by hilzoy
"A House committee released documents Monday that showed hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.In a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the official, Philip A. Cooney, who left government in 2005, defended the changes he had made in government reports over several years. Mr. Cooney said the editing was part of the normal White House review process and reflected findings in a climate report written for President Bush by the National Academy of Sciences in 2001. (...)
Mr. Cooney said his past work opposing restrictions on heat-trapping gases for the oil industry had had no bearing on his actions once he joined the White House. “When I came to the White House,” he testified, “my sole loyalties were to the president and his administration.”
Mr. Cooney, who has no scientific background, said he had based his editing and recommendations on what he had seen in good faith as the “most authoritative and current views of the state of scientific knowledge.”"
"The most authoritative and current views", indeed. If this weren't so serious, it would be worthy of Molière.
Legislative branch version: (h/t Kevin Drum):
"House Republican Leader John Boehner would have appointed Rep. Wayne Gilchrest to the bipartisan Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming -- but only if the Maryland Republican would say humans are not causing climate change, Gilchrest said."I said, 'John, I can't do that,' " Gilchrest, R-1st-Md., said in an interview. "He said, 'Come on. Do me a favor. I want to help you here.' " (...)
Gilchrest, who co-chairs the House Climate Change Caucus, has long been an environmental-protection advocate and has co-sponsored the Climate Stewardship Act designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to 70 percent below 1990 levels.
He expressed his interest in the committee several times to Boehner and Minority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri, telling them the best thing they could do for Republican credibility was to appoint members familiar with the scientific data.
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, a research scientist from Maryland, and Michigan's Rep. Vern Ehlers, the first research physicist to serve in Congress, also made cases for a seat, but weren't appointed, he said.
"Roy Blunt said he didn't think there was enough evidence to suggest that humans are causing global warming," Gilchrest said. "Right there, holy cow, there's like 9,000 scientists to three on that one.""
Roy Blunt: a man of parts. Not just a Congressman, but a climatologist as well. It reminds me of the days when the world of high politics was peopled by the likes of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who invented the calculus* and justified God's creation of the world when he wasn't too busy negotiating treaties.
Then again, maybe not.
***
* And binary! I had forgotten that Leibniz was responsible for that as well.
Jesus wept.
I think Jesus weeps about a lot of things.
Putting C02 deep in the earth is, arguably, getting it out of the biosphere, for however long it stays deep in the earth. Putting it at the bottom of the sea, less so. And we really have no idea what the long term results of doing either of those things are.
The Statoil program is a clear success. They also have the advantage of having a very appropriate geological formation quite close to the point where the C02 is captured. Basically, they pump it back into the ground some distance above where the gas came from.
Here's a good link to some details.
http://www.llnl.gov/str/Johnson.html
Per this article, the Statoil program sequesters something like a million tons of C02 per year. Also per this article, the Statoil program is the only active carbon sequestration project (as opposed to injecting C02 for purposes of recovering oil or gas) in the world. That last fact may be out of date by now.
The global anthropogenic generation of CO2 per year is about 24 billion tons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions
That's 24,000 Statoil programs.
Here's a better idea. Let's use less energy.
There is no away.
Thanks -
Posted by: russell | March 23, 2007 at 06:41 PM
Russell, we aren't capable of using less energy. We aren't even capable of using less oil.
We can do just fine at persuading consumers to use less energy. Record high heating oil prices can eventually persuade people to turn their thermostats down and wear undershirts and sweaters and such. High gas prices will eventually persuade people to use less gasoline.
But that only shifts around the consumption. Are we going to tell our servicemen that they can't have the armor they need because the fuel is too expensive? In wartime? I may not remember this stat right, but it went something like -- a regular military HumVee gets 2 miles per gallon. An up-armored one gets 0.5 miles per gallon. But compare the cost of a vehicle that's totalled with multiple casualties, versus one that can be repaired and maybe one or two casualties, and it's a false economy to save on fuel.
And then consider our air force. The B2 bomber weighs around 170 tons -- it's like a flying tank -- and its engines do about 35 tons thrust. Guess how much fuel it uses? But if we don't fly them, what good are they?
Whatever fuel we manage to conserve will be burned quickly the next time we go to war. You can't very well say to conserve fuel to stop global warming when there's a war on. If we lose a war the all the fuel we saved will belong to the enemy.
Averaged over a decade or two we're going to burn oil on average just about as fast as we can get it out of the ground. And there's no way to avoid that but world government, which isn't in the cards.
