DRANT #283: THE NERGY BILL, PROGENY CAPITALISM

Please read the following in its entirety.

It provides a lucid (and thus profoundly frightening) summation of exactly where we and our planet stand at the moment, and a clear account of the perfidy of our government and it's accomplices-- the US Congress and We (the group formerly known as) The People.
Robbing the future to pay Paul.

So take a good look into the eyes of your grandchildren or children, those here now and those yet to come, and do something.

Or not.

They're counting on it.

(Warning: driving a Prius doesn't count.)

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Rachel's Democracy & Health News #939
The Basket Our Eggs Are In
The nation's new energy law will cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions
by a mere 4.7% by 2030 at a time when scientists say we need cuts 5 to
10 times as large. The U.S. seems to be painting itself into a corner,
creating a global warming emergency, which may then be used to
convince us to accept the only "solution" favored by the coal, oil,
mining, railroad and automobile industries: burying carbon dioxide a
mile below ground, hoping it will stay there forever.
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THE BASKET OUR EGGS ARE IN
By Peter Montague

President Bush signed into law the Energy Independence and Security
Act of 2007 on December 19. The Sierra Club celebrated the new law
as a "historic victory." The Union of Concerned Scientists called it
"landmark" legislation. Reports in the nation's major newspapers
(Los Angeles Times and N.Y. Times) focused on two of the new law's
boldest provisions --

** By 2020, U.S. automobiles must average 35 miles per gallon (with
light trucks and SUVs included in the average for the first time), and

** Production of ethanol, a home-grown gasoline additive, must rise
from 9 billion gallons per year in 2008 to 36 billion gallons per year
by 2020.

The 822-page law also requires that energy-efficiency standards
eventually be set for many household appliances and electric motors,
and it outlaws the sale of most incandescent light bulbs by 2012.
Furthermore, the law says new or renovated federal buildings must use
55% less fossil fuel by 2010 and 100% less by 2030 -- in other words
by 2030 federal buildings have to produce at least as much energy as
they use.

Effect on Carbon Dioxide Emissions

An initial analysis of the greenhouse-gas-reduction potential of the
new law has been provided by the American Council for an Energy-
Efficient Economy (ACEEE). They calculate that, by 2020, the law
will have reduced U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by a cumulative
total of 2017 million metric tonnes (megatonnes); by 2030, they say,
the law will have reduced cumulative U.S. CO2 emissions by a total of
7679 megatonnes. (One million metric tonnes = one megatonne = one
trillion grams = 1E12 grams = 1 teragram; one tonne of CO2 contains
12/44 of a tonne of carbon).

How big a dent in the nation's total CO2 emissions will the 2007
energy law make?

According to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, between 1990 and
2005 U.S. annual CO2 emissions rose from 5529 megatonnes to 6432
megatonnes. In other words, between 1990 and 2005, U.S. CO2 emissions
grew exponentially at the rate of 1.01% per year. If that modest
1.01% growth-rate were to continue from 2008 through 2020, the
cumulative CO2 emissions during the period would total 84,557
megatonnes and during 2008-2030 the cumulative total emitted would be
164,041 megatonnes. Therefore we can see that by 2020 the 2007 energy
law will have reduced total U.S. CO2 emissions by 2017/84557*100 =
2.4% and by 2030 the reduction will be 7679/164041*100 = 4.7%.

In sum, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 will force
only a small reduction in U.S. CO2 emissions between now and 2030. And
that assumes the law is totally effective. Business Week magazine
predicts that these sections of the law will never be enforced. More
likely, they say, these sections will be ignored and fines will be
levied, merely driving up the price of automobiles and gasoline as the
cost of fines is passed on to consumers.

In any case, one thing is clear: the U.S. has announced no plans for
reducing greenhouse gas emissions to any substantial degree. Obviously
we are painting ourselves into a corner -- the longer we delay making
the needed reductions, the more drastic the required reductions
become. When Congress finally acts, it will be in response to an
emergency that the U.S. has intentionally created. As we know, the
U.S. financial and political systems thrive on emergencies just such
as this one.

During the climate change conference in Bali in mid-December, the
European Union pressed the industrialized world to commit to reducing
greenhouse gas emissions by somewhere between 25% and 40% by 2020 --
at least 10 times the reductions built into the Energy Independence
and Security Act of 2007. However, the U.S. derailed that Bali plan by
flatly refusing to go along with any numerical targets, even
voluntary ones.

