Block’s Indicator of Sustainable Growth

by Ray Block

Australia represents only about 1.5 per cent of global greenhouse gases, but on a per capita basis, it ranks No 1 in carbon emissions.

The  carbon pollution reduction legislation, which has been subject to endless committee hearings, and purposedly delayed to start July 1 2012,  to avoid  the disruption of the global downturn, requires only a modest 5 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020 from 2000 levels.

The legislation went through the lower House, but has been held up in the Australian Senate, by a determined rabble of global warming sceptics, despite getting significant legislative concessions by the Rudd government.

If you measure Australia against a significant grouping of carbon emissions targets by other countries, the lucky downunder country comes out poorly.

The Copenhagen summit, from December 7 to 18, will go a long way to an international agreement, which can be codified in 2010, and if need be 2011, so as to slot in when the Kyoto Protocol comes to an end in 2012.

Carbon emission targets so far promised:

*European Union 27-country bloc’s  longstanding commitment to a 20 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2020 from below 1990 levels. A few of the country membership, such as UK, Belgium, Netherlands would like the EU to move to a unilateral 30 per cent cut.

However, the eastern European members, particularly Poland, which have  coal dependent economies oppose this move, and would like the 2020 target changed to 2030.

*President Obama’s promise for the US is a  17 per cent emissions reduction by 2020 from below 2005 levels, although the cap and trade legislation is held up in the US Senate. According to the WWF, this is equal to a 4 to 5 per cent reduction from below 1990 levels to have a meaningful comparison with the EU target.

President Obama also said his Administration’s overall goal is to reduce emissions 30 per cent below 2005 levels in 2025, 42 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, and 83 per cent below 2005 levels by 2050.

* China, which is now the world’s largest carbon emitter, with the US the second largest is committed to a meaningful slowing in greenhouse gas emissions. The undertaking is to reduce carbon intensity by 40 to 45 per cent by 2020 compared with 2005 levels. Carbon intensity is the amount of CO2 for each unit of GDP (gross domestic product).

UN climate officials have said to Associated Press that the 40-45 per cent cut would put China on a path to reduce greenhouse gas emissions about 13 per cent from business- as- usual, the level emissions would have reached without any action. As part of its pollution control policy, China has announced that it plans to invest up to US454 billion in environmental protection in the five years to 2015.

  *Japan is committed to a 25 per cent cut in emissions by 2020 from 199o levels. The new Democratic Party government hasn’t spelled out how the emissions cuts are to be achieved. 

But the Japanese steel industry, which has the most efficient emission controls among world steelmakers, will provide their latest technologies for cutting CO2 emissions to Chinese steelmakers.

 In return, the Japanese can include the emissions reductions in their own quotas under the Kyoto Protocol’s clean development mechanism. If more of Japanese industry  follow the same approach, it won’t be too difficult to reach the Copenhagen target.

*Brazil will be tabling its commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions by between  36.1 per cent and 38.9 per cent of their business-as-usual level by 2020. The country is the fourth biggest carbon emitter in the world, largely due to deforestation in the Amazon. Brazil is looking to international funding to help in the remediation process.

*Canada is undertaking to reduce carbon emissions 20 per cent by 2020 from 2006 levels, although legislation is yet to be introduced. Even so, its emissions would still be 24 per cent higher in 2020 from 1990 levels.

* India is yet to announce a reduction in either carbon intensity, or in emissions, but it will make its plans known at Copenhagen. A range of incentives is shortly  to be announced  for 714 of the nation’s most energy-intensive installations across nine sectors.

As with China, energy efficiencywill be the key, with a national registry for energy-efficiency certificates, which will have a one year tenure. It sounds like a type of cap and trade. Prime Minister Singh says that the government has “a very ambitious national plan to combat climate change.”

 *Indonesia, the third largest carbon emitter in the world is undertaking to  reduce greenhouse gas emissions 26 per cent by 2020. As with Brazil, a strong campaign to save the forests and more of the peatlands, which  provide the carbon sinks would greatly help to achieve the target reductions. 

* South Korea is committing to a 4 per cent reduction by 2020 from 2005 levels.  This is equivalent to a 30 per cent reduction on the business- as-usual projection for 2020.

POSCO, the world’s fourth largest steelmaker, accounting  for 10 per cent of Korea’s total carbon emissions is currently studying the brand new technology of the hydrogen steelmaking process. This technology  doesn’t emit CO2 emissions, which would be a tremendous achievement, if it can be done.

* Russian President Medvedev said his country “would try” to reduce greenhouse emissions by 25 per cent, and in the process seek to increase energy efficiency by 40 per cent. 

* The 5o African countries, which have no plans to cut carbon emissions are demanding that rich countries commit to deep cuts in carbon emissions that add to global warming. In a show of unity, African countries blame advanced economies for using fossil fuels to take the fast track to prosperity, but at the cost os unleashing today’s climate nightmare.

