Read the following carefully before you make up your mind about the program that The Economist seems to look upon favourably. It is true that efficient micro cars use less fuel but is that advantage overshadowed by the larger number of cars sold and the longer distances driven?

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Indonesia: Green growth

Economist Intelligence Unit

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Indonesia’s low-cost green car programme opens new opportunities for auto-makers, and may avoid the need to limit car ownership.

Indonesia's new tax breaks for eco-friendly cars are intended to make green automobiles more affordable to Indonesian consumers. They should also open up new opportunities for auto-makers in a country that is expected to overtake Thailand as Southeast Asia’s biggest car market by 2019. So it is not surprising that many carmakers took the opportunity to show off their greenest models at the 21st Indonesia International Motor Show 2013 in Jakarta last month.

The tax side of the low-cost green car programme (also known as Pengembangan Produksi Kendaraan Bermotor Roda Empat yang Hemat Energi dan Harga Terjangkau, or PPKB) was spelt out in two regulations issued in May and July (see box). The tax break cuts between 25% and 100% of the luxury goods tax on locally made cars, as long as they meet fuel efficiency targets. Cars with an engine capacity of up to 1200cc and with minimum fuel efficiency of 20 km per litre will be completely exempt from tax.

Although full implementation will have to wait for another regulation in late 2013, this time for the Ministry of Finance, there are already signs that the subsidies are having an effect. Although overall vehicle sales have slowed in Indonesia over the past three months, sales of smaller cars with engines of below 1,500cc are still rising rapidly, according to the Association of Indonesian Automotive Manufacturers (Gaikindo). Given these already take over half the total vehicle market, the low-cost green car programme is obviously tapping into demand.

Among the carmakers rushing to take advantage of the new programme are Japan's Toyota and its subsidiary Daihatsu. At the Jakarta show in September they launched their Toyota Agya and Daihatsu Ayla models, which were both designed to qualify for the low-cost green car programme. The models come in variants with prices ranging from Rp76m to Rp120m, and are already assembled in Indonesia as part of a joint venture with PT Astra International, a local company.

Compatriot Nissan, meanwhile, unveiled its Datsun GO+ five-seat and seven-seat cars, equipped with 1.2-litre engines for a price of less than Rp100m. Nissan plans to produce the vehicles at its plant in Purwakarta, about 80 km southeast of Jakarta. And Honda took the wraps off its Honda Mobilio prototype, which it plans to produce at its new factory in Karawang, east of Jakarta. Honda said its 1.2-litre Brio Satya models, which are already produced in Indonesia, also qualify for the green car programme. Suzuki Motor introduced the Karimum Wagon R, to be assembled at a plant in Cikarang, a Jakarta suburb. Both the Mobilio and Karimum have engine capacities of 1,000 cc.

Other carmakers are newer to Indonesia. Germany's Volkswagen intends to invest US$266m to build a plant in West Java by 2017 in joint venture with Indomobil Sukses Makmur, according to news reports. General Motors is also expected to participate in the low-cost green car programme. The US automaker suspended operations in Indonesia six years ago but resumed regular production in May 2013 at its factory in Bekasi in West Java, investing US$150m in the re-opened plant. The facility makes the Chevrolet Spin multipurpose vehicle, the first car made by GM for the Indonesian domestic market since the Chevrolet Blazer ceased production in 2006.

Jams tomorrow?

For the government, this investor interest is an affirmation of its policies. Although one spur for its policies was environmental, another was to encourage investment in local production. While consumers benefit from tax breaks, therefore, the producers of low-cost cars benefit from lower import duties on the necessary components. As a result, Indonesia is building up quite a sizeable car industry even as the ASEAN market opens up to free trade in vehicles. Output rose 12% in the first half of 2013 to nearly 587,000 vehicles, according to OICA, making Indonesia the 15th largest producer in the world.

The reason for this hike in production is not hard to fathom, and is based more on the domestic market potential rather than any export ambitions within ASEAN. Indonesia's car market has been growing rapidly since 2009, and with a population of 250m and only 34 cars per 1,000 of them, there is clearly room for more. In 2012, total vehicle sales (including commercial vehicles) reached an all-time high of 1.12m units, according to Gaikindo, up 28% on the previous year.

