carbon emissions

As Global CO2 Emissions Rise, Scientists Warn 2-Degree Target Is Nearly Out Of Reach: ‘We Need A Radical Plan’

Global carbon dioxide emissions are set to rise again this year, putting the world on a path toward dangerous climate change and making the internationally-accepted warming target of 2 degrees Celsius nearly “unachievable,” say researchers.

According to a new paper published yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change, carbon dioxide emissions will rise by 2.6 percent this year, fueled by major increases in China and India. This follows a record year in 2011, when countries pumped 3.1 percent more global warming pollution into the atmosphere — making it very likely that the world will blow past the 2 degree C warming threshold that scientists and international negotiators agree is needed to avoid catastrophic consequences.

Some even call global warming of 2 degrees C, which is on the lowest end of projections, a “prescription for disaster.”

Here’s how one of the report’s authors characterized the problem when talking to The Guardian:

“I am worried that the risks of dangerous climate change are too high on our current emissions trajectory. We need a radical plan,” said co-author Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Britain and professor at the University of East Anglia.

Current emissions growth is placing the world on a path to warm between 4C and 6C, says the study, with global emissions jumping 58% between 1990 and this year. The study focuses on emissions from burning fossil fuels and cement production.

“Unless large and concerted global mitigation efforts are initiated soon, the goal of remaining below 2C will soon become unachievable,” say the authors.

The findings come during the COP18 international climate talks in Doha, Qatar, where observers have low expectations for any agreements to reduce carbon emissions. The world’s two biggest emitters — China and the U.S. — are quietly setting up a framework for a possible international climate treaty after 2015. In the meantime, global warming pollution continues unabated and scientists warn that the window for action is closing fast.

“We are losing control of our ability to get a handle on the global warming problem,” said Canadian Climate Scientist Andrew Weaver, responding to the latest data on carbon emissions.

Last week, the World Bank issued a report sumarizing the latest climate science. It concluded that the world is on track for 4 degrees Celsius warming by the end of the century — an extremely dangerous rise in temperature that ensure “extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.”

How A Cornucopia of Prosperity Can Flow From Carbon Tax

by Craig A. Severance, via Energy Economy Online

Right now the climate and energy community is stuck.  There is a growing consensus, including among conservatives, that it is finally time for a carbon tax.  Yet, no politician — especially President Obama — seems ready to advance the proposal.

The previous proposal to do something about climate — cap&trade — failed to gain wildly popular public enthusiasm (and we need this level of support).  While economists thought cap&trade was the best way to address the carbon pollution that is causing extreme climate disruption, it wasn’t seen as “giving back” enough to the public.

We Need Work not Wonk.  A recent American Enterprise Institute conference on a carbon tax showed broad support for the idea among both Republicans and Democrats.  Conservatives have long wanted to lower taxes on earnings, and many have called for taxing consumption or pollution to achieve this.  A properly structured carbon tax can also bring investment and jobs, and effective action on climate.

However, the conference showed how quickly the discussion can fall into a “wonky” technical morass of various ways to carry out a carbon tax.  There are a host of different and complex ways to assess a carbon tax — but that is not where the discussion needs to begin.

To gain wildly enthusiastic public support, we must first discuss the economic prosperity that can flow from a carbon tax.

No “Bitter Pill.” As much as Americans now want action on extreme climate disruption, the public just won’t take any “bitter pill” to solve the problem.

Climate economists know preventing loss of life and economic damages from superstorms, droughts, floods, and wildfires more than justifies taking action now.  This is all very true and rational, but President Obama knows the public wants action on the economy.

The nation’s main focus is still “jobs, jobs, jobs”.  The President has his ear keenly attuned to the public voice, and he is right to insist economic prosperity must flow from any climate proposals.

The price of climate action will be acceptable if it is used to deliver what the public wants.  Salespeople never begin by focusing on price, but rather strive to meet what the customer wants.  Once the customer decides they want something, they are willing to pay the price to get it.

To gain wild enthusiasm from the public, we must learn to talk about climate action smartly, and show that action on climate is also a way to achieve very popular and tangible economic proposals the public wants.

Fortunately, this won’t be hard.

Top 10 Ways Economic Prosperity Can Flow From Carbon Tax:

Depending on the level of tax placed on carbon and the amount of revenues thus raised, the following “Top 10″ benefits can flow to the public:

10.  Spur New Automobile Buying. With higher prices at the pump, people want more fuel efficient vehicles.  One fair use of some of the funds from a carbon tax would be an improved “Cash for Clunkers” program, basing cash rebates on percentage improvement in fuel economy. This will create auto industry jobs, and get efficient cars on the roads faster.

9.  Build Needed Projects. Another fair use of carbon tax revenues is to repair, and to prevent, damages from extreme weather events.  While pundits have said GDP may now rise with rebuilding from Superstorm Sandy, where are the tens of billions of dollars needed?  Coastal areas also now want to prevent damage from future climate disasters.  Seawalls, levees and other structures are needed just to protect against the global warming we’ve already “baked in”.  On the positive side, communities will use rail projects to help us prosper without burning so much oil.  With these projects, plus private utility spending to convert electric generation to renewable energy, construction jobs will be a major benefit flowing from action on the climate.

8.  Better Buildings Soon. People want to live and work in more comfortable and energy efficient buildings, but most Americans are too “maxed out” and underwater to finance the needed energy improvements.   Block grants of billions of dollars in “seed funds” to states can help them set up revolving-fund special assessment districts to finance energy efficiency and renewable projects. Because the loans are repaid by energy savings, only initial seed funding would be needed. This same Federal seed funding can be used to encourage (instead of failed attempts to require) states to pass strict energy building codes for new construction.  For instance, if a state agrees to pass a strict energy code on new buildings, its amount of seed funding for retrofits would be quadrupled.  Putting money in the hands of building owners to do needed energy work can be a major tool for job creation in local communities across America. 

7.  Raise Revenue and Break the Debt Junkee Habit. For the past several years, about one-third of the total “Want-List” funded by the Federal government has been paid with borrowed money.  New revenue is needed, but of course everyone wants a tax that can be “paid by the other guy”.  A carbon tax fits this, because it offers everyone the option to avoid paying it by changing their behavior.  Yet, according to the Brookings Institution, even a very modest carbon tax could raise an average over 10 years of about $150 billion per year, while cutting carbon emissions significantly. (Funding this full “Top Ten” list would require a somewhat more serious carbon tax, but also includes more economic benefits.)  An energy and climate plan would also reduce our trade deficit — by cutting oil imports and making U.S. manufacturers more competitive — and thus keep more dollars circulating in the U.S. economy, where they are taxed.

6.  Stimulus Effect Now. In the “Magic Math” of Washington, a new proposal is not considered to add to the Federal Deficit so long as it pays for itself over the next 10 years.  In other words, an overall proposal, such as these Top Ten Ways, could be structured to provide a “Stimulus Effect” right now.  Yet it can still be Budget Neutral so long as it pays for itself over 10 years.  Unlike the usual Washington smoke-and-mirrors that depend on outrageous assumptions about growth and other tricks, a carbon tax actually would be set to increase annually and thus could finance a stimulus effect now but truly be balanced over a 10 year period. 

5.  Help U.S. Manufacturers Compete. If the carbon tax is properly structured, imported products will also be assessed based upon the carbon pollutants used in their manufacture and the fuel used to get them to American borders.  This assessment on imports will help U.S. manufacturers compete against Chinese and other imports using dirty coal to make them, and barrels of oil to get them here.  It will also cut global carbon pollution, as much of the pollution by exporting nations is not for their own use but to ship us products.

4.  Give Employers a Tax Break. To gain the support of business, a major tax break should be given to employers, to make it easier to hire U.S. workers.  Extend the “Payroll Tax Holiday” to include the employer’s share of payroll taxes, not just the employee’s share.  Because this is laser focused on jobs, this “employer-friendly” tax break should take priority over cutting tax rates on corporate profits — profits often obtained by slashing workers.

3.  Extend the Payroll Tax Holiday on Wages. Giving back revenues collected from the carbon tax with every paycheck, the current Payroll Tax Holiday of 2% of wages for the employee share of Social Security Taxes should be extended, adding about $1,000 a year to the average family’s take-home pay.   We can thus achieve a long sought goal of conservatives — using taxes on consumption (of a pollutant) to fund a tax break on earnings. To be anti-regressive, the tax break has to be on payroll taxes, because unlike income tax, payroll taxes are paid by even the poorest of workers.  Cutting Social Security taxes naturally raises concerns over the solvency of Social Security, but because this Payroll Tax Holiday would now be funded, it could be structured so as not to affect the program.

2.  JOBS, JOBS, JOBS. All the benefits in the Top Ten Ways will flow out to create more jobs.  Auto industry jobs, construction jobs, energy efficiency and renewable energy jobs (industries more job-intensive than the fossil fuels they would replace), railroad and mass transit jobs, and jobs throughout the economy when employers and wage earners spend their extra cash, will all put Americans to work.  A more effective package of measures for job creation would be hard to imagine.

AND FINALLY — THE #1 WAY A CARBON TAX CAN FLOW BENEFITS TO THE ECONOMY:

1.  Fight Global Warming! Global warming is showing us the true cost of “cheap energy” from coal and other fossil fuels.  If we don’t do something about this, we will keep getting slammed by superstorms, droughts, floods, sea level rise, mass extinctions, wildfires, and crop failures.  Aren’t we sick of extreme climate disruption already?? Can we really take more of this without doing something about it!?

The very thing that makes a consumption tax attractive to conservatives — our ability to choose NOT to pay the tax by choosing NOT to consume the taxed product — is what can make a carbon tax effective in fighting global warming.  By taxing carbon, people will choose not to pay the carbon tax by reducing their consumption of carbon-intensive fuels and products.

It is highly likely we will have to tinker with the level of carbon tax to get this right.  This “Top Ten” list, however, shows us where the monies we collect from a serious carbon tax can go.

They will be given back to us, to help us achieve economic goals we could not achieve without it.

Craig A. Severance, CPA is co-author of The Economics of Nuclear and Coal Power (Praeger 1976), and former Assistant to the Chairman and to Chief Commerce Counsel, Iowa State Commerce Commission. This piece was originally published at Energy Economy Online and was reprinted with permission.

