By Bill Scanlon, The Rocky Mountain News
Scientists have vastly underestimated the challenge of reducing greenhouse gases in a world where billions are boosting their carbon footprint, an important new report says.
The report throws ice water on projections that global warming can be slowed as energy efficiency helps poor countries develop in a more sustainable way.
China has a chance to do that. But nations such as Colombia, Argentina and Iran don’t have the wealth to convert to more efficient energy, even as their economies grow and their citizens demand more electricity and cars, says the report from Colorado atmospheric researchers.
The study by scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado is expected to be a hot topic of discussion at this week’s U.N. Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland.
“We always knew that reducing greenhouse gas emissions was going to be a challenge, but now it looks like we underestimated the magnitude of this problem,” said Patricia Romero Lankao, an NCAR sociologist who is the lead author of the study in this month’s journal Climate Research.
“There is simply no evidence that developing countries will somehow become wealthier and be in a position to install more environmentally friendly technologies.”
Technologically advanced nations such as the United States are under pressure to reduce their per capita emissions of fossil fuels. Developing nations are being urged to adopt cleaner technology.
Both goals will be very difficult to achieve, the authors say.
Poor countries are producing more and exporting more, but they’re not gaining enough wealth to convert to energy-efficient technologies, they say.
Consequently, the developing world is pumping more fossil fuels into the atmosphere as more people can afford energy-consuming goods for the first time.
And energy efficiency in technologically advanced nations isn’t coming close to balancing out the extra fossil fuels emanating from poor countries, the report says.
In fact, despite gains in energy efficiency, the developed world also is increasing its greenhouse gas output, said Lankao, who is with NCAR’s Institute for the Study of Society and the Environment.
Their economic growth is outstripping increases in efficiency as demand for more cars, larger houses and other goods keeps bumping up carbon dioxide emissions.
The goods demanded by the advanced nations often come from the Third World, where factories belch dirty coal.
Citizens of the poorer nations aren’t driving SUVs, but they are burning and logging their forests, which contribute to the buildup of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.
“These countries are just now at the stage the United States was at at the beginning of the last century,” Lankao said. “They still have very energy-intense industries. The cement industry, for example, is moving from the U.S. and Europe to China and the developing nations.”
The current economic slowdown could make things worse, because with demand slipping for oil, and prices plunging, there is no longer an incentive to develop solar, wind and alternative energies that could help developing countries bypass their sooty coal eras, she said.
Researchers divided the world into three types of nations — technologically advanced ones such as the United States, the “have nots” such as Tanzania and Botswana, and the “have somes,” such as India and Thailand.
They found that the advanced nations comprise a sixth of the world’s population but account for 52 percent of energy consumption.
The have-nots, representing a third of the world’s population, consume only 2.8 percent of the energy.
In between are the crucial “have some” nations, which comprise about half the world’s population and use about 45 percent of the consumed energy.
In the 1990s, global emissions of greenhouse gases grew at a rate of 1.3 percent a year, the report said.
Between 2000 and 2006, that rate multiplied to 3.3 percent a year.
The authors examined population, wealth and the ratio emissions to unit of gross domestic product.
They found that the economic disparity between the haves and have nots has grown since 1960 and is likely to grow for at least two more decades.
The authors predict that even as the poor nations grow somewhat wealthier by producing more goods for the developed world, there will continue to be a hierarchy among nations.
The poor nations will adopt more environmentally friendly means to produce products, but at a much slower rate than projected by the International Panel on Climate Change, the group that won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
The brightest hopes the authors see are the initiatives by cities around the world to impose emission restrictions, and the prospect that the Obama administration will push for a national strategy to develop green energies.
“We see prospects for hope, but we need to go deeper and go faster,” Lankao said.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
“It is snowing in Houston.”
Is that what that stuff is? I thought a refinery blew up.
Bill Illis (06:21:59) :
This is probably related more to the oceans than to vegetation.
