MattB says: “well once the govt has set the level of the cap, and the initial allocation of permits to users… why does it not just give them those permits free, instead of charging for them…”

Not a stupid question, but a good one.

Under an ETS, emissions permits will have value resulting from their scarcity. Giving them free to current emitters (or anyone else for that matter), would give them a windfall gain because they would still charge their customers a higher price to reflect that scarcity value whether or not they paid for the permits.

In other words, the end user would still pay a higher price but the emitter would be the beneficiary rather than the taxpayers (via the government).

As Garnaut says in section 14.3 of his latest report “How permits are released into the market will have distributional consequences with respect to the dissipation of their economic rent value.” (Economic rent can be seen as profits above the normal rate due to the ownership of something in short supply or the ability to exclude competitors from a market).

Equally pithy, from later in the same section: “Free permits are not free. Although they may be allocated freely, their cost is borne elsewhere in the economy—typically, by those who cannot pass on the cost to others (most notably, households).”

That’s us in those parentheses, Matt!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar

I am after a solution which removes the excess carbon from the active carbon cycle for millions of years; deep burial will accomplish that.

One can pyrolysise any dry biomass but the big advantage of using trees is that the nitrogen is primarily in the leaves or needles; leaving those in the woods means little N fertilization is required, just some PK. Other souces would require continued applcation of NPK.

With the set up of a carbon market cap and trade system as currently envisaged by the govt… well once the govt has set the level of the cap, and the initial allocation of permits to users… why does it not just give them those permits free, instead of charging for them… The market would still set the same price for carbon (willingnes to pay for a unit of carbon)…

Why does the govt need to make $5 billion or whatever out of it. TO me it removes many many political objections… 1 that it is just a tax grab, and two that it is to prop up an ailing financial system (depending on how keen on conspiracy theories you are).

For the life of me I can;t see how it would change the market rate for carbon… there would still be the identical incentive to sell a unit of carbon to someone who can make more money out of it than you, while charging more than the profit you yourself could make with that carbon… and the total emissions are still controlled under the cap…

Barry notes that fuel will peak in supply, but it’s worse than that, because not only do individual coal mines get used up, so do sequestration sinks:

To do coal with CCS, one has:
M = mine
P = power plant, with power line to grid.
S = sequestration sink, location chosen carefully
=== rail/shipping
— pipelines

and M and S are fairly constrained in their locations.

One can have several configurations:

MPS: everything co-located at minemouth.
This only works as long as *both* fuel and sequestration sink last, not just the fuel. I’m not sure how many sites are like this.

MP—S: minemouth powerplant, pipeline to sink.

M===PS: railroads & energy to move coal, then powerplant sitting on good sink, but as soon as that sink is filled, we get to:

M===P—S: railroads & energy to move coal, pipelines to take CO2 away. If sink fills, need to do more pipelines. My guess this is what one must do with most existing powerplants.

Barry & I went off into scifi land a while ago, but we don’t have to go so far. Fossil fuels (and uranium) are capital, not income. At some point within at most a few hundred years, almost all power must come from renewable sources, and that’s how will it be for the remainder of human civilization.

But that point can be reached with:

a) A fairly low level of energy/person, with the landscape littered with stranded assets that consumed (energy) capital to build, and whose EROI wasn’t that good.

b) Or, a much higher level of energy/person, with much energy capital invested in assets that produce energy income.

Agrichar/biochar does not need to be buried deeply – that would be a waste of an excellent fertiliser. A good explanation of its use can be seen here
http://www.abc.net.au/science/broadband/catalyst/asx/Agrichar_hi.asx

See also: A handful of carbon by Johannes Lehmann1can Nature 447, 143-144, 10 May 2007, doi:10.1038/447143a)

Biochar/agrichar could easily be viewed as the ‘magic bullet, however, I have deep concerns of a knee jerk reaction similar to the use of food crops and deforestation that has and continues to occur as a direct consequence of ethanol. Slow growing forests will not produce biochar at the same rate as fast-growing crops.

If biochar starts making a bucket of money then it would be naive to believe that forests (particularly in 3rd world countries) which are slow growing, are safe from being bulldozed and planted with fast growing crops destined to be burned into the new ‘black gold’.

Aside from the loss of forests, as with above posts, it does not force us to confront the inevitability of peak oil.

This is certainly something that needs further discussion as I admit, agrichar/biochar appears to be such an elegant solution to a multitude of problems.

Sonny

But renewables, unlike CCS, are not dependent on a finite feedstock (coal) that is rising steeply in price as demand increases and is prone to supply bottlenecks (as well as causing climate change). i.e. spending the equivalent trillions on renewables = building an energy infrastructure to last, not one to suit a fuel that will peak in supply around the time all the necessary infrastructure is in place.

The point Heinberg is making is that nobody should kid themselves that pursuing CCS will be cheaper than pursuing large-scale renewables. Yet one is limited by finite resources (coal) whereas the other is not (solar).

