via RAND_TR580.sum.pdf application/pdf Object.
More on this later, but according to this lifecycle analysis, oil produced from the oil sands of Alberta can be cost competitive with crude oil even if carbon costs are taken into account.
However, ramp up of production will lead to very high water usage and massive local and regional impacts.
In other words, Alberta, you’re screwed, rest of the world, you’ll die at the same rate!
More climate change positive feedback news (Positive feedback for children, Good, for climate, bad!). BTW, does this kind of news not make you leery of CO2 Sequestration?
Study says methane a new climate threat – Yahoo! News
Scientists worry about a global warming vicious cycle that was not part of their already gloomy climate forecast: Warming already under way thaws permafrost, soil that has been continuously frozen for thousands of years. Thawed permafrost releases methane and carbon dioxide. Those gases reach the atmosphere and help trap heat on Earth in the greenhouse effect. The trapped heat thaws more permafrost and so on. “The higher the temperature gets, the more permafrost we melt, the more tendency it is to become a more vicious cycle,” said Chris Field, director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who was not part of the study. “That’s the thing that is scary about this whole thing. There are lots of mechanisms that tend to be self-perpetuating and relatively few that tend to shut it off.”
At a time when this country faces major environmental challenges, including catching up with the rest of the developed world on global warming, the agency that would have to do the heavy lifting on environmental regulation ain’t getting the money to do diddley squat. A 25% cut in inflation adjusted terms over 4 years is huge, especially considering that the EPA was not a cushy agency even before that.
ES&T Online News: Budget cuts increasingly damaging to EPA
Support for research and development at EPA has declined by 25% in inflation-adjusted terms between the recent high point in 2004 and the proposed 2008 budget, according to figures from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“Morale has never been so low here since the days of Ann Gorsuch, and even then there was more money,” says one scientist, referring to the time during the early 1980s when former administrator Gorsuch, who resigned under a cloud, did her best to shrink the agency.
But George Gray, assistant administrator for the agency’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), says he fully supports the proposed budget. “This budget fulfills every presidential environmental commitment and maintains the goals laid out in the EPA’s strategic plan, while spending less,” he says. The budget cuts come on the heels of EPA’s program to cut $2 million from the agency’s fund for specialized libraries.
The scientists’ difficulties are likely to increase if the proposals in a June 2006 memo from Lyons Gray, EPA’s chief financial officer, are carried out. The memo, which was released by the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) directs ORD to reduce laboratory physical infrastructure costs by a minimum of 10% by 2009 and another 10% by 2011. The memo suggests that this will require closing, relocating, and consolidating EPA’s laboratory and field locations, as well as reducing or relocating staff. ORD chief George Gray told Congress that EPA does not intend to shut down any labs or get rid of any scientists during the current administrator’s tenure.
The U.S will pay the price for this deliberate destruction of government infrastructure. You won’t see it now, it will be a little more apparent in a few years.
Congress weighs coal fuels, carbon questions linger – Apr. 23, 2007
The technology, developed in coal-rich Germany in the 1920s and used heavily by the Nazis in World War II, involves partly burning coal to turn it into a gas, then using a catalyst, usually a metal, to make it a liquid.
The basic premise of liquid coal (using the wonderful Fischer-Tropsch Reaction) is that “plentiful and easily available” coal is converted into diesel that can be used for automobiles. Liquid coal is yet another wonderful distraction in the quest for clean energy sources.
The attraction of using a plentiful domestic energy source is obvious. It would help cut our reliance on oil, about a quarter of which comes from the Middle East and Venezuela.
It also keeps money stateside, flowing to coal miners instead of countries with links to terrorists, which explains why the coalition’s members include several labor unions.
You mean, you willl do this to every coal mining town just so you don’t have to increase fuel efficiency by 25% and avoid “terrorist” oil? Jeez, and this casual assumption of “if we don’t buy their oil, terrorism will decrease”. Patriotism and blatant fear mongering can be used to sell anything, apparently. Coal mining is one of the most destructive and harmful operations you can imagine. Here’s a short summary (LINK)
It is difficult to explain the scope and impact of mountain top removal to people who have not seen it. Some sites cover three and four thousand acres. Millions of cubic feet of land are blasted away by explosive charge to get at the thin seams of coal underneath the mountain tops. Trees, rocks, soil-in short, everything but the coal-is considered “overburden.” Land is devastated, and afterwards the ground must be compacted so hard to stabilize it that nothing but scrub grasses will grow. Rains rush off the denuded mountain tops at an alarming rate.
Of course, like all other carbon rich fuel sources, carbon sequestration remains a must for any possibility that we can see a decrease in carbon emissions coupled to an increase in carbon fuel use.
