In trying to communicate the urgency of our climate situation to newcomers, there are two basic approaches we can take, and we’re doing a reasonable job on just one of them. We can talk about all the “feeds and speeds” of climate change–if we let atmospheric CO2 reach X parts per million it will mean Y degrees of warming and Z cm of sea level rise and W people turned into climate refugees because of inadequate food and/or water. This is the kind of talk that consumes about 95% of the blogosphere, and quite understandably–it’s hard not to scream about will happen if the ship we’re all on hits the iceberg that’s dead ahead.
But there’s another aspect of this, tied to that old devil I keep bringing up, timing, that realists who know what’s going on are doing a terrible job conveying to the newcomers: The difficulty of doing what science says we must to avoid all those horrific ramifications. The implication of ignoring that side of the coin are terrible; if mainstream consumers and voters think that climate change is a distant concern and that we “have plenty of time to deal with it”, then they will be far less inclined to do something about it now. This is hardly a new phenomenon, or one restricted to climate change. Ask dentists how many patients they see who neglect their teeth for years and then suddenly need root canal procedures or extractions. Ask doctors how many patients they treat who “have been meaning to quit smoking for years” but never did, only to discover they have a serious lung disorder or even cancer.
I find it very frustrating how many of my fellow dedicated enviros are utterly clueless about the sheer magnitude of the effort needed to hit that 80 by 2050 goal. Far too many of “us” think that driving a hybrid, changing their light bulbs, bringing home their groceries in reusable cloth bags, and not buying bottled water “makes them green” and they’re “doing their part to help”, etc. Not only are they not even close to doing “enough”, they’re actually doing considerable harm by inadvertently sending the message to mainstreamers that what they (the enviros) are doing is the silver bullet that will solve our environmental problems if only we could get everyone to be like them. The mainstreamers see that what the enviros do isn’t all that different from what they themselves do, so what’s the rush? Why is everyone getting so worked up about it?
One way to approach this particular gap in our communications is to look at just what it will take to reduce US CO2 emissions below 20% of the 1990 level by 2050. An excellent book on the topic, albeit one focused on the UK and not the US, is George Monbiot’s Heat, which I very highly recommend. I don’t plan to write a US-centric version of Monbiot’s book (although I would certainly read it if one were available). Instead, I plan to look at a series of scenarios for cutting US emissions, and present them in a slightly different way than I’ve done things in the past. For each installment of this series, I will create a spreadsheet that readers can download and fiddle with, and I will write a post that walks you through the spreadsheet and what it says, but without talking about every single cell.
I can’t stress this enough: I want your feedback about this idea in general, as well as what kind of scenarios to include in future installments. You don’t have to write a detailed treatment, just leave a comment here and we can talk about it publicly and narrow it down to something specific enough to be done in Excel. And to be blunt, I will likely not pursue this project unless I have some indication that it’s of value and people want to see more installments; this first one is an experiment.
For the first installment, I wanted to look at one of the enduring memes that’s arisen in the last few years, that we can make huge strides in reducing our CO2 emissions by making much wider use of our vastly increased natural gas reserves. We all know that natural gas is cleaner than coal or oil (and it certainly is), so making a big, long term commitment to using it in place of those other fuels would be a big win, right? Well, maybe not so much.
The Excel spreadsheet accompanying this post is here [XLS]. Please note that I added some pop-up comments to help explain exactly what I did. (Look for the little red triangle in the upper-right corner of some cells; hover your mouse over the cell to see the comment.)
In the spreadsheet, I started off by reproducing some data from the US Dept. of Energy’s Annual Energy Review. The first two tables present data from tables 12.3 and 12.2, which provide US CO2 emissions from energy consumption for 2008 and 1990, respectively. Next is a table showing how much each sector of the economy derives its energy from various sources (coal, oil, etc.).
The next thing in the spreadsheet is Scenario 1: All NG for electricity, transportation, and stationary use, which is simply a reworked version of the AER table 12.3 at the top of the spreadsheet. This is a “magic wand” scenario, in which I’m looking at what would happen if we could wave a magic wand and instantly transform the entire US infrastructure to replace all use of coal and oil for electricity generation, transportation, and stationary use, e.g. space heating and industrial processes). Thus there is no time lag for infrastructure transformation, no issues of how to finance such a massive undertaking, etc. Wave your wand and POOF!, it’s done.