Yet this is not a straightforward story of rocketing growth. Sales growth has slowed markedly in the past three months, and is expected to be modest for the remainder of the year. One reason is higher interest rates, affecting the 70% of cars that are bought on credit. Between June and August 2013, the Indonesian central bank raised its benchmark interest rate from a historically low 5.75% to 7.0%. It also, last year, raised the down-payment that car buyers have to make, while a depreciating rupiah also makes imported cars more expensive.

Fuel prices are also rising as the government tries to rein back its mounting bill for fuel subsidies. In 2012, the government spent Rp306trn on fuel and power subsidies, around Rp100trn more than it had budgeted. After overcoming some determined opposition, it finally managed to push diesel and petrol prices up, by 22% and 44% respectively, in June 2013. Although in the longer term, this could also encourage more people to shift to fuel-efficient green cars, in the short term it will act as a market dampener.

It is partly to avoid having to dampen the market still further that the government is pushing through with its low-cost car programme. Two years ago, there was widespread expectation that Indonesia would have to follow China in restricting car ownership in its major cities, so high had pollution levels become. If it can instead shift people towards greener cars, then that would probably be a far more popular solution with drivers and carmakers alike.

How Useful Are Models of Climate Change

This is a great read. It does combine in one rather short article a discussion of what models purport to do and it discusses specifically the shortcomings/advantages associated with climate change models. Please note the last sentence:

"it is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong—or not to make any estimate at all".

 

Oct 5th 2013 |From the print edition

MODELS simplify. They are supposed to. It is a feature, not a bug. Their formulae may be complex but models deliberately omit some things in order to focus on others. They also leave out factors that cannot be modelled satisfactorily. That is understandable, but what if the factors that cannot be modelled make a huge difference to the outcome? And what if the things that are excluded tend to produce a systematic bias in the results?

That is precisely the situation facing those who model the economic impact of climate change, argue two new studies (see sources below). Nicholas Stern, the author of an influential 2007 review of the economics of climate change, says the models minimise environmental damage. Robert Pindyck of the MIT Sloan School of Management goes further, saying the inputs economists use are so arbitrary that their models say almost nothing useful.

Both think climate models play down or leave out “tipping-point” risks that may not affect the climate yet but could do one day. Examples of such risks include crop yields—which could decline gradually in response to global warming, and then lurch over a cliff—and the possibility that swathes of Siberia might warm, releasing huge stocks of methane that lie locked up in the permafrost. Since methane is a greenhouse gas, that could produce a vicious cycle of more warming and more gas emissions. A recent study in Nature reckoned that if the methane in the Arctic were ever to escape, it could (the authors guessed) do $60 trillion of damage—although there is no sign that this is happening.

Economic models—known as Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs)—borrow the limitations of climate models and add problems of their own. Lord Stern argues that they tend to underestimate environmental damage, and wrongly assume that long-term economic-growth rates will continue unaffected even if the climate changes profoundly (see article). Mr Pindyck objects that the basic assumptions economists make about things such as discount rates and the response of temperatures to rising carbon concentrations are so arbitrary that, as he puts it, “these models can be used to obtain almost any result.”

Economic models typically incorporate losses or damage (from recessions as well as from climate change) by lowering the value of a flow of output rather than reducing the value of the stock of capital, land or labour. Usually, this makes sense. But climate damage may be different. If, say, sea levels were to rise, which they did by almost 20cm in the last century, they could inundate coastal cities and destroy large amounts of productive capital and land (to say nothing of damage to life and limb). That would affect not only current but also future output.

The models also tend to underestimate damage from climate change because, as William Nordhaus of Yale University has noted, they are extraordinarily poor at extrapolating beyond a warming of more than 3°C. One of Mr Nordhaus’s own models assumes that a rise of 19°C would be associated with a loss of half of world output. Warming on that scale would more probably be associated with the extinction of human life on Earth. Many models imply the world would be better off despite higher concentrations of carbon dioxide of up to 650 parts per million (compared with 400ppm now). To most climate scientists, 650ppm looks like a Mad Max scenario. Mr Pindyck calls the models’ assumptions about climate damage “completely made up”.

Lord Stern argues that their treatment of growth is not much better. Most models assume there is an underlying “exogenous” growth rate (ie, one that keeps chugging along regardless of what else is going on in the model). Even when this rate is fairly low—growth of 1% a year, say—the magic of compounding means that after 100 years, output will have almost trebled (see chart, column 2). If the growth rate were 3%, output would rise almost 20-fold.

