China Pulls Ahead in the Great Carbon Race

For awhile it was neck and neck, but China has now clearly pulled ahead of the United States and become the world’s dominant source of carbon dioxide emissions. Elisabeth Rosenthal reports Friday on the results of a new analysis of emissions trends by the Dutch government. Here’s the lede:

China has clearly overtaken the United States as the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas, a new study has found, its emissions increasing 8 percent in 2007. The Chinese increase accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the year’s global greenhouse gas emissions, the study found.

The report, released Friday by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, found that in 2007 China’s emissions were 14 percent higher than those of the United States. In the previous year’s annual study, the researchers found for the first time that China had become the world’s leading emitter, with carbon emissions 7 percent higher by volume than the United States in 2006. Many experts had been skeptical of the earlier study, whose results were less clear-cut than those released Friday. The International Energy Agency had continued to say only that China was projected to overtake the United States by the end of 2007. Now there is little doubt.

“The difference had grown to a 14 percent difference, and that’s indeed quite large,” said Jos Olivier, a senior scientist at the Dutch agency. “It’s now so large that it’s quite a robust conclusion.”

Click here for the full NY Times article.

It's a Tidy Answer to Global Warming

The LA Times has reported on a air CO2 "scrubbing" system which would process the air's CO2 and then store it underground. Seems like the technology works on a bench scale in Tucson warehouse, but scale up will be EXPENSIVE. the article optimistically reports that to remove all 28 billion tons of CO2 released worldwide each year, would require spreading machines over a land area the size of Arizona. Then there's the expense...estimated at $200 a ton, which equates to an annual vacuuming bill of $5.6 trillion....hmmmm!

Here is the Los Angeles Times, 2008-04-29 article by Alan Zarembo:

Here's a simple solution to global warming: vacuum carbon dioxide out of the air.
Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University, said placing enough carbon filters around the planet could reel the world's atmosphere back toward the 18th century, like a climatic time machine.

After a decade of work, his shower-sized prototype whirs away inside a Tucson warehouse, each day capturing about 10 pounds of the heat-trapping greenhouse gas as air wafts through it.
Only a few billion tons to go. In the battle against global warming, technology has long been seen as the ultimate savior, but Lackner's machine is a clunky reminder of how distant that dream is.
He estimates that sucking up the current stream of emissions would require about 67 million boxcar-sized filters at a cost of trillions of dollars a year.

The orchards of filters would have to be powered by complexes of new nuclear plants, dams, solar farms or other clean-energy sources to avoid adding more pollution to the atmosphere.
Despite the scope of the proposal, the allure of high technology is irresistible for modern humans. Salvation has arrived again and again over the last century: the automobile, the jet, the Internet, the iPod.

That dream has pushed scattered groups of scientists to work on massive schemes to reengineer the planet. One idea is to block sunlight, either by constructing artificial volcanoes to blast sulfur particles into the atmosphere or by launching millions of tiny satellites into space and arranging them into a giant mirror.

Another concept is sprinkling iron over the oceans to nurture plankton colonies that would absorb carbon dioxide from the air and transfer it to the depths.

But while the science of dialing back the planet's thermostat is straightforward, the execution is fabulously expensive, complex and grandiose on a scale that boggles the mind. Nobody doubts it is possible to take CO2 out of the air," said David Keith, a professor of engineering and economics at the University of Calgary in Canada and one of several scientists around the world working on the problem. "The issue is, 'What does it cost?' "
Some policy experts argue that blind faith in technology is a harmful distraction from the hard sacrifices needed to control global warming.

"The temptation is to say, 'Let's get John Wayne on horseback or Bill Gates . . . and solve this problem,' " said Dale Jamieson, director of environmental studies at New York University.
But some scientists say that the potential of such ideas cannot be ignored given the world's political paralysis on controlling emissions and its myopic addiction to cheap and dirty coal. "There are not that many alternatives," Lackner said.

The attraction of a technological silver bullet lies in the failure of the world to solve global warming through the obvious solution: reducing emissions. The 1997 Kyoto accords were supposed to bring the world together to address the problem, but the two biggest polluters, the United States and China, have refused to cap their emissions, and Europe is failing to meet even its modest targets.

Worldwide annual emissions of carbon dioxide -- the main culprit in global warming -- have climbed 28% over the last decade, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The rise has been largely driven by industrializing countries, such as China and India, which argue that they have the right to exploit their coal reserves to catch up with the West.
It is clear that cheap energy is a drug that civilization will not give up. But big technological solutions could allow society to keep its drug.

