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E.P.A. to Seek 30 Percent Cut in Carbon Emissions

64 points by cjdulberger 12y ago

phkahler 12y ago
Cap and trade is stupid. It's a form of "carbon credits" designed to create a market for the likes of wall street while allowing for politics to also play a role. The simplest thing to do is TAX the carbon coming out of the ground (oil or coal) or coming into the country. This cost will automatically be passed on to whomever uses that fuel in direct proportion to how much the use. However, we continue to subsidize some carbon producers, so you can clearly see that reducing emissions is NOT the primary agenda here.
- Angostura 12y ago
  I think that climate change is the most important issue facing humanity. I think we will all have to see lower economic growth if our civilisation is to survive. However, I think slapping a straight tax on would be quite disastrous. There are some high carbon industries that going to be vital in the short and medium term, and simply closing them over night, as a flat rate tax is likely to do, is not the way to get our economy to adjust.
  - Shivetya 12y ago
    Alarmist aren't we. Lower economic growth, better try your bets elsewhere because unless you can suddenly remove a third of the population from the planet we ain't going anywhere but up. Energy production will simply shift to what is the most affordable and don't expect it to ever become less than today. If anything our energy expenditures will continue to climb. The only change will be how we create it. When cheaper energy becomes available expect usage to dramatically spike, if anything our biggest threat won't be carbon, it will be heat; waste heat.
  - Retric 12y ago
    Carbon tax can be vary effective while having minimal impact. The important point is it causes conservation in the most economically efficient way possible, carbon credits even with a significantly lower tax rate are far more harmful. The real issue is there is less to lobby about just rate and what to do about imports /exports.
- jshen 12y ago
  I don't think your conclusion follows from your other points. The people pushing for this may very well have emissions reduction as their primary goal, but they are in a system that forces the solution to something like this.
- rayiner 12y ago
  The issue with taxing carbon out of the ground is that it doesn't address what is really relevant: carbon being released into the atmosphere. For example, under a carbon tax, there would be no incentive to research something like carbon capture systems. As for the issue with Wall Street: it would be good to create a market and get Wall Street involved. The politics surrounding Wall Street's involvement in say oil is classic populist dreck: they hate paying more for gas, so they blame "oil speculators" rather than acknowledging the oil traders are just helping the market price-in the fact we're in an era where new oil discoveries come in a firm that's expensive to exploit.
  - Retric 12y ago
    You can always have a seperate credit for sequestration. However, none of the proposedNlong term systems are anywhere close to being as cost effective as going from coal to wind power.
- throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago
  More to the point: a carbon tax introduces price certainty, which (naively) allows efficient long-term planning. (Carbon caps set volume by fiat; carbon taxes set price by fiat. The other variable floats with the market). You can look at the EU carbon market's total failure as an example. It's a cap system, where the price collapsed almost immediately, and so to date it has had zero effect of any sort [0]. The cap right now is way above what the market actually wants. It's useless. The opposite -- price overshoots because of a too tight cap + demand inelasticity -- could also be a really bad thing. Both directly from the pain it causes, and indirectly from the predictable political backlash, which would screw up something else in a new & more creative way. [0] http://www.economist.com/node/21548962 http://www.economist.com/node/21548962
  - smsm42 12y ago
    I'm not sure - how arbitrarily setting prices introduces certainty? Today the Congress or EPA decides the price is X, tomorrow Republicans take the Congress and the presidency and appoint the head of EPA which drops the price to Y, then next cycle Democrats take the power and rise the price to Z, etc. etc. - where's certainty in that? I don't see any objective way of setting such taxes, and as such - any reason why they would be stable is the price is purely arbitrary and thus subject to political games.
    - throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago
      Well it doesn't, no. IF you have stable government policies, than a carbon tax would be a predictable cost, where a cap would be highly volatile. Obviously if the policies are changing too, then you can't predict much of anything. "I don't see any objective way of setting such taxes," How about: estimate the economic damage of a marginal kg of CO2 (external cost), and set the tax equal to that? [0] As an order-of-magnitude guess: [total climate change damage] / [total CO2 emitted], both discounted to present dollars. Not an economist. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
