Slashdot Mirror
US Carbon Emissions Hit 20-Year Low
Freddybear writes "A recent report from the U.S. Energy Information Agency says that U.S. carbon emissions are the lowest they have been in 20 years, and attributes the decline to the increasing use of cheap natural gas obtained from fracking wells. Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, said the shift away from coal is reason for 'cautious optimism' about potential ways to deal with climate change. He said it demonstrates that 'ultimately people follow their wallets' on global warming. 'There's a very clear lesson here. What it shows is that if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources,' said Roger Pielke Jr., a climate expert at the University of Colorado."
It could also means that CO2 release is correlated to the general state of the economy which as of currently is in the shitter.
... that the economy is still in the shitter.
--
BMO
Now the fuel industry in the US will see this as a challenge to get back to the top of CO2 emissions by the end of the year. :S :P
Should have kept quiet about this to help save the planet.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Oh, yes. I see.
Now, the average people have the foresight of a cabbage. :-(
And about half of them less than that...
About 1/3 of carbon emissions comes from manufacturing, and most manufacturing is now done in asia.
"There's a very clear lesson here. What it shows is that if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources"
Sure, that's what everyone's been saying. The disagreement is over how to get there. Should we offer insurance guarantees for nuclear power plants? Should we mandate feed-in tariffs for household solar? Should we loosen restrictions on fracking? Should we increase science funding for alternative energy R&D? Should we institute a carbon tax?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Now, this ruins the whole leftist meme.....no government involvement....this cant be happening, waa, waa, waa. Mayor Bloomberg will be quite unhappy. And look at the carbon trading disaster hitting EU and its silliness. Skyrocketing prices in a marker saturated with energy....heh. Just now starting to frak in parts of EU. Finding massive amounts.....oops. Imagine market at work....
I suppose I could RTFA, but since when does burning natural gas produce less CO2 than gasoline? It's still a hydrocarbon. CxHy+O2->H2O+CO2...
Note how the graph says "Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere in the U.S. from burning coal has fallen to its lowest level in 20 years".
Is the data truly valid for *ALL* emissions, or as the graph suggests, just the ones from burning coal?
Now instead of burning coal we are using shitty methods to create natural gas that will pollute our waters.
From the U.S. Energy Information Agency ... http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=7350
So, this means the US almost hit the targets of the Kyoto Protocol. Interesting.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Or you could simply fix the original market failure by adding the cost of emissions (a negative externality) into the price of energy. To prevent this from burdening the poor, return an equal share of the revenue to everyone.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
The US getting better is commendable, however what matters from a "not turning the planet into another Venus" perspective is *planetary* carbon emissions. It's not like CO2 stays put over the country that emitted it. And global emissions are still on the rise due to the growing economies in China, Latin American, India, and elsewhere. All this press release is is a pat on the back.
We need nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and we need them yesterday.
We are running on overbuilt capacity from the 1960s. After that it became very, very expensive to build a large power plant - with most of the new costs being public protests and public comment sessions that turned into more and more evironmental impact studies. Often the result was the project was abandoned.
In Arizona and Illinois (both places I have lived) the solution was simple: build "peaker" plants that run on natural gas and build them up over time from 200MW to more like 1000MW over time. This still results in a lot of protest activity but governing bodies are far more likely to ignore protests when the plant has been safely and cleanly operating for five years or so when it comes time to expand.
The problem is that this is just a delaying tactic that will not solve the problem in the long run. Most parts of the country could use another 2000MW of capacity right now. Certainly if the economy recovers there will be considerable need for more and more electric power which today simply isn't available.
It is just barely possible today to build a data center that is independent of the grid but the costs for the battery storage are huge. Solar PV generation is constantly being touted as a solution, but the only way it is a real solution would be to have it on a lot of homes and other buildings - a lot meaning probably over 50% of them. Unfortunately, this doesn't address the grid problems at 5-9 PM when everyone gets home, turns down the air conditioner temperature and turns on the microwave and the washing machine. To fix that we are going to need capacity that doesn't depend on the sun and today's grid-tied PV systems do not address that at all.
One way out of the coming capacity crisis would be to have a big switch at the power company office: Day (offices) and Night (homes). This is literally what we might be facing soon. The problem is that we could easily have this kind of capacity problem in five years. It takes five years to build a new coal plant without any public opposition - and there would be plenty no matter where it was going to be built. It takes more like ten years to build a nuclear plant and we almost certainly do not have ten years before really running into a big capacity problem. We also need maybe 20-30 new plants coming on line in five years and we haven't even started building them.
