From the Fallows article I mentioned yesterday:

The group has sponsored research on sequestration, on post-combustion capture, and on the “cleanest” of the emerging pre-combustion coal technologies—“underground coal gasification.” In this process, jets of air (or pure oxygen), sometimes with steam or various chemicals, are blasted into coal seams deep underground. They interact chemically with the coal to produce a gas that flows back up a pipe and can be burned. It leaves in the ground much of the carbon, sulfur, nitrogen, and other elements that create greenhouse gases and other pollutants when coal is burned.

“And this can be very cheap,” Sung told me. “You don’t have to mine the coal. You don’t have to send men underground or haul coal around or dispose of ash. All the dirty stuff stays buried.” Because of these and other savings, he said, coal used this way could match or beat the price of today’s standard dirty power plant.

This is fascinating. The coal industry serves as a double whammy: it has money, which means lobbying power, and that lobbying power opposes renewable energy because it competes with coal. But it also employs a bunch of people, which means all those people, and their families, oppose a shift to renewables too. Say what you will about green growth, I'm fairly sure that in the power industry, a major wind or solar installation is going to employ far fewer people than a coal plant with associated mining activity (though to be fair I need to check that. I'm simply assuming there are only so many openings for solar panel squeegee-ers). But what if coal started employing fewer people? Could that significantly change the political calculus?

Carbon capture and storage

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is somewhat controversial, for two reasons, I think - one reasonable and one less so. The technology basically involves capturing emitted carbon from power plants and pumping it into geological reservoirs where it'll hopefully sit for... a while.

The reasonable reason to be skeptical about CCS is that we don't really know how well this will work. Will the carbon stay underground? Will it start leaking out? If so, how fast? Who knows?

My personal opinion is that that second, somewhat less reasonable reason, is that major supporters of climate action feel CCS is cheating. They view it as a dodge, a way to go on using bad coal to make power when the right thing to do is to commit to true renewables. As such, CCS is morally wrong. There is something to this in a sense. In the long term, what we need is to transition our energy systems, not find stopgaps that support the existing system.

However, that doesn't matter, because the thing is, coal's not going away. The equation goes like this:

1) Coal is bad. No, seriously, really bad.

2) But having no electricity is even more bad.

3) Energy needs in places like China are growing so quickly that even going gangbusters on true renewables won't eliminate the need to also build a bunch of new coal plants. China (and eventually others) will need to build both if it wants to meet its future electricity needs.

3) Therefore, if we don't find a way to make coal less bad, we're all screwed.

Without CCS, we lose. It doesn't matter whether we like the technology and the principle behind it or not. James Fallows wrote a fairly high profile article on this recently, but he merely popularized it; I've heard this story kicking around for at least a couple of years.

It's somewhat depressing, then, that I've seen two articles within the last couple of weeks on failures in major CCS projects. The Australian Zerogen project is apparently being abandoned, and the UK Powerfuel project went into administration through lack of funds.

On the plus side, there's one American project that still appears to be on track. And Fallows sees lots going on (and moving fast) with clean coal in China. So, as with renewables, perhaps we can hope for a convenient deus ex China.

Natural gas

Natural gas is an interesting industry from a climate perspective. It emits, but less than either coal or oil. It has been seen by some as a bridge fuel on the road to renewable energy. In the short term, I think it benefits from emissions controls. In the long term, it suffers - but my guess (and it's a pretty off the cuff guess) is that the long term here is at least 10-20 years.

It's also been in the news a lot. On the one hand, the US has seen recent large growth in available reserves: there's a lot of gas to be had in the US. This means it's selling for incredibly cheap prices at the moment. On the other hand, there's record demand in the UK. The problem here is that natural gas can't be conveniently shipped around the way oil can. So you pretty much have to build a direct pipeline (not very practical from the US to Europe, but this is how Russia gets its gas to the European market) or liquify it and ship it in tanks. The latter option requires special facilities, and to date not a lot of those have been built, although plans are in the works for more as the tension between isolated supply and isolated demand grows. Result: markets for gas are isolated right now. Some specifics:

1) The EU relies heavily on Russia. The three largest holders of gas reserves have historically been Russia, Iran, and Qatar. Geographically, they could all conceivably be linked to the EU by pipelines, but in practice, only Russia has. Iran is too unstable. Qatar is probably stable enough, but is hemmed in by problem states: Iran, Iraq, Syria.

