Saturday, July 01, 2017
Trump Fact Check: Climate Policy Benefits Vastly Exceed Costs
That statistic originated from a report by National Economic Research Associates, Inc., which explicitly notes that it “does not take into account potential benefits from avoided emissions. The study results are not a benefit-cost analysis of climate change.” As Yale economist Kenneth Gillingham noted, the report’s cost estimates are also based on one specific set of policy actions that the United States could implement to meet its Paris pledges. But there’s an infinite combination of possible climate policy responses, with some costing more than others.
For example, a revenue-neutral carbon tax is the proposed policy that currently has the most widespread support. One such proposal by the Climate Leadership Council has been endorsed by a broad coalition that includes Stephen Hawking, ExxonMobil, the Nature Conservancy, and George Shultz. And the Citizens’ Climate Lobby—a nonpartisan grassroots organization advocating for a similar policy—recently sent over 1,000 volunteers to lobby members of Congress in Washington, DC.
Regional Economic Modeling, Inc. (REMI) evaluated how the Citizens’ Climate Lobby’s proposed policy would impact the US economy. The REMI report concluded that implementing a rising price on carbon pollution and returning 100 percent of the revenue equally to American taxpayers would grow the economy and modestly increase personal disposable income, employment, and gross domestic product—the total of all goods and services produced within a nation’s borders. And the REMI report didn’t even include the financial benefits of slowing climate change and curbing its harmful economic impacts.
Those benefits are potentially massive. In terms of climate change, many of the benefits are realized in avoided costs. For example, the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change found that unabated climate change would cost the world 5 to 20 percent of GDP by 2100. The economic picture could be even bleaker yet—most economic modeling assumes that economic growth will continue steadily regardless of climate change, but in reality, climate impacts are likely to slow economic growth. That was the finding of two papers published in 2015 by researchers from Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley.
The second paper found that there’s a sweet spot average temperature of around 13 degrees Celsius (55 degrees Fahrenheit) at which economic productivity is highest. The United States and much of Europe currently have climates in that optimal range, but many countries near the equator—which happen to predominantly be poorer, developing countries—already have temperatures above the sweet spot. As global warming causes temperatures to rise, the climates of the United States and Europe will slip out of the economically optimal temperature range, and that same temperature rise will push those poorer countries even further into the realm of economy-crippling heat. As a result, global warming will hamper economic growth. The researchers estimated that this would amplify the costs of climate change by at least 2.5 times more than previous estimates.
Tackling global warming will certainly come with costs. Although a revenue-neutral carbon tax would benefit the economy, that one policy by itself won’t be enough to solve the problem. We would still need to invest in and deploy low-carbon technologies like renewable energy and electric vehicles. However, looking at those costs in isolation without considering their benefits, as President Trump did, paints a misleading and inaccurate picture.
Read more at Trump Fact Check: Climate Policy Benefits Vastly Exceed Costs
New York, Massachusetts Move on Energy Storage Targets
Massachusetts set its first targets, and quickly drew criticism for starting too low. New York lawmakers took their first step by passing an energy storage bill.
New York is set to join the ranks of a small but growing number of pioneering states that are setting targets for energy storage as wind, solar and other renewable energies supply increasing amounts of power to their electric grids.
So far, only a few states have laws demanding that utilities meet targets for energy storage—including California, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Nevada—and their targets vary. Massachusetts drew criticism today when it announced its first targets, which energy experts considered well below what will be needed.
New York's legislature has now passed a bill that would join those states by asking its Public Service Commission to set targets for energy storage in New York by as early as January of next year.
"Anyone in the business knows storage is critical to making intermittent energy a reality. Because of this, New York has got to take a leadership role," said Westchester Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, who co-sponsored the bill. She said she was confident that Gov. Andrew Cuomo would sign it.
Under Cuomo, New York moved to significantly upgrade its green energy ambitions. In 2015, the state set goals of having 50 percent of electricity generated by carbon-free renewables by 2030. The challenge from renewables like wind and solar is, of course, that their generation is variable and, therefore, storage is crucial to maintaining continuity of energy flow.
