Congressional leaders are beginning to start thinking about a climate bill again.
Health care legislation has finally started
moving forward in Congress. Shawn Allee reports
the US Senate can now devote some attention to
its unfinished work on climate change:
Transcript
Health care legislation has finally started moving forward in Congress.
Shawn Allee reports the US Senate can now devote some attention to its unfinished work on climate change:
The climate-change bill got a cold reception last year, but Senators Kerry, Graham and Lieberman say they’re making headway lately.
Margaret Kriz Hobson tracks climate legislation for the National Journal.
She says the Senate got stuck negotiating a complex carbon trading scheme.
That would have required most industries to trade carbon pollution credits.
Kriz Hobson says the three senators are now focusing mostly on power companies.
“A lot more people are letting them in the door because the proposal that they’re bringing forward would include some benefits for nuclear power, oil drilling in the United States and for more modern technologies for capture and sequestration.”
That last technology would basically bury carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants.
That could save money and jobs in states that burn or mine coal.
Healthy Reef Systems May Be a Thing of The Past(Photo courtesy of Mikael Häggström)
Some scientists think we might be headed for a mass extinction event
in the oceans. When carbon dioxide gets released into the atmosphere,
a lot of that CO2 soaks into the oceans. That makes the water more
acidic. When the pH gets too low, it dissolves the skeletons of
animals like coral and mussels. Ann Dornfeld reports:
Transcript
** The story as originally broadcast incorrectly referred to the publication as “Natural Geoscience.” It should be “Nature Geoscience.”
Some scientists think we might be headed for a mass extinction event
in the oceans. When carbon dioxide gets released into the atmosphere,
a lot of that CO2 soaks into the oceans. That makes the water more
acidic. It can dissolve the skeletons of
animals like coral and mussels. Ann Dornfeld reports:
Fifty-five million years ago, a mass extinction happened when the
oceans became too acidic.
Richard Feely is a chemical oceanographer for the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration. He says that today’s ocean acidification
is happening too quickly for many species to adjust.
“Over the last 200 years we’ve seen a 30-percent increase in acidity
of the oceans, and about six percent of that increase of acidity of
the oceans has been in the last 15 years.”
Researchers at the University of Bristol in England ran simulations of
the acidification processes 55 million years ago and today. They found
that acidification is happening ten times faster these days than it
did before the prehistoric mass extinction.
That could mean that if we don’t slow our release of CO2 into the
atmosphere, life in our oceans could crash within a century or two.
The study is published in the journal of Nature Geoscience.
Meredith Mull loves dogs. She owns five and works as a groomer. She's not getting rid of any of her pets to help the environment.
(Photo by Julie Grant)
We’ve all heard about the
environmental problems our
gas-guzzling cars and trucks
cause. But some researchers
say our vehicles aren’t the
biggest energy hogs. The biggest
energy users actually live
in our homes. Julie Grant
reports about the new book
‘Time To Eat The Dog?’ about
the wasteful ways of our pets:
Transcript
We’ve all heard about the
environmental problems our
gas-guzzling cars and trucks
cause. But some researchers
say our vehicles aren’t the
biggest energy hogs. The biggest
energy users actually live
in our homes. Julie Grant
reports about the new book
‘Time To Eat The Dog?’ about
the wasteful ways of our pets:
Robert Vale is sorry. He didn’t set out to incriminate Fido. He and his wife Brenda Vale specialize in sustainable living at Victoria University in New Zealand. And they just wanted to see how much of the world’s resources it takes to do things like eat, work, play sports, and own pets.
“The thing that most surprised us, and was the most unexpected was the scale of the impact of pets – which was really, really high.”
Vale says a big dog, like a German Shepard, actually has a bigger ecological footprint than an SUV.
To measure the ecological paw-print of pets, the Vales looked at the ingredients in common brands of dried pet foods. Based on recommended portion sizes, they calculated that a medium sized dog would consume more than 3 ounces of dried meat a day. To get that much dried meat, the Vales found, it takes nearly a pound of fresh meat. Add that up each day, and they concluded a medium sized dog eats about 360 pounds of meat a year!
