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.

Do you think it’s time to hang some hard numbers on the promises that China, India, and the US are making regarding their CO2 emissions? I sure do.

The promises:

• China said it will reduce the intensity of their CO2 emissions per unit of GDP by up to 45% by the year 2020, from a 2005 baseline. I will assume they succeed in the full 45% reduction.
• India said it will reduce their CO2 emissions per unit of GDP by 20 to 25% by 2020, also from a 2005 baseline. I will assume they make the full 25% reduction.
• The US has said it will reduce total emissions by 17% by 2020, from a 2005 baseline. Again, I will assume they succeed.

The context:

China

• 2005 GDP: 2,225 billion US$
  
• 2005 CO2 emissions: 5,429 million metric tons
  
• 2020 GDP: 10,130 billion US$
  
• 2005 CO2 intensity: 2.44 million metric tons CO2/billion US$
  
• 2008 CO2 emissions: 6,315 million metric tons CO2

India

• 2005 GDP: 759 billion US$
  
• 2005 CO2 emissions: 1,194 million metric tons
  
• 2020 GDP: 3,228 billion US$
  
• 2005 CO2 intensity: 1.57 million metric tons CO2/billion US$
  
• 2008 CO2 emissions: 1,664 million metric tons CO2

United States

• 2005 GDP: 12,457 billion US$
  
• 2005 CO2 emissions: 5,994 million metric tons
  
• 2020 GDP: 28,830 billion US$
  
• 2005 CO2 intensity: 0.48 million metric tons CO2/billion US$
  
• 2008 CO2 emissions: 5,612 million metric tons CO2

The GDP numbers are from page 12 of the 2020 Foresight Report, and the CO2 numbers are from Table 11.19 of the US Dept. of Energy’s Annual Energy Review. The 2005 carbon intensity numbers are simply (2005 CO2 emissions) / (2005 GDP). The 2008 estimated CO2 emissions come from the CDIAC, Preliminary 2007-08 Global & National Estimates [XLS].

Please note that all CO2 numbers from these sources measure the burning of fossil fuels, and do not include cement manufacture, land use changes, natural gas flaring, etc.

The projections:

China

• Reduction in CO2 intensity, 2005 to 2020 (assumed): 45%
  
• 2020 CO2 intensity (assumed): 1.342 million metric tons CO2/billion US$
  
• 2020 CO2 emissions with no intensity reduction: 24,717.2 million metric tons CO2
  
• 2020 CO2 emissions with the promised intensity reduction: 13,594 million metric tons CO2
  
• Change in CO2 emissions, 2005 to 2020, with the promised intensity reduction: +8,165 million metric tons CO2/year (+150%)
  
• Cumulative CO2 emissions, 2008 to 2020, with the promised intensity reduction: 119,448 million metric tons CO2

India

• Reduction in CO2 intensity, 2005 to 2020 (assumed): 25%
  
• 2020 CO2 intensity (assumed): 1.178 million metric tons CO2/billion US$
  
• 2020 CO2 emissions with no intensity reduction: 5,067 million metric tons CO2
  
• 2020 CO2 emissions with the promised intensity reduction: 3,802 million metric tons CO2
  
• Change in CO2 emissions, 2005 to 2020, with the promised intensity reduction: +2,608 million metric tons CO2/year (+218%)
  
• Cumulative CO2 emissions, 2008 to 2020, with the promised intensity reduction: 32,796 million metric tons CO2

United States (items re-ordered to reflect calculation sequence)

• 2020 CO2 emissions with no level reduction: 12,973 million metric tons CO2
  
• 2020 CO2 emissions with the promised level reduction: 4,975 million metric tons CO2
  
• Change in CO2 emissions, 2005 to 2020, with the promised level reduction: -1,018 million metric tons CO2/year (-17%)
  
• 2020 CO2 intensity (calculated): 0.173 million metric tons CO2/billion US$
  
• Reduction in CO2 intensity, 2005 to 2020 (calculated): 64%
  
• Cumulative CO2 emissions, 2008 to 2020, with the promised level reduction: 63,516 million metric tons CO2

The cumulative emissions for each country assumes the reductions begin in 2009, since the most recent numbers I could find were estimates for 2008, and that the reductions will happen linearly.