UN Climate Chief Calls Out U.S. For Climate Inaction: Hurricane Sandy Is ‘Yet Another Wake-up Call’

Hurricane Sandy’s $50 billion damage demonstrated the vulnerability of America’s largest cities to the effects of global warming. Christiana Figueres, the top United Nations diplomat for international climate negotiations, said Sandy serves as “yet another wake-up call” for the U.S. to cut carbon pollution.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Figueres made the case for why it’s in the country’s best interest to lead with urgency:

FIGUERES: First, from a domestic perspective, why would the United States allow other countries to pursue the technologies of the future while the United States stays with the technologies that are becoming every day more obsolete, hence losing its future competitiveness in an increasingly competitive world? I don’t think that the visionary leaders of the United States will let this happen. I do think that there is going to be increasing pressure in particular from the private sector to catch up with the rest of the world, which is moving toward low-carbon technologies. So just from a domestic point of view, it doesn’t make any sense.

e360: What about the frustration part of that, that we are now deep into this process and the U.S. so far has not made a formal commitment?

FIGUERES: One must say, given the historical responsibility that the United States plays in this issue, it is quite a unique position that the United States is in and one that frankly they have not responded to in a commensurate manner. So, yes, if the United States does not strengthen its participation in the global climate regime under the newly re-elected president I think there will be increased frustration with the United States.

More than 30 countries have already taken steps well beyond the U.S., instituting caps on carbon pollution or a carbon tax, including Europe, Australia, South Korea, South Africa, and Mexico. As Figueres says, it is not a choice between lower pollution and economic growth, since climate change devastates businesses and American security.

Next week, global climate negotiations will continue what Figueres calls “slow but steady” progress at a conference in Doha, Qatar.

Nearly 200 Leading Global Companies And Investors Call For ‘Clear, Stable, Ambitous’ Carbon Price

by Tom Wittig

Even as the Obama Administration backs away from making climate change an immediate priority in its second term, the world’s leading companies — some of them fossil fuel companies — are calling for more action.

Last week, Exxon reiterated its support for a carbon tax in order to “address rising emissions.” And this week, Royal Dutch Shell has come out in support of a global initiative to curb greenhouse gas emissions.  The oil giant cosigned a letter with Statoil and 100 other companies asking politicians worldwide to put a predictable price on carbon.

The joint letter will be presented to Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner on Climate Change:

A clear, stable, ambitious and cost-effective policy framework is essential to underpin the investment needed to deliver substantial greenhouse gas emissions reductions by mid-century. As business leaders, we believe that the certainty created by this policy framework and the investment it will unlock offers the prospect of increased business success and job creation in key sectors including energy, transport and the built environment.

Released ahead of the UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar, the letter points out that “a convincing strategy to reduce emissions… continues to evade the global community,” but warns against considering carbon pricing a “silver bullet.” Instead, the companies advocate combining carbon pricing “with other locally appropriate policies.”

And just today, a group of 80 investors with more than $1 trillion in assets issued a similar letter to world governments calling on them to establish better policies to encourage swifter climate action:

Investors worldwide are currently taking actions to address climate risks and opportunities. These range from considering and addressing climate risks in their investments, directly investing in assets such as renewable energy, low-carbon energy infrastructure, and clean technology, encouraging companies to improve energy efficiency and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, measuring and disclosing the carbon performance of their own portfolios, to persuading regulators to require corporate disclosure of the business impacts of climate change. These efforts are not yet sufficient and must be scaled up dramatically. Governments will need to adopt stronger, more consistent policy frameworks which provide the right market signals to support increased investment.

These calls for action come one day after the World Bank released a new report summarizing the state of climate science. The study concludes that the world will encounter “unprecedented heat waves, severe drought, and major floods” if it continues on its path to a 4˚C increase by 2100.

While Shell’s support of carbon pricing is not unprecedented, – it admitted internally pricing of $40 per ton CO2 in 2010 — it does provide new fodder for the dialogue around pricing carbon. Unfortunately, even though Shell, Exxon and the world’s top investors are endorsing this kind of carbon policy, the Obama Administration still won’t touch it.

Tom Wittig is an intern on the ocean policy team at the Center for American Progress.

The Road To Climate Disaster Is Paved With Coal: 1,200 New Coal Plants Planned Around The World

Some weeks, a few news stories come together to illustrate just how dire the situation is for the world’s climate. This week is one of them.

This morning, new data from the World Meteorological Organization showed that carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide levels hit record highs in 2011. As of last year, concentrations of CO2 — one of the most abundant heat-trapping gases — hit 390.9 parts per million. (350 ppm is what many scientists say is the upper limit on “safe” levels of CO2).

According to WMO, we’ve seen a 30 percent increase in “radiative forcing” — i.e. the amount of heat trapped on earth — since 1990.

These record levels of greenhouse gas emissions aren’t a huge surprise considering that other organizations have reported similar findings. The real news is what the world intends to do about it. And according to a new report on the global pipeline for coal-fired power plants — a technology that accounted for 45 percent of CO2 in 2011 — there’s not much hope for slowing the record pace of global warming pollution.

According to a new analysis released today by the World Resources Institute, there are nearly 1,200 new coal plants planned for construction around the world. Most of those plants will be built in China and India, but there are dozens planned for America, Australia, Europe, and Russia.

The report outlines virtually every coal plant announced around the world. That does not necessarily mean that every one will get built. In the U.S., for example, it is highly unlikely that many — if any — new coal plants will move forward as cheap natural gas, growing renewables, and legal pressure from environmental groups trips up the pipeline. (Also, as Justin Guay of the Sierra Club points out in a piece today, local resistance in communities around the world is also hindering many of these projects).

But the tally is still staggering. If all these plants were built, they would amount to generation capacity four times greater than the entire U.S. coal fleet. And to see just how rapidly coal consumption is increasing in Asia, take a look at this animated graphic from the Energy Information Administration.

The interactive map below shows where these plants could be constructed:

Ironically, the World Bank — a lending institution responsible for helping finance some of the world’s largest coal plants — released a report this week outlining the “devastating” consequences of our current emissions path. Summarizing leading climate change research, the institution warned that the planet is on track to warm by 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, thus triggering “extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.”

That’s more conservative than the International Energy Agency, which warned recently that we are on a path toward 5.7 degree Celsius warming by the end of the century. The IEA also issued a resource assessment last week concluding that we must leave roughly two-thirds of carbon reserves in the ground in order keep global temperature rise at 2 degrees Celsius — a widely-recognized threshold for preventing catastrophic climate change.

It’s clear that we’re still nowhere near considering that as an option.

Related stories:

• Shocking World Bank Climate Report: ‘A 4°C [7°F] World Can, And Must, Be Avoided’ To Avert ‘Devastating’ Impacts
• Do The Math: Mr. McKibben Goes To Washington
• In The ‘Crazy’ World Of Carbon Finance, Coal Now Qualifies For Emission Reduction Credits
• Interactive Graphic: China’s Explosive Consumption of Coal

Why Hundreds More Dirty, Aging Coal Plants In The U.S. Are ‘Ripe For Retirement’

Photo: danoStL via Flickr

by Katie Valentine

America’s older coal generators are dirtier, less efficient and less utilized than the rest of the country’s coal fleet. And a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists has found they’re not economically viable either.

The report’s authors looked at each coal generator in the U.S. and determined whether its operating costs would be higher than those of a natural gas generator when updated with any of the pollution controls for sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, mercury or soot that it lacked. It found that up to 353 coal-fired generators in 31 states are “ripe for retirement” – meaning adding upgrades important to the health of communities and the planet was more costly than retiring the coal plant or using natural gas and renewable energy.

The 353 generators, which account for about six percent of the nation’s power supply, are in addition to the UCS’s estimated 288 units that have already been scheduled for retirement in the U.S.  According to the report, the two groups of generators – those which are ripe-for-retirement and those which will be closing soon – have a lot in common:

• On average, the ripe-for-retirement generators are 45 years old – 15 years past the 30-year average lifespan of a coal generator and 5 years shy of the average age of the 288 generators slated for closure.
• The two groups of coal generators are dirty – more than 70 percent of the generators identified as ripe-for-retirement lacked at least three out of the four pollution control upgrades accounted for in the study. The same is true for 88 percent of the soon-to-be-closed generators.
• The two groups are under-utilized. On average, ripe-for-retirement generators operate at 47 percent of their power generation capacity, while the generators slated for closure operate at 44 percent. The total U.S. coal fleet operates at 64 percent of its capacity.

The report found the ripe-for-retirement generators were primarily located in the Southeast, with Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida containing the most, followed by Michigan. Southern Company, which operates in Georgia, Alabama and the Florida panhandle, owns about 27 percent of the 353 ripe-for-retirement units, but has announced the fewest number of closures when compared to other large energy companies, including Tennessee Valley Authority and Duke Energy Corp.

These findings make clear that, as America’s existing coal fleet ages and natural gas and renewable energy sources become more affordable, it will be the energy market – not environmental regulations – that plays the largest role in phasing out coal in the country. Even without accounting for needed pollution controls updates, the report found that about 40 percent of the ripe-for-retirement coal generators are more expensive to operate than existing natural gas plants.

“Consumers are hearing, especially during the election, about the EPA’s war on coal and how we need to keep coal plants open, and our analysis provides good information to show that that’s not necessarily the case,” Steve Clemmer, research director of the UCS’s climate and energy program and one of the report’s authors, said during a webcast Wednesday.

Replacing the 353 ripe-for-retirement and 288 scheduled-to-close generators with natural gas generators would reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 245 million tons per year — equivalent to 9.8 percent of U.S. power sector CO2 emissions in 2010. Of course, natural gas is not a long-term solution to climate change, and the report notes that if ripe-for-retirement generators are closed, state governments should incorporate renewable energy and energy-saving technologies into its replacement energy sources.

Katie Valentine graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in journalism. She is an intern on the international policy team at the Center for American Progress.

Exxon: Carbon Tax Would ‘Play A Significant Role In Addressing Rising Emissions’

President Obama indicated yesterday in a press conference that a carbon tax is not high on his Administration’s priority list. Nor does the policy have much support from leading Republicans in the House of Representatives.

But with chatter about carbon taxes in both conservative and progressive Washington political circles growing into a serious bi-partisan conversation, influential players are chiming in with their support.

Speaking to Bloomberg News, oil and gas giant Exxon reiterated its support for a carbon tax yesterday. A spokeswoman for the company said that the tool could “play a significant role in addressing the challenge of rising emissions.”