Two parts to vegetation: When it’s hot, plants grow better so soak up CO2 much faster. Dead plants decay faster so more CO2 released from rotting. The balance varies from place to place.
Ed Reid,
They have no idea, for the most part. Those who do have an idea are keeping very mum about it. Why they are mum is clear if you simply extrapolate the implications of what they demand.
The dirty secret of the IPCC is that the global warming industry needs the solution to be impossible. Without this simple fact, their funding cannot continue to grow.
Governments like companies exist to expand funding and control. The scientists who make these article also hint that somehow wealthier economies can support alternative energies. IMO this is also clearly false.
I started my blog looking into the money of the global warming industry. I estimated over 100 billion dollars was being spent annually — on RESEARCH. The UN is very interested in expanding its own 28 billion dollar budget for global warming and is guaranteed to do so with Obama and both houses in the US lining up.
Pamela Gray (06:29:16) :
I’ld be willing to bet that coal is used in the US for electricity generation more than any other use. The push to electricity will likely result in more coal fired electricity generation. There are only so many places one can dam a river economically.
About 1/2 of U.S. electricity comes from coal (20% nuke then nat gas turbines, hydro etc. Solar and wind are in the ‘trivial’ bucket.)
Other major coal use is coking for steel making (much moving overseas) and similar uses (such as cooking limestone to make CaO “lime” and cement – also going elsewhere). Everything else is trivial in comparison.
Substantially all suitable hydro sites have been built. In the west, many old smaller sites are being removed as they are not economical to repair / rebuild.
The move to electric cars implies: More coal plant, more nuclear plant, a lot more natural gas turbines, or orders of magnitude more wind, wave & solar. Given that the AGW folks forbid the first three we are left with building a new industry substantially from scratch and depending on it. Not good, easy, fast or cheap. It will take more than a decade to build out all the capacity needed and this will be limiting for electric car adoption.
The other limit is all the copper this would require… Will Peru & Indonesia welcome the expansion of mining? Do the folks who advocate ‘green’ electric cars recognize the strip mining involved? Will they want electric cars but forbid more mining, then cry about the evil businesses not making the cars they want? Oh, and the lithium batteries limit on the single lithium mine of any size…
Kim says:
Linky, linky, linky.
I must say, when you mistake a sociologist for a scientist you have clearly been drinking too much beer.
Wit that low a standard of living you’d have chopped up the piano for firewood long ago…
Neil Jones (01:28:10) :
Sorry Neil, it is right on topic.
The world economy cannot afford to get rid of fossil fuels, period.
It has already been ruined by one set of computer models, that is, those models of derivatives the fools in the investment community used to get us into the truly catastrophic mess we are in now.
Can we really afford another set of computer models, those used by the climate change community, to finish us off? Or worse yet, some sort of carbon trading based derivatives being contemplated now?
By the way, carbon sequestration is not a viably demonstrated technology and can be quite dangerous.
Imagine millions of tons of CO2 breaking out of its geological prison. It is, after all, a gas, and has the unwelcome tendency to escape from the ground, following any flaw in the containing geological strata above. One of the key components of a volcanic eruption is large volumes of CO2.
If there were such an escape from sequestration, the resulting cloud of CO2 would smother to death any breathing thing. CO2 tends to hug the ground, so it would take awhile for it to disperse. Remember too, it is odorless, so the victims would not even notice until too late they had no oxygen to breathe.
All of this is documented in the book “Terrestrial Energy”. I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the drawbacks to all forms of energy production.
“convert to more efficient energy”
What is inefficient about a modern, coal-burning powerplant? The author has simply appropriated the word “efficiency” to bolster the arguement.
They found that the economic disparity between the haves and have nots has grown since 1960 and is likely to grow for at least two more decades.
“Economic disparity”?!! Oh noooo, quick, someone make us all “have nots”. Oh wait, no worries, the EPA will control the evil fossssilll fuel polutant. Whew, problem solved. Peace and Social Justice achieved./sarc
Seriously, I’d suggest something else to deal with chronic panic attacks.
