Category: Global warming

It is Time to Take the Next Step on Energy Policy

The following piece was first published on energypost.eu and the text is reprinted here as a new blog post.
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US desperately needs a national energy policy
September 24, 2015 by Allan Hoffman

The US – and indeed the world – is at a crossroads when it comes to the choice on how we want to provide energy services in the future, writes US energy expert Allan Hoffman. According to Hoffman, the US desperately needs a national energy policy that recognizes the importance of moving to a renewable energy future as quickly as possible. Without such a policy, economic growth, the environment and national security will suffer.

There are two fundamental ‘things’ needed to sustain human life, water and energy. Water is the more precious of the two as reflected in the Arab saying “Water is life.” Without water life as we know it would not exist, and there are no substitutes for water – without it we die.

We also need energy to power our bodies, derived from chemical conversions of the food we consume. We also need energy to enable the external energy services we rely on in daily life – lighting, heating, cooling, transportation, clean water, communications, entertainment, and commercial and industrial activities. Where energy differs from water as a critical element of sustainable development is the fact that energy is available in many different forms for human use – e.g., by combustion of fossil fuels, nuclear power, and various forms of renewable energy.

Critical juncture

Today the U.S., and indeed the world, stands at a critical juncture on how to provide these energy services in the future. Historically, energy has been provided to some extent by human power, by animal power, and the burning of wood to create heat and light. Wind energy was also used for several centuries to power ships and land-based windmills that provided mechanical energy for water-pumping and threshing. With the discovery and development of large energy resources in the form of stored chemical energy in hydrocarbons such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas, the world turned to the combustion of these fuels to release large amounts of thermal energy and eventually electricity with the development of steam power generators. Nuclear power was introduced in the period following World War II as a new source of heat for producing steam and powering electricity generators and ships.

My recommendation is to put a long-term and steadily increasing price on carbon emissions to motivate appropriate private sector decisions to use fewer fossil fuels and more renewable energy and let the markets work

Renewable energy, energy that is derived directly or indirectly from the sun’s energy intercepted by the earth (except for geothermal energy that is derived from radioactive decay in the earth’s core), has been available for a while in the form of hydropower, originally in the form of run-of-the-river water wheels, and since the 20th century in the form of large hydroelectric dams. Other forms of renewable energy have emerged recently as important options for the future, driven by steadily reducing costs, the realization that fossil fuels, while currently available in large quantity but eventually depletable, put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when combusted, contributing to global warming and associated climate change. Renewable energy technologies, except for biomass conversion or combustion, puts no carbon into the atmosphere, but even in the biomass case it is a no-net-carbon situation since carbon is absorbed in the growing of biomass materials such as wood and other crops.

Support for renewables is also driven by increasing awareness that while nuclear power generation does not put carbon into the atmosphere it does create multigenerational radioactive waste disposal problems, can be expensive, raises low probability but high consequence safety issues, and is a step on the road to proliferation of nuclear weapons capability. Another driver is the now well documented and growing understanding that renewable energy, in its many forms, can provide the bulk of our electrical energy needs, as long disputed by competing energy sources.

Clean future

All these introductory comments are leading to a discussion of the energy policy choice facing our country, and other countries, and my recommendations for that policy. This choice has been avoided by the U.S. Congress in recent years, much to the short-term and long-term detriment of the U.S. We desperately need a national energy policy that recognizes the importance of energy efficiency and moving to a renewable energy future as quickly as possible. That policy should be one that creates the needed environment for investment in renewable technologies and one that will allow the U.S. to be a major economic player in the world’s inevitable march to a clean energy future.

Before getting into policy specifics, let me add just a few more words on renewable energy technologies. Hydropower is well known as the conversion of the kinetic energy of moving water into electrical energy via turbine generators. Solar energy is the direct conversion of solar radiation directly into electricity via photovoltaic (solar) cells or the use of focused/concentrated solar energy to produce heat and then steam and electricity. Wind energy, an indirect form of solar energy due to uneven heating of the earth’s surface, converts the kinetic energy of the wind into mechanical energy and electricity. Geothermal energy uses the heat of the earth to heat water into steam and electricity, or to heat homes and other spaces directly. Biomass energy uses the chemical energy captured in growing organic material either directly via combustion or in conversion to other fuel sources such as biofuels. Ocean energy uses the kinetic energy in waves and ocean currents, and the thermal energy in heated ocean areas, to create other sources of mechanical and electrical energy. All in all, a rich menu of energy options that we are finally exploring in depth.