There are several ways to store energy from intermittent generators like wind and solar and save it for later use. Some are already widely deployed, like pumping water behind hydroelectric dams; others are coming on fast, like banks of modern batteries. As wind and solar grow, the competition between storage technologies is expected to grow brisker.
Like legislation in other states, the New York State bill gives regulators a great deal of flexibility to set targets for both the amount and type of storage. The only criteria is that it be the best available and most cost-effective technology. The objectives are clearly to create more reliability in the system to support zero-carbon energy sources.
California and Oregon currently set the standards for energy storage in their states. California has directed its utilities to build 1.35 gigawatts of energy storage—toward which they have already made substantial progress including opening the largest lithium ion storage facility in the United States. Nevada is writing its standards now. Additionally, Maryland offers an energy storage tax credit to encourage adding more storage.
The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources just announced its energy storage goals, but only required utilities to produce 200 megawatts of energy storage by 2020. That was very disappointing to many energy experts who had hoped they might set a new high bar.
Tim Fox, vice president of Clearview Energy Partners, a research firm for institutional investors and corporate strategist, was one of those who had been expecting more. "We consider 200 megawatt hours to be a comparatively modest target in relation to expectations," he said. "The 200 would represent considerably less than one percent of the state's total annual electricity consumption projected in 2020."
Read more at New York, Massachusetts Move on Energy Storage Targets
So far, only a few states have laws demanding that utilities meet targets for energy storage—including California, Oregon, Massachusetts, and Nevada—and their targets vary. Massachusetts drew criticism today when it announced its first targets, which energy experts considered well below what will be needed.
New York's legislature has now passed a bill that would join those states by asking its Public Service Commission to set targets for energy storage in New York by as early as January of next year.
"Anyone in the business knows storage is critical to making intermittent energy a reality. Because of this, New York has got to take a leadership role," said Westchester Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, who co-sponsored the bill. She said she was confident that Gov. Andrew Cuomo would sign it.
Under Cuomo, New York moved to significantly upgrade its green energy ambitions. In 2015, the state set goals of having 50 percent of electricity generated by carbon-free renewables by 2030. The challenge from renewables like wind and solar is, of course, that their generation is variable and, therefore, storage is crucial to maintaining continuity of energy flow.
There are several ways to store energy from intermittent generators like wind and solar and save it for later use. Some are already widely deployed, like pumping water behind hydroelectric dams; others are coming on fast, like banks of modern batteries. As wind and solar grow, the competition between storage technologies is expected to grow brisker.
Like legislation in other states, the New York State bill gives regulators a great deal of flexibility to set targets for both the amount and type of storage. The only criteria is that it be the best available and most cost-effective technology. The objectives are clearly to create more reliability in the system to support zero-carbon energy sources.
California and Oregon currently set the standards for energy storage in their states. California has directed its utilities to build 1.35 gigawatts of energy storage—toward which they have already made substantial progress including opening the largest lithium ion storage facility in the United States. Nevada is writing its standards now. Additionally, Maryland offers an energy storage tax credit to encourage adding more storage.
The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources just announced its energy storage goals, but only required utilities to produce 200 megawatts of energy storage by 2020. That was very disappointing to many energy experts who had hoped they might set a new high bar.
Tim Fox, vice president of Clearview Energy Partners, a research firm for institutional investors and corporate strategist, was one of those who had been expecting more. "We consider 200 megawatt hours to be a comparatively modest target in relation to expectations," he said. "The 200 would represent considerably less than one percent of the state's total annual electricity consumption projected in 2020."
Read more at New York, Massachusetts Move on Energy Storage Targets
In the U.S., the South Will Pay the Most for Climate Change, Study Finds
“If we continue on the current path, our analysis indicates it may result in the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the country’s history.”
As temperatures rise in the coming decades, no part of the United States will pay a bigger price than the South.
