It’s hard to read the energy and climate news some days and not hear a frustrated Vince Lombardi, the legendary US football coach, shouting, “Does anyone here know how to play this game???”
That’s precisely the reaction I had last night when I ran into a couple of articles, one concerning the coal industry and the other the prospects for a meaningful US climate bill.
Bradford Plumer, a writer you should be following, asks the non-rhetorical question, Is The Coal Industry Suicidal?, in a piece which begins with a perfect description of the coal business:
For years, the coal industry’s strategy for dealing with climate change has gone something like this: 1) Fight off caps on carbon pollution for as long as possible. 2) Convince politicians to throw gobs of money at fancy low-carbon technologies like carbon capture and sequestration. 3) Pray that those fancy technologies actually work. The strategy has succeeded so far. Seeing as how half the electricity in the United States comes from coal, there’s never a shortage of members of Congress willing to do whatever the industry wants.
But it might be time for King Coal to switch gears…
For a long time, coal was the cheapest energy source because the industry was allowed to offload so many of its hidden costs onto the public-asthma-causing air pollution, shoddy safety regulations, coal debris dumped in Appalachian streams… But as the government starts regulating these side effects more closely, it will become clear that coal isn’t actually all that cheap. Meanwhile, natural gas prices are falling and prices for renewables are tumbling. Fewer and fewer utilities want to keep plunking money down on coal.
Then there’s global warming. Again, the industry is clinging to the hope that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) will become viable someday, and low-carbon coal can become America’s energy source of choice. Right now, though, CCS is very much unproven, and it’s hugely expensive. A recent GAO report found that CCS simply won’t take off unless there’s a price on carbon or some sort of restriction on greenhouse gases. The coal industry could fight for a cap-and-trade system that a) allowed utilities to continue operating (some) coal-fired plants, and b) provided financial incentives for carbon capture. But, instead, the industry is just digging in its heels-and, in the end, that may prove to be a huge blunder.
Quite the nasty corner coal is stuck in, isn’t it? If they stick to their old game plan, they can likely help to delay a price on carbon emissions a little while longer, but that only digs them deeper into a losing proposition and heightens the potential loss from betting on CCS. And no one should doubt the importance of CCS to the coal business. Given that the proper level for CO2 emissions is, as one scientist (Ken Caldeira?) once said is the same as the proper number of muggings of little old ladies: zero, we cannot and will not tolerate a highly polluting form of electricity generation like coal to continue with business as usual in the long run. In the US, coal accounts for 36% of all energy-related CO2 emissions, meaning if we wiped out all other CO2 emissions we’d still be well above the required 80%-by-2050 reduction and emitting nearly twice our limit.
The coal industry is running out of time and options.
The second article has the grim title Climate Bill, R.I.P. and starts with a body blow:
A comprehensive energy and climate bill – the centerpiece of President Obama’s environmental agenda – is officially dead. Take it from the president’s own climate czar, Carol Browner. “What is abundantly clear,” she told Rolling Stone in an exclusive interview on July 8th, “is that an economy-wide program, which the president has talked about for years now, is not doable in the Senate.”
But the failure to confront global warming – central not only to Obama’s presidency but to the planet itself – is not the Senate’s alone. Rather than press forward with a climate bill in the Senate last summer, after the House had passed landmark legislation to curb carbon pollution, the administration repeated many of the same mistakes it made in pushing for health care reform. It refused to lay out its own plan, allowing the Senate to bicker endlessly over the details. It pursued a “stealth strategy” of backroom negotiations, supporting huge new subsidies to win over big polluters. It allowed opponents to use scare phrases like “cap and tax” to hijack public debate. And most galling of all, it has failed to use the gravest environmental disaster in the nation’s history to push through a climate bill – to argue that fossil-fuel polluters should pay for the damage they are doing to the atmosphere, just as BP will be forced to pay for the damage it has done to the Gulf.
Top environmental groups, including Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, are openly clashing with the administration, demanding that Obama provide more hands-on leadership to secure a meaningful climate bill. “We really need the president to take the lead and tell us what bill he’s going to support,” says Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense Fund. “If he doesn’t do that, then everything he’s done so far will lead to nothing.”
But Obama, so far, has shown no urgency on the issue, and little willingness to lead – despite a June poll showing that 76 percent of Americans believe the government should limit climate pollution. With hopes for an economy-wide approach to global warming dashed, Congress is now weighing a scaled-back proposal that would ratchet down carbon pollution from the nation’s electric utilities. It has come to this: The best legislation we can hope for is the same climate policy that George W. Bush promoted during the 2000 campaign. Even worse, the “utilities first” approach could wind up stripping the EPA of its newfound authority to regulate carbon emissions from power plants.
You get the idea, but you should go read it all.
Related: Forward or Backward on Global Warming?