While the Bali conference was under way, in the U.S. the business-
friendly Conference Board issued a report showing that 40%
reductions in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions could be achieved with
only modest investments. This raises the question, if the Conference
Board acknowledges that the desired reductions are affordable, why
does the U.S. consistently refuse to allow them to be adopted as a
voluntary international goal? The oil and coal industries have nothing
to gain from efficiency or renewable sources of energy and have
successfully resisted all efforts by Congress to force them to help
pay to remediate the problems they have created. The Energy
Independence and Security Act originally included $13 billion in taxes
on oil corporations, earmarked for the support of renewable energy. By
the time the law was enacted that $13 billion support for renewables
had evaporated. The insider's newsletter, Greenwire, attributed this
remarkable evaporation to the "raw power" of the oil corporations.
This year alone the oil corporations have given members of Congress
$75 million in reward for fealty. The question is, under what
circumstances -- if any -- will the oil and coal corporations allow
the U.S. to reduce CO2 emissions?

The Size of the CO2 Problem

In 2005, humans worldwide dumped about 27 billion metric tonnes of
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from fuel combustion.[1, pg. 48]

For many years, global CO2 releases from industrial sources have been
increasing steadily by about 2% per year,[2] thus doubling in size
every 35 years. If this growth-rate continues, global industrial CO2
emissions during the 45-year period 2005-2050 will total 2 trillion
tonnes and by the end of this century will total 8.2 trillion tonnes.
This gives us some feel for the size of the world's problem -- it is
very large.

A variety of solutions to these problems have been proposed.

1. Energy efficiency. As we have seen, 40% reductions in greenhouse
gas emissions are considered affordable by the Conference Board, which
serves U.S. industrial corporations. However, we have also seen that
the U.S. delegation would not allow even 25% to be set as a voluntary
international goal at the Bali Conference, and the best Congress could
do in the 2007 energy law was a 4.7% reduction by 2030. No, the U.S.
government clearly is not able to take energy conservation seriously.
The "raw power" of the oil and coal corporations will not allow it.

2. Renewable energy -- wind and other forms of solar power. Numerous
technologies exist for rapid deployment of solar power, developing
an energy system that is carbon-free and nuclear-free -- but oil and
coal corporations oppose the necessary investments. Globally,
renewable energy is not expected to develop substantially between now
and 2030. According to the Wall Street Journal, in its most recent
annual report, World Energy Outlook 2007, the International Energy
Agency (IEA) predicts that by 2030 renewable sources of energy will be
no further along than they are today: "Renewable energy sources such
as solar will grow in use in certain areas, like the United Kingdom,
but the current logistical challenges and costs of using and
developing them mean all renewable energy sources will remain a
fraction of total energy use globally in 2030 at about 10%, unchanged
from today," says the IEA.

3. Extract CO2 from the air. A machine to extract CO2 from the air
was announced this month by Sandia National Laboratories in
Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their aim is to split CO2 into carbon
monoxide and oxygen, and then to use these as building blocks for new
liquid fuels, which would compete with petroleum products like
gasoline. Initially Sandia plans to extract CO2 from the smokestacks
of power plants but eventually, they say, they intend to extract CO2
from the atmosphere to create "carbon neutral" liquid fuels. It
remains to be seen whether the development of this potentially-
subversive machine will be allowed to continue.

Another technique for extracting CO2 from the atmosphere would mix it
with alkaline and alkaline-earth oxides to produce solid compounds
such as magnesium carbonate and limestone (calcium carbonate).[3,
Chapter 7] This would require mining 1.6 to 3.7 tonnes of silicates
for each tonne of CO2 and would produce 2.6 to 4.7 tonnes of carbonate
rocks for each tonne of CO2 -- in sum, a very large mining and waste-
rock disposal operation.

Another machine to extract CO2 from the air was announced earlier
this year by Columbia University. The announcement pointed out that
the captured carbon dioxide could then be buried in the ground. We
predict that this machine will quickly attract major investment from
oil and coal corporations. As we'll see, it is exactly what
they need.

4. Carbon capture and storage: Here, finally, we come to the only
approach strongly favored by the U.S. government, by the coal, oil,
automobile, mining and railroad industries, by teams of researchers at
more than a dozen universities, and by several of the big
environmental organizations in Washington and New York (Environmental
Defense, Natural Resources Defense Council [NRDC], The Izaak Walton
League, The Clean Air Task Force, and even the Union of Concerned
Scientists, among others). This is the basket our eggs are in.

The plan is to extract CO2 from industrial smoke stacks (or from the
open air), compress it into a liquid, and pump it 3000 to 8000 feet
below ground, hoping it will stay there forever. This plan is known as
CCS, which stands for carbon capture and sequestration, or carbon
capture and storage.

Of all the options described above, only CCS is being vigorously
pursued. The U.S. Department of Energy has allocated roughly $2
billion to CCS projects that are going on now in 41 states. More
than a dozen universities are researching the pros if not the cons.
Several prominent environmental organizations have enthusiastically
endorsed the plan, even before a decade of necessary research has
begun. It is no exaggeration to say that CCS has become a bandwagon --
or a juggernaut.

