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Enhancing Our National Security By Reducing Oil Dependence And Environmental Damage

Joe Romm — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:44:03 +0000

The United States has an historic opportunity to enhance its national security by reducing its dependence on oil. Policies to accomplish this goal, including more efficient fuel economy standards, investments in hybrid and electric vehicles, development of natural gas-fueled heavy duty vehicles, and production of advanced biofuels would also create jobs and reduce global warming pollution. This piece, by CAP’s Christopher Beddor,Winny Chen, Rudy deLeon, Shiyong Park, and Daniel J. Weiss, was first posted here. It summarizes the findings of their 21-page report (pdf).

On June 26 the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, or ACESA. The bill would cap greenhouse gas emissions, boost investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy such as wind and solar, and jumpstart the transition to a clean-energy economy. These new investments in clean-energy technologies would slash global warming pollution and reduce foreign oil use while creating jobs and increasing our economic competitiveness with China and other nations.

But in the lead up to the ACESA vote and in the weeks since House passage, conservative opponents of clean, domestic energy have wildly misrepresented the bill’s content and cost, while resorting to scare tactics and half-truths in service of the status quo. On the contrary, America’s reliance on imported fossil fuels instead of clean, domestic sources of energy has long been costly to our economy, our environment, and our national security— and will become even more so if we fail to act now.

America’s dependence on foreign oil transfers U.S. dollars to a number of unfriendly regimes, while robbing the United States of the economic resources it desperately needs for domestic development and American innovation. American petrodollars fund regimes and economic investments that do not serve U.S. interests. And our enormous appetite for oil—America burns a full quarter of the world’s oil—feeds the global demand that finances and sustains corrupt and undemocratic regimes around the globe. The perilous implications of this arrangement—increasing power and influence of oil exporters, many of whom comprise the world’s worst regimes—will become more explicit if global demand increases as some current forecasts predict.

What’s more, the United States will increasingly turn to exporting countries that have opposing interests as oil production in friendly nations becomes depleted or less viable. Ultimately, the United States will become more invested in the volatile Middle East, more dependent on corrupt and unsavory regimes, and more involved with politically unstable countries. In fact, it may be forced to choose between maintaining an effective foreign policy or a consistent energy supply as U.S. consumers face higher energy prices.

The good news is that the United States has an historic opportunity to enhance its national security by reducing its dependence on oil. Policies to accomplish this goal, including more efficient fuel economy standards, investments in hybrid and electric vehicles, development of natural gas-fueled heavy duty vehicles, and production of advanced biofuels would also create jobs and reduce global warming pollution. A transformation from oil to no- and low-carbon energy sources will catalyze innovation that creates new technologies that the United States can market to other nations, leading to long-term economic growth and prosperity as well as enhanced security.

This fall the Senate has a historic opportunity to reduce U.S. oil consumption as part of its debate on comprehensive clean-energy jobs and global warming pollution reduction legislation.

Download the full report (pdf)

This piece originally appeared on Climate Progress

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(Posted by Joe Romm in Resource - Politics at 3:44 PM)

Even Fantasy-Filled American Petroleum Institute Study Finds No Significant Impact of Climate Bill on US Refining

Joe Romm — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:28:12 +0000

In addition to funding phony astroturf “Energy Citizen” campaigns against the climate bill, the American Petroleum Institute has just released a study purporting to show how devastating the House climate and clean energy bill would be to the refining industry.

But if you ignore the fantastical elements, and focus on the real analysis, it’s clear that the bill would have a minimal impact on petroleum refining through 2030, which is precisely what you would expect from a bill focused on achieving the maximum amount of emissions reduction at the lowest possible cost. And the API completely ignores peak oil, which will hit U.S. refineries so hard that the climate bill will almost certainly have no impact whatsoever on U.S. refineries.

You can find the API’s study here. If you want to understand what the real “worst-case” scenario is for petroleum refineries, focus on the “Basic Case” of the Energy Information Administration (EIA) that the API models. As previously discussed, the EIA projects an allowance price of $32 per metric ton of CO2 equivalent in 2020 — about double what EPA and I project and 50% higher than CBO’s projection (see “Despite its many flaws, EIA analysis of climate bill finds 23 cents a day cost to families, massive retirement of dirty coal plants and 119 GW of new renewables by 2030 — plus a million barrels a day oil savings“).

