Barack Obama has only four years to save the world.

This stark warning from James Hansen leads off an article in Sunday’s The Observer (UK). The article contains this quote from Hansen:

“We cannot afford to put off change any longer. We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead.”

Hansen says current carbon levels in the atmosphere are already too high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming, yet the levels are still rising. Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and rising sea levels and threatening further widespread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns.

Cap-and-trade schemes – the best of the efforts so far seen from politicians and scientists – have so far proved feeble and futile. Too little, too late. What are needed are a stiff carbon tax and, most crucially, a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, with a phase-out of existing plants to follow.

So how do the prospects look for action from the Obama administration? Not good, judging from these quotes compiled by Kate Shepard at Gristmill from testimony at the confirmation hearings of Obama’s nominees to head up crucial energy and environment agencies.

Steven Chu, nominee for secretary of energy:

I am optimistic we can figure out how to use those resources in a clean way. I’m very hopeful that this will occur and I think that we will be using that great natural resource.

Lisa Jackson, nominee for EPA administrator:

Coal is a vital resource in this country. It is right now the source of generation of about 50 percent of our power. And I think that it is also important for us to say in the same sentence that it is – the emissions from coal-fired power plants are – the largest contributor to global warming emissions. So we have to face square-shouldered the future and the issues of coal and then move American ingenuity towards addressing them.

Ken Salazar, nominee for secretary of the interior:

Coal is a controversial subject. The fact of the matter is it powers today much of America, and there are lots of jobs it creates . . .  The challenge is how we create clean coal . . .  I believe that we will move forward with the funding of some of those demonstration projects so we can find ways to burn coal that don’t contribute to climate change. I will certainly be an advocate of making that happen.

In Oregon, environmentalist were (embarrassingly) agog over Kulongoski’s “jobs and transportation” plan, which threw them a few crumbs while continuing our “war against space.” Now even those crumbs are being retracted. Concerned about economic damage, Kulongoski’s office is signaling the governor is ready to accept a less restrictive cap than the state’s greenhouse gas reduction goal would require. Brian Shipley – Kulongoski’s deputy chief of staff for energy, climate change and natural resources – is quoted in an article in the Saturday Oregonian as flatly stating that the economy comes first, the environment and climate be hanged:

The governor is not going to approve a proposal that’s going to damage the Oregon economy.

The myriad forces of the status quo are girding for battle under the Orwellian umbrella “Oregonians for Balanced Climate Policy.” Represented are realtors, paper mills, loggers, industry, cattlemen, dairy owners, farmers, metals industries, food processors and builders. Even labor, Kulongoski’s staunch ally, wants more protections for affected workers.

Last week I wrote a post on James Hansen’s open letter to President-elect Barack Obama, taking him to task for pimping nuclear and the chimerical “clean” coal.

Now Gar Lipow has posted a piece at Gristmill taking Hansen on from a different angle.  Rather than betting the farm on yet-to-be-developed 4th generation nuclear power and CCS technology, Lipow argues that our power needs can more quickly be addressed using already available wind and solar generation technology.

Where Lipow goes off track is in conceding that Hansen’s proposed solutions would be cheap. Nuclear will never be cheap – and neither will CCS.

The New York Times reports that the coal ash spill in eastern Tennessee – already the largest environmental disaster of its kind in the United States – is more than three times as large as initially estimated:

Officials at the authority initially said that about 1.7 million cubic yards of wet coal ash had spilled when the earthen retaining wall of an ash pond at the Kingston Fossil Plant, about 40 miles west of Knoxville, gave way on Monday. But on Thursday they released the results of an aerial survey that showed the actual amount was 5.4 million cubic yards, or enough to flood more than 3,000 acres one foot deep.

The amount now said to have been spilled is larger than the amount the authority initially said was in the pond, 2.6 million cubic yards.

clean coal

The ash contains potentially dangerous levels of heavy metals including arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead, as well as radioactive elements such as uranium and thorium.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in its Regulatory Determination on Wastes from the Combustion of Fossil Fuels published in 2000 that federal standards for disposal of coal combustion waste were needed to protect public health and the environment. But the U.S. government has failed to take action.

Dave Rutledge, chair of Caltech’s engineering and applied sciences division, says Earth’s coal reserves are far smaller than we think.  He estimates that humans will only pull up a total – including all past mining – of 662 billion tons of coal out of the Earth. That’s a lot less than the conventional wisdom.  The World Energy Council, for example, says that the world has almost 850 billion tons of coal still left to be mined.

If Rutledge is right, that’s good news for climate – but maybe not such good news for our grandchildren.  We’ll have squandered their energy inheritance in an orgy of self-indulgence.

This graph uses Rutledge’s estimates for coal reserves, along with oil and natural gas assessments from ASPO.

According to Rutledge, the world could burn all the world’s coal and other fossil fuels and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 would only end up around 460 parts per million, which is predicted to cause a 2-degree-Celsius rise in global temperatures.

That’s far above the 350 ppm Hansen and others warn is the target we need to hit if we are to avoid passing tipping points, sending Earth into a spiral of catastrophic climate change, But it’s far short  of devastating scenarios laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There is more than enough coal to keep CO2 well above 350 ppm well beyond this century, even if Rutledge is right.

Whether Rutledge is right or not, the imperative to develop non–fossil-fuel energy sources remains.

The Sierra Club won a stunning legal victory Thursday (November 13), blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from issuing a permit for a proposed coal-burning power plant in Utah without addressing global warming impacts. The EPA Environmental Appeals Board held that the EPA’s Denver office failed to adequately support its decision to issue a permit for the Bonanza plant without requiring controls on carbon dioxide.

