Eric on Energy

Unlike the high concern over peak oil, discussions about peak coal have tend to produce less energy, so to speak. This might change with a new study that adds weight to the idea that global peak coal will happen sooner rather than later, and this should make coal reserves a bigger consideration in today’s decisions about climate change and energy security.

The study says peak coal will happen next year or near to it, and studies and policies based on assumptions about centuries worth of coal remaining available are flawed. For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has incorrectly assumed 100 years of increasing carbon dioxide emissions under business-as-usual scenarios, according to the study’s authors.

At the same time, the study’s lead author, Tad Patzek, said in a press release that carbon sequestration efforts are misguided:

“The current global hysteria around carbon capture and sequestration is leading to desperately poor government policies,” says Patzek. “For instance, large-scale subsurface sequestration of CO2 will decrease power plant efficiency by up to 50 percent. The same resources could be spent more wisely on increasing U.S. coal-fired power plant efficiency by 50 percent from the current 32 percent.”

Making coal-fired power plants emit less carbon may be a better route than trying to capture some of the carbon they produce, but this is arguing at the margins of the larger problem. We’ve already emitted enough carbon dioxide to assure nasty climate change effects. We need to drastically reduce emissions rather than simply slow their growth.

The notion that peak coal is just around the corner complicates efforts to model climate change. But it doesn’t change the problem we face or the stark choices we’re left to consider.

Peak coal will increase the cost of coal over time, but it’s not likely to do so sharply enough for soon enough to substitute for a price on carbon emissions. And growing energy demand could easily lead governments to find ways to increase coal subsidies.

From an energy security perspective — if nothing else — peak coal should spur us on to kick the carbon habit (no, it won’t be easy; yes, there will be pain). I worry when, instead, people talk about devoting resources to getting the most out of the fossil fuels we have left.

For every one degree Celsius increase in global temperature, there’s a 10 percent decrease in crop yield.

Crop yields could be down by 1/3 to 1/2 by 2100, when the global population is likely to be considerably larger than it is now, said David Battisti, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. Battisti was a speaker at a geoengineering workshop at MIT Friday.

A recent study shows that U.S. crop yields are likely to decrease somewhere between 30 and 82 percent by the end of the century, depending on the pace of global warming.

Battisti said that rising sea levels and increasingly destructive droughts and flooding caused by global warming aren’t severe enough problems to convince him to consider drastic measures like geoengineering — deliberately altering the climate to counteract our unintended alterations. The impact of global warming on global food production, however, is another matter. “It’s the one thing that scares me,” he said.

There’s not a lot of unexploited viable cropland left, and we already have a billion people malnourished today, he said.

While today’s food security issues probably have more to do with political and economic factors affecting food distribution networks than they do with crop yields, the larger picture Battisti paints is scary. I hope a lot more research focuses on the problem. This also raises the stakes in the biofuel-versus-food debate.

The MIT workshop addressed the questions of whether geoengineering is possible and whether we should attempt it. The consensus was that precious little science has been done on geoengineering, what science is emerging is revealing that geoengineering is highly risky and uncertain, global warming is so bad that we need to consider geoengineering anyway, and we need to get busy with research on the problem. Several scientists expressed concern that we won’t be able to reduce the uncertainty in the time we have left.

The issue of the geoengineering moral hazard — whether taking geoengineering seriously leads people to weaken their resolve on emissions reductions — was also discussed at the workshop (see previous post).