Natural gas emits less carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels, but is itself a greenhouse gas. (image: knowledge.allianz.com)

In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, two scientists say that even the most ambitious proposals made at Copenhagen to reduce carbon emissions won’t reverse global warming. So what would they have us do? According to Robert Watson, former chair of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and Mohamed El-Ashry, senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation, “the most obvious strategy is to make an all-out effort to reduce emissions of methane.”

Methane accounts for 75 percent as much warming as carbon dioxide, say Watson and El-Ashry, but has not received nearly as much attention in any climate protection measures. That’s because methane has a shorter lifespan than carbon dioxide—when released into the atmosphere it lasts decades, while carbon dioxide can persist for hundreds of years. The Kyoto Protocol made methane one of the six gases it targeted, but calculated its effect over the same period of time as carbon dioxide. That distorts methane’s relatively brief but nonetheless powerful impact.

But for Watson and El-Ashry, methane deserves attention not just because of it’s large contribution to global warming but because “relatively cheap ‘end of pipe’ technologies are available to collect methane and convert it to useful energy rather than venting it to the atmosphere.” For example, manure, which releases methane, can be converted into electricity; such programs have already been begun in Colorado and by the firm Green Energy Live.

For advocates of natural gas, Watson and El-Ashry’s proposal puts them in an awkward position. Natural gas emits significantly less carbon than oil, a fact that has made it the darling of fossil fuels for some environmentalists; even the Sierra Club and 350.org founder Bill McKibben have lauded the benefits of natural gas. But if methane is a warming threat on the same level as carbon dioxide, then natural gas—which is primarily methane, and which was the third largest source of methane emissions in the U.S., according to the EPA—doesn’t look any prettier than oil or coal and swapping carbon dioxide for methane is not a tenable solution to climate change.

However, while carbon emitters may breathe a sigh of relief at being out of the crosshairs in at least one op-ed, Watson and El-Ashry also propose a handful of programs to capture methane emissions, and say those measures are more affordable than carbon capture. From their perspective natural gas might still have some advantages, but those advantages are in the ways it is capturable, not clean.

(image: seattlepi.com)

In the wake of the largely-seen-as-failed climate talks in Copenhagen this month, news outlets, analysts, and politicians alike are trying to wrap their heads around what happened in Denmark. Most agree that the talks were a failure, many blaming the process itself. After all, getting 193 countries, all with their own challenges and interests, to agree on anything is a tall order.

Bloomberg columnist Eric Pooley takes it a step further. He points out that all parties going in to this conference knew it wasn’t going to produce a strong agreement, and that fact hinged on one country alone: the United States. Without a firm commitment from the U.S. Senate concerning emissions reduction, few others were willing to lay their cards on the table, and talks suffered because of it. George Monbiot of the U.K. Guardian said as much, perhaps in a more blunt fashion, in his commentary entitled “If you want to know who’s to blame for Copenhagen, look to the U.S. Senate.”

According to Pooley, President Obama knew this going into the Copenhagen talks, having decided to direct his focus on health care instead of climate change. He also believes that Obama needs to mount a “full-scale public education campaign” to educate Americans just exactly what is at stake. He needs to convince his public that addressing climate change will help the economy, not doom it to fail. And after all the preparation that went into Copenhagen, all the hoopla, the posturing, and the protest, “we are where we were: waiting for Obama to lead the charge in the Senate.”

Over at the Wall Street Journal, Nigel Lawson, former U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher, calls for a Plan B in dealing with climate change. Lawson first acknowledges that Copenhagen “predictably – achieved precisely nothing.” He attributes the failure to the massive costs associated with decarbonizing the world’s economies. Coal and oil are largely used for one reason: they are cheap. And in the developing world, where hundreds of millions of people are still dealing with extreme poverty, switching from these dirty forms of energy while continuing to industrialize is just not feasible.

