Economic recession has failed to curb rising emissions, undermining hope of keeping global warming to safe levels Photograph: Dave Reede/All Canada Photos/Corbis

Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.

The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius – which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change” – is likely to be just “a nice Utopia”, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions.

Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel – a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data.

“I am very worried. This is the worst news on emissions,” Birol told the Guardian. “It is becoming extremely challenging to remain below 2 degrees. The prospect is getting bleaker. That is what the numbers say.”

Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire. “These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a ‘business as usual’ path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path … would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100,” he said.

“Such warming would disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict. That is a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce.”

Birol said disaster could yet be averted, if governments heed the warning. “If we have bold, decisive and urgent action, very soon, we still have a chance of succeeding,” he said.

The IEA has calculated that if the world is to escape the most damaging effects of global warming, annual energy-related emissions should be no more than 32Gt by 2020. If this year’s emissions rise by as much as they did in 2010, that limit will be exceeded nine years ahead of schedule, making it all but impossible to hold warming to a manageable degree.

Emissions from energy fell slightly between 2008 and 2009, from 29.3Gt to 29Gt, due to the financial crisis. A small rise was predicted for 2010 as economies recovered, but the scale of the increase has shocked the IEA. “I was expecting a rebound, but not such a strong one,” said Birol, who is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on energy.

John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace UK, said time was running out. “This news should shock the world. Yet even now politicians in each of the great powers are eyeing up extraordinary and risky ways to extract the world’s last remaining reserves of fossil fuels – even from under the melting ice of the Arctic. You don’t put out a fire with gasoline. It will now be up to us to stop them.”

Most of the rise – about three-quarters – has come from developing countries, as rapidly emerging economies have weathered the financial crisis and the recession that has gripped most of the developed world.

But he added that, while the emissions data was bad enough news, there were other factors that made it even less likely that the world would meet its greenhouse gas targets.

• About 80% of the power stations likely to be in use in 2020 are either already built or under construction, the IEA found. Most of these are fossil fuel power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early, so they will continue to pour out carbon – possibly into the mid-century. The emissions from these stations amount to about 11.2Gt, out of a total of 13.7Gt from the electricity sector. These “locked-in” emissions mean savings must be found elsewhere.

“It means the room for manoeuvre is shrinking,” warned Birol.

• Another factor that suggests emissions will continue their climb is the crisis in the nuclear power industry. Following the tsunami damage at Fukushima, Japan and Germany have called a halt to their reactor programmes, and other countries are reconsidering nuclear power.

“People may not like nuclear, but it is one of the major technologies for generating electricity without carbon dioxide,” said Birol. The gap left by scaling back the world’s nuclear ambitions is unlikely to be filled entirely by renewable energy, meaning an increased reliance on fossil fuels.

• Added to that, the United Nations-led negotiations on a new global treaty on climate change have stalled. “The significance of climate change in international policy debates is much less pronounced than it was a few years ago,” said Birol.

He urged governments to take action urgently. “This should be a wake-up call. A chance [of staying below 2 degrees] would be if we had a legally binding international agreement or major moves on clean energy technologies, energy efficiency and other technologies.”

Governments are to meet next week in Bonn for the next round of the UN talks, but little progress is expected.

Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, said the global emissions figures showed that the link between rising GDP and rising emissions had not been broken. “The only people who will be surprised by this are people who have not been reading the situation properly,” he said.

Forthcoming research led by Sir David will show the west has only managed to reduce emissions by relying on imports from countries such as China.

Another telling message from the IEA’s estimates is the relatively small effect that the recession – the worst since the 1930s – had on emissions. Initially, the agency had hoped the resulting reduction in emissions could be maintained, helping to give the world a “breathing space” and set countries on a low-carbon path. The new estimates suggest that opportunity may have been missed.

Source Guardian

Nikola Tesla – The Forgotten Wizard (Father Of Scalar Energy!) may have had many of those answers had he not been silenced by JP Morgan who saw no value (money to be made) in free energy for all.

Sometimes the most important news is what is not happening.

