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12 - Nuclear Energy
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- Beyond Smoke and Mirrors
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- 05 November 2014
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- 06 November 2014, pp 189-237
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter of the first edition was written before the meltdown of three of the six reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant in Japan. The failure was caused by the earthquake and tsunami that occurred on March 11, 2011. All safety systems survived the earthquake itself and worked as designed until the tsunami came over the seawall protecting the site 40 minutes later and drowned out all the emergency power systems which were located in the basements of the generator buildings. Since Japan is regarded as one of the most technically sophisticated countries of the world, there was concern that if this could happen in Japan, perhaps nuclear energy was too risky to use.
The Japanese Diet set up its own investigations committee which reported in the harshest language that the accident was entirely human-caused, caused by what we would call “regulatory capture” where the regulators come too close to the regulated and do not enforce the rules properly [35]. (This is the same situation which was the root cause of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in April of 2010.)
The resurgence of nuclear power mentioned at the beginning of this chapter in the first edition was briefly paused for rethinking after Fukushima. It is back on track in most of Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and in parts of South America. Of the reactors in the planning stage in the United States before Fukushima, four are under construction, and if they come in on time and on budget, more will be built. In Europe, only Germany and the Netherlands plan to phase out their nuclear power (the third phase-out for Germany; the first being after the Chernobyl disaster, the second being the phase-out of the first phase-out when they rescinded the law requiring the phase-out of nuclear, and the third being the current one).
4 - The Past as Proxy for the Future
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- Beyond Smoke and Mirrors
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- 06 November 2014, pp 45-55
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Summary
A Short Tour Through 4.5 Billion Years
The global warming debate is about what will happen in the next few hundred years. Our planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and over the planet’s lifetime changes in temperature, greenhouse gas concentration, and sea level have occurred that dwarf any of the changes being discussed now. Life is thought to have begun roughly 3.5 billion years ago, perhaps earlier, with bacteria-like organisms whose fossils have been found and dated. They lived in the oceans in a world with only traces of or perhaps even no oxygen in its atmosphere. It was about 2.5 billion years ago that the first algae capable of photosynthesis started putting oxygen into the atmosphere, but to a level of only about 1% compared with the 20% of today. All the creatures of the time were small. This earliest period is largely a mystery that is still being unraveled. Recent work indicates that it was only about 540 million years ago that the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere rose to anything like today’s values and larger plants and animals appeared.
From then to now saw the rise of many diversified life forms: the growth of giant plants and trees in the Carboniferous era 300 million years ago whose decay and burial gave us the supply of the fossil fuel we use today; a mass extinction about 250 million years ago whose cause is not understood; the rise and disappearance of the dinosaurs in another mass extinction about 65 million years ago, thought to have been caused by the collision of a giant meteor with the Earth. Life is old; we are young. Homo habilis, thought to be our African first ancestor, lived about 4 million years ago. Our particular subspecies, Homo sapiens, is only about 100 000 years old. Our civilization is a mere 10 000 years old, a time period so short as to be only the blink of a geological eye. Yet in that eye blink our numbers and economic activity have begun to have effects on a global scale. If we continue increasing emissions at the rate we are now, these effects will become of a size comparable to major geological effects.
List of Conversion Factors
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- 06 November 2014, pp xiv-xv
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6 - Taking up Arms Against this Sea of Troubles
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- 06 November 2014, pp 79-95
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Introduction
This chapter sets the stage for the energy part of the book, giving population expectations, emissions data, and predictions of where the world might be going in demand for energy in a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario. Details have changed since the first edition, but the larger picture looks about the same.
The chapter begins the discussion of how we can get out of the climate change trap that the world is in because of economic growth, population growth, and a lack of understanding of how our actions affect our environment. Though even the poorest are better off than they were a century ago, global warming will reverse the improvement in the lives of all, unless we do something about it. The source of the problem is the energy we use to power the world economy, and the agricultural practices we use to feed the world population. The problem is solvable, but the solution requires global action.
