Putting a wedge in global warming

By Jill Hahn

The argument over global warming has shifted, from whether it’s real to what we ought to do about it.
On the one hand are those who’ll give you advice about what you, the individual consumer, can do to help. Buy energy-efficient appliances. Trade in your SUV for a hybrid. Change your lightbulbs to compact fluorescents.

On the other hand are those who point out that global warming is a problem of - well, of global dimensions, and your noble yet pitiful attempt to help is like hoping the ocean will care if you remove a drop of water. What you really need to do is learn how to adapt. Get flood insurance. Make sure your air-conditioning works.

So should you change your behavior, or is it pointless? In order to answer that, we need to get a handle on the magnitude of the problem, and the magnitude of your potential response.

Before the industrial age, Earth’s atmosphere contained about 280 parts per million (ppm) of CO2. Today the concentration of CO2 stands at about 375 ppm. There is some agreement that, in order to prevent most of the damaging climate change predicted by global models, we need to limit future atmospheric CO2 concentrations to no more than 500 ppm.
Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala, economists at Princeton University, asked what we would need to do in order to keep atmospheric CO2 from climbing past 500 ppm in the next 50 years. They found that carbon emissions would need to be held near the present level of 7 billion tons (or gigatons) of carbon per year (7 GtC/year) for the next 50 years. There’s a problem, though: emissions are currently on course to more than double in that time, pushing atmospheric CO2 concentrations past 700 ppm.

So Pacala and Socolow made a graph. The top line rises as emissions will if we continue “business as usual.” The bottom line is horizontal, holding steady at 7 billion tons of carbon per year. Pacala and Socolow then divided the difference between the top line and the bottom line into seven equal ‘wedges.’ Each wedge represents an emission-reducing activity that starts at zero today and increases until it accounts for a cumulative total of 25 GtC of reduced emissions over 50 years. In other words, if we can find seven different ways of lowering emissions by 25GtC over the next fifty years, we’ll keep ourselves below the ceiling of 500 ppm of atmospheric CO2.

Gigatons – that’s a lot of carbon. Trading in one SUV won’t do the trick. But what if we insisted that every new car sold in the United States be twice as fuel-efficient as the current fleet? That wouldn’t be hard to achieve, considering that right now the average American passenger car gets 22.4 mpg, while vans, pickups, and SUVs average a measly 16.2 mpg. Pull out your scratch paper.

We buy lots of new cars and light trucks in the US, 6.6 million in 2003 alone. If we doubled the fuel efficiency of these new vehicles, we would save over 5 billion gallons of gasoline per year. Each gallon of gasoline accounts for about 3 kg of carbon, so our new vehicles would save 17 million tons of C in a year. Over 50 years, the savings from that one year’s worth of new, more fuel-efficient automobiles would accrue to 846,387,000 tons, or 0.8 GtC.
Assuming that the same number of new vehicles is built each year for 50 years, these more efficient vehicles would save 21 GtC, almost an entire wedge. Buying that hybrid may represent only a tiny drop, but mandating higher fuel efficiency for all new vehicles would go a long way towards stopping draining the ocean.

What about potential energy savings in your home? Dr. William Moomaw, Director of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Tufts University, recently built a new home that uses one-third the energy of a conventional house. That’s a high bar to achieve, but “my contractor,” says Dr. Moomaw, “… has built houses that … use 2/3 of the energy of a standard house at no extra cost.”

We know how many new houses are built in the U.S. in a given year, and how much energy they use annually, because the U.S. Census and the Department of Energy keep track of it. We can therefore calculate annual carbon emissions due to new homes (not counting AC): 3,363,228 metric tons.

Let’s be conservative and imagine that these houses were built to be 25% more energy-efficient. That would save us 840,807 metric tons of carbon each year. Over 50 years, adding a million energy-efficient new houses each year, we get a total savings of 1GtC, or a twenty-fifth of a wedge. So, although buying an energy-efficient refrigerator is a responsible thing you can do right now, it’s changing how we build all new buildings that will really make a difference to the planet. And the sooner we begin, the more of an impact we’ll have, since accrued over fifty years, it’s the early changes that make the most difference.

And what about lightbulbs? In 2001, lighting accounted for 101 billion kilowatt hours of U.S. household electricity use, which translates about 105 metric tons C. Compact fluorescents would save 66% of that, or about 5 GtC over 50 years. That’s a fifth of a wedge, if we simply replaced every lightbulb in every home in America with compact fluorescents. How many people does it take to change a lightbulb? Everybody, if we want to change the world.