This summer has given us one such example: the climate change bill, for which the US President Barack Obama had pushed so hard, will not even be presented to the US Senate because it stands no chance of passage.

This means the US is about to repeat its “Kyoto experience”. Twenty years ago, the US participated (at least initially) in the first talks aimed at achieving a global accord to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

At the time, the EU and the US were by far the greatest emitters so it seemed appropriate to exempt the world’s emerging economies from any commitment.

Over time, it became apparent that the US would not live up to its commitment owing, as now, to opposition in the Senate. The EU then went ahead on its own, introducing its path-breaking EU Emission Trading System in the hope that Europe could lead by example.

Without the American climate change package, the promises made by the US administration only seven months ago at the Copenhagen summit have become worthless. The European strategy is in tatters – and not only on the transatlantic front.

China’s commitment to increase the carbon dioxide efficiency of its economy by about 3 per cent a year is of no help because annual GDP growth rates of close to 10 per cent mean the country’s emissions will soar this decade.

By 2020, Chinese emissions could be more than triple those of Europe and even surpass those of the US and Europe combined. Exempting emerging markets from any commitments, as the Kyoto Protocol sought to do, no longer makes sense.

Why has every attempt to set prices for global carbon emissions failed? The answer is cheap and abundant coal.

Burning hydrocarbons (natural gas and petrol) yields water and carbon dioxide. By contrast, burning coal yields only carbon dioxide. Moreover, compared with natural gas and crude oil, coal is much cheaper for each tonne of carbon dioxide released.

This implies that any tax on carbon has a much higher impact on coal than on crude oil (or gas). Owners of coal mines and their clients are thus strongly opposed to any tax on carbon.

They constitute a small but well organised group that wields immense lobbying power to block efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions by putting a price on them, as the planned US cap-and-trade system would have done.

In Europe, indigenous coal production no longer plays an important economic role. Therefore, it is not surprising that Europe could enact a cap-and-trade system that imposes a carbon price on a large part of its industry.

The tax seems to fall mostly on foreign suppliers of coal and to a lesser extend on foreign suppliers of hydrocarbons in the Middle East and Russia.

By contrast, opposition by US states with economies that rely significantly on coal production proved decisive for the fate of Mr Obama’s climate change bill.

The US experience has wider implications. If it proved impossible to introduce a moderate carbon tax in a rich economy, it is certain no commitment will be coming for the next generation from China, which remains much poorer and depends even more on indigenous coal than the US. And, after China, India looms as the next emerging coal-based industrial superpower.

Without any significant commitment from the US, the Copenhagen Accord, so laboriously achieved last year, has become meaningless.

Business will now continue as usual in terms of climate change diplomacy, with its wandering circus of big international meetings, and of rapidly increasing emissions.

The meetings are aimed at creating the impression that the world’s leaders are still working on a solution to the problem. But rising carbon dioxide emissions constitute what is really happening on the ground: a rapidly growing industrial base in emerging markets is being hard-wired to intensive use of coal. This will make it exceedingly difficult to reverse the trend in the future.

A planet composed of nation-states that in turn are dominated by special interest groups does not seem capable of solving this problem.

Unfortunately, there is enough cheap coal around to power ever-higher emissions for at least another century. So the world will become warmer. The only uncertainty is how much warmer.

Determined action at the global level will become possible only when climate change is no longer some scientific prediction but a reality that people feel.

But at that point, it will be too late to reverse the impact of decades of excessive emissions. A world incapable of preventing climate change will have to live with it.

* Project Syndicate

Daniel Gros is the director of the Centre for European Policy Studies.

Photo courtesy dirtybusinessthefilm.com

The following presentation may make you think twice about how you use or limit the use of electricity. For Jeff Goodall, author of Big Coal, the Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future, he says: Clean coal is sort of like healthy cigarettes or limited nuclear war or fat free donuts. It’s one of the great oxymoron’s of our time.

“Assuming no new climate policies,” the EIA says, “worldwide increases in output per capita and relatively moderate population growth overwhelm projected improvements in energy intensity and carbon intensity.”