Conclusions, based on the Copenhagen promises about 2020:

• Emissions from China and India will rise substantially, while those from the US will decline slightly.
• China will be emitting 2.73 times as much CO2/year as the US, or 8,619 million metric tons more/year.
• India will be emitting 76% of the US’s total, or 1,173 million metric tons less/year.
• The US has the greatest CO2 intensity reduction, 64%, compared to China’s 45% and India’s 25%.
• The avoided emissions (2020 business as usual vs. 2020 promise; millions of metric tons/year) are China: 11,123, the US: 7,998, and India: 1,265.
• The combined, cumulative emissions of China, India, and the US from 2009 to 2020 will be 215,760 million metric tons. China’s share will be 55%, the US’: 29%, India’s: 15%. Assuming we have a remaining worldwide CO2 budget of 3,660,000 million metric tons, the combined, cumulative emissions of the three countries over that 12-year period will represent 5.9% of our entire remaining allotment. Removing the 40% “Archer bonus”[1] reduces our CO2 budget to 2,196,000 million metric tons, which means these three countries will eat up 9.8% of it in just 12 years.

Clearly, one can object to the exact way in which I made these calculations regarding China and India. Should their GDP be measured in US dollars or their own currencies? Should they be nominal or PPP (purchasing power parity) figures? And whose GDP projections should we use? This is one of the fundamental issues with CO2 intensity-based pledges: As tough as it is to get accurate measurements of emissions in countries that have an enormous incentive to lie about them (which is every country on the planet), we now have additional layers of “debatable uncertainty” added in the form of economic projections and a choice of ways to measure GDP. That makes it much more difficult to evaluate our collective performance and make useful projections. In an age of “living measured lives on a managed planet”, that’s not good enough.

No matter how you slice and dice the numbers, the bottom line remains the same: None of these three countries are promising to do enough. Until they do, all the political posturing in Copenhagen (and likely Mexico City in 2010) means precisely nothing.

[1] The “Archer bonus” (my term) refers to the fact that we’ve arbitrarily given ourselves a 40% bonus in the amount of CO2 we can emit by selecting the year 2100 as an arbitrary cutoff date. David Archer details this situation on 162 of his (highly recommended) book The Long Thaw.

Many of you probably know about this free book and have already downloaded a copy and actually read it[1], but let me point the rest you to it.

The book is David McKay’s Sustainable Energy - without the hot air. You can get the book from the above link as one ginormous PDF (roughly 50MB), or in smaller sections.

From the preface:

I’m concerned about cutting UK emissions of twaddle – twaddle about sustainable energy. Everyone says getting off fossil fuels is important, and we’re all encouraged to “make a difference,” but many of the things that allegedly make a difference don’t add up.

Twaddle emissions are high at the moment because people get emotional (for example about wind farms or nuclear power) and no-one talks about numbers. Or if they do mention numbers, they select them to sound big, to make an impression, and to score points in arguments, rather than to aid thoughtful discussion.

This is a straight-talking book about the numbers. The aim is to guide the reader around the claptrap to actions that really make a difference and to policies that add up.

I don’t know if I will love or hate this book, but based on the above quote and a very perfunctory skim of a few early chapters, it sounds like my kind of work.

[1] Just to be clear: I hadn’t gotten around to downloading the book until this morning. Someone recommended it to me on Facebook (thanks, Paul!), so I thought I’d give it a mention and bubble it up near the top of my to-do list.

From the web page for the above graphic:

The researchers at the Texas Transportation Institute have recently published new estimates of the effects of traffic congestion. Nearly 3 billion gallons of fuel is wasted each year due to traffic congestion. In 2007, the amount of wasted fuel declined slightly due to an overall decline in vehicle miles traveled when fuel prices skyrocketed. The wasted fuel amounts to 1.6% of total highway fuel use in 2007.

See the web page for a table of the data in the chart.

