by Henry Robertson
Senator Claire McCaskill urged president-elect Barack Obama to hold off on moving a climate change bill through Congress.
“I think a delay may be necessary,” she told ABC News on December 9. “Yes, we’ve got to do something. Yes, we have to move forward. But we can’t kill the business climate at the same time. I’m from a state where most of the people who turn on the lights in the state get it from utility companies that depend on coal. And the cost of switching all that to clean coal technology or to alternative sources is going to be borne by them.”
It was inevitable that politicians and those with an interest in the status quo would cry that the economy can’t afford the burden of more expensive fossil fuels. This is a big deal. The imminence of higher-priced coal has made new coal-fired power plants so risky that many have been cancelled.
Meanwhile, Obama promised a sort of green New Deal as an economic stimulus. Both carbon regulation and a public works project, if done right, would cost money up front but pay off down the road.
Forward to the past or the future?
Rebuilding decrepit roads and bridges may be necessary, but that’s just deferred maintenance. Bailing out Detroit? The Big 3 CEOs still don’t get it. They blame their problems on circumstances beyond their control—the credit crunch. Everything was just fine before that!
Senator McCaskill mentioned clean coal. That means carbon capture and storage (CCS)—pumping the stuff underground. CCS doesn’t exist yet, and if it does come to pass, it will be at a forbidding cost in both money and energy.
Much of the electricity from a power plant equipped for CCS must go to run CCS itself—as much as 30–40% by a recent estimate.
Weatherizing old buildings to make them more energy-efficient is labor-intensive—plenty of jobs there, and megatons of CO2 saved. Investment in renewable energy technologies and energy efficiency technologies promise to launch a new, more sustainable economy, not just prop up the infrastructure of a resource-intensive way of life that has gone bad through waste and bloat.
Personally, I believe that efficiency and renewable energy won’t save us unless we first vastly reduce our demand for resources and terminate the delusion of perpetual economic growth. But there are sectors of the economy that should grow, and efficiency and renewables are foremost among them.
If carbon regulation is expensive, let’s consider what’s already been committed to bailing out the old economy, and what we stand to lose.
If not now, when?
I ask Sen. McCaskill: If not now, when?
The risk of climate change has been known for well over a century, and the reality has overtaken us faster than the caution of scientists predicted. Just between 2006 and 2007 world CO2 emissions grew by 3%. US emissions grew by 2% and China’s by 7.5% just in that one year. Far from getting the problem under control, mankind is accelerating its run toward disaster.
Climate scientists have calculated that to avoid runaway, uncontrollable global warming we must stabilize the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million by volume or, at the very most, 550 ppmv.
The goal of 450 is fading in the rear view mirror, and now NASA’s James Hansen says we must hold to 350 ppmv. We’re already at 387. That means we need negative CO2 emissions.
We have to suck it out of the atmosphere and into the forests, soils and oceans. Yet there are signs that the oceans and forests are slowing in their ability to absorb carbon, and the oceans are acidifying, killing corals and other life. Warming threatens to make soils emitters, not absorbers, of CO2.
And don’t forget methane, a greenhouse gas more than 20 times as potent as CO2 at trapping heat. As Arctic permafrost thaws, it releases huge quantities of methane.
There is also the first evidence that the Arctic Ocean off the Siberian coast is beginning to give up methane caused by the melting of methane hydrates, which are crystals of the gas trapped in ice.
Obama’s climate change policy echoes the scientific advice that we should reduce our greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Now we’re being told to focus on nearer-term goals of achieving a large portion of those reductions by 2020. Kansas City issued a climate action plan last July setting a municipal goal of reducing emission 30% by 2020—ambitious, but it really needs to be higher.
Cap and trade
Sen. McCaskill was urging Obama to go slow on cap and trade legislation. Cap and trade is probably not the best way to reduce emissions—there’s much to be said for a carbon tax or mandatory regulations like CAFE standards for cars—but it is definitely the frontrunner in Congress.
It means putting a cap on CO2 emissions and lowering that ceiling over time. Emission allowances are issued in an amount that adds up to the cap. Firms in the industries that are covered by the cap—certainly the big polluters like utilities, automakers, cement, etc—get their quotas of emission allowances (or rights to pollute) and trade them on a market. It’s better to sell them than to have to buy them, so firms have an incentive to reduce emissions and sell allowances they no longer need.
The allowances should be auctioned off at the outset, not given away. The government will thus collect a fund that can be invested in low-carbon and no-carbon technologies and can also provide relief to those who suffer from the transition, as some inevitably will.
The whole point of carbon regulation is to make fossil fuels more expensive so that we will finally force ourselves to phase them out. You have to spend money to save money. The excess price on carbon must be used to fund the transition to alternatives.
Now the climate crisis coincides with an economic crisis. Economists and elected officials say the government has to spend us out of this recession because confidence has collapsed to the point where lending has dried up.
Whether the stimulus plans will work and how we’re going to deal with a societal debt load that was already astronomical before the crisis began are questions I can’t answer. But as long as we’re going to be spending all this money, let it go to building the new economy, not bailing out the old.