      - bastawhiz 12y ago
- wpietri 12y ago
  I would personally rather see a carbon tax; it'd be simpler. But I see three big differences with cap and trade that make it more practical. One is that a cap-and-trade program acknowledges the status quo. There are a lot of businesses that are currently emitting CO2, and saying, "Surprise! Big tax for you!" will generate enormous political resistance. If I understand cap-and-trade programs rightly, we'd start out by giving those businesses the right to keep emitting, but let them sell the right if they aren't using it. Suddenly they have choices, turning the response from, "Rawr! Tax bad!" to "Hm, can I get a competitive advantage from this?" The second is that in cap-and-trade, the right price for carbon flows not from government fiat, but from market outcomes. What's the right level for a carbon tax to drive the right amount of reduction 15 years out? Hard to say. Cap and trade lets us fix what we care about, the reductions, and then lets market mechanisms work out how to do that most economically. The third comes from the combination of the first two. The US right is fervently anti-tax, and has been for decades. They are, however, pro-market, at least nominally. Plus, Wall Street loves anything market-like, as it gives them an opportunity to make a buck. A carbon tax will be fought hard by the people facing it before, during, and after. But markets mean winners and losers, and the opportunity for a lot of capitalist reindeer games.
waps 12y ago
This is not true at all, or at least it's only true from a narrow US view of the world : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-31/obama-step-forward-on-carbon-undone-by-china-s-steps-back.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-31/obama-step-forward-... And let's not get any illusions. One of the main real changes in the world that make this possible is outsourcing of production to China, where instead of a mix of oil, nuclear and coal, goods will be produced with nearly exclusively coal. Obama is not an idiot and knows this. His voters seemingly are not so aware. So what it should really say is something along the lines of "in an attempt to improve earbon emission numbers in the US, the EPA doubles worldwide carbon emissions, in cooperation with it's European counterpart, moving the emissions where they are not counted on his report card".
- spenrose 12y ago
  Outsourcing manufacturing to China can increase emissions; closing coal plants in the USA does not affect in or outsourcing; therefore your summary is false.
  - ams6110 12y ago
    Expensive energy here vs. cheap energy in China certainly would factor into outsourcing decisions.
    - Daishiman 12y ago
      Energy is going to get a lot more expensive in China from here on too.
  - nospecinterests 12y ago
    This is not true at all. Making energy more expensive to harvest, store, and consume directly impacts production costs. The higher the price the more organizations move production to areas of lower costs. When they are prevented from moving they pass those costs on to their customers.
spenrose 12y ago
"Accounting for the damages [of unpriced externalities] conservatively doubles to triples the price of electricity from coal per kWh generated" http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05890.x/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010....
- hyperbovine 12y ago
  And voilá, wind and solar suddenly beat coal.
  - ams6110 12y ago
    Not yet, because wind and solar are currently able to generate only a tiny fraction of the energy we get from coal.
- rustyconover 12y ago
  All of our lungs should breathe a collective sigh of relief for not having to deal with so many particulates from coal burning after these rules go into force. Not to mention saving our water from pollution of coal ash. It will be pleasant to have less of these types of plants in operation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Scherer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Scherer And this country will be just a little bit greener knowing, we don't need to have trains crossing the country 24/7 from Wyoming just to keep the boilers running.
  - smsm42 12y ago
    Is there any data that our lungs are seriously hurt by these particulates right now? >>> And this country will be just a little bit greener knowing, we don't need to have trains crossing the country 24/7 from Wyoming just to keep the boilers running. We will have to get the energy from somewhere. The only viable alternative on that scale that I can see is nuclear energy, but given current panic mood about it, does not seem very likely. If not, are we ready to seriously cut energy consumption and accept the accompanying life standards drop? I don't think so.
cwal37 12y ago