That’s according to a study published in the June 30 edition of the journal Science that forecasts the economic damage of climate change on a county-by-county basis. Overall, researchers found, the parts of the country that are already the hottest and have the greatest economic disparities will likely suffer the most.
“In the absence of major efforts to reduce emissions and strengthen resilience, the Gulf Coast will take a massive hit,” Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers Univesity-New Brunswick and one of the study’s co-authors, said in a release.
The Gulf Coast’s “exposure to sea-level rise ― made worse by potentially stronger hurricanes ― poses a major risk to its communities,” Kopp said. “Increasingly extreme heat will drive up violent crime, slow down workers, amp up air conditioning costs, and threaten people’s lives.”
As a result, economic opportunities would shift northward and westward from the South and the Midwest, stimulating economies along the Rocky Mountains and in the northern border states:
But while those historically cooler regions would benefit from things like higher agricultural yields and lower energy costs, the overall American economy is expected to suffer.
For each 1 degree Fahrenheit that temperatures rise, the team of economists and climate scientists say, we should expect the U.S. gross domestic product to drop by about 0.7 percent.
“Unmitigated climate change will be very expensive for huge regions of the United States,” said lead researcher Solomon Hsiang, an economist and public policy expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “If we continue on the current path, our analysis indicates it may result in the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the country’s history.”
Read more at In the U.S., the South Will Pay the Most for Climate Change, Study Finds
That’s according to a study published in the June 30 edition of the journal Science that forecasts the economic damage of climate change on a county-by-county basis. Overall, researchers found, the parts of the country that are already the hottest and have the greatest economic disparities will likely suffer the most.
“In the absence of major efforts to reduce emissions and strengthen resilience, the Gulf Coast will take a massive hit,” Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers Univesity-New Brunswick and one of the study’s co-authors, said in a release.
The Gulf Coast’s “exposure to sea-level rise ― made worse by potentially stronger hurricanes ― poses a major risk to its communities,” Kopp said. “Increasingly extreme heat will drive up violent crime, slow down workers, amp up air conditioning costs, and threaten people’s lives.”
As a result, economic opportunities would shift northward and westward from the South and the Midwest, stimulating economies along the Rocky Mountains and in the northern border states:
But while those historically cooler regions would benefit from things like higher agricultural yields and lower energy costs, the overall American economy is expected to suffer.
For each 1 degree Fahrenheit that temperatures rise, the team of economists and climate scientists say, we should expect the U.S. gross domestic product to drop by about 0.7 percent.
“Unmitigated climate change will be very expensive for huge regions of the United States,” said lead researcher Solomon Hsiang, an economist and public policy expert at the University of California, Berkeley. “If we continue on the current path, our analysis indicates it may result in the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the country’s history.”
Read more at In the U.S., the South Will Pay the Most for Climate Change, Study Finds
Floating Wind Plan Could Finally Crack California’s Offshore Market
Falling prices, improving technology, and smart public policies are changing the calculations.
Until recently, offshore wind simply didn’t make economic sense along the West Coast, because the steep continental shelf makes it prohibitively expensive to build the normal underwater foundations. But the ability to erect increasingly large wind turbines on floating platforms has presented new possibilities, particularly in California, where state renewable-energy mandates must be met even if the electricity prices aren’t as cheap as fossil-fuel options.
A 2015 report from the Carbon Trust, an organization that promotes efficiency and emissions reduction, estimated that the average costs over the lifetime of a large commercial floating wind project would be around $110 to $123 per megawatt-hour. That’s more expensive than natural gas, but already around the cost of fixed offshore wind. Meanwhile, improving turbine technology and greater economies of scale are expected to drive down costs much further by the time a project like the one in Morro Bay would actually be built. Floating wind also allows developers to go further offshore, where it’s possible to capture far more energy and minimize environmental impact, says Alla Weinstein, founder of Trident Winds, which proposed the project.
The confluence of greater energy potential, falling prices, and renewable-friendly public policies could finally open up a promising new segment of the wind industry, potentially offering a vast new supply of clean energy.