Now combine those results with the models’ tendency to underestimate climate damage. Even if the loss in economic output were reckoned at 50% (ie, the loss associated with a life-obliterating 19°C rise in temperatures), the models still say future generations would be better off (see chart, column 4). At a growth rate of 1% a year, for example, it would take an output loss of two-thirds to make people worse off in 2100. These results are incredible. The problem is not that climate change will certainly leave people worse off in future. Rather, it is that it could do so if things got bad enough. But the models almost rule that possibility out. As Lord Stern says, they “come close to assuming that the impacts and costs [of global warming] will be modest, and close to excluding the possibility of catastrophic outcomes.”

Not useless, just plain wrong

The question is whether it is nevertheless useful to have some guide to the future cost of climate change, however inexact. Mr Pindyck’s answer is radical: forget the models. He calls them “close to useless as tools for policy analysis…their use suggests a level of knowledge and precision that is simply illusory.”

Lord Stern is a little more hopeful. He points out that scientists are producing a new generation of climate models and urges economists to do the same. But to work, he says they require sweeping changes to incorporate the idea that global warming can damage capital stock, productivity and growth. They would also, he says, need low or even negative discount rates, to reflect the possibility that future generations will be worse off than the current one. That is controversial: the use of a low discount rate in the “Stern review”, the 2007 study that used some of the models he now complains of, was heavily criticised. But as John Maynard Keynes is supposed to have said, it is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong—or not to make any estimate at all.

S. Korea Should Decrease Reliance on Nuclear Power.

 

Sat, Oct 12 2013

By Meeyoung Cho

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea should reduce its reliance on nuclear power in view of public discontent with corruption in the industry and Japan's difficulty tackling the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, a group weighing up the problem said on Sunday.
The Energy Ministry published the findings of a study group of 60 representatives from industry, academic institutions and civic bodies that recommended reducing to between 22 percent and 29 percent the portion of electricity that can be generated by nuclear power. That compares to 41 percent proposed in a government plan for 2030.
Asia's fourth-largest economy currently generates one third of its electricity from nuclear power as part of long-term efforts to replace imported oil and gas.
Agreement on a range of 22-29 percent was reached "based upon consensus to minimize social conflict over the proportion of nuclear power generation," the study group said in a statement released by the energy ministry.
The government will hold public hearings over the report's conclusions and plans to draw up final revisions to energy policy in December, it said.
The group also recommended keeping the proportion of renewable energy at 11 percent as planned. It suggested imposing taxes on coal-fired power stations and lowering taxes on liquefied natural gas and kerosene.
Public discontent over nuclear power has been fanned by a scandal over the use of fake certificates which, since 2012, has prompted a series of reactor shutdowns in South Korea.
The nuclear industry has been criticized for breeding a culture of secrecy that led to corrupt practices among officials involved in safety certification.
Six of 23 reactors remain off line, including three halted in May to replace cables supplied using bogus certificates. Authorities on Thursday said 100 people, including a top former state utility official, had been indicted on corruption charges.
The head of the group, Kim Chang-seob, said the figures provided were intended strictly as guidelines to take account of trends and growing discontent over the nuclear sector.
"Our suggestion is to set the direction in the policy for social consent, as there are huge social conflicts," Kim said.
Anxiety has also risen over repeated setbacks by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) in its efforts to halt radiation leaks and make safe the Fukushima plant north of Tokyo, which was crippled by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011.
Tepco last Thursday said radiation levels in seawater just outside the plant had climbed to their highest level in two years.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been criticised since he declared the problems at Fukushima "under control".
Japan's Nuclear Regulation Agency earlier this month ordered Tepco to draft in additional workers and report on its measures to tackle the clean-up.
(Reporting by Meeyoung Cho; Editing by Ron Popeski and Jason Neely)

New Sustainable Deveklopment Goals

 

UN brewing up new -- and expensive – global 'sustainability development goals'