Richard Sharpe (07:50:28)
Sorry, Richard, it is Vinod K. Dar:
http://www.rightsidenews.com/200806181211/energy-and-environment/as-the-earth-cools-what-does-it-mean-for-the-energy-industry.htm
=========================================
Dang, that gives me a 404 not found. I found it through Yahoo.
=======================================
Seek, and ye shall find (at least with Google):
Cooling and Energy
Not sure if Gas-X will help reduce CO2, but I’m sure it would cut down on Methane emmissions.
;>P
Poor countries ‘need carbon cuts’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7773799.stm
“Being able to introduce efficient wood stoves is not rocket science ”
The future for the third world appears to be an efficient stove for the mud hut.
Jack Simmons (08:59:10) :
One of the key components of a volcanic eruption is large volumes of CO2.
Carbon sequestration from past civilisations?? LOL
Dave.
Ron de Haan (23:30:26) :
To build on your information regarding Argentina, China, Colombia and Iran, the fact is that China may be the LEAST able to convert to greater efficiency. They are the poorest of the 4 countries mentioned.
The author, Patricia Romero Lankao, compares China’s chances of increasing efficiency to 3 other countries favorably but I am willing to bet that she never bothered to look at the actual data. She assumes that China is an economic juggernaut because that’s what she’s been told but nothing can be further from the truth.
Here are some numbers.
Country GDP GDP Pop. growth rate
real growth rate per capita
Argentina 8.7% (2007 est.) $13,100 (2007 est.) 1.068% (2008 est.)
China 11.9% (2007 est.) $ 5,400 (2007 est.) 0.629% (2008 est.)
Colombia 8.2% (2007 est.) $ 7,400 (2007 est.) 1.405% (2008 est.)
Iran 6.2% (2007 est.) $11,700 (2007 est.) 0.792% (2008 est.)
As you can see the economic “powerhouse” that is China is the poorest of the 4. They are currently growing faster but at 6.2 – 8.7%, none of the other 3 are slouches and frankly it’s more sustainable. The “myth” that China is some kind of economic juggernaut is similar to the myth of global warming. Even questioning it marks you as stupid.
“We see prospects for hope, but we need to go deeper and go faster,” Lankao said.
I guess she means they need to shovel the BS deeper and faster, because things just aren’t working out for them.
kim (10:06:45) :
/as-the-earth-cools-what-does-it-mean-for-the-energy-industry.htm
=========================================
Richard Sharpe (10:22:47) :
Seek, and ye shall find (at least with Google):
That link, http://co2sceptics.com/news.php?id=1464 is a fascinating read.
Oddly enough, it matches what I’ve been using to project who will win long term in the markets. A couple of quotes with comments for folks who didn’t take the link:
The fanatical worship of flawed climate and planetary models is a primitive idolatry that makes civil communication across the two antagonistic belief systems impossible.
I’d agree with that…
The ability of the West to act unilaterally on carbon management is quite limited. The U.S. and Japan will not tell Asia and Africa to choose poverty, disease, hunger and illiteracy over electricity. Europe may but Europe’s hard, soft and moral power are now negligible. Europe has no ability at all to make credible military threats; its soft power compares unfavorably with a wet noodle; its moral authority is imperceptible given that it will miss its own Kyoto targets by a considerable margin.
Ouch! Such brutal honesty is hard to find these days. I think I like this guy! The notion that the west will tell China to do anything is laughable at best.
Like oil and gas, there is plenty of uranium in the world but the low cost resource is heavily concentrated. Half the world’s low cost uranium reserves are in just three countries: Australia, Kazakhstan and Canada.
[…]
At present, India and China have very little in the way of low cost uranium reserves; the EU, Japan and South Korea have none.