Deploying it broadly would require the development of an infrastructure that would require trillions of dollars of investment and decades of work.

And rolling out any of the CCS alternatives (hundreds of thousands of wind turbines, thousands of hectares of solar arrays, re-engineered national transmission grids, energy storage technology, hundreds of 4km-deep drillholes, etc., etc.) won’t?

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/46737

Published Sep 30 2008 by Post Carbon Institute

Delay and Fail
by Richard Heinberg

Last week, speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York, Al Gore suggested that young people should engage in civil disobedience to stop the building of new coal power plants “that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”

I sympathize with Gore’s intent. Coal is the most polluting of the fossil fuels, and if we burn more of it there is little hope of averting catastrophic climate change.

But is carbon capture and storage (CCS) a solution? The technology exists only in the sense that its components have been demonstrated on a small scale. Deploying it broadly would require the development of an infrastructure that would require trillions of dollars of investment and decades of work. According to Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba, in a recent letter to Nature, we would need to handle a volume of CO2 twice as large as the world’s crude oil flows just to sequester one quarter of carbon dioxide emitted in 2005 by large stationary sources.

CCS is essentially a “delay and fail” strategy by the coal industry. By selling the idea of “clean coal,” the industry delays an energy transition away from fossil fuels, while setting itself up for an eventual failure of the entire CCS project. By the time that the failure is clear and obvious, there will be no alternative: the coal plants will have been built, the money invested. We’ll burn more coal, and to hell with the climate.

Mr. Gore would do well not to play along with this industry ploy by touting CCS as a solution.

The aspect of Mr. Gore’s statement that generated more public controversy was of course his advocacy of civil disobedience in shutting down new coal plant construction. Presumably he envisions young people sitting in front of bulldozers and other construction equipment, thus paralyzing the coal plant builders.

Unfortunately, with regard to direct action we are moving into a new era:
high-tech surveillance technologies, anti-activist police tactics, and “sub-lethal” crowd control weapons ensure that the kinds of efforts that worked in the 1950s, ’60, and ’70s against segregation and the Vietnam War will be far more difficult to mount in the future, and far more costly to the lives and health of protesters. If Mr. Gore is going to encourage young people in this direction, I would expect to see him at the front of the barricades.

Realistically, solving the climate crisis will require international cooperation to phase out all fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Protests might speed the process somewhat in some countries, but until world leaders really understand the dead end that fossil fuels represent from both an environmental AND AN ECONOMIC perspective, little headway is likely to be made.

The economic argument for leaving fossil fuels behind is of course tied to the phenomena of depletion, dependency, and supply vulnerability. Once these are understood, alternatives to fossil fuels begin to appear far more attractive and practical even to policy makers who have no care whatever for the fate of future generations.

So grow whatever grows best in each region; the trees will soon be cut under this plan.

My personal hope is that the changes required to get to 550pm will be enough to make 450ppm seem like common sense, and in fact tthe economy of the world will change to such an extent that we will get to lower without even trying.

You guys talk about tipping points all the time… surely there has to be an economic “tipping point” past which economics will actually dictate CO2 reduction, rather than feel constrained because of it…

Possibly too naive of me.

They key to me is that Australia fight tooth and nail for 450ppm targets, and only accept 550 as a compromise we totally oppose and lobby continually to change.

One does wonder why it is that the possible targets are 100 apart and located in between 0 and 100.

If we can;t get 450 how about we go for 490??

There is little evidence in the Final Report as to what a world of 550 ppm CO2 with temperatures of 2 to 3 degrees C higher than pre-industrial levels would be like to live in.

The Report appears to assume as if, once 550 ppm CO2 concentration is reached, manipulating some magic levers global temperature dials can be reversed down to 450 ppm or any other level. This is not the case. Unless CO2 draw-down technology is developed, as required by Hansen et al.(2008), It would take time scales in the order of centuries to millennia for natural CO2 sequestration to reduce the greenhouse effect to acceptable levels.

Garnaut’s Final Report states, among other: “Achievement of a comprehensive agreement around a 550 ppm objective would be a step forward of historic dimension.” and “It would bring the next step to 450 closer to reach.” However, the Report also states “The difference in environmental outcome between successful achievement of a 550 ppm objective and of a 450 ppm objective is substantial for Australia, as demonstrated in chapters 6 and 11 in particular. But it is small compared with the difference between 550 ppm and the complete failure of mitigation” (p. 595-6).