Jill Hahn, a Newton Highlands resident, is a biologist, a writer, and a mom. All three roles contribute to her interest in environmental issues. She can be reached at jkkhahn@comcast.net.

This article is archived at www.greendecade.org/environmentpage.html

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Why are we still using coal?

By Patricia Goldman/ Special To The Tab

Book Review
"Big Coal" By Jeff Goodell

When I was a child growing up in Pennsylvania in the 1940s, my father had to shovel dirty black lumps of coal into a fire in our basement furnace to heat our home. By 1950 we had switched to natural gas heat, but electricity was powering our many post-war appliances, from dishwasher to freezer to TV. I have always assumed that coal hasn't been used for ordinary energy since then.

In fact, dirty coal is powering a significant percentage of electric plants across this country, even in Massachusetts, far from Appalachian, Midwestern, and Wyoming coal mines. This electricity comes into our homes to power 21st century computers, stereos, DVD players and microwaves.

Why are we still using coal, which we know to be polluting, instead of cleaner, renewable sources of energy? That is the question answered in Jeff Goodell's fascinating new book, "Big Coal: the dirty secret behind America's energy future" ((c) 2006, Houghton Mifflin).

Goodell, a veteran journalist, spent three years researching and writing "Big Coal." It is a colorful narrative, with extensive footnotes, that takes you along on his trips down into an Appalachian coal mine, blasting the top off a Wyoming strip mine, riding on one of the mile long trains incessantly hauling coal across the country, visiting power plant managers, engineers, scientists, company executives, lobbyists and government officials.
Big Coal is a huge industry, wielding extraordinary influence in Washington and state capitols, with legions of lobbyists and millions of dollars in campaign contributions. As we worry about our dependence on overseas oil, it turns out that the biggest fossil fuel reserves in the world (25 percent of the world's recoverable reserves) are buried within the U.S. As of 2005, more than 120 new coal powered energy plants were planned or under construction in the U.S. The coal industry wins huge government subsidies, succeeds in choking environmental regulations, while its PR spinmasters promote the message that coal is safe and cheap.

Since the passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act, emissions per unit of energy from American coal plants have dropped, but the total "volume of pollution released by coal plants remains staggering." Coal plants are responsible for nearly 40 percent of U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide (the main greenhouse gas), plus sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, particulates, and some sixty varieties of what the EPA terms 'hazardous air pollutants', including toxins such as lead, chromium, arsenic and mercury" - and solid waste equal to three times as much as all municipal garbage in the country, laced with heavy metals. The coal-powered electricity industry was born in 1882, when Thomas Edison invented a dynamo in lower Manhattan that heated coal in four big boilers and used the steam to activate generators that produced enough current to light up 1200 lamps in the neighborhood. Black smoke and soot poured into the air and nearby residents immediately began to complain.
Edison realized that to capitalize financially on producing electric power, he had to locate the dirty dynamos out of sight and out of mind. Instead of simply selling the dynamos, he wanted to build the power plants, lay the wires, and make money by selling the electric current. Edison put Samuel Insull in charge of moving Edison Electric's operation to Schenectady, New York. Later, it became General Electric.

Insull moved on to take over Chicago Edison. He understood that "power plants are expensive to build but comparatively cheap to run." He convinced fellow power industry executives not to waste money building duplicate power plants. He argued that power companies would do better as monopolies regulated by the state. With Chicago's corrupt political machine at the time, there was little interference from regulators.Insull's strategy for growth (still pursued today) was to keep prices low, encourage consumption, and "promote electricity as clean and sanitary: no more soot from the coal stove!" He and Edison created a nation of "electricity junkies."

As the power companies grew into multi-state empires, reformers called for public ownership. Instead, Congress passed the 1935 Public Utility Holding Company Act, which broke up the huge companies and forbade competition among them. The Act established "cost-plus pricing", which guaranteed utilities a fixed return on their investments. The more electricity is used, the more the utilities earn. The utilities were required to pass 100 percent of any efficiency gains on to customers, so there was no incentive for them to spend money to develop more efficient and cleaner energy. The coal companies, the railroads hauling the coal and the power plants liked the income they were producing the old way.

Goodell points out that the cheap "cost" to customers does not include "the social, environmental and public health costs of burning dirty coal... the devastated mountains of West Virginia, the heart attacks and asthma caused by air pollution, the pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere" or the dead coal miners. These costs are "all offloaded onto the public." According to the ten-year ExterneE study, if the market accurately reflected these true costs, "old coal burners would be shut down because the price of the power they generated would be too high for the market to bear."

