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The Problem With Carbon-Cutting Programs

Posted by samzenpus on from the selling-warm dept.

Med-trump writes "Alberta's $60 million carbon-cutting program is failing, according to the latest report from the Canadian province's auditor-general, Merwan Saher. A news article in Nature adds: 'the province, despite earlier warnings, has not improved its regulatory structure — and calls the emissions estimates and the offsets themselves into question.'"

10 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. It's Alberta... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What? Do you really think the tarsands province has an interest in putting carbon emissions on its beloved oil? Or that the federal Conservative government of the corporate elite wants them to either?

    1. Re:It's Alberta... by masternerdguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm not concerned. We're going to run out of fossil fuels eventually and then we'll be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.

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    2. Re:It's Alberta... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Oh, we'll run out of fossil fuels but it won't be for a long time yet. Canada and the US both contain so much oil in the form of tar sands and oil shale that they could become the world's premier oil exporters. Techniques for extracting these reserves are being developed that would not require strip mining so you wouldn't even know there was an oil operation going on. Sorry, but the age of oil is not over yet unless you can find another source of energy and methods of storage and transportation that are as cheap, convenient and energy dense as plain old oil, gasoline or other hydrocarbon fuels.

    3. Re:It's Alberta... by rtfa-troll · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Solar Panels....

      It's not a substitute. Oil products are incredibly convenient. They concentrate energy into a small space (compare energy density for jet fule with Li batteries one day) doen't spontaneously burn (compare with hydrogen) but it burn easily when you want it to (compare with coal / wood etc).

      However, oil is even more valuable as the base material for things such as plastics. Burning it is a true sin and our descendants are likely going to hate us for it.

      To make solar panels a direct oil substitute, fundamentally we need processes for turning electricity (+CO2 from the atmosphere and H from water) into hydrocarbons. These do exist, but most are in early research stages and/or quite inefficient. Getting them going at large scale, together with much cheaper solar panels would be great.

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    4. Re:It's Alberta... by chudnall · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This is exactly the line of reasoning that explains why every government program inevitably gets bigger and bigger.

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    5. Re:It's Alberta... by khallow · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Energy is king.

      Can't emphasize this enough. For example, if you need the elements carbon and hydrogen (basic building blocks of hydrocarbon chemistry) and you have a vast amount of cheap electricity available, then you can pull both from atmosphere. Electrolysis gets you water and heating wood in a reducing atmosphere (the trees which you can light up with LEDs) gets you carbon. Running hot hydrogen over carbon gets you methane. I don't know electricity-based tricks for going from methane to ethene (but they're there), but the latter is apparently the building block for most plastics.

    6. Re:It's Alberta... by SnarfQuest · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There's only 20 years of fossil fuel left in the ground. At least, that's what we were told in the '70s, the 80's, and the 90's. With oil usage increasing as much as it has been lately, mostly because of China, I'd guess that we're now down to 20 years left.

      --
      Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
  2. Alberta tar sands by mspohr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Alberta is the home of the tar sands... the dirtiest source of petroleum. Do you actually think they are interested in cutting carbon emissions?

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  3. Re:Not much of a surprise by vlm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The various carbon markets and carbon trading schemes have likewise been plagued with fraud

    Equally true statement for all other markets if you cut out the word "carbon"

    The various markets and trading schemes have likewise been plagued with fraud

    Its just another crooked tax and intermediary scheme to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. What a huge surprise.

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  4. Re:Not much of a surprise by guises · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not much of a surprise. Kyoto was designed (intentionally or not) as a subsidy that would allow business as usual while just writing a check to Eastern Europe.

    Because Eastern European countries have such great international bargaining clout? Come on. It's not a subsidy, it's not a conspiracy, it's an effort to do something good about something bad. They picked a year with a target that they thought they could hit. Obviously some places would be effected by this to a greater degree than others.

    Doubtless there was some weedling and self-centered manipulation going on, so what? Whenever you have a broad and painful treaty like this there will always be someone hurting more than others - you make it as fair as you can and then you suck it up, because it has to be done regardless. My own country, the United States, pollutes far more by every metric than any of the signatories of the Kyoto treaty so we, to my chagrin, decided to take our ball and go home. Hopefully we'll step up and own to some of the problems that we've caused with the next one.