Marc Jacobson, apparently. In his recent paper “Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security,” the Stanford professor incorporates findings from a variety of studies to rank clean energy technologies by their lifetime carbon dioxide emissions per unit of energy produced. Jacobson’s calculations include not only direct emissions, but also indirect emissions due to construction, mining, transportation, and other factors.

The addition of indirect emissions produces some compelling results. Even though coal with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) has few direct emissions, its overall emissions are over 80 times greater than those of the least-emitting technology, wind. In fact, every other clean energy technology considered in the paper – wind, photovoltaic, geothermal, tidal, wave, hydro, and nuclear – emits less than coal with CCS. Coal with CCS emits about as much as a natural gas power plant, roughly 60% less than coal without CCS.

The findings are important for all nations considering how to invest scarce resources for cutting emissions, but perhaps especially for the World Bank, as the steward of the proposed Clean Technology Fund (see David Wheeler’s latest discussion of this).

Jacobson doesn’t factor in the cost of each technology, but for policymakers deciding where to focus research and development, the implication is clear: coal with CCS is less “clean” than is often claimed. Rich and developing countries – and those designing various clean technology funds – would do well to take note.

See below for a graph of Jacobson’s estimates, read his paper, or watch a presentation of his findings.

(From Jacobson’s presentation slides. The blue bar is the lower bound of the estimated emissions; the red bar is the upper bound. All emissions values referenced above are the average of the lower and upper bound.)

Nearly two years after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to determine whether greenhouse gases (GHGs) pose a threat to peoples’ health or welfare – the first step toward regulation — the EPA this week issued a draft rule on a national GHG registry:

In general, EPA proposes that suppliers of fossil fuels or industrial greenhouse gases, manufacturers of vehicles and engines, and facilities that emit 25,000 metric tons or more per year of GHG emissions submit annual reports to EPA.

This is an important step forward: you can’t manage what you don’t measure. But merely collecting the data won’t be enough. Similar reporting requirements have applied to U.S. power plants since 1996 and, in theory at least, the information has been publicly available. But actually using that data is anything but straightforward. The U.S. government is not alone in failing to make this data easily accessible: in Europe, a cottage industry has sprung up to make sense of data from the EU’s Emissions Trading System.

Two years ago, CGD launched Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA.org) to address the urgent need for globally consistent, reliable data on emissions, starting with the power sector, which accounts for about a quarter of all emissions worldwide. CARMA provides information on the reported or estimated emissions of some 50,000 power plants around the world, plus plant ownership and aggregated firm-level emissions through Google Maps, Google Earth, an application programming interface (API), and spreadsheets. CARMA uses government-collected plant-level emissions data whenever we can find it, including in the United States, EU and India. Not surprisingly, the numbers get a lot more attention and use on CARMA than when they are buried in a hard-to-find and hard-to-use government spread sheets.

Ultimately, for the world to get a grip on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, verified up-to-date information on where the emissions come from will be crucial, not only for the power sector but also for industrial processes (cement plants are a major source), land use change (both deforestation and agriculture), livestock, transportation and commercial and residential buildings. This global monitoring effort will be larger than anything we at CGD expect to be able to provide. It is urgently needed and should be among the commitments that nations make at the international climate conference in Copenhagen in December. A plan by Cisco and NASA to design a monitoring system called “Planetary Skin” is a welcome development and we look forward to hearing more about it.

Until such a system is up and running, the additional data that will come from the EPA and other government reporting efforts will be a boon to CARMA and other non-governmental public information disclosure exercises. And we hope that CARMA will be a useful example of the importance and power of making the data readily accessible in a form that people can use.

Here’s an example of the power of CARMA to yield valuable information. The proposed EPA rule will apply to U.S. facilities that produce more than 25,000 tons per year of the six leading greenhouse gases, an estimated 13,000 facilities that account for 85-90 percent of total U.S. emissions. A few clicks on CARMA revealed that there are 9,473 power plants in the United States, but only 1,743 of these have emissions of more than 25,000 tons. The good news? These 1,743 plants account for more than 99 percent of U.S. power plant emissions.

On March 2, thousands of people are expected to engage in mass civil disobedience at the coal-fired Capitol Power Plant in Washington, DC. The protest, which is expected to include NASA climate scientist Jim Hanson, author Wendell Barry, and environmentalist Bill McKibben is timed to coincide with the final day of PowerShift09, a four-day “National Youth Summit” that aims to bring 10,000 students to Washington to lobby for action on climate change.

