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."
Read the article. It talks about that quite a bit.
While conservation efforts, the lagging economy and greater use of renewable energy are factors in the CO2 decline, the drop-off is due mainly to low-priced natural gas, the agency said.
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$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It produces around 30-40% less CO2 than coal for the same power output. Coal is particularly bad, both in terms of CO2 production, and other kinds of pollution (though with currently mandated scrubbers it's not as bad a contributor to things like acid rain as it once was).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
Except if you'd looked at the graph in TFA, you'd see that CO2 emissions by the US were pretty level for a good bit of the past decade, and appear to have started trending downward prior to the 2008 economic crash.
I'm sure the state of the economy has a role in this, but it's certainly not the whole story.
Additionally, the summary quote from Pielke may be a bit misleading when taken in isolation. In the article he also states that "Natural gas is not a long-term solution to the CO2 problem". I only mention this because most people won't bother to read the article.
#DeleteChrome
No, not at all.
If you look at the article (it's not that long, won't take that long), they discuss whether the level of economic activity has changed because of the state of the economy. It makes it very clear that this has nothing to do with the state of the economy being in slow-growth.
And it's not the state of the economy is bad for everyone, you know? Luxury cars, yachts, diamonds, high-end houses and condos aren't doing all that badly, and in some cases are doing very very well.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
A big part of this is the advantage of modern natural gas power plants is the combined-cycle nature of their operation vs. the single cycle of coal plants. In a coal plant, burning coal heats water which turns to steam which drives a turbine that is connected to the generator. In a combined cycle gas plant, instead of just burning the gas for heat, they use the gas to power a turbine similar to one that you would find in a military jet engine. The turbine produces mechanical energy on its output shaft which drives a generator directly in addition to the hot output gas is also used to power a heat exchangers which boil water and makes more electricity in using the traditional method.
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.
Except that the reason it is cheap is because of shale gas. Of which there is at least a 100 year supply. It is just not going to run out for decades, even with massive increases in usage.
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
Kyoto was never about saving the Earth. It was about holding the US back so the rest of the world could catch up economicly.
You're half right. Kyoto was never about saving the Earth. Kyoto was about politicians pretending to care about saving the earth to improve their reelection chances by making promises that would be delivered far enough in the future that those making the promises could not be held accountable.
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!)?
The fact that you can't price perfectly (particularly since there is no market here) doesn't mean you can't price at all. Right now, we price CO2 emissions at 0. For those who agree on the basic premise that CO2 emissions are a problem, 0 is obviously too low a price.
If you agree that CO2 is a problem, pricing CO2 emissions is the right answer.
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!
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.
The power generation plants use purpose built gas turbines designed specifically for electrical generation with methane fuel. they're large, heavy, and designed for longer duty than aircraft engines.
You do understand that they mine the cheapest, easiest to get at gas first, just like any other resource. The cost of production goes up steadily until it crosses the cost of something else. Then production slows or stops, always long before the resource is fully depleted.
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/
Fracking itself is an excellent example, none of the stuff fracking can get to was considered viable to extract not that long ago.
Fracking is a bad example. We've been able to horizontally fracture oil wells for the past 50 years. It hasn't been much utilized because it is expensive. It was only when crude oil starting hitting $90 a barrel did it start to get popular.
Same with fracking natural gas - it's an economic rather than technical decision. Most of the major 'breakthroughs' in hydrocarbon resource extraction haven't occurred because of improved technology, but instead (largely) due to price increases.
Yep, there is a lot of oil and natural gas around. Maybe not so much relatively inexpensive stuff around. 'Cost effective' is an arguable point. If energy prices increase too much, the economies tend to fall off (as noted in TFA). We'd best hope that renewables get more reasonable fairly soon.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Nothing is 100% safe and effective. Been that way for 50,000 years.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The last time the state of Milankovitch Cycles was similar to what they are now was during the interglacial about 430,000 years ago. That one lasted about 30,000 years. But if "On the Effect of a New Grand Minimum of Solar Activity on the Future Climate on Earth" (Feulner & Rahmstorf 2010) is right then the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases has postponed any new ice age indefinitely. It's unlikely a new glacial period will happen any time soon certainly not in the lifetime of anyone alive today*.
*Assuming no breakthroughs in immortality.