The power companies really don't care. They will not be the enemy when you find your refrigerator doesn't run during the day and there is a new box that shuts off your house power whenever the capacity is needed. You can bet their PR departments and outside agencies will be working overtime to make sure someone else gets the blame.
But hey, if we don't build any new plants you can bet everyone will be shouting about how our CO2 emissions are down.
It that isn't a trolling comment I don't know what is. Trying to tie Mann to a scandal in the football program. On top of that Mann has never been shown to be a liar. If his studies lead him to be alarmed about the potential for global warming to devastate our civilization shouldn't he as a leading scientist in the field voice his concerns?
We are still producing more CO2 than the plants can remove.
And I think some of the credit should go to the better cars and hybrids, the wind turbines, and solar panels. People biking to work, using CFL and LED lights, and reducing the amount of power it takes to heat and cool a house. Even the switch from CRT and desktop computers to low power laptops and cell phones helped. There is a lot of easy things we can do to reduce the power we consume.
It isn't a competition to see what can be better than coal, it is a race to see if we can get below the amount of CO2 that the plants and trees use each year.
And we should look into those treaties again. The Republicans made a wrong decision for not signing it. If they would have, we would have achieved it, and China might have grown slower meaning that there would be more jobs here in the US.
Now they've got an excuse for when global warming fails to live up to their predictions.
I keep hearing from conservatives that we can't do anything about climate change or reducing CO2. Natural gas has long been proposed as superior to oil because of releasing far less CO2. Fracking is dirty but we were producing plenty of natural gas before fracking. Fracking simply caused a glut and increased profits. Other factors like the reduction in driving mimics more efficient cars so we don't have to stop driving to make a difference. I just read we could offset all the cars just by grass feeding cows. Less corn is needed saving oil used in it's production, less corn means less gassy cows and allowing them to free range breaks down the waste more naturally releasing less methane and CO2. Also the soil becomes more biologically active allowing it to store more carbon as well as restoring the soil itself for farming. There are claims even, and not from left wing fanatics, that by field raising all our animals and going back to organic farming we could offset all our CO2 released. The point is factory farming is not sustainable and in some ways it's already starting to collapse. Downer cattle and Mad Cow are some of the many symptoms of weakness in the system. With farming we get the Gulf of Mexico dead zone as well as listeria outbreaks are a direct result of farm waste getting into our rivers. All of it together suggests the system is fixable without everyone driving electric cars and living like hyppies. Also organic farming is a cute term but hyppies didn't invent it it's how we produced food for the first 12,000 years. Modern farming has only been around for the last 100 years and has largely been a disaster.
Apparently Kenya is on a course for carbon-free electricity, predominately geothermal. Basically because it's cheapest and more reliable even than hydroelectric.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The market doesn't really care about lowering pollution, though, since pollution is an unpriced negative externality.
It's quite well priced. Companies know there are legal risks, and they also want good relations with the communities they are in. They know the costs of cleanup of various materials, there's a ton of comparative data now.
It's a fallacy to claim that every company totally ignores pollution, many companies try to be responsible in this regard. You have to be or you generate a lot of bad press.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I work at a coal plant. This year alone the overall power requirement for our area had been lower than the historical average. Yes, we did hit a peak generation record this year as well, but it's been a much milder year than normal.
We've also seen the cost of natural gas fall to the point where it was cheaper to leave the coal plants on standby and run the natural gas plants for the power demand.
This year we've run about 50% less than last year.
I remember reading an article many years ago - long before the global warming scare - that pointed out that moving to lower carbon fuels was a long-term trend. Industry started out with coal and charcoal, essentually pure carbon. Then it moved on to oil, which contains a mix of carbon and hydrogen. Natural gas was up-and-coming, with 1 carbon to 4 hydrogens. The article assumed that the future held nuclear and solar, both of which are essentially zero-carbon.
Aside from the hiccups with nuclear (justified or not, depending on your point of view), the article seems to have been pretty prescient.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Not really. The water is pumped back deep underground into disposal wells. The only problem with that is when it's pumped into a fault line.
Or you could simply fix the original market failure by adding the cost of emissions (a negative externality) into the price of energy.
It's bizarre to claim you can "add the cost of emissions" to a product. How would you honestly come by such a figure, when there are myriad sources that can cause health issues (including people who smoke!)?
Would you equally burden supposed "green" sources of energy with the same costs, from the production of pollution in China when producing components?