“Combined with further advances in energy efficiency and new technologies spurred by market innovation, a well-designed carbon tax could play a significant role in addressing the challenge of rising emissions,” Kimberly Brasington, a spokeswoman for the company, said in an e-mail. “A carbon tax should be made revenue neutral via tax offsets in other areas,” she added.

Exxon’s political action committee gave nearly $1.2 million to political candidates in the past two years, 93 percent of it to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Exxon is the biggest U.S. natural-gas producer. A carbon tax could boost demand for natural gas in U.S. power plants, as gas emits half the carbon dioxide as coal when burned to make electricity.

This is not a new policy stance. The company came out in favor of a carbon tax in 2009 so that it could point to something it did support while lobbying against the cap and trade program being considered in Congress at that time.

“As a businessman it is hard to speak favorably about any new tax,” said Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson in January of 2009. “But a carbon tax strikes me as a more direct, a more transparent and a more effective approach.”

Exxon appears to be sticking to its original position now that there are more serious discussions underway about how to price carbon.

Earlier this week, anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist said that swapping a carbon tax for a cut to the income tax might be acceptable to conservatives — a position that he has expressed before. However, Norquist walked those statements back a day later while facing pressure from the American Energy Alliance, a fossil fuel advocacy think tank supported by the Koch Brothers.

How Would We Implement A Carbon Tax? (Almost) Everything You Need To Know

by Richard W. Caperton

If you had told me on Tuesday morning that I was about to spend my day at a standing room only event that had nothing to do with the election, I would’ve said, “But, I’m not planning to go to a David Petraeus news conference!”  Ah, but it turns out that there are other topics that bring out the masses.  I did, in fact, spend the day at a standing room only event that had nothing to do with the election.

The topic?  Carbon taxes, of course.

Yesterday, the American Enterprise Institute hosted a conference to talk about anything and everything related to the economics of carbon taxes.  Normally, a full-day conference with more than a dozen speakers on a tax issue in DC will be lucky to get more than a few dozen attendees, even with a free lunch.  Carbon taxes, though, are different.  The enthusiasm for this issue is such that there were over 200 attendees, many of whom stood for half the day.

What makes carbon taxes different? Simply put, people across the political spectrum now know that putting a price on carbon is an indispensable tool for dealing with our climate and budget problems, and that a carbon tax is the most politically viable path forward.  This dynamic has created an exciting amount of momentum that now needs to be turned into policy.

Not only is the political situation ripe for a carbon tax, but yesterday’s AEI conference demonstrated that the thought leadership is ripe as well.  That’s not to say that there’s agreement on the best way to design a carbon tax; the ultimate design will likely be about political decisions as much as policy ones.  But, the implications of different policy choices are largely known, which was the focus of the conference.

The benefits of a carbon tax would be tremendous.  According to the Brookings Institution’s William Gale, the amount of money a carbon tax could raise is roughly comparable to the size of the Bush tax cuts, indexing the alternative minimum tax for inflation, or the budget sequester that’s part of the upcoming fiscal cliff.  Instituting a carbon tax would make it much easier to deal with our country’s budget crisis, because it would give us another tool for solving the problem.  And, a carbon tax can get significant reductions in greenhouse gas pollution.  Allen Fawcett presented findings from the Energy Modeling Forum that show a multitude of technology development scenarios that get to 50 percent reductions in greenhouse gases with a carbon tax.

Broadly speaking, there are two questions about designing a carbon tax: how to collect the money, and what to do with the money?  Neither of these is simple, and virtually every option involves tradeoffs.

First, let’s talk about collecting the revenue.  Do you want to cover the entire economy, just the energy sector, or even a smaller subset of industries?  As Rob Williams of Resources for the Future pointed out, most of the greenhouse gas reductions with a modest carbon tax will come from the electric power sector, which would seem to indicate that you could only deal with a small part of the economy and get almost all of the benefits at much lower political cost.  At the other extreme, you could cover things like agricultural-related methane emissions, although the mechanics of this are much more complicated.

After deciding how much of the economy to cover, you also need to decide where to assess the tax, which Jack Calder of the International Monetary Fund discussed.  You can assess the tax very far upstream, where fossil fuels enter the economy (at the mine mouth or wellhead, for instance).  This is relatively simple and gets at every use of fuels, but the problem is that it puts a tax on fuels that ultimately don’t get burned and contribute to climate change.  Oil used as a feedstock for plastics production, for instance, doesn’t add to greenhouse gas pollution, nor does coal burned in a hypothetical power plant with carbon capture and storage technology.  All things being equal, Calder’s ultimate recommendation is to make a carbon tax as similar as possible to our existing tax system, which should minimize administrative challenges and unintended consequences.

What about complementary policies?  That is, what should happen with the state renewable energy standards, federal incentives, and EPA regulations after a carbon tax is put in place.  While the conventional wisdom among economists is that these other policies simply make a carbon tax more expensive, Karen Palmer from Resources for the Future argued that these policies often deal with externalities – including positive externalities – that a carbon tax doesn’t fix.  And, the lesson from the acid rain program is that EPA needs to have the authority to go above and beyond a carbon tax based on up-to-date information about the costs and benefits of further pollution reductions.

Second, after you collect the revenue, you need to do something with it.  The biggest issue is that a carbon tax is most likely to be regressive; that is, it has a disproportionate impact on poor people.  Modeling by Aparna Mathur at AEI finds that a $15 carbon tax is effectively a tax of 3.54 percent of the income of the poorest decile of the population, but just .63 percent for the wealthiest.  Terry Dinan, a senior advisor at the Congressional Budget Office, has studied seven different ways to deal with this problem, and found that while there is no perfect solution, doing some sort of income tax or payroll tax rebate has a very positive effect.

Of course, once you have a pot of money (which will still be large even after fixing the regressivity problem), you want to spend the money wisely.  RFF’s Williams proposed three uses: cutting pre-existing taxes, reducing the deficit, and valuable public spending.  In the short term, it’s worth noting that simply reducing the deficit is probably not as valuable as spending on infrastructure, including clean energy infrastructure.

This is just a small sample of the issues that will come up in designing a carbon tax, and many of these choices don’t have options that are immediately obvious as being the “best” way to design the system.  But it’s clear that we know the implications of different policy choices.  After yesterday’s conference, no one should ever say that we don’t know how to design a carbon tax.  The bigger issue is that politicians need to decide what they want a carbon tax to achieve and then plug in the right policy tools.

And this is where the slowdown begins.  Of the standing room only crowd at AEI, there was almost certainly no consensus on any of the important questions.  Is the primary goal of a carbon tax to reduce the deficit?  Or to offset corporate income tax reductions?  Or to raise money for clean energy investments?  Or to simply cut pollution, with all of the money going back to consumers?

This issue will come to a head in 2013, and Climate Progress and CAP will have recommendations for building a progressive carbon tax.  Be on the lookout for new work on this issue in the coming weeks.

Richard W. Caperton is Director of Clean Energy Investment at the Center for American Progress.

Four Important Things To Know About California’s First Ever Carbon Auction

by Emily Reyna, via Environmental Defense Fund

While millions of Americans recover from the Sandy-Nor’easter extreme weather event combo, and even as President Obama’s remarks about action against a “warming planet” linger, all eyes will be on California this coming Wednesday. This is when the next big event in the climate change conversation will take place.

Between 10am and 1pm pacific time on November 14th, California will conduct the state’s first ever cap-and-trade auction for climate change pollution.  This landmark event will kick off the second largest carbon market in the world, the European Union being the first. Entities covered in the program include utilities, oil refineries, oil producers, and large manufactures, though other individuals and organizations can also participate to buy carbon allowances if they meet the state’s rigorous requirements.  A practice run was held back in August, and all systems are ready to go. More information about the nuts and bolts of the auction can be read here.

In anticipation of this historic occasion, here are four things to keep in mind:

1.  This is the best designed cap-and-trade program in the world
California has the good fortune of learning from predecessor cap-and-trade programs like the European Union Emissions Trading Platform, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and the Acid Rain Program, just to name a few. Key elements of California’s program include giving free allowances to industry in the beginning years to help with transition; letting entities bank allowances for future use; and establishing an allowance reserve in case prices exceed a certain value. All help keep carbon prices more stable and make for a well-functioning market.

2.  A price will be established for carbon, but that will vary as the program evolves
The California program will include auctions four times a year through 2020 – 32 more times after November 2012.  As such, the number of participants, the settlement price and other results of the first auction may not necessarily predict the activity of future auctions. Over time, the market will change and both prices and participation will fluctuate as the cap reduces and businesses decide how best to participate.

3. Money from the auctions will be used to invest in California’s clean energy future
Proceeds from the auction must be invested in ways that further the goals of the law – the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32).  Though these investments are scheduled to start in the next fiscal year, a specific investment plan is still underway and is being guided by two bills passed at the end of California’s legislative session. Likely project categories include renewable energy, energy efficiency, advanced vehicles, and natural resource conservation. In addition, 25% of proceeds must be used in ways that benefit disadvantaged communities. These investments will boost clean tech in California, improve air quality, and create jobs.

4. California’s leadership will serve as a launch pad for other programs
California is the ninth largest economy on the planet, and the world is watching. No state or country can stop climate change alone, but California’s environmental policies have a history of success and replication, including clean car, clean fuel and energy efficiency standards that have saved consumers across the US hundreds of billions of dollars in avoided energy purchases.  If the past is any indicator, California’s rich history of leading the nation on responses to critical environmental problems, while delivering wide ranging benefits, means the US is on the brink of something special.

A public notice of the auction results will be released on Monday, November 19, 2012 and will be posted to both the Air Resources Board and auction website.

Emily Reyna is Senior Manager of Strategic Partnerships and Alliances for the Climate & Air Program at the Environmental Defense Fund. This piece was originally published at EDF and was reprinted with permission.

Grover Norquist Abruptly Changes Position On Carbon Tax After Facing Criticism From Koch-Backed Group

Anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist raised a lot of eyebrows on Monday when he told National Journal that a carbon tax might be on the table if it were swapped with a cut to the income tax.

“It’s possible you could structure something that wasn’t an increase and didn’t violate the pledge,” he reportedly said.

As president of Americans for Tax Reform, Norquist has convinced hundreds of members of Congress to sign a pledge that they will never raise taxes. While his influence appears to be waning in Washington, Norquist’s tax pledge is still considered gospel for many Republicans. That’s why his willingness to consider a tax on global warming pollution is a big deal in political circles.