Lawson proposes what some might see as a radical approach to climate change, which is abandoning Kyoto, abandoning Copenhagen, and adapting “to whatever changes in temperature may in the future arise.” He argues this will allow us to derive the many benefits of a warmer world while at the same time reducing the costs. Addressing these problems directly as they arise, he says, will be far more cost-effective than our current ideas, and does not require a global agreement. Beyond the idea of adaptation, his plan includes “a relatively modest, increased government investment in technological research and development—in energy, in adaptation and in geoengineering.”

He then points out that it will likely never happen, due to the trauma and deprivation many would feel at having no climate conference to attend.

Opinions continue to abound in every direction over the climate talks. An editorial on FinancialTimes.com calls for a revival of international cooperation, arguing that the U.S. and China, not as ideologically far apart as they might think, can take the lead. The U.K. Guardian even had a positive spin on their political blog, saying that if countries come to Mexico (where the next large-scale international meeting on climate change is scheduled to take place) with a greater sense of realism and a new attitude, Copenhagen “may yet be seen as a useful fresh start.” And the staff over at Politico.com posted a bevy of takes and opinions from various politicians and commentators that range from calling Barack Obama the big winner, to calling the U.N. process limited.

The fallout from Copenhagen will likely keep coming for months, if not years. With all their talk of “action now” and making real progress in Denmark, we still walked away from the table with little to show. Perhaps Copenhagen’s greatest legacy will be in teaching the world how not to get things done. Which, at this point, would be a step in the right direction.

Secretary of State Clinton made a huge financial commitment on the behalf of the US that helped moved stalled talks forward in Copenhagen today. (image: blog.nature.org)

Finally, some progress! With just over a day left in the Copenhagen climate talks, some momentum gathered Thursday, as the United States announced an aid package to help poor nations combat climate change. According to the New York Times, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the U.S. would help raise $100 billion a year by 2020, the first real financing commitment to come from the Obama administration.

While Clinton reiterated America’s stance that any such package would be contingent on assurances of transparency from China, the Asian nation responded with a surprising shift in posture. Not only did it signal that developing nations would move to limit their emissions, but also warmed to the idea of outside verification. Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei told reporters that his country was open to “dialogue and cooperation that is not intrusive, that does not infringe on China’s sovereignty.” As China has been vehemently opposed to international transparency requirements through the whole of the Copenhagen conference, this is definitely progress.

Given the slow progress of the talks in Copenhagen over the last two weeks, these latest developments come just in time for major world leaders to descend on the Bella Center. President Obama will arrive in Copenhagen tomorrow, and is expected to come with additional pledges of cash for poor nations. His arrival has been one of the most highly anticipated of the talks, and the hope is that his presence will give the faltering negotiations a much-needed boost. Early Blumenauer, part of the delegation of Democratic congressmen, described the president’s arrival with optimism, saying “I’ve got a sense that [Clinton] set the table, and he is going to deliver the knock-out punch.”

Over at the Huffington Post, political analyst William Bradley put together a great list of what Obama will – and won’t – bring to the talks with him tomorrow. Working against him is the Senate’s failure to even debate, let alone pass, comprehensive climate change legislation, which many experts say falls short of what is really needed. He doesn’t have binding agreements with China and India, and he doesn’t have a specific aid package for poor nations. What he will carry into Copenhagen tomorrow is the EPA’s decision that greenhouse gases are a public health hazard, and thus subject to regulations, as well as some solid energy policy in place here at home. In short, there is some hope that the president has some negotiating power up his sleeve.

Also at the talks today was a victory for developing nations, as rich nations abandoned their attempt to dismantle the Kyoto protocol, ending a weeklong deadlock between the rich and the poor. Instead of abandoning Kyoto altogether, negotiations will move forward maintaining the integrity of the original agreement, in which binding commitments are placed on rich, not poor, nations. While huge differences remain, it is a step forward at an otherwise stalled conference.