A similar attitude to Africans is likely to be taken by Central and South American countries.

On the table for consideration at Copenhagen is that the rich industrial countries will subscribe US$ 10 billion a year to help developing countries become equipped to cope with climate change, and to make available technology transfers and know how on renewable energy. 

 

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Posted under Carbon Abatement Scheme, Climate Change, Commodity Prices, Economies, energy efficiency, Food, Global Warming, Low Carbon Economy, Renewable Energies, World Inflation

by Ray Block

The stealing of a large volume of emails from the Hadley Centre in England by reportedly Russian hackers has been seen by climate sceptics as proof that the climate scientists are involved in a left wing conspiracy.

Scientists are their own worst enemies. Constantly going back to their predictive models, subjecting them to peer review time and time again, and then challenging them all over again. It’s a chaotic process, but that’s the way it has always been.

The climate sceptics start from a different perspective to the scientists. It’s one of almost religious belief and commitment. Whether this comes of preoccupation with intelligent design; or possibly maverick scientists who want to avoid consensus peer reviews and want to be seen as   independent of the pack; and there are other sceptics with their own political agenda.

To be preoccupied with an apparent reduction in climate over the last decade, when you need to measure climate change on a 50 or even 100 year span to see the long run impact, is a bit silly, but that’s climate sceptics for you.

The daily release of the newsletter Science Daily is quite revealing of the climate scientists at work.  A few of the headlines from recent issues.

*Nov 23 2009 The ice sheet in Antarctica is losing about 190 billion metric tons a year, based on data from 2002 to 2009, according to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin. This was reported by the journal Nature Geoscience.  The rate of ice sheet loss is accelerating, increasing to 220 billion metric tons a year since 2006.

*Nov 19 2009 The journal Nature (Nov 19) report findings from oceanographers at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth  Observatory. They say the  oceans ability to maintain their role in regulating climate by absorbing more than a quarter of CO2 from burning fossil fuels  is at risk. Now, the oceans are struggling to keep up with rising emissions.

The researchers estimate that the oceans last year took up a record 2.3 billion metric tons of CO2 from human-made carbon. But with overall emissions growing rapidly, the proportion of emissions absorbed by the oceans since 2000 may have declined by as much as 10 per cent.

*Nov 13 2009 Professor Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol  in the UK reports that satellite observations and a state- of- the- art regional atmospheric model have independently confirmed that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate.

The ice sheet loss over the eight years to 2008 is estimated at 1,500 gigatons. That is equal to 1.5 trillion tons, and over the most recent two years to 2008, the loss was as high  as  273 billion tons.

* Nov17 2009 Researchers involved in the Global Carbon Project report a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel beteen 2000 and 2008, as reported in the journal Nature Geoscience (Nov 17) Over the last 50 years, the average fraction of global CO2 emissions that remained in the atmosphere each year was around 43 per cent, the rest as absorbed by the forests and oceans.

*October 10 2009 Rising sea levels are increasing the risk of flooding along the  south coast of England.  As reported in the journal, Continental Shelf Research, coastal engineering expert, Professor Robert Nicholls of the University of Southampton has produced a single data set of south coast sea levels across the years. The data shows that both average sea levels and extreme sea levels have been rising at a similar rate through the 20th Century. The rate of rise is in the range 1.2 to 2.2 mm per year.

*Oct 9 2009 UCLA scientists report in the online edition of the journal Science (Oct that the last time CO2 levels were this high was at least 15 million tons. This was at a time when global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than  they are today, and the sea level was approximately 75 to120 feet higher than today.

*October 6 2009 Despite a slight recovery in summer Arctic sea ice in 2009 from record setting low years in 2007 and 2008, the sea ice extent remains significantly below previous years and remains on a trend leading toward ice-free Arctic summers, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Centre. The past five years have seen the five lowest Arctic sea ice extents ever recorded.

Draw your own conclusions, but it is hard to believe that so many scientists are involved in a conspiracy to fake records.

*Nov 23 2009 Nature Geoscience report that scientists at the University of Texas at Austin said that Antarctica’a ice loss since 2006 may be as high as 220 billion tons a year. This compares with ice loss for the 2oo2 to 2005 period averaging 144 billion tons a year.

*Nov 13 2009

Posted under Carbon Abatement Scheme, Climate Change, Economies, Global Warming, Low Carbon Economy, Renewable Energies, World Inflation

by Ray Block

For United States and China to collaborate on renewable energy is always  fraught with US politicians trying to outdo themselves, beating their chest, that it has to be made in USA.

A case in point involves the joint venture between A-Power Energy Generation Systems, a member of  the Shenyang Power Group, with two American companies, Cielo Wind Power of Austin Texas, and the US Renewable Energy Group.