All of the major emitters of greenhouse gases have now agreed that the problem is real, but have not agreed on how to share the burden of cleaning things up. It will be hard to devise a system of action that allows the developing nations to continue to improve the welfare of their citizens while they also reduce emissions. The consequences are in the future while action has to begin in the present, and that creates difficult political problems for all nations because the costs are now, whereas the benefits will come later (I come to that in Part III).
I start here outlining the sources of the greenhouse gases that cause the problem, how the projections of future energy use that dominate emissions are made, and how we have to reduce emissions over time to stabilize the atmosphere at some new, not too dangerous level. The longer we wait to start, the harder it will be to solve the problem because the emissions will be larger and reductions will have to be larger, faster, and more expensive. The next chapter is about what the economists have to say about how fast to go in reducing emissions. After that, I move to the specifics about various forms of energy.
13 - Renewables
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- 06 November 2014, pp 238-271
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Summary
Introduction
Discussion of renewable sources of energy is where you will find the largest collection of half-truths and exaggerations. The Renewables covered in this chapter include wind-, solar-, geothermal-, hydro-, ocean-, and biomass-energy systems (biofuels are treated in the next chapter). According to the IEA’s Key World Energy Statistics for 2013 [15], the renewables make up about 13% of world total primary energy supply (TPES) as they did in 2008, but the only two that make a significant contribution to emission-free energy today are large-scale hydroelectric dams and biomass. Large hydropower systems supply 18% of world electricity and 4% of TPES, but are often not included in the definition of renewables for reasons that involve value judgments that have nothing to do with greenhouse gases and global warming. Biomass, which contributes 7% of TPES, is the use of waste plant and forest materials for energy and is the fuel that the poorest people have available for heat and cooking as well as supplemental fuel for energy in more developed nations; I will come back to it briefly in the chapter on biofuels.
When large hydro and biomass are excluded, only a tiny part of TPES comes from wind, solar electrical, geothermal, ocean, and biofuel systems: about 2% in the Unites States, but less than 1% worldwide. Of these, wind is the largest, supplying about 3% of US electricity in 2013, but has problems because it is intermittent and the best sites are often not where the largest demand is. Solar energy’s problem is that the Sun does not shine all the time and no good method of storing electricity exists. A new source of geothermal energy from deep, hot, dry rock is being developed which, if successful, will allow a big expansion of geothermal power, but it was tried in the 1970s and failed – the jury is still out on this one. The oceans are a harsh environment and ocean systems have not worked so far. New technology is being tried.
15 - An Energy Summary
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- 06 November 2014, pp 291-312
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Summary
The Size of the Problem
Part II has covered the energy scene. Part III is on policy, both for the United States and internationally. However, policy has to be based on reality, so I want to summarize the important technical and fiscal points. I have tried in Part II to present all the facts without prejudice, but here I will let my own opinions shine through and end this chapter with a repeat of the energy scorecard shown earlier.
It is appropriate to begin by repeating something I wrote in the Introduction to this second edition: “There is also a need to take a view broader than just climate change when thinking about, and planning, an energy future that takes into account the aspirations of the developing world and the national security interests of all. Just telling a poor nation that they have to do something about climate change is not enough to get action if that action will keep them poor for a longer time.”
In the section on fossil fuels I showed that we cannot handle the economic aspirations of a world of 10 billion people in the year 2100 without a crippling rise in the price of coal and oil. A change in world primary-energy sources is necessary on grounds separate from climate change, and we need to get on with it because the sooner we start the lower the eventual cost will be. Business as usual is not an option on economic and national security grounds as well as on the grounds of climate change.
We are in a race to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases while energy demand is going up fast, driven by two things: a projected 50% increase in population, and an increase in world per capita income. Continuing on our present course, world primary energy demand is expected to double by 2050 and double again by 2100, mainly because of what is happening in the developing world.
Preface to the Second Edition
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- 06 November 2014, pp ix-xi
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Summary
This second edition of this book is aimed at the general public, as was the first edition. It is not intended to be a textbook, but rather an accessible overview of what we know and don’t know about energy and climate change, what options we have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the energy sector of our economy, and what policies we should and should not adopt to make progress. I have also come to realize that climate change is not the only reason we have to change the energy sources that drive the economies of the world, and will discuss the others.
