The worsening nuclear crisis in Japan raises questions. What would be the consequences of shutting down nuclear reactors in the U.S.? In light of fresh doubts about the wisdom of nuclear power, is swapping out the U.S. vehicle fleet with all-electric vehicles realistic?

The chart below shows what the U.S. energy mix is today, and what the U.S. Energy Information Agency projects it to be over the next 25 years. The nuclear and coal part of the mix are expected to drop only a bit, coal from 45% to 43% and nuclear from 20% to 17%.

[Note that 43% of 5+ trillion kilowatt hours per year is a lot more than 45% of the 4+ trillion kilowatt hours coal accounts for today - meaning coal consumption in electricity generation is thus expected to increase substantially.  So much for doing anything about global warming.]

The University of California, Berkeley Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology has published a technical brief which considers three scenarios for “maximum penetration” of electric cars into the market, projecting market share of new cars at 2015, 2020, 2025, and 2030 under differing cost assumptions.

The “market” in the above chart is defined as those likely to buy electric vehicles – 20% of the total market is excluded as not likely to buy electric vehicles.

Under the baseline scenario, 81 million electric vehicles would be on the road by 2030; under the operator-subsidized scenario, 151 million.

The U.C. study calculates that by 2030 the fleet of electric cars is estimated to require between 190 and 350 million megawatt hours of electricity per year. Currently, electricity generation in the U.S. totals around 4 billion megawatt hours per year. Powering an electric car fleet would require that the U.S. increase electricity generating capacity by 4.75%-8.75% by 2030. And that’s assuming no growth in electricity usage elsewhere in the economy, despite population and presumably economic growth.

In 2009, U.S. nuclear plants generated 798.7 billion kilowatt hours (or 7,987 million kilowatt hours) from 104 commercial nuclear generating units; “nuclear generating units” in the U.S. thus average 7.68 megawatt hours per year in output. The 602 coal power plants in the U.S. produce on average ~3.88 megawatt hours per year. Powering the projected U.S. electric car fleet would therefore require building 25-46 additional “nuclear generating units” by 2030. Or 50-90 coal-fired power plants.

Renewable sources, including wind and solar, currently account for about 10% of U.S. electricity generation – but two thirds of existing renewable capacity is hydroelectric, which is about tapped out and even under threat of decline. Solar and wind together account for only a little over 2% of renewable electric energy – about 72,000 megawatt hours per year. Powering the projected electric fleet from solar and wind alone would require increasing our solar and wind capacity by a factor of 2,500 – 5,000. Just to power electric cars,  nothing else: no growth, no phasing out of nuclear or decommissioning aging plants, no shutting down of CO2-emitting coal plants.

Phasing out nuclear power while we are still able so to as avoid catastrophic accidents, and phasing out coal to save the planet as we know it, would seem to be of a bit higher priority than powering our go-carts.

Challenging times indeed. Replacing our gasoline-powered cars with electric cars is about the last thing we should be focusing on.

The Environmental Law Institute recently conducted a review of U.S. government fossil fuel and renewable energy subsidies for Fiscal Years 2002-2008. The findings are presented in the paper, Estimating U.S. Government Subsidies to Energy Sources: 2002-2008 – and illustrated in the graphic “Energy Subsidies Black, Not Green.”

Key findings include:

• The vast majority of federal subsidies for fossil fuels and renewable energy supported energy sources that emit high levels of greenhouse gases when used as fuel.
• The federal government provided substantially larger subsidies to fossil fuels than to renewables. Subsidies to fossil fuels – approximately $72 billion over the study period, as opposed to $29 billion for renewables.
• Almost half of the subsidies for renewables went to corn-based ethanol [which at best has a barely positive EROEI, and whose climate and environmental consequences are questionable].
• The largest subsidies to fossil fuels were written into the U.S. Tax Code as permanent provisions. By comparison, many subsidies for renewables are time-limited initiatives implemented through energy bills, with expiration dates that limit their usefulness to the renewables industry.
• The vast majority of subsidy dollars to fossil fuels can be attributed to just a handful of tax breaks, such as the Foreign Tax Credit ($15.3 billion) and the Credit for Production of Nonconventional Fuels ($14.1 billion, though this credit has since been phased out).

Conservation biologist and climate scientist Guy McPherson is guardedly optimistic:  the consequences of peak oil might, just might, bring the industrial economy to an overdue close, just in time. At least that’s what he told Kurt Cobb.

There’s no chance – zero – that humans will voluntarily do what is necessary to avoid climate catastrophe. Even Christiana Figueres, the UN’s new climate chief, admits that a comprehensive “big bang” global climate treaty is not possible.

For a graphic representation of why nothing but systemic collapse can save humans from themselves, take a look at this graph posted by Joseph Romm at Climate Progress:

While people have been flapping their lips, talking about doing something to avert climate catastrophe, their actions speak the truth: left to our own devices, we will commit planetary suicide. We are committing planetary suicide.

Update: as if increasing coal consumption isn’t bad enough, there’s this:

In a bid to shore up its precarious energy security Japan is to start commercial test drilling for controversial frozen methane gas along its coast next year.