...
Dividing Allegiances
Whether or not this particular project ever gets built, by Trident Winds or another firm, the unsolicited proposal has already set in motion a bigger and more consequential undertaking: it prompted California’s governor, Jerry Brown, to ask the Department of the Interior to establish a state task force in coordination with Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, initiating the formal process of identifying promising areas for wind energy development off the state’s coastline.
The task force hopes to produce the list of potential sites around the end of this year, says Joan Barminski, BOEM’s regional director for the Pacific. Following high-level environmental reviews of those locations, the government will hold lease sale auctions that will allow wind energy companies to bid on sites where they hope to build. Trident Winds could face competition for the Morro Bay site, as the Norwegian energy company Statoil has since expressed an interest in it as well.
The potential for new energy generation along the coast of California is huge. An assessment last year by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated that offshore wind farms in the area could produce 112 gigawatts, most of it in waters 200 feet deep or greater, where floating wind is the most viable option.
Read more at Floating Wind Plan Could Finally Crack California’s Offshore Market
A 2015 report from the Carbon Trust, an organization that promotes efficiency and emissions reduction, estimated that the average costs over the lifetime of a large commercial floating wind project would be around $110 to $123 per megawatt-hour. That’s more expensive than natural gas, but already around the cost of fixed offshore wind. Meanwhile, improving turbine technology and greater economies of scale are expected to drive down costs much further by the time a project like the one in Morro Bay would actually be built. Floating wind also allows developers to go further offshore, where it’s possible to capture far more energy and minimize environmental impact, says Alla Weinstein, founder of Trident Winds, which proposed the project.
The confluence of greater energy potential, falling prices, and renewable-friendly public policies could finally open up a promising new segment of the wind industry, potentially offering a vast new supply of clean energy.
...
Dividing Allegiances
Whether or not this particular project ever gets built, by Trident Winds or another firm, the unsolicited proposal has already set in motion a bigger and more consequential undertaking: it prompted California’s governor, Jerry Brown, to ask the Department of the Interior to establish a state task force in coordination with Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, initiating the formal process of identifying promising areas for wind energy development off the state’s coastline.
The task force hopes to produce the list of potential sites around the end of this year, says Joan Barminski, BOEM’s regional director for the Pacific. Following high-level environmental reviews of those locations, the government will hold lease sale auctions that will allow wind energy companies to bid on sites where they hope to build. Trident Winds could face competition for the Morro Bay site, as the Norwegian energy company Statoil has since expressed an interest in it as well.
The potential for new energy generation along the coast of California is huge. An assessment last year by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated that offshore wind farms in the area could produce 112 gigawatts, most of it in waters 200 feet deep or greater, where floating wind is the most viable option.
Read more at Floating Wind Plan Could Finally Crack California’s Offshore Market
Climate Refugees Will Search Hard for Homes
Where can the climate refugees go, if 2 billion are driven away by rising tides, and the interior available becomes ever more inhospitable?
By 2060 around 1.4 bn people could be climate refugees, driven from low-lying coastal cities by sea level rise. By 2100, as the global population may have reached 11bn, there could be 2bn climate refugees.
To feed those 9 to 11 bn people expected in the second half of the century, farmers will have to grow as much food in 40 years as they have grown in the last 8,000 or so.
And in a world of accelerating sea level rise and climate change, in which farmland is being degraded and turned to desert, in which ever more land is set aside for carbon storage in the form of forest, and in which the strains of survival increase social divisions and social conflict, there is a new challenge: where will the 2bn climate refugees find new homes?
“The colliding forces of human fertility, submerging coastal zones, residential retreat, and impediments to inland resettlement are a huge problem,” said Charles Geisler, professor emeritus of development sociology at Cornell University, in New York state.
“We offer preliminary estimates of the lands unlikely to support new waves of climate refugees due to the residues of war, exhausted natural resources, declining net primary productivity, desertification, urban sprawl, land concentration, ‘paving the planet’ with roads, and greenhouse gas storage zones offsetting permafrost melt.”