The Capitol Power Plant makes a convenient symbolic target. According to the Wikipedia account:

• In 2000, the office of the Architect of the Capitol considered eliminating the use of coal at the plant, but was dissuaded by two coal-state senators: Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
• In 2006, citizens from Capitol Hill, emboldened by the threat of global warming, met with the Architect of the Capitol to discuss ways to make the power plant more environmentally friendly, for example, by switching fuels. They were told that since the plant is owned by Congress, little would change without a Congressional mandate.
• In 2007, Nancy Pelosi seemed to give such a mandate, announcing a new effort to “green” the entire Capitol complex. But a plan to reduce the Capitol Power Plant’s emissions has not emerged, and Pelosi has instead pursued a controversial policy of purchasing carbon offsets from the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Oddly, the Capitol Hill Power Plant doesn’t actually generate any electrical power, a function that it ceased to perform in 1952. Since then it has provided the Capitol complex only steam and cooled water. Based on the amount of coal burned at the plant, it produces around 60,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year: about as much CO2 you would generate if you drove a Hummer from Washington DC to Los Angeles and back 20,000 times. That makes the Capitol Power Plant the largest single point source for greenhouse gases in within the District of Columbia. But it is still tiny compared to other coal-burning plants in the national capital region.

For example, according to CGD’s Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) database, the Potomac River Power Plant, located just across the river from the Capitol, produces almost thirty times the emissions of the Capitol Power Plant. (Owned by Mirant Corp., the Potomac plant has long been a target of environmental activists because of serious local negative health impacts.) The Robert W. Scherer Power Plant in Juliette, Georgia — the largest single-point source of carbon dioxide in the United States — produces more than 450 times the CO2 emissions of the Capitol Power Plant.

Of course, the leaders of the Capitol Hill protest understand the relatively small size of the Capitol Power Plant’s emissions. Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, wrote that the Capitol Power Plant wasn’t chosen because it produced a large amount of emissions, but rather “because it’s a way to get the conversation started.” That conversation is likely to continue. David Wheeler’s Another Inconvenient Truth points out that catastrophic climate change can only be averted if the rich world and the developing world both move to rapidly cut emissions. But the developing world, with a huge poverty burden and per capita emissions that are just a fraction of those in the United States and other rich countries, will not act unless the rich world goes first — and that means action to cut emissions in the United States, where vested interests are working hard to perpetuate business as usual.

The Capitol Power Plant protest, while not the first such action, is likely to be the highest profile civil disobedience on climate yet. Other creative, peaceful acts of civil disobedience will almost certainly follow. As Wheeler wrote last December, “the confrontation between complacent institutions and alarmed citizens is escalating, and threatens to become a collision.” When the young people who are now getting ready to head to Washington to take part in PowerShift09 return to their hometowns and campuses next week, CARMA (searchable by zip code) and other public information sources will be ready to help them identify nearby power plants and the firms that own them.

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!

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.

This project no longer makes any sense. In fact, it is obsolete by the IFC’s own standards. Here’s the rationale provided by the IFC, along with the current reality.

1. Claim: The IFC should use scarce international resources for the Mundra project because its efficient, supercritical coal-combustion technology will provide a model for India. According to the IFC: “The project is the first private sector power project in India to be based on the energy efficient supercritical technology.”

Reality: Wrong on both counts. No model is needed, because several other private- and public-sector supercritical plants are already under construction or planned. These include Sipat and Akaltara (Chattisgarh State), Sasan (Madhya Pradesh), and Shahapur (Maharashtra). Figure 1, drawn from our CARMA database, shows the percentage of planned Indian power capacity other than Mundra that will employ supercritical technology during the next five years. For the public and private sectors combined, supercritical capacity without Mundra will be around 60% of new capacity in 2013. For the private sector, it will be over 70%.

Conclusion: The rationale for Mundra is obsolete. India’s public and private sectors are moving to supercritical technology anyway, without IFC subsidies. A big driver is the rapidly-rising price of coal, which puts a premium on combustion efficiency.

2. Claim: The IFC must support Mundra, because India has no scalable, economically-feasible alternative for baseload power. And in any case, India has a lot of cheap coal and should exploit it.