Controversial

Energy policy is a complicated and controversial field, reflecting many different national, global, and vested interests. Today’s world is largely powered by fossil fuels and is likely to be so powered for several decades into the future until renewable energy is brought more fully into the mainstream. Unnfortunately this takes time as history teaches, and the needs of developing and developed nations (e.g., in transportation) need to be addressed during the period in which the transition takes place.

The critical need is to move through this transition as quickly as possible. Without clear national energy policies that recognize the need to move away from a fossil fuel-based energy system, and to a low-carbon clean energy future, as quickly as possible, this inevitable transition will be stretched out unnecessarily, with adverse environmental, job-creation, and other economic and national security impacts.

My recommendation is to put a long-term and steadily increasing price on carbon emissions to motivate appropriate private sector decisions to use fewer fossil fuels and more renewable energy and let the markets work. Nuclear power, another low-carbon technology, remains an option as long as the problems listed earlier can be addressed adequately. My personal view is that renewables are a much better answer.

The revenues generated by such a ‘tax’ can be used to reduce social inequities introduced by such a tax, lower other taxes, and enable investments consistent with long-term national needs. In the U.S. it also provides a means for cooperation between Republicans and Democrats, something we have not seen for several decades. It is clear that President Obama ‘gets it’. It is now more than time for U.S. legislators to get it as well.

Editor’s Note (Karel Beckman, energypost.eu)

Allan Hoffman, former Senior Analyst in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), writes a regular blog: Thoughts of a Lapsed Physicist.

On Energy Post, we regularly publish posts from Allan’s blog,in his blog section Policy & Technology. His writings often deal with issues at the intersection of energy technology, policy and markets. Allan, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from Brown University, served as Staff Scientist with the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and in a variety of senior management positions at the U.S. National Academies of Sciences and the DOE. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

One More Blog Post About Global Warming

I admit to be being concerned about global warming, its many impacts, present and future, on human welfare, and the insidious fact that those least responsible for global warming and the resultant climate change are likely to suffer the most serious impacts. I also admit to anger at my fellow humans, both scientific and political, who continue to deny the scientific basis for concern about global warming when the consensus among scientists is overwhelming, an unusual situation in science. It is a failure for which the deniers and minimizers should be held accountable.

In retrospect it is easy to reflect on human history and find examples where numbers of people, some highly educated and well respected, were wrong about important events and changes in society. Certainly many were sincere in their ultimately incorrect beliefs, based on limited available information and their life experiences and inevitable mental filters for processing that information. Others were undoubtedly self-serving opportunists who perhaps knew better but compromised their integrity. In this latter category I include those scientists and other well-informed people who denied the link between smoking and serious health effects, and more recently those who deny global warming or minimize its impacts. In my mind they are people who have sold their souls for filthy lucre.

What is so hard to understand about global warming? It is the same physical process that occurs in a car on a hot day that we all experience. The visible light rays from the sun, distributed in a spectrum determined by the sun’s surface temperature (about 5,500C) easily penetrate the car’s glass windows and are absorbed by the car’s interior which gets warm and often hot to the touch. These warm or hot surfaces then reradiate in a spectrum different from the sun’s radiative spectrum because of their vastly different surface temperatures. The basic physics is the same – Planck’s Law, first proposed in 1900, determines the spectral distribution and intensities of the radiation emitted by a black body at temperature T. In a car the reradiated heat from the interior surfaces is mostly in the infrared region which the glass is not as transparent to as it is to the visible radiation from the sun. This trapping of the reradiated heat causes the car’s interior temperature to rise until enough reradiated infrared radiation gets through the glass due to the interior’s now higher temperature to provide a balance between the energy of the incoming and outgoing radiation streams. This is exactly what happens in the earth’s atmosphere, with gases in the atmosphere playing the role of the glass windshield and determining the atmosphere’s transmission characteristics. Important global warming gases are CO2, largely from combustion of fossil fuels, and natural gas (methane), and a few others. The earth’s current temperatures, hospitable to life, reflect such an energy balance between the sun and the earth. Venus is an example of where the equilibrium temperature reached by the planet to achieve an energy balance with the sun is much higher.