Using 20 pounds of CO2/gallon of fuel[1], this gives us 56 billion pounds of CO2/year from US congestion. This is greenhouse gas that we’ll have to live with and account for in climate policy for centuries. That’s a sizable cost to incur for no gain. I’d be hard pressed to come up with a better argument than this for adding start-top technology to new on-road vehicles that have internal combustion engines.

[1] For gasoline the figure is just below 20, and for diesel fuel it’s about 22 pounds, so using 20 pounds for a back-of-the-envelope number is reasonably accurate. On-road fuel usage in the US is roughly 2:1 gasoline:diesel fuel, but nearly all of that diesel fuel is used by long-distance trucks that encounter less congestion than the average daily commuter.

Joe Romm, indefatigable blogger, defender of truth, and gleeful denier slapper, has posted a devastating video in, The video that Anthony Watts does not want you to see: The Climate Denial “Crock of the Week”.

Please watch it (embedded just below), and don’t do what I normally do when I encounter such posts, which is read the text and not play the video. This one is worth it. (Be prepared to horse laugh at the big reveal at around the 5:20 mark, of how Watts’ claims stack up against real world data, even using his own cherry picking of weather stations.)

This video perfectly explains just how ridiculous Watts’ data crusade really is, and who’s supporting him. He has followers helping him in this effort, and I have to wonder how many of them realize that they’re on a futile effort that will have only one tangible outcome: To make Watts more famous and help him sell more books.

As for the Heartland Institute connection in the video and Watts’ laughable attempt to get the video pulled from YouTube–is anyone really surprised?

I think it’s a sorry commentary when this kind of nonsense not only develops a following, but prompts US government employed scientists to spend so much as a minute refuting Watts’ claims. Given the staggering amount of new evidence regarding climate chaos that’s piling up, there’s plenty of real science those people can do, and, I suspect, would much prefer to be doing.

Please help spread the word.

This time of year, there’s a lot of talk about what the ice at the top of the planet is doing, so here’s an Arctic ice eye candy round up. Consider it a brief right-brain vacation; I’ll get back to flow charts and numbers and other left-brain things soon.

On September 15-16, 2007, at the time of the Arctic sea ice minimum, relatively cloud-free skies enabled the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra to observe much of the sea ice and open ocean throughout the Arctic. Overlaid onto the image are sea ice minima from 2007 (medium blue), the previous record low from 2005 (light blue), and the long-term average from 1979-2000 (gray). The 2007 minimum, which correlates closely with the ice visible through clouds in this image, fell substantially below previous records. Image by Terry Haran, National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado, Boulder, using NASA MODIS data.

The graphic and above text is here.

How are we doing this year? Just barely above the 2007 record:

The graphic is here.

But ice concentration is important, too:

The graphic is here.

If you’d like a 3D view:

The graphic is in this directory, along with a bunch of other imagery.

Finally, if you’re curious about what’s happening at the other end of the planet, here’s the ice extent for Antarctica, which shows we’re just barely above the long-term trend:

The graphic is here.

Of course, you can find these graphics (and more!) via the latest version of the Quick Graphs page.

Gather ’round the monitor, folks, it’s time for yet another of the US Dept. of Energy’s flow diagrams.

This time around, it’s petroleum. Oil, that is. Black gold. Texas tea.

Anyway, first, the chart:

(Click on the image above to see the full-size version in a new window.)

Things I find interesting in this one:

• Total consumption was 19.42 million barrels/day. According to the US DOE, the highest yearly value for US oil consumption was 20.802 million barrels/day, and the last time oil consumption was below 19.42 million barrels/day was 1998, at 18.917.
• Imports of crude oil and refined products totaled 11.29 million barrels/day.
• Transportation, often portrayed as the monster under our oil consumption bed, deserves to be demonized. It accounts for 13.65 million barrels/day, 70% of US consumption. That’s 140% of crude oil imports, and 275% of crude production.
• Jet fuel, which most people would assume is a large portion of our oil consumption (thanks to all the attention flying gets for its carbon emissions), is actually pretty small. It’s only 11% of transportation, and 8% of all oil consumption.
• Only a tiny sliver of our oil consumption is used to generate electricity, about 1%. (Remember, when discussing the electricity flow chart I pointed out that a small portion of our electricity came from oil; this is the flip side of that oil/electricity relationship.)
• The residential consumption, a mere 0.68 million barrels/day, can be very misleading. It includes only direct use of oil, basically all heating, and doesn’t include the residential portion of that gigantic transportation flow. In general, this is a problem with how energy numbers are reported across sectors of an economy. While it’s definitely very useful to do the “recite” breakout (residential, commercial, industrial, transportation, electricity), this can lead to what appears to be absurdly low consumption numbers for the residential sector, in particular. Consider your own energy use. How much of it is electricity and transportation? My guess is quite a lot, and about all that’s left is space heating (assuming it’s not done with electricity) and gasoline for the lawn mower (assuming it’s also not electric) and relatively minor, non-energy oil uses.