The prominent US Democrat Senator, Charles Schumer of New York, is up in arms about the deal. An energy agreement to instal 240 2.5 MW wind turbines on a wind farm in west Texas to produce a total 600 MW of renewable energy at a cost of $1.5 billion is big news even in Texas, the dominant US wind state.

One of the two US companies involved, Cielo Wind Power is a wind energy specialist, having developed 1.15 GW (1,150 MW) of wind energy installations, largely in Texas. The other US firm, US Renewable Energy Group, is one of the largest US private equity groups focussed on investing in renewable energy.

The Chinese company, A-Power is one of the largest providers of distributed power generating systems in China, and although relatively new in wind turbines has a licensing agreement with the German wind  company, Fuhrlander AG and Norwin of Denmark, two long established wind turbine firms.

The US Department of Energy is making available loan guarantees authority for the rapid deployment of renewable energy projects, providing they are located in one of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, or a  US territory.

The Chinese are putting up the bulk of the funds, and this at a time when US banks are unwilling to finance renewable energy projects. Yet Senator   Schumer wants to block funds to projects, unless they use “high value components,” built in United States.

The Green Inc column of the New York Times (November 5 2009) reports a study by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, finding that 84 per cent of green stimulus funding has thus far gone to foreign companies building renewable energy projects in the US.

The real problem is that American renewable energy companies are usually too small,  move  too slowly, and are often hampered by lack of funding , while Asian companies move more swiftly in this new exciting age of renewable energy development.

Reporting from China, New York Times correspondent, Michael Forsythe (November 18 2009) points to the excitement and sheer exhilaration in China, as regions seek to outdo each other in the race to develop alternative energy sources and reduce pollution.

The Breakthrough Institute and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in their report Rising Tigers and Sleeping Giant (November 2009) elaborate on this theme.

The speed in North Asia to become world leaders in elaborately transformed manufactures, and particularly in renewable energy, is very engaging, and yet quite worrying for the west, when compared to the much slower United States in gaining  first mover advantage in the new technologies.

The Breakthrough report says that China, South Korea and Japan will invest a total of US$509 billion in clean technology over the next five years (period through to 2013), while the US will invest $171 billion over the same period.

The Breakthrough report describes the exceptional incentives  in China at both the national, regional and local government level to develop clean technology and innovation clusters, including free land, low cost financing, tax incentives, and money for R&D.

In just over three years, Baoding in Central Hebei Province has been transformed into a second Silicon Valley, with nearly 200 renewable energy firms. The Christian Science Monitor’s Peter Ford (August 10 2009) describes the crusader Mayor Yu Qun’s determined stand to make his city a hub of renewable energy. An ancient city, but now a very modern one, proud of his “electricity valley” as the Mayor describes it.

Or take Ordos in Inner Mongolia, the centre of the most modern coal mine  in  the world. Jonathan Watts reporting for the London Guardian on the two faces of China’s coal industry (November 15 2009) says “China is trying to use science to clean up and expand coal production” at the same time.

“Dirty old steel factories are being upgraded or relocated. To rerduce smog, the low chimneys of small thermal power generators are being replaced by the towering smokestacks of more efficient supercritical plants.”

Ordos is also the location of one of the two major coal to diesel plants in China, which has pioneered a direct liquefaction technique, that cracks carbon with hydrogen extracted from water to produce clear diesel.

Ordos is also the centre of a 2GW solar photovoltaics panel array in the Mongolian desert. This is being developed by Arizona based First Solar, the largest solar company in the world, and the first one to join the Standard and Poor’s 500 index. In turn, the First Solar installations will be part of an even larger 12 GW solar project.

China’s fast moves ahead is obscuring to some extent, Japan’s many technologies in the clean energy space. Toyoto’s hybrid Prius and Honda’s hydrogen fuel cell Clarityare two prominent examples of world leadership.  Sanyo, now being acquired by Panasonic is the world’s largest rechargeable battery company, and about the third largest solar cell producer. Japan is also the centre of the exciting energy storage market.

The Chinese are providing the bulk of the finance, but Senator Schumer ants

Posted under Carbon Abatement Scheme, Climate Change, Economies, energy efficiency, Global Warming, Low Carbon Economy, Renewable Energies, World Inflation

by Ray Block

Although a commercial outcome of producing algae at comparable prices to oil is five to 10 years away, there is a great volume of research proceeding at a fast clip.

For fans of algae as a future transportation fuel, it is highly significant that the longest ranking researcher of algae, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), has returned to  its long standing algae research.  

NREL, a lab of the US Department of Energy, conducted research between    1978 and 1996  on more than 300o potential  strains of micro algae, mostly diatoms and green algae in its aquatic species program.