Henry said that “carbon storage” – an untested technology where about half the carbon dioxide in coal is removed and injected underground – can make liquid coal so that it emits 60 percent less carbon dioxide than gasoline.
“This statement is total garbage,” said Pete Altman, coal campaign director at the National Environmental Trust, saying the study Henry was referring to compared a hybrid diesel engine to a gasoline engine
So we’re willing to go to greatly increased carbon emissions, devastated country side, increased water pollution, air pollution, mining deaths, etc. just so we don’t increase fuel efficiency by 25%? Wow, priorities!!
The bill is expected to make it to the Senate floor in the next few weeks, and both Democrat and Republican staffers say a Republican sponsored amendment allowing for liquid coal is likely.
Other bills provide loan guarantees for companies building coal-to-liquid plants, which typically cost $3 billion to $5 billion apiece, as well as guaranteed price support if oil falls below $40 a barrel.
It seems clear the industry needs government help to succeed. Lawmakers have to decide if they are willing to fund a fuel that appears to do little to cut greenhouse gases.
I am sure lawmakers will make it happen as long as their lobbyists want to make it happen, if it means subsidies, relaxation of pollution rules, and other such shenanigans, so be it.
Note: the blog Environmental Action follows the liquid coal story very closely and had a post on this very article. Reading this blog, you will find that the great savior Barack Obama is also a liquid coal acolyte (It’s that whole midwestern pandering to coal and ethanol!)
Shameful. I did not blog much, or anything about the recently passed energy bill because I thought it was a watered down compromise that subsidized coal, oil and ethanol industries at the expense of renewable energy, public transportation and public health. But these are the consequences of passing such a bill, it allows the EPA to claim that something major has already been done, so noting needs to be done any more .
The E.P.A. administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, said the proposed California rules were pre-empted by federal authority and made moot by the energy bill signed into law by President Bush on Wednesday. Mr. Johnson said California had failed to make a compelling case that it needed authority to write its own standards for greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks to help curb global warming.
E.P.A. Says 17 States Can’t Set Emission Rules for Cars – New York Times
This is truly absurd. The energy bill does not address CO2 emissions. California has used its right to set stronger standards many times in the past, and nothing in this bill preempts this right.
I guess this is Supreme Court bound, where that one man decision making machine Justice Kennedy will no doubt set the standards for this country.
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Tags: Energy, Environment
Is apparently someone called Rex Murphy who writes political and social columns for Canada’s premier newspaper, who has done what thousands of scientists all over the world could not do: Solve the issue of global warming by pointing out that Toronto is having a very cool July.
So where’s that global cooling alert? – The Globe and Mail
Now, however, Toronto in July is cool and I am waiting in vain for the lips of just one forecaster to ask how can this be. Waiting just once to hear the familiar phrase “global warming” in a sentence that even hints that the theory behind it is so much more tentative than we have been urged with such fervour to believe.
It was so easy, the solution was in front of us all this time, why did no other scientist not use the obvious connecting equation: Weather (in one’s hometown in July) = Climate?? Damn, there goes my Nobel. Sometimes, it is that easy!
Next week on the Globe and Mail: Isee Flaturtha stands on top of a hill, looks all around, can see nothing but flat land for miles and miles, publishes an opinion piece proving that the Earth is flat and excoriating the so called “Round Earth” scientists.
I am glad that Canada’s best newspaper is open to such great scientific writing. Clearly, Canada’s future is bright.
Overall, the study estimates that fires in the contiguous United States and Alaska release about 290 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, which is the equivalent of 4 to 6 percent of the nation’s carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning. But fires contribute a higher proportion of the potent greenhouse gas in several western and southeastern states, especially Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Washington, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Arizona. Particularly large fires can release enormous pulses of carbon dioxide rapidly into the atmosphere.”A striking implication of very large wildfires is that a severe fire season lasting only one or two months can release as much carbon as the annual emissions from the entire transportation or energy sector of an individual state,” the authors write.
US Fires Release Large Amounts Of Carbon Dioxide
In a study that is sure to be seized upon by global warming refuseniks everywhere, it has been discovered that fires release CO2. Um, however you do it, if you burn 12 grams of carbon completely, you will get 44 grams of CO2 (as you probably learned in middle school chemistry).
I am glad this study was done, but it’s not news, and it is not a STRIKING IMPLICATION by any means. If you know the acreage of forest fires, and you have some estimation of biomass density, it’s trivial to come up with an estimate of CO2 emissions.
What forest fires also do is put a lot of fine particulates into the air, now that is truly hazardous for people in the vicinity and has much more STRIKING IMPLICATIONS on air quality.