We may need the good news in Clean Energy more urgently than we thought....

Today's post: Wednesday, 11-24-2010

We need an 80% reduction in fossil fuel use by 2050 to avoid the worst global warming effects. And, practically speaking, we need to also double our electricity generation and double the useful work done per unit of electricity & other energy sources as well during that same time to have a decent economy.

At some point, the oil that we’ve been using to power much of our economy will begin to run low enough that our world economy will shrink due to lack of supply or excessive costs or both. Kuwaiti scientists recently predicted peak oil in 2014 – just 4 years from now.

And, once the demand for oil picks up again with the apparent economic recovery or supply begins to plateau or drop, the prices will again go back up. That will cause more hard times economically unless we have enough alternative sources of energy to turn to.

Today’s post: We may need the good news in Clean Energy more urgently than we thought

1. Progress is happening in almost every area of clean energy.

Every part of the transition to cars and other vehicles being powered mostly by electricity and less and less by oil is showing progress.

Some biofuels that do NOT need to take farmlands or cut down forests to produce are beginning to show progress.

We will have more nuclear power -- which I pray will be as safe as the nuclear power in France and Japan has been.

More wind power is coming online gradually.

Every part of solar generated electricity and hot water is making progress.

And, a start is being made on becoming a more energy efficient economy and in saving money that was being spent on energy unnecessarily.

We may even begin to see oil and coal companies have to be less polluting in use and begin to pay the true costs using their products actually incur.

So, clean energy will soon cost less than energy from fossil fuels in many parts of our economy.

2. It’s still 40 years late and going at one fifth the needed speed or less. But, finally, it IS beginning to pick up speed and momentum.

3. The scary news is that we may need this far more urgently than we thought.

Day before yesterday I saw an AP article titled :

“Leaking Siberian ice raises a tricky climate issue” By ARTHUR MAX, Associated with a dateline of: CHERSKY, Russia. I think I found it on NPR

Here are the key paragraphs:

“Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — at a perilous rate.

Some scientists believe the thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. They say 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere.

"Here, total carbon storage is like all the rain forests of our planet put together," says the scientist, Sergey Zimov — "here" being the endless sweep of snow and ice stretching toward Siberia's gray horizon, as seen from Zimov's research facility nearly 350 kilometers (220 miles) above the Arctic Circle.”

And:

“….global warming is amplified in the polar regions. What feels like a modest temperature rise is enough to induce Greenland glaciers to retreat, Arctic sea ice to thin and contract in summer, and permafrost to thaw faster, both on land and under the seabed.

Yet awareness of methane leaks from permafrost is so new that it was not even mentioned in the seminal 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned of rising sea levels inundating coastal cities, dramatic shifts in rainfall disrupting agriculture and drinking water, the spread of diseases and the extinction of species.

"In my view, methane is a serious sleeper out there that can pull us over the hump," said Robert Corell, an eminent U.S. climate change researcher and Arctic specialist. Corell, speaking by telephone from a conference in Miami, said he and other U.S. scientists are pushing Washington to deploy satellites to gather more information on methane leaks.”

And:
“Katey Walter Anthony, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has been measuring methane seeps in Arctic lakes in Alaska, Canada and Russia, starting here around Chersky 10 years ago.

She was stunned to see how much methane was leaking from holes in the sediment at the bottom of one of the first lakes she visited. "On some days it looked like the lake was boiling," she said. Returning each year, she noticed this and other lakes doubling in size as warm water ate into the frozen banks.”

“More than 50 billion tons could be unleashed from Siberian lakes alone, more than 10 times the amount now in the atmosphere, she said.”

“The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in its 2010 Arctic Report Card issued last month, said the average temperature of the permafrost has been rising for decades, but noted "a significant acceleration" in the last five years at many spots on the Arctic coast. “

4. If the rest of the arctic also emits methane as the permafrost is melted, the total could be 20 to 35 times the amount now in the atmosphere.

This could have rather severe repercussions.

In most places, the 2 inch to 16 inch increase in sea level many people now forecast by 2050 could wind up being five to eight times that. Since many of the most populated and the most economically productive cities are coastal, the several feet higher sea level this makes look possible, could be a rather severe problem.

The added warming it also may cause could increase disastrous weather events, cut the amount of food grown world-wide, and cause more tropical diseases in place that have not had them.

The article makes clear that despite the scary trends, it’s too early to tell for sure how bad this will actually get as we go forward.

a) If we do manage to stop putting out more CO2 or even cut back some on producing it and forces we do not yet completely understand slow this methane release, this may make things worse but not by that much.

b) If the economy improves and we fail to switch to clean energy fast enough and keep up some increase in CO2 release and this methane release is a bit less than it looks like now it will be, there might be a way to make this better. But the increased warming will cause problems.

By direct use or better by using it to generate electricity, if we capture this methane and replace using oil for transport, this might be economically helpful. If we also generate the electricity with Bloom Energy fuel cells instead of burning it and feed the CO2 release initially to algae to make biofuels, there might be a way to benefit the economy and make profits for energy companies in this methane release.

c) If this methane release begins to speed up as much as these report suggest it will, no one will disbelieve in global warming again! And, we will be in quite serious trouble.

So, the race is on!

Can we speed up clean energy and energy efficiency fast enough to improve our economy AND slow CO2 release soon enough to compensate for this effect?

We will see how it turns out.