As we enter the last day of the Copenhagen summit, there are rays of hope. While it was looking for a while that the talks would be a complete failure, there is a chance of walking away from this with some, albeit not necessarily comprehensive, progress made. Concessions from rich nations and a change in tune from China are definitely signs of good things to come. Let’s just hope that these breakthroughs didn’t come too late in the game. As the rest of the major world leaders arrive tomorrow, talks are nowhere near as complete or organized as they should be. It will be interesting to see what Obama brings to the table, and where we leave off as we leave Copenhagen.

(image: cloudave.com)

Does a state have the right to institute laws that regulate emissions? A power company in New York is hoping to make the case that it does not. WNYC radio reported on Monday that Indeck Energy, based upstate, has filed a lawsuit challenging the cap and trade law that governs New York and other Northeastern states.

Indeck, which is facing financial trouble at one of its gas-fired power plants in Corinth, NY, is challenging the cap and trade system that former New York Governor George Pataki helped create. That system, which was instituted to regulate CO2 emissions throughout the Northeast, was formally called The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). The New York bill mandated across-the-board cuts on emissions from power plants in pursuit of the goal of a ten percent reduction in CO2 emissions from the power sector by 2018.

RGGI, mapped out by politicians in 2003, includes states throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic that joined at different points in time. Current members are New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Rhode Island. The agreement was the first mandatory, government-instituted, market-based effort in the country aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

The way the RGGI cap and trade system works, as WNYC laid out, is that each state in the group requires local power plants to adhere to the emissions cut. The trade part of the bill allowed the plants to spend money or, as WNYC put it, “buy an allowance,” to emit or carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The plants could buy this allowance from other plants that had cut their CO2 emissions, thereby creating a communal ecosystem of sorts intended to keep emissions down. Of the cap and trade systems, the Kyoto Protocol is probably the best known.

Indeck is now claiming that the bill is unconstitutional. Unlike other plants in the state, Indeck’s Corinth plant has a longstanding contract to sell electricity to utility Con Ed at a fixed rate through 2015 and this, the company says, is creating a grim financial reality. A representative for Indeck said that while other energy companies can raise their rates to pay for measures to meet emissions standards, it cannot because its rates are controlled by a state agency. The representative also stated that, given current conditions, the company is looking at running the Corinth plant at a loss. Indeck’s lawyers are now claiming that RGGI violates interstate commerce laws.

Aside from forcing New York to potentially withdraw from RGGI, Indeck’s case has far-reaching ramifications that could affect other green policies in New York and, potentially, the entire country. As both climate bills currently under consideration in Congress include the creation of a national cap and trade system, Indeck’s suit could set an example that scores of other power generators around the country follow. Even if Indeck doesn’t win its suit, and New York is able to remain a member of RGGI, Dave Gahl, at the New York watchdog group Environmental Advocates, said the damage has already been done. Gahl said Indeck’s case has caused the state to freeze money that was supposed to be invested in clean energy options, money intended to support homeowners looking to go green.

The fund Gahl refers to was created by the state legislature in September with a law that allowed the state to take money made from carbon credits to support loans to homeowners looking to do environmentally-conscious renovations, like replacing old heating oil boilers or furnaces. The bill, called Green Jobs/Green New York Act, allowed homeowners to get an energy audit if they used a state-certified contractor for the work.

As WNYC notes, some $180 million had been raised through the Green Jobs/Green New York Act but was frozen because of the Indeck case. Since that money has been sitting in reserve, New York Governor David Patterson recently tapped it to help balance the state budget. WNYC said Paterson took “a blowtorch to that block of ice” and used half of the $180 million in what many environmentalists say is a “raid.”

While Indeck’s suit has led to a seemingly glum outcome for environmentalists, it’s not all bad news, one source told WNYC. Columbia’s Michael Gerrard, who teaches climate law, said it’s a positive sign that only one power plant, of the over 200 that fell under the cap and trade bill, sued. Gerrard said this points to fact that this legislation can work. “It is absolutely possible to have a cap-and-trade system that works, that seems to be free of market manipulation or corruption, [if] people can figure out how to use it,” he said to WNYC.