This is true, but misses a couple of points. India has LOTS of thorium and thorium can be easily used in existing nukes (see ticker THPW for example) and India has thorium specific reactor designs. It is also possible to extract U from sea water at economical rates (though not market competitive ones yet) via polymer adsorption. See:
http://www.taka.jaea.go.jp/eimr_div/j637/theme3%20sea_e.html
and /or just google “Uranium polymer adsorption japan” for more examples. (both adsorption and absorption are good search terms… why? don’t ask why…)
So I’d expect that any time U becomes too expensive from land, folks will just start sinking plastic mattresses in the ocean, and lots of countries have coastlines…
Within the U.S., Illinois, Montana and Wyoming are the big 3 in known recoverable coal reserves, easily accounting for a majority of known U.S. coal reserves.
This simplifies things rather too much. About 1/4 of the U.S. sits on top of coal. He describes where the coal is presently very cheap and easy to mine, but there is plenty of coal mined in, for example, the soft coal of Texas.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1996/of96-092/map.htm gives a great view of why the U.S. can tell OPEC to kiss off any time it wants to. Why we don’t is another issue…
But the meat of it:
Worldwide coal fired generation may well double in the next 25 or so years propelling a huge increase in coal use; steel making capacity will also grow rapidly impelling even more growth in coal use An astonishing three quarters of the world’s growth in coal use is expected to come from just 2 nations: China and India.
So exactly why are they exempt from Kyoto? And why ought we to commit economic suicide so they can double world CO2 output? Even if CO2 were an issue, Kyoto does nothing to ‘fix’ it…
China alone expects to add almost 500 GW of net additional coal fired generation in the next 2 decades or so, while India plans to deploy another net 100 GW of coal fired generation. In addition, China is planning to build several CTL plants over the next 20 years further increasing coal consumption.
Hey, we can by CTL gasoline and Diesel from them instead of Saudi oil. 8-{
The anticipated increases alone in the coal fired generating capacity of China and India over the next 25 years are almost twice the existing coal fired generating capacity in the U.S. Roughly once a week, for the next 25 years, India and China will add a coal generator. About every 15 months China and India together will add enough coal generating capacity to equal the entire coal powered generation in the U.K.
So the U.K. could destroy their economy by shutting down all coal use and it would mean 1 1/4 years of ‘reduction’ (oh, and moving all their jobs to Chindia.)
The Western nation best positioned to benefit, by far, from the golden age of coal and nuclear generation and LNG trade in Asia is Australia.
And right now they are way down in price. You can get the closed end fund IAF for dirt cheap (disclosure: I own a bunch and it’s thinly traded) and they are leveraged to China for coal, metals, et. al. (and not subject to Obama and the congress.) The more generic exchange traded fund for Australia is EWA with a high yield and very liquid. RIO and BHP are the miners stocks.
Contingency planning should entail strategic responses to a warming globe, a cooling globe and a globe whose climate reverberates with laughter at human hubris. Human beings are miserable at forecasting but they are pretty good at improvising and adapting. Why not focus on the strength rather than invest so heavily in the weakness?
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Kim, that you so much for this reference, the article is a gold mine.
That last line ought to have been:
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Kim & Richard, thank you so much for this reference, the article is a gold mine.
Richard Sharpe (10:22:47)
Much gracious. It’s a long article, breathtakingly lucid, and, I think, clairvoyant.
===================================
EM Smith quotes and says:
I think that the claim that steel production will increase over the next 25 years has to be in doubt right now, at least for the next 10 years. I expect excess capacity for a long while. However, I expect that China will go ahead with its Nuclear power plants and some coal-fired plants, even if only to keep people employed.
kim (10:06:45) :
http://www.rightsidenews.com/200806181211/energy-and-environment/as-the-earth-cools-what-does-it-mean-for-the-energy-industry.htm
The URL is missing the trailing ‘l’. (I.e. .htm should be .html.) Try:
http://www.rightsidenews.com/200806181211/energy-and-environment/as-the-earth-cools-what-does-it-mean-for-the-energy-industry.html
Mr Sharpe (07:50:28) :
“too much beer”.
I’ve been thinking about this concept for some time now.
Nope, still can’t understand it.
FB says:
Beer goggles …