Go to carma.org/blog/earth/ to learn more, or check out the screenshots below to get a taste of CARMA’s latest incarnation.

Last week’s Washington Post feature on CARMA focuses on massive growth in Chinese emissions. Although pollution wasn’t big news once the Olympics started, this year China’s power sector will emit more CO2 than the US power sector for the first time. Furthermore, rapid construction of coal-fired plants is wiping out any improvements in emissions intensity. But China will (sort of) head in the right direction, on carbon intensity, as it doubles electricity production over the next decade: the share of fossil-fuel generation will decrease from 83% to 73%.

What about the rest of the world? Well, in India the share of fossil fuel plants in India will only increase by 1% over the next decade and decrease in overall intensity, but generating capacity will triple over the same period and 77% of capacity will depend on fossil fuels.

In Europe, great wealth, soaring environmental rhetoric, and world-leading technologies suggest the region should be leading a massive push to replace fossil plants with renewable energy technologies. In fact, Europeans have some explaining to do, as the continent as a whole is poised to increase the share of fossil-fuel power from 47% to 53% at the same time governments are reconsidering the costs of subsidizing renewables. This certainly won’t help things.

And in the US, despite permitting delays and cancellations of coal-fired power plants, the fossil fuel share is set for a 2% increase, to 71%. Public support for renewable energy notwithstanding, the unstable investment climate caused by a Congressional standoff on investment tax credits is delaying rapid development of the sector.

In sum, the world is still heading in the wrong direction as far as the atmosphere is concerned. As IPCC head R.K. Pachauri was quoted as saying in a Washington Post op-ed last week, “The cities, power plants and factories we build in the next seven years will shape our climate in mid-century.” Postponing a push toward renewable energy will make the inevitable switch vastly more expensive than it has to be, in terms of the sunk costs of investments in fossil fuel technologies as well as the cost of any climate-related economic damage. These costs make the current lack of political will to reduce dependence on carbon-intensive energy seem staggeringly myopic.

But this will no doubt change. Already, India’s government is concerned about National Thermal Power Corporation’s CARMA, and that emissions disclosure on CARMA will hinder fundraising for coal power plants. Here in the US, major Wall Street banks are pricing CO2 in their lending models. But the question remains whether political leaders worldwide will act soon enough to make a difference.

We’ll keep you updated when CARMA 3.0 comes out next year!

The authors of MIT’s comprehensive Future of Coal study wrote in 2007 that

Coal use will increase under any foreseeable scenario because it is cheap and abundant … [and] CO2 capture and sequestration (CCS) is the critical enabling technology that would reduce CO2 emissions significantly while also allowing coal to meet the world’s pressing energy needs. …

The priority objective with respect to coal should be the successful large-scale demonstration of the technical, economic, and environmental performance of the technologies that make up all of the major components of a large-scale integrated CCS system – capture, transportation and storage.

Unfortunately, CCS pilot projects hoped to be operational before 2014 are very few and far between. In January, the Department of Energy cancelled the FutureGen pilot project because of cost overruns, and BP and Rio Tinto recently abandoned CCS plans in Australia because “rock formations wouldn’t seal in carbon dioxide.” To date no one knows what will happen to CO2 pumped underground in the US at volumes that rival the amount of natural gas transported each day, assuming suitable locations are found. Note also that new coal-fired plants need to be using the technology on a massive scale by 2020 to make a serious dent in CO2 emissions.

But the feasibility of CCS in a meaningful timeframe is not the only obstacle the technology faces. The Future of Coal financial model depends on a $30/ton CO2 charge to achieve cost parity with traditional coal-fired plants, not counting coal price rises in the year since the report came out. That’s right, not only is the technology completely unproven and unavailable in a usable timeframe, the electricity from CCS coal plants will always be more expensive than electricity from the most efficient coal plants out there today. Rapidly growing emitters in the developing world – i.e. China and India – will balk at a permanently higher energy costs, and keep building dozens of dirty plants every year.

Of course, $30/ton is also pretty close to the conservative $35/ton charge my colleague David Wheeler writes is necessary to cause a switch to environmentally benign solar thermal power generation, and is in the middle of the range of carbon charges expected by major US investment banks. Let’s not forget that strategic investments of $4-8 billion dollars by the World Bank’s Clean Technology Fund, or the Chinese, or the US government, could rapidly push the cost of solar thermal power down the cost curve as it scales up using proven technology.

And then there’s wind. The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) 20% Wind Energy by 2030 scenario points out that the price of wind-generated electricity has dropped by 80% in the last 20 years as the technology has improved. At an incremental cost of $43 billion for ramping up wind installations and upgrading the transmission network beyond the massive investment needed already – not counting the value of avoided emissions under a carbon trading scheme – the DOE estimates that the US can feasibly generate 20% of its electricity from wind by 2030.

This is not to say that there aren’t challenges to rolling out renewable energy technologies, from supplying baseload power to simply building the infrastructure on a massive scale. But these are not insurmountable problems, though Congress is not making things any easier.

The bottom line is that wind and other renewable energy technologies are well understood, are as affordable as CCS would be whenever it gets off the ground (in a decade?), and approach the cost of traditional coal power already. Looking at it this way, CCS may be the best kind of vaporware we can hope for in this situation: obsolete on delivery.

First up is Asthma Mom. Inspired by her daughter’s respiratory disorder, Asthma Mom comments on information and tools she encounters online in the hopes of helping other parents with children with asthma. She has used CARMA (look towards the end) to help choose where to relocate, ruling out cities surrounded by dirty coal plants that could aggravate her daughter’s condition. Interestingly, using CO2 emissions as a proxy for air quality is the inverse of the Vulcan Project’s methodology, which maps CO2 emissions using air quality data.

Second is Al Gore’s March Ted Talk, “New thinking on the climate crisis.” Presenting evidence on the pace of climate change, he uses a graph that is strikingly similar to one published last year by CGD fellow David Wheeler and research assistant Kevin Ummel in Another Inconvenient Truth: A Carbon-Intensive South Faces Environmental Disaster, No Matter What the North Does. Both graphs separate emissions paths for developed and developing countries, showing that business-as-usual economic growth in the developing world would cause climate change by itself within a few decades, even without developed-country emissions. Below are the original graph, the Gore slide, and the video of his talk.

Tell us how you use CARMA in cool ways we never thought of, and we’ll feature you here.

From Another Inconvenient Truth (Wheeler and Ummel, 2007)

A slide from the video of Al Gore’s Ted Talk.