Kyoto, Japan, the site of the first-ever global meeting on the issue of climate change and precursor to the Copenhagen conference. (image: intellectualtakeout.org)

In a Wednesday piece in the U.K. Guardian, (probably the best news source around for the Copenhagen Summit) co-founders of the Copenhagen Climate Council Tim Flannery and Erik Rasmussen dissected the world of difference between Copenhagen and Kyoto. Back in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was the first legally binding set of requirements for developed economies to reduce emissions by 2010. But the authors name three deficiencies right off the bat:

1. The reductions required in the agreement are now considered small by today’s scientific standards.

2. Rapidly developing nations have no limits placed on their emissions; the entire burden is placed on fully industrialized nations.

3. There is no real guidance for business on how to reduce emissions and remain profitable in the long term.

Beyond the agreement itself, there are marked differences in the science being presented at today’s conference, and, perhaps even more importantly, public opinion has greatly shifted. As the pair points out, Kyoto occurred before An Inconvenient Truth, Hurricane Katrina, and other drastic climate-based disasters. We now live in a world where the climate change agenda is front and center, both in the peoples’ minds and the politicians.

Although the recent controversy stemming from the illegally released emails by some leading scientists has re-ignited skepticism about man-made global warming (particularly in the US), the majority of the global community is aware of and concerned about the issue of climate change.

The parallel expansion of fossil fuel and renewable energy use in China can both be traced to a centuries-old tradition of self-preservation and self-reliance. (image: jbrussellphoto via flickr.com and Greenpeace Southeast Asia via flickr.com)

Editor’s Note: President Obama began his first visit to China this week, and energy issues and action on climate change are prominent items on his agenda. With this in mind, we thought it would be a good time to learn more about the most populous nation on earth and the rising economic superpower’s energy strategy. What are China’s energy priorities? What are the motivations behind its efforts to secure massive foreign supplies of oil and natural gas? How are those efforts related to China’s push into the green energy sector? We asked these questions of our contributor Jeff Jorve, a former business journalist in Shanghai, and he filed this report.

Listening to a speech given by Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), on the eve of Chinese president Hu Jintao’s speech to the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh on September 19th, it was easy to see the idea that China will lead the world into a greener future as not so far-fetched. While Mr. Hu’s speech the following day contained fewer specific targets and promises than did Mr. de Boer’s, the Western media has taken the secretary’s claim at face value and run with it. As world leaders prepare for the Copenhagen conference on December 6th, one last opportunity to hammer out a replacement emissions-reduction framework for the expiring Kyoto Protocol, all eyes are on China (the world’s largest CO2 emitter) as Mr. Hu considers agreeing to cap emissions. But agreeing to a binding cap on carbon emissions and taking a global leadership position on green tech are not as inexorably linked as Mr. de Boer and other China hopefuls might believe.

China’s push into green technology is not a matter of desire for global prominence but a direct result of two concerns: an increasing reliance on foreign sources of oil and natural gas, and the limits of reliance on coal as a viable energy source.

Energy Independence

During the presidencies of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Chinese energy policy was characterized by a fear of vulnerability that resulted in government insistence on virtual energy self-sufficiency. By the end of Mr. Jiang’s tenure in 2001, China met 96 percent of national energy demand with domestic resources while accounting for 10 percent of global demand.

Following the transition of leadership from Mr. Jiang to Hu Jintao in late 2001, energy policy loosened and domestic demand began to increase dramatically. In 2008, China accounted for 17.7 percent of global energy demand, and met a greater percentage of that demand with foreign supplies.

At the end of 2008, China reported 15.5 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, accounting for only 1.7 percent of the world total, while accounting for 20 percent of the world’s population. Limited domestic oil reserves and increasing domestic demand (projected to double by 2013) have intensified China’s race to secure resources abroad, including a recent US$25 billion in loans to Russia’s Rosneft and Transneft, as well as US$10 billion to Brazil’s Petrobras, in exchange for guaranteed supplies of oil and natural gas.

