by Robert Bryce
In short, I don’t side with the “climate alarmists” like Al Gore, who famously—and nonsensically—declared in his movie An Inconvenient Truth that “you can even reduce your carbon emissions to zero.”14 Nor do I side with the “climate skeptics” who maintain that nothing is happening. Instead, I consider myself a realist, a pragmatist who has done the math on carbon dioxide emissions and understands that no matter what course of action the United States takes—short of completely shutting down its economy and consigning the vast majority of its citizens to the drudgery of scratching out an existence with something approximating 40 acres and a mule—it cannot, and will not, make a significant difference to concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
And that’s the key issue. Over the past few decades, nearly the entire discussion about global warming and climate change has focused on the desire to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. But for all the talk about reducing carbon emissions, the reality is starkly obvious: Those efforts have failed miserably.
The Kyoto Protocol was supposed to address global climate change. Adopted in 1997, the agreement took force in 2005. By 2009, some 188 countries had signed the agreement.15 The United States was not among them. In the late 1990s, the U.S. Senate voted 94 to 2 against ratifying the agreement.16 How well has Kyoto worked? By 2012, it is expected that just 6 of the signatories will have achieved their goal; emissions in the other 182 will likely still be well above target levels. Among the countries that have failed to achieve the targets, for example, is Japan. By late 2007, Japan’s carbon dioxide emissions were 14 percent above the Kyoto target.17 By early 2009, with the country still far above the target level, the Japanese had begun buying carbon offsets.18 The inability of Japan—which has high population density, a homogeneous society, and an extremely energy-efficient economy—to achieve the carbon dioxide reductions outlined in Kyoto may be the single best indicator of the impracticality of the proposed carbon-reduction schemes. And Japan’s failure to achieve its carbon reduction targets provides a stark warning about the ability of the United States to achieve an 80 percent reduction by 2050.
The problem, once again, can be shown by doing basic math. Here are the numbers: In 2006, the United States emitted about 5.9 billion tons of carbon dioxide.19 That means that the average American is responsible for the production of about 20 tons of carbon dioxide annually. (The U.S. population is about 307 million.)20 An 80 percent reduction in U.S. emissions would mean that the United States would only be allowed to emit about 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2050. That level of emissions would take the United States back to the levels achieved in 1910, when the country’s factories and households emitted about 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year.21 But in 1910, the United States only had about 92 million people, and the per-capita income (in 2009 dollars) was about $6,000. Today, the population is more than three times greater than it was a century ago, and thankfully, per-capita incomes have jumped to more than $39,000.22 By 2050, the United States will likely have about 439 million people.23 At that population level—and remember, total emissions are to be no more than 1.2 billion tons per year—per-capita carbon dioxide emissions would have to be about 2.7 tons per year, or about one-seventh of current per-capita emission levels of about 20 tons per year.
Which countries are close to achieving Obama’s implied per-capita target of 2.7 tons of carbon dioxide per year? In 2006, countries that had emissions in that range included Cuba (2.36 tons), North Korea (3.18), and Syria (2.65). In 2006, global average per-capita carbon dioxide emissions amounted to 4.28 tons per year—or about 50 percent higher than what the United States is aiming to achieve by 2050.24
Under the target identified by Obama and congressional Democrats, by 2050, U.S. per-capita emissions would have to be far lower than those of current-day China, where each citizen now emits the world average of about 4.27 tons of carbon dioxide per year.25 As Steven Hayward, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out in a 2008 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, the “enthusiasm for an 80% reduction target is often justified on grounds that national policy should set an ambitious goal.”26 But as Hayward noted, there’s a difference between an ambitious goal and an absurd one. The chances of the United States actually achieving an 80 percent cut in carbon dioxide output by 2050 ranges somewhere between slim and none. And, as my father used to say, “Slim left town.”
FIGURE 26 Per-Capita Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the United States and Other Countries, 2006, with Implied Projection for U.S. Emissions in 2050
Source: International Energy Agency, “Key World Energy Statistics 2008,” http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/2008/key_stats_2008.pdf, 49–57.
But just for the sake of discussion, let’s run the numbers one more time, and let’s do it in a way that is favorable to the 80 percent reduction target. Let’s assume that the U.S. population doesn’t grow at all over the next four decades, so that by 2050, there are still about 307 million Americans. Again, the math is straightforward: With 1.2 billion tons of total annual carbon dioxide emissions, divided among 307 million people, the United States would have per-capita emissions of about 4 tons. That’s fine. But it’s still less than the world average per-capita carbon dioxide emissions in 2006. Indeed, it’s nearly 10 percent below the level in Jamaica, a country where per-capita GDP in 2006 was about $7,500.27
The reality is that, for all the talk about drastic cuts in carbon dioxide, the United States cannot—and it will not—make any radical reductions in its carbon output. And the reasons it won’t are obvious: There are no cheap—and that is the most essential qualifier—viable technologies that will allow it to do so; Americans are not willing to change their lifestyles to make it happen; and any government-mandated restrictions on hydrocarbon use that would be severe enough to achieve the 80 percent reduction target would almost certainly ruin the economy.