I actually wrote something up on indirect carbon pricing in the US yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829683 TL;DR EU carbon is trading at $6.88/tonne. Working back from an enrollment mailer I found that TVA's green power program prices it at $42/tonne (in terms of lbs of CO2 emissions avoided by purchasing blocks of renewable generation).
melling 12y ago
So, by 2030 even if the US cuts emissions by 30%, aren't there going to be 2-3 billion people in emerging markets moving up the economic ladder who will use a lot more energy. Sure 300 million Americans are currently using a lot of energy but we're going to be much smaller part of the problem by 2030.
- mhurron 12y ago
  It doesn't solve it all, so we shouldn't do anything?
  - crazy1van 12y ago
    That's a false choice. There are more options than either doing nothing or doing something predictably ineffective.
  - melling 12y ago
    That wasn't my point, at all. It's great that we're committed to reducing our usage by 30%. The problem is that 10x the number of people are going to increase their usage by a lot more than that amount.
- Daishiman 12y ago
  By that point renewables will be substantially cheaper. I suspect that at that point, since many countries will be experiencing the effects of climate change full-force (especially the Chinese), there will be economic treaties which will tax according to emissions per capita or a similar metric.
- smsm42 12y ago
  How does it help being smaller part of the problem? Sure, there are many ways to be smaller part of the problem - from reducing economic output to increasing the overall problem - but that doesn't seem to be a worthy target. If it does not lead to contraction of the whole problem - e.g. if strict regulations would just make manufacturing move to countries with weaker regulations - then why do it? Just to say "it's not us, it's those guys" - does not sound very helpful.
crazy1van 12y ago
What's the deal with using 2005 as the reference date for the 30% cuts? Do we not have more accurate carbon measurements since then? Is it to make the cuts seem smaller since 2014's emissions are probably bigger than 05. There must be some specific reason to pick a reference date of almost a decade ago. Any thoughts?
- cwal37 12y ago
  A few things: 1. Your intuition about emissions being higher now is wrong. For NOx and SOx: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=15611 http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=15611 CO2: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.html http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.html 2. The recession messed with a lot of energy and consumption so that the years from 2008-2012 or so are something of anomalies. 3. There have been significant rollbacks and cuts to getting datasets complete. It used to be we were only a year or two behind in lots of the published federal data. I've found it to be far more scattershot today, and sometimes just cross my fingers and hope they have managed to stay up to date. That said, the EIA has mostly managed to stay on top of their annual publications. 4. Natural gas prices bottomed out a couple years ago, and we'll have a glut of it for a while, keeping prices much lower than they were in the early 2000s. 5. Coal plants are getting replaced with natural gas combined cycle because of the fuel costs, and also because of new regulations on the new MATS stuff (also in the link above). 6. "Clean" coal has mostly been a bust. Duke Indiana's been trying to get their gasification plant to full capacity for a while, and cost ovverruns has resulted in them asking for rate increases. Also, carbon capture still isn't up to snuff, and underground gasification never took off.
  - crazy1van 12y ago
    Interesting. Any idea why they picked the 2005 date to be the reference?
    - cwal37 12y ago
      Sorry it took a few days, but I couldn't get the numbers to work (couldn't tell that they were using 2005), and now I know why. http://common-resources.org/2014/2005-vs-2012-in-epas-proposal/ http://common-resources.org/2014/2005-vs-2012-in-epas-propos... And here's a good general breakdown of the proposed rule. http://www.vox.com/2014/6/4/5779052/how-to-figure-out-which-states-get-hit-hardest-by-obamas-climate-rule http://www.vox.com/2014/6/4/5779052/how-to-figure-out-which-...
tgb 12y ago
Does anyone know of a study on how effective such programs have been in the past (assuming it passes and isn't significantly overturned by the courts)? As in, what is the expected success rate of long-term plans of the US government (or other nations)?
- paulyg 12y ago
  Look at Germany and Canada (specifically Ontario). Not so good.
Zak 12y ago
Good plan. Let's build some nuclear plants. Oh, wait. Not politically viable? It should be: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...
- scarmig 12y ago
  One thing that carbon taxes and cap-and-trade have going for them: they would increase the pent-up demand for nuclear power, allowing people to build coalitions for a viable, clean, safe future based on nuclear energy.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Actually it is politically viable, we're building the first new addition to our nuclear fleet for 30 years: http://www.ajc.com/news/news/breaking-news/a-65b-federal-loan-guarantee-jolts-ga-nuclear-powe/ndWgF/ http://www.ajc.com/news/news/breaking-news/a-65b-federal-loa...
