Following my recent post, a number of commenters suggested that I ought to respond more directly to the arguments of James Hansen and others for a CO2 target of 350 parts per million, as opposed to the 450 ppm that forms the basis of much current policy discussion. I’m using this paper as a basis, and take the following two points as its central claims
* To avoid unacceptable risk of passing a point of no return beyond which explosive feedbacks (icecaps melting etc) are inevitable, we should aim to reduce CO2 concentrations to 350 ppm by 2100. This is below current levels and won’t be achieved simply by ending net emissions
* We can achieve part of this (maybe a reduction of 60 ppm) through reforestation, biochar and similar measures
* Further reductions will require expensive technological solutions, estimated cost $200/tonne or $20 trillion to remove 50 ppm. Given a maximum point around 450 ppm and 50 ppm from reforestation, that’s about the amount required.
What then should we do? In particular, how much should we be willing to pay now, to avoid high costs in the second half of this century?
It’s important to note a big shift in focus here. Most of the discussion so far has been along the lines “What do we need to do by 2050 to avoid unacceptable damage to the climate later this century”. Looking ahead for a century is challenging, to put it mildly. But the questions raised by Hansen shift the time-scale for action out another 50 years, and the consequences are centuries into the future. That means there are huge uncertainties that are difficult to reason about. As a starting point, I’m going to follow Hansen and co-authors in treating the problem as if it were deterministic, with a known target of 350 ppm and costs as stated.
With these drastic simplifications, the problem is not all that hard, and can be made a bit simpler with the right choice of parameters. The question is, how much would we pay (in $/tonne) today (I’ll say 2010) and around 2050 (I’ll say 2045) to avoid a cost of $200/tonne in 2080 (all in constant value dollars). With a 2 per cent discount rate (I’ve argued at length that this is a good choice), the answer is given by the rule of 70: values double every 35 years. So, we ought to be willing to pay $50/tonne now and around $100/tonne in 2045.
I’ll come back to this a bit later and discuss less simplified estimates. The main point that would suggest a higher current price is a lower trajectory with the same endpoint implies less residence time for CO2 in the atmosphere and therefore less risk.
John Quiggin 
Don’t forget the ocean currently deals with a third of manknd’s carbon emissions and will contimue to reduce atmospheric carbon after we achieve zero net emissions.
Ocean acidificaton ensures we must achieve zero net rather than going partway and leaving the rest up to nature.
Depopulating really is the only answer and some clever person needs to do a study on the financial cost of that, per capita. There’s no credit being ahead of one’s time I know but all those who are twisting themselves into knots to avoid the ticking bomb of population growth are going to get smacked in the face with it before 2020.
It’s looking to me like methane will a very difficult problem to deal with. You can’t stop our meat animals emitting the stuff, along with nitrous oxide, and more people means more meat animals. Overfishing also means more meat animals. More warming means more methane releases. I believe we are in great peril from methane.
The French are apoplectic with a suggested CO2 price of around $A30 a tonne and they have the lowest emissions in Europe. In real terms $200 may be unattainable since the economy would need to be rich to afford it. But if we can’t find enough low carbon energy in that time then we won’t get rich. If adverse selection is bad luck but moral hazard is delusion then I think carbon sinks are the latter. Because a few trees grew strong and healthy in a high rainfall area we want to believe that will always happen. In the perfect world of carbon sinks there are no droughts, fires or dieback. With biochar I suspect there is substantial undercounting of the use of diesel and transferring carbon from different zones.
The blunt instrument I suggest is $20 a tonne no offsets like tree planting and use most of the money to build nuclear power stations. As each nuke is switched on demolish a decrepit coal fired power station. Now the ditherers will give a hundred reasons why that won’t work.
Thanks for that John, sorry to bug you on the other post.
From a policy perspective these numbers are tough to action over the short term. Once we finally achieve political will, the reality is likley that, to meet Hansen, we will obviously be relying on some pretty high $/tonne numbers.
@Salient Green
As a vegetarian I certainly support the idea of cutting down on the number of livestock being raised, but it is worth noting that it is possible to raise animals for meat without having a large environmental footprint. The Grass farmer movement has done some interesting stuff that makes ‘organic’ seem pretty dirty by comparison. If all the meat people ate came via this approach, I’d probably not be that bothered by it.
I do agree that stabilising and eventually reversing population growth is the longterm sustainable thing to do, but I doubt that this side of further economic development in the developing world that such goals are attainable. We must strive to achieve and exceed the Millennium Development Goals, empowering women in the developing world. Only then will we see birthrates start to fall dramatically.