I scaled the emissions from natural gas to replace coal and oil in the residential, commercial, industrial, and electricity sectors to show what they would be if an equivalent amount of energy were provided by natural gas. This assumes that the same mix of natural gas technologies would be used as is currently in place.
For transportation, I reduced the CO2 emissions from oil use by 25%. Why only 25%? As it turns out, that’s all the CO2 savings you get from burning natural gas instead of gasoline in a motor vehicle. Proponents of CNG vehicles talk about how it’s vastly cleaner than gasoline, and it is, if you take into account all pollutants, like particulate matter. But we’re talking here about CO2 emissions, and that’s all you get.
The results? This sweeping change gets us a whopping 13% reduction from 1990 emissions levels, or 26% from 2008 levels. If you look at the sector totals in the spreadsheet, you’ll see that transportation is a wash compared to 1990 levels, and the other sectors shoe a 13% to 24% improvement. Not exactly the improvement we were hoping for.
In Scenario 2: Scenario 1 + 50% more nuclear, I bumped the amount of electricity the US gets from nuclear power from 20% to 30%, and continued to make the simplifying assumption that nuclear power has zero CO2 emissions. (It does have some associated emissions, of course, but the level is very low so I hand waved it.)
This improves the situation, but not by a lot. We’ve now reduced CO2 emissions by 17% (compared to 1990), 30% (2008). Suddenly, 80% is starting to look like really immense number.
And I note that in the real world where we don’t have magic wands, that 50% bump in nuclear power would require one new nuclear reactor to go online every week for a year, or one a month for over four years. Anyone care to bet on that happening?
In Scenario 3: Scenario 1 + 100% more nuclear, I assumed a 100% increase in nuclear power, bring its contribution to 40% of US electricity (with a real-world contrustion time of two years at one/week, over 8 years at one/month).
The results improve slightly, and we’re now up to 21% less CO2 (vs. 1990), or 33% (2008).
In Scenario 4: Scenario 1 + 100% more nuclear + 33% reduction in elect I assume that not only do we have the full natural gas changeover plus a doubling of nuclear power capability, but we also achieve an ongoing reduction in electricity demand of 33%. That one-third conservation factor is purely a visceral guess about what could be possible in the US. I realize that would still leave us higher, per capita, than Japan and the EU, for example, but I don’t think that sort of mass hypnosis you could do better than that, given how many Americans think conservation is part of some vast hippy pinko plot to turn their children gay, remove religion from public life, and force them to eat cardboard-like cereal for breakfast.
Note that in calculating the conservation savings I assumed that all of it would come from that portion of electricity generation provided by natural gas, so we would get the maximum benefit fro the doubling of nuclear power.
This drags our numbers up to a 30% CO2 reduction (1990), or 40% (2008).
Finally, Scenario 5: Scenario 1 + 100% more nuclear + 33% reduction in elect + 33% reduction in trans adds a 33% reduction in all transportation emissions. You can make whatever assumption you want about how we get there–much greater use of public transit, more people walking and bicycling, a conversion of a large swath of private vehicles to EV’s, or some combination thereof.
After all that–NG conversion, doubling nuclear power, 33% reduction in emissions from non-nuclear electricity generation and 33% reduction in transportation emissions–we’re still at only a 40% CO2 reduction (1990), 50% (2008).
Clearly, this is a rough first pass at estimating the difficulty of making the kind of CO2 emissions reductions required. I didn’t take into account a major electrification of transportation, for example, the possibility of algae fuel delivering a major portion of our transportation at nearly zero net carbon emissions, or the continue expansion of wind and solar power. But I also didn’t point out that the population of the US is projected to rise to 420 million by 2050, according to the US Census Bureau [PDF], which throws a gigantic wrench into the works.
Lou,
This is an excellent series shaping up. I just finished reading Heat and it truly is sobering. The one thing that really sticks in my mind from Monbiot’s book is that we all need to stop traveling by air. A return flight London-New York produces 1.2 tons of CO2 per passenger, or the quantity of emissions allowable, in a year, for all uses of energy if the 90% cut is to be made.