  - paulyg 12y ago
    That plant broke ground before Fukushima. How many permits have been issued since then: 0. Perfectly good nuclear plants like Vermont Yankee have been shut down (decided not to renew operating license) due to "concerned citizens. We were headed to a nuclear power renascence until that accident happened and took the wind out of the sails.
    - anigbrowl 12y ago
      If it had taken the wind out of the sales then we could have skipped the $6.5 billion federal loan guarantee we issued last February, which is mentioned in the article I linked to. As for Vermont Yankee, the operating license was renewed in 2011 and remains valid until 2032, but Entergy said that a mix of price controls and economic inefficiency for a small single-reactor design made it uneconomical to continue operations: http://www.entergy.com/news_room/newsrelease.aspx?NR_ID=2769 http://www.entergy.com/news_room/newsrelease.aspx?NR_ID=2769 Vermont's senate voted against a future renewal of the plant's license, but since this wouldn't have been an issue for almost two decades I don't think it's that big of a deal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Yankee_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Controversy_and_operations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Yankee_Nuclear_Power_Pl... The fact is that the federal government is putting its money where its mouth is as regards Georgia, and with the President about to announce a target of cutting US CO2 emissions by 30%, the door is open for other nuclear projects. A bigger problem for the industry has been the fall in power prices due to the huge surplus of natural gas that currently obtains in the US, with no sign of decline any time soon.
rrggrr 12y ago
I hypothesize that with two years remaining, President Obama is again delivering big for the Futuregen 2.0 project in his home state. I mean, if he was really looking to reduce carbon emissions he might make that a priority in his dealings with China and Russia and the developing world. This is politics, not policy in my opinion.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  Why, so he can get re-elected? Absurd. the sticking point with getting the BRIC and other developing nations to cut emissions has been the US failure to lead in doing so. The recent Supreme Court ruling that the EPA is authorized to regulate pollution that crosses state lines is a sea change and has been a long time coming.
  - rrggrr 12y ago
    He is unemployed in two years. The BRIC sticking point is reality. Economic reality.
nospecinterests 12y ago
When it comes to coal these efforts and those who support them seem to always make the assumption that there is nothing that can be done to make burning coal "cleaner". After working with the utilities industries (mostly natural gas industries) I can tell you with 100% certainty that more than 80% of the by products from the burning of coal, including CO2, can be removed using scrubbing technologies and filters. In many cases the cost to install these technologies are lower than the costs to convert a plant to natural gas. The problem is that EPA regulations on coal are driving the costs up (by making it harder to mine and transport) to the point where in the long run natural gas is cheaper (though get a change in the US administration and that could sway the other way again)(Edit: Which is why a lot of coal plants are being converted to natural gas). My point is that if coal didn't cost as much as it currently does (because of federal regulation) a number of technologies could be installed that would enable coal plants to continue to be used with much much less environmental impact.
- pyk 12y ago
  Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) of CO2 is still in very early development and pilot testing, so costs are quite uncertain, and it is not in use in any reasonably sized coal plant in the US. For all plants >60MW planned to have CCS, they are either still in planning or under construction [1] (note that 60MW is a relatively small power plant). Quite separate from CO2, there are NOX wet/dry scrubbers and flue gas desulfurization units (removal of SO2). While having a very helpful large reduction in fine particulate (PM2.5) and ozone downwind health impacts (SO2 and NOX form PM2.5 and O3 downwind), it unfortunately does not remove CO2 emissions. In talking to power companies, my guess is that natural gas is being switched out for coal for many reasons, some more subtle. In part due to new PM2.5 and ozone regulations, in part because in some years it has been cheaper than coal due to new extraction techniques (fracking), and in part because it is easier to dispatch natural gas plants (ramp up and down) to meet electricity demand or high variance renewable energy generation like solar and wind (large spikes in generation). [1] http://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/index_capture.html http://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/index_capture.ht...
  - nospecinterests 12y ago

