Every 10% cut in US emissions is completely negated by 6 months of China’s emissions growth.
Admittedly, that seems to be calculated at previous growth rates for the Chinese economy, rather than at current or pending rates.
That is from the interesting and provocative Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines, by Richard A. Muller.
Negated? If the US had produced more, would China have produced less? Presumably Chinese emissions are largely independent of US emissions…
+1
> Presumably Chinese emissions are largely independent of US emissions…
I’d expect them to be highly interrelated. One important way to reduce US emissions is to move heavy industry offshore, to places like China. We do this all the time via environmental regulation.
But China taking over US production reduces the pollution per unit output.
Any production shutdown in the US is the oldest, most polluting, and least efficient portion, while China’s larger production capacity is generally higher in efficiency than the US average which is still dragged down by old obsolete facilities.
The capital investment in the US to meet EPA rules is basically the same as that made in China, with the difference in the aid to corporations given to the corporations. And the biggest form of Chinese corporate welfare is in property rights which makes the Kelo case seem like anti-capitalism by a whiny woman trying to extract millions from a corporation by filing frivolous lawsuits.
Que? “The capital investment in the US to meet EPA rules is basically the same as that made in China” I find this statement questionable. Chinese infrastructure is _newer_, but that doesn’t mean it’s being put together to the same specs…
Your point is that zero environmental regulation plus the freedom to build new facilities at will is actually better for the environment than current US policies? That’s interesting, but I’d want to see evidence.
Wow.
It says that US reductions are offset by Chinese increases; it says nothing about the obverse and is not making a causal connection.
So what? Country A’s decreases being offset by Country B’s increases doesn’t really mean much of anything. As long as Country A’s decreases don’t cause country B to increase by a greater or equal amount, one is achieving the goal of reducing emissions.
But that’s not the goal. The goal is preventing what emissions cause
One thing about the global diplomatic circus approach to curbing carbon emissions is that my understanding is that a bilateral treaty between the U.S. and China would be sufficient (and an international agreement would require American and Chinese cooperation anyway). In fact unilateral cuts by either the U.S. or China would make a dent in the problem. So why the reliance on periodic global diplomatic circuses?
The carbon emissions focus has made people forget about the less glamorous, more localized types of pollutants.
It doesn’t matter how much more China produces, victories over smog, particulates, allergens, dust, sensetizers etc. are real and your to keep.
Exactly! We hear a lot about climate change, and very little about dangerous carcinogens … or at least less than we used to hear.
That’s because environmental stewardship is dead on the Left. People cause pollution. Period. They take up space and generate waste. But now that the US has to find space for 1.5 million extra people a year to live and throw their trash and buy their cellphones, things like national parks, biodiversity and effluents just aren’t good topics for polite company anymore. And as the money to fund our vast social engineering schemes runs out, who do you think is going to win the debate over mineral and timber rights in the national parks–white, bourgeois backpackers? So the Left and its media megapones have moved on to ethereal notions like “climate change” and “renewable energy.”
Edward Abbey was apparently the last shout of the Old Left.
That’s in part because the U.S. and Europe have already addressed a lot of those things.
China would be happy to sign a bilateral agreement with the US where China doubles its per capita carbon emissions in lock step while the US cuts per capita carbon emissions in half. Net emissions would be about zero.
To put pressure on China and the U.S., who have thus far not agreed to bilateral or unilateral cuts.
would China have produced less ??
And? Thus we shouldn’t cut our own emissions? That’s silly.
Not really. The whole idea behind global warming alarmism is that total global emissions have to be cut back dramatically or we’re all doomed. Us cutting back incrementally while China and India scale up really does nothing to prevent warmist armagedon.
We shouldn’t cut emissions in highly costly ways or ways that just move the emissions around. We should cut them in ways that save money and are easily copied by developing countries. That is to say, in ways that don’t currently exist. Safe nuclear and an ultra-efficient, convenient and super-cheap solar panel come to mind.
Let’s say the US and China agreed to a carbon tax that was equal for both nations.
Who do you suppose would be the winners on growth with the tax funneled back into the economy any way you like?