I do agree with Hermit on nuclear power, but I can’t see that $20 is going to go close to cutting it. You’re going to need at least $100 per tonne to put that on the agenda, and as this is the figure widel;y touted as the threshhold for viable CC&S it seems to me that it is the starting point.
Those interested might look at Professor Mackay’s e-book for some ewxcellent data on calculating energy demand. Five energy plans for Britain looks at this in a UK context but there’s a wealth of data and forulae in the book so the whole site is worth a look. Apparently Milliband has just taken him on to work on these matters.
A global $50/tonne +2%/year CO2 price is a better outcome than is likely from Copenhagen. A complicating issue is the carbon cycle. Some of the CO2 emitted now will be absorbed by the ocean and biomass, but feedbacks from the artic permafrost melting or the amazon going up in flames could lead to more CO2 entering the atmosphere.
Uncertainties in the carbon cycle, costs of carbon capture technologies, climate sensitivity and so on is of course also a big issue.
It seems to be politically harder to get a high initial CO2 price than a high future price. The price floor in the Waxman-Markey bill has a lower initial value (US$10), but a higher discount rate (5%).
@Fran Barlow
500 Mt x $20/t = $10 billion. The Chinese will build up to a hundred of their variant of the Westinghouse AP 1000 at less than half that cost and supposedly in less than three years for each plant. See http://nuclearaustralia.blogspot.com/ for how they will do it. Building enough widely spaced wind farms with extra connections could cost 2-3 times that to achieve similar reliability. Gas fired generators would be quicker and cheaper to build until we start paying world parity prices for gas. As a CO2 price to get rid of coal twenty is plenty.
@Fran Barlow
Fran
that raises an interesting point – eradicate female inequality in the labour force and you might just see the birthrate fall to a sustainable level as the benefits from working to women come to outweigh the benefits of providing labour to a male partner in exchange for his greater financial contribution to living costs. The female childraising contribution is a positive externality that has never been factored in by the market.
But then, firms want replacement labour dont they? I doubt this will fly..at all. But perhaps it should when the core issue is population growth.
@Alice
The relative claims of labour are only one aspect of the problem. The other is the ability of women to live independently of men, to hold their own property, to say no to marriage or to children or to extra children, to have a quality education, to be free of an excessive burden of child rearing.
Cutting birth rates is also a consequence of social security, since the old, in societies without it, and who cannot labour, need a family network to avoid living in penury. It’s also a consequence of decreases in morbidity, since one expects children to survive to become adults. Here in the west, it wasn’t until the late Victorian period, when prosperity began to increase, and major epidemic diseases began to be controlled that families started shrinking and the culture started treating both women and children as the focus of community concern. Much of the theorising on the nature of childhood and the obligations of adults towards children dates from this period.
@Hermit
Oh I’m not considering how much money is needed to fund nuclear plants — and frankly even putting aside the fact that neither party would contemplate a proposal for nuclear energy — $10 billion would be unlikely to get you three decent sized nuclear plants in practice, especially when you consider the legal bunfight that would arise.
No, I’m looking for a cost on carbon dioxide emission that
a) corresponds to the value to the commons of avoiding carbon emissions and the associated risks
b) drives changes in spending and investment in the direction of a low carbon economy
c) can fund remedial measures, adaptation, restitution, complicance, R&D etc
d) demonstrates that CC&S can never work before we waste more money on it
e) could be advocated with a degree of political plausibility
$20 per tonne is not even close to that figure. Most people wouldn’t notice it in their electricity bills or in petrol. Cambridge Physicist David Mackay presents this table. As you can see, it’s not until $900 per tonne that carbon charges really affect driving, $500 is described as ‘some impact on European lifestyle’ and $370 is the ECI community cost of emissions and affects air travel.
Here in Australia, I think we could legitimately ask for $100 on the basis that we are funding a technology (CC&S) which wouldn’t be viable for less than that.
Fran Barlow, do you really believe that governments around the world throw $20 billion down the drain if they thought CCS was not feasible.
Why not? The US government through $US10billion each month and a mountain of bodies of US servicemen down the drain when they went into Iraq, essentially, as far as I can see, to ensure they won the next election. They are still doing it in Afghanistan. The world spends about $US33billion each year in perfumes and cosmetics and they aren;t ‘feasible’ either.
Renewables — bugger all … Keeping the filth merchants and their hostages happy — priceless
Nice to see the beginning of some target-350 economics.
I am especially interested in gaining some understanding of how different projections for the cost of carbon dioxide removal affect – or don’t affect – prescriptions for the near future. If you suppose that the drawdown of CO2 becomes effectively free in 2090, does that change things? How about 2030? Is there much difference to the short-term presciptive consequences, in assuming that air capture becomes free in 2030, 2050, 2070, 2090, never? Etc.
