Tag: emissions

Is Wood Biomass Just Blowing Smoke? (Part 1)

  • President of Manomet consulting group John Hagan says the bottom line is that biomass can be carbon neutral ... if subsidies and policies are precise.(Photo courtesy of Shawn Allee)

State governments often mandate power companies to buy alternative energy.
They figure it’s worth having everyone buck up and pay extra since these don’t contribute carbon dioxide emissions that change the climate.But what energy sources should make the cut?
Shawn Allee found one is getting lots of scrutiny.

Transcript

State governments often mandate power companies to buy alternative energy.
They figure it’s worth having everyone buck up and pay extra since these don’t contribute carbon dioxide emissions that change the climate.

But what energy sources should make the cut?

Shawn Allee found one is getting lots of scrutiny.

Bob Cleaves heads up the Biomass Power Association.

He spends a lot of time pitching the idea that electricity made by burning wood is worth government help.
After all, he can’t sell the idea of biomass on price.

Electricity generated from wood had to compete with coal and natural gas and it became very difficult to operate these plants on a profitable basis.

Cleaves says other alternative energy sources are expensive, too, but biomass has extra benefits …
He says try running solar panels at night – biomass power plants run 24-7.

But Cleaves admits he’s got explaining to do when it comes to carbon emissions.

You know, from burning wood.

when you burn something you release CO2 …

For years, Cleaves could follow-up with a simple argument.

He’d just run through the carbon cycle idea you might recall from high school.

You know, you burn trees.
That releases CO2.
Then, as trees re-grow, they absorb that same carbon again …

These are carbons that are recycled into the environment in a closed-loop fashion.

This argument often won out.
Many states give biomass from wood subsidies, since they considered it carbon neutral.

The US House came close to doing the same thing last year.

But lately, biomass’ rep got into trouble.

Well, the carbon issue came up in the fall as a result of an article published in Science magazine.

The title of the article was “Fixing a Critical Climate Accounting Error.”
It challenged the idea that biomass power from wood or anything else is always carbon neutral.

Critics now use the article’s arguments against biomass subsidies.

“This policy is intended to reduce carbon emissions and it’s doing the exact opposite.”

This is Jana Chicoine, an anti-biomass activist from Massachussetts.

She says, sure, trees you cut for power now will grow back and then re-absorb carbon.

But not soon.

“It will create a pulse of carbon emissions that will spike for decades. Policy makers are telling us we are in a carbon crisis and that we have to reduce carbon emissions now.”

So, Chicoine says it makes no sense to subsidize biomass technology.

It’s going to harm public policy on clean energy. Those funds should be going to the truly valuable contributors to the energy problem like wind and solar, conservation and efficiency.

Well, Chicoine and other biomass critics won a temporary victory in Massachusetts.

The state was leaning toward subsidizing biomass power, but it held off a final decision.

It’s waiting for advice from an environmental consulting group called Manomet.

President John Hagan says people expect a simple answer: would a biomass industry in Massachusetts be carbon neutral or not?

“The last thing you want to hear a scientist say is, it’s complicated, but I’m afraid it is in this case.”

The latest research suggests some biomass power operations can be carbon neutral while others won’t be.

The best operations would use tree trimmings or waste wood like sawdust. That keeps more trees in the ground … absorbing carbon.

Biomass power plants prefer to use waste wood anyway, since it’s cheap.
But Hagan says maybe more biomass plants will all chase the same scrap wood.

Prices will rise … and suddenly standing trees start looking cheaper.

It’s like a puzzle, when you push on one piece, eighteen other things move.

Hagan says the bottom line is that biomass can be carbon neutral … if subsidies and policies are precise.
He says policies should work like scalpels.

But often, they’re simple … and work more like big axes.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Billions for Better Rail Service

  • High speed trains may be sprouting up across the country in light of the recent initiative. (Photo courtesy of Black Leon)

The U.S. government is spending billions of dollars to improve the nation’s railroads and passenger train service. But those billions will be just the beginning of the cost of updating rail service. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

The U.S. government is spending billions of dollars to improve the nation’s railroads and passenger train service. But those billions will be just the beginning of the cost of updating rail service. Lester Graham reports:

New investments in higher-speed rail are making passenger rail supporters almost giddy. Eight billion dollars from the Recovery Act is seed money for new high-speed routes in California and Florida and improvements for existing routes in other regions.

At a recent National Press Club panel discussion, Amtrak’s Joseph McHugh said Amtrak is not getting any of that money… but it’ll improve the freight railroads on which Amtrak operates its trains.