I am a latecomer to the climate and energy field. My career has been in physics. I received my PhD in 1956 and my Nobel Prize in 1976 at the relatively young age of 45. Many Nobel Laureates continue research, but some look for other mountains to climb, and I was one of those. I took on the job of directing a large Department of Energy scientific laboratory at Stanford University in 1984. During my 15 years as director we expanded opportunities in many areas; the number of users from outside Stanford that came to the laboratory rose from about 1000 to nearly 3000, and the facilities that we pioneered were reproduced in many parts of the world.
Like many scientists, I had followed the growing debate on climate change from a distance, though I did have some peripheral involvement in related areas having to do with energy options. I became seriously interested in climate and energy issues in the mid-1990s, partly because it was clear that this would be a critical issue for the future and partly because of the lure of another mountain range. Since stepping down as a laboratory director in 1999, I have devoted most of my time to various aspects of the issue.
9 - Fossil Fuels – How Much Is There?
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- Beyond Smoke and Mirrors
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- 06 November 2014, pp 117-130
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The world economy runs mainly on fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas – and as shown in the previous chapter, they are the main sources of greenhouse gas emissions outside the agricultural sector. They were made in geological processes that turned plants grown hundreds of millions of years ago into the fossil fuels we use today. High temperature and high pressure can convert a prehistoric tree into a piece of coal, or under different conditions of temperature and pressure into oil or gas. What we are doing today is mining the fuels generated so long ago at a rate much faster than they can be replaced by the processes that produced them in the first place. This means that fossil fuels are going to run out eventually and the era of powering the world economy with them will come to an end. The question is not if, but when, so the movement away from fossil fuels that is required to deal with climate change will eventually have to happen anyway to deal with resource exhaustion. Think of this century as a transition period in a move away from the energy resources that have brought great economic benefits, but have turned out to bring an unexpected problem – global warming.
Some say the era of available and affordable fossil fuels is coming to an end very soon, but the data on reserves say this is not true about availability, although it is very likely true about affordability. There is enough coal, oil, and gas to last for a good part of this century even under the business-as-usual scenario, and the rate at which exploration has added to proven reserves has exceeded the rate of consumption of those reserves for many years. However, if the growth in demand continues at its present rate it is very likely that there will be supply constraints in the second half of the century. All the fossil fuels will certainly get more expensive as the easy-to-access sources begin to be used up. Part of the increase in the price of oil seen in recent years is because meeting demand has required tapping resources like the Canadian tar sands, where production costs are much more expensive than the standard light oil produced by OPEC.
1 - Introduction
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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The First Edition
Our planet’s atmosphere has been the dumping ground for all sorts of gases for as long as human history. Its capacity is large, and when those using it as a dump were few there was no problem. There are now more than seven billion of us, and we have now reached the point where human activities have overloaded the atmospheric dump and the climate has begun to change. The United Nations population group projects that there will be 10.5 billion by 2100. Our collective decision is what to do about it. Do we do nothing and leave the problem to our grandchildren who will suffer the consequences of our inaction, or do we begin to deal with it? It is much easier to do things now rather than later, but it will cost us something.
To me the answer is clear: we should start to deal with it. This book describes the problem and the alternatives that exist to make a start on limiting the damage. This is not an academic book, even though I am a physics professor. It is written for the general public. True, it does contain some scientific details for those interested in them, but they are in technical notes at the ends of chapters; you can skip them if you like.
The title of the book, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors, can be taken two ways. One is what future energy sources might replace coal and today’s versions of solar power. The other is the real story behind the collection of sensible, senseless, and self-serving arguments that are being pushed by scientists, environmentalists, corporate executives, politicians, and world leaders. I mean the title both ways, and the book looks at the technical and policy options and what is really hiding behind the obscuring rhetorical smoke and mirrors. There are many ways to proceed and, unfortunately, there are more senseless arguments than sensible ones, and still more that are self-serving.