2) Russia also relies heavily on the EU. Once you sink billions into building fixed pipelines to your primary market, you have some serious incentives to play nice (although Russia has still pulled a few stunts.) However, my impression is that Russia would find it somewhat easier to diversify than the EU; it's got a huge potential market - China - on its other border. There have been Russia-China pipeline projects planned in the past, and I haven't fully followed up on them, but they seem to have run into problems and stalled out a lot. I'm not entirely sure why this is, honestly; it seems like a very logical move.

3) Gas is probably a weaker lobby than it could be in the US. If it could export effectively, that would give it markets in Europe and China, as well as strengthening prices domestically. Overall, it'd become a more important and more prominent industry. That could be good for building an emissions reduction coalition - in part because a lot of US natural gas is dealt with by US oil companies. So theoretically this could blunt their commitment to opposing emissions controls. This I'm very unsure about, though. I don't fully understand the structure of the gas market yet.

Why a multi-round treaty process?

[Today's actual post!]

There seems to be a general attitude in large-scale environmental negotiations that the right way to approach them is to try to get lots of people to sign on to relatively light requirements, and then hold multiple subsequent rounds of negotiation in which you slowly ratchet things up. This is actually sort of an intuitively satisfying model, I think - I mean, it seems like how you might intuitively approach a hard issue - but I've had oddly little luck finding scholarly discussion of treaty-making that discusses this attitude explicitly or breaks it down into an actual theoretical process. I'm sure it must be out there, because the attitude definitely exists and someone must have tried to fit a theory or theories to it, but I haven't yet been able to find them. I've thought of three possible ones, though:

1) Best diplomatic practice: one could postulate that the best (or even, only practical) way to get large concessions is to stair-step toward them: secure one set of small concessions at a time, using each as the new baseline from which to launch a renewed negotiation.

2) Harnessing learning effects: one could postulate that one can, at any given time, only get people to commit to relatively small expenditures; however, each execution of each commitment causes learning, which reduces costs and ambiguities, freeing up resources for another round of commitments. Hence, negotiation should be built to encourage and accommodate that process.

3) Normative spiral: Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink have proposed a "spiral model" for uptake of norms such as human rights at the state level, which could also apply here. Without going into it in detail, basically the model postulates that uncooperative states can be pressured into making small tactical concessions. Although these concessions are initially viewed as onerous and externally imposed, after a period of adjustment and acculturation, the state takes them up as its own norms and begins to behave in manner consistent with the concessions, viewing the new regimen as part of its normal behavior and identity; this in turn makes it more open to taking further steps. In other words, a spiral in which initial concessions change states, creating space for further concessions, and so on. If we view environmental treaties as promulgating norms of environmental behavior, we can imagine this spiral process occuring through the treaty process, with each round consolidating and building on the effects of the prior round.

But I haven't actually found an instance yet of any these explanations (or others) being mobilized to provide a formal theoretical underpinning for actual observed practice. Surely they must be, and I just haven't found it.

Basically, we're screwed

[Wednesday's post! Which is appropriate, as it is full of woe.]

I have this theory that there are really only two (successful) ways out of treaty negotiations* - at least, environmental and economic negotiations (I'm uncertain whether defense treaties fit).

Let me approach this backwards, by talking about why I think the climate change negotiations have been so relentlessly unsuccessful. My belief is that this has been the case because the issue area combines two characteristics that, in combination, close off the two standard success routes.

First, the issue area is systemic rather than bounded. By this I mean that the implications of a major energy transition promise upheaval throughout virtually all areas of industry and human life. There are potential losers in every industry. (Of course, there are also by the same token potential winners in every industry - but the losses are easier to engage with than the gains, which are ambiguous and difficult to predict; and humans are risk averse to start with.) In a bounded issue area, a limited set of arenas is affected, meaning that potential losers are a limited set.

