We're going to need big carbon straws by 2030

That's the consensus of the latest part of an updated climate change report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It says, per the link, that, if we don't do more to limit carbon emissions by 2030, that the only way to stop major global warming is going to be by sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

And of course, as the story notes, no such technology exists today, and it likely won't in 2030.

Plus, as the story doesn't note, such technology itself would be a major carbon producer. Can you imagine the energy involved?

And, for some conservatives and moderates who accept that some degree of change is happening, but that we can adapt? Er, this:

Even as the early effects of climate change are starting to be felt around the world, the panel concluded that efforts are lagging not only in reducing emissions, but in adapting to the climatic changes that have become inevitable.

That, too, will cost money and willpower.

On the containment, not the mitigation, here's the bottom, bottom line:

As scientists can best figure, the target requires that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, stay below 500 parts per million. The level recently surpassed 400, and at present growth rates will surpass 500 within a few decades.

Actually, even at current rates of change, we'll be at at least 450 ppm by 2030. 

And, per the top of the story, here's what that will mean in detail:

If emissions do overshoot the target, the report found, future generations would likely have to develop ways to pull greenhouse gases out of the air. It is fairly clear this will be technically possible. It could be achieved, for instance, by growing bioenergy crops that take up carbon dioxide, burning the resulting fuel, and then injecting the emissions into underground formations. But the large-scale use of land to grow energy crops would compete with food production, already under strain as a consequence of the planetary warming.

Machinery might be developed that could directly extract greenhouse gases from the air; in fact, early work on such systems has begun. But experts have said the costs, safety and practicality of such techniques cannot be foreseen today. They believe it would be much cheaper to find ways to avoid putting the gases into the air in the first place.

And, even growing bioenergy crops is optimistic. Where?

And, this is already going to be problematic. I've blogged earlier about the fading future of the Colorado River. The Southwest, and even more the Pacific Coast, continue to face drought, a drought that may be exacerbated by jet stream changes in turn affected by climate change.

Shareholder resolutions to cut carbon sound fine, but they're worth little more than the paper upon which they're written. And, they may end up being as much  of "carbon indulgences" as planting trees for carbon offsets has become.

The only realistic answer starts with a carbon tax domestically combined with carbon tariffs on imports, to keep American businesses from further "cheating" by exporting carbon dioxide generation.

And, given that West Texas is expected to get drier, as well as hotter, with climate change, and a lot of central and eastern Texas depend on it, via downstream river flows, for a lot of water?

Texas climate change denialists should remember the old Fram commercial: You can pay me a little bit now or a whole lot later. 

More proof here: Flow into the Texas Colorado River's Highland Lakes was the second-lowest on record last year.

Joe Nocera gets teh stupids for Summit Power

I swear, every time Joe Nocera writes about climate change issues, he gets stupider:. And yes, he's probably topped his Keystone XL howlers with this paean to Summit Power and its proposed carbon capture coal-fired power plant near Odessa.

He gets two things wrong: Laura Miller and the "greenness" of the plant.

On Laura Miller, anybody who lived in Dallas for any length of time around the start of this century knows that the Laura Miller Nocera idolizes died, oh, about the time she decided to leave the Dallas Observer and run for mayor of Dallas. By the time her mayoral tenure ended, she had become a caricature of the politicians at Dallas City Hall she used to skewer.

On Summit, if it really were that green, since China is building so many plants from the ground up, don't you think it would? (I have lived in Odessa as well as the Metroplex, therefore I know well both hales of Nocera's wrongness.)

Or, if it's actually relatively energy efficient, ditto on China, since as JoePa says, it's worried about growth above all else.

So, either it's not that green, or carbon capture on coal sucks up a fair bit of energy.

That dichotomy doesn't exclude that a carbon-capture plant, at least with coal, actually could have problems on both sides of the street.

And, for those who know the reality of Summit, such appears to be the case.

