The Copenhagen Conference was a failure. It was chaotic, overcrowded, and eventually accomplished very little except putting off definitive action. The world is now waiting for the U.S. and China, the two largest emitters of the greenhouse gas, CO2, to produce significant plans for emission reductions. The so-called Copenhagen Accord included tables that the world’s nations were supposed to fill out with their internally verifiable plans for CO2 reductions last December. No nation has done so yet. Our House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Marley bill that was essentially a strong cap on CO2 emissions by industry, but the Senate has not yet introduced a bill to the senate floor. There are about three bills in committees, but many senators are now balking at "cap and trade" and it appears to me that the U.S. will not have a decent climate warming law this year even though Obama would very much like one.

President Obama has stated many times that he wants a cap and trade bill and how important that will be, yet I have not heard of a creditable timetable for Government action. Until the United States acts with a definite, verifiable plan for significant CO2 emissions reductions by 2030, the rest of the world with a few exceptions will not act either. The reason for this is that significantly reducing CO2 emissions entails complex economic and technological planning and actions that have the potential to curtail a country’s economic growth unless carefully undertaken. So far, the political-economic fears have easily overcome whatever global warming fears the public has.

Yet the science provides clear warning that global warming is upon us and will cause grave harm and economic disaster in the future. I have discussed this in previous columns; in particular, my last column describes the beliefs of Dr. James Hansen, the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and adjunct professor of Earth and Environmental Studies at Columbia University and at Columbia’s Earth Institute. He is one of the leading climate change scientists in the world.

Fossil fuels supply almost all the energy and power used by the world today. The electric power industry, with its already built fuel and electric distribution infrastructure, finds it cheaper and easier to just continue along the fossil-fuel path into the future as long as the industry and their customers ignore the terrible pollution they produce. Furthermore, fossil fuels produce the bulk of the CO2 responsible for global warming now. All governments agree with that statement and many have made strides toward changing their electric power to wind, solar, and nuclear power. In this column I’ll try to explain how this can be done worldwide in such a manner as to actually prevent destructive global warming. Previous columns have dealt with various aspects of the solution; in this one I will provide an outline of a plan that seems to me to have a chance of working. But the world, and the U.S. in particular, have wasted an awful lot of precious time denying what we know must be done.

I start my solution from the point of view of Dr. James Hansen (c.f. my Column #18), namely, that we must quickly end the burning of coal, the "dirtiest" of the fossil fuels. Coal is used throughout the world mostly for the production of electricity. Coal is comparatively cheap, ubiquitous in the world, and there are vast reserves. Since it has been used for a couple of centuries, the technology and its various infrastructures are well developed and understood. In short, coal is a tough economic competitor as long as it does not have to pay for the deaths and damage it causes. What this means is that it is politically hard to displace coal. A way has to be found to assure that electricity customers do not rebel over inevitably higher electricity costs. A way has to found for reasonable financing costs for the new capital costs of the solar and wind power plants that must be built in quantity quickly without significant economic disruption of one’s economy.

Why does Dr. Hansen insist that coal use must end right away? The reasons are that coal is the most egregious of the fossil fuels in terms of CO2 emissions and coal produces more than 40% of the world’s fastest growing energy, namely electricity. Oil also produces a substantial percentage of the world’s CO2 emissions. But oil, needed as a transportation fuel, is hard to replace in all applications, but we must move to hybrid electric and all-electric automobiles as fast as practical. (C.f. my previous columns on coal, oil, and automobiles.) In fact, in the near future, oil (gasoline) will have to be replaced by electricity for much of the transportation sector; that means more coal may have to be burned to provide some of that electricity!

There is large source of clean energy that does not make headlines: energy conservation. The International Energy Agency points out, "On average, an additional one dollar invested in more efficient electrical equipment and appliances avoids more than two dollars in investment in power generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure." McKinsey & Company produced a now famous study of ways to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases in the United States; the result showed that nearly 40% of the reduction could potentially be accomplished along with money savings. Improved residential and commercial lighting efficiency heads the list. Insulation retrofits in commercial and residential buildings, hybrid electric vehicles, and more efficient electric motor systems are other important energy efficiency techniques.

Sixty-five per cent of the heat produced in making electricity goes up into the air in a typical coal or natural gas power plant, wasted in effect! Much of that energy can be captured in combined cycle plants. Also there are now lower temperature turbines available for retrofit to take advantage of some of this heat energy.

As an example of what can be done in energy efficiency, California has written extensive energy efficiency laws resulting in a flat per-capita energy use over the last 25 years. In contrast, the rest of the United States has had an increase of 60% over that period!