EIA’s predictions may not come true for two reasons. First, China, the country that emits the most greenhouse gases (GHG), pledged to reduce emissions by 40 to 45 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels. Second, last week, companies from China and Finland signed 12 clean technology deals with a value of about $250 million. 

Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang said of the deals, “As China is experiencing rapid industrialization and urbanization, we have to build a resource-saving and environmentally friendly society as soon as possible.” He added, “Finland has advanced capability in clean tech innovation and application, so there’s great potential for cooperation between the two countries in this regard. I hope our companies will grasp the opportunity, strengthen development and application of clean tech and carry out more reciprocal cooperation.”

What about America?

What about the U.S., the second largest emitter of GHGs? Unfortunately, the outlook for climate change legislation to pass in Congress this year is not sunny with November elections coming up for Congress followed by the December break for Congress.

“There is little chance anything will happen this year,” said Tom Lewis, chief executive. “Healthcare legislation was passed because the president made a major push but no one is willing to take a major step prior to the mid-term elections,” Lewis said. “The Democrats are in line to lose a number of seats and I don’t see a passionate push between now and November 2 to get this over the finishing line,” he added.

President Obama said he hopes bill will pass this year because the oil spill highlights the need for energy reform, but he may have used up his political influence to pass healthcare reform legislation in March.

“Obama may have used all his political capital to get healthcare over the finishing line,” said Chelsea Maxwell, managing partner of the Clark Group and former senior climate advisor to Senator John Warner.

A recent article in the Guardian, a British newspaper, hit the proverbial nail on the head when it comes to the U.S. government and the oil industry. The article says that politicians have “allowed themselves to be seduced by the cheap petrol and tax provided by BP.” The article added that in the U.S. “big oil firms, like big banks are too big to bury.” There is one factor the article overlooks: the American people, who are disgusted by the disaster in the Gulf, and BP’s bungling of it.

Source Care2

The greatest coal rush the world has seen is being conducted as if climate change is not happening, and coal is king.

It wasn’t always this way. Coalmining has a long history in Australia, but coal wasn’t an important export until the last few decades. Before 1960, Queensland had no coal-export industry. Most of the coal mined was used to fuel state-owned power stations, or BHP’s Newcastle and Illawarra steel mills. As recently as 1981, Australia was but a minor medallist in the global coal trade – exporting less than half as much coal as the US. But just as climate change inconveniently peeked over the horizon, Australia started to bet big on coal. As recently released cabinet documents reinforce, the Fraser government, with strong support from the eastern states, decided to use cheap coal to attract energy intensive investment. State governments provided export infrastructure, low royalties and long-term sweetheart deals between state-owned power generators and industries such as aluminium smelting. The demise of BHP’s steel production in Newcastle, the rise of Asian demand and a UN climate convention that let fossil-fuel exporters off the hook by counting emissions where fuels are burned were just some of the many green lights given to coal exporters.

The coal push became a rush, and Australia quickly became headquarters for a global trade that bakes as it booms: our thermal coal pushes cheap and dirty electricity on many countries, and our coking coal and iron ore underpin an Asian boom in the use of blast furnaces, the most emission-intensive steel-making option. (In developed countries, most steel is produced in electric arc furnaces fed with either scrap metal or direct reduced iron, which can be made without coal.)

Yet, the coal industry remains a benign abstraction for most, not much more than a hum of economic and political waffle on the periphery of everyday life: “biggest export, thousands of jobs, economic backbone”, “‘clean coal’ on the way”. Many link coal to global warming, but conclude that coal exports are a necessary evil. Few appreciate the incomprehensible magnitude and pace of the current rush, or ponder its climate-changing consequences. Right now, around 120 mines across New South Wales and Queensland export more than 280 million tonnes of black coal annually (Victoria’s vast brown coal reserves have not been economically viable as an export proposition).

