S. 2191, The Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2007

This Senate bill is the main legislation under consideration in the US for dealing with greenhouse-gas emissions.

Cap and Trade
Its most important feature is cap-and-trade covering utilities, industries, and motor fuels. It's aggressive enough, with ambitious goals, but it has so many escape clauses and offramps that its value has to be deeply discounted. Moreover, the emission rights will be auctioned off to support favorite causes, so it is actually a tax. Many analysts believe taxing carbon emissions is the only way to reduce them. Maybe they're right, but if it's a tax it won't fly. That's a given in US politics. People want the services and benefits that come from government largesse, but they won't vote for any politician who makes them pay taxes.

That pretty well makes the rest of the subject moot, but we'll proceed anyway because some other points have to be part of future discussions.

Carbon Sequestration
Another major feature is an emphasis on CO2 sequestration. It seems that CO2 producers will get credit for pumping CO2 into the ground. The bill contains provisions for determining the capacity of storage locations, but not for evaluating whether or not the CO2 will stay in place.

To date, no sequestration site in the world has been tested for leakage. Furthermore, no one knows how to conduct such a test.

On the subject of sequestration, Senator Jeff Bingaman makes this remark: "Currently there are no formal site selection criteria for carbon dioxide injection wells that will be used for carbon storage." He goes on to explain that the EPA has no clue how to set the criteria. That reflects the impossibility of sequestering CO2 with any confidence.

Under the terms of this bill, utilities can pump CO2 into the ground and act as though it never was generated, without any assurance it won't leak into the atmosphere some decades later. If it does leak, utilities will have paid large amounts for this program, all for no purpose.

Energy Supply
The US Energy Information Administration did a
study to compare the effects of the bill, under various scenarios. What the study showed is especially instructive.

The results seem obvious, but prove that nuclear opponents are wrong. Even under the most optimistic conditions, renewables won't provide the energy the country needs. The simple fact is that if nuclear energy isn't developed to its full potential, then the US will depend more on natural gas, a substance in great demand and short supply, and coal. Moreover, some of the coal combustion would have to be subject to carbon sequestration, an untested and dubious concept.

Future
One hesitates to criticize. The world faces an enormous challenge and it's only natural that practical people would turn to easy-sounding solutions such as carbon taxes and sequestration. Sadly, those won't succeed; one is political poison and the other is imaginary.

Instead, we have to commit ourselves to the hard work of reshaping our energy usage. Instead of auctioning off pollution rights, we have to outright ban the installation of fossil-fueled generating plants, either new or replacement capacity. New electricity demand must be met by a combination of renewable and nuclear sources, and offset by efficiency and the curtailment of low-return energy use. Vehicle efficiency has to be raised much more than the feeble changes Congress has mandated. Bureaucratic obstacles to synthetic fuels like Green Freedom should be cleared and, if it's necessary, subsidies that currently go to fossil-fuel producers should be directed toward offsetting the cost difference between petroleum fuel and synthetic fuel.

That's what it will take to beat this problem.

Replacing Fossil Fuels

If you follow the public debate over global warming, you get the impression that generating electricity is the only problem. Actually, electricity is the easy part of the problem because we can generate all the electricity we need from non-fossil energy sources. Considering the externalized costs of fossil fuels, the non-fossil sources are even cost-effective.

The hard part of the problem is motor fuels. We don't have a good substitute in place. Biofuels won't ever supply a major part of our motor fuels, for reasons we've discussed before. But take heart. Two chemists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have devised a process using current technology that could replace petroleum as as source. F. Jeffrey Martin and William L. Kubic have published Green Freedom: A Concept for Producing Carbon-Neutral Synthetic Fuels and Chemicals (Patent Pending).


A Simple Description

As you can imagine, turning atmospheric CO2 into gasoline takes a huge amount of energy. In this process, the energy inputs are in the form of heat and electricity. Lots of both.

The electricity could come from a number of sources, but the process is most effective if the electricity supply is steady, which effectively limits it to nuclear. That's just as well, though, because the CO2 capture requires spraying a potassium-carbonate solution into an air stream. That requires something very much like a wet cooling tower, so the wet cooling tower for the nuclear plant can do double duty as a CO2 collector.