By George Russell

Published October 03, 2013

EXCLUSIVE: The United Nations is planning to create a sweeping new set of “sustainable development goals” for the planet that will likely require trillions of dollars of spending on poverty and the environment, a drastic reorganization of economic production and consumption -- especially in rich countries -- and even greater effort in the expensive war on climate change.
It’s an agenda that its prominent boosters have declared will make the next 15 years “some of the most transformative in human history,” although the exact nature of the goals themselves, and how they are to be achieved, is unclear.
In typical U.N. fashion, panels of high-profile international figures have offered up their views, task forces have been commissioned to come up with suggestions, hundreds of non-governmental organizations have been polled, and a 30-nation working group is holding sessions that will extend early into next year before offering more concrete suggestions to the U.N. General Assembly, where they will be further chewed over.
The goals themselves are slated to become a program of the U.N.  -- and all the nations that endorse them -- in 2015, as part of what U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called  “a universal sustainable development agenda” for the planet -- an equally undefined set of far-reaching aspirations for global environmental management and new and expanded roles in the future for the U.N.’s sprawling array of funds, programs and institutions.
They are supposed to be endorsed at an as-yet-unplanned global U.N. summit -- the successor to the Rio + 20 summit on sustainable development which boosted the current elaborate process -- in 2015.
According to skeptics such as William Easterly, an economics professor and co-director of New York University’s Development Research Institute, the program also has great potential to become a “huge unworkable mess.”  So far, Easterly says, what he sees is a “confused mashup of every development fad of the last 20 years” married to the aim of giving the U.N. a more central role in economic development -- “not a good thing,” in his opinion.
Other experts, such as Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, are more forgiving. The still-unformed SDGs, he says, are “a way to frame conversations about where we want to be and how much progress we can make. I think right now we're in the negotiation stage. We'll get to the campaign in 2015.”
In effect, the U.N. is hoping to double down on the mixed success of its so-called Millennium Development Goals, or MDGs, an eight-point program of mostly anti-poverty measures that was endorsed in 2000 and is slated to expire in 2015 -- when the new sustainable development goals, or SDGs, are intended to take their place.
The MDGs aimed largely at improving life for the globe’s most desperate people. They included such targets as cutting in half the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty (less than $1.25 per day); reducing child mortality rates by two-thirds; reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other killer diseases; and cut in half the number of people without access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
In a number of cases, the MDGs have already succeeded:  The number of people living on $1.25 a day, for example, was cut in half by 2010, according to the U.N. -- though most of that change was due to the massive economic transformation of China, and to a lesser extent, India.
The number of children under age 5 dying each year has also declined, from 12.4 million to 6.6 million -- less than the  Millennium Development Goal, but still substantial progress. The same applies to rates of HIV/AIDs and malaria, largely due to the efforts of the Global Fund to Combat AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, initially sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Given the diverse sources for the relative success of the MDG effort, there is no telling how much they have cost. But Ban is still exhorting everyone to ante up further. “We must do everything we can to achieve the MDGs by the end of 2015,” he told a special “high-level event” at the U.N. on September 25, while hailing some $2.5 billion in new contributions from governments, philanthropies and corporations.
The Sustainable Development Goals, however, are much more sweeping, and likely to be much harder to measure. Their overall aim -- at least so far -- is to marry the specific targeting of the most successful MDGs with the much more sweeping and imprecise language of “sustainability” -- a term that has never been very specifically defined.
Roughly speaking, “sustainability” is supposedly centered on the social, economic and environmental well-being of individuals, societies and the entire planet -- but without the precision of hard-edged economics to measure its inputs and outcomes.
Instead, the new development agenda is characterized as “one that seeks to achieve inclusive, people-centered, sustainable global development,” in the words of a U.N. task force composed of some 50 U.N. agencies and international organizations, which reported on the topic last year.  It would also include unspecified “reforms of mechanisms of global governance.”
Among other things, the task force declared,  “Immediate priorities in preserving environmental sustainability in­clude ensuring a stable climate, stopping ocean acidification, preventing land degradation and unsustainable water use, sustainably managing natural re­sources and protecting the natural resources base, including biodiversity,” -- in short, a total, and global, environmental renovation that includes the draconian limits on carbon emissions agreed to in the Kyoto Protocol, which the U.S. has not ratified.
(According to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Dean Pittman, speaking in New York last week, the U.S. is already “investing approximately $800 million per year” through President Obama’s newly announced Global Climate Change Initiative “to address the climate needs of developing countries.”)
Additional topics that the old MDGs did not address, that the task force mentioned, included “productive employ­ment, violence against women, social protection, inequalities, social exclusion,” as well as “persistent malnutrition and increase in non-communicable dis­eases, reproductive health and complexities related to demographic dynamics, peace and security, governance, the rule of law and human rights.”
Atop that, the task force said, “Sustainability also implies ensuring inter-generational justice and a fu­ture world fit for children. This entails safeguarding a sustainable future in which children will be able to grow up healthy, well-nourished, resilient, well-educated, culturally sensitive and protected from violence and neglect.”
In short, pretty much everything.

