Energy Information Administration to evaluate an unrealistically harsh and unsophisticated clean energy standard, designed to represent the Republicans’ worst nightmare: every electricity retailer in the country (some of them quite small) must meet a relatively high and rising standard for low-carbon energy, starting very soon, with no trading between companies, banking of excess credits, or other flexibility mechanisms that would soften the blow.

Even the Republican nightmare doesn’t look as bad as one might have suspected: according to the EIA analysis, it achieves a rapid reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, while causing electricity prices to rise by less than one percent per year, and lowering GDP per capita in 2035, the end of the study period, all the way from (watch closely or you’ll miss this) $65,848 to $65,658 – a reduction of less than 0.3 percent, in a national income nearly twice as high as today’s. Employment is slightly higher, as a result of this standard, from the mid-2020’s onward.

In the light of day, no one would allow this nightmare version of a clean energy standard to be adopted. Trading of clean energy credits between companies would almost certainly be included in any real standard. The goal, after all, is to reduce nationwide emissions as cheaply as possible, not to impose burdens on each and every company regardless of size or situation. The large reduction in costs that can result from trading is well established in economic theory, and confirmed by the experience of sulfur emissions trading under the Clean Air Act, among other cases. If some companies can reduce emissions more inexpensively than others, it makes perfect sense to let them sell credits to others; the same amount of emission reduction occurs, but at much lower cost than under the rigid plan that troubles Ralph Hall. This, by the way, is perfectly orthodox free market economics, of a sort that Republicans, once upon a time, used to swear by.

Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), the science-denying chairman of the House science committee, says a federal clean energy standard would be an “expensive new electricity tax on the American people,” based on a study he requested. An analysis by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of a clean energy standard he designed finds that “household electricity bills could jump an average of $115 per year by 2025.” President Obama has called for a clean energy standard of 80 percent clean electricity production by 2035, allowing for production from renewable sources, nuclear, natural gas, and coal with carbon capture and sequestration. This goal would mean that America’s aging, dirty coal plants would be mostly phased out over the next 25 years.

Defending the coal industry that funds him, Hall attacked the president’s plan based on the EIA report:

This report—prepared by independent government experts—makes clear that the CES amounts to an expensive new electricity tax on the American people. With an anemic economy and unemployment stuck above nine percent, it is very troubling that the President continues to pursue an energy policy that would add billions to Americans’ energy bills.

Hall fails to mention that the EIA analysis says the “impacts on electricity prices prior to 2015 are negligible.” In other words, this standard poses no threat to the “anemic economy” of today. In fact, the EIA projects that employment will increase over the reference case by 2030.

Furthermore, the EIA analyzed a clean energy standard proposed by Hall, not by the Obama administration. The EIA makes that clear throughout its report, saying their analysis is of the Hall Clean Energy Standard (HCES). Hall’s CES was purposely designed to compel rapid investment in new electricity production without flexibility, which EIA models as a high cost. The inflexibility Hall required includes these provisos:

There is no option to purchase compliance credits from the government.

HCES credits earned in one year cannot be “banked” for use in a subsequent year.

All electricity retailers are covered by the requirement, regardless of ownership type or size.

There is no provision for excluding any electricity sales from a seller’s baseline based on resources used to produce the electricity or type of customer purchasing the electricity.

This report’s findings are a result of Hall’s deliberate gaming of the economic tools of the EIA. Moreover, they reflect the assumptions that energy economists use to analyze policy instruments, even though those assumptions have been proven false by history. The health costs of coal pollution are not incorporated, even though top economists have found that coal-powered electricity is dragging down the US economy by ruining Americans’ health. The EIA projects that electricity prices would increase by 2.7 cents/kWh by 2035, which is almost exactly what economists found as the annual cost of health damages from coal pollution today (2.8 cents/kWh).

To repeat — the “costs” that the EIA projects in 25 years as a result of Hall’s rigid clean energy standard are already being paid today by Americans through suffering and death, especially our children and elderly. A clean energy standard would replace the economic costs of asthma and heart disease with investment in new jobs and technology.

The EIA also ignores the existence of global warming, with a reference case that has the United States continuing to increase its greenhouse pollution for decades, even though that would mean planetwide catastrophe. As the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook describes, in a “climate friendly” scenario “the power sector is largely decarbonized by 2035.”

Under Ralph Hall’s inflexible clean energy standard, the EIA finds that annual electricity sector carbon dioxide emissions would decrease by more than 60 percent from the reference case by 2035. Using an estimate of the social cost of carbon of $100 per ton of carbon dioxide, then the benefits of that decline would reach $100 billion a year in 2035, far outweighing the supposed “costs” of shutting down “cheap” electricity from high-polluting coal plants.