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Recent Posts by Daniel Kammen
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Discussions of our proximity to a "global tipping point" on climate have now become commonplace. Today the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is about 385 parts per million -- more than 100 parts per million higher than before the Industrial Revolution. Just when and where the climate will begin to change in large, unpredictable ways remains a threat that all our environmental models say is coming, even if they cannot be forecast with any real accuracy. James Hansen, the tremendously well-respected climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard institute for Space Studies, has often been quoted on this topic. "We don't understand how fast ice sheets can respond," Hansen said in a podcast interview with Earth & Sky. "But what we're learning
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At a recent Capitol Hill hearing I was surprised to learn that it was far from common knowledge just how competitive wind power has become. As a result, a bit of a data and price update memo may be of use, even to those who follow the industry. In addition, I will summarize the data on a few of the least cost wind farms in the nation.
Wind energy in the United States has continued to grow, and represented 19 percent of the new nameplate capacity added to the electrical grid in 2006 . With a total cumulative U.S. capacity of 11,575 MW (1 percent of total U.S. nameplate capacity) at the end of 2006, wind energy is now often directly cost competitive with fossil-fuel generation, and at times is a least-cost supply option.
Representative Wind Project and Wind Power
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The risks of climate change and, of course, high oil prices have unleashed a wave of interest and commitment to changing our energy economy that, perhaps, could safeguard the planet. City, state, federal and international proposals and legislation are today all in play -- and in flux -- to lay out targets for greenhouse gas reductions.
Some of the most notable are the 25 percent reduction in GHG emissions by 2025 and the 80 percent reduction by 2050 that California has adopted, the 70 percent or more reductions proposed in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the Japanese proposals, and the 100 percent fossil-fuel-free plans of Sweden, and a number of progressive cities intent on making climate-wise statements.
How these diverse and ambitious plans pan out is anybody's
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Over the next five decades progress to meaningfully address the risk of significant climate change will require an estimated 80 percent, or more, reduction in the global emissions of greenhouse gases. From the baseline in 2007 of over seven billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions, three-quarters of which comes from fossil fuel combustion (with the remainder largely from land conversion and forest burning), the reductions required are from a global emissions portfolio that is currently increasing.
As the largest current emitter, at roughly 25 percent of the global total -- but more importantly as the nation with the largest energy resource and research base to affect change -- the United States and its inaction on climate protection for the last several years is poised to play a
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Energy and climate are now all over the news these days. Remarkable agreements between many an erstwhile nemesis -- Democrat and Republican, environmentalist and venture capitalist, public official and industry leader, evangelist and reductionist/rationalist/scientist/atheist -- show that they are now, roughly, on the same wavelength.
In fact, the convergence is so strong that there is an evolving common international language around the need to investigate not just the science of global warming, but the specific local impacts of change -- from flooding to Great Britain, to hurricanes in the United States, to changes in ocean chemistry and coral growth. Global warming has, for many become a common language of carbon management. There is a recognized need to explore the
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A Currency for the Wealth, and Environmental Debt, of Nations
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In order to survive and thrive in the face of climate change, we need to establish and then put into practice -- as quickly as possible -- markets that utilize the value of carbon.
The development of human civilization has followed a series of scientific and technological innovations -- starting with harnessing fire and domesticating plants and animals, the evolution of increasingly convenient energy sources, powerful personal communications and computing devices -- that have made our relatively quick progress possible. Looming advances include distributed energy systems, nanotechnology, and the pervasive use of genetic technologies for plants, and potentially for humans as well.
But as a physicist who is focused on energy science, technology and policy related to climate change and the fates of rich and poor nations, when I look at the next fifty years, I believe financial and economic change are essential if we want to safeguard the future of Mother Earth.
Over and over again, it is a financial revolution that I see as needed to change our mindset about the value of the environment -- and of our relationship to the planet and the world we leave the generations to come. That is not to say that we don't need scientific and technological advances -- arguably we need these at rates never before achieved in the energy sector -- but that our inability to value nature stands today as a fundamental obstacle in our appreciation of both nature and ourselves.
There have arguably been three fundamental stages in our economic "meta-history." First, the development of a monetary system, and hence, and perhaps tautologically, a value of money. Second, we evolved a sense and a sensibility of the value of time. Each of these added sophistication -- and complication -- to human transactions. While money provides the means evolve beyond barter, the value of time provides a measure of the pace of change, and the opportunities that we both face and create.