By the way, notice how we still measure oil consumption in barrels (i.e. a large unit) per day (a small unit)? I guess if we went around saying that the US uses 298 billion gallons of oil/year people would freak out.

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In this Graph of the Week, I want to take a look at another of those US Dept. of Energy flow charts that I love so much.

This time around, it’s everyone’s favorite, coal:

(Click on the image above to see the full-size version in a new window.)

You can find links to all of the flow diagrams from the Annual Energy Review on the AER’s home page [•], in HTML and PDF format.

Note that the units in the above chart are millions of short tons per year.[1]

The interesting bits about this one, in my opinion, are:

• The sheer size of the US annual coal consumption, over 1.1 billion short tons.
• The US supplies all of its own demand, with a slight export surplus. Given the US’s large reserves, and how often we’re called “the Saudi Arabia of coal”, and how the reserves of those two fuels have been questioned lately, it’s true.
• 92.9% of US coal consumption goes for electricity. Think the coal industry is worried about a push to reduce CO2 emissions from electricity generation, given the cost and difficulty of widely implementing CCS (carbon capture and sequestration)?
• The US residential sector still uses about 400,000 short tons of coal per year, presumably for heating. From the age of 13 to 21 I lived in what was once coal country (Wilkes-Barre, PA), and even I have a hard time wrapping my head around that one.

But wait, you must surely be thinking, how does all that coal get to all those power plants? Largely by rail, of course, and it’s a big chunk of the US railroad industry:

• According to the [US] Bureau of Transportation Statistics and this page [•], in 2002 coal accounted for 17% of all freight ton-miles (not just that traveling on railroads), for a total of 562 billion ton-miles.
• According to page 3 of this 2008 document [• small PDF] by the American Association of Railroads:
  

  Coal is the most important commodity carried by US railroads. In 2007, coal accounted for 44 percent of rail tonnage and 21 percent of rail revenue. …railroads handle more than two-thirds of all US coal shipments.

  A pie chart on the same page shows that the 21% of railroad revenue is the largest single source by a considerable margin.

44% of all freight ton-miles??? Does anyone else here think the railroad industry has to be almost as unhappy over coal’s dim prospects as the mining companies are?

Finally, and most obviously, there’s the environmental price we pay for burning that constant river of coal. In 2007 alone, the US emitted 2.16 billion metric tons of CO2 from just coal consumption [•].

[1] For those of you not up to speed on your tonnage, a short ton is the “small one” (2,000 pounds), and a metric ton is the “big one” (1,000kg or 2,206 pounds). The seldom-mentioned long ton is 2,240 pounds, which is apparently still alive and well in the UK and some other places, where it’s known as an imperial ton [•].

Those of you wondering when I would get off my butt and rework the Quick Graphs page so it looks like something created after 1996 can stop wondering.

It’s done and posted.

When the US Dept. of Energy recently released the latest edition of its Annual Energy Review, that naturally included updated versions of their “flow diagrams”, which are still the most useful set of graphics I’ve seen for understanding the sources and uses of all energy, coal, petroleum, natural gas, and electricity in the US.

This time around, let’s do electricity:

(Click on the image above to see the full-size version in a new window.)

You can find links to all of the flow diagrams from the Annual Energy Review on the AER’s home page, in HTML and PDF format.