In any concerted attempts to contain climate change and limit global warming, climate scientists have to consider two big things. One is: how to drastically reduce fossil fuel use. The other is: how to use the land surface so that it takes up atmospheric carbon dioxide most efficiently.
Professor Geisler and his co-author Ben Currens, an earth and environmental scientist at the University of Kentucky, look at the big picture of land use in the long term.
They report in the journal Land Use Policy that they considered the implications of an ever faster rate of global sea level rise, as atmospheric temperatures warm and glaciers melt.
A study in Nature Climate Change has just confirmed that the seas that in the last century were rising by on average 2.2mm a year are now rising by 3.3mm a year. “Although reclaiming land from oceans has been an important human project for millennia,” write Geisler and Currens in their study, “it seems that oceans are now ‘reclaiming’ the land.”
They start from the premise that global mean sea level rise will continue beyond 2100, and from the prediction that for every 1°C of climate warming, humans should expect an eventual 2.3 meter rise in sea levels.
Read more at Climate Refugees Will Search Hard for Homes
To feed those 9 to 11 bn people expected in the second half of the century, farmers will have to grow as much food in 40 years as they have grown in the last 8,000 or so.
And in a world of accelerating sea level rise and climate change, in which farmland is being degraded and turned to desert, in which ever more land is set aside for carbon storage in the form of forest, and in which the strains of survival increase social divisions and social conflict, there is a new challenge: where will the 2bn climate refugees find new homes?
“The colliding forces of human fertility, submerging coastal zones, residential retreat, and impediments to inland resettlement are a huge problem,” said Charles Geisler, professor emeritus of development sociology at Cornell University, in New York state.
“We offer preliminary estimates of the lands unlikely to support new waves of climate refugees due to the residues of war, exhausted natural resources, declining net primary productivity, desertification, urban sprawl, land concentration, ‘paving the planet’ with roads, and greenhouse gas storage zones offsetting permafrost melt.”
In any concerted attempts to contain climate change and limit global warming, climate scientists have to consider two big things. One is: how to drastically reduce fossil fuel use. The other is: how to use the land surface so that it takes up atmospheric carbon dioxide most efficiently.
Professor Geisler and his co-author Ben Currens, an earth and environmental scientist at the University of Kentucky, look at the big picture of land use in the long term.
They report in the journal Land Use Policy that they considered the implications of an ever faster rate of global sea level rise, as atmospheric temperatures warm and glaciers melt.
A study in Nature Climate Change has just confirmed that the seas that in the last century were rising by on average 2.2mm a year are now rising by 3.3mm a year. “Although reclaiming land from oceans has been an important human project for millennia,” write Geisler and Currens in their study, “it seems that oceans are now ‘reclaiming’ the land.”
They start from the premise that global mean sea level rise will continue beyond 2100, and from the prediction that for every 1°C of climate warming, humans should expect an eventual 2.3 meter rise in sea levels.
Read more at Climate Refugees Will Search Hard for Homes
China Energy Demand May Already Have Peaked: Researchers
The study by the China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) study said China's total energy consumption is expected to fall to the equivalent of 4 billion tonnes of standard coal in 2020, which would represent a decline of 8 percent from last year.
Consumption would then inch down to 3.74 billion tonnes in 2030 and 3 billion tonnes by 2050, the study said.
"(Peak demand) could be this year or next year - this is a gradual process and isn't just coming down suddenly from a very pronounced summit," said Qiang Liu, director of CASS's Institute of Quantitative and Technical Economics.
The CASS study suggests Beijing is cutting coal use far faster than expected, and comes weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump decided to quit the 195-nation Paris agreement on climate change and reaffirmed his commitment to revive U.S. fossil fuels.
It also indicates China could reach its pledge to bring climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions to a peak by "around 2030" earlier than expected, given that the energy sector is estimated to account for 70-80 percent of its CO2 emissions.
Read more at China Energy Demand May Already Have Peaked: Researchers
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