Comparing the candidates on climate change

Martin Bunzl — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:10:00 +0000

chinadialogue has recently published speeches on climate change by Barack Obama and John McCain, the two leading candidates for president in the November 2008 US elections. Here, Martin Bunzl comments on the plans.

If you are going to eat a sausage, people say, you don’t want to see how it is made. (Although that is not something that directly affects me, as a vegetarian.) The same can be said of the process of making political policies. And that is especially true when it comes to policy in the United States.

US presidents have much less power than people think. They can propose policy to Congress, but so can any member of Congress. They can veto bills passed by the Congress, but those vetoes can be overridden by a two-thirds vote by Congress. So, when a president comes out with a proposed policy, it is not the end of the story. It may not even be the beginning of the story.

Nonetheless, if you read the speeches on climate change by the two leading candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, which were recently published on chinadialogue, you will find that something very important has happened. Not because of the details on which the candidates differ, but because of how much they agree on.

As is the case in most political systems, the two major parties in the US – the Republicans and the Democrats – compete for supporters by looking for differences that they can highlight. One party is for gun control, the other is not. One is for abortion, the other is not. And so on. Because the political parties are fairly evenly matched in the degree of support they have, this makes for a stalemate situation. There are not enough Republicans or Democrats in the Congress to push through legislation on their own. Legislation only moves when there is consensus. And major legislation only moves on an issue when both sides have decided not to use that issue to highlight differences between the two parties.

One of the reasons that there has been so little progress on climate legislation in the US is because it has been an issue the parties use to highlight difference. The degree of overlap between McCain and Obama’s positions is significant because it shows that this is no longer the case. Climate change has been taken off the table as an issue over which the parties are going to compete for votes. That makes the prospects very good for serious climate legislation under the next president.

There are, however, some important differences between Obama and McCain’s positions. The most significant is that McCain calls for a 60% reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2050, while Obama call for an 80% reduction. (The scientific consensus is that 80% is the minimum necessary target to avoid the serious consequences of warming.) McCain sets specific intermediate greenhouse-gas emission goals, while Obama sets explicit intermediate efficiency and renewable energy goals. McCain sees a much larger role for nuclear energy than Obama. Both call for a cap-and-trade system in which permits are auctioned, with the proceeds going to public use. McCain’s plan calls for a “transition over time” to such an auction system, and also allows for the purchase of offsets outside the system. Obama’s plan is silent on this issue. The devil is in the details with these plans, and silence could be a good or a bad sign, depending on how cynical you are.

But sticking with the cynicism for a moment, it is a mistake to think that these plans are just about climate change. In both speeches, the re-assertion of American leadership in the world is a central theme, as is the development of business opportunities for US corporations. This is not just electioneering: for better or worse, these are two of the major traditional drivers of US foreign policy. How much they matter remains to be seen. In some ways, the details of any US legislation on climate change do not matter, as long as they are serious enough to establish American bona fides on the international stage. The more they are seen as an attempt to re-assert US political and corporate power, the harder that goal may be to achieve.

Martin Bunzl directs the Initiative on Climate change and Social Policy at Rutgers University

You can read more details about the plans on John McCain and Barack Obama’s websites.

Homepage photo by Serene Silence via Flickr

Making the case for carbon capture

Wallace Broecker, Martin Bunzl — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:32:00 +0000

Taking carbon dioxide straight out of the atmosphere may be an important, and overlooked, technology to mitigate climate change, writes scientist Wallace Broecker. Plus – Martin Bunzl provides the background.

The amount of coal waiting to be mined around the world is thought to be around 900 gigatonnes. Even if the amount were one-third as great, we are still faced with the likelihood that enough will be burned to raise the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content well above 560 parts per million (more than double the pre-industrial content). Model simulations suggest that this would warm the earth by about 3.5 degrees Celsius. As a consequence, the focussing of rainfall on the tropics will be strengthened and the adjacent dry lands will become more arid. Sea level will undergo a slow but expensive rise. All natural flora and their accompanying fauna will be forced to migrate.