This time around, the algae research by NREL to greatly increase productivity is in the form of a cooperative R&D agreement with Chevron, which will use the resulting oil as a feedstock for a renewable fuel.  

As the blog, Permaculture Activist has pointed out, compared to oil palm long considered to be the most productive crop in  oil volume produced per acre per year at 635 gallons, it is drawfed by micro algae. Under the right growing conditions, the algae volume can be up to 5,000 gallons per acre.

Micro algae grown in salty pond conditions  doesn’t compete with traditional crops, such as corn grown on prime land, as only marginal land is used. 

With up to 57 start ups in algae, Greentech Media (August 18  2009) points to two methods for producing algae, one in open ponds, the other in closed ponds or photo-bioreactors (PBR).

Sapphire Energy, with about $100 million in venture capital, expects to produce 1 million gallons of diesel and jet fuel by 2011, 100 million gallons by 2018, and 1 billion gallons by 2020 uses open ponds in New Mexico. 

Similarly, the new alliance of Exxon Mobil, the world’s biggest oil company with the start up Synthetic Genomics (SGI), whereby the oil company is investing $600 million on the algae project, half internally and the balance in the start up will also use open ponds.

Most of the start up researchers are growing algae using photosynthesis to transform carbon dioxide and sunlight into lipids, or oil. However,  Solazyme with about $76 million in capital, is using fermentation for feeding the algae sugars in heated sealed stainless steel tanks.

Another algae start up Aurora Biofuels, says it has identified and optimised a genetic pathway in a species of wild algae, that “turbocharges” the growth and breeding cycle of the single celled algae. Greentech Media (August 18 2009) says it will be able to double oil production. “This gets us to 5,000 gallons per acre a year, which we think is economically viable.”

 

 

Solazyme has been selected to provide 1,500 gallons of algae derived jet fuel for testing and certification by the US Navy. The company has also received a $789,697 biosynthetic transportation fuel grant by the California Energy Commission to develop clean fuel from local cellulosic feedstocks.

Posted under Carbon Abatement Scheme, Climate Change, Economies, Global Warming, Low Carbon Economy, Renewable Energies, World Inflation

by Ray Block

The World Energy Outlook 2009  released by the International Energy Agency (IEA) is quite stark in its projections of energy growth over the years ahead to 2030.

In a continuation of a high carbon business as usual scenario, world   electricity demand would rise by 2.5 per cent a year to 2030, of which 80 per cent will be in non-OECD countries, mainly Chins and India.  

 Globally, additions to power generation capacity by 2030 to total 4,800 gigawatts (GW), equal to five times the existing capacity of United States.    

Coal remains the backbone fuel of the power sector,  with its share to rise   from 40 per cent to 44 per cent.

 

Non-hydro renewables in total power output to rise from 2.5 per cent  in 2007 to 8.6 per cent in 2030, with wind power seeing the biggest absolute increase.  

Capital investment required to meet projected energy demand through to 2030  is huge, amounting to US$ 26 trillion in 2008 dollars.  Broken down on an average annual basis, the capital investment required  would need to be around   $1.1 trillion per year,  equal to 1.4  per cent of GDP.

 Over half of all energy investment is needed in developing countries, where  demand and production is projected to grow faster.  However, “financing energy  investment will, in most cases, be more difficult and costly than before the global financial crisis took hold.”

If these trends were to persist in the long term, says the IEA, global energy related CO2 emissions would drive greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in excess of 1,000 parts per million (ppm),  leading inevitably to temperature increases rising up to 6 degrees Celsius.

To move  to a 2 degree Celsius rise in global temperature, implicit in the 450 ppm scenario of a low carbon economy by 2030, would require formidable hurdles to be met. The IEA is saying there would be need for an industrial and consumer revolution, with appropriate price signals for the world’s use of fossil fuels to peak by 2020, “if  it is to escape a dangerous spike in global temperatures.”

The IEA is calling for a deal in Copenhagen. “We need a signal for the energy industry. Without that, nothing will move. The need will be for  ”better energy efficiency, rapid growth in renewable energy, and increased use of nuclear power will be critical to move the world away from fossil fuels. A second revolution would have to happen in the automobile industry, so that six of every 10 cars sold in 2030 are hybrids or electric.”

 It is hard to believe that with so many climate change sceptics around, wearing their religion of business as usual, and no change at all costs,   holding the rest of us hostage to ransom, that substantial change can possibly take place, unless the price of oil was to streak up to US$200  a barrel, over the next five years.

It may be perverse to say it, but I hope the oil price does spike up. It will be the only way people will take notice.

   

                                                                                                                 

Posted under Carbon Abatement Scheme, Climate Change, Economies, Global Warming, Low Carbon Economy, Renewable Energies, World Inflation