It's economics and international relations. All the oil that you don't buy will be bought by somebody else -- cheaper for them if you don't bid the price up. And if all the consumers together can't afford it, that makes it cheaper for the government to buy it for a war.
It's like a kindergarten birthday party with no mommies. All the kids who want cake grab it as quick as they can because it isn't going to be there if they wait.
Posted by: J Thomas | March 24, 2007 at 12:07 AM
One problem with pumping CO2 underground is that we cannot be sure that it will actually stay there long enough to be mineralized (we simply have no long term experience with that). Another can be the induction of seismic instabilities (those have happened in the past when liquid waste was pummped into deep wells under pressure).
This doesn't mean that the whole process is worthless but we should take possible repercussions into account before doing it on a truly large scale an relying on it working perfectly.
Concerning water vapour
Wouldn't that be triggerd by rising temperatures (higher evaporation) and thus "just" being a positive feedback loop?
Posted by: Hartmut | March 24, 2007 at 06:57 AM
One problem with pumping CO2 underground is that we cannot be sure that it will actually stay there long enough to be mineralized (we simply have no long term experience with that).
Yes, we have a lot of experience with methane leaking out of oil and coal deposits.
And how would the CO2 be mineralised? Would we expect it to, say, replace lots of sulfates and so we get the sulphates in the deep water instead? Over millions of years turn a whole lot of dolomite into limestone? Iron oxides into siderite and such? Volume and solubility changes....
I think it would be very interesting. High temperatures, heavy pressure, lots and lots of CO2, we might get minerals never before seen in nature. Millions of years from now alien geologists might thank us if they figure out what we did.
Posted by: J Thomas | March 24, 2007 at 12:56 PM
"The Statoil program is a clear success. They also have the advantage of having a very appropriate geological formation quite close to the point where the C02 is captured."
Great, thanks for accepting that. Can we agree that your statement that "carbon sequestration is bogus" is wrong then?
It's not the complete picture, but it is a transistion technology which can form one of Solocow's stabilization wedges.
"Yes, we have a lot of experience with methane leaking out of oil and coal deposits."
Yup, 'cos of course you never, ever see methane co-produced with oil.
Posted by: No Longer A Urinated State of America | March 24, 2007 at 07:18 PM
"Yes, we have a lot of experience with methane leaking out of oil and coal deposits."
Yup, 'cos of course you never, ever see methane co-produced with oil.
I don't know what your point is, but my point is that where methane leaks, CO2 will probably leak too.
Posted by: J Thomas | March 24, 2007 at 07:43 PM
I don't know what your point is, but my point is that where methane leaks, CO2 will probably leak too.
Could care less. If most of it stays down a century that's good enough. One way or another, we're not going to be burning fossil fuels 100 years from now.
Posted by: Tim | March 25, 2007 at 11:16 AM
Great, thanks for accepting that. Can we agree that your statement that "carbon sequestration is bogus" is wrong then?
No.
My point is that burying the products of human industrial activity someplace doesn't make them go away.
The Statoil program appears to be a great way for one particular oil drilling operation to sequester C02. It works because there happens to be an appropriate geological structure to hold the C02 that is quite close -- colocated, in fact -- to the point where the CO2 is located. Since it's already a drilling site, there also happens to be industrial infrastructure in place to do the injection. That location also happens to be at the bottom of the ocean, so if anything goes wrong it won't also create harmful side effects for a nearby human population. How lucky for Statoil.
The goodness of the sequestration solution assumes that the CO2 never escapes, and that it doesn't cause other adverse side effects like acidifying ocean water, disturbing underground aquifers, or forcing other undesirable underground materials to the surface. We don't really know if these are reasonable assumptions or not, because the Statoil program at Sleipner is the oldest one around, and it's something like 10 years old.
So, if you can convincingly demonstrate that none of the possible adverse side effects will occur, that geological sequestration is reliably leak proof, and that there is something like 27,000 other sites that are as generally wonderful as the Statoil Sleipner site, I'll be happy to retract my statement that sequestration is bogus. Don't bother spending any time on that, because it's not possible. The information is not available, because the technology is not mature enough.
So, IMO sequestration is bogus. Not bogus as technology. That's not the question. There are lots of wonderful technologies flying around. Bogus as a useful, practical, reliable real-world *solution* to the problem of human-generated greenhouse gases.
Every few years, somebody comes up with the next silver bullet for how we will magically make the products and side effects of industrial culture go away. They are always bogus. In other words, they never make those products and side effects go away.
That's because there is no "away" where things we don't want can be placed. When we put them someplace that won't bother us today, that creates another situation that will bother us, or if not us than some other subsystem, sometime down the line.
