1473. Climate Change: Technocrats Enter the Debate

By Eduardo Porter, The New York Times, July 8, 2014

Here’s what your future will look like if we are to have a shot at preventing devastating climate change.

Within about 15 years every new car sold in the United States will be electric. In fact, by midcentury more than half of the American economy will run on electricity. Up to 60 percent of power might come from nuclear sources. And coal’s footprint will shrink drastically, perhaps even disappear from the power supply.

This course, created by a team of energy experts, was unveiled on Tuesday in a report for the United Nations that explores the technological paths available for the world’s 15 main economies to both maintain reasonable rates of growth and cut their carbon emissions enough by 2050 to prevent climatic havoc.

It offers a sobering conclusion. We might be able to pull it off. But it will take an overhaul of the way we use energy, and a huge investment in the development and deployment of new energy technologies. Significantly, it calls for an entirely different approach to international diplomacy on the issue of how to combat climate change.

“This will require a heroic cooperative effort,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist who directs the Sustainable Development Solutions Network at the United Nations, which convened the multinational teams.

The teams, one in each of the 15 countries, looked at what would be necessary to keep the atmosphere from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above the preindustrial average of the late 19th century, a target that most of the world committed to at the climate summit meeting in Copenhagen five years ago. To do so, CO₂ emissions from industry and energy use would have to fall to at most 1.6 tons a year for every person on the planet by midcentury.

That is less than a tenth of annual American emissions per person today and less than a third of the world average. And we haven’t quite figured out how to get from here to there.

The American team built several paths that would hit the target, using different mixes of nuclear power, renewable energy and fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage technology. So did the Russian team, aided by the expected shrinking of the Russian population.

But the Chinese team was stymied by the country’s vast heavy industry — its steel makers and cement plants, which use enormous amounts of energy. The best it could do was chart a path that took CO₂ emissions to some 3.4 tons per person by midcentury. “We have shipped a lot of industry to China,” Mr. Sachs said. “Industry is hard to decarbonize.”

Over all, the teams built plausible technological paths to cut annual emissions across the 15 countries only to about 2.3 tons per person.

The analysis, however, offers solid ground for hope. The teams expect to improve on these paths in coming months. Faster deployment of some technologies than assumed could provide for deeper decarbonization in several countries. What’s more, likely changes in economic structure in coming decades — such as China’s expected shift away from heavy industry — could further shrink the carbon footprint.

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Most important, the assessment offers an opportunity to end decades of inconsequential horse-trading over climate change and to start addressing the problem for real.

Five years since political leaders from countries around the world committed to do whatever it took to keep global temperatures from rising more than two degrees above the preindustrial average, no one had taken the trouble, until now, to evaluate how that might be achieved.

Lacking any understanding of the feasibility of the exercise, governments postured and jockeyed over which country should be responsible for what, offering as little as they could get away with in actual reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, whether the collective effort met the two-degree commitment or not.

“If governments don’t have any idea of what two degrees means in their countries, how can they commit to two degrees?” asked Guido Schmidt-Traub, executive director of the Sustainable Development Network.

The report commissioned by the United Nations could end the jockeying: to stick to the two-degree limit every country, rich and poor, must reduce annual CO₂ emissions to 1.6 tons per person, whether it is responsible for a lot or a little of the climate change so far.

This is dictated not by fairness, but by our technological frontier. There is wiggle room for negotiation. China’s emissions from manufacturing would look smaller if they were allocated to consuming rather than producing countries. Still, we know of no feasible technology that would allow, say, the United States to have negative emissions in 2050 so India or China could emit more.

The new assessment also underscores the pointlessness of small, incremental emissions cuts. Under the path, the United States decarbonizes its energy supply at an average pace of almost 4 percent a year over the next four decades. That is more than 10 times faster than the Energy Information Administration’s forecast last year. China takes CO₂ out of its energy about six times as fast as the E.I.A.’s forecast.

This is not achievable by going after low-hanging fruit, such as replacing coal with natural gas in power plants. Doing so could even be counterproductive, locking the country’s energy infrastructure into a high-carbon path.

Most important, perhaps, the new assessment suggests that deep decarbonization can be done without breaking any economy. Chinese incomes, for instance, are assumed to grow about 4.6 percent a year until midcentury.

The decarbonization paths rely on aggressive assumptions about our ability to deploy new technologies on a commercial scale economically. For instance, carbon capture and storage is supposed to be available starting in about 10 years. Second-generation biofuels are assumed to come into play by 2020. Hydrogen fuel cells and power storage technology are deployed starting around 2030.

But these technologies all exist today and seem reasonably scalable. The teams did not rely on more speculative technologies, like cold fusion, to make their numbers.

The new approach — which the United Nations hopes will inform the debate up to the next climate summit in Paris in fall 2015 — could offer a path out of the stalemate that international climate negotiations have become.

No country will commit legally to slash its CO₂ emissions by 80 percent over the next 40 years. But if there is a map, many might offer their best effort to follow it. Absent a legal commitment, a long-term path could encourage the large investments ultimately required to address the problem.

“Governments won’t precommit to huge technological revolutions on a legal basis,” Professor Sachs said. “Countries might be willing to aspire more on a conditional basis.”

What’s more, countries are more likely to participate if they understand what everybody else is trying. “The Chinese want to see an American pathway to two degrees,” Mr. Schmidt-Traub said.