Once the CO2 is collected, it can be extracted from the solution by an electrolytic process, originated by Martin and Kubic. They claim that this is their chief innovation and that all the other features of the process are standard to the chemical industry. The electrolytic process is more energy-efficient than other means of separating the CO2, and generates hydrogen at the same time, reducing the amount of hydrogen that has to be generated elsewhere.

In their baseline design, Martin and Kubic propose to use water electrolysis for generating the additional hydrogen needed. They chose this because nuclear plants in the US are all capable of providing the electricity needed. As they point out, more-recent technology can improve efficiencies substantially. Steam electrolysis consumes less energy and advanced nuclear reactors can generate hydrogen thermochemically; this last technique can be essentially 100% efficient, since the leftover heat can generate electricity.

Once the hydrogen is generated, commercially-tested processes can be used for converting CO2 and hydrogen into methanol, and for converting methanol into gasoline. Alternatively, hydrogen, CO2, and steam can be combined over catalysts in the Fisher-Tropsch process to produce any kind of hydrocarbon compound, including diesel oil and aviation fuel.


Practicality

As the authors take pains to make clear, the process depends only on equipment in commercial use today. There are no technological barriers to implementing it. There is a cost consideration, however. Their calculations show that the gasoline could be sold at the pump for $4.60 per gallon. Since we're dealing here with known technology they probably are not understating it by much, taking into account that projects of all kinds end up costing more than the planners expected.

But there are ample reasons for believing the actual costs would be lower. As they explain, newer technology will improve efficiencies considerably. Moreover, their analysis assumes their nuclear plant, which comprises the main capital cost, would be dedicated to producing hydrocarbon fuel. In practice, the nuclear plant will sell electricity during times of peak demand, especially when renewable energy is in short supply. This will become more apparent when fossil-fired power plants are phased out and all electricity depends on renewable and nuclear sources. We can look forward to an economy in which nuclear plants produce all our hydrocarbon fuels during off-peak hours. This sharing of costs will greatly reduce the cost of producing liquid fuels.


Looking Ahead

What we can say for sure is that it will take a massive energy investment to free the world from dependence on petrofuels. Straight hydrogen doesn't look promising because of the difficulty of onboard storage and because the inevitable leaks will threaten the ozone layer. Batteries for powering freight-hauling trucks don't seem like a reasonable hope, given the paltry improvements batteries have seen in the last few decades. Biofuels won't do the job, as discussed earlier. Since this process is already practical, it's not much of a stretch to predict that something very similar will be our fuel source in the future.

Tipping Points

With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change by Fred Pearce is not reassuring or comfortable. It is a scientifically-grounded explanation of climate change/global warming/freaky world changes.

It probably could only have been written by Mr. Pearce. He's been following the global-warming story as a journalist since about 1990 and because of that he was able to interview many of the principal researchers in the ongoing struggle to understand the process.

He presents four topics of interest. First, he explains the mechanics of climate change. If you're a little fuzzy on the ocean conveyor or methane clathrates he'll bring you up to speed. Second, he lays out the limits of knowledge. The parameters cover large ranges and he keeps clear the distinction between what is known and what isn't. Third, he covers the slipperiest part of the whole topic: tipping points; how they work and what happens when we reach them. He also discusses what the consequences of climate change are likely to be, bearing in mind the limits of certainty. We're going to say a little here about tipping points, based on the author's remarks.

Skeptics dismiss the concept of tipping points. You can't prove them, they say. Actually, you can prove some of them but it's not clear what will activate them. Some others aren't understood to the point they can be considered certain. It goes the other way too, though. There's no justification for traveling up the Keeling curve with insouciance. Before we jump into a pot of hot tar, common sense tells us we ought to find out how hot the tar is.

I'll go through the main tipping points the author describes.

* Shrinking ice caps. This one is maybe the most basic. As the ice caps shrink the world is absorbing more energy from the sun. Furthermore, the water released lubricates the glaciers' movements, causing the process to accelerate.

* Clearing of rain forests lowers the amount of rainfall downwind from them, whether it's done on purpose or by natural fires that result from drying out. As the vegetation burns and exposes the soil to sunlight, large amounts of CO2 are released.

* As frozen bogs thaw in the extreme north, rotting tundra releases methane, a terribly effective greenhouse gas.