Coal used to be labour intensive: in 1908 it employed more than three-and-a-half times as many people (as a share of Australia’s population) as it does today. The process is now largely automated. Coal is extracted with the help of gargantuan dragline excavators, hauled by three-storey-high trucks to piles from which conveyor belts tip it into freight trains, which can be 100 carriages long and take three locomotives to shift. It then clatters and grinds its way to one of nine coal terminals dotted along the east coast of Australia, where ships queue to ferry loads of up to 200,000 tonnes to ports around the world. Along with all the diesel and electricity used to extract and transport coal, mines release large quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more potent than CO2. But these emissions pale in comparison with those released when the coal is burned offshore. A single train might carry a load that will generate the annual emissions equivalent of 6000 cars, a ship the equivalent of more than 90,000 cars. With every tonne of coal generating 2.7 tonnes of CO2, our exports generate more than 750 million tonnes of CO2 annually – much more than the emissions occuring in Australia. The plan to double exports before 2020 puts us on track to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest carbon exporter in the next 15 years.

There’s really no physical limit on the rush. Australia’s recoverable coal reserves are estimated at 40 billion tonnes; there’s enough to increase exports for the rest of this century. Around 40 new export mines or expansions of existing ones are under way, thousands of kilometres of new railway track are being laid, and new coal terminals are being built (and existing ones expanded) to handle a doubling of exports. The scale of the expansion makes it easy to forget that the industry is the result of more than a century of deliberate and generous government subsidy. Most coalmines built in the first half of the twentieth century were government-owned. When coalmining, power generation and railways were virtual state-run monopolies, it made sense to co-locate rail and power infrastructure close to the mines. As coal has become an export commodity and domestic power has been opened up to competition, the coal industry was gifted an unassailable competitive advantage courtesy of the taxpayer.

Nothing captures the government’s role in developing Australia’s coal industry quite like the eulogies to Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. As Bob Katter Jr put it, were you to remove the close relationship between Sir Joh and Sir Leslie Thiess from history, you would “erase the coal industry from the face of Queensland”. Having paved the way for Thiess (along with Mitsui and Peabody) to establish Queensland’s first big export mines, Bjelke-Petersen championed the expansion of the coal industry, assisting with substantial infrastructure and a five-cents-a-ton royalty rate that companies such as Utah and Mitsubishi found impossible to refuse. As a young MP, Katter had serious doubts about public investments that he saw as “irresponsible risk-taking”; now he says Joh was nation-building. However, there’s no mention of the jury finding that Sir Les bribed Sir Joh so he would win coal projects, and no mention of the 453 million tonnes of CO2 that Queensland’s coal exports now add to the atmosphere annually. Taking all this into consideration, Katter’s youthful caution looks inadvertently prescient: it was irresponsible risk-taking, and it will come back to bite us.

Only not just yet, as successive generations of politicians and bureaucrats have decided that doubling the stakes to stay at the table is the way to avoid paying coal liabilities. Just keep playing, and let the next generation cash in what’s left of the chips. Having spent billions subsidising coal exports into existence, governments won’t walk away. That would mean having to say “no” to friends and ex-colleagues: to Australia’s largest coal union (the CFMEU), which has regularly been federal Labor’s biggest external donor; to coal baron Clive Palmer whose Mineralogy Pty Ltd is the biggest external donor to Queensland’s Liberal National Party; and to former premiers, treasurers and ministers now paid by the coal industry. It would also mean saying “no” to senior politicians on both sides of politics who have recently made what locals call “fortunate purchases” of rural properties on which coalmining is anticipated. The media tips a 200% to 500% return on these properties, but only if the coal rush rolls on.

Governments are behaving as if the more hopeless their coal addiction, the less likely it is they will be asked to quit. Not a single Australian coal-fired power station has been closed to reduce emissions. Antique 1960s power stations are being dusted off, and a dozen new ones are in the planning stage. Much of the coal rush is only viable thanks to government subsidies to build, for example, ‘missing link’ railways. Queensland is currently spending more on coal-related infrastructure ($15.6 billion) than it has made from coal royalties over the past decade ($11.4 billion). For that $15.6 billion, the government, in partnership with the private sector, could replace more than one-third of Queensland’s existing coal-fired power stations with renewable energy generators. Instead, the “smart state” wants to spend it on doubling the amount of ‘world-class’ coal it exports. It also wants to salve Queensland’s budget by privatising coal-related port and rail assets, thereby hooking more private investors to the coal addiction.