The themes of occasional highly specific potential targets coupled with sweeping objectives are deeply embedded in the report this summer of  a U.N.-sponsored, 27-member High-Level Panel  on the post-2015 Development Agenda, appointed by Ban in July 2012, which included British Prime Minister David Cameron among its top-tier members.
The report declared that the world must “finish the job that the MDGs started,” and eradicate “extreme poverty from the face of the earth by 2030” -- meaning raise the standards of the estimated 1.2 billion people still living on less than $1.25 per day.
The panel left fill-in-the-blanks percentages -- assuming much further discussion ahead -- for suggested measurable goals, such as reductions in the mortality rate for child-bearing women, or in the number of children whose growth is stunted annually by malnutrition.
But the panel also added such things as “prevent and eliminate all forms of violence against girls and women;” “adopt sustainable agricultural, ocean and freshwater fishery practices and rebuild designated fish stocks to sustainable levels;” and “safeguard ecosystems, species and genetic diversity.”
Some of these goals, the panel admitted in a discreet footnote, “require further technical work to find appropriate indicators” of success.

What all of this might cost is also largely unexamined. Instead the panelists focus on benefits, often arrived at by elaborate methods. Thus, the report states, “Every $1 spent to reduce stunting [of growth in children] can yield up to $44.50 through increased future earnings.”
(The 2012 research paper cited by the panel, and examined by Fox News, sets the overall cost of a campaign to reduce the number of underweight children by 10 million annually -- along with 210 million adults -- at about $154 billion, in current terms. It assumes an averaged 15 percent increase in individual income due to higher agricultural productivity in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kenya and India as the main source of benefits.)
Nonetheless, observers development expert Kenny, a supporter of the goals, “given progress toward wiping out $1.25 a day poverty and the global decline in malnutrition, the eventual aim of close-to abolishing hunger so-defined doesn't sound implausible to me (even if it might be implausible by 2030).”
Of the rest, he says, “think of the proposal as a long list that will be chipped away at on the grounds of political and practical plausibility both in terms of measurement and achievement.”
Skeptic Easterly sees the new goals -- not to mention the long, elaborate ramp up, the incessant consulting, and frequent consultation with experts who essentially agree on the process -- differently.
As he puts it:  “Compared to this, the Millennium Development Goals look like masterpieces of clarity. This process seems to get worse over time.”
George Russell is editor-at-large of Fox News and can be found on Twitter @GeorgeRussell

Latest IPCC report: Are There Still Any Climate Skeptics Out There?

Climate change? Try catastrophic climate breakdown

The message from the IPCC report is familiar and shattering: it's as bad as we thought it was

Former Irish president Mary Robinson emphasized the need to leave fossil fuels untouched. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