64 points by cjdulberger 12y ago

Cap and trade is stupid. It's a form of "carbon credits" designed to create a market for the likes of wall street while allowing for politics to also play a role. The simplest thing to do is TAX the carbon coming out of the ground (oil or coal) or coming into the country. This cost will automatically be passed on to whomever uses that fuel in direct proportion to how much the use. However, we continue to subsidize some carbon producers, so you can clearly see that reducing emissions is NOT the primary agenda here.

Angostura 12y ago
I think that climate change is the most important issue facing humanity. I think we will all have to see lower economic growth if our civilisation is to survive. However, I think slapping a straight tax on would be quite disastrous. There are some high carbon industries that going to be vital in the short and medium term, and simply closing them over night, as a flat rate tax is likely to do, is not the way to get our economy to adjust.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  Alarmist aren't we. Lower economic growth, better try your bets elsewhere because unless you can suddenly remove a third of the population from the planet we ain't going anywhere but up. Energy production will simply shift to what is the most affordable and don't expect it to ever become less than today. If anything our energy expenditures will continue to climb. The only change will be how we create it. When cheaper energy becomes available expect usage to dramatically spike, if anything our biggest threat won't be carbon, it will be heat; waste heat.
- Retric 12y ago
  Carbon tax can be vary effective while having minimal impact. The important point is it causes conservation in the most economically efficient way possible, carbon credits even with a significantly lower tax rate are far more harmful. The real issue is there is less to lobby about just rate and what to do about imports /exports.
jshen 12y ago
I don't think your conclusion follows from your other points. The people pushing for this may very well have emissions reduction as their primary goal, but they are in a system that forces the solution to something like this.
rayiner 12y ago
The issue with taxing carbon out of the ground is that it doesn't address what is really relevant: carbon being released into the atmosphere. For example, under a carbon tax, there would be no incentive to research something like carbon capture systems. As for the issue with Wall Street: it would be good to create a market and get Wall Street involved. The politics surrounding Wall Street's involvement in say oil is classic populist dreck: they hate paying more for gas, so they blame "oil speculators" rather than acknowledging the oil traders are just helping the market price-in the fact we're in an era where new oil discoveries come in a firm that's expensive to exploit.
- Retric 12y ago
  You can always have a seperate credit for sequestration. However, none of the proposedNlong term systems are anywhere close to being as cost effective as going from coal to wind power.
throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago
More to the point: a carbon tax introduces price certainty, which (naively) allows efficient long-term planning. (Carbon caps set volume by fiat; carbon taxes set price by fiat. The other variable floats with the market). You can look at the EU carbon market's total failure as an example. It's a cap system, where the price collapsed almost immediately, and so to date it has had zero effect of any sort [0]. The cap right now is way above what the market actually wants. It's useless. The opposite -- price overshoots because of a too tight cap + demand inelasticity -- could also be a really bad thing. Both directly from the pain it causes, and indirectly from the predictable political backlash, which would screw up something else in a new & more creative way. [0] http://www.economist.com/node/21548962 http://www.economist.com/node/21548962
- smsm42 12y ago
  I'm not sure - how arbitrarily setting prices introduces certainty? Today the Congress or EPA decides the price is X, tomorrow Republicans take the Congress and the presidency and appoint the head of EPA which drops the price to Y, then next cycle Democrats take the power and rise the price to Z, etc. etc. - where's certainty in that? I don't see any objective way of setting such taxes, and as such - any reason why they would be stable is the price is purely arbitrary and thus subject to political games.
  - throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago
    Well it doesn't, no. IF you have stable government policies, than a carbon tax would be a predictable cost, where a cap would be highly volatile. Obviously if the policies are changing too, then you can't predict much of anything. "I don't see any objective way of setting such taxes," How about: estimate the economic damage of a marginal kg of CO2 (external cost), and set the tax equal to that? [0] As an order-of-magnitude guess: [total climate change damage] / [total CO2 emitted], both discounted to present dollars. Not an economist. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
    - bastawhiz 12y ago
wpietri 12y ago
I would personally rather see a carbon tax; it'd be simpler. But I see three big differences with cap and trade that make it more practical. One is that a cap-and-trade program acknowledges the status quo. There are a lot of businesses that are currently emitting CO2, and saying, "Surprise! Big tax for you!" will generate enormous political resistance. If I understand cap-and-trade programs rightly, we'd start out by giving those businesses the right to keep emitting, but let them sell the right if they aren't using it. Suddenly they have choices, turning the response from, "Rawr! Tax bad!" to "Hm, can I get a competitive advantage from this?" The second is that in cap-and-trade, the right price for carbon flows not from government fiat, but from market outcomes. What's the right level for a carbon tax to drive the right amount of reduction 15 years out? Hard to say. Cap and trade lets us fix what we care about, the reductions, and then lets market mechanisms work out how to do that most economically. The third comes from the combination of the first two. The US right is fervently anti-tax, and has been for decades. They are, however, pro-market, at least nominally. Plus, Wall Street loves anything market-like, as it gives them an opportunity to make a buck. A carbon tax will be fought hard by the people facing it before, during, and after. But markets mean winners and losers, and the opportunity for a lot of capitalist reindeer games.