In NSW the planning laws have been rewritten so that protections that would normally apply can be swept aside by ministerial fiat once a project is declared to be of state significance – which most coalmines are. Although 16 NSW rivers have been permanently damaged by careless mining – mainly as a result of subsidence caused by long-wall coalmines – the government is happy to consider coalmines underneath the water catchments of Sydney and the central coast. Calls for a kilometre-wide buffer around rivers and aquifers have been dismissed. Meanwhile, the Keneally government is getting back to the business of buying its own coalmines – even though the estimated value of the coal-fired power assets it is looking to privatise has reportedly fallen from $35 billion to $6 billion in just over a decade.

In Canberra, Kevin Rudd calls the coal industry “the backbone of regional Australia”. His resources minister, Martin Ferguson, regards new coal-fired power stations as inevitable and warns against holding back coal export growth. With the explicit aim of doubling exports, federal environmental approval and billions of dollars in subsidies are being given to expand port, rail and road infrastructure. And billions more are propping up pilot projects to help maintain the illusion that ‘carbon capture and storage’ might clean up Australia’s coal industry. On the other side of politics, where climate-change sceptics choose the leader, one of Tony Abbott’s first items of business was visiting a Hunter Valley coalmine to declare that this “great industry” should flourish – not merely survive.

When Shenhua funds a new rural health clinic in Gunnedah, when Rio Tinto’s Coal & Allied sponsors Newcastle’s NRL team, when BHP Billiton and Xstrata fund drought-relief concerts by the Sydney Symphony, coal stealthily locks in permanency. With each state-owned coal asset that is privatised, an implicit guarantee is given that the coal industry’s expansion will be unfettered. But it is not the governments addicted to coal that are the victims; most victims of the climate chaos being fuelled by Australian coal are yet to be born in places like Bangladesh and sub-Saharan Africa. The ordeal of the more immediate victims of the rush – Glenn Beutel and the thousands like him – is unknown to most Australians.

S. Tompkins from Charlotte, NC, asks “How does the global warming pollution from cars compare to other major sources such as a coal power plant?” and is answered by Clean Vehicles Senior Engineer Jim Kliesch.

Looking at the big picture, about a third of U.S. global warming pollution comes from moving vehicles: passenger cars and trucks, big rigs, airplanes, trains, waterborne shipping, etc. Passenger cars and trucks are the biggest slice of that pie just because of the sheer number of them we have on the road.

In broad terms, the environmental impact of a vehicle is affected by three things:

* the emissions from producing the vehicle

* the emissions from operating the vehicle

* the emissions associated with the vehicle’s fuel (see below)

Typically, the production of a vehicle accounts for only about 20 percent of its overall environmental impact, so for our purposes, I’m going to focus on emissions from the vehicle and fuel.

While your question is focused on global warming pollution, it’s important to note that there are key differences between smog-forming pollutants and global warming pollutants when it comes to cars. The amount of smog forming pollution your car produces depends on a device called a catalytic converter, which is essentially a washing machine that cleans your exhaust before it exits the tailpipe. There’s no corresponding device to clean global warming emissions, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), from your car.

So the global warming pollution from passenger cars and trucks is therefore largely related to how much fuel they burn. There are direct emissions, which come from combusting fuel in the engine, that create about 19 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gasoline burned. And there are “upstream” emissions, which come from the extraction, refining, and transport of the fuel from the well head to the gas station pump, that create another 5-6 pounds of CO2 per gallon. Before you even start your car, you’re already responsible for the emissions produced by transforming that fuel from crude oil to the gas in your tank.  So, when you add up the direct emissions with the upstream emissions, a gallon of gasoline is responsible for close to 25 pounds of CO2.