McHugh: And that means higher speeds, reduced trip time, additional frequencies, improved facilities, and a higher level of reliability for our services all around the country.

Beyond that first eight-billion dollars, the Department of Transportation’s so-called TIGER grants mean a few billion dollars more for further upgrades railroads and depots that tie into commuter rail, light rail and other mass transit.

Supporters of rail are expecting big things from the investments.

But others see spending billions upon billions of dollars on passenger rail as wasted money. They don’t see the utopia of transportation in better, faster trains. Many online comments from readers of stories on higher-speed rail indicate they don’t want the government to subsidize rail projects. They see it as stealing from necessary highway and bridge improvements. Others are more political, saying the government is trying to imitate the high-speed rail of Europe when –they feel– Americans are more independent and prefer cars.

So the debate sometimes devolves into — car versus train. Or individuality versus socialism.

Susan Zielinksi heads up the Universtiy of Michigan’s SMART transit project. She says that’s the wrong way to view it.

Zielinski:I think we get ourselves stuck in the polarization and this isn’t about getting rid of cars.

She says better passenger rail and tying it in to better mass transit gives more people more choices. She notes not everyone has access to a reliable car.

Environmentalists add… the train is just more environmentally friendly. Howard Lerner is with the Environmental Law and Policy Center.

Lerner: On a per-passenger-mile basis, rail is about three times as efficient as travel by car in terms of fuel efficiency, six times as efficient as travel by air. So, there are pretty substantial pollution reduction benefits, both in terms of greenhouse gasses and other pollutants when it comes to traveling by rail.

But the investment of billions of dollars during the Obama administration is generally considered just the down payment on the cost of bringing U.S. passenger rail service into the 21st century. Just a couple of years ago the Bush administration tried to zero-out the Amtrak budget. A future president might do the same.

Susan Zielinksi at the University of Michigan believes the improvements in rail service we’ll see in just the next several years will prove this investment is worth it.

Zielinski: Congress is not going to be able to go backwards on this. This is going to usher in a whole new set of industry opportunities, of economic development in communities, of new opportunities for jobs.

But even people who like the idea of improved passenger rail service say if this doesn’t result in the trains arriving on time… doesn’t fix the problem of having no transportation once they arrive at the depot… doesn’t spiff up the drab Amtrak train cars… and keep train ticket prices reasonable… it’ll be hard not to keep piling into the car or cramming themselves into an airline seat.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Global Warming Law Under Attack

  • Opponents say the law should not be implemented until California’s unemployment rate is much lower. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

There’s a new ballot initiative
underway that is trying to repeal
the nation’s leading global warming
law. The law seeks to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions by
close to a third by 2020. Mark
Brush reports the opponents of
the law say it will cost jobs:

Transcript

There’s a new ballot initiative
underway that is trying to repeal
the nation’s leading global warming
law. The law seeks to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions by
close to a third by 2020. Mark
Brush reports the opponents of
the law say it will cost jobs:

Conservatives and some Republican lawmakers are behind the petition effort in California. If they’re successful, they’ll suspend the state’s Global Warming Solutions Act. They say the law should not be implemented until California’s unemployment rate is much lower.

Supporters of the law say it’s the one thing that’s actually driving innovation and creating jobs in the state. Tom Soto is with Craton Equity Partners which invests in clean tech businesses. He says the backers of this ballot initiative are hanging onto the past.

“I think it is a shameless last ditch effort of the oil companies and industry who are clinging by their bloodied fingernails onto something that simply is no longer sustainable.”

Opponents of California’s global warming law are hoping to capitalize on growing skepticism about climate change science.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Cleaning Up Coal’s Future

  • 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.]

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Interview: A Pound of Coal

  • 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.

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New Year Brings New Monitoring

  • The US Environmental Protection Agency's greenhouse gas monitoring program will cost businesses about $115 million total this year. (Photo courtesy of the US EPA)

The government wants a better
sense of where America’s greenhouse
gas emissions are coming from,
so starting today -January 1, 2010,
more than ten-thousand businesses
will have to report them. Shawn
Allee explains:

Transcript

The government wants a better
sense of where America’s greenhouse
gas emissions are coming from,
so starting today -January 1, 2010,
more than ten-thousand businesses
will have to report them. Shawn
Allee explains:

Oil refineries that fuel our cars now have to report greenhouse gas emissions to the federal government. So do kilns that make cement for homes and businesses. Same thing for landfills that take our garbage.