Very few people have heard of CCS; in the U.S., at least, it is
essentially invisible. Yet it is so far along that it looks like a
done deal, almost unstoppable. It seems clear that coal and oil
corporations and their camp followers are counting on CCS to solve the
global warming problem. CCS is a major industrial plan; all other
proposed solutions to global warming are tinker toys by comparison.

No environmental organizations and no news reports have so far
mentioned it, but a major feature of the Energy Independence and
Security Act of 2007 is Title VII, which requires the federal
government to undertake a nationwide assessment of the suitability of
geological formations capable of storing carbon dioxide underground.
(A "Carbon Sequestration Atlas of the U.S." has already been produced
[29 Mbyte PDF].) Title VII also requires the federal government to
support seven projects to demonstrate the capture of CO2 from
industrial sources. This is the most far-reaching section of the 2007
energy law and you can be sure that Title VII will be vigorously
enforced. The coal industry will see to that.

The CCS plan was devised by the coal industry, but has the financial
support of many of the world's most powerful corporations, an all-star
cast from the oil, gas, mining, railroad, and automobile industries:
American Electric Power, the American Petroleum Institute, Aramco
Services, BP (formerly British Petroleum), Chevron, ConocoPhillips,
The Electric Power Research Institute, ExxonMobil, Ford Motor, General
Electric, General Motors, Marathon Oil, Peabody Energy, Schlumberger,
Shell Oil, Southern Company, and Toyota, among others. They, in turn,
have lined up support within academia and the corporate environmental
organizations.

The coal industry is betting its whole future on the CCS plan: "Coal
is going to be the answer and is the answer, and carbon capture and
sequestration is the answer to climate change," says Steven F. Leer,
chief executive officer of Arch Coal, Inc., the nation's second-
largest coal company, after Peabody Energy. If the CCS plan fails, the
coal industry will fade into history, at least in the U.S., where
carbon dioxide emissions are causing cancellations of new coal-fired
power plants.

Here is why CCS seems like such a good idea -- the only good
idea -- from the viewpoint of the fossil corporations, coal and oil:

1. CCS is compatible with the existing energy infrastructure. If
industry's carbon dioxide can be buried in the ground, the coal and
oil industries can continue Business as Usual until declining supplies
make fossil fuels too expensive. If the fossil fuel industries can
maintain Business as Usual, then so can the mining, railroad and
automobile industries. Nothing will have to change. Once CCS has been
"demonstrated" (a word that means very different things to different
people) then the major incentive to conserve energy or develop
renewables will evaporate. Even the small federal investment currently
devoted to conservation and renewables could be logically withdrawn.
Why spend money on futuristic energy technologies that are not needed
-- especially potentially-subversive sources like solar that lend
themselves to dispersed community control but not to
centralized corporate control?

2. After it has been injected into the ground, carbon dioxide will be
out of sight and out of mind. Best of all, it will be irretrievable
and its precise whereabouts will be unknowable. Once it's down there,
it's beyond human control. Of course corporate experts will claim to
know where it is, but it will be loose in the deep earth and under
tremendous pressure from the weight of the earth above it. Buoyant
forces will be constantly pushing it upward. It turns water acidic and
so can leach rocks. The site where it is buried will be poorly
understood because of a fundamental catch-22: to understand the
geology a mile below ground in detail requires numerous bore holes
sunk into the earth. But these bore holes ruin the natural integrity
of the site and make leakage more likely. So you can have a poorly-
understood site that retains its integrity, or a well-understood site
that has lost its integrity, but you can't have a well-understood site
that retains its integrity. Thus the perpetual danger of leakage will
be with us and with our children and with their children and their
children's children....

Happily, after a few decades the injected CO2 will almost certainly be
forgotten as other, bigger problems absorb humanity's attention and
resources. Humans have no experience paying attention to anything for
hundreds of years, much less tens of thousands of years. By the time
leaks begin to occur -- even if by chance anyone is still paying
attention and leakage is detected -- the people who created the
problem will be long gone. The public will be left holding the bag.
The fossil fuel industry has already proposed that its liability for
buried CO2 should end after just 10 years.) This is very similar to
present-day U.S. hazardous waste law, which allows waste corporations
to bury megatonnes of industrial poisons in the ground. Almost
everyone involved acknowledges that these poisons will eventually
leak, but the companies that do the deed are only legally liable for
30 years. After that, it's the public's problem. CO2 storage is being
proposed on this same corporate-friendly model.