Among the options, carbon filtering is the most direct and best understood. If industrialization is a process of transferring carbon stored in the earth to the atmosphere, filtering seeks to put it back. The technology is decades old. Bottled oxygen used in hospitals started out as plain air before nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other gases were filtered out. Space capsules and submarines extract carbon dioxide to maintain breathable air for crew members.
The process for removing atmospheric carbon involves putting one compound, usually a hydroxide, in contact with the air, setting off a reaction that grabs CO2 and incorporates its carbon atoms into a carbonate compound.

Then, in a reaction that requires a large input of heat, the carbonate compound is broken apart, reconstituting and trapping the carbon dioxide. Researchers propose pumping the captured CO2 into the ground, a practice already used to increase the pressure in oil wells. Geologists say there is room in subterranean rock formations to lock it away forever.

The beauty of carbon capture is that it scrubs the planet without intruding on it, unlike artificial volcanoes and sun reflectors, which could cause enormous planetary damage in the form of acid rain or giant shadows that stunt crops. The filters could be placed anywhere in the world, since carbon dioxide disperses throughout the atmosphere.

For all its appeal, the process is hideously inefficient. Carbon dioxide makes up less than 0.04% of the atmosphere, and removing climate-changing quantities of it requires filtering massive amounts of air. Lackner calculated that sucking up all 28 billion tons of CO2 released worldwide each year would require spreading out his machines over a land area the size of Arizona.

That seems like a reasonable sacrifice to save civilization, until you consider the expense.
Experts estimate that it would cost up to $200 a ton to filter and store carbon dioxide from the air. That means the yearly vacuuming bill could reach $5.6 trillion. Even filtering the greenhouse gas from smokestacks, where it is hundreds of times more concentrated and thus much cheaper to capture, is still deemed too expensive for commercial use.

The enormous cost raises the question: Who would pay?

It is the same impasse that has stymied efforts toward a global agreement to reduce emissions. China argues that the West should foot the bill because it created the problem over the last two centuries. The United States says China must accept its share of responsibility as the world's new top polluter.

The cost of the technology will surely fall over time, but without government action that is unlikely to happen soon enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change.
Without at least a 50% cut in emissions by mid-century, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the temperature rise will exceed 2 degrees, resulting in worsening drought, a dangerous sea level rise and widespread extinction of species.
Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, said that the failure to cut emissions might force the world to reshape the environment through drastic use of technology. The risks could be enormous, but the risks of failing to reduce emissions could be greater, he said.

Crutzen said that only out of a "sense of despair" had he come to favor the last-ditch option of spewing more than a million tons of sulfur a year into the air. It's a dirty proposition that, in some ways, is its own environmental crime. But it works, as shown by the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, which temporarily cooled the planet by almost 1 degree Fahrenheit. "It might be the last escape route from the problem," he said.

The power to reengineer the planet raises another question: Who gets to control the thermostat? Despite the perception that climate change is a global problem, it is in reality a series of regional transformations that benefits some places and harms others.
Countries in the far northern latitudes have less incentive than tropical countries to counteract the warming. Russia has already laid claim to the North Pole in hopes that the arctic thaw will open access to new oil reserves. Canada is pondering the possibility of its vast expanse of tundra becoming a breadbasket.

With enough carbon filters, a single country or even several rich individuals would have the power to set the world's temperature. "No matter how you go about it, there will be a lot of politics," Lackner said. For now, his machine, a solitary prototype, continues to hum away in the Tucson warehouse. With no good place to store the carbon dioxide it traps, the gas is simply released back into the air.

EMISSIONS: LA Requires LEED Buildings, but with Lean Enforcement

LA mayor Villaraigosa used Earth Day to sign a new law that requires new and renovated buildings and residential towers bigger than 50,000 square feet to meet LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) standards - approximately 150 buildings and 7.5 million square feet per year (most builders say that it will not increase the cost of construction). Los Angeles joins Connecticut and 14 cities in requiring LEED standards compliance of developers.


The City has an aggressive goal of reducing carbon emissions by 35% below 1990 levels by 2030. This new law will prevent about 85,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions over 5 years (the equivalent of 15,000 cars off of the road).