In bounded cases, it is therefore easier to build a coalition of supporters from industries and arenas that are not subject to direct disruption from the proposed treaty, assuming any reasonably large or widespread potential gain from a treaty. The area of ozone depleting substances was this sort of area: it ultimately only required disruption of a small subset of the economy. In a systemic issue area, there is no potential coalition of unaffected supporters to be accessed. You have to try to convince lots of people who will be affected that they will ultimately be winners from the deal. That's much harder, as long as the path to winning remains ambiguous. And, of course, the more systemic an issue is, the larger its total costs likely are, which makes everything harder in a general way.

So climate change is systemic, and that makes it hard. Do we have examples of successful systemic treaties that might suggest how we could get out of this trap? Well, kind of. I would argue that both the WTO and the EU are systemic deals. And here's the second problem. Both of these deals probably succeeded in large part because the benefits they provide are club goods - you cannot access them without signing on. This can force nations to sign on even when they're facing systemic effects. But a climate treaty would provide a public good; there's no pressure to agree.

So: treaties have two escape routes to success. If they're bounded, you can escape via domestic support from unaffected parties. If they're not bounded, you'd better hope they're either a club good or can be transformed into one somehow. Thus far, all the treaties I've looked at fit into one or the other of these (or are an epiphenomenal result of one of the starred options below). If they're both systemic and public, you might be screwed - and that's climate change.

Lately I feel I should tag all my posts with either "optimism" or "pessimism".

* There are also two ways to get a desired outcome that don't really require treaty negotiations: have a hegemon who can force everyone to do what they want, or have an actor or set of actors that are independently motivated to provide your public good whether or not others cooperate. Neither of these applies to climate change either.

How well is China doing?

I've been on a bit of a posting holiday while recovering from being sick and miserable, but hey, I'm back!

There's been a few interesting things in the news of late. No, no, not about Cancun. Here's one thing:

http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2010/12/14/chinas-incipient-renewables-boom/

Earlier this semester I was up at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs talking with Mark Levine, a fairly senior guy up there who's group leader for their China Energy Group. He knows, in other words, a lot about what China's doing in terms of clean energy. Someone in the group asked him, in essence, whether China made everything the developed world was trying to do irrelevant because of its potential to simply blow everyone else out of the water in terms of emissions. His response was that he didn't think so at all; in fact, he said, they'd been doing analysis and his opinion based on that was the China was much closer to peaking its emissions and beginning to climb back down than most people thought.

I wasn't sure what to think about this - Mark Levine strikes me as a knowledgeable and pragmatic guy, but that was a pretty optimistic statement - but this seems like a supporting data point, with China set to beat its own targets in solar and wind for 2015 and 2020, and "Provincial plans to build out nuclear, rail and wind far exceed[ing] national targets."

This is a nice bit of optimism for its own sake. But it cheers me for another reason. Many people would say the most critical factor in making the Montreal protocol on ozone depleting substances work (Montreal being the gold standard for a successful prior environmental treaty) was that one large player had incentives to move ahead unilaterally: the US essentially decided it was economically worthwhile to go ahead with reducing ODS on its own. That unilateral movement overcame learning barriers and brought down costs for relevant technology, such that eventually joining in on action became economically sensible for more and more countries. Increasing numbers of signatories over time, and increasingly rigorous commitments over time, effectively tracked the falling costs of action as more players joined in and costs came down. (That's one story, anyway - not necessarily the emphasis every analyst would give.)

The mechanism here is a little different, I think. It's not so much that China has decided it is economically sensible to concentrate on zeroing out emissions. I have a research slave - er, undergraduate research assistant - that I'd set to learning about energy industry drivers in India. What he said to me recently was that it didn't seem like there was much competition between different parts of the energy industry; solar didn't compete with coal, because India is growing fast enough that it needs as much as it can get of each. This is true, as well, of China.

But whatever the driver, it's heartening that there IS a driver for the widescale unilateral installation of large amounts of clean power. Whether China can engage in near-term radical emissions reductions or not, its widescale installation plans, if fulfilled, will bring down costs and overcome learning barriers for other countries, such that more of them might be in a position to do so. Even if China doesn't sign in the near term, China's work might lead to more signatures on a more rigorous emissions reduction treaty.