But the Garnaut Report acknowledges: “Large positive climate–carbon feedbacks could result from the release of carbon from long-term sinks such as methane stored deep in ocean sediments and in frozen soils as temperatures increase (IPCC 2007a: 642). There is a high level of uncertainty about how the carbon cycle will respond to climate change”.(Section 2 page 37)

The report admits feedbacks are difficult to quantify, stating: “This causal chain does not explicitly include the feedbacks and non-linearities in the climate system that are important in its response to human forcings.” (page 30). However, a major conclusion arising from the study of the recent history of the atmosphere is that carbon cycle feedbacks coupled with ice melt/water feedbacks constitute major amplifying mechanisms of initial relatively minor solar and greenhouse triggers (forcings). This observation is central to the view of the acceptability, or otherwise, of a 550 ppm CO2 atmosphere, for the following reasons:

(1) Based on a climate sensitivity of 3 degrees for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels, at 550 ppm CO2 which is twice the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm CO2, mean global temperatures will rise to about 3 degrees Celsius. (2) A rise of global temperature of 3 degrees Celsius implies sea level rise of about 25 metres +/- 12 metres, as recorded from the mid-Pliocene (3 million years ago) and consistent with sea level rise/temperature relations during glacial terminations. (3) Temperature rises to 3 degrees Celsius imply widespread desertification of mid-latitudes – the agricultural centres of the world. (4) Natural sequestration of greenhouse gases occurs over time frames of centuries to millennia and no atmospheric mechanism is known which will “stabilize” CO2 levels over shorter periods. (5) In terms of the longevity of civilization, allowing CO2 levels to rise further than they already are (387 ppm) would prove to be a unidirectional process.

But I couldn’t agree more about the risk of people turning to CTL to replace oil for liquid fuels if we don’t make the switch to an electric transport infrastructure powered by solar / wind / geothermal / wave / tidal / biogas power (its already happening in fact – http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/2008/04/coal-to-liquids-in-australia.html).

Unfortunately countries like Australia are mostly waiting for other places to lead the way, so we all seem to be relying on California (along with Germany and Japan) to create the technologies needed to solve the problem.

Phil Hart’s nice writeup is a much more detailed and Oz-specific discussion of issues I’ve been raising for a while, as in this guest post at John Quiggin.

The basic problem is that economic models of climate change *must* include reasonable models of Peak Oil to make much sense. Having just gotten back from an ASPO Peak Oil conference last week, I’m as concerned as ever that people aren’t moving *fast enough* to rework infrastructure and transport for sustainability, i.e., even the most aggressive measures for dealing with AGW may not be fast enough to deal with the economic issues.

For anyone interested, there were many good talks:

Conference: http://www.aspo-usa.org/aspousa4/
Most of the presentations have been posted under Proceedings.

Note that California uses almost no coal, and is trying very hard to expand its solar+wind+geothermal supplies, raise gas mileage, and get to PHEV and BEV cars as fast as we can, and get charging stations around to enable BEVs. We know oil will be running out [recall that CA is an oil state.]

Some of this is for air-pollution reasons, and some for climate, but some of it is to be try to enter the 22nd century with a 22nd-century infrastructure & economy [~zero fossil fuels], not a broken-1900s one littered with useless stranded assets that consumed much resource to build.

Like CA, OZ at least has the solar and wind resources to do this…

The real scare is if people get hit by Peak Oil and then Peak Gas, without having prepared the infrastructure and vehicle fleets, the pressure to burn more coal and expand CTL will be enormous…

Even were we to make a conscious decision to stop everything this minute and convert all land use back to original ecosystems, based on the delayed impact of emissions we are already committed to a minimum 2-degree increase. With this in mind, the question becomes, can – indeed should – prior ecosystems be reinstated?

I refer here to Hughes, Cawsey, and Westoby’s research paper: ‘Climatic Range Sizes of Eucalyptus Species in Relation to Future Climate Change’ Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Jan., 1996), pp. 23-29

In this, they report that of the 819 species of Eucalyptus, 41% have a temperature tolerance range of less than 2 degrees C, 25% less than 1 degree C, and 23% can tolerate less than a 20% variation in rainfall.

I have not followed up on this to research the tolerance levels of other natives but a back-of-the-envelope extrapolation would indicate that restoration may be utterly wasted. This is an ugly negative-feedback problem and one that needs full-bodied debate. I suspect there will be no time for flora to naturally migrate to more amenable latitudes and altitudes and mature into CO2 sinks.

So, do we reinstate ecosystems (plant more trees) and create CO2 sinks destined to fail and become CO2 sources, or do we replace ‘dead ecosystems walking’ with those likely to function in warmer, dryer regimes?

Of course the problem diverges into, which replacement ecosystems should be used when their tolerance levels may be equally narrow?

I’m not suggesting we landscape Australia based on what regimes we think may be coming. I’m merely stating the problem while offering no solution, and hoping someone has one.

Sonny

The mooted conversion of marginal pastoral country to mulga could prove to be a colossal waste of resources unless biochar proves capable of sustained net CO2 sequestration on a massive scale, and said mulga (and any other afforestation in southern Australia) becomes an input to that process.

This site

http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/biocharscprs

is about making biochar for carbon sequestration.