by Henry Robertson, Chapter Energy Chair
You wouldn’t know it from the media, but there are actually bills in Congress that address climate change. It’s about time. The political will has been building from below, with individuals and businesses changing their ways, towns signing up to the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement (which the Sierra Club has adopted as its Cool Cities campaign) and many states passing laws for cleaner electricity, more efficient buildings and the like. A federal law, if it were serious enough, would do in one swoop what all these piecemeal efforts are groping towards.
Best known is the McCain-Lieberman bill, officially titled the Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act (S. 280). It would cap greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2010 at the level where they stood in 2000. This is weaker than the inadequate Kyoto Protocol. Only two bills would really do the job, setting an ambitious goal for GHG emissions of 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Their stated objective is to avoid a temperature rise of 3.6°F (2°C) and hold the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere below 450 parts per million; it’s currently 381 ppm and growing at about 2 ppm per year.
These bills are the Safe Climate Act (H.R. 5642) introduced by Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) and the Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act (S. 309) sponsored by Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA). The Sierra Club supports Sanders-Boxer as the most effective. Both bills attack the problem on multiple fronts, requiring more fuel-efficient vehicles, more renewable electricity generation, and tougher efficiency measures for the use of electricity.
Renewable Electricity Standards
Both bills include a Renewable Portfolio Standard. It would be more convenient to call this a Renewable Electricity Standard (RES). This requires utilities to get an increasing amount of their electricity from renewable sources, whether they generate it themselves or buy it on the market. The targets start low and increase over time to let the utilities grow into them. The federal goal would be 20 percent renewable generation by 2020.
Nearly half the states have some form of RES. (As usual, the Show-me state won’t do anything until it’s been shown how by at least 45 other states. But we’re working on it.) Most of them have much weaker goals than 20/20. They also differ in ways that could make them incompatible. There are different definitions of renewable energy—in Pennsylvania even coal can be a “renewable” resource. Some have credit-trading programs while others don’t.
A strong federal RES would be a big advance.
Cap-and-trade
Both bills rely on government regulation, but Waxman’s includes a market-based capand-trade scheme for GHG. Sanders-Boxer does not, but it allows the EPA to create one by regulation.
The whole idea of cap-and-trade is distasteful. First, a level of allowed pollution is set. Then the emissions below this ceiling are carved up into rights to pollute and allocated to the polluters. The ones that pollute less than their proportional share can sell their allowances; businesses that pollute too much have to buy. The hope is that most companies will find it more in their interest to make a profit, not a loss, on the deal and will lower their emissions so that they will have more allowances than they need.
Depending on your point of view, emissions trading by market mechanisms is the ideal, or at least the pragmatic, way to do things; or it’s another attempt to privatize the commons, turning the atmosphere into corporate property and developing nations into plantations to grow energy crops for the industrial world.
One of these days I’ll wrap my head around this complex subject and be able to pontificate with authority. For now, I’m keeping an open mind.
The devil is in the details. Carbon trading might work if the program is designed right. Sanders-Boxer, for example, would ratchet down the carbon cap if and when carbon-controlling technologies became cheap enough, so there wouldn’t be a permanent right to pollute at the initial level.
Rest assured, however, that the carbonintensive industries will lobby furiously for loopholes.
Carbon sequestration
All of the bills stress technological innovation and assume the continuation of economic growth. Sanders-Boxer in particular, in order to reduce CO2 emissions from electricity generation, relies heavily on geological carbon sequestration.
Carbon sequestration, or carbon capture and storage (CCS), is the idea that we can keep CO2 out of the atmosphere by putting the carbon back where it came from—underground or in ocean sediments.
It sounds implausible: how can you keep a gas underground? Nevertheless there are reputable studies that say it is feasible, including one in 2005 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of scientists whose reports on climate change are the most authoritative—and increasingly urgent—warnings that global warming is real and dangerous.
Economics may be a bigger obstacle than engineering. Building power plants capable of capturing CO2, let alone retrofitting old plants, is expensive. Storage takes the right kind of geology; Missouri’s porous karst topography would never hold CO2 down. It would have to be piped somewhere else, and the pipeline would be pure, deadweight cost.
The only, limited market for CO2 is in enhanced oil recovery—pumping the compressed gas into old oil fields to increase the pressure and bring more oil out of hiding. When your objective is to reduce GHG, that’s counterproductive. It will take a hefty tax on carbon before CCS becomes cost-competitive with funneling CO2 into the open air for free.
Muttering the c-word
In all these Congressional bills and in most other plans being publicly floated, the emphasis is on technological solutions, most of which are unproven and expensive. The mood is less one of can-do optimism than of desperation. If we’re lucky, CCS will let us keep burning fossil fuels; if not, we’ll just have to hope that efficiency and renewables will give us the same kind of abundant and reliable energy supply. Economic growth and the precious high-consumption lifestyle are not negotiable.
What we’re not hearing is the c-word: conservation. Efficiency means doing the same job with less energy. Conservation means using less energy, period. Efficiency conserves up to a point, but if the job (or the whole economy) continues to grow it eventually takes more energy even if it’s done with maximum efficiency.
The International Energy Agency projects that world energy demand, given current trends, will double within 35 years. Can energy efficiency and renewable energy keep up with the pace of this accelerating treadmill? Right now we’re only whispering the cword.
We should scream it: “AMERICA, USE LESS ENERGY!”