Yesterday, Gov. Kaine announced the membership of his new Climate Change commission. In newspaper reports this morning, I keep seeing this, over and over again, regarding the carbon dioxide (CO2) goals spelled out in Gov. Kaine's energy plan.
Creating the [Climate Change] commission was one of the recommendations in the Virginia Energy Plan, which was completed in September. Another was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent - to the levels they were at seven years ago - by 2025.
Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent? Is that true? The short answer is "no," yet the corporate media keeps reporting it. This isn't that complicated, but let me try to clear it up nonetheless.
*In 2000, Virginia emitted 122.66 million metric tons of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion.
*In 2004, Virginia emitted 127.38 million metric tons of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion.
*That's growth of about 4% between 2000 and 2004. Assuming that rate continued through 2007, we're talking about Virginia CO2 emissions about 7% higher than 2000 levels as of 2007 -- about 131 million metric tons of CO2.
*U.S. carbon dioxide emissions are projected, in the "business-as-usual" case (aka, "baseline projection") to grow by about 24% from 2007 to 2025, and around 30% from 2000 to 2025. To simply this discussion, and because I have no reason to believe otherwise, I'm assuming that Virginia's C02 emissions will grow at about the same rate as the country overall through 2025.
*Under this assumption, Virginia's CO2 emissions in 2025 would be around 159 million metric tons.
*Gov. Kaine's plan calls for Virginia to be emitting at 2000 levels (122.66 million metric tons) by 2025.
*That would constitute roughly a 23% reduction in projected CO2 emissions from "business-as-usual" (aka, "baseline") projections. It would constitute roughly a 7% reduction from 2007 CO2 emissions levels.
*This is not, no matter how you look at it, a 30 percent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2025. Why everyone keeps repeating this figure is beyond me, but it's simply not correct, either from current levels OR from projected, "business-as-usual" levels.
*In short, what we're talking about is a slight reduction in current CO2 emissions by 2025 under Gov. Kaine's plan. That's fine as far as it goes, but it's not a 30 percent reduction as is being reported. It's also not even close to what scientists are saying we need to do in order to head off catastrophic climate change. That would require the world to cut CO2 emissions on the order of 80% from current levels by 2050. In turn, that would require that we be well on the way by 2025, perhaps an ABSOLUTE CUT -- not from "business-as-usual" projections, but a REAL CUT FROM CURRENT EMISSIONS LEVELS -- of 30% or more by 2025.
*Gov. Kaine's plan, while an excellent and admirable start insofar as it acknowledges the climate change problem and starts looking at ways to deal with it, will need to be made a lot more aggressive if it's going to reach goals commensurate with what the science is indicating.
*That, of course, is going to require some tough decisions, the toughest being the future of coal in the Virginia energy mix. Coal is by far the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Coal is also the fuel source we use in Virginia to produce nearly half of our electricity. Big Coal also is a powerful political force in this state, as is Dominion Power ("Global Warming: It All Starts Here!"), which uses most of that coal.
*Guess who's on Gov. Kaine's climate panel -- that's right, "David Heacock of Richmond, President of Dominion Virginia Power." Hmmmm. (note: there are also some strong pro-environment people on the panel, including Joe Bouchard, Paul Ferguson, and representatives from The Nature Conservancy, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and the Southern Environmental Law Center. I'd love to see someone from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network as well. A top-notch climate scientist would be great too...maybe someone from the Nobel Peace Prize winning IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)?
My fear is that the utilities will try and push through coal plants arguing that they can be retrofitted for sequestration later, but will then use the usual stalling and delay tactics to try and push off sequestration as far into the future as possible.
This is why we need the government to step in and create a market for gaseous carbon. Then, let the market figure out the best way to get us to a carbon neutral energy economy.
This is totally off the question, but the only question I have about the global warming equation is, where does all the extra water in the system go?!? I'm a chemical engineer, so I look at the atmosphere as a black box -- what goes in either must go out, react, or accumulate. When we burn fossil fuels, we don't just get Co2, we also get H2o. What is happening to all this extra water vapor? I have never seen this question adequately addressed (to be fair, I haven't looked THAT hard).
The polluters, if you will, have a distinct advantage because they can compare today's cost (which doesn't take pollution and damage into account) to what it would cost to implement a filter/cleaning system and say that it's orders of magnitude more expensive. Then they use that justify the economic devastation, they ask the same question you do "at what cost", and they come to the same conclusion - it's too expensive given the current economic situation.
If we change the current total cost calculation, to include the true economic cost of the pollution, the outrageous costs of filtration will not seem so outrageous. It's just that we've been fudging the numbers for such a very long time - because there were no known environmental costs for centuries - that those "no environmental costs" calculations have become the baseline for comparison. So the polluters use that to great advantage to argue that filtration systems are too expensive.
Time to reset the baseline - then everything changes.
CCAN definitely needs to be on this commission as at least one organization that has a level of grassroots activism component to it. Who's otherwise going to represent the opinions of the environmental activist membership? Where's Sierra Club, or the Virginia Conservation Network or the League of Conservation Voters? You know the groups that lobby on behalf of us lowly Virginians for environmental protection? Everyone else on this commission otherwise has an agenda and/or is strictly a policy wonk.