We’ve used up about half of our budget for putting carbon into the atmosphere, according to two studies (1, 2) in Nature.
The bottom line is in order to avoid dangerous climate change we have to avoid putting another trillion metric pounds of carbon in the atmosphere by 2050. This means burning less than a quarter of the known fossil fuel reserves between now and then.
A Scientific American story sums up the reports.
Geoengineering is rife with potential for unintended consequences. We can’t say that altering the atmosphere or ocean to try to curb or reverse global warming is a good or bad idea. We don’t understand the extraordinarily complex and interconnected climate systems involved well enough.
This doesn’t mean I’m against studying geoengineering. Studying the effects of tinkering with the climate is a great way to begin to map the minefield of potential consequences. Let’s at least get an idea of the trouble we can get into.
One such study, an analysis of the effects of deliberately spewing aerosols into the stratosphere, delivers a bit of irony. Increasing the concentration of aerosols in the stratosphere would reduce the amount of direct sunlight penetrating the atmosphere, and this would cool the planet. But it would also reduce the effectiveness of concentrated and passive solar energy systems.
So one method for dealing with the impact of fossil fuel use would come at the expense of another. Of course, if we’re desperate enough to attempt to remedy how we’ve altered the atmosphere by further altering the atmosphere, the potential hit to some solar energy systems would probably be low on the list of priorities.
The study provides a good example of how just about everything to do with climate involves trade-offs.
While I’m on geoengineering, let’s think about that label for a minute. Can we really say that our level of knowledge about deliberately altering the climate deserves to be called engineering? Do we have the degree of control and precision implied by that word?
Maybe we should find another term, at least until we have a substantially larger body of knowledge on the subject. How about geo-interference? That more accurately describes the process, and it’s less likely to lull people into a false sense of security about our ability to control the climate.
Given that John Holdren, president Obama’s top scientist, broached the subject of geoengineering last week — and he understands the dire circumstances we’re in as well as anyone on the planet — we could be running out of time to deal with the issue.
John Holdren, President Obama’s top scientist, presented the cold, hard facts about global warming to a receptive audience at yesterday’s Clean Power: Building a New Clean Energy Economy forum at MIT. “We are experiencing dangerous human interference now. Bigger disruptions are coming,” he said.
Tackling climate change will take more than an Apollo project and more than a Manhattan project, he said. I can’t say I’m confident we’ll see anything on that scale.
During a post-forum press conference, MIT President Susan Hockfield noted that the National Institutes of Health have a $30 billion-a-year budget, and that level of funding has helped us pull off major revolutions in healthcare over the last 30 years. But today’s budget for energy research is at best $4 billion per year, she said.
The forum focused mostly on policy, however.
Rep. Edward Markey, cosponsor of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (aka the Waxman-Markey Bill), was ringmaster at yesterday’s event. The bill is the first draft of legislation aimed at setting a course for dealing with climate change. The forum gave Markey and the administration, represented by the president’s assistant for energy and climate change Carol Browner, an opportunity to rally the loyalists for the fight ahead in Washington.
The room was filled with major Massachusetts stakeholders in the green economy: energy startup executives, state and local officials, and MIT leadership. Not to suggest that everyone in the room was thrilled with the Waxman-Markey Bill — judging from the questions and murmurs in the room many were not.
A major point of concern is the as-yet-undetermined number of carbon credits that’ll be given away rather than auctioned off in the cap-and-trade carbon emissions portion of the bill. Obama had initially declared that 100 percent of the credits would be auctioned, but has backed off that position. Fully auctioning the credits remains in the picture but as a long-term goal, Markey said.
The cap-and-trade scheme coming out of Washington is beginning to resemble the European approach, which didn’t start off too well, but the folks from Washington are making a point of saying that they’ve learned from Europe’s mistakes. Both Markey today and Rep. Jay Inslee at the MIT Energy Conference last month used the line that sometimes it’s better to be second, suggesting a common set of talking points. (Who says Democrats can’t maintain message discipline?)
Who gets what out of the cap-and-trade system is still under discussion, but Markey said the first priority is trade-sensitive industries. At the press conference, he said he’d ultimately like to see international agreement on a sector-by-sector basis, and he gave steel as an example.
Not surprisingly, there wasn’t any discussion of the six-year window in the bill for new coal plants to come online without having to meet the new emissions standards until 2025, as highlighted by the Wall Street Journal’s Keith Johnson.
I also didn’t hear the phrase “carbon tax” at any point, and Markey and Browner avoided a question about raising the federal gas tax.
Still, Markey and Browner made some positive noises and left the impression that the administration and its Congressional allies are committed to the fight. It’ll be interesting to see if the administration treats what’s likely to be a flawed outcome as a first step or if they take what they can get, declare victory and turn their attention elsewhere.
Stay tuned for more: hearings on the Waxman-Markey Bill begin a week from today, launching what is likely to be a contentious process of forging a national climate and energy policy.
The billions flowing to cleantech from the federal stimulus plan and the budget are good news, but we’re a long way from riding off into a photovoltaic sunset.
The $277 million the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provides for the Department of Energy’s Energy Frontier Research Centers is a big boost that will help jumpstart these centers.
Each center will be formed by one or more research organizations — universities, national labs, nonprofits and companies — to study fundamental properties of matter and energy at the nano, atomic and subatomic scales in the context of generating, storing and transmitting energy. Each center will be awarded $2 to 5 million a year over 5 years.
The DOE is also slated to get the $100 million originally requested for the centers in the 2009 budget. The question is, is that $377 million the bulk of the money the program is ever going to see or is it truly just the beginning?
According to the Department of Energy, the centers will “accelerate the transformational basic science needed to develop plentiful and cost-effective alternative energy sources and will pursue advanced fundamental research in fields ranging from solar energy to nuclear energy systems, biofuels, geological sequestration of carbon dioxide, clean and efficient combustion, solid state lighting, superconductivity, hydrogen research, electrical energy storage, catalysis for energy, and materials under extreme conditions.”
In other words, these are the research centers that will go after the fundamental breakthroughs that will turn perennially promising technologies like solar cells, batteries and hydrogen fuel into mainstays of the world’s energy systems.
We need to boost support for the materials science, biology, chemistry and physics research that can crack many of the tough science and engineering problems that limit much of today’s renewable energy production.
What are the charge separation and carrier transport properties of this nanostructure? What is the environmental sensitivity of that microbial metabolic pathway? What is the temperature dependence of those metal organic frameworks?
We need armies of scientists exploring questions like these if we want renewable energy technologies to progress along a steep enough curve to significantly displace fossil fuels in the next couple of decades.
Research organizations have applied for $4.9 billion over five years through the Energy Frontier Research Centers program. This works out to $980 million per year.
Though not all of the applications necessarily warrant taxpayer money, I can’t help but wonder what worthy research will lose out on the $377 million, and I worry about funding levels in subsequent years when there may not be stimulus packages.