8 - Energy, Emissions, and Action
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- 06 November 2014, pp 103-116
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Setting the Stage
This chapter moves our discussion to how to reduce the effect of the energy we use on our environment. The amount of energy we use is so large that it is hard to get a feel for its size. I start with comparing the total primary energy supply (TPES) to natural phenomena that we could possibly use to supply the world’s energy needs. The TPES from all sources amounted to a yearly average power of 14 terawatts in 2006 [15] (a terawatt is one billion kilowatts), a number that is too big to mean much to most people. It is the energy used to light all the world’s light bulbs; run all the world’s cars, trucks, buses, trains, airplanes, and ships; produce all the steel, cement, aluminum, and other metals; run our farms; produce all our computers; and everything else that we make or use. It also keeps going up and was 17.5 terawatts in 2011.
In my time as a working physicist I did experiments involving subnuclear processes and processes that were related to the scale of our cosmos; from a billionth of a billionth of a meter to 14 billion light years. Those numbers mean something to me mathematically, but are not easy to visualize. So it is with the TPES. It is hard to understand what 25 trillion barrels of oil per year really is (it would cover the entire United States with oil one foot deep), or what many billion tons of coal is (six billion tons would give every man, woman, and child on Earth 2000 pounds of it), or what trillions of cubic meters of natural gas is (6 trillion cubic meters of gas would give each person 100 000 party balloons full of gas). Table 8.1 above is a comparison of what we use now to all the world’s natural phenomena that can be used to generate energy. The table is for today, but the projection for increased energy demand is that the TPES demand will increase by four times by the end of this century while, of course, the natural sources remain the same. As our demand goes up, the natural sources available seem to get smaller relative to what we will need.
17 - World Policy Actions
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- 06 November 2014, pp 333-347
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Summary
Introduction
All the nations of the world share one atmosphere. What goes into it affects all, and the consequences of climate change will fall on all. Depending on your perspective and your experience with international agreements, you can be either impressed or disillusioned about the international response to the need to mitigate global warming. It was only in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit that the nations of the world agreed there was a problem. After that, with remarkable speed, the Kyoto Protocol was produced in 1997, and entered into force in 2005 when industrialized nations accounting for at least 55% of 1990 emission signed on.
A mere 13 years from recognition to action is regarded as fast by those with experience with the UN organization, or slow by those focused on the urgency of the problem. However you regard it, Kyoto is the basis for action now, but it expires in 2015 and has to be replaced with a new and necessarily better Protocol that brings in all the nations that were left out of the action agenda last time.
The United States played an important role in designing the Kyoto Protocol, but never ratified it. Cap and Trade is an example of a US proposal that was viewed with suspicion at the beginning of negotiations, but became the mechanism favored by most for reducing emissions. There are other US inventions as well. However, the issue at home in the United States before, during, and after the Kyoto meeting was the role of the large developing countries. The US Senate in a resolution in early 1997 stated clearly that they would not ratify any treaty that did not include some binding commitments on the part of the developing countries. There were none included, and President Clinton did not send the Protocol to the Senate for ratification since he knew that it would lose. On taking office President G. W. Bush said he would not send it on since it would not work if the developing counties made no commitments of their own.
Part III - Policy
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- 06 November 2014, pp 313-314
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5 - Predicting the Future
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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Who Does It?
There are many sayings about the difficulty of predicting the future. My favorite is naturally Richter’s First Law; “Predicting the future is hard to do because it hasn’t happened yet.” It is especially hard when you are trying to predict what will happen 100 years from now and the science behind the prediction is really only 50 years old. It was the work of Keeling and Revelle in the 1950s mentioned earlier that jump-started the science community’s work on climate change and global warming. It is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that does the predictions today.