Fran Barlow, I also would like see more to be spent on renewables but we must face reality and if everything goes to plan by 2050 CCS technologies will reduce global CO2 emissions by one third.
Something that Jim Hansen doesn’t consider – and nor do policymakers or economists – is that of rapid extinction of marine life, some of which is essential to humans. The specific mechanism is a change in oceanic conditions from one that has a well oxygenated structure, to one that has little or no oxygen at depth. Such a change can be very quickly inflicted by a cessation of the ocean conveyor currents. These currents carry oxygenated water from the polar regions, down through the depths and on to the equatorial waters.
The switching off may occur when the temperature difference between the polar regions and the lower latitude regions becomes small enough, which seems to have been the trigger for the development of Canfield oceans at the P-T extinction, and also for a series of Canfield ocean occurrences during the T-J mass extinction.
A Canfield ocean is one that is anoxic and has an abundance of sulfur-consuming bacteria, that belch hydrogen sulfide, and unfortunately inhibit the fixing of nitrogen. According to Peter Ward [pg 126, “Under a Green Sky”, Peter Ward, Smithonian Books, 2007] biomarkers – chemicals produced by specific microbes – are quite detectable in geologic structures.
While this eventuality may seem fanciful, the last four or five years have seen a strengthening of evidence that such large scale oceanic changes have occurred in the past, and that either a shift in location of the conveyor currents, or a cessation, can trigger the change. Unfortunately paleoclimate data doesn’t provide much information on the decadal changes of interest to the current crop of humans.
As a hypothetical, let us assume that we have some half decent idea as to how likely anoxic and Canfield ocean formation is, given the rate of temperature change and whatever else we need to know. How would an economist convert this information into costs, in order to put a price on carbon? [Pr Q, my question is a serious one, I really would like to know how this is done]
Mosh, I too believe governments would throw $20b down the drain to milk a few more trillions out of coal. Co2 is produced at roughly twice the mass of the coal burnt. There is simply no room for it, or at least an effective fraction.
Fran, we do need to eat less meat. I recently saw a disturbing little clip showing male chicks in a hatchery being ground up alive, and other cruelties. Farmed fish are a cocktail of chemicals. People need to know how their meat is produced, in all it’s gory and distasteful detail, so that they can make an informed choice. That would certainly cut meat consumption!
Empowerment of women in the developing world generally goes hand in hand with economic development but if that development is done without regard to sustainability and a low carbon society, then you are replacing one problem with another. I’m not saying we should not continue to strive for the MDG’s, just that they should be done properly. If they are to be done properly, we in the developing world need to set the example. In terms of population growth, GHG emissions and overconsumption, we are the example of what NOT to do.
Donald, I did not know that. As if the ocean didn’t have enough problems already with overfishing, dead zones, trash gyres and acidification, to name the main ones.
Salient Green, the EU has a good track record when it comes to going green and they would not be contributing some $11 Billion into CCS R & D unless there was a good reason.
@Salient Green re:women
I certainly didn’t imply that we should look the other way on sustainable development. Rather, what we must do is find ways in which the developing world can skip our mistakes and do the right things with our support
One attractive option is the Hyperion Small Module. At $US25 million and 25MWe it has enough power to supply about 5000 people energy at the daily rate of consumption of Europeans without implying the building of a large grid. Some modest community in Africa or Bangladesh or Latin America could suddenly have all the electricity they needed to run their cars, pump and clean water and light, heat and cool their homes at an installed cost less than coal and without a fuel bill. And all secure and hands off operation, like a battery.
What’s not to like about that?
@Michael of Summer Hill
One third is not enough and it will be at a cost that is unacceptable and generate a waste problem that makes a mockery of nuclear waste.
Do you have any idea of the colume of CO2 that would have to be stored forever to meet even the 1/3 reduction?
oops
We can’t continue to ignore nuclear energy. It is the elephant in the room for these sorts of discussions. Consider this:-
1. An Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) produces about 100 times more energy compared to a conventional Light Water Reactor. The fuel to power the energy needs of your entire life would be about the size of a golf ball.
2. If fueled using nuclear waste an IFR reduces the worlds stockpile of nuclear waste. Both quantitatively and qualitatively.
3. Using IFRs the worlds current stock pile of nuclear waste could provide all our current energy needs for a period of 700 years with no requirment to mine additional uranium or fossil fuels.
4. Processing the worlds nuclear waste via an IFR is cheaper than the current and proposed storage options.
5. In nuclear accident terms IFR reactors are fail safe. If control is lost they shut down rather than melt down. Not through applied controls but throught natural physices. You could fly a plane into an IFR reactor or cut off the cooling system and it will not go into melt down. It can’t.