The things I find most interesting in this one include:

• The relative sizes of the sources. Coal really is about half, as much as we wish it were otherwise, and oil is a barely perceptible sliver (don’t tell the media; they still love their decades-old conviction that the US still generates a sizable portion of its electricity with oil). Renewables, while still smaller than we’d prefer, is mostly conventional hydroelectric power.
• Conversion losses practically leaps off the screen. This is (mostly) the energy lost in burning fuel to heat water to make steam to spin a turbine to pump electrons. When I show this chart to middle school students and tell them what “conversion losses” means, they give me the most withering, “Just how stupid are all you adults, anyway???” look. Aside from those awkward moments, it’s a good reminder that we decide things like how to generate electricity via economics, not energy or natural resource conservation.
• Transmission and distribution losses are tiny. The almost universal misunderstanding among mainstreamers is that T&D losses are a huge factor in their electricity costs, when it just isn’t so. By comparison, conversion losses are 24.8 times higher.
• The relatively even balance between residential, commercial, and industrial consumption. My guess is that while the commercial and industrial sectors are hardly paragons of environmental concern or even conservation purely for the sake of saving money, they’re probably on the whole much better than the residential sector. If my guess is right, then the low-hanging fruit for electricity conservation is in our homes and not at our jobs.
• Transportation’s share of consumption is so tiny you almost need a magnifying glass to see it. How much do you think that will change, on a percentage basis, in the next ten years?

Not bad for one diagram, eh?

I’ve just uploaded beta version 0.0.1 of “Lou’s Energy and Environmental Clock”. It’s now a fully self-contained HTML + CSS + JavaScript page, which means it should (he typed nervously) run on Windows, Linux, Macs, or any other system that has browser released in this century.

Get it here.

This version is a complete re-write of the energy clock Windows program I released some time back that I know was popular with quite a few people.

Please note that this is a beta version, and beta comes from the Latin for “guaranteed to be so riddled with bugs and stupid design errors that you’ll wonder why the doofus programmer ever let it see light of day”. Consider yourself warned.

I plan to do a series of these clocks focused on different energy and environmental metrics, as time permits and I receive “interesting” suggestions from all you people who live on the other side of my screen.

While all feedback is welcome, right now I most want to hear about problems–it won’t work right on a particular mobile device (and I have none of those, so I’m relying on others to do that part of the testing) or browser or whatever oddity you run into. If you report a problem please make sure to tell me exactly which OS and browser you’re running, and anything else about your system that could be relevant.

So that’s it. Give it a spin and let me know what you think, either in a comment below or in a direct e-mail.

Graph(s) of the week: Carbon emissions, measured in absolute yearly amounts and per capita levels, from the web site of CDIAC (Carbon dioxide Information Analysis Center), perhaps the most interesting and important US government site that not enough energy and environmental geeks know about. One of these graphs is terrifying, and I’m willing to bet that it’s not the one most of you would have picked after a quick glance (at least without this spoiler).

Please note that the values graphed below are carbon, not CO2. I normally try to stick to talking about CO2, but the critical detail is the shape of the curves. Mentally scale the lines in these graphs upwards by a factor of 3.67, if you’re so inclined.

First up is annual global carbon emissions:

(Click on the graph to see a slightly larger version in a new window.)

Notice that this is not a plot of cumulative emissions, but yearly emissions. In other words, the steep slope of the curve is not an indication of how quickly the running total of carbon that humanity has poured into the atmosphere is rising. It’s a measure of how quickly our annual emissions have risen since roughly the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Next on our graphical hit parade is per capita carbon emissions:

(Click on the graph to see a slightly larger version in a new window.)

Worldwide per capita carbon emissions have remained relatively flat since the mid-1970’s. So surely the “terrifying” graph is the total, right? Well, no. I would argue that the per capita graph is the scary one, for a couple of very basic reasons[1]:

First, the world population is still rising, a lot. We’re currently in the neighborhood of 6.8 billion people[2], and the most common prediction I’ve seen is that world population will top out at around 9 billion in 2050. Call it an increase of one third over today’s level. If nothing else changes, meaning the mix of people in different economic groups and following various consumption patterns, the carbon intensity of the things those people do, etc., then we’re looking at a staggering increase in carbon emissions, from today’s 8 billion metric tons/year to about 10.6 billion metric tons/year, in a span of 41 years, less than the lifetime of a coal or nuclear power plant, and well within the lifetime of most people reading this site.