But one day later, after being criticized by the American Energy Alliance, the advocacy arm of a Koch-supported energy think tank devoted to promoting fossil fuel development, Norquist has completely reversed his statement, saying there virtually “no conceivable way” he could support a tax on carbon.

“Grover, just butch it up and oppose this lousy idea directly. This word-smithing is giving us all headaches,” wrote AEA in its newsletter, while promoting a newly-published study labeling carbon taxes “political cronyism.”

Americans for Tax Reform issued this statement this morning:

Americans for Tax Reform opposes a carbon tax and will work tirelessly to ensure one does not become law.

Taxing American energy consumption not only opens up a new revenue stream for proponents of big government, but threatens to forever damage the American economy.

Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist describes a carbon tax this way:

“The creation of any new tax such as a VAT or energy tax — even if originally passed with offsetting tax reductions elsewhere — would inevitably lead to higher taxes as two taxes would be at the disposal of politicians to increase taxes. Two smaller tapeworms are not an improvement over one big tapeworm. Tapeworms and taxes grow.

There is no conceivable way to add an energy or VAT tax to the burdens American taxpayers face that would not violate the pledge over time.  If someone first passed and implemented a constitutional amendment with 2/3 of the House and Senate and 3/4 of the states concurring to forbid the restoration of the income tax, we might more safely consider passing a VAT or energy VAT. And then it would be foolish and economically destructive thing to do.”

Meanwhile, conservatives who understand the threat of climate change continue to discuss the prospects for pricing carbon in Obama’s second term, possibly as part of a grand bargain on a deficit deal. While some consider taxing carbon pollution a “pipe dream,” others believe it’s one of the only opportunities to get Congressional Republicans to support a carbon reduction policy. Norquist’s immediate reversal shows just how difficult it will be to bring enough Republicans around on the issue and get something done.

The Obama Administration said last week that it has no intentions to introduce a carbon tax proposal.

IEA Report: Fossil Fuel Boom Is A Climate Disaster In The Making

by Lorne Stockman, via Oil Change International

The International Energy Agency released its annual flagship publication yesterday, the World Energy Outlook. The IEA made an historic statement in the executive summary.

It said, “No more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050 if the world is to achieve the 2 °C goal,” the internationally recognized limit to average global warming in order to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Let me rephrase that.  Over two-thirds of today’s proven reserves of fossil fuels need to still be in the ground in 2050 in order to prevent catastrophic levels of climate change.

We congratulate the IEA for recognizing this crucial point and encourage the organization to prioritize this message in its presentations and public messaging. It is especially important given that the world’s fossil fuel industry is working overtime to increase its proven reserve base.

Let’s take the Canadian tar sands industry as an example. As the chart below shows, the tar sands industry has enough projects producing, under construction and approved to blow well past the climate limits prescribed by the IEA. Nevertheless even more projects are lined up for regulatory approval leading to a possible trebling of production capacity over and above the IEA limit.

Globally, the oil industry as a whole is also lining up enough production capacity to cook the climate several times over.

According to one analysis, there could be as much as 110.6 million barrels of oil production capacity in 2020, while the IEA says that less than 90 million b/d is plenty, see the chart below.

That the IEA acknowledges the constraints on commercializing the world’s proven reserves is helpful, as the agency has a huge influence on global energy policy, particularly in the developed countries of the OECD, where the greatest per-capita consumption is concentrated.

But there is cause for even more caution over fossil fuel reserves than even this suggests.

The IEA’s calculations are based on having a 50% chance of constraining climate change to less than 2 degrees (C). Given that today the world’s climate is warmer by about 0.8 degrees (C) and we are already seeing some intense impacts, including record losses of Arctic sea ice, we may want to do more to ensure we stay below 2 degrees.

Last year, the London based Carbon Tracker Initiative calculated the proportion of proven fossil fuel reserves that could be consumed to have an 80% chance of hitting the 2 degree target. A target which I think many of us would be more comfortable with than one that basically gives us a 50/50 chance of failure. They found that proven reserves are five times over this limit. So some 80% of those reserves would need to stay in the ground.

This is a crucial conversation that needs to be had and we are glad the IEA is starting to engage in it. Especially as high energy prices are enabling new technologies to open up ever more reserves.

The IEA states in another section of the report that discusses the North American oil boom, a subject we will explore in a subsequent blog, that the fracking boom has enabled access to an additional 250 billion barrels of recoverable oil globally that was not in the IEA’s reserves figures in last year’s report.

It is clearly time for a coherent energy policy that keeps some fossil fuels in the ground.

Lorne Stockman is a Research Director for Oil Change International. This piece was originally published at Oil Change International and was reprinted with permission.

Grover Norquist Bombshell: Pairing A Carbon Tax With Income-Tax Cut Wouldn’t Violate GOP No-Tax-Hike Pledge

Has Hell (And High-Water) frozen over?

The National Journal reports today:

In a step that may help crack open the partisan impasse on climate change, Grover Norquist, the influential lobbyist who has bound hundreds of Republicans to a pledge never to raise taxes, told National Journal that a proposed “carbon tax swap”—taxing carbon pollution in exchange for cutting the income tax—would not violate his pledge.

Norquist’s assessment matters a lot, and could help pave the way for at least a handful of Republicans to support the policy. Over the past six months, a growing number of conservative voices, including former Republican officials and renowned economists, have amped up pressure on their party to finally address climate change.

Lots of folks have been jumping on the carbon tax band-wagon (see “Bipartisan Support Grows for Carbon Price as Part of Debt Deal“). The Washington Post editorial board boarded this weekend.

Even a modest carbon tax can deliver serious revenue (see “20 Dollar Per Ton CO2 Tax Could Reduce Deficit By $1.2 Trillion In 10 Years“). The two key questions are:

1. Is a tax politically feasible?
2. Is the politically feasible tax environmentally meaningful?

I’ll address the second question in detail in a later post. But for now I’ll point out that any tax in the $15 to $25 a ton of CO2 range (together with other policies already enacted, such as the fuel economy standards) would almost certainly achieve a CO2 cut greater than 17% by 2020 (compared to 2005 levels). That 17% cut was Obama’s pledge going into the Copenhagen climate talks. I think that any such U.S. carbon tax would have a transformational effect on global climate talks. Indeed I imagine a significant fraction of the nations of the world would probably seriously consider adopting whatever carbon tax the United States adopts.

It’s been fairly clear that the only way you could get a carbon tax is if you could give Republicans something they wanted more in return. That is, the carbon tax has to make the debt and tax reform deal easier not harder — since obviously that deal is monumentally difficult already, without introducing the climate issue. So, some sort of swap made sense.

The biggest obstacle has been Norquist’s infamous “no new taxes” pledge taken by the overwhelming majority of Republican members of Congress:

The problem is that creating a new “energy tax” would be viewed by some as political suicide. And Republicans who have signed Norquist’s pledge would be barred from supporting it.

That’s where the “swap” side of the policy comes in: The new carbon tax would be paired with a cut in the income tax—something Republicans have long sought. The idea essentially would be to cut the tax on income and move it over to carbon pollution—keeping the proposal revenue-neutral.

“It’s possible you could structure something that wasn’t an increase and didn’t violate the pledge,” Norquist told National Journal.

That qualifies as a bombshell.

Norquist himself doesn’t like the tax, but he misunderstands the politics I think:

“If the Democrats thought it was a good idea and the country wouldn’t hate them for it they would have done it in 2009,” when their party held majorities in both chambers of Congress, he said.

Still, if the tax swap could indeed be structured in such a way that it wouldn’t violate Norquist’s pledge, it could remove at least one political obstacle for some Republicans.

Uhh, Grover, the Democrats thought that something far more complicated was a good idea: a cap-and-trade system that extended out 40 years (far further in the future than any other country in the world had ever contemplated a domestic carbon bill) — and it ultimately would have required a very high carbon price, far higher in, say, 2040 than one would contemplate for just a 10 year budget deal.

The point Norquist seems to miss is that if a carbon tax were part of a bipartisan budget deal that truly put our debt and deficit trajectory on a more sustainable path, everyone involved would have political cover to make politically difficult choices:

“We hear frequently, constantly from Republican lawmakers who say, we see climate change as a huge problem and we want to talk about ways to do this, but for now they’re afraid to talk about it, because of the political repercussions,” said Rob Sisson, president of the group ConservAmerica, formerly Republicans for Environmental Protection.

For those who want to become more knowledgeable about the ins and outs of a carbon tax, Brookings, AEI, the IMF, and Resources for the Future are sponsoring an all day forum on it Tuesday. You can watch it live here. Climate Progress will be covering it.

Pricing Carbon: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are And Where We May Be Going

by Robert Stavins, via An Economic View Of The Environment

The recent demise of serious political consideration of an economy-wide U.S. CO₂ cap-and-trade system and the even more recent resurgence in interest among policy wonks in a U.S. carbon tax should prompt reflection on where we’ve been, where we are, and where we may be going.

Lessons

Almost fifteen years ago, in an article that appeared in 1998 in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, “What Can We Learn from the Grand Policy Experiment?  Lessons from SO₂ Allowance Trading,” I examined the implications of what was then the very new emissions trading program set up by the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 to cut acid rain by half over the succeeding decade.  In that article, I attempted to offer some guidance regarding the conditions under which cap-and-trade (then known as “tradable permits”) was likely to work well, or not so well.  Here’s a brief summary of what I wrote at the time:

(1)  SO₂ trading was a case where the cost of abating pollution differed widely among sources, and where a market-based system was therefore likely to have greater gains, relative to conventional, command-and-control regulations (Newell and Stavins 2003). It was clear early on that SO₂ abatement cost heterogeneity was great, because of differences in ages of plants and their proximity to sources of low-sulfur coal. But where abatement costs are more uniform across sources, the political costs of enacting an allowance trading approach are less likely to be justifiable.

(2)  The greater the degree to which pollutants mix in the receiving airshed or watershed, the more attractive a cap-and-trade (or emission tax) system will be, relative to a conventional uniform standard. This is because taxes or cap-and-trade can – in principle – lead to localized “hot spots” with relatively high levels of ambient pollution. Some states (in particular, New York) tried unsuccessfully to erect barriers to trades they thought might increase deposition within their borders.  This is a significant distributional issue.  It can also be an efficiency issue if damages are nonlinearly related to pollutant concentrations.