While the world’s rich nations could perhaps accomplish a major shift to alternate fuels and hence avoid large-scale coal use, developing nations will very likely follow China’s lead and power their standard-of-living rise largely with coal. Hence, we must be prepared to deal with the consequences. As shown by Klaus Lackner and his associates at General Research Technologies (GRT) in Tucson, Arizona, it is economically and environmentally feasible to capture CO₂ directly from the atmosphere. This opens the means for rich nations to “compensate” for the use of coal by developing nations. As the atmosphere mixes very rapidly, it does not matter where CO₂ is removed. So, for example, the European Union could pay for the sequestration of the CO₂ produced by nations in central Africa, while the actual removal and burial of the CO₂ could be done in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

GRT’s plan is to absorb CO₂ on fibres of a plastic with ligands (charged molecular sites). The CO₂ would then be removed by exchange with steam. They have shown that the plastic’s CO₂ to H₂O exchange cycle can be repeated hundreds of times without loss of capacity. The plastic also withstands punishment by the wind and by the impurities it carries. GRT plans to have a commercial prototype in production by the end of 2010. Each modular unit will remove one tonne of CO₂ a day and can be shipped in a standard container. The goal is that capture and storage of CO₂ by this method will raise fossil-fuel energy costs by no more than 20%.

Of course, even with such a capability, many hurdles stand in the way of its deployment. How will CO₂ capture and storage be paid for? Where will it be stored? Can the necessary global agreements be negotiated?

Regardless of how the CO₂ problem is dealt with, when all is said and done, the consequences of coming greenhouse warming will be sufficiently uncomfortable and expensive that there will be a strong plea to bring the atmosphere’s CO₂ content back down. Only one means will be available: direct capture from the atmosphere.

Wallace Broecker is Newberry Professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

Backgrounder: Lackner’s trees

Martin Bunzl spoke to Klaus Lackner about his vision of direct carbon capture.

Klaus Lackner and his associates have been working on a model to capture carbon from the air rather than the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants. This would have many advantages, if it can work and be cost effective:

* Much CO2 comes from places other than coal-fired power plants, on which most work on carbon capture is currently focussed;

* Capturing CO2 from coal plants will be extremely difficult;

* Not everyone running a coal-fired power plant is actually going to capture the CO2, given the additional costs of doing so, even if they say they are;

* Separating out who produces CO2, where it is (or was) produced and where and when it is captured allows the developed world to clean up some of its historic output.

I spoke to Lackner recently, and he cited figures of US$200 a tonne going down to $30 a tonne for the operational costs of such a system at scale. This includes the cost of manufacture and the power needs of the system, but excludes the costs of sequestration. He envisages deploying small units the size of shipping containers, which each remove one tonne of CO2 a day. Like all carbon capture, this approach uses power, so unless you use renewable energy as a source, it adds to the problem as it works to solve it. Cleaning up the CO2 that a coal-fired power plant produces requires burning 30% more coal to produce the energy for the clean up.

However, with an ambient system one could locate Lackner’s units in a desert and run them with solar power. How many would be needed? If each extracts one tonne of CO2 a day, three would take out roughly 1,000 tonnes a year. The world currently puts out about 27 gigatonnes of CO2 annually and we need to reduce to 18 gigatonnes to stabilize atmospheric CO2 at 450 ppm. Lackner is about to publish data on his work, which has been eagerly awaited by the scientific community. If it holds up, the real fly in the ointment of the whole scheme may be the sequestration of the carbon. But one way or another, there is no getting around the urgent need to test sequestration for safety on land or in deep sea locations. There is just too much coal available to burn.

Martin Bunzl directs the Initiative on Climate Change and Social Policy at Rutgers University.

Homepage photo by edgeplot

Latest Articles by Martin Bunzl

Comparing the candidates on climate change

Making the case for carbon capture