Reality: Wrong again. India does have a scalable, economically feasible alternative to coal. As Figure 2 shows, the region near Mundra has huge solar potential and is one of the most sparsely-settled areas in India. Baseload solar power with thermal storage for 24-hour operation is now technically feasible, as I have noted in a recent paper and blog. As for exploiting Indian coal, Mundra will use coal imported from Indonesia and other countries at rapidly-rising cost.

For the IFC, solar thermal power is also financially feasible for two major reasons.

• Coal’s previous cost advantage has largely vanished. Fuel and construction costs for supercritical coal-fired power plants have been escalating rapidly. Both costs have at least doubled since 2005, nearly eliminating coal’s cost advantage over solar thermal power. Since completing my previously-cited paper, I have incorporated these changes into new production cost estimates for supercritical coal and solar thermal power. The gap is now less than one penny per kilowatt hour (8.23 cents for solar thermal vs. 7.65 cents for supercritical coal (up from 4.20 cents two years ago). Power from Mundra will never be sold at the rate advertised on IFC’s website (5.6 cents/kWh), because this would guarantee bankruptcy in short order.
• Financing from international clean technology funds can fill the remaining cost gap. Since a solar thermal plant emits no carbon, it qualifies for European Union offset payments under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The current CDM payment rate is about $15 per ton of CO2 averted, and solar thermal capacity equivalent to Mundra’s (4,000 MW) would annually avert 29.7 million tons of CO2 produced by the CDM’s “baseline case” (a low-efficiency subcritical plant). This would qualify the solar thermal plant for $445 million/year in CDM payments — enough to recover most of the total cost difference between solar thermal and supercritical coal before the current CDM arrangement expires in 2012. The rest can easily be covered by the World Bank Group’s new Clean Technology Fund, financed by donor-country taxpayers.

In short, IFC’s proposed Tata Ultra Mega project is obsolete, unnecessary, ultra-dangerous for the planet, and mega-dangerous for the environmental reputations of the IFC and the World Bank Group. Does anyone really believe that donor-country taxpayers will continue supporting the Bank Group if it takes billions for the Clean Technology Fund with one hand and invests billions in coal-fired monsters with the other? Let’s get serious here. The IFC’s Board should take Ban Ki-Moon’s Bali declaration of a planetary emergency seriously, vote no on Tata Ultra Mega, leave coal-fired power behind, and commit to renewable power. They will find a willing partner in the Indian Government, which has already begun piloting solar thermal power and would undoubtedly welcome a big push on renewables.

Figure 1: Planned Supercritical Coal Capacity in India Without Tata Mundra

(% of Total Planned Annual Capacity Installation, Private and Total)
Back to text

Figure 2: Solar Power Potential in the Region Near Mundra

Back to text

Dominion is calling its proposed $1.8 billion coal-fired power plant the Virginia City Hybrid Energy Facility, a name that seems calculated to reassure northern Virginian’s Prius-driving environmentalists. The plant shows up on CARMA.org as St. Paul, named after a nearby town that will host the emission of some 5.3 million tons of CO2 annually. This would make the plant the third largest utility source of CO2 in the state, accounting for roughly the same amount of CO2 as Mongolia’s entire power sector, and slightly less than Jordan’s.

To win support for the plant from Virginians who hope that mining means jobs, Dominion has promised that coal for the new plant will be mined exclusively in Virgina. What this means in practice is accelerated mountaintop removal mining (high resolution photos here), a practice that creates few jobs but has already destroyed more than 475 mountains in Appalachia. In Wise County, where the plant would be built, 25 percent of the land has already been reduced to a sterile moonscape. By blasting away more ridges and filling valleys with hundreds of feet of unstable rubble, future mining would also ruin potential wind farm sites.

Groups like Chesapeake Climate Action Network and Appalachian Voices, which have joined forces in Wise Energy for Virginia, must compete with Dominion’s vigorous lobbying efforts. In 2007 alone, Dominion made nearly three-quarters of a million dollars in campaign contributions to members of the Virginia Senate and House of Delegates, in addition to LOTS of flowers, banquets, and Redskins tickets (click on any “Yes” in the “Gifts” column at the link above see who got which Dominion goodies). According to Grist, Virginia governor Tom Kaine, a Democrat who likes to tout his green credentials, received $135,000 from Dominion for his campaign and inauguration. Kaine reportedly backs the plant.