But China’s appetite for greater amounts of oil and natural gas continues to undermine the national perception of security. Part of the government’s solution to this perceived weakness was launched in 2003 with the introduction of the National Strategic Oil Reserve Plan. The plan entails the construction of four coastal oil reserves, with capacity to reach the equivalent of one month’s consumption by 2010 and three month’s consumption by 2020.

Projected increases in energy demand led the government to target increased efficiency in energy utilization rather than absolute levels of energy usage —a 20 percent reduction target in China’s energy intensity, or energy per unit GDP, became part of the China’s 11th five-year plan for the period from 2006 to 2010. Through 2008, the Chinese government has largely achieved its goals.
Coal’s Untenable Future

While reliance on volatile foreign powers to supply oil and natural gas stokes the security fears of hard-line nationalists in China, the dirty reality of coal-fired plants is finally settling on the government in Beijing in the wake of the 2008 Olympics. Despite the over US$20 million spent by the government to improve air quality for the 2008 Games, Beijing’s particulate counts violated WHO guidelines over 81 percent of the last three months of the year.

Yet despite the smog-filled skies, China added 65.8 gigawatts (GW) of fossil fuel-fired electrical capacity in 2008, an increase of 11.9 percent from the 554 GW capacity reported in 2007. The US Energy Information Administration projects China’s coal consumption to grow at an average annual rate of 2.7 percent through the year 2030, reaching 98.3 quadrillion BTUs annually.
China boasts 13 percent of the world’s coal reserves, enough to sustain 2.7 percent annual growth in coal consumption well into 2050. And as the country’s most abundant domestic energy resource, China will continue to meet a majority of domestic demand with coal-fired power through 2030. But given the enormous costs of pollution, to the environment and to public health, China must look to mitigate the effects of increased coal consumption on the country’s already smog-blanketed cities. China became the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in 2006, and while it won’t surrender that position any time soon, the government has shown intentions of cutting back emissions.

Yet the notion that China will limit such emissions by moving away from its heavy reliance on coal energy is wishful thinking. To meet rising domestic demand while limiting reliance on foreign energy supplies, coal will need to remain the nation’s principle energy source. But the government, as data from the UN Millennium Development Goals show, is working to decrease carbon intensity by making its coal-fired plants more efficient.
Green Self-Interest

Mr. Hu’s pledge to derive 20 percent of domestic energy from renewable resources by 2020, seen in the light of China’s increasing dependence on foreign energy supplies, seems as much a throwback to the legacy of self-sufficiency as an application for leadership in the battle against climate change. But the paranoid fear of energy vulnerability is bringing China to the forefront of the green revolution. The China Greentech Report 2009, published jointly by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce, estimates that China’s green technology market could grow to as much as 15 percent of China’s forecasted GDP for 2013.

With China’s green tech industry set to take flight in the coming years, Chinese leaders will occupy a key seat at the table for talks on global climate change. Their privileged position will only render an agreement on absolute caps for carbon emissions more difficult to achieve. Any absolute cap on China’s carbon emissions will likely be ignored. A more plausible scenario would be a targeted reduction in carbon intensity, or emitted carbon per unit GDP. Su Wei, director of the Leading Committee on Climate Change for China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), hinted in April that targets for carbon intensity reduction could find their way into the country’s 12th five-year plan in 2011.

But neither investment in green technology nor a commitment to reducing carbon intensity should cause world leaders to assume that China’s crowning as poster child for the green revolution has been anything but the result of pursuing the status quo. Chinese leaders are not taking such steps in an effort to be placed on a green pedestal—rather, any international prestige garnered from their green tech initiatives is an added bonus for policies of pure self-interest.

Offline Sources

1.) UN Millennium Development Goals Data for CO2 1998-2006
2.) IMF Data for GDP in US$ 1998-2008
3.) Energy Information Administration for projected coal supply 2009
4.) BP Statistical Review of World Energy for energy consumption 1998-2008
5.) Rosen, Daniel and Houser, Trevor “China Energy: A guide for the perplexed” China Balance Sheet, May 2007