6. We have over 300 operating years of experience with large scale IFR equivalent reactors. They are proven technology.
7. Nuclear power can easily be cost competitive with fossil fuels. In fact it is generally cheaper.
8. If built in tandem with desalination plants the heat generating capacity of an IFR can be switched to creating cheap fresh water production whenever there is any slack in electricity demand. In fact this has been done in a large scale nuclear plant in the past.
9. An IFR is quick to build.
10. All that stands in the way of scaling up such a solution is politics. Otherwise there are no technical or commercial barriers.
11. Even if we only removed (or reformed) the red tape in nations that currently have some form of nuclear power anyway, this would still allow us to elliminate most of the worlds energy related CO2 emissions via this single technology.
Fran Barlow, I’m sure the scientists are well aware of the dangers of leakage associated with transportation and/or storage.
@Michael of Summer Hill
As are we … and we don’t like the odds or the results or the cost. CC&S doesn’t tick any box strongly enough for rational people to be interested in it.
p.s. James Hansen is an IFR advocate.
Fran Barlow, unless a petition opting for a stronger CO2 target of 350 parts per million is tabled in Parliament before Copenhagen we are left with the CPRS.
TerjeP, Thanks for that on the IFR. Even after the AGW Mistake becomes more apparent, humanity will still be confronted with the fact of a finite supply of fossil energy. IFRs are a practical replacement and, as you say and as I, a licensed engineer who has many years experience in the nuclear power field agree, no new technology is needed. The estimate of 700 years using stored waste sounds about right. IFRs could meet all of humanity’s energy needs for millions of years using known deposits of uranium.
IFR generated electricity could provide light, heat and mechanical power for homes and commercial customers plus 80% of personal transportation energy by using plug-in hybrids. The energy could also be used to synthesize liquid fuel for the other 20% of personal transportation. The choice between synthetic liquid fuel and algae produced bio-fuel is an economic one.
Since 2000, atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by an amount equal to 18.8% of the increase from 1800 to 2000. According to the average of the five reporting agencies, the trend of average global temperatures since 1998 shows no increase and from 2002 through 2008 the trend shows a DECREASE of 1.8°C/century. This SEPARATION (there have been many others) corroborates the lack of connection between atmospheric carbon dioxide increase and average global temperature. As the atmospheric carbon dioxide level continues to increase and the average global temperature doesn’t it is becoming more and more apparent that many climate scientists have made an egregious mistake and a whole lot of people have been misled.
As shown in the pdfs at http://climaterealists.com/index.php?tid=145&linkbox=true there is no significant positive feedback from increased average global temperature (Also shown is a rational explanation of the planet temperature run-up of the twentieth century). An understanding of how a feedback loop works may be required to recognize this when examining the paleo temperature data. Climate Scientists apparently do not really understand how feedback loops work (I learned about them in post-graduate engineering) or they would recognize from the temperature trend reversals in the paleo temperature data that added atmospheric carbon dioxide has no significant influence on average global temperature. With no feedback, the GCMs show only a nuisance value of 1.2 degrees C warming from doubling CO2 level. Other assessments show half this or even less. Without net positive feedback, AGW is not significant, and without AGW human activity has no significant effect on climate change. Any change caused by CO2 doubling would be very small and lost in the variability of natural climate change.
“People need to know how their meat is produced, in all it’s gory and distasteful detail, so that they can make an informed choice. That would certainly cut meat consumption!”
.
No it wouldn’t. It would simply lead to worse alternatives like “organic” farming that take far more space and resources.
Dan Pangburn, scientists do know what is going on and industrialisation is the main culprit when it comes to global warming over the last two centuries. Scientists do know global temperatures will increase as melting permafrost in arctic regions and underground methane escape into the atmosphere. And as for nuclear power in Australia keep on dreaming.
conrad #27 Organic farming is the best alternative, not ‘worse’. It’s sustainable. What is the point of continued population growth if the only way to feed it is by farming methods which pollute the ecosystem, rob resources from the future and puts toxins in the food it produces. And sometimes involve cruelty to animals. Check this vid out and tell me if a bit of reality would not cut meat consumption.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/hatchery-horrors-mercy-for-animals.php
Not looking at anyone in particular, but, it must getting harder to be an AGW skeptic these days. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/arctic-warmest-temperature-2000-years.php
Oh these people that continue to push nuclear as if it is the only solution really really worry me….it will just replace big coal with big uranium and other future unforseen uncosted external problems by emlarging the market for uranium and its profit value. To even imagine we can control this stuff (the radioactive inputs) indefinitely into the future when its life is dangerous to us and thousands of times greater than ours is just absurd. We can do much better than tha and we need better inventions than nuclear power stations and maybe we need to reassess exactly how much power we really need. So much is wasteful already.
