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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
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.
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.
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.
The solution is distributed solar. Solar pays back in under 5 years now with a lifetime of 20+. The only problem with solar is that the energy companies (almost all privatized now) see solar as a threat, so they continue to push the "it just doesn't work" press releases. Despite the fact they are all lies, people still believe, so long as it lines up with their personal philosophies.
Grid tied solar on homes would solve the power issue. Buy the dumped panels from China for the initial installation, and ramp up domestic production for replacement parts (as 20+ year life is good, but still means you need to replace about 5% per year forever). Distributed solar will take care of almost all our problems. We may end up with the (good) problem of more peak generation than demand, in which case we'd need to invest in some sufficient storage (China uses hydro storage, and it's quite effective - yes, I've been to Tien Shi and seen the production facility). Enough of that stable enough, and we could decrease baseline production.
Learn to love Alaska
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!