Of course, air travel is growing very quickly so this stat really depresses me because I see no way around this one. And I have a long trip schedule for July that I will feel guilty both ways for several hours.
Although Al Gore is a polarizing figure (and I never voted for him, BTW) his latest book Our Choice is quite good if one wishes to know about carbon mitigation and energy conservation. Some chapters are slow reads but stick with it and you will be rewarded.
I also think Joe Romm’s book Hell and High Water: Global Warming–the Solution and the Politics–and What We Should Do is a good source on this topic.
Scott A. Mandia
Web: http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/
Blog: http://profmandia.wordpress.com/
The ark starts to form from the mist…
http://www.inhabitat.com/2010/03/05/maldives-to-fight-rising-sea-levels-with-floating-islands/
Lou,
Get the economics of carbon energy right and all the rest will follow. If there is a silver bullet–that is it.
Since I believe we will run out of oil (at least figuratively) in the next couple decades, the transportation sector will basically take care of itself. We “just” need to make sure that what we replace the oil with is something that is basically zero carbon system wide.
As for renewable energy sources…I’m a big believer in technology & innovation etcetera. Go back 30 years and try to imagine how the computer industry would develop, or 20 years and try to envision the internet/telecommunications revolution or 15 years and try to predict how the cell phone revolution would occur (and that most cell phones would be sold in the 3rd world!)…
I suspect that in fact most of the 3rd world will leap-frog the whole “the utility grid” concept. If investors in the US are concerned about building new coal plants, just imagine China’s concern about relying on coal as their single energy source despite the risk that the entire rest of the world could at any time decide (via carbon pricing) to turn its back on coal and make them a pariah state (okay maybe Hu Jin Toa is not losing much sleep over this yet!)
Thanks for the reminder on Joe’s book. I read it when it first came out, but it’s now buried under one of the embarrassingly large piles of books and papers and clippings in my office (I think). As soon as I finish re-reading Limits to Growth (which I can’t recommend highly enough) I’ll try to get to it.
There are two possible futures for air travel in the long run:
1. It shrinks to a tiny percentage of its current volume, simply because we tax it so heavily it becomes a boutique industry.
2. They figure out how to make nearly carbon neutral bio jet fuel work on a scale and at a price that rescues them. (The ramifications of using bio fuel in jets opens another 55-gallon drum of worms, depending on what’s used for fuel feedstock. If it’s something with very little or no impact on arable land, like algae, then it might not be such a bad thing. Otherwise…)
disdaniel: I would not assume for a second that we can count on peak oil strangling our consumption enough to make a big difference in transportation. If nothing else, cheap natural gas in the US + rising oil prices will push people to NG vehicles (even though I think it’s a spectacularly bad idea, given the crummy 25% CO2 reduction it buys you).
Trust me: There were plenty of people who saw where computers and telecomm were going a long time ago. I worked with some of them.
I know, right down to my DNA level, what technology can do, but I also know what an absurd set of roadblocks we can erect around those breakthroughs thanks to simply stupidity and some entrenched interests resisting change. (Ask the average American how he or she feels about the cable company or his/her HMO.)
Cable companies? lol That is so end of the twen cen Lou.
Thanks for your analysis Lou. Given the 1990 population as 250 million, would a good “business as usual” starting point for 2050 be 420 million/250 million= 1.68? In other words, to get to 80% of 1990 levels we’ll have to reduce a similarly scaled output by 50-odd%? That’s a big monkey wrench, given your analysis…..
Lou, I’m sure there are better uses for algae-based fuels than air transport.
One thing which has to be examined carefully is the mix of electricity / liquid fuels / coal / renewables in the future energy economy.
The spin doctors love to promote Nuclear Power as a panacea, conveniently ignoring that nuclear only accounts for 6% of total primary energy. Here in the UK, nuclear accounts for around 20% of our electricity supply, and 6% of total primary energy. We cannot increase that to 100% using current nuclear technology, which is baseload-only. Even if we did, and didn’t change the energy use mix, electricity would still only be providing 30% of our energy “demand” (whenever I hear that term I think of spoilt brats and tantrums, which I fear is not that far from reality).