@Dan Pangburn
Dan Pangburn
Go take a look at sites such as realclimate.org or tamino.wordpress.com or a range of others, not climate denialist sites such as climaterealists. The claims you make are just plain wrong, the same ‘it hasn’t warmed since 1998, CO2 doesn’t have any real impact’ crocks that have been around the Denialosphere for some time. If you are simply mis-informed on this, please go and do a lot more reading and be very careful what sources you use. If your comments are not mis-information but the usual Denialist rubbish, please go away! Our world and our societies are in grave peril and we can’t afford any more of this rubbish. Unless you would care to disclose who you are funded by.
@Peter Wood
A price that starts low and increases rapidly is only marginally suboptimal, provided there’s a clear path to something like $100/tonne by 2050. That’s because investments are (or should be forward looking) so a low initial carbon price shouldn’t lead (for example) to investment in new coal plants that will face much higher prices in future. The risk is that bad investments, even those made post-Copenhagen, will get grandfathered in.
@Dan Pangburn
Advocates of nuclear energy would be more convincing if they didn’t routinely reveal themselves as anti-science delusionists. If you don’t believe mainstream science, why should we listen to anything you have to say about nuclear technology? You might as well advocate cars powered by fairy dust.
Dan,
The big problem with getting a good, basic understanding of the climate science – as distinct from the available policy directions for dealing with the issues exposed by climate science – is that there is an insistent clammer of vested interests trying to drown out any reasonable discussions around the science. A secondary problem is that corporate media journalism too often focus on the latest “breakthrough” or “discovery” but fail to place it into context; the net result is a sensationalist depiction of said discovery and that is just confusing to the lay person. I don’t wish to sound patronising, so in this context by layperson I pretty much mean anyone who hasn’t worked as a climate scientist…which is most of us.
I’ve done a lot of reading of the original scientific literature and scientific texts, and I’m still way off being across it all. There are numerous excellent books for the genuinely intellectually curious layperson. Just avoid books written by people who haven’t done their time in the field, at least at first.
Anyway, here is my current list of recommended reading for the interested layperson:
Spencer Weart, “The Discovery of Global Warming”: available as paperback, or as a web-book (free) from Spencer’s website. This book is fairly short and to the point, which makes it great for an initial understanding of the concepts behind the theory of global warming, and how scientists eventually reached large-scale agreement on that theory (in spite of what you may read elsewhere). In my opinion Spencer tries a bit too hard to be apolitical, to the extent that he over-emphasises grant money as a motive for research scientists. That’s my only gripe.
Mark Bowen, “Thin Ice”: great book. This is an account of the fieldwork by scientist Lonnie Thompson and his team, which takes them to many of the mountaintop glaciers in the tropics. The great thing about this book is that it slowly dawns on the reader (at least me) just how difficult and dangerous this research is. People die doing this! Whenever someone says something like “the scientists just do it for the grant money”, think back to this book and the fatalities. [One mistake I picked up: Bowen claims at one point that carbon dioxide increases seem to precede temperature increases in the ice core data; in fact, in most cases the carbon dioxide lags the temperature increase, or happens in sync (to the accuracy of the measurement techniques). Bowen did write the book prior to the scientific publications pointing this out, so I don’t think Bowen was trying to mislead anyone.]
Peter Ward, “Under a Green Sky”: another great book. The writer’s style can be a little annoying (at least it bugged me), but the story itself is in my opinion excellent. To do it justice requires a little familiarity with palaeontology terminology, which may be picked up from a children’s book on dinosaurs if desperate. Peter Ward is a palaeontologist, and this work takes him to various remote locations around the world, as well as to more familiar places in the US (if you are an American). Ward’s fieldwork has also had its share of injuries and a fatality (deepwater dive). Peter Ward gives a compelling hypothesis as to how several of the mass extinctions of the past came about, and he provides the evidence to support his hypothesis.
Then there are:
William Burroughs, “Climate Change in Prehistory”. You have probably heard of Ian Plimer’s book. I own both it and Burroughs’ book. Burroughs gives a fairly reasonable account of natural climate changes in humanity’s past; Plimer does not. If you feel driven to read Plimer’s book, don’t do it until you’ve read Burroughs’ book first.
John Imbrie and Katherine Palmer Imbrie, “Ice Ages: solving the mystery”. This is also a great book. It sticks largely to the history of scientific endeavour to unravel the mechanisms behind the ice ages. It covers geologic evidence, astronomical factors, and climate science as it evolved into the multidisciplinary field of today. Along the way a timeline of discoveries and their historical significance is built up, which makes it an excellent first read for the layperson.