The gas is methane hydrate, a sherbet-like substance consisting of methane trapped in water ice – sometimes called “fire ice” or MH – that is locked deep underwater or under permafrost by the cold and under pressure 23 times that of normal atmosphere. . .

Concerns had been raised that digging for frozen methane would destabilise the methane beds, which contain enough gas worldwide to snuff out most complex life on earth. Methane itself is a greenhouse gas which is 21 times as damaging as carbon dioxide and any leakage from wells could be an environmental problem. . .

Environmentalists, however, are concerned about the burning of more earth-locked hydrocarbons. Methane may be a cleaner-burning fossil fuel than coal or oil but will still release many tons of CO2.

Pray for collapse. Plan for collapse. Work for collapse. Collapse is humanity’s only hope.

An analysis of coal production by Tadeusz Patzek at The University of Texas at Austin and Gregory Croft at the University of California, Berkeley concludes that the global peak of coal production from existing coalfields will occur close to the year 2011. The study was published in Energy, the International Journal.

After 2011, the production rates of coal and CO₂ decline, reaching 1990 levels by the year 2037, and reaching 50% of the peak value in the year 2047. In other words, the peak of global coal production from the existing coalfields is imminent, and coal production from these areas will fall by 50% in the next 40 years.

The CO2 emission estimates used for government policy decisions assume unlimited coal and fossil fuel production for the next 100 years, an unrealistic premise that skews climate change models and proposed solutions. Co-author Tad Patzek observes:

The IPCC carbon estimates, which are used by all major decision makers, are based on economic and policy considerations that appear to be unconstrained by geophysics.

A new study concludes that carbon sequestration is a pipe dream:

Published reports on the potential for sequestration fail to address the necessity of storing CO2 in a closed system. Our calculations suggest that the volume of liquid or supercritical CO2 to be disposed cannot exceed more than about 1% of pore space. This will require from 5 to 20 times more underground reservoir volume than has been envisioned by many, and it renders geologic sequestration of CO2 a profoundly non-feasible option for the management of CO2 emissions.

The study, titled “Sequestering carbon dioxide in a closed underground volume”  by Christine Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M, and Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at University of Houston, is published in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering.

Total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in 2007 were 6.02 billion metric tons (tonnes) including 2.16 billion tonnes from coal fired electric power generation, 2.6 billion tonnes from petroleum consumption mainly for transportation, and 1.2 billion tonnes from natural gas consumption. The EIA projects that US carbon dioxide emissions are forecast to reach 6.41 billion tonnes by 2030.

The Kyoto Protocol aims to keep the global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels and aims at stabilizing CO2 concentrations below 550 ppm – a target which scientists now believe is completely unrealistic.  Keeping CO2 levels below 350 ppm, perhaps far below, is necessary to maintain Earth’s climate as it has been over the time human civilization developed.

If we’re to save Earth’s climate, the evidence is growing that our only hope is that oil runs out quickly and that we can muster the will to stop burning coal before we destroy ourselves.

A recent post pointed out our actions belied any intention to actually do anything about global warming – we’re not really serious. Here’s another example.

First, Bloomberg reports Chinese president’s special envoy Xie Zhenhua vowing to “vigorously” fight “world scale climate destruction”:

The scale of economic destruction would be equivalent to that of the two world wars and the Great Depression combined” if global temperatures rise by 3 degrees (5.4 Fahrenheit) to 4 degrees Celsius, Xie said. “Human beings and the Earth cannot afford such disasters.

On the very same day, China Daily reports a huge jump in Chinese coal production:

China’s coal output grew 28.1 percent year-on-year to well over 751 million tons in the first quarter, the National Bureau of Statistics said Thursday. . . .

The report estimates China’s total coal production capacity has exceeded 3.6 billion tons.

Channeling Groucho Marx:  who are you to going to believe, Xie or your lying eyes?

Portland General Electric Co. is preparing plans to shut down Boardman – Oregon’s only coal-fired power plant – by 2020 – 20 years earlier than previously planned. The plant burns strip-mined coal shipped in by train from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, and accounts for about 25 percent of the power generation owned by PGE. Boardman is the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon.

Jeff Bissonnette at Blue Oregon points out this is a very big deal. Boardman may be the first baseload coal plant in the nation to be shut down.

The Boardman coal plant is located about 150 miles east of Portland and provides a baseload output of more than 500 megawatts. Under the existing plan, huge investments would be required to control pollution – which would do nothing about the plant’s carbon emissions. If global warming legislation or a carbon tax were to be enacted, the resulting high price of its electricity might force the plant to close anyway. Based on its analysis of carbon and natural gas prices, PGE believes that a 2020 shutdown would be the low-cost, least-risk plan for utility ratepayers and shareholders.

The earlier shutdown needs approval from the Oregon Environmental Quality Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

PGE is proposing to fill the gap left by Boardman’s closure with two new gas plants: a base-load unit adjacent to the existing Boardman coal plant and a smaller unit next to its existing gas plant in Clatskanie.

A new study published titled “Mountaintop Mining Consequences” published in the journal Science should put a final end to the myth of “clean coal”:

“Mining permits are being issued despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that mitigation cannot compensate for the losses.”