Recent events have favored Big Coal. Concerned that, if elected, Al Gore would work to regulate pollutants, Big Coal threw its money behind George W. Bush, who won and immediately began staffing regulatory agencies with former coal industry executives and lobbyists. The lobbyists have cynically worked to portray global warming as theory rather than fact. Big Coal has failed to pursue technologies to make coal energy cleaner and more efficient, such as coal liquefaction and sequestering CO2 underground.

Says Goodell, "The key debate today is not whether pollution from coal plants kills people. It indisputably does..." The question is, "Are we willing to put the earth's climate at risk to save ten bucks on our utility bills?"... Goodell also asks, "What can I do to lighten the load?...I simply believe that it's within our grasp to figure out less destructive ways to create and consume the energy we need."

Patricia Goldman was Executive Director of the Asthma & Allergy Foundation of America/New England Chapter, until she retired in 2004. She was also a contributing editor for the Newton Times.

This article is archived at www.greendecade.org/environmentpage

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Hurricane man blows into town

By Lois Levin/ Special To The Tab

Those who braved the cold on Feb. 27 to hear MIT Professor Kerry Emanuel's
Environmental Speaker Series lecture at the Newton Library were captivated by his
clear presentation of complex scientific data from his climate modeling research.
Dr Emanuel's data shows that the intensity of
hurricanes in the Atlantic has grown dramatically -
doubled - in the past 30 years. This is due largely to
human activity. We have released enormous amounts
of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by burning
oil and coal to create energy to power factories, heat
our homes and run our automobiles. We have
warmed the oceans, including the areas where
powerful storms are formed, and this translates
directly into more powerful hurricanes, with serious
consequences for coastal areas.
New England is highly vulnerable to hurricanes, which
have occurred at a remarkably steady rate for
centuries, averaging one every five years. As these
storms continue to grow more intense, they place us
at increasingly greater risk. Therefore, while we work
to address global warming, we must also empower
public agencies to plan for and cope with these
storms, which expose us to great physical danger and
financial risk. Insurance companies are already
refusing to provide coverage for storm damage in
many coastal areas.
The lecture, sponsored by the Green Decade Coaltion, will be aired on NewTV later
this spring.

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Frozen by uncertainty

By Eric Olson/ Special To The Tab

Global warming is upon us. Even the oil companies tell us so. BP, formerly known as
British Petroleum but now officially just "BP" (after spreading the rumor they wanted to
stand for "Beyond Petroleum") is running full-page ads in major newspapers
encouraging people to take the time to calculate their carbon footprint. The only
reason anyone would take the time is if they first believed there was some problem
with their carbon footprint, i.e., specifically carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas
formed whenever a fossil fuel is burned. Climate scientists have been fretting for a
couple of decades now that our species' emissions of billions of tons of CO2 per year
could warm up the planet, and both their models and their observations point clearly
now in that direction. So it is a great relief to see at least some of the major
beneficiaries of our carbon-intensive economy are finally encouraging consumers to
take note.

Let's say you do use the BP calculator or others like it to calculate your footprint. You
provide information on your household heating and air conditioning, your electricity
consumption, your mileage and miles driven, add in a plane trip or two, and don't
forget the hot water heater. What did you get? Between 15 and 20 tons per year? Are
you surprised that I guessed so close? It's not hard. Energy geeks all know that the
typical American house generates just over 13 tons annually, and we just add in 5 to
10 additional tons for transportation. Plane travel is especially costly by this measure.
Now what? This is the question of the decade. There is a great deal of uncertainty
about what if anything we can do on a personal level. Consider first the climate itself:
This is an unpredictable beast and has changed over the millennia all on its own.
There is a slim chance that it will either autocorrect (maybe more clouds will form and
will block the sun) or an act of God will save us at least temporarily (ash from large
volcanic eruptions also block the sun). A second rescue could come from our own
ingenuity: Surely we will come up with something - a cheap fuel from our own
garbage, cold fusion, vastly superior yet cheaper solar panels, etc. A third option is to
turn to the government and shout, "Make everyone suffer equally! Only then will I
accept sacrifice." Finally we could just be resigned to our fate. After all, maybe a
warmer world won't be so bad, really. We could just ride it out and send food to the
people suffering the worst consequences.