With this in mind, a passenger car or truck today is typically responsible for around 7.4 tons of CO2 a year. If you compare that to a typical, existing 600 megawatt coal plant, producing 5.2 million tons of CO2 pollution a year, then, in one year, that plant is producing as much global warming pollution as around 700,000 cars. (This assumes the plant does not use carbon capture and storage technology, which has yet to be demonstrated in the form of commercial-scale, fully integrated projects at coal-fired power plants.)

But be sure to note the reference to “in one year.” Often, when people talk about something that emits a lot of pollution, they’ll say “if we manage to stop it, it would be like taking X cars off the road,” and that’s all it says. There’s a big difference between taking those cars off the road completely and taking them off the road for one year. A new vehicle is driven about 15,000 miles per year and burns the corresponding amount of fuel. On the other hand, if you take a vehicle off the road entirely, 150,000 miles of travel – or more – would be avoided.

But what’s clear from all of this is that we are producing way too much global warming pollution in both the transportation and the energy sectors. At the end of the day, it’s going to take a diversified effort—including efficiency improvements, a shift to clean energy, and development of clean fuels and advanced vehicle technologies, among others—if we are to reach the kind of global warming emissions reductions that scientists say are needed to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Jim Kliesch is an engineer with expertise in clean and efficient vehicle technologies. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Ohio University, and a master’s degree in environmental and energy policy from the University of Delaware.

Source Union of Concerned Scientists

China’s leaders are so concerned about rising energy use and declining energy efficiency that the cabinet held a special meeting this week to discuss the problem, according to a statement Thursday from the ministry of industry and information technology. Coal-fired electricity and oil sales each climbed 24 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, on the heels of similar increases in the fourth quarter

Premier Wen Jiabao promised tougher policies to enforce energy conservation, including a ban on government approval of any new projects by companies that failed to eliminate inefficient capacity, the ministry said. Mr. Wen also said that China had to find a way to meet the target in its current five-year plan of a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency.

“We can never break our pledge, stagger our resolution or weaken our efforts, no matter how difficult it is,” Mr. Wen said. Western experts say it will be hard to meet the target, but that China’s leaders seem determined.

“No country of this size has seen energy demand grow this fast before in absolute terms, and those who are most concerned about this are the Chinese themselves,” said Jonathan Sinton, the China program manager at the International Energy Agency in Paris.

China has been the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases each year since 2006, leading the United States by an ever-widening margin. A failure by China to meet its own energy efficiency targets would be a big setback for international efforts to limit such emissions.

Such a failure would also be a potential diplomatic embarrassment for the Chinese government, which promised the world just before the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December that it would improve energy efficiency.

The issue has major economic implications for China and for global energy markets. The nation’s ravenous appetite for fossil fuels is driven by China’s shifting economic base — away from light export industries like garment and shoe production and toward energy-intensive heavy industries like steel and cement manufacturing for cars and construction for the domestic market.

Almost all urban households in China now have a washing machine, a refrigerator and an air-conditioner, according to government statistics. Rural ownership of appliances is now soaring as well because of new government subsidies for their purchase since late 2008.

Car ownership is rising rapidly in the cities, while bicycle ownership is actually falling in rural areas as more families buy motorcycles and light trucks.

General Motors announced on Thursday that its sales in China rose 41 percent in April from a year earlier, virtually all of the vehicles made in China because of high import taxes.

Zhou Xi’an, a National Energy Administration official, said in a statement last month that fossil fuel consumption was likely to increase further in the second quarter of this year because of rising car ownership, diesel use in the increasingly mechanized agricultural sector and extra jet fuel consumption for travelers to the Shanghai Expo.

The shift in the composition of China’s economic output is overwhelming the effects of China’s rapid expansion of renewable energy and its existing energy conservation program, energy experts said.

The increase in oil and coal-fired electricity consumption in the first quarter was twice as fast as economic growth of about 12 percent for that period, a sign that rising energy consumption is not just the result of a rebounding economy but also of changes in the mix of industrial activity. The shift in activity is partly because of China’s economic stimulus program, which has resulted in a surge in public works construction that requires a lot of steel and cement.

Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, which many scientists describe as the biggest man-made contributor to global warming.

President Hu Jintao pledged in November that by 2020 the Chinese government would slow its growth in greenhouse gases by sharply improving energy efficiency. Mr. Wen went to the Copenhagen climate meeting three weeks later and opposed any international monitoring of China’s energy efficiency effort or binding limits on China’s overall energy consumption.

China’s current five-year plan, from 2006 to 2010, already sets an efficiency target that the country may now be less likely to meet.

The plan calls for the energy needed for each unit of economic output to decline by 20 percent in 2010 compared to 2005.

For a while, China seemed to be on track toward that goal. According to the ministry of industry and information technology, energy efficiency actually improved by more than 14 percent from 2005 to 2009.

But it deteriorated by 3.2 percent in the first quarter, the ministry said on Thursday.

Mr. Wen said that this deterioration would make it “particularly difficult” for China to meet the 20 percent target.

Without big policy changes, like raising fuel taxes, “they can’t possibly make it,” said Julie Beatty, principal energy economist at Wood Mackenzie, a big energy consulting firm based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Mr. Hu promised last November that China would improve the energy efficiency of its economy by 40 to 45 percent by 2020. The ministry statement on Thursday did not mention whether Mr. Hu’s promise might still be achievable.

Complicating energy efficiency calculations is the fact that China’s National Bureau of Statistics has begun a comprehensive revision of all of the country’s energy statistics for the last 10 years, restating them with more of the details commonly available in other countries’ data. Western experts also expect the revision to show that China has been using even more energy and releasing even more greenhouse gases than previously thought.

Revising the data now runs the risk that other countries will distrust the results and demand greater international monitoring of any future pledges by China. If the National Bureau of Statistics revises up the 2005 data more than recent data, for example, then China might appear to have met its target at the end of this year for a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency.

China’s recent embrace of renewable energy has done little so far to slow the rise in emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

Wind energy effectively doubled in this year’s first quarter compared with a year earlier, as China has emerged as the world’s largest manufacturer and installer of wind turbines. But wind still accounts for just 2 percent of China’s electricity capacity — and only 1 percent of actual output, because the wind does not blow all the time.

Meanwhile, fuel-intensive heavy industry output rose 22 percent in the first quarter in China from a year earlier, while light industry increased 14 percent.

Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations research unit, said in an e-mail message that he believed China was serious about addressing its emissions.

“There is a growing realization within Chinese society that major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would be of overall benefit to China,” he wrote after learning of the latest Chinese energy statistics. “This is important not only for global reasons, because China is now responsible for the highest emissions of greenhouse gases, but also because its per capita emissions are increasing at a rapid rate.”

To some extent, China’s energy consumption now might actually help limit its global warming emissions in the future.

China, for example, used 200 million tons of cement in building rail lines last year, while the entire American economy only used 93 million tons, said David Fridley, a China energy specialist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Although production of that cement raised energy use and emissions of global warming gases, it also expanded a rail system that is among the most energy-efficient in the world.

China currently moves only 55 percent of its coal by rail, for example, which is down from 80 percent a decade ago, as many coal users have been forced by inadequate rail capacity to haul coal in trucks instead. The trucks burn 10 or more times as much fuel per mile to haul a ton of coal, Mr. Fridley said.

But now, with new high-speed passenger lines leaving more room on older lines to haul coal and other freight, the percentages could begin shifting away from energy-inefficient trucking, he said.

Source New York Times

A new research paper from American academics is threatening to blow a hole in growing political support for carbon capture and storage as a weapon in the fight against global warming.

The document from Houston University claims that governments wanting to use CCS have overestimated its value and says it would take a reservoir the size of a small US state to hold the CO2 produced by one power station.

Previous modelling has hugely underestimated the space needed to store CO2 because it was based on the “totally erroneous” premise that the pressure feeding the carbon into the rock structures would be constant, argues Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at Houston, and his co-author Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M University

“It is like putting a bicycle pump up against a wall. It would be hard to inject CO2 into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones and possibly escape to the surface,” Economides said.

