Carbon Capture “Vaporware” No Alternative to Real Clean Energy Technology
In the software industry, vaporware is a great new product announced by a developer, but is never released or is seriously delayed. Besides getting users’ hopes up, it can make potential customers hold off purchases of alternative solutions as they wait for the latest and greatest, which the developer swears is just around the corner. While vaporware is annoying, it’s arguably not much more than that for most people. But when it comes to clean tech, there is a lot more at stake, and betting on “clean coal” and carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) instead of real clean tech is a terrible idea.
Where do the CARMA plant numbers come from?
CARMA’s operating philosophy is to maximize possible transparency, so it’s only fair to shed some light onto how we calculated plant data. For the full CGD working paper, please read Calculating CARMA, Global Estimation of CO2 Emissions from the Power Sector by David Wheeler and Kevin Ummel.
CGD decided to focus on the power sector because it accounts for the most CO2 emissions (26%), and because it’s better-documented any other CO2-emitting sector. With that being said, it was no cakewalk to process emissions data from numerous sources, and we recognize that our findings are still far from perfect.
Widget exploration
As you may know, we just released a series of Widgets to help you explore CARMA. We’ve been looking at some of the plants tagged using the Improve Your CARMA widget, and there’s a lot of really interesting results to share. The following are just a few plants that you helped find…
CARMA in Action: Interfaith Forum on Wise Country Power Plant
One role of CARMA is to provide information on plant and firm-level CO2 emissions to local activists trying to block new coal fired powerplants. I am involved in one such effort in Northern Virginia, where a group with the wonderful name Interfaith Power and Light (GWIPLE) is working to organize religious organizations to combat climate change.
CARMA and CGD research in the wild
The Confronting Climate Change team at CGD is always interested to see what happens to our work once it leaves our desktops and joins the “marketplace of ideas,” fighting to make it to the top of a mountain of information on environmental issues. So we thought we’d quickly share two recent sightings from two very different corners of the internet.
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Welcome to CARMA
The objective of CARMA.org is to arm individuals with the information they need to forge a cleaner, low-carbon future. By revealing the unvarnished truth regarding both clean and dirty power producers, CARMA hopes to influence the opinions and decisions of consumers, investors, shareholders, managers, workers, activists, and policymakers. In other contexts, so-called “public information disclosure” techniques have proven successful in reducing traditional pollutants.