Sneaky carbon leakage problems

I was remarking to my advisor the other day that one thing low-carbon electricity had going for it was that it's hard for international leakage to occur. Leakage is a potential problem in manufacturing in carbon-restricting countries: if reducing the amount of carbon produced in manufacturing a car means that the manufacturing becomes more expensive, then that manufacturing and its attendant jobs may leak out to other countries that haven't chosen to regulate carbon.

But right now, in any reasonably sizable country, electricity pretty much has to be manufactured locally, because we don't have storage and transmission technologies that are efficient enough to make moving electricity long distances economically sensible. It isn't really vulnerable to leakage. You can't ship your electricity production to China, even if you make it more expensive to produce at home.

Efficient long-distance transmission is something that most people see as a useful development for transition to a low-carbon economy, because it increases overall efficiency of the grid (saving emissions directly), increases grid flexibility, and could allow exploitation of otherwise inconveniently located green resources (for instance, parts of Russia are quite sunny and could be prime solar generation sites, but these parts of Russia are largely quite far from the population centers.) I was speculating, however, that an unintended consequence of real advances in efficient long-distance transmission could be to allow for leakage of electricity manufacturing to less carbon-controlled countries.

Another sneaky potential problem pointed out by my Russian renewable energy book is a potential shift of manufacturing of renewables technologies to high-carbon manufacturing sites. Per Overland and Kjaernet:

There is also a more negative scenario, in which Russia instead uses heavily subsidized energy from abundant coal, natural gas or nuclear power to produce renewable energy input factors such as silicon [for solar panels] and hydrogen. Some  Russian actors are already thinking in this direction. For example, the oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who is the main shareholder of the conglomerate Basic Element and the world's biggest aluminum producer Rusal, has aired the idea of establishing polychrystaline silicon production at Sosnovy Bor outside St. Petersburg. The point would be to take advantage of the cheap energy from the nuclear plant located there.

(Overland and Kjaernet, Russian Renewable Energy: The Potential for International Cooperation, 2009)

The larger point here, I suppose, is that transition from a low-efficiency high-carbon economy to a high-efficiency low-carbon environment involves massive shifts in the location of and control over important resources, business interests, and so on. The way those shifts flow through the global economy will be complex and unpredictable - though a lot of those unpredicted outcomes will look like inevitable reactions to existing interest structures once we're analyzing them in hindsight.

Defender of the fur seal!

Having sung the praises of work-blogging elsewhere, it remains the case that there are days when nothing major really gels. So let me quote you Henry Elliott talking about the fur seals. Henry Elliott was an early conservationist who reported on the fur seal crisis and became a major advocate for them, working with policy makers on solutions to the sealing problem. In fact, according to IMDB there's a 2005 documentary called Henry Wood Elliott: Defender of the Fur Seal!

Here he is on private interests' influence on international cooperation around fur seal conservation:

That these facts were not presented by our agents and 'experts' to the Paris Tribunal was due to the ignorance of them by those men: they were not equal to the proper conduct of this case, either in making it up in Washington, or in presenting it to the Court. President Harrison was duly warned, in the spring of 1891, of that serious deficiency in these agents and 'experts.' But he ignored the warning; the lessees [private entities with interests in sealing] were pleased with them: and that settled it in the departments!

...this [conservation measures] was attempted in 1895 and again in 1898 by the passage of a bill in the House of Representatives: but that bill was defeated in the Senate by the agents of the land and sea butchers of this herd. ... They have made no open argument in defence of their infamous work - they cannot; but they have suborned departmental officials, Senators and Congressmen to that end. 

Private interests must be entirely eliminated from the situation now and forever...

 (Henry W. Elliot, "The Loot and the Ruin of the Fur-Seal Herd of Alaska," The North American Review, 1907)

So hey - the idea of distortion of environmental regulation by private interest pressure and the use of industry-backed "experts" presenting inadequate and inaccurate facts: at least a hundred years old! Surprising? I'm not sure if I find it so or not.