This is a long introduction to my real purpose in this blog post, to share with you a recent statement on global warming that was forwarded to me by a colleague. I found it clearly written, insightful and powerful. Its author is Dr. David Vernon who has advanced degrees in mathematics and life sciences. He has had a long career in technical areas, and currently serves as a principal at Carbontech Global LLC. Carbontech’s mission is to turn “..organic waste streams into renewable energy streams..”

The statement follows:
“On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 2:57 PM, David Vernon wrote:
Global warming is not a theory. It is a measurement, known to the climate science community since 1900. Climate change as a result of global warming is a physical phenomenon. Certain air masses become weaker, others stronger, the circulation changes, the sea currents change, etc. It is just physics. The CO2 hypothesis was first presented in the 1920s by a Nobel-winning chemist, who proved that it was possible for increased atmospheric CO2, another actual physical measurement, to account for the increase in the average earth surface temperature. The amount of carbon required to double tropospheric CO2 from .04% to .08% is huge – there is no place for it to have come from except the burning of coal for 250 years. Until the advent of supercomputers in the 1980s, it was impossible to calculate the appropriate correlation statistics within a human lifetime, but by 1990 the math was done – the case is, as we say, proven. it is coal burning for energy that has warmed the globe, counteracting the ice-age cooling that is produced by orbital, rotational, and solar cycles, threatening our coastal settlements, our water supplies, and our agricultural production while increasing the severity and intensity of all storms. Scientists are now debating how bad this will get for us, how soon, and how this will ultimately affect the oncoming ice age.

This is not rocket science. The reason it took supercomputers was the volume of point data to be included in the calculations. The earth is about 8,000 miles thick, giving a surface are of more than 200 million square miles. Even one data point per square mile is unmanageably large. Furthermore, air movement is driven by pressure and temperature differences, which are in turn changed by air movement, so there are second order, third order, and higher order effects which must also be included in any mathematical analysis.

The issue is the inconvenience of the truth. The United States derives about 40% of its electricity from coal combustion. Several States, many companies, and thousands of Americans depend on this coal business for their livelihoods. This is not a problem in “right and wrong”. it is a problem in complex and conflicting human interests. It is wishful thinking to cope with an inconvenient truth by denying it. It is also human nature. However, we cannot command physics, or chemistry, or even biology, and we can barely control our own human behavior. Perhaps it is time to return to the meaning of republican government – we choose the smartest and least corruptible people to represent us, make these decisions for us, and counteract the pressure from short term interests for short term gains. Without life, money is just trash.”

I hope you find this statement as powerful as I did.

Note: this week marks the 2-year anniversary of this blog – my first blog post was published on May 29, 2013. I intend to keep blogging on this site, but perhaps less frequently than to date (93 posts in 104 weeks) as some of my energies are being diverted to writing a book on the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables as seen by me since 1969. I hope to finish the book within the calendar year, but as I’ve learned from several book-writing friends it is not easy to gauge how long it will take. It will be a personal, not a technical, book – my views on the technical aspects of energy issues are well documented in this blog.

Addressing Climate Change – A Needed Policy

The following editorial appeared today (25 April 2015) in the Washington Post:

““CLIMATE CHANGE can no longer be denied,” President Obama said in Everglades National Park on Wednesday. “It can’t be edited out. It can’t be omitted from the conversation.” No matter how much, Mr. Obama might have added, Republican presidential hopefuls would like to neglect the matter.
Since the GOP presidential season began, Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), the first major Republican to declare his candidacy, sounded the most extreme note on global warming, insisting that his attacks on scientists make him akin to Galileo standing up to 16th-century theological authorities. Shortly after announcing his candidacy, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) offered some vague doubts about how much humans contribute to climate change. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who has not yet formally entered the race, said that he is “concerned” about climate change and that the United States should negotiate with other nations about it, but he also suggested that the private economy has already addressed the problem and that he’s more worried about the “hollowing out of our industrial core.”
The common element among GOP leaders is resistance to the notion that the government needs a significant policy against greenhouse-gas emissions. What would the national conversation be like if Mr. Obama got his way and they accepted the need to act with ambition?
Ironically, it wouldn’t be kind to some of Mr. Obama’s policies, but that’s not his fault. Because of the GOP’s abdication, the Obama administration has cobbled together a climate plan from legal authorities it could exercise without Congress’s say-so. The result is an awkwardly designed and inefficient approach. A more reasonable Congress could shape a more efficient plan, with an eye toward sparing the economy gratuitous pain.
Economists have known for decades how to do this. First, the government should eliminate energy subsidies of all kinds — for fmossil fuels as well as renewable energy. Then Congress should put a significant tax on carbon-dioxide emissions and set it to rise over time. The resulting market forces would decide how the economy would move to a greener state. Consumers and businesses would have more reason to consider wasting less electricity, buying efficient appliances and investing in products that require less carbon dioxide to make. Generators of electricity would have an incentive to use cleaner fuels and renewable sources of energy — when it makes economic sense, not when the Environmental Protection Agency decides they must. Companies that exploit giveaway subsidy policies would have to compete fairly.
Republicans, meanwhile, could return any revenue raised to taxpayers, either directly or by reducing taxes on labor, on corporations or in any manner of their choosing.
The nation’s climate debate has been impoverished by the absence of responsible conservative voices. A revenue-neutral carbon tax is a reform Republicans should love. It could end irrational federal subsidies, lower the GOP’s most-hated taxes and harness market efficiency to provide some insurance for the planet at a minimal cost. Instead, the party’s would-be leaders appear to be looking for any way to avoid engaging seriously.”

I don’t always agree with the Post’s editorial positions, but on this subject I agree strongly.  My views on the need for putting a price on carbon emissions to allow market forces to address global warming and climate change are well documented in several of the posts you will find on this blog web site. I also agree, and have written, that government subsidies to energy companies are unbalanced and need redress if not outright elimination so that energy technologies can compete on a level playing field. I also agree that using the resulting revenue proceeds of putting a price on carbon emissions to address inequities and reduce other taxes is a basis for bipartisan cooperation between Democrats and Republicans.

It is more than time for the U.S. Congress to get on the right side of history and address the global warming issue in a way that protects the long-term interests of the nation and the larger global community.

Two New Books Worthy of Your Attention

I am pleased to use my blog to bring two new books to your attention, one just published and one to be published next month.  Both are highly recommended.

The first, just published by W.W.Norton and co-authored by Lester Brown and several of his Earth Policy Institute colleagues, is ‘The Great Transition: Shifting from Fossil Fuels to Solar and Wind Energy’.  It addresses the energy transition that is unfolding rapidly around us and is a topic I have been writing and speaking about for many years, including in this blog. Lester has been an important part of this discussion from day one  and in this book he and his fellow authors “..explain the environmental and economic wisdom of moving to solar and wind energy and show how fast change is coming.” It is a global topic that needs increased public visibility and discussion, one that will impact the energy systems that our children and grandchildren will inherit.  Without going into too much detail I will quote just a few lines from the book’s preface and  the comments of two book reviewers:

“Preface: Energy transitions are not new. Beginning several centuries ago, the world shifted from wood to coal. The first oil well was drilled over 150 years ago. Today we are at the start of a new energy transition, one that takes us from an economy run largely on coal and oil to one powered by the sun and wind. This monumental shift, which is just getting underway, will compress a half-century of change into the next decade.

The purpose of this book is to describe how this great transition is starting to unfold. While the book cuts a wide swath and takes a global view, it is not meant to be a comprehensive study of the world energy economy. Each technology discussed here easily deserves its own book, as do many topics important to the transition that are not discussed in depth here, such as energy efficiency, the “smartening” of electrical grids, energy savings opportunities in industry, and batteries and other energy storage…..”

Reviewer comments: “Brown’s ability to make a complicated subject accessible to the general reader is remarkable..”(Katherine Salant, Washington Post); “..a highly readable and authoritative account of the problems we face from global warming to shrinking water resources, fisheries, forests, etc. The picture is very frightening. But the book also provides a way forward.”(Clare Short, British Member of Parliament).