(3)  The efficiency of a cap-and-trade system will depend on the pattern of costs and benefits. If uncertainty about marginal abatement costs is significant, and if marginal abatement costs are quite flat and marginal benefits of abatement fall relatively quickly, then a quantity instrument, such as cap-and-trade, will be more efficient than a price instrument, such as an emission tax (Weitzman 1974).  With a stock pollutant (such as CO₂), this argument favors a price instrument (Newell and Pizer 2003).  However, when there is also uncertainty about marginal benefits, and marginal benefits are positively correlated with marginal costs (which, it turns out, is a relatively common occurrence for a variety of pollution problems), then there is an additional argument in favor of the relative efficiency of quantity instruments (Stavins 1996).

(4)  Cap-and-trade will work best when transaction costs are low (Stavins 1995), and the S0₂ experiment showed that if properly designed, private markets will tend to render transaction costs minimal.

5)  Considerations of political feasibility point to the wisdom of proposing trading instruments when they can be used to facilitate emissions reductions, as was done with SO₂ allowances and lead rights trading, less so for the purpose of reallocating existing emissions abatement responsibility (Revesz and Stavins 2007).

(6)  National policy instruments that appear impeccable from the vantage point of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Berkeley, California, or Madison, Wisconsin, but consistently prove infeasible in Washington, D.C., can hardly be considered “optimal.”

Implications for CO₂ Policy

In the same article, I noted that many of these issues could be illuminated by considering a concrete example:  the “current interest” in applying cap-and-trade to the task of cutting CO₂ emissions to reduce the risk of global climate change.  Some of the points I made in this regard in my 1998 article were:

(a)  The number of sources of CO₂ emissions are vastly greater than in the case of SO₂ emissions as a precursor of acid rain, where the focus could be placed on a few hundred electric utility plants.  Feasibility considerations alone argue for market-based instruments (cap-and-trade or taxes) to achieve meaningful reductions of CO₂ emissions.

(b)  The diversity of sources of CO₂ in a modern economy and the consequent heterogeneity of emission reduction costs bolster the case for using cost-effective market-based instruments.

(c)  As the ultimate global-commons problem, CO₂ is a truly uniformly-mixed pollutant.  With no concern for hot spots, market-based instruments present none of the problems that can arise in the case of localized environmental threats.

(d)  Any pollution-control program must face the possibility of emissions leakage from regulated to unregulated sources. This would be a severe problem for an international CO₂ program, where emissions would tend to increase in nonparticipant countries. Furthermore, it raises concerns for the emission-reduction-credit (not cap-and-trade) system in the Kyoto Protocol known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).  Such an offset system can lower aggregate costs by substituting low-cost for high-cost control, but may also have the unintended effect of increasing aggregate emissions beyond what they would otherwise have been, because there is an incentive for adverse selection: sources in developing countries that would reduce their emissions, opt in, and receive credit for actions they would have taken anyway.

(e)  Although any trading program could potentially serve as a model for the case of global climate change, I argued that the trading system that accomplished the U.S. phaseout of leaded gasoline in the 1980s merited particular attention. The currency of that system was not lead oxide emissions from motor vehicles, but the lead content of gasoline. So too, in the case of global climate, great savings in monitoring and enforcement costs could be had by adopting input trading linked with the carbon content of fossil fuels. This is reasonable in the climate case, since – unlike in the SO₂ case – CO₂ emissions are roughly proportional to the carbon content of fossil fuels and scrubbing alternatives are largely unavailable, at least at present.

(f)   Natural sequestration of CO₂ from the atmosphere by expanding forested areas is available (even in the United States) at reasonable cost (Stavins 1999).  Hence, it could be valuable to combine any carbon trading (or carbon tax) program with a carbon sequestration program, although this will raise significant challenges in regard to monitoring and enforcement.

(g)  In regard to carbon permit allocation mechanisms, auctions would have the advantage that revenues could be used to finance reductions in distortionary taxes.  Free allocation could increase regulatory costs enough that the sign of the efficiency impact could conceivably be reversed from positive to negative net benefits (Parry, Williams, and Goulder 1999).  On the other hand, free allocation of carbon permits would meet with much less political resistance.

The Necessity of Market-Based Instruments:  Cap-and-Trade or Carbon Taxes

I concluded that developing a cap-and-trade system for climate change would bring forth an entirely new set of economic, political, and institutional challenges.  At the same time, I recognized that the diversity of sources of CO₂ emissions and the magnitude of likely abatement costs made it equally clear that only a market-based instrument – some form of carbon rights trading or (probably revenue-neutral) carbon taxes – would be capable of achieving the domestic targets that might eventually be forthcoming.

In other words, my conclusion in 1998 strongly favored a market-based carbon policy, but was somewhat neutral between carbon taxes and cap-and-trade.  Indeed, at that time and for the subsequent eight years or so, I remained agnostic regarding what I viewed as the trade-offs between cap-and-trade and carbon taxes.  What happened to change that?  Three words:  The Hamilton Project.

The Making of an Advocate

For those of you who don’t know, the Hamilton Project is an initiative based at the Brooking Institution that – according to its web site – “offers a strategic vision and produces innovative policy proposals on how to create a growing economy that benefits more Americans.”

In 2007, the Project’s leadership asked me to write a paper proposing a U.S. CO₂ cap-and-trade system.  I responded that I would prefer to write a paper proposing the use of a market-based CO₂ policy, describing the two alternatives of cap-and-trade and carbon taxes.  I explained that I was by no means opposed to the notion of a carbon tax, having written about such approaches for more than twenty years.  Indeed, I noted, both cap-and-trade and carbon taxes would be good approaches to the problem; they have many similarities, some tradeoffs, and a few key differences.

The Hamilton Project leaders said no, they wanted me to make the best case I could for cap-and-trade, not a balanced investigation of the two policy instruments.  Someone else would be commissioned to write a proposal for a carbon tax.  (That turned out to be Professor Gilbert Metcalf of Tufts University – now on leave at the U.S. Department of the Treasury – who did a splendid job!)  Thus, I was made into an advocate for cap-and-trade.  It’s as simple as that.

Giving It My Best Shot

I argued in my Hamilton Project paper (which you can read here) that despite the tradeoffs between the two principal market-based instruments that could target CO₂ emissions, the best (and most likely) approach for the short to medium term in the United States was a cap-and-trade system, based on three criteria:  environmental effectiveness, cost effectiveness, and distributional equity.  Although my position was not simple capitulation to politics, I argued that sound assessments of environmental effectiveness, cost effectiveness, and distributional equity should be made in a real-world political context.

I said that the key merits of the cap-and-trade approach were, first, the program could provide cost-effectiveness, while achieving meaningful reductions in greenhouse gas emissions levels.  Second, it offered an easy means of compensating for the inevitably unequal burdens imposed by a climate policy.  Third, it provided a straightforward means to link with other countries’ climate policies.  Fourth, it avoided the political aversion in the United States to taxes.  Fifth, it was unlikely to be degraded – in terms of its environmental performance and cost effectiveness – by political forces. And sixth, this approach had a history of successful adoption and implementation in this country over the past two decades.

I recognized that there were some real differences between taxes and cap-and-trade that needed to be recognized.  First, environmental effectiveness:  a tax does not guarantee achievement of an emissions target, but it does provide greater certainty regarding costs.  This is a fundamental tradeoff.  Taxes provide automatic temporal flexibility, which needs to be built into a cap-and-trade system through provision for banking, borrowing, and possibly cost-containment mechanisms.  On the other hand, political economy forces strongly point to less severe targets if carbon taxes are used, rather than cap-and-trade – this is not a tradeoff, and is why virtually no environmental NGOs have favored the carbon-tax approach.

In principle, both carbon taxes and cap-and-trade can achieve cost-effective reductions, and – depending upon design — the distributional consequences of the two approaches can be the same.  But the key difference is that political pressures on a carbon tax system will most likely lead to exemptions of sectors and firms, which reduces environmental effectiveness and drives up costs, as some low-cost emission reduction opportunities are left off the table.  But political pressures on a cap-and-trade system lead to different allocations of the free allowances, which affect distribution, but not environmental effectiveness, and not cost-effectiveness.

I concluded that proponents of carbon taxes worried about the propensity of political processes under a cap-and-trade system to compensate sectors through free allowance allocations, but a carbon tax would be sensitive to the same political pressures, and should be expected to succumb in ways that are ultimately more harmful:  reducing environmental achievement and driving up costs.

Of course, such positive political economy arguments look much less compelling in the wake of the defeat of cap-and-trade legislation in the U.S. Congress and its successful demonization by conservatives as “cap-and-tax.”

A Political Opening for Carbon Taxes?

Does the defeat of cap-and-trade in the U.S. Congress, the obvious unwillingness of the Obama White House to utter the phrase in public, and the outspoken opposition to cap-and-trade by Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney indicate that there is a new opening for serious consideration of a carbon-tax approach to meaningful CO₂ emissions reductions?

First of all, there surely is such an opening in the policy wonk world.  Economists and others in academia, including important Republican economists such as Harvard’s Greg Mankiw and Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard, remain enthusiastic supporters of a national carbon tax.  And a much-publicized meeting in July at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. brought together a broad spectrum of Washington groups – ranging from Public Citizen to the R Street Institute – to talk about alternative paths forward for national climate policy.  Reportedly, much of the discussion focused on carbon taxes.

Clearly, this “opening” is being embraced with enthusiasm in the policy wonk world.  But what about in the real political world?  The good news is that a carbon tax is not “cap-and-trade.”  That presumably helps with the political messaging!  But if conservatives were able to tarnish cap-and-trade as “cap-and-tax,” it surely will be considerably easier to label a tax – as a tax!   Also, note that Romney’s stated opposition and Obama’s silence extend beyond disdain for cap-and-trade per se.  Rather, they cover all carbon-pricing regimes.

So as a possible new front in the climate policy wars, I remain very skeptical that an explicit carbon tax proposal will gain favor in Washington, no matter what the outcome of the election.  Note that the only election outcome that could lead to an aggressive and successful move to a meaningful nationwide carbon pricing regime would be:  the Democrats take back control of the House of Representatives, and the Democrats achieve a 60+ vote margin in the Senate, and the President is reelected.  A quick check at Five Thirty Eight (Nate Silver’s superb election forecast website at the New York Times) and other polling web sites makes it abundantly clear that the probability of such Democratic control of the White House and Congress is so small that it’s hardly worth discussing.

What About Fiscal Policy Reform?