Already, a thousand blogs and columns insist the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's new report is a rabid concoction of scare stories whose purpose is to destroy the global economy. But it is, in reality, highly conservative.
Reaching agreement among hundreds of authors and reviewers ensures that only the statements which are hardest to dispute are allowed to pass. Even when the scientists have agreed, the report must be tempered in another forge, as politicians question anything they find disagreeable: the new report received 1,855 comments from 32 governments, and the arguments raged through the night before launch.
In other words, it's perhaps the biggest and most rigorous process of peer review conducted in any scientific field, at any point in human history.
There are no radical departures in this report from the previous assessment, published in 2007; just more evidence demonstrating the extent of global temperature rises, the melting of ice sheets and sea ice, the retreat of the glaciers, the rising and acidification of the oceans and the changes in weather patterns. The message is familiar and shattering: "It's as bad as we thought it was."
What the report describes, in its dry, meticulous language, is the collapse of the benign climate in which humans evolved and have prospered, and the loss of the conditions upon which many other lifeforms depend. Climate change and global warming are inadequate terms for what it reveals. The story it tells is of climate breakdown.
This is a catastrophe we are capable of foreseeing but incapable of imagining. It's a catastrophe we are singularly ill-equipped to prevent.
The IPCC's reports attract denial in all its forms: from a quiet turning away – the response of most people – to shrill disavowal. Despite – or perhaps because of – their rigours, the IPCC's reports attract a magnificent collection of conspiracy theories: the panel is trying to tax us back to the stone age or establish a Nazi/communist dictatorship in which we are herded into camps and forced to crochet our own bicycles. (And they call the scientists scaremongers …)
In the Mail, the Telegraph and the dusty basements of the internet, Friday's report (or a draft leaked a few weeks ago) has been trawled for any uncertainties that could be used to discredit. The panel reports that on every continent except Antarctica, man-made warming is likely to have made a substantial contribution to the surface temperature. So those who feel threatened by the evidence ignore the other continents and concentrate on Antarctica, as proof that climate change caused by fossil fuels can't be happening.
They make great play of the IPCC's acknowledgement that there has been a "reduction in surface warming trend over the period 1998–2012", but somehow ignore the fact that the past decade is still the warmest in the instrumental record.
They manage to overlook the panel's conclusion that this slowing of the trend is likely to have been caused by volcanic eruptions, fluctuations in solar radiation and natural variability in the planetary cycle.
Were it not for man-made global warming, these factors could have made the world significantly cooler over this period. That there has been a slight increase in temperature shows the power of the human contribution.
But denial is only part of the problem. More significant is the behaviour of powerful people who claim to accept the evidence. This week the former Irish president Mary Robinson added her voice to a call that some of us have been making for years: the only effective means of preventing climate breakdown is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Press any minister on this matter in private and, in one way or another, they will concede the point. Yet no government will act on it.
As if to mark the publication of the new report, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has now plastered a giant poster across its ground-floor windows: "UK oil and gas: Energising Britain. £13.5bn is being invested in recovering UK oil and gas this year, more than any other industrial sector."
The message couldn't have been clearer if it had said "up yours". It is an example of the way in which all governments collaborate in the disaster they publicly bemoan. They sagely agree with the need to do something to avert the catastrophe the panel foresees, while promoting the industries that cause it.
It doesn't matter how many windmills or solar panels or nuclear plants you build if you are not simultaneously retiring fossil fuel production. We need a global programme whose purpose is to leave most coal and oil and gas reserves in the ground, while developing new sources of power and reducing the amazing amount of energy we waste.
But, far from doing so, governments everywhere are still seeking to squeeze every drop out of their own reserves, while trying to secure access to other people's. As more accessible reservoirs are emptied, energy companies exploit the remotest parts of the planet, bribing and bullying governments to allow them to break open unexploited places: from the deep ocean to the melting Arctic.
And the governments who let them do it weep sticky black tears over the state of the planet.

EPA and Coal Power Plants.

 

At one level, the Obama administration desrves lots of credit for having the courage to set a standard of 1000 pounds of CO2 emissions for every 1 MHW of electricity generated either from coal or from natural gas. But a deeper level of analysis immediately reveals the weak foundations of the above policy. The first weakness is the fact that the standard is ti apply only to new power plants. The second weakness is that power plants have seven years within which to attain the standard. But , in my mind, the real fundamental weakness is the fact that we seem to insist that we want to have our cake and eat it too.
Why not reduce the need for energy instead of producing through CCS ( carbon capture and storage) which is a process that is energy intensive, unproven and produces energy by using energy. The seuestration is no longer in oceans since scientists have concluded that would affect the acidification of the oceans and so currently the plans are to use coal capture the CO2 and inject into deep geological foundations at a huge cost in terms of energy and into formations that could leak the captured gases back into the atmosphere. We will do anything as long as it does not address the root issue that we need to consume less, produce less and thus use less energy!!!