Robert Vale says raising that meat – beef, lamb and chicken – has an environmental impact.
“And we did the calculation based on a dog eating chicken, which is a fairly low footprint meat, rather than say beef, which is a fairly high footprint meat. So, we tried to bias it in favor of the dog. But it still came out really big. It was a big surprise, really.”
Vale says the dog takes more than 2 and a half times more energy and resources than building and driving an SUV 6000 miles a year.
These numbers aren’t just coming from the Vales.
The New Scientist Magazine asked the Stockholm Environment Institute in England to calculate a dog’s paw-print, and the findings were almost exactly the same.
But none of this really computes with dog-lover Meredith Mull. She doesn’t understand why Robert Vale would even look into this.
“He must not have a pet. He must not know what it’s like to be loved by an animal and take care of it and have it give you nothing but respect and loyalty and love. He must not know what it feels like.”
The Vales don’t have any pets. They used to have cats and other animals. But when they died, Robert Vale says they felt they shouldn’t replace them and use more of the world’s resources just to give themselves a little more comfort.
“We are increasingly pushing up to a question of limits. What can we have, what, everything. I think to some extent, that’s why it’s unpopular. We’ve all been brought up to believe that not only can we have more of everything, but it’s our right to have more of everything.”
But some people think the Vales are barking up the wrong tree.
Chetana Mirle works on global warming issues at the Humane Society of the United States. She says instead of blaming dogs, people should look at what they, themselves are eating – and how that contributes to environmental problems.
“So to me, I felt like, ‘are you kidding me?’ Um, we’re worried about our pets, and what our pets are eating instead of what we’re eating, and what our consumption is about – which has such a huge disproportionately large impact on climate change and the environment in general.”
It’s not that the researchers want people to blame dogs and cats instead of themselves. They say they just want people to understand that each choice we make – right down to whether we have pets – has an environmental impact.
A coal mine in West Virginia.
(Photo by Erika Celeste)
The coal industry wants us to
believe in the idea of ‘clean coal.’
But burning coal emits a lot of
carbon dioxide, the greenhouse
gas contributing to climate change.
The coal-burning electric power
industry is just now testing technology
to capture CO2 and to permanently
store it. The second round of tests
is happening at American Electric
Power’s Mountaineer Power Plant
in New Haven, West Virginia. Hank
Courtright is monitoring those tests.
He’s with the non-profit Electric Power
Research Institute. Lester Graham
talked with him and asked how the
tests are going:
Transcript
The coal industry wants us to
believe in the idea of ‘clean coal.’
But burning coal emits a lot of
carbon dioxide, the greenhouse
gas contributing to climate change.
The coal-burning electric power
industry is just now testing technology
to capture CO2 and to permanently
store it. The second round of tests
is happening at American Electric
Power’s Mountaineer Power Plant
in New Haven, West Virginia. Hank
Courtright is monitoring those tests.
He’s with the non-profit Electric Power
Research Institute. Lester Graham
talked with him and asked how the
tests are going:
Hank Courtright: We think it has great progress, it’s really the second step of a multi-step process that we’re doing. We had just concluded a project up in Wisconsin on a smaller scale, the same type of technology, and it was very successful. It capture 90-plus percent of the CO2 that passed through it and saw some great promises as far as reducing the cost of doing it. The idea here is that we’re scaling it up ten times larger at the mountaineer plant and so far the early results seem very good and we’ll continue to test that over a year plus to see how it does produce.
Lester Graham: I understand it takes a lot more energy to run this extra CO2 capture equipment, as much as 30% more coal has to be burned to generate the same amount of electricity, what’s being called a parasitic load. What’s this going to mean for our power bills?
Hank: Well, what we’re trying to Lester is that the parasitic load gets down into the, let’s say, the 10 to 15% range. If you get to that level, it means that the electricity out of a coal plant might be about 25% higher than it is. But right now coal is basically the cheapest form of producing electricity, so it still ends as being an economical option even if you might be increasing the cost of that coal plant by about 25%.