But because Tricky Ricky Perry and others are in love with coal, still ... including Texas' dirty lignite, Summit, unlike the AEP-proposed plant in Illinois, will probably stick it to somebody somewhere on pricing.

Finally, while CO2 can indeed enhance oil recovery, we still have little guarantee about how long it will stay in the ground.

I mean, Joe Nocera knows not one fucking thing about the reality of this issue. Not one fucking thing.

Carbon storage: Overrated, unlikely

And, that not some environmentalist challenging ExxonMobil, Massey Coal, etc., in touting the worth of carbon capture and storage. It's renowned oilfield economist Michael Economides.

What's the problem? Pressure build-up with storage attempts:
"It is like putting a bicycle pump up against a wall. It would be hard to inject CO2 into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones and possibly escape to the surface," Economides said.
ExxonMobil and Massey, via the American Petroleum Institute, are already trying to shoot down Economides' paper, and he's already fired back.

Kool and the Gang now Coal and the Gang

How sad is it for these aging soulsters to be doing sellout songs for Big Coal? Oh, probably no sadder than Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to be doing sellout pandering for Big Coal.


Oh, and doesn’t the Big Coal billboard look like one of those sex machines or a dildo or something? “Big Coal = Screwing Pennsylvania’s Air.” The clouds are courtesy Salon, as the web caption notes. Why?

Two images you also will never see in a pro-coal commercial are pictures of coal plants or smokestacks. If imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, then the coal industry is positively in love with the environmental movement. Blue skies with fluffy white clouds and greenery abound in pro-coal commercials.

Meanwhile, the budget for Big Coal’s leading greenwash PR group has gone from $8 mil to $45 mil in just three years.

As for cost? Besides the Greenpiece analysis that I blogged about earlier today, the New York Times says some people compare the clean-coal effort to the expense and difficulty of the Apollo project.

Oh, and the pandering bottom line? Unlike James Hanson (remember, politicians trot out scientists only when they agree with them), neither Clinton nor Obama will commit to a moratorium on coal-fired power plants.

Carbon-capture coal or climate-crashing cheat?

Via DeSmog Blog, here’s the lowdown from Greenpeace on the eco-failure carbon capture could well be.

Here’s the summary:

CCS cannot deliver in time to avoid dangerous climate change.
The earliest possibility for deployment of CCS at utility scale is not expected before 2030. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not expect CCS to be commercially viable until at least 2050.

CCS wastes energy
The technology uses between 10-40 percent of the energy produced by a power station. Wide-scale adoption of CCS is expected to erase the efficiency gains of the last 50 years and increase energy consumption by one-third.

CCS is expensive
It could lead to the doubling of plant costs.

“Capture Ready” coal plants are greenwash
CCS is being used as an excuse by power companies and utilities to push ahead with plans to build new coal-fired power plants branding them as “capture ready.” Promises to retrofit are unlikely to be kept. Retrofits are very expensive and can carry such high efficiency losses that the plants become uneconomical.
Storing carbon underground can have unintended consequences
The world has no experience in the long term storage of anything, let alone CO2. In Cameroon, a sudden release of trapped, naturally generated CO2 from the bottom of Lake Nyos killed 1,700 people by suffocation in 1986.

You know the financial side is bad when, despite the opportunity for all the greenwash, electric companies still won’t actually touch carbon-capture coal-fired power plants.

Environmental news roundup – corn killing Gulf, Canada banning dirty coal

More ethanol fuel could increase Gulf of Mexico dead zone

The “why” is simple. More corn means more fertilizer washing down the Mississippi, increasing a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Simon Donner says that would spell “environmental disaster” for the Gulf.

Donner, a geographer at the University of British Columbia in western Canada, and Chris Kucharik of the University of Wisconsin used computer models to conclude that growing enough corn to meet US biofuel goals set for 2022 would cause a boost of 10 to 34 percent in nitrogen pollution in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers, which run into the Gulf of Mexico. …

The authors predict the only way nitrate pollution could be controlled and ethanol targets met would be if American farmers stop raising meat animals on corn and dramatically change agricultural management techniques.

