Perpetual Innovation

Category: cost of carbon

  • Oil & Gas Spills in North America Since 2010

    Oil & Gas Spills in North America Since 2010

    A
    question I sometimes ask of people who think that fossil fuels are here
    forever more and that electrification of everything will never
    happen… 

    Has there ever been an oil spill in Yellowstone National Park? If so, how many?

    The answer I get surprisingly often is “none”. It is, after all, a National Park, right? 

    ArcGIS
    does a map overlay with the data of your choice. In this case the data
    is documented oil and gas spills since 2010, by type of spill and the
    SIZE of spill. Map for North America here.
    The size of the circle indicates the size of the spill. Note the big
    circles; size of the circle indicates the size of the spill. Blue is
    refined oil (gasoline, diesel, etc.). Red is NatGas. Since NatGas just
    vents into the atmosphere (unless it catches fire or is flared), it’s a
    “clean” spill. Kinda. Natural Gas is a wicked greenhouse gas, with a
    warming factor of 80x more than carbon dioxide. 

    The next chart just shows oil & gasoline spills. Crude oil in green (ironically), refined petroleum in blue. Zoom in and select a circle to find out more about the spill (year and amount).

    Yellowstone is in the northeast corner of Wyoming. Yellowstone has had two notable oil spills
    since 2010: an oil spill on the Exxon-Mobil pipeline in 2011, and
    another spill in 2015 from the pipeline owned by the True Companies.
    Those spills seem tiny compared to the thousands of spills throughout
    North America. No info from Canada though. There have been many oil
    spills in the Alaska pipelines that run all the way through Canada to
    the US.

    Note that there are tens of thousands of old wells that
    have been abandoned; many have never been capped or have been poorly
    capped. Old wells are leaking massive amounts of oil and natgas. The big
    oil companies sell off the depleted wells to small companies. Those
    companies milk the well for a while and then go out of business. 

    “According to the Government Accountability Office, the 2.1 million unplugged abandoned wells in the United States could cost as much as $300 billion.[2]” from this Wikipedia article on Abandoned Wells in the United States.
    There are abandoned oil wells everywhere: in the gulf, in Pennsylvania,
    in Texas, in California.  And that is in the USA where there are better
    regulations than most countries. Read about the Biden effort to go out
    and cap them at the NRDC. There are lots of other sources, but you get the idea.

    When
    you think of the costs to the environment, the costs to clean up, and
    the costs to not cleanup, the costs are massively greater than what you
    pay at the gas meter or at the pump. And yet the world’s governments
    still subsidize fossil fuels at the rate of $1T per year. According to the IMF, explicit fossil fuel subsidies are about 1% of GDP, but implicit is 6% to 7% of GDP (about $6T USD).

  • Finally, a great GOP plan to address climate change. Who’s Who

    The unbelievable list of Who’s-Who from the GOP world have joined together (Climate Leadership Council) to come up with a very workable, market-based, approach to address climate change. Schultz and Baker have been around since the Reagan era. One of their crowning achievements was related to getting the world to reduce all of fluorocarbons (like Freon) which was wiping out the protective ozone layer of our atmosphere. You rarely hear the discuss on the ozone layer, right? Schultz and Baker are a big part of the reason why. The world-wide agreement on fluorocarbons is know as the Montreal Protocol.

    Here is a great article by Schultz and Baker, both from Ronald Reagan era Republicans. A Conservative Answer to Climate Change.

    First, to address climate change, has some scary implications. It really is unnerving if there is no energy policy in the US. In this report, we may have the only energy policy forming since the attempt by President Carter to have an energy policy. Obama tried to use the EPA to regulate fossil fuels and more, which is no substitute for an actual energy policy that is congress/legislative based.

    For decades, economists have linked a market based approach to address the non-sustainable use of energy in the US and globally. One approach is to build a more complicated approach for putting a price on carbon, cap and trade (Emissions trading). A simple tax is so much more straight forward. In this case, they want to take the carbon tax and rebate it back to the population in the form of dividend rebates. The estimate is that the bottom 70% of the population, income-wise, will have a net benefit from this plan. Revenue neutral.

    From an international security issue, it reduces the money we send to other countries in order to use more fossil fuels ($1T over every couple years). The large producers of the world are not necessarily friendly to us: Russia, Venezuela, Saudi, Iran. Much of the terrorism of the world is also paid from from oil moneys (ISIS and the renegades in Nigeria).

    The beauty of this approach — above and beyond environmental benefits — is that people can take that dividend money and pay even more for gas and gas-guzzling vehicles. Or, even better, use if for something they value more.