China or the US?
> Who do you suppose would be the winners on growth…
> China or the US?
Regardless of the truth on this particular matter, there is something deeply sick in someone who can only view an environmental question as a zero sum game. “Winners”? X _or_ Y? Maybe that’s the choice, but to presuppose it like this … wrong.
If we really wanted to do something about the emissions problem, we would leave it alone. Less efficient means of production are eliminated in the US because there are cheaper means of production available. The same thing will occur in China as it becomes more advanced; forcing them to cut their emissions is only slowing their progress with costly means of production that their country is simply not technologically developed enough to handle. Putting limits on growing countries’ production frontier only stunts their growth and unnecessarily extends the time that they remain in the dark ages of early industrialization.
Yes, US has to cut back dramatically. To even suggest that India should slow down its emissions growth is silly, given that there are many Indians without access to power.
That depends on which baseline you’re using. It does something relative to the “do nothing and carry on” baseline.
After one diner has gorged and had her fill, she is appalled at the wasteful eating habits of the next diners to sit at the table.
The other diner is fatter though…..
No, it is a table of 4 really fat people from a long line of really fat people gorging on 16,000 calories, condemning a table of 16 really skinny Chinese eating a total of 16,000 calories, 16 Chinese who come from a long line of emaciated and hungry people who have been sacrificing for two generation from forgoing 80% of their natural sex to keep the table from being 20-25 people eating 16,000 or maybe 10,000 calories. The 4 fat Americans try to have much more sex than the Chinese, but they are too busy eating and too fat to have more than twice the number of kids than the Chinese.
Kitchen closes in five minutes?
Because as we all know, for every 10% increase in US emissions, China stops growing for 6 months.
I liked things better when half the world was hopelessly repressed.
They still are.
But fewer are oppressed.
The US needs to wake up and realize that it needs to cut its emissions drastically, given that emissions from India and China will continue to increase.
The most obviously effective way to do this is to crack down on immigration from poor countries.
Why? In my experience poor people tend to use less energy. They are less likely to afford air conditioning and large houses in need of cooling.
Even in China I noticed that the average person is much more frugal than in the US. Less wasteful packaging, smaller garbage bags that don’t fill nearly as quickly.
So the goal of immigration policy is to increase the number of poor people living in the US.
Well, at least you’re being honest about it.
The Original D points out that people in poor countries emit less carbon per capita than people in America. But, he doesn’t grasp the implications for immigration policy.
If immigrants from poor countries successfully assimilate to American norms of earning and consuming, they, and their descendents, will emit vastly more carbon than if they stayed home.
According to the UN’s International Energy Agency, residents of America in 2007 put out an average of 19.1 tons of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas. In contrast, the residents of Mexico each emit 4.1 tons per year. In other words, the typical inhabitant of America churns out 4.6 times as much carbon dioxide as the typical inhabitant of Mexico. And Mexicans emit far more greenhouse gases per capita than, say, Central Americans.
Immigrants will either assimilate economically and substantially increase global carbon emissions or fail to assimilate economically. Which is it?
I crunched all the numbers on the impact of immigration on carbon emissions here:
http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-mexicans-in-the-living-room-why-wont-greenies-admit-immigrations-global-warming-impact
“The US needs to wake up and realize that it needs to cut its emissions drastically”
That’s only going to happen if we replace a lot of coal plants and the only viable non-carbon replacements are nuclear power plants. It seems unlikely to happen without a viable long term Nuclear waste repository. And Senator Reid is going to keep blocking the use of the Federal facility in Nevada.
South Australia has shut down its two coal plants using a combination of wind and solar which now supply over a third of the state’s electricity. One coal plant is shut down for good and the other will be switched on when the weather turns warm again and electricity demand goes up. As wholesale electricity prices are dropping and solar power expanding, it might not be long before that coal plant is shut down for good. In Australia, without subsidies, point of use solar provides electricity to consumers at a lower cost than coal power. So wind and solar are definitely viable options.
If that is happening, then why worry so much? Market forces will dictate all/most coal plants close and solar/wind take their place. Why do we need federal subsidies if it will soon happen without subsidies?