Well, ANY president leading the charge on that is about as real as any president leading the charge on global warming.

Canada plans carbon capture and dirty coal ban

Looks like Ottawa is ahead of us. Both plans go into effect in 2012. But the plan has loopholes:

For example, while oil companies will be required to cap carbon emission per barrel of oil, the number of barrels of oil produced will not be limited, leading to a spike in overall CO2 emissions, if production continues to rise, (enivironmentalists) say.

That is a loophole, indeed, especially depending on how much of the process on oil sands gets included in the cap.

World of science roundup

A shirt that can generate electricity

Georgia Tech engineers claim to have invented a microfiber shirt that can generate electricity. Yes, but how much is a shirt with gold microfiber threads going to cost?

Bat evolution: Flight first, then ecolocation

The fossil of a 52-million-year-old bat answer the debate conclusively on this chicken-or-egg question. The fossil shows none of the echolocation-specific features of modern bat skeletons.

Titan has more energy than Earth fossil fuels

That’s what the latest analysis of Saturn’s largest moon says. Cool to a science junkie, perhaps, but also pretty much a no-brainer finding. And, as the story points out, totally irrelevant to Peak Oil here on Tellus Mater.

Fuel from air?

That’s what our nation’s top science think tank, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, claims. LANL scientists claim they can harvest CO2 and water vapor for raw materials from the air.


Oh, there’s a catch or two. One, it would take massive amounts of electricity. Two, in a no-duh thought, LANL proposes to use nuclear power for this. (Columbia University scientists claim to have a similar plan, but using solar/thermal power for the juice.) Also, there’s a question about, LANL claims to the contrary, just how well this can be scaled up.

For more on the current nonlikelihood of capturing CO2 from coal-fired power plants, etc., That’s what our nation’s top science think tank, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, see here.

One more: three major banks to tighten financing on coal fired power plants:

Three top lenders, believing the government will impose greenhouse-gas emissions caps in the future, want utilities seeking financing for coal-fired plants to ensure they’ll be viable with such caps:

Citigroup Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley say they have concluded that the U.S. government will cap greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants sometime in the next few years. The banks will require utilities seeking financing for plants before then to prove the plants will be economically viable even under potentially stringent federal caps on carbon dioxide, the main man-made greenhouse gas.

Question: Will presidential candidates, including would-be GOP nominee John McCain, who in the past has admitted near-cluelessness on economics issues, pay attention?

Remember, FutureGen carbon-sequestered coal-fired power plants are just as much “just around the corner’ as the hydrogen car or nuclear fusion power.

FutureGen hits PresentSnag — and, is it all hype in the end?

The experimental power plant for carbon-capture coal-fired electricity has been shelved:

With the budget of the so-called FutureGen project having nearly doubled, to $1.8 billion, and the government responsible for more than 70 percent of the eventual bill, the administration completely revamped the project.

The Energy Department said it would pay for the gas-capturing technology, but industry would have to build and pay for the commercial plants that use the technology. Plans for the experimental plant were scratched.

Top Energy Department officials said the change would save taxpayers money, generate more electricity and capture more than twice as much carbon dioxide.

But independent energy experts largely criticized the move, saying it would require two to four more years for new designs, plans and approvals, let alone budget tussles and eventual construction.

The idea is to capture carbon dioxide emitted by coal-fire power plants and then pump it deep into the earth to avoid further buildup of the gas in the atmosphere. But several experts said the plan still lacked the scope to test various gas-separation technologies, coal varieties, and — most important — whether varied geological conditions can permanently hold carbon dioxide.

I’m guessing that, in another five years, we’ll see FutureGen as the same global-warming stall bullshit out of Bush as the hydrogen car.