    I’ve been very disappointed in the GOP; they have let the deniers drown out the engagement of addressing such the critical issue of the non-sustainability of fossil fuels. A smart market approach will work nicely and solve lots of problems simultaneously. This approach will apparently reduce carbon emissions by 2x from  Obama’s EPA approach to “clean energy”, and 3x what dumping the plan an reverting to business as usual (BAU).  As one of the authors and economist Greg Mankiw says, “this is pretty close to a panacea in the way that it solves lots of problems as once”. No need to subsidize renewable; let the best solutions rise and the worst dwindle.

    Consider this dividend-tax as insurance. You buy insurance to reduce future risks and costs. This plan starts to steadily reduce carbon emissions.

    Everyone wins with this plan. Well, except maybe coal, oil and gas companies and countries.

    Now these guys need to go convince Pres Trump and his merry band of fossil burners. Surprisingly, it might just work.

    Also see Amy Harder Feb 8 blog on the topic in WSJ. She discusses the meeting of the Climate Leadership Council with Pres Trump where they voiced that they were “cautiously optimistic”.

  • 13 of 14 warmest years on record occurred in 21st century – UN | Environment

    13 of 14 warmest years on record occurred in 21st century – UN | Environment | theguardian.com:

    Ouch. As you look at the clock, you will see that we are only 14 years into the 21st Century. Yet we have 13 of the hottest 14 years in recorded history.

    You do have to take the whole of the earth into account, obviously, not just the USA, where we were ?fortunate? enough to have a exceptionally cold and blizzardy Winter. (Polar Vortex is now in our daily vernacular.)

    If you are interested in the science go here to look at the 11 or 12 major indicators (based on several data sources each) that would indicate global warming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_temperature_record

    If you want a composite graphic that shows the robustness of the evidence, go here. There are several data sources overlaid in each graphic. Note that the stratosphere is decreasing (cooler), that is consistent with a depletion of the ozone layer.

    The recent UN report talks about the trends in costs associated with climate effects, like typhoons. A draft report talks about $1.45T costs associated with climate change over the next decade. (See here http://www.livescience.com/43891-global-warming-economic-damage.html.)

    The costs are expected to reach $70 to $100B per year for adaptation by 2050. (See here: http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/03/31/will-the-uns-new-report-shift-the-global-warming-debate)

    NASA has lots of interesting graphics, including time-series that will show the world temperature changes over the last couple hundred years. (Or just recently if you want since 1970).(The science visualization study at NASA is awesome, no mater what your interests: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/Gallery/index.html or if you want to draw your own graphs based on the underlying data, go here: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/global/globe/land_ocean/3/2/1880-2014).

    As we come up on Earth Day (EarthDay.org or EarthDay in Wikipedia) the impacts of business as usual (BAS) really revolves around whether you think something should be done to be much more sustainable NOW!, in decades or in centuries to come.

    The degree of urgency really depends on how much you believe in global warming, and how fast you think that warming may take place.

    Look at the graphs and make your own call on this.

    ‘via Blog this’

  • Next generation of biofuels is still years away | Hattiesburg American | hattiesburgamerican.com

    Next generation of biofuels is still years away | Hattiesburg American | hattiesburgamerican.com:

    Biofuel is a byline in the energy mix.

    So biofuel is mandated. And because it is ordered to be true, it must be.

    And because it is ordered to be true, the mandate must meet the expectations.

    Thus is the problem with government subsidies… Burning food for fuel (corn to ethanol) is still a rather dumb idea, even though it is finally getting efficient enough that there is a small net gain gallon-equivalent per gallon of ethanol.

    What would work perfectly well, from an economics point of view, is to raise taxes on non-renewable sources of fuel and energy. A simple carbon tax would do it. It could be progressive over time.

    Then the more accurate costs of non-renewables would allow for the energy economy to shift and make its on path forward. The types of renewable fuel would decide themselves and the government would be out of the picture setting mandates in less-than-smart — some might say foolish — areas.

    Of course the politicians who set the wheels in process for a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade (tax?) will soon find themselves out to pasture shoveling biowaste.

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  • Social Good Summit 2013 – Social Good Summit

    Social Good Summit 2013 – Social Good Summit:

    Here’s a video of the conference on United Nations Foundation, Gates Foundation and more. on Social Good Summit 2013… Conference runs from Sept 22 – 24, New York, NY.

    Al Gore is in this too.

    Hash tag I guess is #2030now

    Check out the LP Recharge game, Kuuluu.com. Part of the UN movement to have affordable, renewable energy for all. 1.3B people do not have access to energy. Maybe 3B don’t really have safe and affordable energy.

    Very interesting.

    Not quite the balance of the business and economic engine for development and wealth creation that we would like to see. But some very good stuff here.

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