There is no away, there is no silver bullet. We won't escape to colonize another planet on a magical spacecraft. We are going to be living with the consequences of industrial production for as long as anyone meaningfully thinks about these things.
If we want to avoid the consequences of industrial activities, we have to do less of, or perhaps stop doing, the things that generate those consequences. That doesn't mean a return to the Stone Age. It means aligning industrial culture with practices that are sustainable on this actual planet.
There is no other way to skin the cat. None.
Thanks -
Posted by: russell | March 25, 2007 at 11:33 AM
If we want to avoid the consequences of industrial activities, we have to do less of, or perhaps stop doing, the things that generate those consequences. That doesn't mean a return to the Stone Age. It means aligning industrial culture with practices that are sustainable on this actual planet.
There is no other way to skin the cat. None.
If true, then as an engineer my advice is to learn to breathe water if you're on the coast. If your only solution is to abandon trillions of dollars of infrastructure, it's just not going to happen. The existing coal power plants are more than enough to doom you.
Posted by: Tim | March 25, 2007 at 12:03 PM
If true, then as an engineer my advice is to learn to breathe water if you're on the coast.
I live in a small town (4 sq miles) surrounded on three sides by ocean water. Geologically, it's a hard ledge head, and we're mostly pretty high up. I'll actually be OK, although I may find myself living on an island.
If you're interested, you can see how your town will make out using this handy Google maps hack:
http://flood.firetree.net/
Good luck.
If your only solution is to abandon trillions of dollars of infrastructure, it's just not going to happen.
When I lived in Philly, a lot of the older homes had brass lighting fixtures left over from when the lighting was by gas. They've been rewired for electric. That's an entire industry (and infrastructure) abandoned and repurposed.
The river valleys of New England, where I live now, are full of old mill towns, each full of acre upon acre of old mill buildings that were abandoned when we moved away from hydro-driven mechanical power for manufacturing. If they're close enough to the tech hubs, they're now condos and offices. Otherwise, they're derelict.
Whaling used to be an enormous industry up here as well. So did farming, but all the old farms were abandoned when the Ohio territory opened up -- the old Yankees got sick of eking a living out of our poor, rocky soil. New England is largely reforested now, but you will still find mile upon mile of stone boundary wall, and thousands of old fieldstone farmhouse foundations where the farms used to be.
My wife was born near Cleveland. The lakeside industrial infrastructure there is more or less a museum now. I mean that literally, they are trying to decide whether to tear it out, or keep it around as a industrial museum. I think the Ford River Rouge plant in Dearborn is also a museum now.
Technical and industrial infrastructure has been, is being, and will continue to be abandoned whenever it becomes uneconomic. At the drop of a hat, in fact. Happens every single day.
If your way of doing things is going to kill you, you either change or die. If your solution to the harmful products of industrial production is to put them "somewhere else", your way of doing things is on track to kill you.
Sequestration is a neat technology. It also requires enormous energy inputs, and requires a big industrial infrastructure of its own. As a magic bullet solution to making greenhouse gases "go away" in quantities sufficient to solve the actual problem, it's bogus.
We have to find ways of doing things that are based on sustainable technologies and practices. There isn't another solution. There are, at best, ways to mitigate ill effects in the short term. That's not good enough.
TANSTAAFL. Every engineer knows that.
Sorry for the long post.
Thanks
Posted by: russell | March 26, 2007 at 08:45 AM
'Yup, 'cos of course you never, ever see methane co-produced with oil.
I don't know what your point is, but my point is that where methane leaks, CO2 will probably leak too. '
It was a sarcastic point to point out the unfamiliarity of you and Russell with . I have exactly the same problem with your assertion . Some formations have retained methane for timelines on the orders of millions of years.
Also, on Russell's point re. the StatOil: you've assumed the limiting factor on the CO2 input to the is the capacity of the formation to bear it. However, the CO2 reijected to the saline aquifer is that co-produced with the oil & gas extracted. IIRC the limiting factor on the CO2 reinjected is the amount of CO2 produced, not the capacity limitations of the aquifer used. (A couple of years back, I could have pulled the papers by StatOil off the shelf and told you the definitive answer, but I've since changed employer.)
That some formations aren't suitable for CO2 sequestion does not mean that all formations aren't suitable for CO2 sequestration.
"It also requires enormous energy inputs, and requires a big industrial infrastructure of its own."