The problem of how to make such drastic cuts in global carbon dioxide emissions has led some of the world’s leading thinkers on climate and science to question the conventional wisdom. In 2006, Roger Pielke Jr., a professor in the environmental studies program at the University of Colorado, made a concise statement about climate change.28 In testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform, Pielke said: “Even if society takes immediate and drastic action on emissions, there can be no scientifically valid argument that such actions will lead to a perceptibly better climate in the coming decades. For the foreseeable future the most effective policy responses to climate-related impacts (e.g., such as hurricanes and other disasters or diseases such as malaria) will necessarily be adaptive.”
Pielke went on, making it clear that he wasn’t arguing that the United States should ignore the problem: “The point of this analysis is not to throw up our hands and do nothing about mitigation,” he said. But “if meaningful action is to occur on mitigation we must think about different strategies, and in particular policy options that have more symmetry between the timing of costs and benefits.”29
Other analysts are coming to the same conclusion. In February 2009, Britain’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers issued a report, “Climate Change: Adapting to the Inevitable?” which pointed out that the Kyoto Protocol has been “a near total failure with emissions levels continuing to rise substantially.”30
Given the continuing use of hydrocarbons, and carbon dioxide levels, the British engineering group, which has some 75,000 members in 120 countries, determined that adaptation to changing weather patterns will be an essential strategy for the countries of the world.31 The report said, “We are unlikely to be far more successful at curbing our carbon dioxide emissions in the near future than we have been over the past decade or so. And even with vigorous mitigation effort, we will continue to use fossil fuel reserves until they are exhausted.”32 Instead of focusing on emissions, governments should “invest significantly more effort in adaptation for the long term, which enables each nation to undertake the necessary steps to ensure its future prosperity and
survival.” It went on to say that although efforts to curb emissions are “vital,” those efforts have “questionable” efficacy. Therefore, “It is a duty of government to embrace adaptation and protect the nation against the potential risks of a ‘business as usual’ outcome.”33
When the report was released, the institution’s point person on climate change issues, Tim Fox, said that too much time was being spent considering how to reduce carbon emissions and too little on how to cope with climatic changes. “But by researching and developing adaptation strategies we have a chance to cope with what is around the corner,” he explained.34
About the same time that the Institution of Mechanical Engineers released its report, the National Academy of Sciences released a similar report that came to similar conclusions: “We must consider how climate change research should evolve in the United States. A federal science program is needed to comprehend the nature and extent of the climate change threat, to quantify the magnitude of the impacts, and to provide a data and knowledge foundation for identifying effective adaptation and mitigation options.”35
My thinking about the science of climate change is not that we should do nothing with regard to carbon dioxide emissions. The United States, even in the absence of any Kyoto-style mandates to reduce carbon emissions, has made substantial reductions in its carbon dioxide emissions. And global carbon emissions are getting a big nudge downward thanks to the sorry state of the U.S. and world economies. In August 2009, the Energy Information Administration predicted that 2009 emissions would fall by about 6 percent from 2008. And that follows a drop of about 3 percent in 2008.36
Those are sizable reductions, but they are still light-years away from the 80 percent reduction by 2050 that Obama claims should be a U.S. goal. The sad but true state of carbon politics is that the only realistic way to achieve that goal would be for the United States to intentionally destroy its economy and the jobs that go with it. Of course, no savvy politician will say that the goal should be a weak economy. So politicos and environmentalists are advocating another approach to the carbon dioxide emissions issue, one that will allow the United States to continue using large amounts of coal while also making huge volumes of carbon dioxide simply disappear.
But as I mentioned in the introduction, we must remember Jim Collins’s admonition that “facts are better than dreams.” And when it comes to carbon capture and sequestration, Americans are hearing lots of dreams and precious few facts.
Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is the Holy Grail of carbon strategies. Given the right technologies, CCS will be a key part of the solution to the world’s ever-increasing quantities of carbon dioxide emissions, or at least that’s what the promoters have been telling us. And there are plenty of promoters. In 2008, David Hawkins, the head of the climate change program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that “burying billions of tons of carbon dioxide is a huge job, but that is not necessarily an argument against CCS. You can’t solve a big problem without a big effort.”37
In February 2009, Fred Krupp, the head of the Environmental Defense Fund, one of America’s biggest environmental groups (the group’s annual budget is about $100 million), said that carbon capture provides “a future for coal” and that “it will be an important technology for reducing carbon dioxide emissions because it offers the possibility of retrofitting some of the existing power plants.”38 At about that same time, a research engineer at the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Howard Herzog, said that, given the fact that coal-fired power plants will be around for a long time, CCS is “the only real alternative”: “Therefore, we have to make CCS work.”39
Herzog was repeating some of the findings of a 2007 report done at MIT called “The Future of Coal: Options for a Carbon-Constrained World,” which concluded that coal was going to be part of the world’s generation mix for a long time to come. “Coal use will increase under any foreseeable scenario because it is cheap and abundant,” said the authors of the interdisciplinary study. “Coal can provide usable energy at a cost of between $1 and $2 per MMBtu [million Btu] compared to $6 to $12 per MMBtu for oil and natural gas.”40 The report also claimed that CCS was “the critical enabling technology that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly while also allowing coal to meet the world’s pressing energy needs.41
In March 2009, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar told the New York Times that his agency was investigating the potential for using public lands for carbon capture and storage. The U.S. Geological Survey, he said, had recently produced a report designed to help find the best areas for CCS.42
In May 2009, Nobuo Tanaka, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, called CCS a “vital” technology for greenhouse gas control “that will be needed to make power generation and heavy industry sustainable.”43 About that same time, U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu gave a speech in Rome in which he declared that “we need to capture the carbon” and sequester the emissions “safely,” adding, “and we have to do this in an economically viable way.”44
In August 2009, David Sandalow, an assistant secretary of energy, testifying before the Senate, declared that “it is technically feasible, through retrofitting and new construction, to ensure that the entire US coal fleet employs CCS by 2035.”45
Note that Sandalow said CCS is “technically feasible.” He didn’t say it made economic sense. And that’s the rub: No one knows how to do CCS in an economically viable way. The idea of CCS is simple: Capture carbon dioxide from the flue of a power plant and then inject that gas (after it has been compressed and cooled) into a geologic formation. And while the idea is simple, making it into a reality on a large scale is extremely tricky. That point was made clear by the Congressional Research Service in December 2008: “Developing technology to capture CO2 in an environmentally, economically, and operationally acceptable manner—especially from coal-fired power plants—has been an ongoing interest of the federal government for a decade. Nonetheless, the technology on the whole is still under development: no commercial device is currently available to capture carbon from coal plants.”46
That’s not to say there’s no money available. Shortly before Chu gave his speech in Rome, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it was going to provide $2.4 billion in funding for CCS projects. That money was made available from the massive stimulus package passed by Congress known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.47 The European Union is also throwing huge amounts of money at CCS. In mid-2009, the European Commission announced that it was providing about $1.4 billion to thirteen CCS projects across Europe. Europe believes it will be able to collect large amounts of money to support additional CCS projects through the auctioning of carbon credits.48
But here’s the reality: No matter how much money the United States and the European Union throw at CCS, it won’t work. The volumes of carbon dioxide are too large, and the technical problems—and therefore the costs—associated with sequestering that much gas are just too big.
Only a handful of energy projects are now using CCS. The most familiar of those is one being done by the Norwegian oil giant, StatoilHydro, in the North Sea at the company’s Sleipner platform. Since 1996, StatoilHydro has been capturing, compressing, and reinjecting about 1 million tons of carbon dioxide per year into a formation under the ocean.49 (The carbon dioxide is stripped out of the natural gas the company is producing at the site.) But Sleipner is tiny compared to overall global emissions. And as author and journalist Jeff Goodell pointed out in a 2008 article on CCS, it would take ten Sleipner-sized projects to offset the emissions from just one large coal-fired power plant .50
The environmental group Greenpeace raises a number of valid points about the problems of CCS, including the length of time needed to deploy it, the additional energy required to fuel the CCS process, the viability of underground storage, cost issues, and long-term liability questions.51
Greenpeace’s cri
ticisms are valid, and they are all essentially related to the problem of scale. The volume of global carbon dioxide emissions is staggering. In 2006, global carbon dioxide emissions totaled 29.1 billion tons.52 Let’s assume that policymakers mandate a program requiring the annual sequestration of 10 percent—about 3 billion tons—of global carbon dioxide emissions. That figure is a reasonable starting point, and it’s equal to about one-half of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, which totaled 5.9 billion tons in 2006.53
But how can we get our minds around that figure? Three billion tons is a difficult number to comprehend, especially when it represents something that is widely dispersed the way carbon emissions are in the atmosphere. According to calculations done by Vaclav Smil, if that amount of carbon dioxide (remember, it’s just 10 percent of global annual carbon dioxide emissions) were compressed to about 1,000 pounds per square inch, it would have about the same volume as the total volume of global annual oil production.54
In other words, the volume of that highly pressurized gas would be approximately equal to the volume of all of the oil produced around the world in a year. Of course, since no one has ever seen all the world’s annual oil production stacked up in one spot, that amount of material is still too large to be understandable. We can bring it into sharper focus by cutting it down to daily figures.
In 2008, global oil production was about 82 million barrels per day.55 Thus, 10 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions in one day would be approximately equal to the daily volume of global oil production. So here’s the punch line: Getting rid of just 10 percent of global carbon dioxide per day would mean filling the equivalent of forty-one VLCC supertankers every day. (Each VLCC, or very large crude carrier, holds about 2 million barrels.)56 Given that huge volume of carbon dioxide, the immediate questions are obvious: Where will we put it? And how will we put it there?