waps 12y ago

This is not true at all, or at least it's only true from a narrow US view of the world : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-31/obama-step-forward-on-carbon-undone-by-china-s-steps-back.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-31/obama-step-forward-... And let's not get any illusions. One of the main real changes in the world that make this possible is outsourcing of production to China, where instead of a mix of oil, nuclear and coal, goods will be produced with nearly exclusively coal. Obama is not an idiot and knows this. His voters seemingly are not so aware. So what it should really say is something along the lines of "in an attempt to improve earbon emission numbers in the US, the EPA doubles worldwide carbon emissions, in cooperation with it's European counterpart, moving the emissions where they are not counted on his report card".

spenrose 12y ago
Outsourcing manufacturing to China can increase emissions; closing coal plants in the USA does not affect in or outsourcing; therefore your summary is false.
- ams6110 12y ago
  Expensive energy here vs. cheap energy in China certainly would factor into outsourcing decisions.
  - Daishiman 12y ago
    Energy is going to get a lot more expensive in China from here on too.
- nospecinterests 12y ago
  This is not true at all. Making energy more expensive to harvest, store, and consume directly impacts production costs. The higher the price the more organizations move production to areas of lower costs. When they are prevented from moving they pass those costs on to their customers.

spenrose 12y ago

"Accounting for the damages [of unpriced externalities] conservatively doubles to triples the price of electricity from coal per kWh generated" http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05890.x/abstract http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010....

hyperbovine 12y ago
And voilá, wind and solar suddenly beat coal.
- ams6110 12y ago
  Not yet, because wind and solar are currently able to generate only a tiny fraction of the energy we get from coal.
rustyconover 12y ago
All of our lungs should breathe a collective sigh of relief for not having to deal with so many particulates from coal burning after these rules go into force. Not to mention saving our water from pollution of coal ash. It will be pleasant to have less of these types of plants in operation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Scherer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Scherer And this country will be just a little bit greener knowing, we don't need to have trains crossing the country 24/7 from Wyoming just to keep the boilers running.
- smsm42 12y ago
  Is there any data that our lungs are seriously hurt by these particulates right now? >>> And this country will be just a little bit greener knowing, we don't need to have trains crossing the country 24/7 from Wyoming just to keep the boilers running. We will have to get the energy from somewhere. The only viable alternative on that scale that I can see is nuclear energy, but given current panic mood about it, does not seem very likely. If not, are we ready to seriously cut energy consumption and accept the accompanying life standards drop? I don't think so.

cwal37 12y ago

I actually wrote something up on indirect carbon pricing in the US yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7829683 TL;DR EU carbon is trading at $6.88/tonne. Working back from an enrollment mailer I found that TVA's green power program prices it at $42/tonne (in terms of lbs of CO2 emissions avoided by purchasing blocks of renewable generation).

