The EPA released their analysis of the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES or just the Waxman-Markey Bill as it is being called after the two representatives who are sponsoring the bill), stating that passage of the bill will lead to a 7% decrease in consumer electric bills by 2020 thanks to increased energy efficiency measures, and a reduction of coal generated electricity by up to 50 GW by 2015.
Daniel J. Weiss, Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, had this to say about the EPA analysis (full article here).
The main argument conservatives and big oil and coal companies use against the American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) is that it would cripple American households with a crushing energy tax. To make that claim, they have distorted cost estimates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and conducted their own biased studies. Today, the Environmental Protection Agency obliterated these phony numbers with the release of its economic analysis of H.R. 2454. The EPA estimated the bill would actually lower household electricity bills.
EPA’s findings are consistent with the independent Congressional Budget Office analysis released on June 19th. CBO determined “that the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion—or about $175 per household.” CBO did not evaluate the impact of the energy efficiency measures on consumer spending on utilities.
The bottom line is that independent analyses found that ACES would cut spending on utilities, as well as have minimal overall costs to the average household – somewhere between 22 to 48 cents a day. Hopefully, representatives will pay heed to these government studies and ignore conservatives’ counterfeit estimates when they vote on the American Clean Energy and Security Act this Friday.
Let’s get off our asses and get this passed. It is far from perfect, relying heavily on reductis to come from new nuclear facilities, unconventional natural gas use, and other less than clean technologies, but it is a good step in the right direction. Contact your congressman/woman and tell them you want this passed, NOW.
Earlier today a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced that China will not accept a binding emissions reduction target when the UNFCCC holds its climate change conference in Copenhagen saying that this would stunt the country’s economic growth.
China is still a developing country and the present task confronting China is to develop its economy and alleviate poverty. Given that, it is natural for China to have some increase in its emissions, so it is not possible for China to accept a binding, compulsory target.
This is a setback for the Obama administration which had said that they would push hard for China to accept such a resolution later this year in Copenhagen, where the world will decide on a new climate change protocol which will replace the existing Kyoto Protocol (which was not signed by the U.S.).
However after last weeks U.S.-China climate change talks in Beijing it became pretty apparent that China and the U.S. were at opposite ends of the spectrum when it came to agreeing on what they expected of each other. China wants the U.S. to give up 1% of its GDP (about $140 billion) to help fund clean energy technology in the developing nations, and wants the U.S. to slash it’s emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. In contrast, the current “Clean Energy and Security Act” floating around congress right now only obliges the U.S. to cut emissions by 17% during this time frame, and it is likely that before the bill passes these emissions reductions will be watered down even further.
And therein lies the problem. The U.S. and China simply cannot have this sort of round and round relationship when it comes to reducing emissions. China, which is already the worlds largest producer of CO2, needs to accept the fact that even if the U.S. caused this mess (which we did), China needs to be a large part of the solution. What’s more, the U.S. cannot use China’s reluctance to cut emissions as an excuse to keep our own emissions so high. We should already be working on reducing our emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. There is no reason not to. It is scientifically feasible, would be economically beneficial to the country as a whole, and of paramount importance would set a huge example for the rest of the world to follow.
As Orville Schell from Yale 360 describes the problem:
Officials in Beijing have evolved considerably over the last few years in terms of recognizing the serious consequences of climate change in China, including the risks of increased drought in the North; flooding in the South; melting glaciers and thawing permafrost on the Tibetan Plateau; increased desertification; and aberrant weather patterns throughout China. But Chinese leaders still steadfastly hold that since the West is primarily responsible for the problem, it must bear most of the costs of remedy.
So let’s take the lead. If China sees that the U.S. is actually taking such large steps to solve the problem they will be far more likely to follow suit.
World marketed energy consumption is projected to increase by 44 percent from 2006 to 2030.
The report projects that most of the increase will come from developing Asian countries like China and India. The report also indicates that the vast majority of this energy consumption will come in the form of burning fossil fuels. However the percentage of this consumption that comes from liquid fossil fuels (petroleum, diesel, etc.) is expected to decrease from 36% to 32% during this time frame.
What does this mean for all of us who are already freaking out about what is going to be happening with the earth’s climate 25 or 50 years from now? Not a whole lot. Unless there is a drastic global event that really halts economic development, and/or our rampant population boom, it makes a lot of sense to expect this type of increase in energy consumption. What we really need to be focusing on is how to start producing this extra energy along with a big chunk of what we already are producing using renewable resources.
Unfortunately, if these two graphs turn out to be accurate, we won’t be doing that. At least not in the next 21 years.