The City of San Francisco is considering an even more aggressive ordinance (all structures over 25,000 square feet to a higher standard than LA's) with stricter enforcement. The Los Angeles law is light in enforcement - only every seventh application will be scrutinized for violations.

Bush Sets Greenhouse Gas Emissions Goal

President Bush called Wednesday for the United States to stop the growth of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 and challenged other countries, including major polluters like China and India, to abandon trade barriers on energy-related technology and commit to goals of their own.
The White House cast Mr. Bush’s announcement in the Rose Garden as an ambitious effort by a president determined to lead on the climate change issue, even with just 9 months left in office.

But critics — including environmentalists, scientists and lawmakers — said the effort was too little, too late. They accused Mr. Bush of trying to derail legislation that would curb emissions even further. And because he did not offer any specifics for how to reach his 2025 goal, they dismissed the speech as irrelevant.

“It is now time for the U.S. to look beyond 2012 and take the next step,” Mr. Bush said, a reference to his previously stated national goal, announced in 2002, of an 18 percent reduction in the growth of emissions of heat-trapping gases relative to economic growth by 2012. Mr. Bush said the nation was on track to meeting that target.

The speech was intended to influence an international conference on climate change, which is convening in Paris on Thursday. The conference is the outgrowth of a process Mr. Bush initiated last year, when he called together major polluting nations and urged them to come together by the end of 2009 around a common goal for the long-term reduction of emissions.

But Mr. Bush’s talk was also a slap at the Democratic-controlled Senate, which is about to consider legislation that would impose limits on emissions and allow companies to trade pollution credits — the so-called “cap and trade” approach. The White House vehemently opposes that approach, a point Mr. Bush restated on Wednesday.

“Bad legislation would impose tremendous costs on our economy and on American families without accomplishing important climate change goals we share,” Mr. Bush warned. But rather than outlining his own legislative proposal, Mr. Bush emphasized advances in technology, like clean-coal energy, wind power and farm-grown fuels like ethanol, as a means to achieving emissions reductions. As he has in the past, he said the route to reducing emissions was through the free market and incentives for companies to invest — as opposed to mandates or new taxes.

“The wrong way is to raise taxes, duplicate mandates, or demand sudden and drastic emissions cuts that have no chance of being realized and every chance of hurting our economy,” he said. “The right way is to set realistic goals for reducing emissions consistent with advances in technology.”

Click here to read the full NY Times article.

Sizing Up the Utilities, if Carbon Caps Take Hold

FUEL prices and dividends are usually big drivers of the share prices of utilities. Now there is a new variable to consider: how much carbon their power plants emit. Federal regulations over the next few years could limit the carbon emissions of these companies, and Wall Street analysts have begun compiling lists of potential winners and losers, based on that possibility.

All of the leading presidential candidates say they favor such measures, and some kind of legislation affecting utilities is likely at some point after the November election, Citi Investment Research said in a January report.

If “carbon caps” — limits on carbon emissions — eventually become law, the winners may include operators of nuclear power plants (which don’t emit carbon), while the losers may include power companies that mainly burn coal, analysts say. Beyond that, who wins and who loses will depend on the details of possible future regulations, which can’t be predicted with certainty. Still, a cottage industry on Wall Street has begun to evaluate these questions.

“I think the time when you can keep your head in the ground is just over,” said Hugh Wynne, a senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

Some analysts have begun to evaluate the potential impact of carbon caps on stock prices.
“Carbon has been an ongoing issue for the investment community for the last three or four years,” said Brian Chin, an equity analyst at Citi Investment Research.

Federal carbon rules might be similar to regional efforts in the Northeast and California. These plans are to place emission limits on plants that emit carbon dioxide, and, in the case of California, on other greenhouse gases as well. Allowances or credits to emit a certain level of greenhouse gases are either auctioned or granted free.

Under such a system, called “cap and trade,” utilities that stay below emissions quotas can hold credits for the future or sell them on the open market. In Europe, the cost of one credit has averaged $25 a metric ton of carbon dioxide since January 2005, when the European Union's emissions trading plan began.

Companies like the Exelon Corporation, the Constellation Energy Group and the Entergy Corporation, which operate nuclear power plants, would benefit from cap-and-trade plans under consideration, like the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, which is pending in Congress, Mr. Chin said.

“They all potentially get a very large benefit from higher power prices being pushed up by carbon,” he said.

Click here to read the full NY TIMES article.