Arlington County, where I live, adopted a resolution against the plant in December, citing its impact on climate change as well as concerns about pollution. A similar resolution in neighboring—and much larger—Fairfax County, in northern Virginia, would be a much bigger worry for Dominion, because growing demand for power in that part of the state is the primary justification for the plant. (Virginia, meanwhile, ranks a miserable 38th in energy efficiency of the 50 U.S. states). A proposed motion by the Fairfax county supervisors [PDF] expressing reservations about the new plant was scheduled for a vote on February 25. Mysteriously, county executive Andy Griffin withdrew the motion without explanation on the night of the meeting.

What happened? Evidently alarmed by the rising opposition to the plant, Dominion offered in a Feb. 1 letter to state environmental regulators to convert the Bremo Bluffs Power Station from coal to natural gas. Bremo Bluffs is one of the state’s oldest and filthiest coal plants and is much closer to Fairfax than Wise County.  As the letter rather baldly states:

“This new commitment… will help to reduce emissions of SO2 and Mercury in Virginia to below current levels, and will help to offset emissions of NOx, CO2, and PM [particulate matter] while at the same time resulting in a significant increase in electrical power generation”

Not surprisingly, conversion of the Bremo Bluffs to less polluting natural gas would only proceed AFTER the Wise County power plant is built. And reduced mercury pollution may not be the only sweetener. The word in Fairfax political circles is that the county wants to start taxing Dominion properties that are currently exempt. According to this view, Dominion would not fight these new taxes if Fairfax refrains from a resolution against the plant.

Dominion’s apparent offer, arguably a combination of blackmail and bribery, make for a terrible deal. In essence Dominion agrees to start paying taxes and poison Fairfax less, so that county officials will turn a blind eye to blowing up mountains, poisoning people living farther away in Wise County, and accelerating climate change that threatens us all, particularly poor people in developing countries.

With coal on the defensive across the country there’s clearly a lot at stake. The Fairfax county board, which is scheduled to consider the matter again on March 9, should take courage from these trends and demand that Dominion both clean up the Bremo Bluffs plant and scrap plans for Wise County in favor of energy efficiency and renewables. And while they are at it, the board could tell Dominion it’s time to start paying local taxes, too. Shouldn’t be too hard to find the money.  According to Forbes, in 2006 Dominion CEO, president and chairman Thomas F. Farrell II, an outspoken advocate of more coal, received total compensation of more than $7.3 million. 

Stay tuned! And feel free to tell us about your own adventures using CARMA data and other information to persuade power companies and government regulators to get serious about climate change.

Less-appreciated, perhaps, is the fact that China, India and other developing nations also blinked. For the first time, they accepted the principle that verified reduction of their emissions should be considered in a future agreement. From a global perspective, this was a victory for common sense. As Kevin Ummel and I note in a recent paper, unrestricted emissions from developing countries are growing so rapidly that they will create a climate crisis in this generation, even if developed-country emissions fall to zero immediately.

And the Europeans blinked as well, although their rhetoric remained aggressive to the end. After insisting on quantitative targets throughout the conference, they grudgingly accepted a non-specific commitment to future emissions reductions, and abandoned their threat to boycott US-sponsored talks among major carbon emitters. This was simply realistic, because the deal that must be struck will include many more elements than emissions targets.

Everyone ultimately blinked on Bali because they recognized several uncomfortable truths: The global stakes are mortal; time is short; success depends on universal participation; and getting everyone onboard will be impossible if negotiations focus only on emissions reduction targets. A sustainable global compact to halt global warming will also require provisions for clean technology development, accelerating global adoption of clean technology; and assisting poor countries that will be hard-hit by inevitable climate change.

Negotiating the global compact will not be simple, because each country faces different opportunities, risks and costs (For a comprehensive look, see “Country stakes in climate change negotiations : two dimensions of vulnerability“). To cite a few examples among many: Some countries (most notably the US and China) are so dependent on coal-fired power that a very rapid transition to clean energy will be wrenching and costly. They will not join a compact that threatens their economic and political stability. Many developing countries have huge renewable-energy potential, but it can only be tapped with developed-country support. This should include relaxing intellectual property laws to permit low-cost deployment of innovative technologies, but too much relaxation will eliminate the profit incentive that drives innovation in the first place. And for developed countries, the cost of supporting clean technology development will have to be weighed against their own transition costs, as well as the costs of assisting developing countries with adaptation to climate change.