This is a good question. And the answer is South Australia only has a large amount of renewable energy because it had expensive electricity. There are no cheap deposits of coal. In most of Australia coal only costs power plants a few dollars a tonne. Obviously, it is hard to make money from building a wind turbine in a state where coal plants can produce electricity at a marginal cost of a fraction of a cent per kilowatt-hour. The carbon price that Australia introduced six weeks ago basically makes the price of coal power in all states similar to what it was in South Australia. Now a tonne of coal has a minimum cost to a power plant of $70 or more. This makes renewable energy more profitable and reduces the price of gas relative to the price of coal.
Solar has a lot of potential in Australia, but in the absence of a carbon price it doesn’t take a lot of solar capacity to start pushing the price of electricity down towards zero on sunny days and this would obviously discourage the building of further solar capacity.
In Australia there are still subsidies for wind and solar, but we could get rid of them simply by raising the carbon price to a level where the cost of adding CO2 to the atmosphere equalled the cost of removing it. (This might be around $60 per tonne of CO2 in Australia.) Making fossil fuel generators pay for one of their largest externalities would remove a major market failure and allow market forces to more efficiently determine the generating mix.
Australia’s carbon price has raised electricity prices, but the revenue from it has allowed us to reduce income taxes and increase government benefits. As I am a low user of electicity and live in a state with a lot of renewables, I am definitely ahead, as are most Australians.
In the U.S. (as Muller’s excellent book explains), coal cannot compete with wind and solar on average. The serious competition in America to wind, solar and nuclear is natural gas obtained from hydraulic fracturing. However, it is expensive to transport natural gas abroad so which option comes out ahead depends on each country’s natural resources. China has access to lots of cheap coal so it continues to build coal-powered plants with serious consequences not just for climate change but also local air quality.
“South Australia has shut down its two coal plants using a combination of wind and solar which now supply over a third of the state’s electricity.”
I doubt that. As an electrical engineer who knows a bit about the industry what you are describing is pretty much an impossibility. Wind and Solar power are intermittent. In other words you can’t count on them at any given time. You are virtually guaranteed to get windless nights from time to time. A coal plant runs all the time.
It’s virtually certain that when the coal plants were shut down, peaking natural gas plants were brought on-line to deal with the intermittency. So in reality, your coal plants were replaced with natural gas plants and the solar and wind acts to conserve fuel.
This isn’t a bad thing, but it’s important to realize what’s actually happening. You can’t run a grid off of intermittent power sources. Solar and wind are intermittent. They can provide fuel savings to your fossil fuel plants, but they don’t really replace them.
No, that’s not the case. While South Australia’s wind power is intermittent and acts as a fuel saver, peak demand in Australia is during hot days in the summer in the daytime. This makes solar load following. We use more electricity during the daytime than at night and we use more electricity when it’s sunny than when its cloudy. South Australia only gets a small percentage of its total electricity from solar at the moment, but its peak output occurs around times of peak demand. As I mentioned, we are starting up one of the coal plants in the summer, as that’s when the price of electricity goes up, but as we build more solar capacity and push down the price of electricity during the day, I expect that the coal plant will either be shut down for good or operated as a peak plant before long.
I don’t know much about electricity demand in the United States, but after looking at this page:
http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/table4.1a.cfm
It appears that all regions in the US but one have their peak in the summer. If this is due to air conditioner use, then solar might be load following to varying degrees in almost all the US.
Ronald, I don’t think you understand his point. It wasn’t that solar + wind can’t keep up during the day. It was that solar + wind is intermittent, which means you need a backup generation method or extremely large/efficient energy storage.
What does south Australia do if the wind is calm at night?
” I expect that the coal plant will either be shut down for good or operated as a peak plant before long. ”
You can’t use a coal plant as a peak plant. They don’t work that way. A peaking plant is one that can satisfy near immediate electrical demands. I.E. The wind is slowing down, so we need to replace all the power provided by the wind plants in the next 15 minutes. Coal plants require 6+ hours just to bring the boilers up to temperature.