Because the EIA is poor/dreadful at modeling natural gas, energy efficiency, and renewables, it’s basic analysis is a worst-case for the petroleum industry because it overestimates the allowance cost over the next two decades while underestimating the amount of low-cost reductions possible in the utility sector. Here, then, is the worst-case for U.S. refining under a climate bill:

Note that even in the EIA’s Basic Case, with a CO2 price in 2020 of $32 per metric ton, the refinery industry would be supplying more product than it does today — for all the stats on U.S. refinery production, go here. Heck, API projects that US domestic refined product will increase steadily under the climate bill, while imports drop steadily.

Of course, even this chart shows what a fantasy world API lives in. Because of peak oil, the baseline is not steadily rising U.S. refining for two decades (see World’s top energy economist warns peak oil threatens recovery, urges immediate action: “We have to leave oil before oil leaves us”).

Let’s bring a little reality about global oil production to this discussion. As Dr. Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA) recently explained:

Dr. Birol said that the public and many governments appeared to be oblivious to the fact that the oil on which modern civilisation depends is running out far faster than previously predicted and that global production is likely to peak in about 10 years – at least a decade earlier than most governments had estimated.

The IEA’s work makes clear that for oil to stay significantly below $200 a barrel (and U.S. gasoline to be significantly below $5 a gallon) by 2020 would take a miracle — or rather 6 miracles see “Science/IEA: World oil crunch looming? Not if we can find six Saudi Arabias!” See also “Merrill: Non-OPEC production has likely peaked, oil output could fall by 30 million bpd by 2015,” which noted,

Steep falls in oil production means the world now needed to replace an amount of oil output equivalent to Saudi Arabia’s production every two years, Merrill Lynch said in a research report.

Now the good news for the refining industry is that their profit margins and total profits typically soar when oil prices soar. The bad news for them is that when total US consumption of refined product drops significantly below current levels, then their total profits may start to decline.

The key fact to remember is that: “$50 per tonne of carbon ($14/tonne of CO2) corresponds to 12.5 cents per gallon of gasoline. So the EIA’s $32/tonne price for CO2 is a whopping 18 cents a gallon in 2020. Even the EIA’s absurd price of $65/tonne in 2030 is only 36 cents a gallon. It is just hard to see how those prices are going to make a very big dent in oil consumption — even the EIA only projects a 5% reduction by 2030 in its Basic Case (and the EIA also live in the fantasy world of no peak oil).

That’s why the API’s hired analytical gun included a scary case that has no basis in reality, the more extreme EIA scenario, called No International/Limited Case [NILC]:

No International/Limited Case combines the treatment of offsets in the ACESA No International Case ["the use of international offsets is severely limited"] with an assumption that deployment of key technologies, including nuclear, fossil with CCS, and dedicated biomass, cannot expand beyond their Reference Case levels through 2030.

Seriously.

The EIA, whose modeling of key technologies even in the base case is absurdly lame, felt obliged to include an even more pessimistic scenario just so the fossil fuel industry types like API could cite it to scare people. That is just more analytical malpractice from EIA.

In the out-of-this-world worst-case NILC analysis, the CO2 price is a whopping $190 a metric ton in 2030. Here’s what’s really amazing about even this absurd NILC case. As you can see from the rest of the slide on page 25 of the API “analysis” (which I cut off in the figure above), the domestic refining industry still supplies 15 million barrels a day of product in 2030, roughly what they are providing today (a point API cleverly obscures by only presenting the baseline numbers starting in 2015).

The CO2 price in the fantasy NILC case would raise gasoline prices some $1.75 a gallon in 2030. And while there is no chance whatsoever that the actual climate bill would do that, I would say there is a very good chance that peak oil will raise gasoline prices that much higher in 2020. If so, then the climate bill will add maybe 10% to that price hike and essentially be lost in the noise.

The bottom line is that Obama and Congress have chosen to focus on the transportation sector through other policies than the climate bill — including Obama’s big fuel economy announcement earlier this year and the 2005 and 2007 energy bills, which push biofuels into the marketplace. The climate bill will have only a small impact on the US refining industry, perhaps an order of magnitude smaller than the impact peak oil will have.

Finally, yet one more reason for adopting my ‘price collar plus’ proposal is that while I’m sure it will have no significant impact on actual emissions reductions through 2030, it will make it much harder for the right wing and fossil fuel industry to put out their absurd analytical models that use wildly overinflated CO2 prices to scare people.

This piece originally appeared on Climate Progress
CCphoto credit

Related posts:

House Committee Approves Landmark (Bipartisan!) Clean Energy And Climate Bill — Political Realists Rejoice, Climate Science Realists Demand More
Cap and Trade 101 What Does Peak Oil Look Like?