My own involvement in climate change research has been more as an observer than as a participant. My first exposure to the issue was in 1978 when a group that I am in, called the JASONs, took it up. The JASONs are a collection of mainly academics that meet every summer for about six weeks to work on problems of importance to the US government. In 1978 a subgroup of the JASONs led by Gordon MacDonald, a distinguished geophysicist, began a study of climate change for the US Department of Energy. The JASONs always have many pots on the stove and I was working on something else. However, we all were fascinated by the climate issue, and nearly everyone sat in on the sessions and critiqued the report. Its conclusion was that doubling atmospheric CO2 would increase the average global surface temperature by 4.3 °F (2.4 °C), and that the increase at the poles would be much more than the average. The JASON climate model included a more sophisticated treatment of the ocean–atmosphere interaction than had been used before. The model was a simplified one that could be solved without big computers, and the answer was in fairly good agreement with what we get now for the average temperature increase, but overstated the polar increase. The report was influential in increasing government funding for climate change research.
List of Units
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- 06 November 2014, pp xii-xiii
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7 - How Fast to Move: A Physicist’s Look at the Economists
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- 06 November 2014, pp 96-102
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Summary
Former US President Harry Truman once said that he wished the government had more one-handed economists because his economists were always telling him on the one hand this, on the other hand that. Today, we do have many one-handed economists writing on the economics of taking action now to limit climate change. Unfortunately they seem to fall into camps with different hands. I will call the two camps after the two people who best represent them. One I call the Nordhaus camp after Professor William Nordhaus, the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, and the creator of the Dynamic Integrated model of Climate and the Economy (DICE model) that is used by many to estimate the economic effects of climate change. The other I call the Stern camp after Sir Nicholas Stern, former Head of the UK Government Economics Service, who led the effort to produce the influential 2006 British analysis of climate change impacts called the Stern Report (he is now Lord Stern of Brentford and is at the London School of Economics).
The issue is how much the world should be spending now to reduce the emissions that will cause large climate changes in the future. If we could assign a monetary value to future harm, and we used some reasonable discount rate (defined below), we could in principle figure out how much to invest now and in the future to reduce the harm. The Nordhaus camp says that we should be spending a reasonable amount now, but that there is no need to panic. The Stern camp in contrast says that the consequences are so severe as to constitute a global emergency and that drastic action is called for immediately. There is no one among the leaders of the economics profession who says we should do nothing now.
10 - Electricity, Emissions, and Pricing Carbon
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- 06 November 2014, pp 131-149
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The Electricity Sector
Worldwide, the two largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions are electricity generation and transportation. Electricity generation is the topic of this chapter while transportation is part of the next.
Coal, even today, makes up by far the largest fraction of fuel used to produce electricity. The United States and China are the Saudi Arabias of coal, and coal with all its emissions problems is the fastest expanding fuel for electricity production worldwide, though not in the United States because of its shale-gas revolution. Outside the United States, coal is the lowest in cost because of its abundance and ease of extraction, and because power plants can be built relatively quickly. Unless fracking spreads through the rest of the world leading to low-cost shale gas, without some sort of emissions charge or other limitation mechanism coal will remain the lowest-cost fuel for a long time to come. Finding a substitute for coal or a way to reduce emissions from coal is critical to the world effort to reduce greenhouse gas production.
In the United States, coal and natural gas are used to generate 70% of electricity, and, according to the EIA, in 2007 were responsible for producing nearly 40% of US greenhouse gas emissions. The percentages were not very different from those of other industrialized countries, with the exception of France. France gets most of its electricity from greenhouse-gas-free nuclear power and has much lower emissions per unit GDP and very much lower emissions from the electricity sector. I will come back to this in the chapter on nuclear power.
16 - US Policy – New Things, Bad Things, Good Things
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- 06 November 2014, pp 315-332
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Introduction
The Kyoto Protocol is the instrument in effect today that tries to define the first steps in a worldwide regime to reduce greenhouse gas emission. It was signed in 1997 and entered into force in 2005 when it was ratified by 55% of the signatories. The United States never ratified it, but nonetheless has been trying for years to get something done on the national level, as is to be expected of the nation that is the richest in the world and has the second highest amount of greenhouse gas emission. The world story follows in Chapter 17. Here I limit myself to the US story.