“This makes solar load following. We use more electricity during the daytime than at night and we use more electricity when it’s sunny than when its cloudy. South Australia only gets a small percentage of its total electricity from solar at the moment, but its peak output occurs around times of peak demand.”
Yes, this is true. Solar power can act to shave off peak air conditioning demand. But that’s limited by what the peak air conditioning demand is. Solar’s effective power production period is roughly 4 hours a day. You need direct sunlight. Incidental sunlight in the morning and afternoon doesn’t provide a lot of solar electrical power. Which effectively limits it to 5-10% of your total load in a hot, sunny climate. It’s much less than that in a colder, cloudy area.
However, back to my original point, to get much above the 20-30% range you need to provide base load power. And the only non-carbon, reliable base load power is Nuclear.
I agree on nuclear being important but wind and solar are competitive at this point. The levelized costs for nuclear, solar PV and wind as computed by EIA are $111/megawatt-hour, $153 and $96.
There is the problem of generating power in the evening and/or in slow wind conditions but that doesn’t make solar and wind non-viable — it just means they cannot be the only source of electricity.
Everything seems futile unless we consider geo-engineering to counterbalance warming gases with cooling gases. So why so little talk about geo-engineering? Oh yeah, because it doesn’t evoke anger and therefore isn’t capable of going viral.
Well, see that’s the cool thing about geoenineering. Geoengineering would be comparable to central banking in economics. Instead of relying on, well, totally unreliable legislatures to form fractious coalitions that enable dubious stabilization policy, well run central banks can effectively, but also not entirely reliably, create economic stabilization. Geoengineering would be comparable climatic stabilization, suffering from the same draw backs as central banking. Those would namely be: democratic deficit, small institutional intransigence, and I’m sure there would be lots of Ron Paul equivalents. To me those problems seem imminently more solvable than carbon reduction through collectively deciding to raise the price on fossil fuels.
JPA, South Australia gets only a bit over a third of its electricity from wind and solar. The rest is gas at the moment. So if there is no wind at night gas meets demand. South Australia’s wind power is not firm. We can’t rely on it to meet peak demand. But as our peak demand occurs on hot, cloudless summer days we can rely on our solar capacity to assist in meeting it. If we wanted to we could expand our solar capacity and then retire fossil fuel capacity down to the point where it is sufficient to meet peak night time demand. Energy storage would make it possible to reduce the amount of fossil fuel capacity even further, but at current storage costs and the current carbon price it is cheaper to use natural gas.
JWatts, coal plants can be used as peak plants. While it’s very unlikely that anyone would ever build a coal plant to use as a peaking plant, an existing coal plant faced with a situation where it is only profitable to operate during peak times can be used as a peak plant. (And in a grid with a significant amount of intermittent capacity and a carbon price, using electrical resistance heating to maintain boiler temperature during periods of low electricity prices is an option.) Also, in our electricity market there would be no need for it to respond rapidly. Plant operators could simply state it will supply X amount of electricity during Y time period. Fiddling around within pay periods is for those who contract to provide grid stability, which probably wouldn’t be a smart thing for a coal plant to do.
We’re not limited to four hours of effective solar production here. Not unless you have an odd definition of effective. In the past, subsidies in Australia encouraged people to simply maximise the output of their solar panels, but now people have an incentive to match output more closely to their consumption and so we have more westward facing panels. This increases solar output in the late afternoon and results in production more closely matching demand. While this decreases the total amount of electricity that could be produced, this isn’t a problem as it’s still a money saver. Given the decreasing cost of solar PV we have the potential to get a lot more than 5-10% of our total electricity from solar.
You mention that for wind and solar to get much above the 20-30% range, base load power needs to be provided. This is interesting because currently South Australia has no operating base load generators and we’re doing fine. And as for nuclear power being part of a carbon neutral electricity sector, if you can build a reactor that is competitive with other options, please come to South Australia and construct one for us. But it will have to work as a load following plant. And given the rate that solar is expanding it might have to end up as a peak plant, and I don’t think nuclear works that way.
Looks like I spoke too soon. REW, the German utility, is building coal peak plants.
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