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(Posted by Joe Romm in Resource - Politics at 1:28 PM)

Obama’s Green Credentials Tested By Battle Against Mountaintop Mining

WorldChanging Team — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 19:35:52 +0000

by Suzanne Goldenberg

James Hansen and Darryl Hannah among those opposing open-cast coal extraction that destroys mountains and forests

The Hidden Destruction of the Appalachian Mountains from Dave Cooper on Vimeo.

It is still technically possible to see the original white paint of Larry Gibson's pick-up truck beneath the myriad of stickers declaring his love of West Virginia's mountains and his opposition to coal mining.
But it would be a mistake to see the truck as mere conveyance. This is a mobile command centre in Gibson's one-man 25-year war against King Coal and the highly destructive mining method known as mountaintop removal.
Windscreen-mounted video camera in working order? Check. CB Radio on to listen for miners arriving for their shifts? Check. Luminous green t-shirt and cap for maximum visibility? Check. And Gibson, who is about five feet tall and in his 60s is usually armed, like many people in this part of West Virginia.
"The mountains in West Virginia are the oldest in the world and now they are gone in the blink of an eye," he said. "I am the man who is holding the fort down here. I am the man holding them back."
Mountaintop removal begins with the clear-cutting of entire forests and then the shearing off up to 1,000 vertical feet of mountain peak. This exposes thin seams of coal that cannot easily be reached by underground tunnels.
Some 500 mountaintops across West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky have already been replaced by dry flat plateau, and 1,200 mountain streams have been buried beneath dumped rock and dirt. By 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates that more than 2,200 square miles of Appalachian forest will disappear.
At some sites, the mining companies try to rebuild the silhouette of the old mountain, or replant. But mostly they leave the mountain missing its crest. In any event, nothing ever grows on the land again, locals say.
Kayford Mountain, or what Gibson calls his home place, is one of the frontline positions in an epic confrontation between the coal industry and a broad coalition of local activists, environmental organisations, national figures and Hollywood celebrities.
The struggle against mountaintop removal is also proving an uncomfortable test of Barack Obama's green credentials.
The US administration has frustrated environmentalists who had relied on the president to ban a practice that devastates landscapes and uproots hundreds of local communities.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the environmental lawyer and son of the assassinated presidential candidate, recently accused Obama of presiding over an "Appalachian apocalypse".
James Hansen, the Nasa scientist who coined the term global warming and who has become a passionate supporter of Gibson, demanded activists hold the president to account. "We can not continue to give President Obama a pass on this much longer," Hansen said.
Now Obama could be upstaged by the Senate which has taken up a bill to ban mountaintop removal by prohibiting mining companies from dumping debris in streams. The bill has support from Republicans as well as Democrats.
The bill is too late for Gibson's beloved Kayford Mountain. A short stroll from his campsite brings visitors to a view that looks like something out of a science fiction film. Giant trucks crawl over the earth on a vast yellow plateau below; at 5.10pm there is a loud blast.
"It looks to me like descriptions of places that got bombed in Hiroshima ," said Lora Webb, who lives in the nearly abandoned town of Twilight, which is surrounded by mountaintop mining. "It looks like what I would imagine if I was going to imagine what hell would look like: dry, dusty, no air or water."
Webb is about to leave Twilight herself, exhausted by blasts so forceful they have blown her out of her bed and on to the floor, shattered her glassware collection , and left a thick coating of dust on her ceiling fan.
Emerging scientific scientific evidence now suggests even more extensive damage from mountaintop removal than previously understood, with widespread and potentially permanent damage to water systems. Former mine areas are more vulnerable to erosion than unspoiled mountainside, and are at increased risk of flash floods and mud slides.
"There is irrefutable scientific evidence that the environmental impacts of mountaintop removal are substantial and they are permanent," Margaret Palmer, a professor at the University of Maryland's centre for environmental science, told a recent Senate hearing .
"You can't reverse it, at least not in any time span we can recognise as humans."
Meanwhile, the EPA has detected high levels of the heavy metal selenium, which can cause reproductive problems in humans, downstream from mine fill sites. Government biologists also detected deformities among local fish.
"It just destroys the health of the people who live here," said Joan Linville, who lives in the town of Van and whose home was nearly buried by a mud slide from a mined mountaintop. "One little tiny coal seam and they keep tearing up the country for miles. It's the most destructive thing I have ever seen in the 70 years I have been alive and I have been in every state."
Gibson's war against coal began in the late 80s, soon after an injury forced him into early retirement from a job at General Motors in Ohio. Around the same time, mining companies began buying up locals' small plots, and began to dynamite the peaks surrounding Kayford.
Gibson refused to sell out, and based himself on the mountain in a two-room cabin without running water or mains electricity. He persuaded his extended clan to come too.
His determination made him a hero to environmentalists. Over time, the patch of mountain has become a pilgrimage to environmental and other activists, even school groups, with Gibson's wife handling the scheduling requests. Next month he is due in court with the actress Daryl Hannah to face charges over a protest action.
But Gibson also has powerful opponents. Almost half of America's electricity comes from coal, and mining companies say mountaintop removal is cheaper and more efficient than tunnelling underground.
In Washington, industry lobbyists claim that locals welcome mountaintop removal — for its development potential.
"I can take you to places in eastern Kentucky where community services were hampered because of a lack of flat space — to build factories, to build hospitals, even to build schools," said Joe Lucas of Americans for Clean Coal Electricity. "In many places, mountain-top mining, if done responsibly, allows for land to be developed for community space."
Coal mining no longer fuels West Virginia, accounting for just 7% of the economy: there are more jobs at Wal-Mart than on the coal face. But while the number of mining jobs has shrunk from a high of 150,000 to just 12,000 over the decades, the scarcity of other employment still leaves plenty of locals threatened by Gibson's crusade.
Gibson — himself the son and grandson of miners — had his fourth of July protest picnic broken up by burly men with tattooed and shaven heads, and shots were fired at his cottage in June. "They just pulled out a gun and went pop pop pop," he said.
Like other opponents of mountaintop removal, Gibson had been counting on Obama, with his election promises of a clean energy economy, to shift the power balance away from coal.
But those hopes evaporated in May when the EPA signed 42 permits for mountaintop removal while turning down only six — a higher ratio even than during the latter part of the George Bush presidency. Some 170 more permits are pending, according to the Sierra Club.
In June, the White House announced it would strengthen oversight of mining operations, but it refused to endorse a ban on the dumping of debris into mountain streams.
That stand has infuriated Obama's natural allies. Gibson sees it as pure betrayal. "I think Obama's going to fall into line like the last president we had," he said. "He has developed into a coccoon that is going to end up not being a butterfly but a corporate president."

