1533. China Plans a Market for Carbon Permits

By Reuters, The New York Times, August 31, 2014

BEIJING — China plans to introduce its national market for carbon permit trading in 2016, a government official said on Sunday, adding that Beijing is close to completing rules for what will be the world’s biggest emissions trading program.

The nation accounts for nearly 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and it plans to use the carbon market to slow its rapid growth in climate-changing emissions.

China has pledged to reduce the amount of carbon it emits per unit of its gross domestic product to 40 to 45 percent below its 2005 levels by 2020.

It has already introduced seven regional pilot markets in a bid to gain experience ahead of a nationwide program.

“We will send over the national market regulations to the State Council for approval by the end of the year,” Sun Cuihua, a senior climate official with the National Development and Reform Commission, told a conference in Beijing on Sunday.

The national market will start in 2016, although some provinces would be allowed to start later if they lacked the technical infrastructure to participate from the outset, she said.

The Chinese market, when fully functional, would dwarf the European emissions trading system, which is now the world’s biggest.

It would be the main carbon trading hub in Asia and the Pacific, where Kazakhstan and New Zealand already operate similar markets. South Korea will start a national market on Jan. 1, 2015, while Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam are drawing up plans for markets of their own.

The Chinese market will cap carbon dioxide emissions from sources like electricity generators and manufacturers. Those that emit above their cap must buy permits in the market.

Five pilot markets that opened in China last year saw a high degree of compliance by included emitters in their first year, although data secrecy and a tendency to hand out too many permits made them inefficient in cutting emissions.

The pilot programs are keen to attract professional trading companies to increase liquidity, and Shenzhen — the smallest of the pilot markets — recently allowed trades to be settled in foreign currencies in a bid to make trading easier for foreign traders.

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.

1467. To Address Climate Change, Nothing Substitutes for Reducing Carbon Dioxide Emissions

By Science Daily, June 27, 2014

The politically expedient way to mitigate climate change is essentially no way at all, according to a comprehensive new study by University of Chicago climatologist Raymond Pierrehumbert.

Among the climate pollutants humans put into the atmosphere in significant quantities, the effects of carbon dioxide (CO₂) are the longest-lived, with effects on climate that extend thousands of years after emissions cease. But finding the political consensus to act on reducing CO₂ emissions has been nearly impossible. So there has been a movement to make up for that inaction by reducing emissions of other, shorter-lived gasses, such as methane, hydrofluorocarbons, and nitrous oxide, and particulates such as soot and black carbon, all of which contribute to warming as well.

Pierrehumbert 's study shows that effort to be, as he puts it, a delusion. "Until we do something about CO₂, nothing we do about methane or these other things is going to matter much for climate," he said.

Pierrehumbert is the Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences at UChicago, and holder of the King Carl XVI Gustaf Chair in Environmental Sciences at Stockholm University for 2014-2015. His study, published in Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, brings together findings from the scientific literature with new research and analysis. Its conclusions are clear.

"Ray convincingly shows the benefit and importance of doing everything we can to lower CO₂ emissions, and as soon as possible," said Katherine H. Freeman, professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University. "We should lower short-lived pollutants like methane too. But, as he makes clear, we should not let them distract us from the urgent need to stop burning fossil fuels."

The basic physics of climate pollutants has been well known for a long time. The warming effect of methane and other short-lived climate pollutants disappears quite quickly after the pollutants are removed from the atmosphere. When you remove them, you get a one-time-only, lump-sum benefit. CO₂, on the other hand, lingers in the atmosphere. And if you are still emitting CO₂ while you are reducing methane and its fellows, that additional CO₂ continues to affect the climate for thousands of years.

Perhaps as a result of wishful thinking, the policy implications of those facts had become confused, said Pierrehumbert. Part of the problem is that the statistical tool used to compare the climate effect of gasses is badly flawed. The measure, called Global Warming Potential (GWP), predicts the effect on climate by comparing the emission rate of carbon dioxide with the emission rate of methane. But a one-ton-per-year reduction in the amount of methane emitted translates into a single lowering of the global thermostat, while a one-ton-per-year reduction in CO₂ yields a climate benefit that increases over time. That's because each extra ton of CO₂ that would have been emitted would have irreversibly ratcheted up the global thermostat by an additional increment.

Despite its well-known defects, GWP has been used since 1990 and was incorporated into the Kyoto Protocols in the climate-trading schemes implemented by Europe. Pierrehumbert proposes a different metric, which looks at the climate effect of reducing CO₂ emission by a fixed number of tons and then finds the rate by which you have to reduce methane emissions to get the same effect.

Pierrehumbert's study doesn't propose a single "right" policy on climate change, said Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State. "But it is a very useful analysis that will be viewed carefully by people who are interested in making good policies, and the main conclusions will help inform those policies."

Pierrehumbert himself hopes that his work will help lead policymakers to abandon Kyoto-style multi-gas trading schemes, which treat the gasses equivalently, and put the emphasis on CO₂ for the next 50 years or so. "I see puncturing the excessive enthusiasm about short-lived climate pollution control as a step in the right direction," he said, "because it takes away one of the grounds for procrastination on CO₂. If you're serious about protecting climate, it's the CO₂ you've got to deal with first."

Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by University of Chicago. The original article was written by Carla Reiter. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:

1. R.T. Pierrehumbert. Short-Lived Climate Pollution. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 2014; 42 (1): 341 DOI: 10.1146/annurev-earth-060313-054843