3. Injecting CO2 into the ground is something that only a handful of
geologists, physicists and engineers will be able to discuss in
detail. Within the U.S. regulatory framework, in which individuals
typically are invited to public hearings where they are given 5
minutes or less to ask questions and offer facts and perspectives,
there will be no way for the public to participate in CCS decisions.
Thus this "techno-fix" will further weaken U.S. democracy, leaving the
important decisions to partisan corporate "experts," some of whom will
work directly for industry, some for academia, and some for corporate
environmental organizations. The media can be counted on to present
all these experts as independent and occasionally even adversarial.

As with the nuclear industry, those who make the decisions on CCS will
be engineers with a vested interest in saying that it can be done
"safely" (without ever defining what that word means in the context of
burying trillions of tonnes of liquid CO2 a mile below ground
"forever"). Given the decline of U.S. government regulatory capacity
during the past 30 years, there is no regulatory structure left to
counter the claims of partisan advocates and corporate experts. When
he announced that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would
soon write regulations governing CCS, EPA chief Stephen Johnson
said, "By harnessing the power of geologic sequestration technology,
we are entering a new age of clean energy where we can be both good
stewards of the Earth, and good stewards of the American economy." In
other words, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has already
been captured. We cannot expect EPA to provide a probing analysis of
the serious dangers of CCS. Who then will do it? Many of the corporate
environmental groups have also been captured. The skids are fully
greased.

4. It is relatively easy for unprincipled technical personnel to claim
that CCS can be accomplished safely. There is no way to "demonstrate"
that CO2 can be stored underground forever. No matter how long you run
your test, it could always fail next year as leaks develop. So
"successful" CO2 storage cannot be demonstrated -- given that the goal
is storage in perpetuity. Therefore, engineers will define some other
"test" that they will then claim "demonstrates" successful CO2
storage. In fact, almost any test will do. Example: CO2 is currently
being buried in the ground at three locations, about a million
tonnes per year at each site. A million tonnes may sound like a lot,
but it is minuscule compared to the total amount of CO2 being
produced. To bury even two trillion tonnes -- much less 8 trillion
tonnes -- would require scaling up current operations by a factor of
2E12/3E6 = 670,000. Despite the major difficulties inherent in such
enormous growth, a small group of corporate environmentalists and
corporate-funded academics in the U.S. is already claiming that CCS
has been successfully demonstrated. The public is not well-prepared
to understand the shameless deception and rank dishonesty of such a
claim.

5. Carbon capture and storage provides a way for energy corporations
to make a great deal of money from the CO2 catastrophe that they have
created, which they have spent millions denying and thus prolonging.
If the Columbia University CO2 extraction machine works as advertised,
perhaps the patents will be purchased by oil and coal corporations so
that they can profit doubly from the machine. U.S. coal and oil firms
may soon be marketing their "proven safe" carbon storage services to
China and India, where regulation and oversight will be even more lax
than in the U.S. Large amounts of money could be made in the short
term, and in the long term when the CO2 begins to leak out and heat up
the planet, perhaps threatening the tenure of humans on earth, it will
be somebody else's problem.

6. All the CCS activity generated by the U.S. Department of Energy
creates the impression that CCS is just around the corner. Given this,
coal companies can promise to build new power plants that could
use CCS but don't have to use CCS (they could just as easily,
and far more cheaply, dump their CO2 into the atmosphere). Such plants
are called "capture ready."

CCS will cost anywhere from $50 to $100 per tonne of CO2 captured
(not including the costs of transport and burial). So carbon capture
may eliminate coal's price advantage over renewable fuels. Therefore
actually burying carbon in the deep earth may not be what the coal
companies are counting on. "The coal industry's many proposals to
build 'clean' coal plants that are 'capture ready' across the U.S. is
a smokescreen," says Leslie Harroun, a senior program officer at the
Oak Foundation in London, U.K. Until a decade of research is
completed, CCS may just be something to talk about with bluff and
bluster, to gain permission to build a hundred or more "capture ready"
coal-fired power plants. That would be a strategy Big Coal could
take to the bank right now.

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[1] International Energy Agency, Key World Energy Statistics 2007.
Paris: International Energy Agency, 2007, pg. 48.

[2] Pushker A. Kharecha and James E. Hansen, "Implications of 'peak
oil' for atmospheric CO2 and climate." Available online in PDF.

[3] Bert Metz, Ogunlade Davidson and others, editors,
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC Special Report on
Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2005). (23 Mbyte PDF)

Return to Table of Contents

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Plus- check these out as well:

The Backlash Against Biofuels
Just as the U.S. Congress passes a new law requiring a 4-fold
increase in the use of ethanol for fuel, critics argue that such
biofuels reduce the world's food supply and don't necessarily
alleviate global warming.
World Food Stocks Dwindling Rapidly, UN Warns
The world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are
soaring to historic levels, the top food and agriculture official of
the United Nations warned Dec. 17.
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