It happened yesterday. Quietly, without anyone hardly noticing, a group of about 40 families (about 2000 people), part of a group known as the The Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea, packed their belongings into boats and said goodbye to their island home forever, thus making them the world’s first, but certainly not last, climate change refugees.
Water levels around their small island home have risen over 10 centimeters in the past 20 years. While this might not seem too significant it should be noted that the maximum elevation on the island is 1.2 meters, and a change of this magnituted causes disaterous consequences. Already the island’s crops have been destroyed by the rising tide, and the remaining land has become contaminated with salt making it completely unfarmable.
Very few people are aware that this forced evacuation is even taking place. I myself had no idea about this until earlier today, despite the fact that I try to follow the subject closely. While the families have been given land on a nearby island (with higher ground) it is tragic that an entire community has been displaced by climate change. I hope their loss will open more people’s eyes to the reality around them.
I’ve been staring at a lot of GHG emissions data lately. Is there anything more fun than pouring over table after table of UNFCCC national submissions, IEA reports and E.P.A. eGRID values? OK, I guess I can think of a few things, but reviewing all this data has actually been pretty interesting. One of the things I noticed, and that I view as a bit of progress, is the fact that our emissions rates for energy production have been steadily going down for the last few years.
In 2004 the average number of grams of CO2 produced per kWh of electricity generation was 572, in 2005 it was 570, and in 2006 it was down to 559 g CO2/kWh. The trend extends beyond those last three years of data to about the last decade. Slowly but surely we have been reducing our emissions rate.
But have we reduced our emissions? Earlier today the new E.P.A. National Inventory of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks report was issued today. I took a look at the report to see what I could find out about our newest set of emissions values. Unfortunately, as I suspected, despite our improved emissions rates our increased demand for energy has continued to drive up our overall emissions.
According to the E.P.A report emissions in 2007 (the year with the most current available data), the United States total emissions increased 1.4% from 2006, and 17.2% from 1990. And what’s to blame for this increase in emissions? According to the report the biggest jump in emissions came from increased consumption of fuel and coal produced electricity.
Despite an increase in national awareness over the last couple of years, despite increased political pressure for change, all we are seeing is a rise in our output. Can you say COLLAPSE anyone?
In his Op-Ed this weekend in The New York Times Thomas Friedman gave a quick account of one country that has recognized the need to develop its environmental policy and energy policy hand in hand. That country is Costa Rica, and for the last 20 years they have been doing just about everything right in order to ensure the preservation of their incredible biodiversity.
Here is a quick run down of some of Costa Rica’s environmental accomplishments:
95% of Costa Rica’s energy comes from renewable resources (chief among them are hydroelectric, wind and geothermal)
When oil was discovered 5 years ago the country banned oil drilling
Imposed a 3.5% carbon emissions tax
Used the revenue from aforementioned emissions tax to pay indigenous communities to protect the forests around them. The country now has nearly twice as much forest as 20 years ago
We should take a page from Costa Rica’s playbook. As Mr. Friedman puts it “we are racking up a bill in the form of climate-changing greenhouse gases, petro-dictatorships and bio-diversity loss that gets charged on our kids’ Visa cards to be paid by them later. Well, later is over. Later is when it will be too late.”
Yesterday China announced that they are working on a stimulus plan that they hope will spur development in their renewable energy industry. While it isn’t exactly clear what the stimulus will entail, it seems likely that it will involve providing large subsidies to solar and wind energy producers. The mere announcement of the stimulus caused stock prices of chinese solar and wind companies to skyrocket. The country’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines saw their stock increase by 10% following the announcement and similar increases were noted by the country’s solar industry.
China has publicly stated that their goal is to boost usage of renewable energy to 10 percent of total energy consumption by 2010. Currently China, the world’s second-biggest consumer of energy, derives 80 percent of its electricity from burning coal.
The Bonn Climate Change Talks, one of the series of UNFCCC conferences that are leading up to the Copenhagen talks (where a new UN protocol will be adopted to replace the Kyoto protocol), ended on April 8th.
UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer stated that, with regard to emission targets for industrialized countries, the numbers discussed so far fell well short of the range recommended by the IPCC, and stressed the need for these countries to show greater ambition. He pointed out that developing countries were willing to undertake mitigation actions if the promised financial and technical support were delivered, while some already had climate change strategies in place.
The new world of solar technology is looming near. Over the last few years researchers have started to have some limited of success building what are known as dye-sensitized solar cells. Solar cells that function by basically imitating the process of natural solar collection by plants and light-sensitive bacteria.