Lester: If they can accomplish that with this experiment, how long will it take to get this technology built into the bulk of coal burning power plants?
Hank: Well, you’re going to be working over this for several decades, really. If this plant at Mountaineer works well, our thinking is around 2020 you’re going to be able to have most new coal power plants use the carbon capture and storage. And you might be able to retrofit about 20%, 25% of the existing plants in the United States with this type of technology.
Lester: If all of these methods fizzle, we can’t capture carbon economically, or at the other end, we can’t find a way to sequester this carbon underground, or whatever type of method they can come up with, what’s next?
Hank: Well, that causes some difficulties because right here in the United States coal is used to produce about half our electricity. And if it doesn’t work on coal, it’s also the issue that it won’t work on any other fossil fuels such as natural gas, which produces about 20% of our electricity. So you’re into a difficult situation that if you’d wanted to significantly reduce the CO2 emissions to improve the climate change issue, then you’d have to be looking at a combination of probably nuclear power and a very large roll out of renewable energy. Both of those would have to take the lion share of electricity production. But our hope is that we can get this working because it is not only here in the US that you need it on fossil fuels of coal and gas, but also in places like China, Russia, India, Australia, country’s that very large reserves of coal and hope to use those natural resources.
Lester Graham at the coal mine Shay #1 in Macoupin County, Illinois. He's interviewing the mine general manager Roger Dennison.
(Photo courtesy of Phil Ganet)
The coal industry is hopeful
an old technology will help
them clean up an increasingly
unpopular fuel. Lester Graham
reports, without it, coal faces
an uncertain future:
Transcript
The coal industry is hopeful
an old technology will help
them clean up an increasingly
unpopular fuel. Lester Graham
reports, without it, coal faces
an uncertain future:
[Editor’s Note: The script for this story will be posted shortly.]
In 2005, global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide were 35% higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution. (Data courtesy of the US EPA. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
The EPA recently announced that
it’s moving forward with regulations
to limit global warming pollutants
like carbon dioxide. Now, some
Senate Republicans want to stop
the EPA. Samara Freemark has that story:
Transcript
The EPA recently announced that
it’s moving forward with regulations
to limit global warming pollutants
like carbon dioxide. Now, some
Senate Republicans want to stop
the EPA. Samara Freemark has that story:
Senate Republicans say, if the country wants to regulate greenhouse gases, Congress should do it – not the EPA.
Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski represents Alaska. She’s drafted an amendment to put a hold on EPA greenhouse gas regulations for one year.
Critics say the amendment would strip the EPA of an important regulatory tool.
Anne Johnson is a spokesperson for Senator Murkowski. She says regulatory action from the EPA would be too broad and could hurt American businesses.
“Senator Murkowski represents Alaska. It’s ground zero for climate change. There’s no denying that. She knows that we need to do something, and she’s committed to that. At the same time, she’s committed to not harming the economy.”
Murkowski could introduce the amendment as early as this week.
Burning fossil fuels such as
oil and coal creates carbon
dioxide. CO2 contributes
to climate change. Samara Freemark reports
some scientists say we could
capture the emissions from
smokestacks and put in in the
ground – and they think they’ve
found a good place:
Transcript
Burning fossil fuels such as
oil and coal creates carbon
dioxide. CO2 contributes
to climate change. Samara Freemark reports
some scientists say we could
capture the emissions from
smokestacks and put in in the
ground – and they think they’ve
found a good place:
It’s called carbon capture: collecting CO2 from smokestacks, liquefying it, and piping it underground for permanent storage.
A big question is exactly where to bury the carbon dioxide so it doesn’t escape.
A new study from Rutgers University says one good place might be the underwater lava formations that run all along the eastern seaboard.
Dennis Kent is one of the study’s authors. He says the formations are full of basins that could double as CO2 reservoirs. And they’re conveniently close to population centers.
“You have to get it from the power plant to wherever the reservoir is. So having it closer would be an advantage. Take the Co2 down the road somewhere and lock it away.”
The study measured the capacity of one basin off the coast of New Jersey. It found the basin could hold a gigaton of carbon dioxide- or, the amount of gas a coal-burning power plant produces in four decades.