Photo: Charles Pezeshki

The quote is from an article by Ken Ward Jr. in the Charleston (WV) Gazette.

A press release explains:

In their paper, the authors outline severe environmental degradation taking place at mining sites and downstream. The practice destroys extensive tracts of deciduous forests and buries small streams that play essential roles in the overall health of entire watersheds. Waterborne contaminants enter streams that remain below valley fills and can be transported great distances into larger bodies of water.

The paper calls on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the federal Army Corps of Engineers to stay all new mountaintop removal mining permits unless new mining and reclamation techniques “can be subjected to rigorous peer review and shown to remedy these problems.”

That will never happen. The only rational response: No more coal.

Forget “green growth”. Judging by the hard numbers, only two economic factors produce reliably good environmental outcomes: high energy prices and recession.

That’s what Mark Lynas writes at the New Statesman. We need to go cold turkey to kick our addiction to oil:

Unfortunately, these two drivers of emissions reductions are also the two things that everyone seems desperate to avoid.

The good news is, as fossil fuels begin to price themselves out of the market, they could make up for the failure of politicians to do anything to slash emissions.

But remember, the biggest historical contributor to carbon dioxide emissions, and the biggest ongoing threat to climate stability, is coal. Production of this dirtiest of all fuels has been rising for most of the past decade, led by the surging use of coal for industrial uses and to generate electricity in China.

The U.S. Energy Information Agency is projecting an almost 50% increase in coal consumption from 2006 to 2030. That’s the same thing as projecting climate catastrophe.

Expect to see catastrophic climate change could happen within 50 years.

So says a new study prepared for the British Department for Energy and Climate Change.

Met Office: High End Temperature Change

Comparison of surface temperature projections from the high-end emissions scenario, without carbon cycle feedbacks. Temperature increases between 1961-1990 and 2090-2099, averaged over all high-end members.

That bad news is reiterated in a new report issued by the United Nations Environment Programme, entitled “Climate Change Science Compendium 2009.”

An average global temperature rise of 7.2F (4C) could happen by 2060, causing droughts around the world, sea level rises and the collapse of important ecosystems.

The Arctic could see an increase in temperatures of 28.8F (16C), while parts of sub Saharan Africa and North America would be devastated by an increase in temperature of up to 18F (10C). Britain’s temperature would rise by an average 7.2F (4C).

The study included new figures on increased emissions from fossil fuels and considered the effect global warming will have on the ability of the oceans and rainforests to absorb carbon dioxide.

The global picture shows rainfall could decrease by 20 per cent in Central America, the Mediterranean and parts of coastal Australia, causing mass drought. Temperature rises in the Amazon would cause the rainforests to die, while Alaska and Siberia would see the melting of the permafrost causing more carbon dioxide to be released.

NASA reports we’re already seeing increased atmospheric methane levels due to melting permafrost, caused by global warming. Unusually high temperatures in the Arctic, the burning of tropical forests, and heavy rains in the tropics drove a global increase in atmospheric methane in 2007 and 2008 after a decade of near-zero growth (the longer periods of rainfall and larger wetland areas resulted in microbes producing more methane). Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide – and it’s more than 20 times as potent.

Both reports stress that it will be possible to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change only if there is immediate, cohesive and decisive action to cut emissions.

But the world’s governments continue to fiddle while Earth burns.

Copenhagen is dead. Not that the talks aimed at improving or replacing the Kyoto Protocol ever amounted to a serious attempt to avert global warming.

As James Hansen keeps pointing out, burning the world’s remaining oil and gas is enough to get us into a dangerous zone for atmospheric carbon dioxide – but not so far that we couldn’t solve the problem. If you add coal and put that carbon in the atmosphere, then there is no practical way to solve the problem. No climate policy is serious if it allows coal to continue to be used and emit the CO2 in the atmosphere.

So you just have to look at the proposed policy and see what it does with coal. No government or intergovernmental organization is proposing to eliminate coal. The World Bank is spending billions on coal-fired power stations. Three countries – the U.S., China and India – are planning to build nearly 850 new coal-fired plants, which would pump as much as an extra 2.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide, five times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the Kyoto Protocol aims to reduce. Waxman-Markey not only assures that we will continue to run existing coal plants, it actually gives approval for additional coal plants.

At the recent G-20 meeting, negotiators were patting themselves on the back for agreeing to the tiny step of eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, claiming this would make a major contribution to curbing energy demand and emissions growth (according to the International Energy Agency, energy subsidies in the 20 largest non-OECD countries amounted to a staggering $310 billion in 2007). The final agreement on fossil-fuel subsidies, naturally, includes no timeline. With no deadline, it won’t happen.

Obama in his address to the UN said he was proud that “the United States has done more to promote clean energy and reduce carbon pollution in the last eight months than at any other time in our history.” But not one word about coal, except to boast “we’re investing billions to capture carbon pollution so that we can clean up our coal plants.” Earth is burning, and Obama is singing the siren song of clean coal.

The absence of any talk of banning coal is proof that no country, no intergovernmental organization, is yet taking the climate crisis seriously.

You can bet they won’t. Until it’s too late.