Fur seals

I’m turning back to reading about actual treaties for while. Currently I’m reading about the background to the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention, which, for reasons I won’t bore people with at the moment, I think might be a useful case.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the population of the large Alaskan fur seal colony dropped from around 5 million to around 120,000. This was due in large part to pelagic sealing; that is, sealing carried out in the ocean from ships, largely by other nations such as Britain/Canada. The US, which owned the land on which the seals lived and bred, had the motivation and capacity to husband this resource by restricting hunting – as long as the seals stayed on land. But the US had no control over the seals when they were in the open ocean, where they fed. Sealing in the ocean quickly descended into a classic tragedy of the commons situation. And with the seal population dropping rapidly and not under its control, even the US, which otherwise preferred to husband this resource, had incentives to maximize its share of the dwindling resource by hunting as rapidly as possible on land.

The international community attempted a number of rounds of solutions to this, and it took quite a while to find one that worked in a lasting way.

The first multilateral solution was an attempt to control destructive sealing by introducing a set of regulations, created by a European arbitration court, that limited the season during which seals could be hunted (banning hunting between May and July – since hunting was impractical during the long Alaskan winter, this effectively limited hunting to August, September, and parts of October), and limited the weapons with which they could be hunted (no firearms).

Both of these probably looked like good ideas when they were enacted (many hunting restrictions limit hunting to a restricted period in the fall; firearms are more effective killers and thus banning them should reduce kill sizes).

Both turned out to actually accelerate the depletion of the seal herds. The months of August, September, and October are the months during which female seals care for their pups, going out into the open ocean repeatedly to hunt and returning to feed pups. Concentrating hunting during the fall meant an absolute slaughter of these female seals; and each female killed on the ocean counted double or triple because pups left behind were unable to care for themselves and died. And while pelagic sealers had originally used firearms to hunt, once these were banned, they discovered that spears were actually more effective. Firearms discharges would scare seal herds away, but spears were quiet and hunters could go on killing without causing widespread flight.

What’s the lesson? Pick your poison:

1) Regulation is never the answer. Externally imposed solutions are typically stupid because they are typically promulgated by people who aren’t part of the activity in question and don’t fully understand it.

2) We should regulate but do so slowly, after months or years of careful study. Moving quickly means making mistakes that may cost is more than waiting would, while moving slowly allows us to do things like study the cycles of seal life to determine what kinds of restrictions would be most effective.

3) We should move quickly to experiment with solutions (regulatory and otherwise). Mistakes are unavoidable - how could we have known that banning firearms wouldn't be effective until we tried it? - and therefore we need to be aware that a period of unproductive or limited-productivity experimentation is inevitable.

Voting by coal-powered states

It's Monday, I'm sick, and I just finished running a colloquium. Hooray! Here's some more quick thoughts on state interests and voting. Today's question: does the list of states that get more than 80% of their power from coal better predict climate legislation voting?

The short answer: No and Maaaaaaybe.

From last post, the list of coal power states is: Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. To this, I add Hawaii, the only state which gets most of its power (75%) from oil.


With regard to the House, the picture using this list is actually almost exactly the same as the picture using coal production. 65% of Democrats from coal-power states voted for climate legislation, vs. 85% among states that get less than 80% of their power from coal. This compared to 66% yes votes from coal-producing states. To the extent that there's an effect, it appears to be almost exactly the same level (caveat: this list of states seems to me to be a slightly bluer - or at least more purple - list, so perhaps the effect IS stronger, but is masked by a difference in ideological background noise.)


With regard to the Senate, my best guess at the picture of probable voting should a future bill actually get a vote looks like this:


Likely Yes
Akaka (HI)
Inouye (HI)

Maybe
Brown (OH)
Bayh (IN)
Rockefeller (WV)


Lean No and Likely No
McCaskill (MO)
Byrd (WV)
Conrad (ND)
Dorgan (ND)


To me this looks much like the Senate list from the coal production analysis; there's definitely grounds for claiming an effect though there are more Senators from these states that are willing to talk than I might naively have predicted. It feels to me like there's a hair more effect here - one fewer "yes", one more "no" - but that's just a feeling gathered from reading about these senators' positions and it may or may not be valid. In this analysis, the role of Montana is played by Hawaii.


In what should probably be a standard disclaimer, I should note that I'm under no illusions that any of this is going to plausibly yield anything statistically significant.