When it comes to global warming,
America’s in a bind. Almost half
of our electricity comes from coal.
But, compared to other power sources,
coal produces the most carbon dioxide,
a greenhouse gas. Industry’s testing
so-called ‘clean coal’ technology to
deal with the problem. Shawn Allee has this update on a test
project that has some hard work
left to do:
Transcript
When it comes to global warming,
America’s in a bind. Almost half
of our electricity comes from coal.
But, compared to other power sources,
coal produces the most carbon dioxide,
a greenhouse gas. Industry’s testing
so-called ‘clean coal’ technology to
deal with the problem. Shawn Allee has this update on a test
project that has some hard work
left to do:
If you live outside coal-mining country, you may have missed this news about a clean-coal project in West Virginia.
“A big announcement has the state and members of the coal industry very excited about the future of the state’s most valuable resource. Good Evening, I’m April Hall…“
The fanfare’s about a company called American Electric Power. Last fall, AEP started a test that could begin a clean-coal revolution.
“The Mountaineer power plant in Mason County is going to be the first facility in the world to use carbon capture and sequestration technology to cut down on the carbon dioxide that that plant emits. AEP is hoping the implementation …“
The Mountaineer test project made headlines because there’s talk of clamping down on America’s carbon dioxide emissions. Coal produces nearly twice its own weight in carbon dioxide. So, if we could bury or sequester the stuff that would help solve the coal industry’s carbon dioxide problem. Expectations are high, but the company is keeping its cool.
“The tension we’re fighting against is the fact that you can’t go from concepts on paper to commercial scale in one step.“
Gary Spitznogle runs an engineering division for AEP, and if you think he sounds cautious, it’s because he is. Spitznogle says AEP needs to validate carbon capture and sequestration.
“Validation is kind of that intermediate step between what is truly research work and full commercial scale.“
Validation is another way of saying this technology mostly works but let’s take it for a spin. Let’s run bigger and bigger tests, so we learn more and more.
“The test is treating the amount of gas that would be coming from a 20MW generating unit, so that’s very small.“
From 20 megawatts now to two hundred fifty megawatts in a few years – that’s still less than a quarter of the power generation at the Mountaineer plant.
But what’s the point of tests like this? Well, there’s a problem with carbon capture and sequestration: it wastes coal. This waste is called parasitic load. Parasitic – as in parasite.
Spitznogle: “And because it’s taking the power it’s consuming from the generating plant that you’re controlling, it’s in a sense a parasite of that power plant.“
Allee: “Sounds kind of nefarious.“
Spitznogle: “The reason is that it’s such a focus is that, no matter what technology you look at, the number is large.“
Carbon capture and sequestration equipment need power. That adds a parasitic load of thirty percent onto a coal plant. That means it takes thirty percent more coal to generate the same amount of electricity for customers. Spitznogle needs to find out if his technology cuts that parasitic load figure. Other people hope he finds out, too.
“The overarching concern I would have today is urgency.“
Ernest Moniz runs MIT’s Energy Institute. He says if power companies don’t get a handle on parasitic load we’re in for higher utility bills. One estimate puts the cost of clean-coal power at seventy percent above today’s prices. Moniz says we need bigger tests and more of them.
“We’re pushing up against the envelope and we have to do it. If we’re going to be serious about using our extensive coal reserves in a time of carbon constraints, well, then we have to just demonstrate this technology.“
If we fail to demonstrate clean coal technology, the choices aren’t good. We’d have to abandon our cheap coal supplies or we’d burn dirty coal, then deal with the costs of climate change.
Coal train.
(Photo courtesy of the Energy Information Administration)
When you turn on the lights,
there’s a pretty good chance
you’re burning coal. Almost
half of the nation’s electricity
comes from coal. Burning coal
causes the greenhouse gas,
carbon dioxide. But, have you
ever wondered how much?