melling 12y ago

So, by 2030 even if the US cuts emissions by 30%, aren't there going to be 2-3 billion people in emerging markets moving up the economic ladder who will use a lot more energy. Sure 300 million Americans are currently using a lot of energy but we're going to be much smaller part of the problem by 2030.

mhurron 12y ago
It doesn't solve it all, so we shouldn't do anything?
- crazy1van 12y ago
  That's a false choice. There are more options than either doing nothing or doing something predictably ineffective.
- melling 12y ago
  That wasn't my point, at all. It's great that we're committed to reducing our usage by 30%. The problem is that 10x the number of people are going to increase their usage by a lot more than that amount.
Daishiman 12y ago
By that point renewables will be substantially cheaper. I suspect that at that point, since many countries will be experiencing the effects of climate change full-force (especially the Chinese), there will be economic treaties which will tax according to emissions per capita or a similar metric.
smsm42 12y ago
How does it help being smaller part of the problem? Sure, there are many ways to be smaller part of the problem - from reducing economic output to increasing the overall problem - but that doesn't seem to be a worthy target. If it does not lead to contraction of the whole problem - e.g. if strict regulations would just make manufacturing move to countries with weaker regulations - then why do it? Just to say "it's not us, it's those guys" - does not sound very helpful.

crazy1van 12y ago

What's the deal with using 2005 as the reference date for the 30% cuts? Do we not have more accurate carbon measurements since then? Is it to make the cuts seem smaller since 2014's emissions are probably bigger than 05. There must be some specific reason to pick a reference date of almost a decade ago. Any thoughts?

cwal37 12y ago
A few things: 1. Your intuition about emissions being higher now is wrong. For NOx and SOx: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=15611 http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=15611 CO2: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.html http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.html 2. The recession messed with a lot of energy and consumption so that the years from 2008-2012 or so are something of anomalies. 3. There have been significant rollbacks and cuts to getting datasets complete. It used to be we were only a year or two behind in lots of the published federal data. I've found it to be far more scattershot today, and sometimes just cross my fingers and hope they have managed to stay up to date. That said, the EIA has mostly managed to stay on top of their annual publications. 4. Natural gas prices bottomed out a couple years ago, and we'll have a glut of it for a while, keeping prices much lower than they were in the early 2000s. 5. Coal plants are getting replaced with natural gas combined cycle because of the fuel costs, and also because of new regulations on the new MATS stuff (also in the link above). 6. "Clean" coal has mostly been a bust. Duke Indiana's been trying to get their gasification plant to full capacity for a while, and cost ovverruns has resulted in them asking for rate increases. Also, carbon capture still isn't up to snuff, and underground gasification never took off.
- crazy1van 12y ago
  Interesting. Any idea why they picked the 2005 date to be the reference?
  - cwal37 12y ago
    Sorry it took a few days, but I couldn't get the numbers to work (couldn't tell that they were using 2005), and now I know why. http://common-resources.org/2014/2005-vs-2012-in-epas-proposal/ http://common-resources.org/2014/2005-vs-2012-in-epas-propos... And here's a good general breakdown of the proposed rule. http://www.vox.com/2014/6/4/5779052/how-to-figure-out-which-states-get-hit-hardest-by-obamas-climate-rule http://www.vox.com/2014/6/4/5779052/how-to-figure-out-which-...

tgb 12y ago

Does anyone know of a study on how effective such programs have been in the past (assuming it passes and isn't significantly overturned by the courts)? As in, what is the expected success rate of long-term plans of the US government (or other nations)?

paulyg 12y ago
Look at Germany and Canada (specifically Ontario). Not so good.