State power mixes

I spent most of today finding and putting together raw data on state-by-state breakdowns of electricity generation mix. I can now report:

Coal:
There are 15 states for which coal makes up 60% or more of electricity generation: Colorado, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Utah, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Wyoming.

Of these, there are 8 states that derive more than 80% of their power from coal: Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Would this list be a better predictor of voting than coal production was?

Oil:
There is 1 state that derives more than 60% of its power from oil: Hawaii (75%). There are no other states that derive more than 20% of their power from oil (even Alaska derives only 17% - its biggest single power source is natural gas).

Natural Gas:
There are 2 states that derive more than 60% of their power from natural gas: Nevada (69%) and Rhode Island (98%).

Nuclear:
There is 1 state that derives more than 60% of its power from nuclear: Vermont (74%). Interestingly, there were an additional 7 states for whom nuclear makes up the single largest fraction of their power from nuclear: Connecticut, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, and Virginia (though in several cases that meant only 30-40%).

Hydroelectric:
There are 2 states that derive more than 60% of their power from hydroelectric: Idaho (80%) and Washington (70%).

Non-Emitting/Renewable:
There are 11 states that derive more than 50% of their power from non-emitting sources (nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, solar, and geothermal): Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, and Washington. Of these, only 4 derive more than 60% of their power from non-emitting sources: Idaho, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.

If you eliminate nuclear, the 11 drops to 3: Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. If you keep nuclear and add in emitting but renewable sources such as wood and biomass, you gain Maine.

Wind and Solar:
The top users of wind power currently are Iowa (14%), Minnesota (10%), North Dakota (9%), Colorado (6%) Kansas (6%), Oregon (6%), South Dakota (5%), Texas (5%), and Wyoming (5%). Go plains states.

The top users of solar power currently are Nevada (0.46%) and California (0.32%). That includes both photovoltaics and solar thermal. Ouch.

Miscellaneous:
New York is the most diversified state, the only state that derives at least 10% of its power from four different sources.

Russia!

Russia is a depressing topic for climate people. I had hoped that Indra Overland and Heidi Kjaernet's Russian Renewable Energy: The Potential for International Cooperation (2009) would dispell the gloom a bit, but it largely hasn't, because it largely hasn't convinced me that anything about the picture I posted yesterday is majorly wrong.

For example: Overland and Kjaernet identify the northern settlements as some of Russia's highest-potential niche opportunities for renewable energy, because these areas tend not to be connected to the existing grid and whose power needs must therefore currently be served by expensive and doubtless logistically annoying shipments of diesel fuel. Renewables such as wind, they suggest, would be a natural solution to this problem. Moreover, these settlements isolation from the main grid and its subsidized natural gas prices would reduce competition that would challenge renewables.

However, here are the obstacles that these relatively optimistic authors list for this high-potential niche:

1) Corruption: there's a local black market based around the value of the diesel fuel, which can be skimmed and sold/traded by local power (literally and figuratively) brokers. This corrupt network would likely resist change. "In some locations with largely non-monetized economies this phenomenon is so widespread that diesel functions as the main currency..." (40)
2) Bureaucratic incentives: which, for reasons I'll elide, make it difficult to actually figure out what each community needs and uses in terms of energy, thus complicating effective planning and strongly discouraging private investment.
3) Population trends: population in the far-flung northern regions is declining, a trend which Russia tends to encourage. Why should Russia want to invest in a shiny new energy system for these low-value, declining areas?
4) The geography itself: such remote settlements will also have difficulty bringing in maintenance staff and spare parts for renewable energy installations in a timely manner, making them a less than optimal testing ground for a somewhat experimental renewable energy system.

Whew. And this is for a high-potential niche.

Thus far, I see two additional rays of sunshine from this book.

First, it argues that the renewables resources picture is not as bad as it looks in some ways. For instance, although Russia is largely northerly, it has a climate which in large swathes of the country leads to high proportions of clear days. Solar panels don't need heat, they just need solar radiation (in fact, they function less well at high temperatures). So that's interesting. It doesn't change the fact that the Russian economy's huge reliance on fossil fuels is a huge obstacle; but perhaps at least there aren't two huge obstacles. (Caveat: this book takes a relatively optimistic tone - so take with a grain of salt, here. In particular, it doesn't engage with the issue of winter and daylight hours.)