A more promising possibility – though still unlikely – is that if Republicans and Democrats join to cooperate with either a Romney or Obama White House to work together constructively to address not only the short-term fiscal cliff at the end of this calendar year, but also the longer-term budgetary deficits the U.S. government faces, and if as part of this they decide to include not only cuts in government expenditures, but also some significant “revenue enhancements” (the t-word is not allowed), and if (I know, this is getting to be a lot of “if’s”) it turns out to be easier politically to eschew increases in taxes on labor and investment and therefore turn to taxes on consumption, then there could be a political opening for new energy taxes, in particular, (drum roll ….) a carbon tax.

Such a carbon tax – if intended to help alleviate budget deficits – could not be the economist’s favorite, a revenue-neutral tax swap of cutting distortionary taxes in exchange for implementing a carbon tax.  Rather, as a revenue-raising mechanism – like the Obama administration’s February 2009 budget for a 100%-auction of allowances in a cap-and-trade scheme – it would be a new tax, pure and simple.  Those who recall the 1993 failure of the Clinton administration’s BTU-tax proposal – with a less polarized and more cooperative Congress than today’s – are not optimistic.

Nor is it clear that a carbon tax would enjoy more support in budget talks than a value added tax (VAT) or a Federal sales tax.  The key question is whether the phrases “climate policy” or “carbon tax” are likely to expand or narrow the coalition of support for an already tough budgetary reconciliation measure.  The key group to bring on board will presumably be conservative Tea Party Republicans, and it is difficult to picture them being more willing to break their Grover Norquist pledges because it’s for a carbon tax.

Research

Even if the much-ballyhooed political opening for carbon taxes is largely illusory, the opening for policy wonks is real.  And here is where action is happening, and should continue to happen.  At some point the politics will change, and it’s important to be ready.  This is why economic research on carbon taxes is very much needed, particularly in the context of broader fiscal challenges, and it is why I’m pleased to see it happening at Resources for the Future, Harvard University, and elsewhere.

Bottom Line

I would personally be delighted if a carbon tax were politically feasible in the United States, or were to become politically feasible in the future.  But I’m forced to conclude that much of the current enthusiasm about carbon taxes in the academic and broader policy-wonk community in the wake of the defeat of cap-and-trade is – for the time being, at least – largely a manifestation of the grass looking greener across the street.

Robert N. Stavins is the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government, Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, and Chairman of the Environment and Natural Resources Faculty Group. This piece was originally published at his blog, An Economic View Of The Environment, and was reprinted with permission.

Unity College Board Of Trustees Votes To Divest From Fossil Fuels

by Stephen Mulkey, President of Unity College

We are running out of time.  While our public policy makers equivocate and avoid the topic of climate change, the window of opportunity for salvaging a livable planet for our children and grandchildren is rapidly closing.

The way forward is clear, though for many confrontation-averse academics the path seems impassable.  It requires action that is unnatural to the scientifically initiated:  to fight to regain the territory illegitimately occupied by the climate change deniers.

Every day that we avoid taking action represents additional emissions, and additional infrastructure that is dependent on our fossil fuel based economy.  In our zeal to be collegial, we engage with those who are paid by vested interests to argue that our Earth is not in crisis.  When these individuals demonize public investment in alternative energy, we fail to point out how the oil industry benefited from significant taxpayer support in its infancy and continues to receive government subsidies today.  We also sidestep the thorny issue of how oil and coal, in particular, fund large-scale organized opposition efforts to deny legitimate science, winning the battle for climate change public opinion with slogans, junk science, and money.

While there is much uncertainty about how climate change will play out with respect to specific regions and weather patterns, one thing is very clear:  Our current emissions trajectory will carry us beyond 5^oC average global warming by 2100.   This will be a planet that is not consistent with our civilization and science shows us that the impact will be largely irreversible for a millennium.  I don’t know how the stakes could get any higher.

Higher education is positioned to determine the future by training a generation of problem solvers.  As educators, we have an obligation to do so. Unlike any time in the history of higher education, we must now produce leading-edge professionals who are able to integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines, and understand social, economic, and resource tradeoffs among possible solutions.  Imagine being a college president and looking in the mirror twenty years from now.  What would you see?  Would you be looking at a professional who did his or her best to avert catastrophe?  For me, the alternative is unacceptable.

Those within higher education must now do something they have largely avoided at all costs: confront the policy makers who refuse to accept scientific reality. We must be willing to lead by example. Like the colleges and universities of the 1980’s that disinvested from apartheid South African interests – and successfully pressured the South African government to dismantle the apartheid system – we must be willing to exclude fossil fuels from our investment portfolios. We must divest.

The colleges and universities of this nation have billions invested in fossil fuels. Like the funding of public campaigns to deny climate change, such investments are fundamentally unethical.  The Terrifying Math of the 350.org campaign is based on realistic, reviewed science. Moreover, in our country it is clear that economic pressure gets results where other means fail. If we are to honor our commitment to the future, divestment is not optional.  This is especially true for Unity College, where Sustainability Science, as developed by the U.S. National Academy of Science, guides our academic mission.

I am proud to be a part of the 350.org program of divestment, and I am especially proud of the Unity College Board of Trustees for their willingness to make this affiliation.  Indeed, the Trustees have been on the path of divestment for over five years.  The Trustees have looked at the College’s finances in the context of our ethical obligation to our students, and they have chosen to make a stand.   I can think of no stronger statement about the mission of Unity College.

Our college community will lead by fearless action.  We will confront policy makers who continue to deny the existence of climate change.  We will encourage those who work in higher education to bravely step out from behind manicured, taxpayer funded hedges, and do what needs to be done.   We will not equivocate, and we will meet those who have been misled by climate change denial in their communities.

The time is long overdue for all investors to take a hard look at the consequences of supporting an industry that persists in employing a destructive business model.  Because of its infrastructure and enormous economic clout, fossil fuel corporations could pump trillions into the development of alternative energy. Government subsidies and stockholder shares could be used constructively to move these corporations to behave responsibly.

Higher education is the crown jewel of the United States system of education, and it remains the envy of the world.  Higher education has always been dedicated to the highest standards of honesty and integrity.  If our nation’s colleges and universities will not take a stand now, who will?

Stephen Mulkey is President of Unity College in Unity, Maine. You can find out more about 350.org’s “Do the Math” tour here.

We Need To De-Carbonize Our Tax System

by Bill Becker

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

That observation by Charles Darwin has interesting implications in these last weeks of the presidential election campaign.  It suggests that both candidates may be missing what’s most important to keeping America safe, strong and competitive in the years ahead.

Jobs, education, tax reform and energy security all are important, of course. But the key to America’s success will be our willingness to adapt to the new realities of the 21^st century.

One of those realities is that economic development as we have practiced it, and as it is now being replicated around the world, is rapidly pushing us toward several critical ecological boundaries and has already exceeded others.  These boundaries are important not only because they threaten some species and some regions of the world; they’re important because exceeding them is an existential threat to continued peace and prosperity. These are not the relatively isolated and repairable environmental problems of the past. They involve global systems that support life, including the oceans, soils and freshwater resources. They also include the atmosphere’s ability to absorb man-made pollution without destabilizing the climate.  The most available way to manage that risk is to reduce and eventually stop burning oil and coal to fuel economic development.

The failure of the two candidates to address these planetary boundaries, and especially the enormous risks of climate change, is one of the profoundly disturbing shortcomings of the 2012 campaign.  It has been an unconscionable omission considering how critical the next four years will be to the future of the country and the international community.

However, the next president will have another opportunity to confront these risks, perhaps early in his term.  Members of both political parties in Washington are talking about reforming the tax system by lowering rates, trimming deductions and, in Obama’s case, asking the wealthy to pay a bit more. Tax reform also is an opportunity to begin de-carbonizing the U.S. tax code.

Sometime soon, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) will issue a comprehensive carbon audit of the tax code – a report ordered by Congress to identify ways our tax system encourages the pollution most responsible for climate change.

Tax policies that encourage carbon emissions range from subsidies for oil companies – the latest proposal on the Hill would cut them by $113 billion over 10 years – to mortgage interest deductions for energy-wasting McMansions. There are many more. Ending or restructuring them will take a level of courage Congress has not exhibited in recent memory.

Political pragmatists will dismiss this idea as a non-starter, given how controversial messing with these sacred cows would be. But with the first destructive signs of global warming already upon us, we need bold action. In fact, we need to be even bolder. President Eisenhower said that when he was confronted by a problem he could not solve, he made it bigger. “If I make it big enough,” he said, “I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.”  In line with that principle, de-carbonizing the tax code would be only a first step. The larger task is to de-carbonize all of federal fiscal policy – in other words, all the ways the government influences the economy with how it obtains and disburses money.  Our current fiscal policy was built to support the old carbon economy. It encourages things that hurt us and undervalues things that make us stronger.

What the federal government funds in its massive farm and transportation programs are examples of fiscal policy.  So are the types of research the federal government conducts and funds, how much we charge oil companies to drill on public lands, and the criteria for winning federal grants, to name just a few examples.

There is a stark contrast between the two candidates on the need for our economy to adapt to contemporary realities, but neither has addressed it head-on. Throughout his first term and in the campaign, President Obama has talked about building a “new energy economy” and developing the energy technologies of the future. These are the terms he uses to describe a deliberate and necessary transition to a society that has adapted to the fact the end of the atmosphere’s ability to quietly absorb our wastes.

However, by mentioning climate change only in passing during the campaign, Obama has avoided talking about the urgency of the transition.

As a businessman, Mitt Romney knows that a company has to adapt to changing market conditions to avoid “the dustbin of business oblivion”. Yet he proposes that  we become a carbon superpower that, apparently without regard for consequences, produces more oil, coal and gas and keeps using the atmosphere as a waste dump.  He is selling the comfortable illusion that there is no to mess with business as usual – no need for a “clean energy economy.”

The Presidential Climate Action Project has proposed that the next president lead the adaptation of federal fiscal policy to the realities of the contemporary world. That means phasing out virtually all of the policies and practices that encourage the use of coal, oil, and natural gas.

This should not be done with a succession of one-off reforms. Fiscal reform could be accomplished in a process similar to that used years ago to close unneeded military bases. The president would revive the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, perhaps with different members and the help of the NAS, to audit fiscal policy in its entirety and to present him with an all-or-nothing package of subsidies and policies that could be reformed without undermining national security or economic stability.  If the president approved the package, Congress would have 45 days to reject it.