This post originally appeared on guardian.co.uk
CCphoto credit

Learn more:
Mountaintop Mining Legacy: Destroying Appalachian Streams
U.S. Vows Tighter Controls Over Mountaintop Mining In Appalachia
U.S. Activist Battles West Virginia Coal Industry
NASA'S James Hansen Arrested During Coal Mining Protest

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Resource - Politics at 11:35 AM)

Campaign Round-Up: Carbon Regulations, Transportation, E-Waste and More

WorldChanging Team — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:12:30 +0000

Every week, we're amazed by the number of smart contests, campaigns and other initiatives that organizations around the world bring to our attention. These roundup posts are a way for us to shout out the best of what's crossed our desks. -- The WC Editorial Team

FT Climate Change Challenge
The Financial Times and Forum for the Future have teamed up to search the globe for the most innovative new solution to the effects of climate change. That standout innovation could be a new technology, system or service, novel organization or business model. One winner will receive a $75,000 prize to help turn his or her idea into reality. Entries will be accepted from now until January 30, 2009, and the winner will be announced in April 2009.

Time to Lead
On December 11, 2008, European political leaders will decide what their response to global warming is going to be. Last year, they agreed to a 30 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Now, with the downturn in the economy, that deal is under threat and time is running out. As a result, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund through the coordination of the Climate Action Network (CAN) formed the campaign Time to Lead. The movement urges European citizens and organizations to act by contacting local legislators and issuing support of the 30 percent reduction in Europe’s own carbon emissions by 2020.

Transportation For America
We need a bold agenda to fix our roads and bridges; build high speed trains; invest in public transit, infrastructure for biking and walking, and green innovation. Through this initiative, Transportation for America -- an impressive coalition of diverse interests -- invites concerned citizens to join them in calling on President-elect Barack Obama to commit to building a 21st Century transportation system. Their letter asks Obama to lead us in building complete streets; repairing our highways, bridges and transit systems; and pushing ahead with ready-to-go rail projects ... and to commit to that plan within his first 100 days in office. (Obama recently responded to the campaign's earlier call for an agenda: read his letter here.)