Jeremy Leggett, “Half-gone”: it looks at the combination of oil production peaking, continued demand growth for fossil fuels, climate change, and population growth. JL outlines some of the options for addressing global warming, and makes the case that many of these actions must be taken anyway, in order to deal with the eventual drop in oil production. JL is an interesting character who has worked with many of the who’s who of big-oil, was involved from day one with the IPCC, and now runs his own solar energy company. His training is as a petroleum geologist and he has done the time in the big fields.
Jeremy Leggett, “The Carbon War”: this looks directly at the politics surrounding global warming, and provides some context on major political players, whose names you’ll run into on the web-sites and other media. This precedes JL’s “Half-gone” and in my opinion is the best of the two books.
Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe, “Climate Change: picturing the science”. Pretty much as the title says, this is a book of fantastic colour photographs, interspersed with essays by climate scientists.
All of these books are accessible to a layperson, and taken together they provide a fairly complete picture of climate science, and to a lesser extent, of anthropogenic global warming in particular. There are plenty more good books but these are my personal favourites among the non-technical books. If you aren’t convinced by this that anthropogenic global warming is a real and present danger, then fair enough.
Hermit, I mostly agree with your comments except regarding gas; a commitment to gas would leave us saddled with gas plants (which are still heavy CO2 producers) at the point when reductions greater than gas can deliver are required.
Michael of S.H., I’ve commented before on why I believe CC&S can’t be considered a serious proposal; more than 3 times as much CO2 as coal burned, it’s a gas that’s bulkier, more difficult and expensive to handle than coal and the technologies that would be needed like deep drilling and high pressure, high volume pumping would give better value used developing geothermal and compressed air energy storage. I have no problem believing our government would waste the bulk of clean energy R&D on something destined to fail, given we have a government that actively promotes huge expansion of the export of Australian fossil fuels and is developing an ETS that protects the industries it should be designed to force to clean up or go out of business; CCS is about the perception that reliance on fossil fuels can continue to expand without serious consequences, i.e. it’s an attempt to protect the fossil fuel industries, not protect our future climate. It’s clear evidence to me of failure to comprehend the seriousness of climate change or it’s urgency.
@Ken
I agree with you Ken, that CCS funding is largely about managing the public rather than about managing the problem. I don’t mind if CCS is investigated by someone somewhere – but surely funding for alternative energy research and development should greatly exceed CCS funding. Unfortunately both Howard and Rudd have chosen to support CCS far beyond its likely prospects of success, and both Howard and Rudd have stuffed the alternative energy sector around, much more so than the fossil fuel industry has been. Politicians!
Ken, if CCS technologies reduce global CO2 by one third by 2050 then that is one third of the problem solved even though I prefer a stronger CO2 target of 350 parts per million.
A compelling part of the Hansen et al argument is that there is evidence things are currently deteriorating. The evidence is ambiguous but the global pattern of droughts and loss of sea ice does give some rise for concern. Given inertia in the system and the long-lives of many GGEs in the atmosphere things might then get worse even given drastic future cutbacks.
On the $200/t cutback figure and the implied current figure of $50/t – the US in their Waxman/Markey bill see plenty of options for international natural carbon sequestration using forestry at $10/t which looks like a bargain!
@jquiggin
With respect, you miss the point John. The climate change delusionists aren’t really advocates of nuclear power. They merely advocate it on the basis that they think they can wedge those favouring climate mitigation. It’s also the case that without resort to nuclear power, either the social or economic costs (or both) of mitigation rise, so adovcating nuclear power in ways that poison the well serves their agenda, which is to protect pollution-as-usual.
Ken, according to the latest reports the costs of carbon capture and storage might come down to as low as AUD$37-45 per tonne of abated carbon emissions by 2020. It just might become a feasible proposition.
It is interesting that those who argue for Nuclear energy ignore the link between the power and the arms industry. It is unlikely that Iran for instance is interested in nuclear power rather than weapons, but the power is seen as OK by the world, whereas the weapons are not. Nuclear power plants are also a great target for anyone wishing to create havoc in a population; far more so than any renewable energy sources. The problem for renewable energy however is that these are technologies that are more available to people without big profits flowing to multinational corporations.
The problems are complex and do need population measures to limit future energy demands. China has shown leadership in this regard but has not had any kind of recognition of its social experimentation. There is a big unknown as to what impact on policy all of those young men without partners or families will have.
This thread however has brought home that there is plenty we don’t know about the oceans, animal impact and the need for sustainable economic development leading women away from being seen mainly as breeders of many children.