Ed Repa is with the National Solid Waste Management Association – a trade group.

“The gas itself that’s being generated at the landfill is basically 50% methane, which is what natural gas is, and fifty percent CO2. Those gases are produced by organic materials for the landfill. That’s either paper or grass, or yard waste.”

The US Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas monitoring program will cost businesses about 115 million dollars total this year.

Most businesses can handle the new costs, but some small businesses with big emissions could be hit harder.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Money for Methane

  • Cows burp methane gas and their manure also emits methane. Methane is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

The US Department of Agriculture
is planning to give dairy farmers
more money to cut some of their
greenhouse gas emissions. Rebecca
Williams has more:

Transcript

The US Department of Agriculture
is planning to give dairy farmers
more money to cut some of their
greenhouse gas emissions. Rebecca
Williams has more:

Cows are gassy. They burp methane gas and their manure also emits methane. Methane is 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

In Copenhagen, Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack promised to cut greenhouse gas emissions on farms. He said the government will be giving farmers more money for methane digesters. They’re machines that capture methane from manure.

Katie Feeney is with the environmental group Clean Air Council.

“If you can make it easy for them and cost effective for them to be sustainable, to reduce their emissions, then I foresee a lot more people participating in programs such as that.”

But some environmentalists say voluntary programs are not enough. They say big dairy farms should be regulated more.

Starting in the New Year, all kinds of businesses will have to report their greenhouse gas emissions. But there’s a big exception: large concentrated animal farms don’t have to.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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EPA: Greenhouse Gases a Threat

  • 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.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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European Cap-And-Trade Example

  • Europe was the first to do carbon cap-and-trade, four years ago. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

Congress is haggling over a climate
bill that includes a carbon cap-and-
trade system. In many ways, it’s
similar to the one the European Union
put in place several years ago. Liam
Moriarty looks at what
the European experience has been and
what the lessons for the US might be:

Transcript

Congress is haggling over a climate
bill that includes a carbon cap-and-
trade system. In many ways, it’s
similar to the one the European Union
put in place several years ago. Liam
Moriarty looks at what
the European experience has been and
what the lessons for the US might be:

Slashing greenhouse gas emissions is hard. Our economy is powered mostly by fossil fuels. Switching to clean fuels will be disruptive and expensive, at least to start with.

So how do we get from here to there? The approach that’s proving most popular is what’s called “cap-and-trade.” It works like this – first, there’s the cap.

“We’re going to put an absolute limit on the quantity of carbon-based fuels that we’re going to burn. And we’re going to develop a system to make sure we’re not burning more fossil fuels than that.”

Alan Durning heads the Sightline Institute, a sustainability-oriented think tank in Seattle. He explains that once you put the cap in place…

“Then, we’re going to let the market decide who exactly should burn the fossil fuels based on who has better opportunities to reduce their emissions.”

That’s the “trade” part. Companies get permits to put out a certain amount of greenhouse gases. Outfits that can cut their emissions more than they need to can sell their unused pollution permits to companies that can’t.

The cap gets ratcheted down over time. There are fewer permits out there to buy. Eventually even the most polluting companies have to reduce their emissions, as well.

The goal is to wean ourselves off dirty fuels by making them more expensive. And that makes cleaner fuels more attractive.

Europe was the first to do carbon cap and trade, four years ago. And things got off to a rough start. They set the cap on emissions too high and way overestimated the number of permits – or allowances – that companies would need.

“We have too many allowances. Simple supply means that the prices of those allowances crashes. They don’t have much value, and therefore the price went down to close to zero.”

That’s Vicki Pollard. She follows climate change negotiations for the European Commission. She says the whole system got knocked out of kilter.

For the first two years, European carbon emissions actually went up. After the collapse of Phase One, big changes were made. The next phase of the trading system has a tighter cap, more stringent reporting requirements and enforcement with teeth.


Today, Europe’s on track to meet its current emissions target. But environmentalists, such as Sanjeev Kumar with the World Wildlife Fund in Brussels, say those targets are still driven more by politics than by science.

“We have a cap that’s very weak, i.e. that means that it doesn’t mean that we’re going to achieve the levels of decarbonization that we need within the time scale.”

Leading climate scientists say we have to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by the middle of this century to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Business still has concerns about the EU cap and trade scheme. Folker Franz is with BusinessEurope, sort of the European version of the US Chamber of Commerce. He says companies worry about the additional cost of carbon emissions putting them at a competitive disadvantage.