Now, we are poised on the edge of third financial revolution, the value, and cost, of carbon. Unlike the first two, the value of carbon brings our financial assessments back in touch with nature in rather remarkable ways.
The capacity of the biosphere -- the ocean, air, and terrestrial systems -- to absorb carbon emissions, and the extent to which that carbon subsequently transforms nature, is at the heart of the value of carbon. In many respects, of course, it is not the value, but the cost of carbon that I am discussing.
We do not yet know in what range the cost of carbon will float. Some say $20 -- 30 per ton of carbon, some argue $100, some say even higher. What we do know, however, is that like all currencies, it is a monetary proxy for a wide range of resources and processes. In this case, the cost of carbon reflects something never before quantified, the health of the planet.
The pre-industrial concentration of atmospheric carbon was about 270 parts per million by volume. We recently passed 370 parts per mission of carbon -- an event that was marked by environmentalists with a "party" on the Millennium Bridge in London -- and the rate of increase remains steady. Current forecasts of the 'business as usual' scenario are for us triple, or worse, the pre-industrial atmospheric carbon concentration during the coming century, and to eclipse a doubling within the next 50 years.
By all scientific accounts this will fundamentally alter the planet. Many of the effects of this environmental transformation will come as "surprises" as nature does things we had anticipated, and most of these surprises will be bad for our society and our economy.
Our ability to develop a meaningful value of carbon over the next fifty years will be fundamental in our ability to manage environmental change to not only minimize the damage from global warming, but to find ways to address many of the other looming issues we must at some point face. These "next" crises include water shortages, ecological health and resilience, and even arguably the most important social poison we face today -- the incredible poverty in which much of the world lives today and the crippling inequity between the global rich and poor.
We will, indeed we must, find ways to value carbon withinwithin the decade. The question is how soon, and how honestly. If this realization comes late the amount of what is too mildly termed "global warming" will induce severe changes in our society, but if this realization comes sooner, even if halting and geographically patchy initially, the wealth of under-utilized and under-researched technological innovations provides us ample tools to address global environmental change.
That is not to say that today we know how to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by the 80 percent or more needed to avert a climate crisis, but by starting seriously on that path now, we will -- hopefully -- both have time and interest to learn as we go, and find the suite of technologies, policies, and social transformations needed to protect the planet.
Ironically, a snapshot of a city in 50 years will reflect the technological change, not the economic change in the value of carbon. This future could involve significant amounts of solar, wind, biofuel, nuclear, tidal, geothermal, or other forms of low-carbon energy. It also has a very uncertain role for personal automobiles -- cars will need to become low-carbon modes of transport, but simply building low-emission cars does not begin to address the consumption footprint that cars today represent.
That said, it is the appreciation and valuation of carbon that is needed to facilitate the technological change to a low-carbon society that we know is required.
GreenBiz Editor-at-Large Daniel M. Kammen is the Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy at the University of California, Berkeley. He co-directs the Berkeley Institute of the Environment and is founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory. He has appointments in the Energy and Resources Group and the Goldman School of Public Policy.
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Good article Daniel...now currency moves to sensitize the whole
The real visual econ change will be in the countrysides. Perhaps moreso in remote rural regions than others. Rangeland and savannah is likely the largest permanent sink, thus some dough will flow to those areas that have none now. There are approx 15 Billion acres of savannah, rangelands....not a huge soil offset root zone sequester per acre...but alot of acres.
China has dirty air, USA has dirty air and USA/China conjugation means even more dirty air unless they recognize that, offset it, and start cleaning up.
USA is upside down right at $6 trillion Asia dollars. To move a bunch of that dough takes cleaner air recognition by the supposed "powers that be" and offsets.
China buys offsets EU, EU buys USA, as weather moves west to east. The monetary imbalance corrects some flowing east to west then. Thus global economy still flows...Gets greener though ( and all without a default or war too).
Big deal is the air gets cleaner too by the whole afore process.
There would be no reason say Mexico, China or both, would not be the World's leading suppliers of say solar shingles etc.
http://abigfootcarbon.com
[Editor's note: comment headline edited to reflect author's proper name.]