Big challenges remain. Any 40-year forecast must be taken with some skepticism. Technologies that seem feasible and economic today might turn out not to be. And it bears repeating that though the teams contend they can get to 1.6 tons per person, they have not yet.

Russia, for instance, hit the target. But Oleg Lugovoy of the Environmental Defense Fund, who worked on the Russian plan, observed that “if we don’t have carbon capture and storage we would have to reconsider.”

And while sketching a technological path toward a low carbon economy will certainly help ground in reality the abstract negotiations over the future of climate, it does not do away with the main hitch that has stumped progress for decades: How much will this all cost and who will pay for it?

The team purposefully did not assess the costs of their paths to prevent distributional arguments from flaring up immediately. That gives policy makers space to consider the implications without having to stake out a negotiating stance.

An assessment of costs and how they could be distributed will be added in a next iteration to be published next spring. Debates over cost allocation and technology transfer could still hamstring prospects of substantive international collaboration.

But despite these risks, the report offers a promising new path to overcome the decades-old logjam of climate change negotiations. For the first time, when we say we can stop the climate from heating we will more or less know what we are talking about.

1472. Should We Have to Choose Between Two Evils?: The Carbon Dioxide vs. Methane Debate

By Justin Gillis, The New York Times, July 7, 2014

Methane escaping through underground system

Climate scientists long ago settled among themselves the question of whether human emissions of greenhouse gases are a problem, concluding that we are running some grave risks. But the field still features vigorous debate about how bad global warming will get, how quickly, and how to combat it.

One of the biggest fights involves how much effort to put into stopping leaks of methane gas into the atmosphere. It may sound like an obscure topic, but the leaks could have a great effect on the climate that people living today experience.

This issue has grown in importance with the release of President Obama’s new climate plan. It calls for greater use of natural gas, which consists mostly of methane. Among a few academics and on the far left of the environmental movement, cries are going up that the president is about to lock America into a supposed solution to climate change that will be worse than burning coal.

Is that claim plausible?

The basic scientific facts are pretty clear. By far the most important greenhouse gas that humans are spewing into the atmosphere is carbon dioxide, which comes from burning fossil fuels. The second most important is methane, which comes from many sources. It is released when coal is mined; it escapes when wells are drilled for oil or natural gas; and it leaks from pipes that distribute natural gas. Certain agricultural practices also throw up a huge amount.

Pound for pound, methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But in stark contrast to CO₂, methane breaks down quickly in the atmosphere. Every time you flip on a light switch, causing more coal to be burned and CO₂ to be released, you are slightly altering the earth’s climate for thousands of years. Release a puff of methane, scientists say, and the climate influence will be gone in a few decades.

“The methane is like a hangover that you can get over if you stop drinking,” said Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago and the author of a textbook on planetary atmospheres. “CO₂ is more like lead poisoning — it sticks around, you don’t get rid of it, and it causes irreversible harm.”

Despite that difference, billions of dollars are being spent to control methane leaks, and some people argue for spending more. Dr. Pierrehumbert is a leading voice challenging that approach. He argues, essentially, that the world has yet to mount a serious effort to control carbon dioxide, which will be vastly more harmful in the long run, and that methane and other short-term pollutants should largely be ignored until that bigger problem is fixed.

He summarizes his position by adapting St. Augustine’s plea for chastity: “Lord, give me methane control, but not yet.”

Taking the opposite view are scientists who argue that the short-term effect of methane presents an opportunity not to be overlooked. Global warming is already a problem, they point out, noting the rise of certain extreme weather events. Aggressively controlling methane, they say, would help slow the warming sharply over the coming

By contrast, “our success in controlling CO₂ emissions is likely to make very little difference on temperature over the next 40 years,” said Drew Shindell, a longtime NASA climate scientist who is leaving for Duke University.

He and other scientists who see the issue this way have had some success in the last few years helping to persuade the United Nations, the United States Department of State, the Environmental Protection Agency and other organizations to back efforts to control the release of methane, as well as other short-term pollutants.

So what has all this got to do with the president’s climate plan?

Mr. Obama’s administration intends to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 30 percent, from 2005 levels, by 2030. That will push states toward much greater use of natural gas to generate electricity — a shift that is seen as combating global warming because, in a power plant, burning natural gas emits roughly half the carbon dioxide as burning coal.

The plan effectively puts the administration on the side of increased natural gas production, including through the controversial technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Grass-roots environmental groups have erupted, contending that leaks from this form of gas production will effectively cancel out any claimed climate benefits.

But while the scientific evidence suggests that could perhaps be true over the next few decades, the argument effectively ignores the fate of human generations beyond that. Experts say that, looking at the more distant future, it is hugely important to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere now, even if that requires burning more gas. Dr. Pierrehumbert and Dr. Shindell largely agree on this point, with Dr. Pierrehumbert discounting the gas-is-worse-than-coal argument as “bunkum.”

The larger issue is a tough one. If only a limited amount of political capital and money is going to be available to tackle global warming, that would weigh in favor of Dr. Pierrehumbert’s argument for ignoring methane leaks for the time being. Dr. Shindell agrees that methane control should not be pursued at the expense of CO₂ control.

But maybe there is a way out of this conundrum. What is the chance that a two-pronged attack on climate change would increase the overall level of political will?

The idea would be to promise far more aggressive methane control to slow global warming for the benefit of people alive today, along with aggressive CO₂ control for the benefit of future generations. If the prospect of near-term climate benefits could spur a notable increase in public support for longer-term measures, too, that would certainly tilt the argument in Dr. Shindell’s favor.