Take Back My TV
With only three months to go until the U.S. digital TV conversion, the Electronics TakeBack Coalition (ETBC) released its new TV Recycling Report Card, grading the major TV manufacturers on their efforts to establish national programs to take back and recycle their old TVs. ETBC estimates that tens of millions of old-style TVs, each of which includes 4-8 pounds of toxic metals, will be disposed in the near future. They could end up in our landfills, or be dumped overseas in developing countries, as profiled in a recent 60 Minutes report. The EPA estimates that there are 99 million unused TVs in storage in the U.S.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Resource - Politics at 4:12 PM)

Tired of Waiting for Efficiency

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:57:22 +0000

Our right to know about fuel-efficient tires.

by Eric de Place

I'm always fascinated by the "1 percent solutions" to energy. It seems to me that in order to address both climate change and fossil fuel dependence, we'll need a few big structural changes, but we'll also need a lot of 1 percent solutions -- and maybe a bunch of quarter-percent solutions too. And the advantage of the 1 percent solutions is that they're often exceedingly easy; and so cheap that they actually put money in your pocket.

So I enjoyed Cindy Skrzycki's column this morning on low rolling resistance tires:

A study by the National Academies of Science in 2006 concluded it was feasible to reduce rolling resistance by 10 percent. This would increase the fuel economy of vehicles by 1 percent to 2 percent, saving up to 2 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel annually. Michelin said that over the past 15 years its energy-saving tires have reduced fuel consumption worldwide by about 2.38 billion gallons, compared with conventional tires.

Easy, right? The problem is, there's very little opportunity for consumers to evaluate the fuel-efficiency of tires (as Clark once discovered). Not only is there no rating system in place, but a national standard has actually been banned by Congress since 1996.

No kidding:

The congressional ban, first passed in 1996, said there could be no federal rule adding to existing grading standards that would require a certain level of fuel efficiency.

A 1998 Senate report explained that the prohibition covered "any rulemaking which would require that passenger car tires be labeled to indicate their low rolling resistance, or fuel-economy characteristics."

That's very helpful. Thanks, Congress.

Luckily, there's good news just around the corner. Congress has shifted gears and is now demanding a consumer-information program in place by next year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should have a rule in place by the end of 2009, though it's not clear when consumers will actually see the information in a standardized way.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Resource - Politics at 11:57 AM)

European Union Poised to Increase Recycling

Ben Block — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 20:31:10 +0000

The European Union is currently debating waste management targets that could significantly increase recycling rates throughout Europe.

Legislators on the European Parliament's Environment Committee overwhelmingly supported reforms earlier this year that would halt the steady rise in the region's garbage. By 2012, waste production would have to stabilize at 2009 levels, the committee recommended.

To reduce the amount of trash deposited into landfills, EU member states would have to increase recycling rates across all sectors. The policy proposal is a reaction to the growing burden of municipal waste across Europe, although countries that are new to the union may struggle to meet the challenge.

The Environment Committee called for recycling rates to more than double by 2020. Households would have to reuse or recycle at least 50 percent of their waste. Construction, demolition, manufacturing, and industry would be required to meet a 70 percent target. Parliament will vote on the recycling targets on June 16.

The ambitious recycling rates were quickly rejected by the Council of the European Union, however, which called the targets unattainable due to "recycling imbalances" among member states. Instead, the council recommends recycling targets that are about 5 percent more lenient for each sector.

If an agreement is reached, it appears likely that overall recycling rates will have to increase. According to the Parliament's Environment Committee, 49 percent of EU municipal waste goes to landfills, 18 percent is incinerated, and 27 percent is recycled or composted. The amount of municipal waste is expected to grow 25 percent between 2005 and 2020.

The European Commission first proposed that the 1975 Waste Framework Directive undergo an overhaul in 2005.

"We have come a very long way from the original Commission draft, which contained no recycling targets," said Caroline Jackson, a European Parliament member who has led the waste management reforms, in a prepared statement. "The alternative to the package now on the table may not be a better package, but no package at all."

Recycling rates across the European Union vary considerably. Western European nations, lead by the Netherlands and Denmark, send less than 10 percent of their waste to landfills, whereas many eastern European and island nations send more than 90 percent. Rates vary within
countries as well. Italy, for instance, sends half its waste to landfills overall, but it is currently facing a European Commission lawsuit for its failure to dispose of uncollected trash in the city of Naples.

If the recycling targets go into effect, between 279 and 303 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced, according to a study by consulting firm Prognos AG and the University of Dortmund. A ban on discarding biodegradable waste into landfills would yield the higher carbon reduction.

Ben Block is a staff writer with the Worldwatch
Institute. He can be reached at bblock@worldwatch.org.

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(Posted by Ben Block in Resource - Politics at 12:31 PM)