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October 2007

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Global Warming: Looking at the Numbers

By Jon Berg
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October 2007
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Last summer, in a hearing before a Senate Subcommittee on Climate Change (as opposed to calling it global warming), politicians on both sides of the aisle assured a panel of coal industry CEOs that the electric utility fuel share of coal-fired electricity generation will be maintained. The “safety valve” against increases in Chinese coal-fired generation in coming years was also assured. 

The latest Annual Energy Outlook (AEO 2007), produced by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, predicts that regardless of the growth rate in electricity generation until 2030 (ranging from 2.3 percent to 4.6 percent), coal-fired generation will stay between 49 and 50 percent of total U.S. electricity generation until 2020. Between 2020 and 2030, newly installed, coal-fired power plants will increase the share to about 57 percent of operating generation. Carbon emissions from U.S. coal-fired power plants in 2010 are forecast to remain at about 20 percent of global carbon emissions, down from about 22 percent in 2003. China, on the other hand, will have increased its global share of carbon-based electricity emissions, and therein lies the rub among conservative coal industry cheerleaders. What’s less noted, however, is that in this same period China will also have more than doubled its electricity generation from renewable fuel sources. 

The per capita numbers show that with about 5 percent of the world’s population in 2004, the U.S. consumed about five and a half metric tons of coal-fired carbon emissions per person, while China, peopled with over 20 percent of the world’s population, consumed less than one metric ton of carbon emissions per person. The U.S. produced more carbon emissions per capita in 2004 than Europe, China, and India combined. 

The number 445 carbon parts per million in the atmosphere was cited last spring at a United Nations Energy Program conference in Bangkok. That was the proposed cap and point of contention between the major industrial polluters, headed by the U.S. and China (who claimed we have “a century” to figure out what to do about it) and much of the rest of UN member nations, who cited figures by leading scientists arguing that 2015 will be the point of no return—the year when no matter how many mandatory restrictions on carbon emissions and punitive cap ultimatums are in place, global heating will take its own course. The UN cited a 30 to 60 percent reduction in carbon fuel use by 2015 to delay the ultimate meltdown of the polar caps—445 carbon parts per million in the atmosphere because 450 carbon parts will trigger the complete meltdown of the Greenland and Arctic ice shelves, submerging much of the U.S. east coast and “the island continents” below sea level. This will result in between 50 and 90 percent of all species becoming extinct—a phenomenon, noted by Jim Hansen, former head of the National Ocean and Aeronautics Administration (in his July 2006 review of recent environmental books for the New York Review of Books), roughly equivalent to the impact on the globe at the onset of the Ice Age. 

Between 1990 and 2004, global carbon emissions increased at an average rate of about 1.7 percent a year. Additionally, the carbon parts per million in the atmosphere, the emissions that did not escape the atmosphere, have increased about half a percent a year. In 2005 the trapped carbon emissions in the atmosphere was at about 379.1 parts per million. Assuming, as the U.S. Annual Energy Outlook 2007 does in its “base case,” the carbon emissions output continues at or around 1.7 percent until 2030, and assuming a steady .5 percent annual growth rate in trapped carbon gases, the planet has until 2040 before the Arctic/Greenland meltdown. The .5 percent growth in atmospheric greenhouse gases, however, is unreliable. An increasing percentage of the trapped carbon emissions will result by factors independent of (though heavily exacerbated by) manmade carbon emissions. 

Since the 2005 premiere of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, environmental scientists have discovered exogenous repercussions to the increased level of trapped carbon dioxide. The most widely known include: the melting of permafrost that results in the release of carbon emissions trapped in the ice and the heating of oceans that results in the killing of plankton that would otherwise absorb the CO. Also, the melting of the ice caps increases heating when the reduction of the ice shelf’s mass results in less heat reflected back into the atmosphere, increasing the warming of the oceans and intensifying the reduction in ocean floor plankton. 

By 2015, according to a wide consensus of international environmental scientists, this augmentation of exogenous factors will be such that even with drastic reductions in carbon emission output, secondary and tertiary releases of trapped gases will begin an uncontrollable cascade of incidental and unforeseen sources of global heating. And what of the human variable? If that .5 percent growth in trapped gases were increased to .75 percent, which is possible in the very near future, the meltdown would occur before 2040. 

If U.S. and Chinese electricity demands remain robust, a one percent growth rate in trapped gasses would trigger a meltdown before 2025. In the scientific community, this is not in dispute. The dispute is the year 2015—many in the science com- munity claim that it is already too late to stop the reinforced augmentation in global heating. 

Answers and Questions 

The hybrid car and a new fleet of cars averaging over 35 miles per gallon are a dangerous sedative. New cars represent, in any given year, roughly one-sixth of cars on the road. And what percentage of purchased new cars will be hybrids or have better than 35 mpg? U.S. carbon emissions from “transportation” (including automobile, train, plane, and all other inter- and intra-state transit venues) represent, on average, about a third of total annual U.S. carbon emissions. If, next year, the average mpg for all new cars on the road were over 35 mpg, this would reduce nationwide carbon output by, at best, a single digit percentage. 

The big changes will have to come from the places where there is the least likelihood of change. Between 2003 and 2010, carbon emissions from U.S. coal-fired electricity generation is forecasted to increase almost 10 percent, while in Europe it is forecasted to decline by almost 10 percent and in Japan it is expected to remain unchanged. 

Renewable fuel-based electricity generation had its heyday after the Carter administration’s landmark regulatory scheme to encourage a reduction in fossil fuel electricity generation under the PURPA Act of 1978, formally instituted in 1982 after much legal wrangling among utilities to gut it. PURPA enabled non-utility industries to install their own, small-scale cogenerators that utilized a diverse variety of combustible fuels. Paper mills, for instance, could use their scrap wood chips to fuel their cogenerators. These small scale generators doubled the fuel efficiency of conventional large-scale electric utility generators. The local utility was obligated to buy any surplus power capacity by the facility, to assure the industrial and commercial users a return on their costly generator, and provide the community with a greater share of alternative electricity generation. Previously, at the turn of the century in Manhattan, before Edison invented the centralized electric power plant (the first use of which set JP Morgan’s home library on fire), all electricity was provided by cogenerators. The city housed over 100 independent steam-powered electric companies. 

The Carter administration’s energy initiatives played a large part in the decline of international oil prices, which bottomed out in 1992. Between 1980 and 1990, renewable energy generation increased over 12 percent. Electric utilities nationwide saw a threat to their market share and feared a functional transition from power producer to merely distribution grids for decentralized non-utility power. 

It was during the Bush senior and Clinton years that electric utility lobbyists saw to it that non-utility electricity generation would become an open market for utilities to compete for PURPA production. Earlier landmark regulatory policies that forbade anti-monopolistic interstate activities were also gutted. By the late 1990s, for the first time in its history, utility generation was largely unregulated and renewable energy generation was on the decline. Even with the recent 6 percent spike in renewable energy consumption in 2006, it is still 8 percent below its peak in 1997. 

Many people scoff at President Bush’s disingenuous platitudes to sustain a monumentally disastrous and costly (over $300 million a day) war in Iraq. But the results of his environmental non-policy are increasingly more palpable, tragic, and close to home. Judging by the confluence of stridently conservative greed-is-good market crusaders in the House and Senate, it is not clear that we, as a society, are capable of either fathoming the extent of—or accepting responsibility for—a catastrophic environmental disaster many of us may witness in our lifetimes. 

Z 

Jon Berg is a former energy analyst, now freelance writer. 

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