* CO2 dissolved in the oceans is removed by marine organisms that use it to build structural body parts. If the CO2 level rises too high, ocean water becomes too acidic for the organisms to live and this CO2-removal mechanism disappears.

* Clathrates are layers of methane lying in deep ocean trenches where the pressure and temperature are extreme enough to keep them frozen. If ocean temperatures rise enough to thaw some of the methane then inevitably it will enter the atmosphere. But it could be worse: there are layers of methane gas under the clathrates, kept unfrozen by warmth from the earth. If the ocean melts through spots in the clathrates, large amounts of methane will escape.

* Clouds are a subject of considerable uncertainty. As water evaporates we expect to see more white, fluffy clouds that reflect solar energy. That may be why the world hasn't warmed more than it has. But if the atmosphere gets hot enough we'll see fewer fluffy clouds and more high, thin clouds. They admit more solar energy and intercept energy that otherwise would escape.

* The ocean conveyor is a superlong ocean current; one of the things it does is carry heat from the tropics to the north Atlantic, warming the US coast before it swings over and does the same for northern Europe. As it moves north to the Arctic region it cools and drops down to return under the north-moving stream. What if Greenland's ice melts? If it happens fast enough, a real possibility, the fresh water would cause the saltier and heavier water of the current to short-circuit; it would drop down to the return stream prematurely. Northern Europe would see severely cold conditions. Meanwhile, the tropics would warm up because of losing the Arctic cooling.

The author makes the point that this issue is different from the issues we're used to. Usually, when you learn more about a concern you find that it's not as alarming as you thought before. With global warming, the more you learn the more there is to worry about.

Carbon Offsets

Do carbon offsets work? They can work, but won't necessarily. There are companies ready to take your money and grant expiation in return. No doubt some of them are honest, but it's up to you to check them out. There aren't any agencies that regulate them.

Another issue is, what kind of carbon-offset schemes work? Some offer tree planting, maybe in some exotic place. But planting trees won't work, because trees all die eventually and give back all the carbon they've absorbed. It only could work if land was set aside permanently for new forests and if somehow it could be guaranteed that the land would never be cleared. There's no way such a guarantee could be made. At the rate the world population is growing, all the arable land will be needed for growing biofuel, not to mention food. In fact, global warming is likely to reduce land productivity.

But a different scheme could work. Non-fossil energy costs more than fossil energy. That's why we use so much fossil fuel, especially coal. So you could pay your local utility to buy your share of electricity from non-fossil sources, with you paying the difference in cost voluntarily. If this plan were structured properly, nuclear would be one of the non-fossil sources. It never is, though. All or nearly all the energy will come from wind turbines.

If you do that much, why couldn't you pay extra to make up for other CO2 emissions?

Here's some CO2 emission rates you can get from the US EPA's website.

For each KWH of electricity, you generate 1.37 lbs of CO2.
For each gallon of gasoline, you generate 20.4 lbs of CO2.
For each gallon of diesel fuel or heating fuel, you generate 22.3 lbs of CO2.
For each 1000 cubic feet of natural gas, you generate 120.6 lbs of CO2.

The EPA doesn't give this figure, but for commercial air travel, figure 50 passenger miles per gallon, or 1000 / 50 * 20.4 = 408 lbs of CO2 per 1000 passenger miles.

Now you can calculate your footprint in pounds of CO2 per year. If your utility has a green-energy program, ask what the premium per KWH is for green energy. At my utility, the rate is 1.25 cents, so the cost of becoming carbon neutral is 1.25/1.37 = 0.91 cents/pound.

Example:

Electricity	5000 KWH	6850 lbs
Gasoline	1000 gallons	20,400 lbs
	TOTAL	27,250 lbs

Cost of offset = 27,250 * 0.91/100 = $248/year, or $21/month.

So if our example consumer donated $21/month to the green energy program, he'd be carbon neutral, just like former US VP Gore. If your utility doesn't offer such a program, find one of those companies you have confidence in and donate it there. Just don't pay to plant trees.

Now that you're guilt free, let's discuss this sensibly. The only reason carbon offsets work is that we generate electricity in the most stupid way possible. As we move toward non-fossil energy sources, this system will break down. If all the electricity came from nuclear power plants and windfarms, there'd be no way to offset motor and aviation fuels. That means the world has to shift toward hydrogen, battery-powered cars, and electrified rail transit.