Actually, it doesn't. Most of the energy used in regeneration of the solvent is low-grade energy (low temperature condensate). The hit on efficiency of the plant is about 16% reduction in energy output. Frankly, I get the feeling you're just throwing assertions around with minimal familiarity with the technology.
For instance:
"Since it's already a drilling site, there also happens to be industrial infrastructure in place to do the injection."
In fact, the cost of creating the injection point is an order of magnitude less than the capture technology. Similarly, you're assuming that formations are unable to bear the CO2, when we've safely used CO2 for tertiary oil recovery for decades.
Go here:
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/fred/feprograms.jsp?prog=Carbon+Sequestration
For more CO2 sequestration projects.
"TANSTAAFL. Every engineer knows that."
But few engineers are Luddites.
"As a magic bullet solution to making greenhouse gases "go away" in quantities sufficient to solve the actual problem, it's bogus."
Frankly, it's a damn sight less bogus than staking one's claim on conservation or biomass, neither or which are remotely capable of offsetting sufficient quads of energy without either (1) a miraculous change in the energy/$-GDP ratio or (2) a severe destabilizing permanent reduction in GDP.
Look, do yourself a favour and read Pacala and Socolow's article on stabilization wedges at http://carbonsequestration.us/Papers-presentations/htm/Pacala-Socolow-ScienceMag-Aug2004.pdf
Biomass, conservation, solar, wind, sequestration, nuke, we're gonna need them all.
Fetishizing one approach, as you do on conservation, is insufficient to meet the scale of the problem we face.
Posted by: No Longer a Urinated State of America | March 26, 2007 at 12:17 PM
Look, do yourself a favour and read Pacala and Socolow's article on stabilization wedges at http://carbonsequestration.us/Papers-presentations/htm/Pacala-Socolow-ScienceMag-Aug2004.pdf
Will do. And, thanks.
Biomass, conservation, solar, wind, sequestration, nuke, we're gonna need them all.
You'll get no argument from me on that point. Nor will you get any argument from me that mitigating strategies are not a good thing.
Fetishizing one approach, as you do on conservation, is insufficient to meet the scale of the problem we face
You know, I bet we're actually not that far apart.
Here's my one and only point: there is no silver bullet.
Maybe you're completely right, and I'm completely wrong, about sequestration. Maybe we can bury CO2 under the ground in a way that is technically and financially feasible, and which won't create any adverse effect. No acidization of the ocean water, no unwanted escape of CO2, no disruption of underground water tables or other things we'd prefer not to disturb. Hey, it could happen. That would be delightful.
Even given that, I doubt we can scale the Statoil program up by a factor of 27,000 in a time frame that will save our bacon. Plus, some of the energy we create will go back into doing the sequestration. Plus, India and China aren't standing still, and the 27 billion tons per year will likely be more than that. It will need to be a factor much greater than 27,000, as it turns out.
Unless, of course, we find a way to use less, rather than more, energy, and/or to generate that energy in way that doesn't create harmful by products, or at least creates an order of magnitude fewer.
So, my very personal opinion is that the only realistic long term solution to this issue is not to find some collection of technologies that will help us mitigate the effects of what we do now, but to start figuring out how not to do what we do now.
Thanks -
Posted by: russell | March 26, 2007 at 01:32 PM
I liked the googlemaps about higher sea levels; as from 1 meter rise I'll live on an island too, but I'll be safe there for the next 8 meters. Of course they didn't take our sea protection measurements into account, nor the fact that current scenario's in the Netherlands assume the sea will have risen 35-85 cm in 2100.
We (Dutch offical policy) feel that we should both try to minimize human influence on climate change and adapt to changing circumstances. Developing expertise in water-protection might be a nice economic niche coming years.
Posted by: dutchmarbel | March 26, 2007 at 03:27 PM
I would assume that if sea level rise turns into a significant problem, while the Netherlands may suffer to some extent directly, the country will make out like a bandit selling expertise to other affected countries. You must have some of the best flood control people in the world.
Posted by: LizardBreath | March 26, 2007 at 03:31 PM
"You know, I bet we're actually not that far apart."
Thanks. It took me a while to work out that we weren't familiar with the concept of stabilization wedges.
Here's my one and only point: there is no silver bullet."
"Even given that, I doubt we can scale the Statoil program up by a factor of 27,000 in a time frame that will save our bacon. Plus, some of the energy we create will go back into doing the sequestration."