Everyone blinked at the Bali Conference, opening the way for serious work on the global compact. The North and South are now fully aware of their interdependency. Each side emits enough carbon to create a climate catastrophe, and each faces such heavy transition costs that accepting them will require a new vision of global development. The North has the financial and scientific resources to support the compact, but carbon mitigation by the South is the key to making it work in the long run. The compact will have to reflect a host of country-specific benefits and costs associated with emissions reduction, accelerating the transition to clean technology, and financing adaptation to climate change.

While many uncertainties remain, one thing is certain: In forging the compact, this generation will shoulder a huge cost to protect future generations. And the sacrifice will only be acceptable if the global compact respects strict principles of accountability and transparency. To forge a meaningful compact, the international community has to know where carbon emissions are coming from; who is accountable for them; and what concrete steps are being taken to reduce emissions.

The demand for accountability and transparency defines an action plan that we can start implementing now. To establish accountability, the UN should immediately develop a global inventory of emissions from all critical sources, including deforestation. This inventory should identify specific sources (e.g. power plants, cement mills, motor vehicle fleets, land-clearing operations), and the organizations that are accountable for them. To ensure transparency, the emissions inventory should be disclosed to the global community on an accessible, easy-to-use, constantly-updated website.

At the Center for Global Development, we have attempted to catalyze this international effort by launching CARMA (Carbon Monitoring for Action) at www.carma.org. CARMA is the first global carbon disclosure site for the power sector, which produces over 25% of all carbon emissions. It provides easily-accessible emissions and power data for 50,000+ power plants, 20,000+ power companies, and 200,000 locales. With very limited resources, we have established an initial benchmark for global accountability and transparency. Now we believe that the international community should step up. The United Nations, or a consortium of donor nations, should immediately apply the same principles to building a comprehensive public emissions inventory that will provide a key foundation for negotiating the global compact. It’s the first step on a long road, and time is short. Let’s get started.

It is obvious that societies will have difficulty adapting to coming climate change without better information on the magnitude and location of expected climatic impacts at the local level. Identifying the problem spots is only the first step. Detailed projections on a range of natural phenomena are critical to choosing the appropriate intervention.

For example, if the glacier that feeds your local river basin is disappearing, it’s easy enough to see you have a problem. But how you respond will likely depend on what is expected to happen to precipitation, runoff, groundwater recharge, and evapotranspiration as well as seasonal trends in temperature and snowpack accumulation that will impact the rate of deglaciation. The decision to build a dam, expand groundwater extraction, or switch to an entirely different water source is affected by that information.

At present, the deployment of modeled climate projections at the regional or local scale is quite limited. In general, the spatial resolution provided by existing global circulation models (GCMs) is inadequate for local-scale adaptation and planning. Increased temporal resolution is also critical for particular applications. Adequately understanding changes in crop yields, for example, requires projections of overnight temperatures, not just daily means.

For the research community, there are three approaches to addressing this handicap. 1) Statistical “downscaling” of existing GCMs to increase the spatial and temporal resolution of the output. A good example of this technique is a study led by Stanford’s Ros Naylor on the effects of climate variability on Indonesian rice cultivation. 2) The development of country or regional climate models that are “nested” within GCMs. A new 5-year research program at the UK’s Hadley Centre will focus on improving this kind of work. 3) The creation of next-generation, high-resolution GCMs. The U.S.’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has plans to run a high-resolution version of its own GCM at Japan’s Earth Simulator Center, which houses one of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Each approach has its own strengths — usually reflecting an inherent tradeoff between accuracy and required computing power. I’m particularly excited about the prospects for high-resolution GCMs. I’ve been told we might expect output from the NCAR/Earth Simulator exercises in a couple of years.

That gives the social science/development community an idea of how much time it has to get ready. Once the local-scale climate projections are available, we’ll need research tools able to turn the raw data into actionable information. Issues like agricultural production, health impacts, and water availability are in need of some serious cross-disciplinary research if climate adaptation is going to be effectively addressed.

Natural scientists have been fighting the good fight on the climate front for years. Helping shape the adaptation agenda — with an eye toward maximizing its impact on sustainable development — is one way social scientists can provide valuable assistance as we enter a dangerous period for the world’s most vulnerable societies.