Second, Russian businesses have begun investing in polycrystalline silicon production facilities. Polycrystalline silicon is the stuff used to make solar panels - as well as a lot of computer components. As uses of this material increase, manufacturers are facing shortages. It'll be an increasingly important base material as time goes on. If Russian business really gets into this material it could be come an important industry. (The caveat here is that their global share is still quite small, so who knows? Plenty of other countries are investing too.)

In addition to this, Russia's current new polycrystalline silicon facilities are being built to serve the Chinese and US markets. Of these two, I'm most interested in the former. Russia has a lot of obvious interests in being able to make money in China, and geography gives them one natural advantage. Some of those products are ones that could be pulled by an emissions reduction drive on the part of the Chinese - natural gas, polycrystalline silicon, nuclear technology? So, if China really commits to emissions reduction (which, arguably, it has already begun to do), could it pull Russia with it? Or more accurately, how much could it pull Russia with it?

There you go: the most optimistic things I have to say about Russia.

Interests at the country level

Let's talk about country-level interests in climate negotiations!

There are really six entities that matter in climate negotiations. In roughly this order of importance, they are:

1) China
2) The US
3) The EU
4) Japan
5) India
6) Russia

You can argue about the order of importance of the last three. Quite possibly India should go above Japan, but I tend to think India appears to have more influence in this area than it actually does, because it can free ride off of some of what China does.

I tend to subdivide these countries into three groups, as follows:

1) Looking for Green Markets: The EU and Japan

Both of these entities have significant existing technological dominance in renewable energy technologies. This makes sense; both of them have little in the way of fossil fuel resources, and thus are particularly vulnerable to energy security issues. Therefore, both invested early and effectively* in green tech - the EU countries more in renewable energy, and Japan more in efficiency technologies, is my impression. This means both countries have two major interests in an emissions-reduction treaty: first, it will increase the market size for products where they have, at least at the moment, technical dominance. Second, with little in the way of domestic fossil fuel resources, they'll be among the first to be forced to transition off of fossil fuels anyway. Therefore, they have an interest in a treaty that will smooth out the potential competitive disadvantage of transitioning before everyone else by requiring countries to transition along with them.

2) Stalling for Time: The US and China

Both the US and China share significant domestic fossil fuel resources - especially coal - and up-and-coming renewables industries. It's in their interests (or their short-term interests, at least) to hang on to their access to cheap, plentiful coal for as long as possible. And even assuming both countries buy that it's in their long-term interests to do something about climate, it's still in their short-term interests to stall and emphasize research funding and innovation over emissions caps right now, since this could give them time to achieve a greater level of dominance in the renewables and efficiency technology industries, before those markets really take off.

3) Wild Cards: India and Russia

In the long term, India could look a lot like China; right now, it doesn't. China is thinking and working hard on making green technology a profitable future area for it. India isn't, or at least not nearly at the same level. Although India is talking a fair amount about renewables, it's lagging on actual performance; the only major Indian success in green tech is Suzlon, which is a mid-range player in the already crowded and fairly mature field of wind turbines. I don't get the sense that India has figured out how it would make money off a green "revolution"; how it does (or IF it does) will determine how it jumps in the long term. In the short term, it's clearly in India's short-term interests to be obstructionist on emissions reduction; it needs to develop, and has little to sell.

Russia is a wild card for a different reason - because it's hard to imagine what possible benefit Russia thinks it might get from action on climate change. Its economy is largely based off the sale of fossil fuels, and (while it may or may not be true) it's easy to argue that climate change's actual effect on Russia will be more mixed/equivocal than outright bad. Russia is a wild card because it's my belief that if climate change action ever gets going seriously, it could also be seriously destabilizing to Russia. I see only two rays of hope: first, in the short term, natural gas is cleaner than coal or oil, so if, in the short term, climate change action leads to a shift from these to natural gas as a first step, this will benefit Russia. Second, Russia does have some capital in nuclear power, which could be part of the solution.

