This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Multiple reports about reduced carbon emissions in the United States are deceptively optimistic.
The apparent upside includes World Bank data reporting per-capita U.S. emission decreases of 12.4 percent from 2005 to 2009, with per capita energy use achieving a post 1967 nadir. Similarly, the International Energy Agency indicates that the U.S. had the world’s largest global emissions decrease in the last six years; that our share of the global total declined from 26 percent in 1980 to 16 percent today.
So why is this deceptive? In part, it’s because the encouraging data substantially reflect a fracking boom through which cheap natural gas is replacing carbon intensive coal. But the price of gas will inevitably rebound, especially as pressures to export gas become irresistible. So gas-induced carbon reductions may slow or be reversed.
Equally important is that fracking releases methane, a greenhouse gas with 20 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide. A Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences report calculates that switching from coal to gas attenuates climate change only if the fracking induced gas leak rate is below 3.2 percent.
It is, therefore, encouraging that the Environmental Protection Agency reported a leak rate of 2.4 percent in 2009 and, in a report issued this month, that tighter pollution controls have produced substantial year-to-year decreases in methane leaks over the past two decades. While other recent studies have identified individual wells with leak rates as high as 9 percent, anecdotal examples do not alter the conclusion that fracking improves our greenhouse gas profile. But the common assertion that a coal to gas switch cuts carbon emissions in half will remain an overstatement until fracking-associated methane leaks are reduced to zero.
The more salient reason why U.S. carbon emissions data are deceptive concerns bookkeeping.
The carbon footprint assigned to a country measures domestic emissions only. All other things being equal, this means that the outsourcing of carbon-intensive manufacturing improves the measured footprint of developed countries without changing global emission totals.
But other things are worse than equal when we export manufacturing and import finished products. The reasons are increased transportation burdens and because more environmentally mature developed countries produce far less carbon per unit of gross domestic product than developing world counterparts. The perverse effect is that the existing approach to carbon attribution is an innumerate shell game. It gives the feel good impression of good behavior in developed countries whose outsourced manufacturing increases global emissions.
These considerations should help define policy development. Climate change is global and the source of the offending gasses has limited impact. If the U.S. stopped emitting carbon tomorrow there would be a one-time global reduction. But the mathematics is inexorable. If exponential emissions growth in developing countries continued, the world would revert quickly to its current state.
Coal provides an instructive illustration of the need to globalize climate change mitigation strategies. As with cigarette manufacturers before them, coal company angst over decreasing domestic use is greatly eased by a global boom that has doubled US coal exports since 2006.
One reason is that Germany and Japan are replacing nuclear power partly with coal. But the seminal challenges are in developing countries where the 2011 record for global carbon emission increases was nurtured even as the U.S. reduced its contribution; where the International Energy Agency reports that China added 55 gigawatts of coal capacity (about one large plant per week) in 2010 alone and now uses 46 percent of the world’s coal.
The policy implication is that reducing domestic coal consumption is both worthwhile and totally inadequate. Decades of continued coal use and substantial near and mid-term increases are all but certain in the developing world. As a result, the most important contribution the United States could make to the fight against climate change is the pursuit of large scale and exportable carbon sequestration technologies. A well-designed domestic carbon tax would facilitate such efforts by providing research money and by demonstrating to coal companies that sequestration is their only economically viable path to survival.
Squeamish environmentalists who are neutral or opposed to such efforts should discard their environmental purity. The catastrophic potential consequences of climate change leave no moral option but to explore every avenue of escape.
More generally, since a necessary condition for climate-change mitigation is a developing world with economically competitive carbon free energy, the pursuit of globally applicable technologies should guide our efforts in multiple domains.
Manhattan Project-like research efforts and robust export incentives should define our commitment to leadership in technologies like high performance batteries for electric Chinese cars, inexpensive solar installations for sun drenched regions in India, and small thorium-based nuclear power plants as potential complements to wind and solar in providing a safe global alternative to natural gas and non-sequestering coal plants.
Reducing our own greenhouse gas emissions is important. But ultimately, it’s a fly swat at climate change if the billions of people who want to live like us maintain current emission trajectories.
Ken Schechtman is a freelance writer and a professor at the Washington University School of Medicine.