How well do our techno-fixes scale? What of “peak uranium”? Peak rare earth elements? Not to mention the ethical problems of nukes. Weinberg’s “Faustian bargain” is conveniently forgotten these days as the whole level of intellectual debate has been “dumbed-down” to a level which I find unbelievable (and unforgivable).
Phil, wondering when (the totally unthinkable) “peak technology” is going to hit.
One of the things I’ve been curious to see is what kind of reductions we can hit if everyone in the US managed their energy production and usage like one particular State (pick a State). Here in California we are rather proud of our flat per capita use of electrons and encourage others to do as we do, but I rather doubt we would hit the aggressive reduction targets that way. I suspect there is a way to drive that home with another one of your scenarios if you can find the energy mix we actually purchase. (few coal fans out here)
Lou,
I have been communicating with John Reissman to help him with his Fee & Dividend Petition. Is this something you would be interested in?
When I heard Dr. David Karoly, one of the Principal Chief Authors or something like that) of the IPCC (2007) report speak in March or April of 2007, what he had to say was so jolting that I found where he would be speaking a week later and went to hear him again. It was both a relief and almost disabling to know that I had heard him correctly. The next 40-50 years impacts of CO2 are locked in. All of the machinations right now will help, and will have some impacts along the way, but essentially, we are working for change now which will have impacts way out into the future. I know that everybody reading on here is aware of all that.
Now for the worst part. The IPCC report, even with it’s 5 errors out of approximately 2,000 pages, did not include any projected impacts from feedbacks, like the methane you refer to, or albedo, or glacial melt accelerating, or …. (I see a guy coming up the drive with a subpoena from Jim Inhofe right now, but I can stand the pain, or at least until I have to listen to him speak, or try to.) These feedbacks are what truly frighten me more, and to think we are locked in to them until we get the CO2 levels back down, and at that point, global temps will be so high that it won’t make any difference anyway.
With that background, I am not surprised at your numbers, although I think there is no end to the expanse of hopelessness in the collective mess humanity has evolved into.
The only thing which I can think of is to look at what impact reduction of the transportation of food might have. If the US were to stop the production of agricultural products for export and thus reduce the usage of hydrocarbons, our emissions would be greatly reduced. If we were to then streamline the distribution process of the absolute minimal production necessary for our own use, then we would or could greatly reduce the emissions. Since most of the US falls within a temperate climate, survival without a lot of the heating and cooling we have now, particularly with some combination of tiny houses and extreme insulation. The obvious problem with this is the misery we would deal to the remainder of the world which consumes the agricultural products we would be reducing the production of – so maybe we aren’t as bad as we look on paper, from that standpoint.
Maybe we could just take a mulligan and start all over from eons ago. I’d like us to evolve with less of the back problems which bother me, too, if you could, please, Lou.
Oddball musings, and I won’t be offended when this whole thing is deleted.
This post was already enough to reinforce that it simply ain’t gonna happen voluntarily, i.e. short of being forced by physical scarcity, in any such time frame. As if I didn’t think that already, considering, for example, Mayer Hillman’s comment in Monbiot’s “Heat”, that 80% would make Britain look like “a very poor third world country”.
In keeping with this, I figure that the enviros “get” that they will be reduced to utter political irrelevance if the difficulty/scale becomes widely acknowledged. And let’s face simple human nature – the very last thing that people who see themselves as engaged in saving the world would want to reduced to is irrelevance. Thus the thundering silence.
I’ve said before that political action is likely only to the extent that voters can see it as dumping on the evil wicked corporations which deliver the bad news that said voters need to winch themselves out of bed in the morning and do something productive rather than watch sports all day. Once the action is seen as crossing a red line by causing major personal expense and inconvenience, fuhgeddaboudit. And while personal action might be of considerable leadership value (as against the current “do as I say, not as I do”), pigs could surely learn to fly long before it would ever scale even to 80/infinity, much less 80/2050.
It remains that in a larger sociopolitical sense, there is as yet simply no reason to take action based on CO2 concerns. For some reason that stumps me, scientists just can’t seem to grasp that in sociopolitical – not scientific – terms, no pattern of model-generated pixels on any computer screen really constitutes evidence of anything at all, much less evidence that costly action needs to be taken. At the very best, pixel patterns merely constitute sci-fi speculation about a future that is necessarily unknown since it hasn’t happened yet – just the sort of thing, devoid of real-world consequences, which has long sold movie tickets. Compared to, say, being out of a job in the here and now, such things pale to insignificance.