The paper concludes that CCS “is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions, although it has been repeatedly presented as such by others.”

The report has come at a critical time when British and other governments worldwide have started to fast-track a series of CCS prototype schemes as a way of removing carbon from the atmosphere and helping with climate change.

On 8 April, Royal assent was given on to what is now the Energy Act 2010, which made law plans to raise a levy on power users to establish four CCS projects in Britain. Ministers see this as a potentially planet-friendly way of building new coal fired power stations, such as the one E.ON wants to construct at Kingsnorth, in Kent.

The Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA), which lobbies on behalf of the sector, says Britain is now at the forefront of new technology with a legislative framework in place that offers the opportunity for long-term investment.

Projects are proceeding in the US, such as the experimental coal-fired Mountaineer plant in New Haven, West Virginia, which began small-scale carbon capture last year, as well as in Canada, China and other countries.

Jeff Chapman, chief executive of the CCSA, believes Economides has made inappropriate assumptions about the science and geology. He believes the conclusions in the paper are wrong and says his views are backed up by rebuttals from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Pacific Northwest National laboratory and the American Petroleum Institute.

The British Geological Survey confirmed it was looking at the Economides findings and was hoping to shortly produce a peer-reviewed analysis.

Economides, who has a PHD from Stanford University, said he had seen the arguments against his paper from the API and dismissed them as “nonsense” saying vested interests are protecting a new concept foisted on the world by geologists without proper thought.

“I was a [practising] petroleum engineer for many years and soon realised that geologists did not understand flow and the laws of physics, against which you can’t argue.”

Chapman pointed out that Statoil, a Norwegian oil company, had been injecting CO2 into an old reservoir on the North Sea Sleipner field for some time as a successful experiment in carbon storage. But Economides says the Sleipner scheme involved a million tonnes over three years, while one 500mW commercial station would need to absorb and store 3m tonnes annually for 25 years.Economides, who admits he veers towards being something of a climate change sceptic, says the oil and coal industries see these schemes as potential solutions so they can keep on doing what they have been doing in the past, but “CCS is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” he said.

Source Guardian UK

Total World Coal Consumption in 2008: 7,238,207,000 Short Tons!
When it comes to global warming and air pollution, coal is the number one enemy. We were curious to know which countries burned the most, so we compiled a list of the top 10 coal-burning countries in the world based on the latest statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). We chose not to use per capita numbers because the atmosphere doesn’t care about that; in the end, all that matters is absolute numbers. Do you know which country’s number one? Could you guess most of the list?

#10 South-Korea 112,843 thousand short tons

#9 Poland 149,333 thousand short tons

#8 Australia 160,515 thousand short tons

#7 South Africa: 193,654 thousand short tons

#6 Japan: 203,979 thousand short tons

#5 Russia: 269,684 thousand short tons

#4 Germany: 269,892 thousand short tons

#3 India: 637,522 thousand short tons

#2 USA: 1,121,714 thousand short tons

#1 China: 2,829,515 thousand short tons

Danger! World Coal Consumption is Going Up Rapidly
According to the EIA numbers, between 2004 and 2008, total world consumption of coal went from 6,259,645,000 to 7,238,208,000 short tons. That’s a 15.6 percent increase of the most carbon-intensive kind of fuel in just four years. Ouch.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy:

Carbon dioxide (CO2) forms during coal combustion when one atom of carbon (C) unites with two atoms of oxygen (O) from the air. Because the atomic weight of carbon is 12 and that of oxygen is 16, the atomic weight of carbon dioxide is 44. Based on that ratio, and assuming complete combustion, 1 pound of carbon combines with 2.667 pounds of oxygen to produce 3.667 pounds of carbon dioxide. For example, coal with a carbon content of 78 percent and a heating value of 14,000 Btu per pound emits about 204.3 pounds of carbon dioxide per million Btu when completely burned. Complete combustion of 1 short ton (2,000 pounds) of this coal will generate about 5,720 pounds (2.86 short tons) of carbon dioxide.

Via: EIA