 

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U.S. sets first curbs on power plant carbon emissions

Fri, Sep 20 2013

By Valerie Volcovici
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration on Friday announced first-ever regulations setting strict limits on the amount of carbon pollution that can be generated by any new U.S. power plant, which quickly sparked a backlash from supporters of the coal industry and are certain to face legal challenges.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's long-awaited guidelines would make it near impossible to build coal plants without using technology to capture carbon emissions that foes say is unproven and uneconomic.
The rules, a revision of a previous attempt by the EPA to create emissions standards for fossil fuel plants, are the first step in President Barack Obama's climate change package, announced in June.
The revised rule contained a few surprises after the agency held extensive discussions with industry and environmental groups, raising concerns by industry that the EPA's new restrictions on existing power plants, due to be unveiled next year, will be tough.
But the regulations announced on Friday cover only new plants. Under the proposal, new large natural gas-fired turbines would need to meet a limit of 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour, while new small natural gas-fired turbines would need to meet a limit of 1,100 pounds of CO2 per MWh.
New coal-fired units would need to meet a limit of 1,100 pounds of CO2 per MWh but would be given "operational flexibility" to achieve those levels, the agency said.
The most efficient coal plants currently in operation emit at a rate of at least 1,800 pounds of CO2 per MWh.
In a speech at the National Press Club in Washington on Friday, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy discussed the rationale behind the new rules, and defended Obama's climate plan, which opponents say amounts to a "war on coal."
"There needs to be a certain pathway forward for coal to be successful," she said, adding that "setting fair Clean Air Act standards does not cause the sky to fall."
Still, stocks of coal mining companies fell on Friday and most are down more than 25 percent for the year to date. Alpha Natural Resources Inc fell 6.2 percent to close at $6.22 on Friday. Peabody Energy Corp closed 3.1 percent lower at $18.16 and Arch Coal Inc dropped 5 percent to $4.74.
"Today's announcement ... is direct evidence that this Administration is trying to hold the coal industry to impossible standards," said Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from the coal-producing state of West Virginia.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents more than 3 million businesses, said the EPA's strategies "will write off our huge, secure, affordable coal resources."
In her first major speech since being confirmed to the EPA's top job in July, McCarthy described her commitment to cleaner air in sometimes emotional terms, focused on the impact of pollution on public health.
"It's not just the elderly who suffer from air pollution. So do children - especially children in lower income and urban communities," she said. "If your child doesn't need an inhaler, then you are one very lucky parent."
UNPROVEN TECHNOLOGY?
Under the new rules, any new coal plant built in the United States would need to install technology to capture its carbon waste, known as carbon capture and storage (CCS).
That technology, which aims to prevent the release of large volumes of carbon into the atmosphere, is controversial because it is currently not yet operational on a commercial scale, an issue likely to be central to legal challenges to the EPA.
By giving coal plants seven years, rather than the 30 years proposed in 2012, to achieve an emissions rate below 1,100 lbs per MWh, the EPA is showing that it has full confidence in the nascent CCS technology.
"We now have enough information and confidence to say that a CCS option with coal meets the test of being the best system of emission reduction," David Doniger, policy director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Climate and Clean Air Program, told Reuters.
The EPA previously issued a version of the rule last year but made changes to address potential legal weaknesses and to factor in more than 2 million public comments.
The EPA will launch a fresh public comment period after Friday's announcement.
It is due to issue a proposal to address emissions from existing power plants - which account for nearly a third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions - by June 2014.
McCarthy, the EPA boss, said on Friday that people should not look at the proposal for new plants and then assume that the future rule for the existing fleet will be similar.
Canada, whose emissions policies are in focus as it waits for a U.S. decision on whether to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Alberta to Texas, applauded the U.S. action on power plants. Joe Oliver, Natural Resources Minister, noted in a statement that Canada has already banned construction of new coal-fired electricity plants that use traditional technology.
(Additional reporting by David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Editing by Ros Krasny, Eric Beech, Marguerita Choy and Matthew Lewis)

More Growth !!!!

More growth, not less, is the best hope for averting a sixth great extinction

HAINAN gibbons sing to each other every morning; but these days they do not have much to sing about. The species (pictured) is endemic to a Chinese island that is not just a fruitful producer of rice and rubber but also a golfer’s paradise. Most of its forests have been destroyed to accommodate these activities, and the gibbon population is down to a couple of dozen. If the species disappears, it will be the first ape to go extinct since the beginning of the Holocene era 12,000 years ago.
The Hainan gibbon is only one of 4,224 species listed as critically endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Attention tends to focus on mammals and birds, but amphibia, such as frogs, are even more at risk.

Over the past few centuries mankind’s economic growth has caused many of the problems that other species face. But as our special report this week argues, greater human prosperity now offers other species their best chance of hanging on.