“If you produce one ton of steel, you emit roughly one ton of CO2. So any ton of steel produced in the EU is right now some 17 dollars more than outside the European Union. And that makes a difference.”

But, Franz says, European businesses accept the need to take prompt action on climate change and are on board with the stricter cap and trade rules coming over the next few years.

Americans have watched Europe struggle with carbon cap-and-trade. The Sightline Institute’s Alan Durning says we can benefit from Europe’s willingness to break new ground.

“It was a big advance when they started it, because nothing like it had ever been done. But, it’s not the be-all-and-end-all. In fact, the United States now has an opportunity to learn from their mistakes and leapfrog ahead to a much better climate policy.”

Durning says an American cap and trade system could avoid the costly stumbles that’ve hampered Europe’s carbon reduction efforts.

For The Environment Report, I’m Liam Moriarty.

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Slash-And-Burn in Indonesia

  • Indonesia's peat forests are home to Sumatran tigers, Asian elephants and orangutans. (Photo by Ann Dornfeld)

Officials from every country in the
world have gathered in Copenhagen
this week to build the
framework for a global climate treaty.
One of the goals is to slow the
destruction of forests in developing
countries. Those forests process and
store massive amounts of carbon dioxide.
Ann Dornfeld reports:

Transcript

Officials from every country in the
world have gathered in Copenhagen
this week to build the
framework for a global climate treaty.
One of the goals is to slow the
destruction of forests in developing
countries. Those forests process and
store massive amounts of carbon dioxide.
Ann Dornfeld reports:

Preserving forests will be a huge debate in Copenhagen. Poor countries want wealthier countries to compensate them for not cutting the forests for lumber and to convert it to farmland. To find out why that might be important, you have to visit a place like this peat forest on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

(sound of the forest)

Forests like this one are home to orangutans, Sumatran tigers and Asian elephants. But these forests may be more important for what lies beneath their marshy floors. The peat is composed of thousands of years’ worth of organic material. Indonesia’s peat forests are storage units for much of the world’s carbon. And they’re being destroyed at an alarming rate.

Not far down the road, Greenpeace Indonesia campaigner Bustar Maitar looks out on a charred landscape. You’d never know a forest stood here just a few months ago.

“Is the no more ecosystem here. No more forest here.”

Only a few burnt tree trunks are standing. Sour smoke curls up from the blackened ground. Maitar says this fire has been burning for a month.

“Fire is coming from not from in the top of the ground, but the haze is coming from inside. It means it’s the underground fire, especially in peatland. And underground fire is very difficult to handle.”

Indonesia’s peat forests are rapidly being logged, drained and burned in order to clear the land for tree farms and palm oil plantations.

The peat can be dozens of feet deep. When it’s burned, the carbon it’s been storing is released as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. All of that burning peat has made Indonesia the world’s third largest emitter of CO2.

Until recently, industrialized nations topped the list of greenhouse gas emitters. Now the United States shares that shortlist with developing nations like China, India and Brazil. As these countries industrialize, demand for timber and open space has stripped many of their forests bare. But leaders of developing countries insist their nations should be allowed to do what it takes to build their economies – even if that leads to climate change.

Paul Winn works on forest and climate issues for Greenpeace. He says the only alternative is for wealthy countries to pay developing countries to slow their emissions.

“If the industrialized world is serious about climate change, it’s essential. It just has to be.”

Winn says wealthy countries have pledged 45 billion dollars so far to help poor countries reduce emissions. But he says that’s just a start.

“If you compare that to what the industrialized world spent on protecting its banks and its financial institutions during the financial crisis, it’s a pittance. And it’s far more essential that they do it now. Because these forests are threatened, and the emissions that go up into the atmosphere are going to come back and bite the industrialized world if they don’t fund its protection.”

Some of the funding plans on the table at Copenhagen would still involve drastic changes to the world’s forest ecosystems. The UN’s current plan would give pulp and paper corporations in Indonesia carbon credits to convert peat forests into acacia plantations.

Winn says that’s the opposite of what needs to happen. Greenpeace and other environmental groups want industrialized countries to fund a moratorium on logging.

One complicating factor is the rampant corruption in many developing countries.

“It is a concern. And I would imagine that’s why many of the industrialized countries haven’t committed to funding.”

Winn says a thorough verification process would ensure that if countries allowed logging, they’d have to repay donor nations.

Winn is in Copenhagen to promote forest protection in the developing world. He says he doesn’t expect anything major to come out of this conference – but hopefully it will lay some groundwork.

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

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