The better and more direct approach is to limit emissions at a source rather than playing a wild guessing game that in the end amounts to "we get to charge you whatever the hell we like because we don't like you",
But we already heavily regulate power plant emissions. Further controls are just not going to give us much benefit, and skyrocket the cost of energy for everyone - hurting the poor the most since the need for shelter comes almost before even food...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because after a while the cheapest gas will be gone and we'll probably be shifting back to coal.
I'm pretty sure in 200 years or so, either solar will be practical to use en-masse or nuclear will be simple and widespread (or a combination of both).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I keep hearing from conservatives that we can't do anything about climate change or reducing CO2.
That is what you heard.
That's not what they said.
Conservatives have long claimed there is no need to spend extra money to reduce CO2. They said there would be no benefit in ham-stringing first world countries in many ways to reduce a gas that may not even be causing a problem.
And as it turns out, they were correct. If we had adopted Kyoto the U.S. would have a far worse economy than we have today, with many additional regulations imposed on businesses - when it turns out those additional regulations were never even needed.
Over time alternative energy WILL naturally overcome traditional sources just in cost benefit alone, there is no need to hurt the productivity of countries to make that happen.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You could go nuclear and avoid so much of it's proliferation and disposal drawbacks by going with liquid flouride thorium reactors (LFTR's). But then again, if you wanted to create a big government pie-in-the-sky "make work" project, you could pursue fusion. Oh yeah, they're already doing that.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
File this under 'no shit sherlock'
But CO2 seems more like a finite resource than a toxic emissions.
Why? CO2 is the ONLY emission that the biosphere of the entire planet is built around consuming.
CO2 is not pollution, in any sense of the word.
Rather than chasing after black unicorns based on the uncertain idea that possibly the earth MIGHT warm enough to cause any issues at all, we should address real pollution that effects real people living now.
That is the biggest crime in my book, people are focused on CO2 so much they are missing real pollution much closer at hand.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oh poppycock. Fracking is an old (over 100 years) well-proven technology. If it weren't any good we would have known it 50 years ago.
Yes, that has certainly done a great job in China, Russia, Poland, etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This should not be a surprise that the emissions are lowest in 20 years, that's because so many manufacturing jobs have been moved out of USA.
The reality is that the wealthier economy can allow the luxury of decreasing its pollution, but not a poorer economy. Poor people don't care about the environment. Huge governments also don't care about the environment, see USSR for reference.
You can't handle the truth.
Methane leakage is a significant source of greenhouse gases.
It's quite questionable as to whether the switch to natural gas is a significant benefit in terms of global warming for a variety of reasons.
http://energyinnovation.org/2012/05/natural-gas-methane-leakage-and-climate-change/
Go ahead and check for yourself.
It could be argued that whether or not Mann lied was investigated by the same officials who covered up the Sandusky situation to protect Paterno. That's a pretty clear link that does cast doubt on whether or not Mann should have been exonerated in the first place. Whether or not it's true is entirely different. There's no evidence that it is, so the linkage is pure speculation, fitting only for the Senate Majority Leader to put on the congressional record.
Since we also price most pollution at $0, the argument applies there as well. The difficulty of assessing total cost accurately should not be an excuse to pretend the total cost is $0, just as the failure to charge you for each exhalation should not be an excuse to charge a coal plant $0.
If you agree that CO2 is a problem, pricing CO2 emissions is the right answer.
Agree to the premise, disagree to the conclusion unless you add a second premise that we have the power to price emissions uniformly across jurisdictions, or at least the ability to prevent substitution of emissions from one jurisdiction to the next.
If you increase the cost of emissions only in the US, the rational thing for emitters to do will be to substitute emissions somewhere else. A lot of steel gets made in China (with no pollution controls to speak of) and shipped to Europe (ironically, in dirty diesel powered freighters) because CO2 targets (and hence costs) vary across borders.
You can deal with this by simply applying a tarriff on products from countries that don't implement reasonable carbon controls. For a large power to pass WTO review you have to base this tarriff on an estimate of the amount of polution caused by producing the product in the exporting country. But the money raised from the tarriff would more than pay for the cost of estimating the amount of polution being generated in the exporting country. And in reality if a major trade block like NAFTA or the EU implemented such tarriffs others would quickly implement their own carbon dioxide controls. As long as the carbon dioxide emissions are being factored into the price, the exporting country would rather not have that done by the importing country collecting tarriffs.
I don't think that a carbon tax should be the only acceptable way to avoid the tarriff. If the exporter is lowering their emissions faster than the importing country through some other scheme then it would be unfair to apply the tarriff, be that through subsidy of alternate power sources or harnessing the power of the flying spagetti monster. But practically all economists agree that a carbon tax is the cheapest way to address the problem.