The second recommended book, due out next month, is Gustaf Olsson’s second edition of  ‘Water and Energy Threats and Opportunities’. The first edition was published by the International Water Association in June 2012.

In my review of his first edition I stated:  “Professor Olssons book, Water and Energy Threats and Opportunities, the result of a meticulous multi-year effort, meets an important and growing need: to define and illuminate the critical linkage between water and energy. He explores the water-energy nexus in detail, and carefully discusses its many implications, including for food production and its connection to global climate change. He properly and repeatedly emphasizes the important message that water and energy issues must be addressed together if society is to make wise and efficient use of these critical resources. Given its comprehensive scope and careful scholarship, the book will serve as a valuable addition to the libraries of students, researchers, practitioners, and government officials at all levels.”

In his expanded second edition Professor Olsson, a distinguished faculty member in industrial automation at Lund University in Sweden and a Distinguished Fellow of the International Water Association, adds additional and updated information on climate change,  energy system water requirements, renewable energy, and a clear and comprehensive discussion of the important subject of fracking for fossil fuel supplies which has recently emerged as a major public issue.

In its first incarnation Professor Olsson’s book qualified as a ‘bible’ on water-energy issues. In its second incarnation it qualifies even more so.

 

The Climate Change Thing – Revisited

I return to this topic because it is a growing global problem that must be addressed, and because I am disturbed by the continuing resistance by some members of the U.S. Congress to acknowledging the reality of global warming and resultant climate change. I am also scared because some of those members are in leadership positions in the 115th Congress that is just getting underway.

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What I consider to be uninformed and unscientific global warming denial or minimalization reminds me of several incidents in my own lifetime – the reluctance of some national leaders in the UK and the U.S. in the 1930s to realize the full implications of Hitler’s aggressive and inhumane practices; suppression of public discussion of the dangers of civilian use of nuclear power in the name of developing nuclear weapons to oppose Soviet aggression in Europe; failure in the 1960s to understand the nationalistic focus of Vietnam’s struggle for independence from France in the name of resisting Communist advances in Asia; resistance to environmental protection in the name of economic development; and more recently our invasion of Iraq in the name of disabling non-existent weapons of mass destruction. I know that some, perhaps many, people will disagree with some or all of these characterizations, but the lesson for me is that leadership that is not open to a range of views can lead us into quagmires of human suffering.

Global warming and climate change is one of those issues. James Inhofe, the new Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, is a human-induced global warming denier, apparently based on his religious beliefs. He may be sincere in these beliefs – how could global warming be occurring if G_d didn’t want it to happen – but just as sincerely I believe him to be wrong. I am a trained scientist who believes that science is an avenue to understanding and truth as best we can know it, and the science increasingly says that carbon emissions are increasing the greenhouse effect in the earth’s atmosphere. This changes the energy balance between the earth and the sun, resulting in slowly but steadily increasing temperatures on earth. What is especially scary is the heating of the oceans, both surface and at depth, which provide the energy for hurricanes, typhoons, and other weather events. By changing the climate this warming also changes precipitation patterns that are our major sources of water, and produces adverse effects on environment and public health. By not addressing these issues now our leaders are committing future generations to having to deal with these issues, and at much greater cost. It has also always bothered me that those most vulnerable to the adverse impacts of global warming are those least responsible for and least able to deal with it – poor people in many countries and on island nations.

So what difference does it make if Sen. Inhofe, and others like him, are climate change deniers? Unfortunately, he and others (here I bring to mind House Speaker Boehner and Senate Majority Leader McConnell) are in a position to stop or at least slow down federal action to control greenhouse gas emissions, delaying for at least two years U.S. action, in concert with others, to counteract climate change. His and their behavior also sends a signal to young people to discount science and overwhelming scientific consensus, on an issue that will undoubtedly impact their lives. It is also a negative reflection on the quality of U.S. governance.

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I would also note that these leaders will not be around to reap the whirlwind of their decisions. Climate change is a long-term issue, although some impacts are already becoming visible, and those making decisions for short-term politichal gain will not be around to face the voters when the bill comes due. Pressure from an educated public is the best avenue I see to changing this situation and putting us on a more responsible public policy path. Here’s hoping that not too much damage is done in the 115th Congress, and that climate change issues will be an important topic of discussion in the 2016 elections.