A hard-nosed economist, confronted with such uncertainty, might argue for a "wait but
watch closely" approach. If you act too soon, goes this reasoning, you may regret it
when some better option comes along. This sounds sensible, as does so much of
what economists say, but in light of the stakes involved (many species threatened with
extinction, 17% of the land area of Bangladesh to be lost with just a 1-meter rise in
sea level, hurricane intensity in the Atlantic up sharply over the past 30 years), a better
description of this response is "frozen by uncertainty". The deer-in-the-headlights
image comes to mind.

A middle ground is to do SOMETHING, even if it's small. Like get yourself down to
Swartz Hardware in Nonantum and check out their amazingly low prices on compact
fluorescent bulbs (full disclosure: I have no financial interest in that store). This could
be your Step One. Did you know that a single one of these twisty bulbs saves you
over $50 over its seven-year lifetime? Even if they still cost $10 they would be worth it,
but their cost is just a couple of bucks now, and the light quality has improved over
that of earlier versions.

As for Step Two, how about that $50 I just saved you, two lines back? Use that money
to support new renewable, clean electricity generation in New England. There's an
astonishing way to do this, and it gets your money multiplying all over the place.
Here's how it works: The government has already imposed a tiny clean power charge
on our utility bills. Look closely at your NStar bill and you'll see it. This money flows to
an entity called the Renewable Energy Trust Fund, which is charged with encouraging
new clean power (solar, wind, etc.) for the state. If you contribute $50 to support clean
power, the Trust fund will release an equivalent amount back to the City of Newton,
and the City has committed to spending this money on educational solar panel
displays on our public schools. (Oak Hill Middle School will be the first recipient, slated
for this summer.) Then the Trust releases a second $50 match, to support energy
efficiency projects in low-income housing in the state, wherever the need is greatest.
Finally, since this is a donation, you get a tax deduction for it, 100 percent of it. So you
can support new clean power, help put solar panels on a school, make a low-income
family a bit warmer next winter, get a tax deduction, and lo, it's free money to begin
with, because you bought the bulb at Swartz. Would you like to buy a second bulb?
To get going on this and join the growing throng of people voting with their pocket
books for renewable power, call the Mass Energy Consumers Alliance at 617-524-
3950 ext. 129, and ask to speak with Janna Cohen-Rosenthal. You may want to do
those other things - wait and watch closely, shout at the government, etc. - but the first
step is to crack through your own frozen uncertainty and support clean energy. One
lightbulb and one phone call at a time.

Eric J Olson, PhD, is Chairman of the Newton Citizens' Commission on Energy. He
teaches in the Sustainable International Development program, Heller School of
Social Policy & Management, Brandeis University.
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Learning Lessons From the Wind

Book Review by Eric J. Olson, PhD/ Special To The Tab

Book Review
Divine Wind, The Science and History of Hurricanes, by Kerry Emanuel, copyright 2005, Osford University Press.

If there is one must-learn phrase in Kerry Emanuel’s magnificent book it is this: hurricane amnesia. This is not what victims of hurricanes suffer after being struck by flying debris, this is the more widespread drift and denial that our seacoast culture slips into soon after the storm surge has receded and the insurance adjusters have written their reports. We stand witness to the tragedy of New Orleans--for now. We point fingers at the government--for now. We speculate on the role of global warming in all this, as if insanely powerful hurricanes were some new phenomenon on the scene. All of this diverts our attention from the real tough question, which is what should New Orleans become? And what about Florida, that vast low-lying peninsula with one of the higher growth rates of any state in the US? Do we really want to put so many families and dreams and treasure in harm’s way over and over again? This is the essence of hurricane amnesia: when a nation has such a profound attachment to place and growth and warm sandy beaches that we must forget just so we can move on. Addicts have their relatives as enablers, and we have…Uncle Sam’s flood insurance program?

Thankfully, Kerry Emanuel has written an antidote to hurricane amnesia, and in spite of his recent fame as herald of global warming (more on that below), his book also serves as a rebuttal to the notion that Katrina is retribution for the fact we’ve heated up the globe. What we get from Divine Wind is a very different image of these storms – one that we could relish if we would just pull our cities back from our subtropical coasts and watch the sea and the sun and swirling tropical air perform their ancient dance. People travel the world over to see a full eclipse of the sun or improve their look at a passing comet, why not be spectators (via satellite and pilotless planes) of the hurricane?