The truth is that if the US or Europe wanted to get real about CO2 they could. Maybe some smaller countries acting alone couldn't do this because they would be smaked down by the WTO, but they could try this and if enough small countries did this that would work too.
Nothing is 100% safe and effective. Been that way for 50,000 years.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
At worst it MAY raise global temperatures somewhat, making more land arable...
Why do you think MAY?
CO2 is a greenhouse gas like many others. Like the glass in a real greenhouse itnisncausing warming. There is no question about that, except the USA spread fud of the last 15 years.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, said the shift away from coal is reason for 'cautious optimism' about potential ways to deal with climate change"
Only if we close the plants down. If the economy comes back soon and these things are still operational, they'll turn them back on.
We should strike while the iron is hot and get these things closed. It's very easy to make a gas plant, we can have ample capacity in time for a resurgence in industry.
Yeah. but we're now doing it on a scale at such a speed that safety and known good practices are irrevelant.
It's very telling that the fracking companys got an exemption to the Clean Air and Clean Water EPA acts.
I prefer having air and water over nautral gas....
Only a socialist planned economy on a global scale can deal with the environmental pollution crisis. Workers to power! Expropriate the bourgeoisie! Dogfart!
It won't work, based on the record of previous "Dictatorships of the Proletariat".
EUROPE'S ENVIRONMENTAL NIGHTMARE: HARD ROAD TO RECOVERY
Dogfart!
A fair characterization of Communist governance.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The countries that adopted Kyoto protocolls have far less economic problems than the USA. How do you explain that?
Spain is one of them, so is Zimbabwe.
So basically, wrong. Or at least the data is too mixed to say what you are saying.
But there's another side to your story... Kyoto was designed a wealth transfer pipe from large nations to small ones. So you are surprised that it is having the desired affects?
Productivity has nothing to do with the way how energy is produced.
Productivity very much has to do with controls placed on the environment around a business and the cost of everything from living to materials, all of which further regulations on power generation raises.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Rather than speculate you could actually go read the report on Mann and see who the investigating officials were:
Composition of the Investigatory Committee:
Sarah M. Assmann, Waller Professor
Department of Biology
Welford Castleman, Evan Pugh Professor and Eberly Distinguished Chair in Science
Department of Chemistry and Department of Physics
Mary Jane Irwin, Evan Pugh Professor
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Nina G. Jablonski, Department Head and Professor
Department of Anthropology
Fred W. Vondracek, Professor
Department of Human Development and Family Studies
Research Integrity Officer:
Candice Yekel, Director of the Office for Research Protections
Penn State never did a formal investigation of Sandusky until the past year so it's unlikely that any of those people knew anything about it.
it means we outsourced our means of production (real wealth creation) to China, look at their pollution levels.
Carbon emissions and the economy are pretty tightly linked, so if the economy is down, carbon emissions go down. And if you force carbon emissions to go down, the economy goes down. That's because energy is the single most important input to economic activity.
Why? CO2 is the ONLY emission that the biosphere of the entire planet is built around consuming.
I beg to differ. Fixed nitrogen (mostly NOx) is another such emission, consumed by the biosphere whether in vapor or dissolved forms, from combustion by-products, sewage, or fertilizer run-off (especially fertilizer). So are Phosphates, found in detergents, fertilizer, and sewage (and of all major nutrients, possibly the most highly bio-concentrated in terms of the ratio between ambient environment and living organism). Unfortunately, while artificial applications of these nutrients are a boon to agriculture, their haphazard disposal results in eutrophication of freshwater bodies, and dead zones and red tides along coasts. As with all complex systems, the details are important.
In terms of CO2, if we were to assume all other factors remain the same (distribution of temperature and precipitation), we'd likely see some benefit to crops which utilize C3 photosynthesis AND are at least sometimes limited by CO2 uptake vs other nutrients -- I suspect rice, cassava, and potatoes would fall into this category, but not sure about soy and most fruits and vegetables (they're also C3 plants, but not sure how CO2-limited they are). C4-based plants and crops (wheat, corn) will likely show little benefit, being capable of high-intensity photosynthesis in the presence of low CO2 concentration.
The distribution of other limiting factors is the key. I suspect over-all biological production (on land) will rise, but the benefits will vary. For instance, swaths of Canada and Russia will benefit from a longer growing season; Saharan Africa may become greener as well due to more precipitation, while the mid and south-west US could experience reduced biological productivity. But these details of precipitation changes are one of those things associated with complex models (that critics like to deride) and lots of potential error.