That reminds me – in view of the public moods in Greece, or in France as in yesterday’s post at http://www.energybulletin.net/51844, it seems reasonable to suggest that once any sort of action really starts to bite down hard in the here and now, even Europeans may shed their supercilious piousness about the speculative distant future. So if the Chinese just hang in there, they may have little to fear about becoming pariahs.
Short of something dramatic and incontrovertible happening, perhaps people will be left simply to heed the regional climate models – if those can be improved enough to become useful – and move as and when the need arises. After all, most facilities and cities these days are rebuilt every 20 to 50 years anyhow, due to wearout and obsolescence. One blindingly obvious response that need cost little would be simply to rebuild out of harm’s way, further inland, in the routine course of that replacement cycle. (Those too thickheaded to move might simply to be warned at most once, then deprived of all subsidized insurance cover and left to pay, or not, as they see fit, to cover the cost of their own foolish choice.)
I really resent binary “behavioral” solutions like Monbiot’s “stop flying”. The important thing is getting carbon out of the atmosphere. There are many ways to do it, if we just got started. Taking it as a given that humans need to travel and consume energy, we need to marshal the forces of innovation toward that end. We haven’t even tried, and people like Monbiot are trying to sell the idea that we just can’t ever succeed. It’s almost as nauseating as the deniers.
Lou
The problem with talking to newcomers is that the old timers assume a level of knowledge about basics that may or may not be there. I started with a new project team at work a week ago and that is what I face. They assume I know the basics. \the use of jargon is also a problem. Oldtimers tend to talk in alphabet soup.
Lou, thanks for doing this and please continue with the spreadsheets, its increadibly valuable to have these facts pulled together into an easily accessible format (excel) – part of the problem with everything in this age is all the pieces are out there everywhere. It’s great to have things put together like this.
It’s rather sobering to look at this. That was suprising that it was only 25% better at CO2 emissions for auto’s, which isn’t a very efficient use of the fuel anyways. I just assumed it was 50% or something.
It seems about the only place it might make sense to deploy natural gas would be for rapid in-situ replacement of Coal firing plants until that can be replaced by CO2 emissions free generation – but most of the bet has to be on CO2 emission free technology in the first place for alot of our transportation and all power generation or we won’t have a prayer (lately watching what’s happening in Washington and previously in Copenhagen, I’m wondering whether we have a prayer anyways).
I think Air transportation will become a boutique industry without taxing, as worldwide oil demand gets back up to 2008 level and its price follows ($4+ gasoline anyone?), my gut says Summer 2011 is when we’ll get that, just a guess of course. No US airline could come close to making money back when the price was like that and it’ll only get worse – the idea of $100 fares and the middle class being able to travel freely by jet will become a thing of the past – at least until they can make a cheap alternative jet fuel in large quantities which isn’t close to reality at this point.
We’ll be lucky if most US airlines (except for a couple) are still around in 5 years and we’ll be lucky if Boeing still sells commercial jets in 10 years (they’ve dug themselves into a hole with most of their current jets not being much more fuel efficient than the ones they’ve sold this decade and once airlines start going out of business – Boeing gets to try to sell new jets with similar fuel efficiency compared to the collapsed prices of relatively new used ones (this happened to an extent during the recession of the early 80′s and hit Boeing hard at the time – they don’t get orders for new ones) in a shrinking sales market (not so many people will be able to fly since fares will have to go up significantly, so there will be fewer airlines with fewer jets overall) – bad situation for Boeing. Just my $0.02 on that.
Phil:
Oh, to be sure, I think there are better uses for algae-based fuels than airplanes, too, but that says nothing about how they WILL be used, only what you or I think they SHOULD be used for. The airlines are facing certain death if liquid fuel costs go high enough; they can’t burn coal, they can’t run on batteries, they can’t go nuclear. Therefore, they will be willing to pay more for it per gallon than ground vehicles will, making them the first segment of the economy to adopt them on a broad basis. (Unless someone figures out a scalable way to make biofuel for $1/gallon, in whic case everyone will adopt them as fast as we can build the plants.)