The big polluters will need to be dragged kicking and screaming to any price point and it will be a major achievement to get $50/tonne. To get to this point the taxpayer will no doubt have to pay a great deal more in subsidies to the big polluters. Has anyone done this sum?
@Fran Barlow
It’s actually quite complex, Fran. The majority of the delusionists derive this position from previously held anti-environmentalism, so (if old enough) they were pro-nuclear before they were climate delusionist. But, of course, they are trying, not very successfully, to do a wedge on this.
The problem for the wedge is that it goes the wrong way. Given the economic failure of nuclear power, any nuclear supporter needs to advocate a high carbon price, but a supporter of high carbon prices can reasonably judge that nuclear power should be a long way down the dispatch order of merit, and can in any case simply say “Let’s have the high carbon price and see if nuclear looks more attractive than conservation or alternatives when all costs are taken into account”.
I started researching this stuff a few years ago because there was so much conflicting info that I couldn’t determine the truth. At first, I thought that added atmospheric CO2 must be bad because, after all, it does absorb IR at a certain wavelength that is strong in earth’s emitting spectrum and one that is not already saturated by water vapor. Then I made my own plot of the Vostok data and noticed the lag of CO2 change to temperature change which I pointed out in http://www.middlebury.net/op-ed/pangburn.html . (I have discovered a few refinements to this since March of 2008. These refinements include that only the temperature needs to be considered to show that there is no significant net positive feedback from temperature and that for zero feedback IPCC gives a prediction for temperature rise of 1.2 C for doubling CO2.). Later I discovered the particular area of relevant science that Climate Scientists apparently either are not aware of or don’t really understand that, with the paleo temperature data, shows that NET feedback is not significantly positive.
I am no longer a mere skeptic. After over two years and thousands of hours of research I am now CERTAIN that added atmospheric CO2 has no significant influence on global warming and therefore no significant influence on climate change. Having the ability to and doing your own research using credible data sources results in deeper technical understanding than does reading other’s opinions which may be politically or financially driven. I am not funded.
Although whether ice melts or water freezes gives no clue as to what causes the planet to warm or cool it may be interesting to see how Arctic ice area has actually changed over the years. A multi-year daily updated graph which was compiled from NSIDC data is shown at http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png .
The annual average global temperature anomalies and links to the five reporting agencies are given in one of my posts at http://www.celsias.com/article/global-deal-climate-changes-new-era/ . Another post there gives links to several others that also refute AGW but use rationale that is different from mine.
August had no sunspots. The sun has not been this quiet this long since 1913. Some of us know what that portends.
Dan Pangburn, now that you spent countless hours researching and evaluating data, has two hundred years of industrialisation been responsible for global warming and exacerbating the current permafrost to melt in arctic regions or is it fiction?
Tell me Dan Pangburn, are you the one that said there was ‘no radiation fatalities from nuclear plants in the US’?
Crickey John, look what I found Robert Peabody, 37, died after an accident at the United Nuclear Corp. fuel facility during July 1964 as a result of being exposed to 1,000 times the lethal does of radiation. Dan Pangburn must of missed this one.
The thing to remember is that we are not ‘on track’ for either greatly increased renewable energy or a policy driven reduction in fossil fuel burning. On another thread I suggested that wind and solar generation (the proven forms of renewables) need to increase five fold within a decade. That’s just not happening. Diesel and coking coal consumption are down a bit due to the GFC, not because of any deliberate government policy which is effectively absent. Whether wind and solar can physically displace coal burning to any great extent is discussed on other websites in mind numbing detail.
The Rudd government does not have the cojones to stand up to the big emitters and they are now just dancing on the spot. Whatever they say after Copenhagen will carry as little weight as the previous announcements. I think we should just keep it simple; demolish coal fired power stations and build nuclear power stations.
Bloody Nora John, did you know that the cost of cleaning up Hanford Engineer Works radioactive materials flushed into the Columbia River is estimated to be $48.5 billion.
@Jill Rush
Jill … let’s unpick your claims:
You say it’s unlikely that they are interested in civilian nuclear power, but you offer no reason for this inference. It’s quite probably the case that the ability to acquire the materiel to make weapons is a predisposing factor, as it probably was in the case of Thatcher taking this route in 1980 and the US in the 1960s when it switched from thorium to uranium to run its programs, but the reality is that iot would be far cheaper to create a small research reactor aimed, ostensibly, at creating medical isotopes (rather like Lucas Heights here) than a large power reactor. It’s worth noting of course that this was precisely the course taken by Israel when with French help it set up the 24 MW reactor at Dimona in the late 1950s. Israel is widely believed to have about 200 deliverable nuclear warheads but it has no nuclear power.