Lester Graham got a pound of
coal, and then talked to Ezra
Hausman. He’s
the Vice President of Synapse
Energy Economics in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. The first question –
how long would a pound of coal
light up a hundred-watt incandescent
light bulb?:
Transcript
When you turn on the lights,
there’s a pretty good chance
you’re burning coal. Almost
half of the nation’s electricity
comes from coal. Burning coal
causes the greenhouse gas,
carbon dioxide. But, have you
ever wondered how much?
Lester Graham got a pound of
coal, and then talked to Ezra
Hausman. He’s
the Vice President of Synapse
Energy Economics in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. The first question –
how long would a pound of coal
light up a hundred-watt incandescent
light bulb?:
Ezra Hausman: Well, you haven’t told me where you got that pound of coal. Uh, it makes a big difference if it’s from the Appalachian region or the Western region, such as Wyoming in the United States. The Appalachian coal, Eastern coal, would burn a light bulb for about, uh, 10 or 12 hours. A pound of Western coal would only burn it for about 5 or 6 hours.
Lester Graham: There’s that much difference?
Ezra: There’s a big difference in the energy content of the coal, that’s correct.
Lester: And coal, a good portion of coal, is pure carbon. What kind of CO2 omissions would we expect from this one kind of coal?
Ezra: Well, a pound of coal is, let’s say, it’s about half carbon. So that would be a half a pound of carbon, but for every atom of carbon you add two atoms of oxygen from the air. So, you get for every 12 grams of carbon, you get 44 grams of carbon dioxide. That’s basically just how the chemistry works out when you burn carbon and oxygen; it produces carbon dioxide in that ratio.
Lester: So, this one pound of coal, would admit, by weight, more CO2 than I have in my hand here?
Ezra: That’s right; it would end up admitting about two pounds of CO2. Depending again on where the coal came from and how much carbon is in it.
Lester: Now my environmentalist friends would like to see no more coal plants built, no more coal burning power plants built, simply because of the CO2 emissions. The coal industry tells me they’re working on clean coal; there are experiments going on right now to find ways to sequester CO2 and other experiments going on how to store it underground. What do you think is the future of coal?
Ezra: Well, first of all, I think it’s important to say that there is no such thing as clean coal today. So in the first place, coal mining is an extremely environmentally damaging and dangerous process. The high volumes techniques that are now in use including strip-mining and mountain top removal have devastating consequences on mining regions. And secondly, while there are techniques in place that eliminate many of the regular pollutants such as sulfur and nitrogen from coal combustion, there is no current technology that can significantly reduce the amount of CO2 emitted from power plants.
Lester: What do you see as the future of coal and power generation from coal in America in the future?
Ezra: Well, I think we really have no option but the phase out the use of coal for power generation over the next several decades. The problem with coal is not that each pound has so much carbon; the problem is that there is just a vast reservoir of carbon and potential carbon dioxide in the coal reserves under ground in the United States.
Ezra Hausman is Vice President of Synapse Energy Economics.
He talked with The Environment Report’s
Lester Graham.
The EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, announced the U.S. is moving ahead to eventually restrict greenhouse gases.
(Photo courtesy of the US EPA)
The US Environmental Protection
Agency has ruled CO2 is a dangerous
pollutant. Lester Graham reports
the finding gives President Obama
something to take to the climate
talks in Copenhagen:
Transcript
The US Environmental Protection
Agency has ruled CO2 is a dangerous
pollutant. Lester Graham reports
the finding gives President Obama
something to take to the climate
talks in Copenhagen:
The EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, announced the U.S. is moving ahead to eventually restrict greenhouse gases.
“EPA has finalized its endangerment finding on greenhouse gas pollution and is now authorized and obligated to make reasonable efforts to reduce greenhouse pollutants under the Clean Air Act.”
But even with an administrative rule, Jackson says it’s still important that Congress pass a climate change law.
“I stand firm in my belief that legislation is the best way to move our economy forward on clean energy and to address climate pollution.”
The new rule sends a strong message to the climate summit currently going on in Copenhagen that the U.S. is getting serious about the emissions that are causing global warming. And next week, President Obama will go to Copenhagen with something a little more substantive.
Congressional leaders are beginning to start thinking about a climate bill again.