The decision may well stop all new coal plant permitting while the EPA rethinks how the Clean Air Act is to be used to control carbon dioxide. That won’t happen until after the next administration takes office. In the meantime, all permits in the pipeline are stymied. The decision could affect permits for oil refinery expansion as well.

The Sierra Club argued that the EPA’s permit decision violated CAA sections 165(a)(4) and 169(3) by failing to apply “BACT,” or best available control technology, to limit carbon dioxide (“CO2”) emissions from the facility. The argument rested on the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, in which the court ruled that CO2 is an “air pollutant” under the Clean Air Act. The Board remanded the permit for the EPA to reconsider whether to impose a CO2 BACT limit and to develop an adequate record for its decision.

A copy of the decision can be found here.

The significance of the Deseret Power Electric Cooperative decision cannot be overstated. As Joseph Romm reiterates at Climate Progress, the single most important policy measure the rich nations must embrace as soon as possible is to stop building coal plants without carbon sequestration. This ruling will accomplish that in the U.S., at least for a while – and it could give the Obama administration the opportunity to get serious climate legislation passed, which is crucial to getting serious international action on climate.

We’re going to have to replace all of the world’s existing coal plants with either CCS plants or zero carbon alternatives – and sooner rather than later – if we’re to get atmospheric CO2 back down to the 350 ppm necessary to minimize the risk of runaway global warming.

The Sierra Club’s press release is below the fold.

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We’ve pretty much arrived at the point where the reality of climate change is no longer denied. We’re getting to the point where we recognize the imperative to arrest global warming and the greenhouse gas emissions that cause it.

And we’ve pretty much settled on two alternative approaches to slowing and then reversing the growth in emissions: 1) cap-and-trade schemes (such as the WCI), and 2) carbon taxes. Given the political aversion to any tax increases, all of our political efforts, both domestically and internationally, are now going into devising cap-and-trade schemes.

Both carbon trading and carbon tax solutions are market based. They assume that markets offer the best and most efficient tools to accomplish public policy objectives. But is this true? Are markets the only or even the most effective tools we have?

John Michael Greer in a new post at The Archdruid Report points out that societies are guided by myths – cultural narratives – which are so deeply embedded that we are blind to them. The myth of the market is one of these. The ideology of the market is so deeply embedded in our consciousness that we are not even aware it’s a myth.

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Kris De Decker has a great article at Low-Tech Magazine taking a hard look at the feasibility of carbon sequestration. His conclusion? Forget it.

Capturing carbon is energy intensive – so sequestration would require that we level even more mountain tops, just to stay even. And power plants aren’t conveniently located near sequestration sites – so shipping CO2 around would require a huge investment in pipeline infrastructure which would sap even more energy. What’s more, storing carbon dioxide in underground reservoirs is risky – we don’t even know that it can be done safely over long periods of time.

He concludes with three questions:

“Why introduce yet another expensive, energy-intensive and risky technology if there are so many other and better ways to solve the energy crisis? . . .

Why not channel the huge amounts of money needed for the development of CCS to countries with tropical rainforests, so that they have a very good reason to protect them fiercely? Stopping deforestation, especially in tropical forests, would contribute more to the fight against global warming than carbon capture technology could ever do. . .

“Why not put into force a regulation that prohibits the construction of any more power plants that burn non-renewable energy sources? . . . want more energy? Build a solar plant or plant a windmill.”

Rio Tinto Group and U.S. utilities are urging the government to subsidize coal by spending $20 billion on carbon sequestration technology. As the Senate today begins debating the first U.S. curbs on greenhouse gases blamed for climate change, coal companies are warning they won’t pony up for capture-and-storage technology.

Rio Tinto Chief Executive Officer for Energy Preston Chiaro cries that “it’s too costly for companies alone to finance.”

Bloomberg reports this quote from an interview with Chiaro: “We can’t do it without government support for the early projects. Shareholders simply won’t stand for it unless there’s a commercial return.”

Next to vehicles, power plants are the world’s biggest source of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas. Coal-burning plants supply about half of U.S. power demand.

Bloomberg reports the Lieberman-Warner climate change legislation would provide $15.7 billion for research into carbon capture through 2050 and $307 billion to help coal utilities “transition to the new low-carbon economy.” Nuclear power proponents are not the only ones lining up at the government trough. Taxpayer dollars would be far better spent on reducing greenhouse gases by expanding renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) is introducing to the House of Representatives a bill that has the single most important item new climate legislation should have: an emissions standard that stops traditional coal plants from being built.

Joseph Romm reports the bill would provide, starting in 2009, no coal plant can be built that cannot capture and sequester 85% of its carbon dioxide emissions (a grace period of a few years is allowed for plants built after that time to actually find a place to sequestered the carbon).

Relying on “the market” (i.e., cap-and-trade or carbon taxes) rather than regulation would require a very high price for carbon emissions – and that doesn’t look likely. To make the Lieberman-Warner bill an easier political sell, it’s been extensively tweaked gutted. The Wall Street Journal’s blog Environmental Capitol reports a new analysis of the bill  from carbon-market consultants New Carbon Finance says those tweaks should keep the price of carbon below $25 a ton through 2020 – great for selling the scheme, not so great for clean coal.

Gar Lipow at Gristmill does a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation and concludes that solar uses far less land than coal.

“Nevada Solar One takes up about 400 acres, mostly for mirrors and heat engines. You would have to mine about 5,300 acres to feed a coal-fired powered plant producing the same amount of electricity.”

His calculations are based on a 20-year period. But the need to mine coal goes on forever, whereas a solar facility can occupy the same footprint forever. And then you have to also consider the environmental impacts.