Professors Pacala and Socolow of Princeton have come up with a colorful concept that helps describe the potential solutions to global warming. They developed a game that their students play using "wedges" of the total energy pie 50 years from now. A wedge represents an energy producing (or energy conserving) activity that reduces emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere that starts at zero today and increases linearly until it accounts for 1 Giga-ton of carbon per year (GtC/year) of reduced carbon emissions in 50 years. It thus represents a cumulative total of 25 GtC of reduced emissions over 50 years.

The idea is to divide the new energy requirements plus the replacements for existing fossil fuels into 1-giga-ton of carbon slices or wedges. The World now emits 8 GtC from energy production and use and will require twice that much energy production by 2050 due to population increase and economic growth. Thus, to rid the world of carbon emissions totally by 2050, the world would need about 16 wedges. 14 will be necessary according to recent scientific analyses to get down to 350 ppm of CO2 remaining in the atmosphere by 2050.

The Princeton students are then asked to come up with a mix of wedges that will be economically possible, technologically feasible, and politically viable in their opinion. I have done the same and hereby present a collection of wedges that I believe will do the job. I am indebted to Dr. Joseph Romm’s excellent website, ClimateProgress.com, for much of this list. Note that although each reduces carbon emissions by 1 Giga-ton, I have translated the wedge into power capacity or energy produced where appropriate or needed for clarity. Many of these technologies have been explained and discussed in my previous columns. Here they are:

• 3 wedges of efficiency — one each for buildings, industry, and cogeneration/heat-recovery for a total of 15 to 20-million GigaWatt-hrs. A key strategy for reducing direct fossil fuel use for heating buildings (while also reducing air conditioning energy) is geothermal heat pumps.

• 1 wedge of albedo change through white roofs and pavements.

• 1 wedge of vehicle efficiency. All cars must get 60 mpg, with no increase in miles traveled per vehicle.

• 1 wedge of wind for electric power; i.e., one million large (2 MW peak capacity) wind turbines.

• 1 wedge of wind for vehicle electricity (another 2000-GW wind). Necessary because most cars must be plug-in hybrids or pure electric vehicles by 2050.

• 3 wedges of concentrated solar thermal (aka solar base load); that is 5000 GW peak capacity.

• 1 and 1/2 wedges of solar photovoltaic; that is 3000 GW peak capacity.

• 1/2 wedge of second-generation nuclear power; that is 350 GW or 280 reactors of 1.25 GW capacity.

• 2 wedges of forestry. End all tropical deforestation and plant new trees over an area the size of the continental U.S.

Here are additional wedges that require some major advances in applied R&D to be practical and scalable, but are considered plausible by serious analysts, especially post-2030. They could be substituted for those in the list above if found to be economically advantageous:

• 1 wedge of geothermal electric power plants.

• 1 wedge of coal with biomass co-firing plus carbon capture and storage (CCS); that is 400 GW of coal plus 200-GW biomass with CCS.

• 1/2 wedge of third-generation nuclear power; that is 350 GW of capacity.

• 1/2 wedge of cellulosic or algae biofuels for long-distance, heavy transport and aviation. That would use about 8% of the world’s cropland (or less land if yields significantly increase or algae-to-biofuels proves commercial at large scale).

• 1 wedge of soils and/or biochar that absorb and hold CO2. Apply improved agricultural practices to all existing croplands and/or "charcoal created by pyrolysis of biomass."

Both are controversial today, but may prove scalable strategies. That should do the job. The scale is staggering; it is very important to recognize the enormous scale of construction that will be necessary. This scale will certainly strain the engineering resources of all nations as well as strain the ability and resources of construction companies worldwide. Capital requirement will be huge (although much of it would have been required anyway to supply the world’s increasing energy and power needs) and will require extensive cooperation among nations, especially between developed nations and developing ones. The sooner the world starts, the easier it will be.

I believe that only one solution to global warming exists; in the words of Joseph Romm: "We must deploy every conceivable energy–efficient and low carbon technology that we have today as fast as we can." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) head, Rajendra Pachauri, said in November 2007: "If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." He also said, "What is happening, and what is likely to happen, convinces me that the world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a 350 target." (The IPCC shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore.)

It is not too late. Fortunately, there has been action in wind and solar energy in the U.S., Europe, and China. China is also planning a large nuclear expansion. It is encouraging to me that President Obama mentioned the need for a Climate bill in his State of the Union Speech; "And, yes, it means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America. I am grateful to the House for passing such a bill last year. And this year I’m eager to help advance the bipartisan effort in the Senate."

I thought that for this column I would try a book review of a new book by the scientist that has most influenced my thinking about global warming, Dr. James Hansen, the Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and adjunct profe....
Continue