In other words, the per capita graph will have to decline noticeably from its current plateau.

How do we avoid that level of increase in carbon emissions? Some combination of fewer people and less carbon per person. That’s the easy, quick, and almost useless answer, given how difficult it will be to get the yearly emissions down enough to keep the atmospheric level low enough to avoid catastrophic consequences.

Second, the one key assumption I made above–”if nothing else changes”, a.k.a. ceteris paribus isn’t true. The worldwide CO2 emissions per person will rise unless we take heroic actions to prevent them. The issue is those oft-mentioned “developing countries”, most conspicuously China and India, two countries developing and growing their middle classes at an astonishing rate. And those middle classes are showing a marked tendency in their consumption patterns–more meat on their plates, more electrons in their homes, more motor vehicles–that sound very much like European and, dare I say it, American consumers.

Look closer at that per capita line. Not only is it not declining, it started to turn up around 2000. And that’s the value we multiply by the (rising) world population to arrive at the total yearly emissions. In other words, humanity faces the dual chores of de-carbonizing the “developed” nations as well as keeping a lot of the future growth in “developing” countries from carbonzing in the first place (and de-carbonizing some that’s already happened).

Terrified yet?

[1] Careful readers will no doubt remember that I’ve argued against being too enamored of per capita or per GDP dollar numbers, because Earth’s climate doesn’t know or care about such derived statistics. It responds to aggregates–how much warming is triggered by the total level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, how much cooling is triggered by aerosols, etc. This is one time where I think the per capita number yields an unusually large amount of information, in the proper context.

[2] See the US Census Bureau’s population clock for a value of around 6.77 billion, and this one for a value of around 6.92 billion. For more information about the world population that you probably need or want to know, see Wikipedia’s entry.

Yes, it’s true, my fellow geeks: The US Dept. of Energy has just released the Annual Energy Review 2008, the Bible of US energy statistics.

It’s 446 pages of graphs and tables, with very little space squandered on artwork and, you know, words.

The home page of the report is here, where you can download the entire document as one monolithic PDF or individual sections in PDF, Excel, or HTML format.

You can also grab the entire report directly here [446 page, 5.94MB PDF].

One reminder: Don’t plan on spending all day with our new toy. We’re all heading out to a Chinese restaurant for dinner.

We all know that Americans waste a lot of gasoline because of congestion. Well, this is one of those times when what we all know is actually true:

The Texas Transportation Institute studies congestion in 85 urban areas throughout the United States each year. According to their latest study, the amount of fuel wasted due to congestion grew to 74 gallons per traveler in 2002, a total of 5.7 billion gallons of fuel.

That’s 5.7 billion gallons of gasoline that we could have simply poured on the ground and burned, for all the benefit we got from it. And the cost, aside from dollars, was huge: About 51 million metric tons of CO2 added to the atmosphere, from just the one year (2002) in question, CO2 we’ll be dealing with for many decades. If anything, I would expect that the congestion problem has become worse in the US since 2002, even if it’s dropped a bit since entering the current recession.

See the data for the above graph here.

You can quote numbers all day about how much oil the US uses and for which purposes, but few things drive the point home like the graph below. This shows US oil consumption for just transportation (broken out by mode), with a line plot of domestic production, revealing a humongous gap and explaining why so many peak oil adherents are so freaked out.

The description from the graph’s page:

In 1989 the transportation sector petroleum consumption surpassed U.S. petroleum production for the first time, creating a gap that must be met with imports of petroleum. By the year 2030, transportation petroleum consumption is expected to grow to nearly 17 million barrels per day; at that time, the gap between U.S. production and transportation consumption will be 3.7 million barrels per day.

The graph’s caption:

Note: The U.S. Production has two lines after 2005. The solid line is conventional sources of petroleum. The dashed line adds in other inputs — ethanol, liquids from coal, and liquids from biomass. The sharp increase in values between 2006 and 2007 are caused by the data change from historical to projected values.