A central question in this election is whether we will be the architects of our future or its victims, to paraphrase Buckminster Fuller.  The United States and its economy are not exempt from the fundamental laws of evolution. We must adapt if we wish to remain the fittest and the strongest of nations.

Bill Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

One Chart Says It All: Why Oil’s New Supply Boom Is A Bust For The Climate

by Lorne Stockman, Steve Kretzmann, and David Turnbull, via Oil Change International.

What if you knew that smoking that one last packet of cigarettes was going to give you cancer?  Imagine if our understanding of cancer was so precise as to allow doctors to predict with virtual certainty that smoking that particular pack, which you just picked up at the corner store, would definitely be the last straw and cause you to contract life-threatening cancer?  Obviously, you would not smoke that pack.

In the world today, global warming is our collective cancer, and despite dire and clear warnings, the oil industry is still smoking away. The best climate science in the world tells us that in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, we need to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius.  But the amount of new oil production the industry is bringing online over the next eight years is exponentially more than we can afford to burn and stay under two degrees.  We simply cannot afford to burn all the oil that the industry is capable of producing over the next few years, and in the long term.

It is worth noting that this is a new equation that reaches essentially the same conclusion as the Carbon Tracker / Bill McKibben Math, but by using the actual plans of the industry itself rather than estimates of fuels in the ground.  Carbon Tracker measured the total amount of carbon in fossil fuels in existing reserves (2,795 gigatons) and found them to be five times more than can be safely burned (565 gigatons).  That is terrifying, although this does not tell us along what timeline those reserves will be pulled out of the ground.

In this case, we are looking at what the oil industry is building or is expected to build in the next eight years (110.6 million barrels per day of oil production capacity), and comparing it to what experts agree that our oil usage needs to be in just the next eight years if we are to avoid climate disaster (88.1 million barrels per day).  In short, what this new analysis tells us is that the oil industry is in fact developing more than enough oil over the next 8 years to lock in climate chaos.

Oil’s New Supply Boom

In June 2012, a paper from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs shook the energy policy world.  The paper was titled Oil: The Next Revolution.

In the paper, Leonardi Maugeri, a former executive at Italian oil giant ENI and fellow of the Belfer Center’s Geopolitics of Energy Project, detailed the astounding level of investment and activity going on in the global oil industry today.

Maugeri conducted a unique field-by-field analysis of the major oil projects proposed and under construction in most of the world’s oil producing zones. He concluded that just less than 50 million barrels per day (b/d) of oil production capacity is potentially under development through to 2020.  He adjusted this down to 28.6 million b/d after factoring risks that would prevent some of these projects materializing.

When factoring in the decline in production from currently producing fields he concluded that by 2020 global oil production capacity could reach 110.6 million b/d (See Figure 1).

The United States and Canada are at the forefront of this oil boom. Triggered by high global oil prices, the development of technology to access unconventional oil resources in these countries is a significant factor in the global oil boom. Canada’s tar sands and America’s tight oil, obtained through hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling, are the new heavyweights in North American oil production.

Maugeri’s analysis has U.S. production growing by 3.5 million b/d by 2020, to 11.6 million b/d[1]; this factors-in infrastructural constraints on development and decline in existing fields. He forecasts Canadian oil production, led by tar sands production and tight oil, growing 2.2 million b/d to 5.5 million b/d. See Table. So the U.S. and Canada alone could be contributing 32% of the world’s oil production growth over the next 8 years.

Maugeri’s analysis indicates that the global oil industry, with North America leading the charge, is currently investing in an energy production scenario that guarantees global climate chaos.

Finally, it should be noted that Maugeri’s analysis of the industry’s growth is by no means the most aggressive.  Citigroup, for one, has a much more bullish scenario for the North American oil industry that has been widely cited, including by both U.S. Presidential campaigns.

Narrow pathway for climate stability

The International Energy Agency produces annual energy demand forecasts using several scenarios.  These scenarios include one that charts where current policies take us and another mapping where policies that would have a strong chance at constraining climate change to within 2 degrees would place energy demand.

If we use the 2011 IEA scenarios as a benchmark, the difference between the oil production capacity that the industry is currently planning for 2020 and where oil demand must be to constrain climate change is a staggering 22.5 million barrels per day.

Therefore, 79% of the oil production capacity being planned today for 2020 is over and above the safe level of global oil demand in that year.

Perhaps even more worrying is the fact that the IEA Current Policies Scenario is in line with a rise in global temperatures of 6^oC. This is commonly considered to herald an unlivable planet. Even under this disastrous scenario the industry’s current objectives represent an excess of 16 million b/d.

Spurred on by rising oil prices since 2003, the global oil industry, with the U.S. and Canada at the forefront, has invested billions of dollars in developing technology to access billions of barrels of previously inaccessible oil. This may have postponed the so-called “peak oil” crisis but it has precipitated a far worse crisis that will be irreversible.

The IEA 2 degree Scenario (also known as the 450 Scenario, which recent science suggests is conservative), states that global oil demand should peak by 2018 and steadily decline thereafter. We are currently not on that trajectory, but investing in and developing capacity to surpass it by over 25% can only guarantee that we will not make it. Instead, the world needs to aggressively invest in oil demand reduction rather than a continued unsustainable binge.

We need to constrain global oil production to within climate limits now, before the oil industry locks us into inevitable climate disaster.

This piece was originally published at Oil Change International and was reprinted with permission.

Do The Math: McKibben Starts His Roadshow Taking On Big Oil

Photo: Rae Breaux

by Wen Stephenson, excepted from Grist

It was game time. The Saturday night crowd on the Vermont campus was festive, boisterous, pumped. People cheered and whooped when told that one of their heroes, climate activist Tim DeChristopher — serving a two-year federal sentence for his civil disobedience opposing new oil and gas drilling in Utah — would soon be back on the field.

When the man on the stage, 350.org’s Bill McKibben, said it was time to march not just on Washington but on the headquarters of fossil fuel companies — “it’s time to march on Dallas” — and asked those to stand who’d be willing to join in the fight, seemingly every person filling the University of Vermont’s cavernous Ira Allen Chapel, some 800 souls, rose to their feet.

McKibben and 350, the folks who brought us the Keystone XL pipeline protests, are now calling for a nationwide divestment campaign aimed at fossil fuel companies’ bottom line. Beginning with student-led campaigns on college campuses, modeled on the anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s, they’ll pressure institutions to withdraw all investments from big oil and coal and gas. Their larger goal is to ignite a morally-charged movement to strip the industry of its legitimacy.

“The fossil fuel industry has behaved so recklessly that they should lose their social license — their veneer of respectability,” McKibben tells his audience. “You want to take away our planet and our future? We’re going to take away your money and your good name.”

I was there in Burlington on Saturday to spend some time with the 350.org team, watch their run-throughs, and attend the night’s show, a sort of “dress rehearsal” for the 20-city Do The Math tour, officially launching in Seattle on Nov. 7, the day after the election. The tour builds off of McKibben’s Rolling Stone article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” which appeared in July and is one of the most widely read pieces in the magazine’s history. Buzz is clearly building, and not just in McKibben’s home state of Vermont. The Seattle show is sold out. The Boston show, on Nov. 15, sold out in less than 24 hours and has moved to a venue three times larger, the Orpheum Theater, with 2,700 seats. (Full disclosure: McKibben sits on Grist’s board of directors.)

Part multimedia lecture — with video appearances by 350.org allies like Naomi Klein, James Hansen, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu — and part organizing rally, with a live musical performance, the Burlington event gave a taste of what’s to come. The tour will “evolve,” with different elements and onstage guests along the way — for example, Klein and filmmaker Josh Fox, of Gasland fame, will join McKibben onstage in various cities. Although it was a little rough around the edges on Saturday night, nobody seemed to mind (McKibben was playing, wisely, to his hometown crowd). The basic structure and central message of the show were well in place — and, just as important for 350′s objectives, the organizing wheels were well in motion.

As 350′s Matt Leonard, serving as “tour manager” for Do The Math, explained it to me, the tour isn’t simply about “getting butts in seats” for a lecture or concert (thus the relatively low emphasis on the musical guests in each city, most of whom are yet to be announced). It’s about getting “the right people” in those seats. “This isn’t just for publicity and outreach,” he says. “We’re putting tremendous effort into making sure students, community leaders, college trustees, and influential decision-makers are a part of this event, because they are the ones that will turn this from a talk into a hard-hitting campaign.”

Sure enough, there in Burlington, students at UVM and other area colleges were already talking up divestment campaigns. Elsewhere in New England, a student-led divestment movement, spearheaded by the network Students for a Just and Stable Future, is off and running — at Harvard, Tufts, Brandeis, Amherst, UNH, and a dozen other campuses. Similar campaigns are being discussed on campuses around the country. And on Saturday night, McKibben told the crowd that Hampshire College in western Massachusetts, the first to divest from South Africa in 1977, is the first school in the nation to move toward divestment from fossil fuels.

This is real. And it’s just getting started.

Clearly, McKibben and 350 know their audience for this tour, and it’s not simply the general public. Far from attempting to communicate climate science to the uninformed, or disinformed, in a lowest-common-denominator way, Do the Math is about lighting a fire under the movement, rallying the troops, and mustering forces for a major new offensive — what the Do the Math website bills as “the next phase of the climate movement.”

Before heading up to Burlington, I asked McKibben what that means. “Fighting Keystone,” he told me by email, “we learned we could stand up to the fossil fuel industry. We demonstrated some moxie.” But, he added: “We also figured out that we’re not going to win just fighting one pipeline at a time. We have to keep all those battles going, but we also have to play some offense, go at the heart of the problem.”

The Rolling Stone piece and McKibben’s Do the Math lecture leave no doubt what the heart of the problem is. Drawing on a widely-circulated report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a group of UK financial experts and environmentalists, McKibben shows that the fossil fuel industry’s known reserves contain five times the amount of carbon needed to raise the planet’s temperature more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — the point beyond which, according to international consensus, all bets for a livable climate are off.

As McKibben points out, we’ve already burned enough carbon to raise the global thermometer almost 1 degree C, with disastrous effects. At the current rate, we’ll have burned enough additional carbon in the next 16 years to propel us over the 2-degree line this century. To prevent that from happening — to slow the process down and ultimately stop it — the fossil fuel industry would need to commit to keeping 80 percent of its reserves in the ground, forever, and help bring about a rapid shift to clean energy.