Of course, in terms of the overall economy it doesn’t much matter who adopts them first. Every barrel of petroleum the airlines don’t consume because they’ve substituted algae fuel for it leaves another barrel to be used in other vehicles.
Scott: I’ll get back to you in e-mail on this one.
JohnV: Speaking as an old guy (in computer biz terms; I’m 52), I resemble that remark.
Mike: I’m not sure what you mean by “output”. Are you talking about economic production or CO2 emissions? In general, the population growth issue is an enormous problem for the US in terms of its impact on emissions, as you pointed out. I’m beginning to see the wisdom of Ken Caldeira’s comment in an interview(I think) that the proper level of CO2 emissions is the same as the proper number of muggings of little old ladies: zero.
sasparilla:
That “puling things together” issue is one that makes me nuts. As you said, the information is all out there, somewhere, but it can be a real challenge to find particular numbers to make just “one little calculation”. I plan to do an analysis soon that breaks out numbers in a different way than the normal “table 12.3″ way shown in the Annual Energy Review, and it took a good bit of digging around to find the needed numbers.
My hunch is that thanks to the marketplace putting a gun to their head, the airlines will fund enough research into biofuels (with non-trivial help from the US gov’t) to make a breakthrough there pretty soon. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see at least one major carrier flying jets on 90% petroleum/10% biofuel (from algae or plant biomass) within two or three years.
A couple of points on this – which is a very good, simple approach to illustrating how difficult it will be to make significant reductions in GHG emissions.
First, the current legislation (Waxman-Markey) calls for an 83% reduction in emissions by 2050, but about half of that can be in the form of offsets – that is, reductions of GHG emissions outside the U.S. While this makes economic sense, given that it doesn’t matter where the reductions occur, it means that we are putting off making the levels of reduction that we will eventually need to make if we’re going to get to an acceptable CO2 concentration.
Second, why not take your magic wand and simply decarbonize both the power and transportation sectors entirely? If we were to magically convert all electricity production to renewable sources or nuclear, and also convert all vehicles to electricity, biofuels or other zero-carbon fuels (also using the wand to make biofuels zero carbon), we would still not reach the 80% reduction target. Your comments that we will need to reduce consumption is right on target. I’ll also note that the simple fact that we need to reduce across all sectors is the basis for most of the mitigation strategies that are out there now, including the Pacala/Socolow “wedges.”
Andy:
If I did everything with my magic wand the first time around, then this would be a really short series of posts. (Yes, that’s a joke, kind of.)
While I’m presenting this in the context of the magic wand metaphor, I plan to explore different proposed approaches to see how far they get us, individually and in combination. But I’m also trying to keep them somewhat realistic, which is why I didn’t assume, for example, that the US went 100% nuclear and I won’t assume we go 100% solar, etc.
I think this is a good project, to start a conversation about how difficult it will be to adjust to a low-carbon future. I have made many of the changes (hybrid car, telecommute, recycle, no bottled beverages, buy local etc.) but I know my actions, even if followed by all US citizens will not likely achieve the targets.
The definition of personal success includes implicit great wealth and high consumption. Uber-wealthy individuals are admired. Populations in developing nations aspire to wealth and consumption enjoyed by Americans (US). At some level, this is recognized by many people, and this may be part of the fuel that fires climate change denial.
With respect to your spreadsheet, a few suggestions:
1. Include links to the data sources (I assume they are online.)
2. Include solar power and solar water heating. (Maybe that is ‘other’ but this should be more explicit. What if all homes had passive solar water heating?)
3. Include cost analysis (I guess in another spreadsheet).
In any case, I commend you on starting this discussion.
Peter,
This is the first installment, so things like solar water heating, better presentation (links), etc. will all show up, eventually.
Some items I’d like to include, like a cost analysis, will be a nightmare unless I get lucky and find some analysis done by a trusted source that I can use wholesale. I normally try to pay a lot of attention to the cost part of the cost/benefit calculation, but trying to come up with realistic numbers for even some “should be simple” things like the cost to convert motor vehicles to run on natural gas, can be insanely difficult.