There are some broader questions that you don’t confront however.
1. No state under international law has the right to deny any other state the right to acquire such weapons systems as it deem neceesary for its own securtity. While there certainly are treaties covering chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and those in the ‘nuclear weapons club’ are of the opinion, predictably, that nobody else should join, any state can decide to ignore the demands of the NNPT if it is willing to cop the diplomatic consequences.
2. The possession, by small states, of nuclear weapons (or the mere belief by others that they possess them and might use them) may actually play a positive role in restraining armed conflict between states. It did so during the Cold War, and if the US had really believed that Iraq had WMD in March of 2003, it’s most unlikely they’d have escalated. The mere thought that the DPRK might have such a weapon has stayed the hand of the US in that region too.
3. Nuclear weapons are probably not the most useful weapon for delivering or threatening a major cost to an enemy. Devising and delivering biological weapons is almost certainly at least as effective, more easily covered and far cheaper than building nuclear weapons for any state determined to build a trump card weapon.
Now, that all said, I would far prefer that there were no nuclear weapons about in the hands of any state. The Integral Fast Reactor [IFR] and some other kinds of reactors can rapidly degrade weapons grade waste material while producing power.
The fact of the matter is that whether we like it or not, there are a large number of states who have already produced enough high grade waste to make all the nuclear weapons any state could ever want, and we do not in practice have any way fo restraining states from acquiuring the materiel. Whether Australia does or does not have a nuclear program will have no impact on whether any other state has one, and here in Australia, if we did have a nuclear power program, we wouldn’t be acquiring such weapons. We could in fact insist on having all waste from our shipped uranium returned to us, making a contribution to better stewardship of waste and underpinning lower carbon footprint power.
No they aren’t, because nuclear power plants are very well protected. If you wanted to run a mass casualty attack, a releasing something like sarin gas in a sports stadium is a far better option or taking down an airliner full of fuel.
1. Whether the profits from selling energy flow to multinational corporations or local ones makes not a scrap of difference. It’s unlikely in practice that any energy system — renewable, fossil, or nuclear, will ber owned by small businesses because the capital requirements will simply be too large. A large windfarm (more likely, a series of interconnected large windfarms, tidal facilites, geothermal stations and associated energy storage facilities, power lines and transformers) will not cost less than an equivalent nuclear power complex. Large companies are at least as likely to own these, if they are profitable, as nuclear power plants. It is of course possible for the state to own nuclear power plants and to licence operators to run them according to a set of performance standards.
The hard reality is that in practice renewables are most unlikely to be able to supply the energy at scale the world needs for people everywhere to have access to the basics of life — quality housing and shelter, clothing, clean water, food, transport and communication, medicine, education etc. The gap between what renewables can deliver at acceptable cost and the demand implicit in even 7 billion people (of which at least 3-4 are short on the above list) must be filled by something. It will be filled by coal, or something else, because the installed cost of delivering renewables to those 3-4 billion people exceeds the financial capacity and/or the political willingness of the wealthiest 3 billion to transfer. And if coal fills it, not only are we in serious trouble, but we are likely by 2100 to start running short even of that, and trhen we have the basis for a really serious resources war.
Salient Green: “Organic farming is the best alternative, not ‘worse’”
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As far as I’m concerned, anything with lower yields is worse, since it means that yet more land will be needed to meet demand. You might think that, for example, a chicken farm is bad, but I think having the same number of chickens on much more land is worse. Of course, you might also argue
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a) that people might care about the animals more if they knew what happened to them — but that seems unlikely to me. Most of the world is used to seeing chickens get their heads cut off etc. and it doesn’t bother them. It’s only Western countries where meat is all nicely packaged. The “this is what it looks like tactic” might work for a while, but people would soon habituate (all the PETA people have been using it for years, with no success). Do you think most people care when they see road kill ?
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b) that people might also eat less meat if farmers were forced to use organic farming and hence meat became more expensive — but I can’t see any government doing that, especially not those that count, like China. Indeed, I’m surprised how quickly the populace there has taken to meat (and dairy products), and the government there is not exactly going to try to stop the trend. You can also look at Europe as an example here too, where meat really is expensive due to import restrictions. One of the fun things you can do is go to the supermarket and look at the permanently-empty “New Zealand” lamb section (it’s half the price of the German stuff). Given this, it’s pretty clear to me that even people who already have a lot of meat in their diet often want to eat more, let alone those that don’t.
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Given these sorts of concerns, thinking of ways to make farms more efficient seems like a good idea to me. Just telling people or trying to shock them into eating less is going to be a failure.