What did for the dinosaurs

There have been five great extinctions in the history of Earth. One killed off the dinosaurs; another wiped out up to 96% of species on Earth. All were probably caused by geological events or asteroids. Many scientists think a sixth is under way, this one caused by man.
From the time that he first sharpened a spear, technological progress and economic growth have allowed man to dominate the planet. He is reckoned to be responsible for wiping out much of the megafauna—giant elk, aurochs, marsupial lions—that once populated Earth. When he paddled across the Pacific he exterminated 50-90% of the bird life on the islands he colonised. Technology allowed him to kill creatures and chop down forests more efficiently and to produce enough food to sustain 7 billion people. As a result, over the past few centuries extinctions are thought to have been running at around 100 times the rate they would run at in his absence.
Yet when people start to reach middle-income level, other species start to benefit. That is partly because as people get richer, their interests begin to extend beyond necessities towards luxuries: for some people that means expensive shoes, for others a day’s bird-watching. Green pressure groups start leaning on government, and governments pass laws to constrain companies from damaging the environment. In the West, a posse of pressure groups such as Greenpeace and the Environmental Defence Fund started up in the 1960s and helped bring about legislation in the 1970s and 1980s.
Growth also has indirect benefits for biodiversity. People clean up their environment in ways that help other species: through building sewage-treatment plants, for instance, and banning factories from pouring effluent into rivers. Prosperity and peace tend to go together, and conflict hurts other creatures as well as man, as the wars in the Congo have shown. Richer countries generally have better governments, and conservation cannot work without an effective state. Agricultural yields rise, allowing more food to be produced on less land. Population growth rates fall: in East Asia, fertility has dropped from 5.3 children per woman in the 1960s to 1.6 now.
One consequence is that in rich countries conditions for other species are, by and large, improving, and endangered creatures are moving away from the edge of the cliff. America’s bald eagle, for instance, was down to 412 breeding pairs in the 1960s. There are now 7,066. Whale populations are mostly recovering thanks to a moratorium on commercial whaling. More broadly, the Living Planet Index, a compilation of a wide range of indicators of biodiversity produced by the Zoological Society of London and WWF, has risen over the past 40 years in temperate (generally rich) countries and fallen in tropical (generally poor) ones. This is not just because rich countries export their growth to emerging markets. Look, for instance, at the fate of the forests on the Korean peninsula: in South Korea, one of the world’s fastest-growing countries in recent decades, forest cover is stable, whereas North Korea has lost a third of its forests in the past 20 years. Nobody exported their growth to North Korea.
In emerging markets some indicators are improving as people press governments to look after the environment better. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, for instance, has fallen from 28,000 sq km in 2004 to 5,000 sq km last year. From a standing start in 1982, China has given over three times as much land to national parks as America has.

Gee up GM

But the problem is by no means solved. Thousands of species are teetering on the edge of extinction. Whether or not they tip over depends in large part on two factors. One is climate change. If the temperature increase is at the medium to high end of the estimated range, then a biodiversity catastrophe is very likely. If it remains at the lower end—which the current hiatus in warming suggests is possible—then most species should not be too badly affected. The second is the demand for land. Habitat loss is the biggest threat to biodiversity. Mankind already cultivates around 40% of Earth’s land surface, and the demand for food is expected to double by 2050. If that demand is to be met without much more land being ploughed, yields will have to increase sharply. That means more fertiliser, pesticide and genetically modified (GM) seeds.
For this to happen, the green movement needs to change its attitude. It has helped other species by pressing governments for change, but some greens want growth to slow and most oppose intensive farming. They have made Europe a no-go zone for new GM crops, and have exported their damaging prejudices to Africa and Asia, to the detriment of biodiversity.
No doubt most of the planet’s other species would have been better off if mankind had never lifted that first spear. The technological progress and economic growth that followed have brought Earth to the edge of the sixth great extinction. But more progress not less offers the best chance of averting it. The Hainan gibbon’s current plight is an improvement on ten years ago, when the chorus was down to a dozen. With a great deal of care, it might just survive to sing for many years yet.

From the print edition: Leaders

NOTE: The above is from the current issue of The Economist. The idea behind posting it is simply to introduce you to various points of view on this subject.  As usual, feel free to either agree or disagree with the article. (Personally I reject the conclusion).