The cells are comprised of a semi-conductor (the most common of which is titanium dioxide), which is then coated with a dye that absorbs the sunlight. When a photon of light with a specific quantity of energy is absorbed by the dye it causes what is called electron excitation (or simply excitation). An electron absorbs the energy of the photon and moves to a higher energy state. The excited electron travels towards the semi-conductor generating electricity when it arrives there.
Now a new breakthrough by researchers at Oregon State University might be bringing dye-sensitized PV cells to the forefront of solar technology. Researchers at OSU have spent the last 5 years working on how to make dye-sensitized PV cells more affordable. and more efficient. Their not so simple answer; take advantage of the existence of an ancient single celled life form, whose exoskeleton happens to have the perfect nanostructure necessary to build the cells, thus eliminating the use of expensive silicon (which is used to construct most conventional types of solar cells), and tripling the electrical output (in comparison to other dye-sensitized cells).
The single celled organism in question are known as diatoms, microscopic organisms that are found in the fossil record as far back as the time of the dinosaurs. They are a key part of the marine food chain and help cycle carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The diatoms are allowed to from on a thin, conductive glass surface, and once they have covered the surface the living organic material (i.e. the organism itself) is removed leaving behind the exoskeleton. Researchers then coat the exoskeleton with a thin film of titanium dioxide which acts as the semiconductor.
“Most existing solar cell technology is based on silicon and is nearing the limits of what we may be able to accomplish with that,” said Greg Rorrer, an OSU professor of chemical engineering working on the project. Adding that, “Conventional thin-film, photo-synthesizing dyes also take photons from sunlight and transfer it to titanium dioxide, creating electricity, but in this system the photons bounce around more inside the pores of the diatom shell, making it more efficient.”
Once again nature proves to be a far better engineer than man.
A few months back I wrote an article about how large scale solar and wind farms were starting to cause real headaches for the people whose job it is to ensure our nation’s electrical grid runs smoothly. In November the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) released a report saying that if we began putting tighter and tighter restrictions on powerplant emissions, and began taking steps to produce more and more of our nation’s power production from renewable resources that our nation’s electrical grid simply wasn’t going to be up to the task.
The problem is simple (at least on paper). Many of America’s best renewable resource generating regions lie far, far way from the large scale distribution hubs (which are typically located near oil, nuclear, or coal fire power plants) that can then transport this electricity to nearby cities. “Most of the potential for renewable resources tends to be in places where we don’t have robust existing transmission infrastructure,” says George Van Wiele, chief executive of ISO New England, who oversees electrical transmission in the six-state region.
Making a case for remaking the grid
Long before climate change spurred our nation (however gently) into reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, there was a case to be made for a major overhaul of our nation’s electrical grid. Simply put, our nation does not have a national electrical grid. The decrepit system we rely upon so heavily is controlled by more than 500 owners, and carries current from more than 10,000 power plants run by about 6,000 investor-owned utilities, public power systems and co-ops. These high-voltage utility lines cover four regional grids in the United States (Texas has its own), and are linked by low-voltage connecting lines that do not provide the capacity to transport electricty from region to region, nor do they have the capacity to handle the additional burden from large scale solar or wind plants that would be intermittently pumping in large additional amounts of electricty.
So what do we do now? Well we can start by making our nation’s electrical grid just that, a national electrical grid. To quote Matthew L. Wald from the New York Times ” The nation’s electric system is virtually a feudal system among those 500 owners. Control of the power flow is also balkanized among dozens of jurisdictions, an artifact of the grid’s history; it grew together from many small systems and local regulators that to this day are not melded.”
Last year American Electric Power (AEP) teamed up with the U.S Department of Energy to rethink the distribution system. Instead of building upon our current system the AEP/DOE plan calls for a new system to be superimposed upon the old system. The new system would be basically a high-voltage long distance transport system that would have various on/off stations along the way pumping energy into pre-existing localized grids. This new transportation “backbone” would operate at a higher voltage (765 kilovolts) than most of todays existing transportation lines (345 kilovolts). This would reduce system losses from today’s 3 to 8 percent range to about 1 percent. To further decrease losses long distance transport lines would use direct-current as opposed to alternating current (which is what virtually all houses and business operate on). This direct current would then have to be converted into alternating-current before being pumped into local grids.
Unfortunately, the price tag isn’t cheap, about $60 billion according to the DOE. Is Obama willing to shell out this kind of cash as part of his massive economic stimulus plan? Probably not. Despite the fact that this grid could potentially pay for itself in about 5-10 years, it would not provide a large number of new jobs, nor would it yield any immediate economic benefits to the country. We have the technology, we have the resources, the only question is when, not if, it will become an issue of national importance.
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