Zak 12y ago

Good plan. Let's build some nuclear plants. Oh, wait. Not politically viable? It should be: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-so...

scarmig 12y ago
One thing that carbon taxes and cap-and-trade have going for them: they would increase the pent-up demand for nuclear power, allowing people to build coalitions for a viable, clean, safe future based on nuclear energy.
anigbrowl 12y ago
Actually it is politically viable, we're building the first new addition to our nuclear fleet for 30 years: http://www.ajc.com/news/news/breaking-news/a-65b-federal-loan-guarantee-jolts-ga-nuclear-powe/ndWgF/ http://www.ajc.com/news/news/breaking-news/a-65b-federal-loa...
- paulyg 12y ago
  That plant broke ground before Fukushima. How many permits have been issued since then: 0. Perfectly good nuclear plants like Vermont Yankee have been shut down (decided not to renew operating license) due to "concerned citizens. We were headed to a nuclear power renascence until that accident happened and took the wind out of the sails.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    If it had taken the wind out of the sales then we could have skipped the $6.5 billion federal loan guarantee we issued last February, which is mentioned in the article I linked to. As for Vermont Yankee, the operating license was renewed in 2011 and remains valid until 2032, but Entergy said that a mix of price controls and economic inefficiency for a small single-reactor design made it uneconomical to continue operations: http://www.entergy.com/news_room/newsrelease.aspx?NR_ID=2769 http://www.entergy.com/news_room/newsrelease.aspx?NR_ID=2769 Vermont's senate voted against a future renewal of the plant's license, but since this wouldn't have been an issue for almost two decades I don't think it's that big of a deal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Yankee_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Controversy_and_operations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Yankee_Nuclear_Power_Pl... The fact is that the federal government is putting its money where its mouth is as regards Georgia, and with the President about to announce a target of cutting US CO2 emissions by 30%, the door is open for other nuclear projects. A bigger problem for the industry has been the fall in power prices due to the huge surplus of natural gas that currently obtains in the US, with no sign of decline any time soon.

rrggrr 12y ago

I hypothesize that with two years remaining, President Obama is again delivering big for the Futuregen 2.0 project in his home state. I mean, if he was really looking to reduce carbon emissions he might make that a priority in his dealings with China and Russia and the developing world. This is politics, not policy in my opinion.

anigbrowl 12y ago
Why, so he can get re-elected? Absurd. the sticking point with getting the BRIC and other developing nations to cut emissions has been the US failure to lead in doing so. The recent Supreme Court ruling that the EPA is authorized to regulate pollution that crosses state lines is a sea change and has been a long time coming.
- rrggrr 12y ago
  He is unemployed in two years. The BRIC sticking point is reality. Economic reality.

nospecinterests 12y ago

When it comes to coal these efforts and those who support them seem to always make the assumption that there is nothing that can be done to make burning coal "cleaner". After working with the utilities industries (mostly natural gas industries) I can tell you with 100% certainty that more than 80% of the by products from the burning of coal, including CO2, can be removed using scrubbing technologies and filters. In many cases the cost to install these technologies are lower than the costs to convert a plant to natural gas. The problem is that EPA regulations on coal are driving the costs up (by making it harder to mine and transport) to the point where in the long run natural gas is cheaper (though get a change in the US administration and that could sway the other way again)(Edit: Which is why a lot of coal plants are being converted to natural gas). My point is that if coal didn't cost as much as it currently does (because of federal regulation) a number of technologies could be installed that would enable coal plants to continue to be used with much much less environmental impact.

pyk 12y ago
Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) of CO2 is still in very early development and pilot testing, so costs are quite uncertain, and it is not in use in any reasonably sized coal plant in the US. For all plants >60MW planned to have CCS, they are either still in planning or under construction [1] (note that 60MW is a relatively small power plant). Quite separate from CO2, there are NOX wet/dry scrubbers and flue gas desulfurization units (removal of SO2). While having a very helpful large reduction in fine particulate (PM2.5) and ozone downwind health impacts (SO2 and NOX form PM2.5 and O3 downwind), it unfortunately does not remove CO2 emissions. In talking to power companies, my guess is that natural gas is being switched out for coal for many reasons, some more subtle. In part due to new PM2.5 and ozone regulations, in part because in some years it has been cheaper than coal due to new extraction techniques (fracking), and in part because it is easier to dispatch natural gas plants (ramp up and down) to meet electricity demand or high variance renewable energy generation like solar and wind (large spikes in generation). [1] http://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/index_capture.html http://sequestration.mit.edu/tools/projects/index_capture.ht...
- nospecinterests 12y ago