Oceanic productivity will also be affected. CO2 could be a limiting factor in niche cases (sea-grass beds, maybe), but in broad swaths of the ocean, other factors predominate (nitrogen, phosphorous, iron, dissolved O2). Acidification is an interesting problem -- you don't need as complex of a model to determine the degree, it's a much more straightforward function. Organisms utilizing carbonate skeletons (and those that eat them) will suffer, while those using siliceous or organic frameworks may benefit from reduced competition. Likewise, lower O2 solubility and changes in inter-strata mixing will benefit some organisms (jellyfish) while penalizing others (possibly commercial fish species).
Personally, I think reducing CO2 production through laws is a fool's game, when enforcement is divided among multiple sovereign players, some who stand to gain an economic advantage by cheating. But I have a beef with climate denialists anyway -- they interfere with our ability to plan and invest in the technology and infrastructure required to adapt to climate changes.
...from fracking, but something else.
I'm still skeptical about any pro-fracking news. There has been some evidence that fracking and the sequestration of the fracking fluids is causing some problems. So my impression is the pro-fracking interests need some good press.
Taking a quick look at some other sources, it looks as if coal still plays a big part in power generation and isn't letting up any time soon.
Political and investment
Those links do not absolutely refute the possibility that fracked gas has helped nor do they suggest it has. They do suggest coal is doing okay despite some EPA controls re emissions.
It just seems more likely to me there is a cumulative effective of better emission controls on cars, high-efficiency heating systems, and emission controls on industry operations (eg, power generating stations) over a period of years.
I just checked the emissions of a nearby coal-fired plant. Between 1999 and 2003, emissions dropped by more than half and have been held there ever since. It looks as if the EPA regs are having a positive impact in our area.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
"Over time alternative energy WILL naturally overcome traditional sources just in cost benefit alone, there is no need to hurt the productivity of countries to make that happen."
And as asked to conservative when will that happen ? The best answer I got was "when alternative energy are cheaper than oil and coal". The problem is, by that time we have burn so many of both that climate change might be irreversible and well going thru. The problem is that conservative lacks UTTERLY in insight, they see their own generaztion only, and future folk are fucked, but who cares. The problem is, some of us see beyond the next year in econom,y and look at maybe 5 or 10 generation in future. Who cares if you lower economy strength by 5, 10% , if rather than take that you fuck up future generation that the climate get so chaotic that the damage long term is greater. The truth is that conservative don't care a shitty bit on the long term consequence. Which is why by the way they don#t care about pollution law in general.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The 'data' as presented show no attribution of cause nor attribution of effect.
Yet MEMann-HockyStick and many others jump to illogical conclusions in
attempts to safeguard their cherished irrational beliefs that have nothing to
do with science and nothing to do with even real global climate change.
What royal clowns these twits.
It's only emissions of CO2 FROM COAL that are down.
"Since 1990, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 10.5%."
Source: U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report
It's not as if burning natural gas doesn't also release CO2 into the atmosphere, and where I'm happy that coal fired power plants are going away, I'm sad that we're not more serious about reducing overall power consumption by increasing efficiency, especially in our residences.
The U.S. has almost completely left rental property residences out of the picture. There's no real business (monetary or tax) incentive to encourage apartment owners or developers to include more efficient appliances or to use better building methods, design standards or other systems that would lower energy usage.
Apparently no one that posts here has their head in the clouds...
When your drinking water is polluted and gets poisonous, I count that as not safe.
... to China.
there is one way for the mom to earn that much money a month: legs apart, lying in a bed...
>Yeah. but we're now doing it on a scale at such a speed that safety and known good practices are irrevelant.
>It's very telling that the fracking companys got an exemption to the Clean Air and Clean Water EPA acts.
Neither of these are valid arguments. Safety and known good practices are obviously VERY relevant. And an exemption to a Federal Law is also irrelevant when in fact states are doing the regulation.
Natural gas is cheap now and a regular combustion engine can easily be converted to operate natural gas - though you may lose power. Wouldn't that be the easiest way to get rid of our dependency on foreign oil?
The article said we've reached 1992. So about another 10% to go. Natural gas electricity conversion should easily reach this. Even if a new Republican government eases the new draconian vehicle admission standards (twice mpg as now).
1) False.
2) You haven't seen the video of the tap water igniting, obviously.
Obviously some that have appeared here and on other public forums in recent times, especially the corporate "free speech" paid posters, would have us instead put blind trust Rupert Murdochs' WSJ.
The WSJ has frequently promoted short term profits above all else no matter what that does to personal, regional, national, and global individual, institutional and governmental well-being.