Here’s a pity of our modern age: we so dread these mighty winds we can’t enjoy them more. Dr. Emanuel shows the way, he is a storm-meister, a wind fanatic, a reveler in the power and the glory and the beauty of the hurricane. Read him -- you will be won over. Fond of literature? Interspersed throughout are poems, ballads, excerpts from The Tempest, snippets of great storm prose. Enjoy paintings? He has tracked down the world’s best storm-wracked work and here they are, rendered in superb color. Relish a good disaster tale? Every third or so chapter tells the story of one of the truly Great Storms of the past several centuries. Or perhaps you’re an engineer, or appreciate fine science writing? Dr. Emanuel the MIT professor patiently explains in words, with just a touch of algebra, how a hurricane is the closest thing nature offers to the ideal heat engine first described by Carnot. He even turns chaos theory into a human-interest story by telling the tale of its serendipitous discovery.
So great hurricanes have always been with us, and by building in their path we’re just asking for trouble. But there is something new, so new it’s scarcely mentioned in the book: humans are decisively fanning the flames that feed these storms. Dr. Emanuel was launched to fame this year on the basis of his August report in the prestigious journal Nature showing that hurricane intensity and duration are both increasing, in lock step with the warming of the oceans. Coming out just two weeks before Katrina, the report naturally led to a media surge on his office throughout the fall. That was when I first heard of him, interviewed on NPR, then again this January profiled in the NY Times. Sadly, the splendor of his book is lost in the intense focus on the conclusions of his Nature paper. But denial about climate change is perhaps even deeper than denial about hurricanes. Just maybe Kerry Emanuel will help us come to terms with both. We need more centrist scientists to come forward, now that the data are in. Here, listen: “There is no doubt that in the last 20 years, the earth has been warming up. And it's warming up much too fast to ascribe to any natural process we know about”. (Kerry Emanuel, NY Times, 10 January, 2006).

Hurricanes have indeed always been with us, they have always been born from hot tropical seas, and they have often slammed into land. But thanks to Dr. Emanuel we can all learn more about their savage beauty. And now he has shown us there is something new about them, that hurricane power in the Atlantic has more than doubled in the past 30 years. He and his colleagues are still working out how things could have gotten so much worse so fast, but Dr. Emanuel regretfully concludes that we humans are partly to blame. We warmed the seas, and that has changed the hurricane. Let’s not forget.

Eric Olson, PhD, Adjunct Professor of Ecology in the Sustainable International Development Program at the Heller School, Brandeis University, is Chair of the Energy Committee of the Green Decade Coalition.

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Katrina: the real story

By Lois A. Levin/ Special To The Tab

Katrina starts with "K". It's not even Labor Day and the weather service is halfway through the alphabet in naming hurricanes. A major US city is uninhabitable, inundated by the sea, with no infrastructure. Other communities along the Gulf Coast are in ruins.

For now, everyone is focused on rescue, evacuation, damage, looters, and the terrible human toll. As with the tsunami last year, poor people have remained vulnerable, while most affluent people had moved to higher ground.
No one should be surprised - horrified, but not surprised. It has long been predicted that a powerful storm would sooner or later overwhelm the city of New Orleans, which has kept the sea at bay by a massive system of levees - until now.
The deeper story? For years, a local Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, Ross Gelbspan, has been telling anyone who will listen that the emperor has no clothes. "Katrina's real name," he wrote in an Aug. 30 Boston Globe Op-ed, is "global warming." No matter how much money lobbyists spend to confuse us about the issue, the truth is that "to allow the climate to stabilize humanity must cut its use of coal and oil by 70 percent".

To protect the fossil fuel industries, our federal government is committed to a collision course with reality. Meanwhile, this unprecedented threat to humanity is being addressed with regional and local government initiatives, by non-governmental organizations, and even by some large corporations mindful that a rising tide will swamp their operations and their profits, and not just the people who live in coastal areas (like most of us).
We need to change the way we think. "The Environment" is not just another interesting subject; it is about our future as a species.

Newton has a large and respected community of environmental activists, including the modestly-named Green Decade Coalition, which has been working on energy issues for over a decade. We need more concerned citizens to join and support local environmental organizations, to help strengthen good programs and create new ones. We are all part of the problem. It's time for all of us to become part of the solution to the greatest global dilemma humanity has ever faced.

Lois A Levin, PhD, a clinical psychologist with a Certificate in Conservation Biology, and owner of the Lightbox Co of New England, is coordinator of the Environment page of the Newton TAB.

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