 | A Simpler Way to Calculate Global Oil Reserves? | The Oil Drum | Server News and Check Out Our Advertisers... |  |
138 comments on Geophysicist Klaus Lackner on Fueling the Future
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
138 comments on Geophysicist Klaus Lackner on Fueling the Future
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
User login
Personnel
Classic posts
Archives
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
The Oil Drum: New York City archives
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
- September 2005
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
is the most authoritative document on carbon sequestration.
In short:
- yes it's economic, if you put a reasonable price on carbon emissions either via a tax, or a 'cap and trade' system
It would probably add c. 2 cents per KWH to your electricity bill (that's me summarising, a closer read of the report might give you a better view)
- the big problem is we don't know where to put the CO2 once we capture it:
- geologic storage may only defer the problem (geological formations leak) and could pose a significant safety risk (I can hear NIMBY coming a mile off). But the fact that we have all these empty oil and gas fields gives confidence that the problems are solvable.
- oceanic storage is entirely speculative, we would need to do a lot more work on the consequences for marine ecology
The Economist this week has a fantastic special section on global warming.
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7884738
is the editorial leader, there is a 12 page special section in the magazine.
...it is actually 24 pages. Huge by Economist standards.
That doesn't take away from the significance of the magazine committing resources to the topic and their reasonable conclusions.
So, is this good MSM or bad MSM? Is this a superficial 24 page treatment of climate change? If the MSM avoid contentious issues just to sell advertising space, then what happened here? Won't this rare bit of truth set the sheeple shaking on their hooves?
Please help me out, I find these sweeping generalizations and plot theories so difficult to follow.
Conspiracy?
Thought control?
Paid-for by whom?
Everything is "unclear" in the land of the fog heads.
But elevating the MSM to public enemeny number one often just means only listening to those you already agree with.
It's nuance, man. Haven't we had this same discussion before - or did I just get a glimpse of ther matrix?
they perform a service by bringing the sponsor's messages to the public. ;-)
The Agency "embraced more than 800 news and public information organizations and individuals." --CIA's 3-Decade Effort to Mold the World's Views, New York Times, 12/25/77
"The final Church report was a disappointment, having been audited by the CIA. A subsequent House investigation was suppressed, though a leak it was published in the Village Voice. The House report indicated that Reuters news service was frequently used for CIA disinformation, and that media manipulation may have been the "largest single category of covert action projects taken by the CIA."" Neoconservatism: a CIA Front?
The CIA and its tentacles into the MSM.
Unbelievable in its range and depth. We are truly sheeple in this regard.
I unplugged my dish satellite the very day my wife left the farm. It only plays DVD movies now.
The benchmark value I often see quoted is $100 per ton of carbon, equivalent to about $30 per ton of CO2 (because CO2 is about a third carbon). Now, actually I think this is an overestimate of the true costs to the world in terms of greenhouse warning. I found a study a while back that compared over 100 separate analyses of the estimated marginal cost of carbon over the course of this century, and the median value was only $14 per ton of carbon:
http://www.uni-hamburg.de/Wiss/FB/15/Sustainability/enpolmargcost.pdf
But even if we use the higher value of $100/tC, that corresponds to only about 20 cents per gallon of gasoline. Does anyone really think that a 20 cents per gallon tax is going to dramatically change people's behavior? We see fluctuations of greater than that amount all the time. Gasoline has fallen by over 50 cents a gallon in the past few weeks. A 20 cent per gallon tax is going to have very little impact on people's energy usage.
And yet, this is the amazing $100 per ton carbon tax which people think is going to save the world, drive sequestration, promote conservation, encourage alternatives, and have all of these wonderful effects. I don't think so.
Next time someone tells you that a carbon tax or carbon trading is going to fix things, just keep in mind this 20 cents per gallon figure. And maybe also take the economic estimates I linked to above into consideration, which implies a 3 cent per gallon gasoline tax as the economically optimal level. That's not going to change a thing.
Some recent estimates of the cost of GW would be higher, I suspect, as estimates of the speed and impact of GW rise.
Because the range of temperatures, and consequences, is a probability distribution, it's not possible to say 'global warming is going to cost us $100bn'. the right hand half of the curve includes a number of possibilities which are of such great concern as to justify radical action.
Because it might cost us civilisation. We don't know what the planet would be like if sea levels were 6 metres higher (what's the cost of relocating the US Eastern Seaboard, and London?). One major Katrina-style disaster in say, NYC or London, could cost $100bn+.
And we don't know what the world would be like if, say, the Amazon dies. or the sub permafrost methane is released rapidly (it happened once before, about 50 million years ago, and 90% of the species on the planet died).
Or what the costs of 2 billion people migrating out of uninhabitable equatorial areas are.
In terms of the 'necessary' level of carbon taxation, the picture is unclear. Since we don't tax carbon emissions, no effort is made to reduce them. Yet the evidence from previous effluent taxes, eg on water, is that economic agents can reduce output by 90%+ in some cases.
Also there may be cheap ways of increasing the uptake and sequestration of CO2.
So high price elasticity activities will follow first. Consuming gasoline is a low price elasticity of demand activity: it may be the case that much higher price changes are needed there to change behaviour (but improving standards for fuel economy may help).
It might be better to use a 'cap and trade' system, which has the advantage of producing a quantitative limit on CO2 emission. Such a system has the advantage of not putting a tax in the hands of government, that might be tempted to use it for economically inefficient purposes.
Either way, the increasing evidence of rapid global warming, species extinction, and the 'right hand' of the distribution of possible outcomes, means we are going to have to do something, do something dramatic, and sooner rather than later.