The graph’s page has a table of the data, but it doesn’t break out those “other inputs”, which seem to be particularly loaded with assumptions. (”Liquids from coal”???) The sources cited for the data are “Transportation Energy Data Book: Edition 27, and EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2009, December 2008″.

One of the responses I always hear from the “I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I bet I can stump the energy geek with something he hasn’t thought of!” crowd when I mention PHEVs and EVs is something along the lines of, “But what if you recharge the battery with electricity made from coal???”

The answer, as you can see below, is that you still reduce CO2 emissions a lot, even in that worst-case scenario.

The description of the graph from the source page (linked below):

Estimates from the GREET model (see Argonne National Laboratory’s information on GREET) show that passenger car PHEV10s produce about 29% fewer carbon emissions than a conventional vehicle, when plugged into an outlet connected to the typical U.S. grid. Even when PHEV10s are charged using power generated completely from coal, carbon emissions are about 25% less than those of a conventional vehicle. The use of light truck PHEV10s reduces emissions by 28% when charged on a typical grid and 23% when charged on power generated from coal. The carbon reductions are greater as the length the vehicle can travel on electricity increases.

(As you’ve probably guessed, a PHEV10 is a PHEV with a 10-mile battery range, etc. “Typical grid” electricity is defined as “50.9% coal; 20.1% nuclear; 16.7% natural gas; 11.0% renewable energy; and 1.3% petroleum”.)

See this page for the tables of data used in the graph.

Yes, my fellow energy and enviro geeks, it’s true: BP’s annual release of their Statistical Review of World Energy is out. I’ll pause for a moment while you run around your office or home, leaping and cheering like a maniac.

The home page for the report is here, and includes the full report, an Excel spreadsheet with the data, and a new online data charting gizmo (Java-enabled browser required) that lets you graph dozens of different combinations of energy reserves, production, and use for various geographic areas.

You can also download the report directly here [48 page 5.3MB PDF].

PECSS is “US Primary Energy Consumption by Source and Sector, 2007″, of course.

(Click the image to open the full-size version in a new window.)

Caption:

[1]Excludes 0.6 quadrillion Btu of ethanol, which is included in “Renewable Energy.”

[2]Excludes supplemental gaseous fuels.

[3]Includes 0.1 quadrillion Btu of coal coke net imports.

[4]Conventional hydroelectric power, geothermal, solar/PV, wind, and biomass.

[5]Includes industrial combined-heat-and-power (CHP) and industrial electricity-only plants.

[6]Includes commercial combined-heat-and-power (CHP) and commercial electricity-only plants.

[7]Electricity-only and combined-heat-and-power (CHP) plants whose primary business is to sell electricity, or electricity and heat, to the public.

Note: Sum of components may not equal 100 percent due to independent rounding.
Source: Energy Information Administration, Annual Energy Review 2007, Tables 1.3 and 2.1b-2.1f, and 10.3.

This is one of my favorite graphics from the US Dept. of Energy, since it tells you both how the US uses each energy source (e.g. natural gas is 3% transportation, 34% industrial, 34% residential and commercial, and 30% electricity generation) as well as how we fuel each sector (transportation is 96% oil, and 2% each natural gas and renewables). You can win a lot of bar bets with this one, assuming you hang out at the right kind of bar.

But why does the graphic only go up to 2007? That’s the other reason I’m posting this: The information in this graphic is from the US DOE’s Annual Energy Review, one of “the” publications any self-respecting energy and environment geek should know and use. The latest version is scheduled to be released on its web page sometime later this month. (At which time I expect that they’ll update the PECCS graphic, so it will automagically update here.)

The home page for this graphic is here, where you can download a PDF version.

Most people on this site have likely seen this graph or a variant of it, but I thought it was worth a little attention. This one shows the world with each country’s size scaled to match its carbon emissions.

For comparison, here’s the 1980 version:

You can find a larger version of the graph, a free PDF poster version, and much more, here.

The US Dept. of Energy has released the State Renewable Electricity Profiles 2007.

The web page for the report is here, including a clickable map and direct access to the state-level stats as well as the entire report in a single, 645KB PDF.