Obviously, given the sheer amount of money at stake — many trillions of dollars — the odds of anything like that happening under current political conditions are nil. McKibben is arguing that, if there’s any hope at all of preserving a livable climate, those conditions must change decisively. And they can — but only if and when enough people understand the simple climate math and realize that the fossil fuel industry is prepared to cook humanity off the planet unless somebody stops it.

Far more than money is at stake. At risk, the Do the Math presentation makes clear, are countless human lives. The most affecting display in Burlington was a show of faces of people, all around the world, who are already suffering the impact of climate change — in Kenya, Haiti, Brazil, India and Pakistan, and many other places, including the United States. Projected on the screen behind McKibben, they’re a powerful reminder of the human face, and cost, of global warming.

Likewise, this tour, and the movement it aims to galvanize, are about far more than math. They’re about justice and injustice, right and wrong — what you could call the moral equation.

This is an excerpt from a longer piece published at Grist.

Wen Stephenson, a former editor at The Atlantic and The Boston Globe, contributes frequently to Grist and has written about climate and culture for the Globe, The New York Times, and Slate.

Heat-Trapping Carbon Dioxide Also Makes Ice Caps And Glaciers More Brittle

Photo: Bob Berwyn

by Bob Berwyn, via Summit County Citizens Voice

Have you ever poured a can of warm coke into a glass full of ice cubes and listened to the cubes crack?

Something similar might be going on in the atmosphere, as MIT researchers have shown that direct exposure to carbon dioxide makes ice caps and glaciers more susceptible to cracking.

The study is the first to show this kind of a direct impact from increasing atmospheric CO2, which as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas is directly responsible for much of the increase in global temperatures during recent decades.

The MIT study used a series of atomistic-level computer simulations to investigate the role of CO2 molecules in ice fracturing, finding that CO2 exposure causes ice to break more easily by directly affecting the hydrogen bonds between water molecules in ice crystals — because the added CO2 competes with the water molecules in the crystals.

Ice strength is also decreased by material defects induced by CO2 bubbles, according to researchers Professor Markus Buehler and Zhao Qin.

“If ice caps and glaciers were to continue to crack and break into pieces, their surface area that is exposed to air would be significantly increased, which could lead to accelerated melting and much reduced coverage area on the Earth,” said Buehler. “The consequences of these changes remain to be explored by the experts, but they might contribute to changes of the global climate,” he added.

Ice caps and glaciers cover seven per cent of the Earth—more than Europe and North America combined—and are responsible for reflecting 80 percent of the Sun’s light rays that enter our atmosphere and maintain the Earth’s temperature. They are also a natural carbon sink, capturing a large amount of CO2.

The study showed that CO2 molecules first adhere to the crack boundary of ice by forming a bond with the hydrogen atoms and then migrate through the ice in a flipping motion along the crack boundary towards the crack tip, where they accumulate and attack the water molecules by trying to bond to them. This leaves broken bonds behind and increases the brittleness of the ice on a macroscopic scale.

The research was published Oct, 11 in the Institute of Physics Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

Bob Berwyn is editor of Summit County Citizens Voice. This piece was originally published at Summit Voice and was reprinted with permission.

By 2020, Indonesian Palm Oil Plantations Will Release More CO2 Than Canada

by Katie Valentine

Palm oil plantation expansion in Indonesia is set to release more than 558 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2020, according to a report published Sunday in Nature Climate Change. That’s more than Canada’s yearly CO2 emissions.

The study, conducted by researchers from Yale and Stanford, examined palm oil plantation development in the Kalimantan region of Indonesia from 1990 to 2010.  Using Landsat satellite images and carbon accounting, the researchers analyzed land cover changes over the 20-year period, estimated the carbon emissions from the plantations and projected the levels of carbon emitted between 2010 and 2020 under Business as Usual and protection scenarios. Here’s what they found:

• In 1990, oil palm plantations covered 903 square kilometers of Kalimantan – by 2010 that number had grown to 31,640 km2.
• Between 2000 and 2010, forest clearing for palm plantations contributed to about 57 percent of Indonesia’s total deforestation.
• Palm growth occurs on government-awarded land leases, 79 percent of which remain undeveloped. The development of the remaining leases would convert 93,844 km2 of land to palm plantations, 90 percent of which is forested and 18 percent of which is peatland.

It’s oil palm’s method of growth that makes it such a high-emissions crop. In Indonesia and Malaysia, which grow and produce 90 percent of the world’s palm oil, rainforests are cleared and sometimes burned to make way for plantations. The emissions from this deforestation are multiplied when the clearing occurs on peatlands, which store vast quantities of carbon. The study found that, as of 2010, 13 percent of Kalimantan’s palm oil plantations were situated on peatlands.

The study comes after the EPA’s decision this January to deny palm oil’s use as a biofuel in the Renewable Fuel Standard, which mandates that 36 billion gallons of biofuels be incorporated into American transportation fuel mix by 2022. The EPA’s analysis of the use of palm oil for biodiesel found that it reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent, falling short of the 20 percent benchmark necessary for a fuel to be included in the standard.

Many scientific and environmental groups applauded the EPA’s decision but claimed the agency underestimated palm oil emissions in its analysis, arguing that the greenhouse gas emissions from palm oil’s lifecycle are actually higher than petroleum-based diesel. During an extended commenting period for the EPA analysis, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report that attempts to correct several of the EPA’s conclusions on palm oil.

The commenting period for the analysis closed April 27, but the EPA has yet to make a final decision on palm oil’s use as a biofuel. As of May, the palm oil industry has hired lobbyist Holland & Knight to help convince the EPA of palm oil’s viability as a renewable fuel. In its analysis, the EPA estimates that 104,000 hectares, or 1,040 km2, of land in Indonesia and Malaysia would be converted to palm plantation if palm oil were accepted as a biofuel source.

But even if the EPA sticks to its original ruling, the fight against palm oil is far from over: palm oil accounts for more than 30 percent of the world’s vegetable oil production, and worldwide demand of the oil is expected to double by 2020. According to the report by the Union of Concerned Scientists, 70 percent of demand for palm oil is food related. This figure puts at least some of palm oil’s future in the hands of consumers: we can’t help make the EPA’s decision (since the commenting period is over), but we can wage a campaign against palm oil in our favorite foods and avoid products made with palm oil.

New Tool Tracks CO2 Emissions In Cities: Could It Spur More Movement In The U.S. Toward A Climate Treaty?

by Roz Pidcock via The Carbon Brief

A study published yesterday outlines a new way to map the emissions produced by cities. Cities are major contributors to global climate change, so the authors say this could be an important step forward in meeting emission reduction targets.

Cities – as hubs of industry, housing, business and transport – are responsible for more than 80 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to the World Bank. With the global population approaching nine billion and 68 per cent of people expected to be living in urbanised areas by 2050, the way cities develop in the future is set to be critical when it comes to setting and meeting international emission reduction targets.

While all countries under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are legally obliged to report their national greenhouse gas emissions, different countries use different methods to do so. This inconsistency filters through to the city level. Although a large chunk of the responsibility to reduce national emissions will fall to cities, an international standard for working out how much cities contribute also isn’t settled.

A new study published yesterday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology lays out a new method for quantifying greenhouse gas emissions for individual buildings every hour for an entire city. Professor Kevin Gurney from the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University and lead author of the study explains why this is important:

“Cities have had little information with which to guide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions – and you can’t reduce what you can’t measure.”

Tracking emissions

Previous research has tended to estimate cities’ emissions on a much broader level, based on data on industrial energy use and average domestic consumption. The new research takes advantage of the growing number of atmospheric measurements made at city level to dig deeper into exactly where the emissions come from.

A still from a video of hour-by-hour changes in carbon dioxide emissions from different building types for the US city of Indianapolis. Credit: Bedrich Benes and Michel Abdul-Massih

The team of scientists collected a range of ‘bottom up’ data about carbon dioxide emissions from air pollution reports, traffic surveys and basic information about building type and size collected for tax purposes. They combined these data with a computer modelling system which calculated energy consumption on a building-by-building basis.

As Gurney explains, users can track the emission intensity for the whole city using colour-coded, high resolution maps and use them to make decisions on where efforts to reduce emissions would be most effective. He says:

“…[T]he emission mitigation impact of targeting older, less insulated homes can be quantified and compared to targeting zones of congested, high-emitting on-road sources.”

Decision-making tool

As well as providing information in a way that is useful to local decision-makers, the colourful visual displays of daily or seasonal variations in emissions from different sources – residential buildings, industry and transport – also make it easier for ordinary people to see the impact they can make locally to help mitigate climate change. Gurney adds:

“…[W]e can provide cities with a complete, three-dimensional picture of where, when and how carbon dioxide emissions are occurring…to identify the most cost-effective ways to reduce emissions and track progress over time.”

The issue of scale is important in emissions accounting for cities. Previous research for the city of Toronto has shown that the differences in emissions intensity within the city can be as big as the difference between cities. For example, residents of high-density apartment blocks in dense city centres can emit half as much carbon dioxide as neighbouring residents in single family homes in the suburbs.

So far the researchers have used the new method in one city in the United States, Indianapolis, but they say it can be reproduced across all major US cities, which together are responsible for nearly 25 per cent of all global carbon dioxide emissions. The researchers are already working on estimates for Los Angeles, California and Phoenix.

What about international treaties?

On an international scale, the team suggests this new tool may help encourage the US to sign up to international climate change treaties. In the past, comparing different countries’ stated emissions without having a way to independently verify them has cast doubt over how to incorporate them into mitigation agreements to follow on from the Kyoto Protocol.

The study is part of a larger project called ‘Hestia’, named after the Greek goddess of the hearth and home, which combines ground-based and satellite measurements of methane and carbon monoxide as well as carbon dioxide. The results from Hestia are expected to complement the launch of the Orbital Carbon Observatory satellite, planned for December 2013, which will measure the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

One thing to note is that the new method does not account for material or electricity consumed within the city but produced elsewhere. A study led by the World Bank in 2011 shows that the greenhouse gas emissions for the same urban resident can vary significantly depending on whether production or consumption, or both, are taken into account when calculating greenhouse gas emissions.

All this shows that clarity counts when calculating urban emissions if countries are to adopt an international standard. But this research by US scientists could make a valuable contribution to creating a standard that countries can agree on.

The full video for the Hestia projects and shorter videos of emission calculations over time for Indianapolis can be found on the project website here.

This piece was originally published at The Carbon Brief and was reprinted with permission.