(1) I don't think we're talking about a 27,000 scaling. For one thing, CO2 sequestration is only practical with point-source production of CO2. We've talking maybe 30-40% of production as maybe being useful
(2) The difficulties of sequestion we're going to have to differ on. Even if only a limited subset of areas were suitable for sequestration, which then necessitated a distribution network to collect CO2 for sequestration in a select set of locations, would still not impact the economics that seriously, as most of the most of CO2 capture & sequestration is in the capital cost of the capture equipment. We have a distribution network for crude and its products; creating a distribution network for CO2 is expensive, but not prohibitive.
Is it a silver bullet? No, but it might get us 16% of where we need to go.
"So, my very personal opinion is that the only realistic long term solution to this issue is not to find some collection of technologies that will help us mitigate the effects of what we do now, but to start figuring out how not to do what we do now."
I'm afraid that we just don't have the time to figure out how to fundamentally change our industrial base. I'd rather have 50 years to make the transition or for New Neato Technologies(tm) to save our asses, which is what the proposed set of current or near-current stabilization technologies let us do. Even if e.g. nuke or sequestration set us up with localized headaches with 10,000 year half-lives, that's preferable to a global problem with a tipping point only a few decades away at best.
Posted by: No Longer a Urinated State of America | March 26, 2007 at 04:14 PM
One of the founders of Greenpeace has become rather pro nuclear energy.
LizardBreath: yup, we should. But countries have to be able to afford it too so it really is a niche market.
Posted by: dutchmarbel | March 26, 2007 at 04:56 PM
it might get us 16% of where we need to go
That actually sounds like a realistic and useful goal.
Thanks for the links, I will check them out.
Best -
Posted by: russell | March 26, 2007 at 08:10 PM
Hey USA -
Sorry, a (hopefully) final thought.
The other night my wife and I were out to dinner with friends. This issue came up, and some folks at the table were all fired up about carbon sequestration. As they saw it, they could basically buy some carbon credits, make no change in any aspect of their lifestyle, and still be the good guys.
In other words, they would throw a little money at somebody else to make the problem "go away". Hey, Al Gore does it, right?
I realize that that IS NOT where you're coming from. I think, however, that it's really, really important to drum into people's heads that the problem will not get better until people's habits and expectations change.
Things like sequestration may be a really good stopgap to buy us time to find a better solution. But we have to find a better solution.
It will probably involve some changes in the way we live. We all need to sign up for that.
Thanks -
Posted by: russell | March 26, 2007 at 08:18 PM
That some formations aren't suitable for CO2 sequestion does not mean that all formations aren't suitable for CO2 sequestration.
Sure. and with some caveats we can predict that the ones that have trapped methane might tend to trap CO2. Particularly if we can get the CO2 up with the methane, instead of down with the water.
If it's in the water then first we can't depend on it to travel like methane does, and second if it hits limestone then wherever it can move little bit it's going to carve out channels to move faster. Don't try this in florida.
Your sort of sequestration looks like a good thing in ideal cases, and it's too soon to say where the point of diminishing returns will be. 16% sounds optimistic to me, but if it can give us 1% without major investment then it's still a good thing.
I'm not hopeful about conservation. Our economic system is set up so that the people who conserve just drive down prices for the people who don't. We aren't going to make much progress on those lines while we have a large middle class. But the Bush administration is doing their part to handle that problem.
Posted by: J Thomas | March 27, 2007 at 08:21 AM
"The other night my wife and I were out to dinner with friends. This issue came up, and some folks at the table were all fired up about carbon sequestration. As they saw it, they could basically buy some carbon credits, make no change in any aspect of their lifestyle, and still be the good guys."
Russell, thanks for being educable. It's rare in blog comment discourse.
I actually don't really have a problem with this, because I don't really think the solution to the problem is a hair shirt. Our problem is with the price of CO2, which in the US is effectively zero. At $10/tonne ((say), you have a lot of low hanging fruit being taken, a lot of which, if you believe Amory Lovins, are going to be net financial positives. At $50-100/tonne, a lot of technologies start to become economically attractive.
The problem is with carbon, not energy use. If someone is driving a big fuck-off SUV plug-in hybrid or electric vehicle using wind-generated power bought off the grid or from their PV cells on the roof, I'm not arsed about it.
There will be changes coming. But I think they will be limited to how and where we generate electricity and other forms of power, rather than fundamental realignments of our economy and lifestyle, IF we start pricing CO2 emissions at ~$50/tonne in the next decade.
If we fart around for another two decades ineffectually, then your scenario becomes more likely (as do a bunch of more unpleasant ones), if only because the fraction of our GDP we'll have to sacrifice will be more substantial.
Posted by: No Longer a Urinated State of America | March 27, 2007 at 11:50 AM