The opening of this chapter in the first edition said, “As of this writing (mid 2009), the United States does not yet have a national policy on emissions reductions.” It still does not have one in early 2014. Though a national policy is needed, none has been forthcoming from Washington, and the states have stepped into the breach. Thirty-six states now have some sort of emission control standards for energy; Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) in some, though the definition of renewable varies among them. Some of the states’ RPS are quite aggressive while others are mild. Some states already have significant fractions of their energy supply from emission-free sources, Idaho, for example, with its large component of hydropower (70% of electricity in 2012). Regional collections of states have agreed on standards. What exists now is a patchwork of attempts to solve what is an international problem, and a national program is needed that places such a program in a world context. On the Federal stage, there has been a partisan divide, with the Democrats for action and the Republicans against. Among the states there has been no such divide, and the regional compacts include states with Democratic and Republican governors. Emission reductions were never a partisan issue out in the country, only in Washington.
14 - Biofuels: Is There Anything There?
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- 06 November 2014, pp 272-290
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Introduction
My first introduction to the idea of biofuels came when I met the Nobel Laureate chemist, Melvin Calvin, in the late 1970s (his prize was awarded in 1961 for the discovery of how photosynthesis worked). It was the time of the Arab oil embargo and he had a dream of what he called growing oil. He had found a plant in the Amazon that produced oil that could directly substitute for diesel fuel, and was working on improving the output of a different plant that could grow in the temperate zone, and on poor ground. He wanted, through genetic engineering, to greatly increase its natural production of an oil-like substance. He did not think using food crops for energy systems was a good idea because of population growth. We would need all the food we could get. Mel retired in 1980 (continuing to work as do most of us) and died before he succeeded. The science community is still trying to bring Mel Calvin’s vision to life.
Today, in the United States biofuels means ethanol from corn, while in Brazil it is ethanol from sugarcane (the European Union has an ethanol program too, and I will come back to it). After looking in some detail at the US program, I confess that I have become a biofuels skeptic. Most of what one hears about corn as a source of fuel ethanol that saves energy and reduces greenhouse gas emissions is propaganda from agribusiness (I think Calvin would agree). Sugarcane is one crop that does give the promised benefits, but even its long-term contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions depends on how land is used. There is an intensive worldwide research program aimed at developing much more effective biological sources of fuel, but as of the writing of the first edition it had not yet reached practicality. Now, five years later, it still has not reached practicality.
11 - Efficiency: the First Priority
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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- 06 November 2014, pp 150-188
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Introduction
There are many recent studies by governments, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector that all come to the same conclusions:
Improving energy efficiency is the cheapest and easiest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions;
Energy not used reduces imports, emits no greenhouse gases, and is free;
The transportation and building sectors use far more energy than is necessary;
The total cost to the economy as a whole of most of the improvements is negative: we save money.
In this chapter I look at what might be done to improve energy efficiency in two of the three sectors of the US economy: transportation and buildings. The third sector, industry, has to have each process looked at separately and that is too big a job for this book.
Improving energy efficiency in buildings reduces electricity demand, thereby reducing fossil fuel use in generation, and reduces fossil fuel use for heating as well.
Increasing the efficiency with which energy is used in the transportation sector does more than reduce greenhouse gas emissions; it also reduces the imports of large amounts of oil to fuel that sector and thereby also reduces the export of the large amount of money that pays for those imports. With the high price of oil ($100 per barrel in 2014), even those few people who do not believe that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is important to reduce the danger of climate change agree that reducing oil imports is important and have become allies in a move toward a more efficient economy.
With those conclusions, it is surprising that so little has been made of the opportunities. In a market economy like those of most of the developed countries of the world, consumer demand forces manufacturers to comply with that demand in order to be competitive, or manufacturers see an advantage and work to convince the customers to buy what the manufacturers want to sell, or the government sees some national importance that makes it force efficiency on the society. Until recently the price of energy was so low that there was little if any consumer pressure for energy efficiency, manufacturers had little incentive to invest in better efficiency technology, and there was no concern on the national level because of any economic drain on the economy from energy prices.
Frontmatter
- Burton Richter, Stanford University, California
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