So! Tomorrow, more on Russia. I have an entire book, which I'm halfway through, entitled Russian Renewable Energy: The Potential for International Cooperation, and it's by two very optimistic Scandinavians named Overland and Kjaernet.


* Actually, the US has also invested quite a lot in fossil fuel alternatives research; but not so effectively. I believe this is partly because corn ethanol turned out to be a very bad bet, but I'm unsure if that's the whole story.

More on coal and states

Today's accomplishment: tracking down a bunch of new info on coal-by-state stuff. This led to lots of little observations that interested me, but most importantly, I can start talking a little more intelligently about the importance of coal by state! Sadly, I still don't have the industry-as-a-percent-of-state-income numbers, but I can talk about two other useful measures:

1) Employment: this is just numbers of people actually employed in coal mining, so it's by no means a sum total of all coal-related employment. In fact, even in the coal-heaviest states, as a percent of the workforce, it's still only 2.5% or so. I'm making the assumption that the ranking of states this produces, however, roughly tracks to the ranking that would be produced by a more complete accounting. This yields a list of states of interest as follows:

Effect Seems Highly Likely:
West Virginia
Wyoming

Effect Seems Possible:
Kentucky
North Dakota
Montana
Alabama

Effect Seems Unlikely:
New Mexico
Utah
Pennsylvania
Virginia
Indiana

2) Use of coal for electricity (again, this should be converted to percent of power generated from coal, but... I didn't find the right numbers for that today, so we're going with raw numbers):

Texas
Indiana
Illinois
Ohio
Pennsylvania
Missouri
Kentucky
Michigan
Georgia

Though I clearly need to rerun this with percentages to eliminate the state size issue, it's not a pure restatement of size. California, New York, and Florida fall off the list, while Missouri moves up significantly. Hard to say what this means, other than that CA, NY, and FL don't burn as much coal as the "should" while Missouri burns more.

So, comparing the three lists:

Using coal/oil production as a metric gives us: Wyoming, West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Texas, Montana, Alaska, and Louisiana

Using percent of workforce employed in coal/oil yields: West Virginia, Wyoming, Kentucky, North Dakota, Montana, Alabama, Texas, Alaska, Louisiana (I add the final three to account for oil; haven't run the numbers but am pretty confident they'll pan out).


Using raw coal electricity numbers gives, though this list probably isn't very useful in its current form: Texas, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Kentucky, Michigan, Georgia (oil isn't generally burned much for fuel, though I should check to see if there are any exceptional states.)

Once I've got the coal electricity numbers worked out as percentages of total generation, and updated the list, it would be interesting to see if one of the lists predicts voting better than another - though the sample sizes are to small, I suspect, to have any rigorous meaning.

Coal industry quotes

In meetings most of the day. Therefore, quotes from coal industry people!

"Palmer had founded the pro-CO2 Greening Earth Society in 1998 to convince people that burning fossil fuels is 'doing the work of the Lord.'" (Fred Palmer of Peabody Energy, the largest US coal producer)

"Blankenship warned that 'the greeniacs are taking over the world,' and painted a grim picture of what American life would be like under 'people of the far-left Communist persuasion.' ... 'I have spent quite a bit of time in Russia and China and India, and I can tell you, that's the first phase. You go from having your own car to carpooling to riding the bus to riding mass transit and you eventually get down to where you're walking. Your apartments go from being nice apartments and homes with your own bathroom to sharing kitchens and bathrooms with four families. That's what socialism and the elimination of capitalism and free enterprise is all about.'" (Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy, the fourth largest US coal company)

Quotes from Pooley's The Climate War, which I'm still wandering through and which, if it's not obvious, I recommend.

Messing around with cap and trade

And for Friday, because I'm full of turkey and it's a holiday weekend, a quick and totally speculative post that I've been thinking about for a bit.

Cap-and-trade programs as proposed in the US appear to me to generally operate through a centralized allowance distribution model. So for instance, in the case of SO2, initial allowances were as I understand it distributed by the EPA (with some hands-on fiddling and extra-allowance-granting by legislators). Waxman-Markey as far as I can tell had the same model - determination and distribution of allowances by the EPA.

What I've been wondering this week is whether a more distributed model would be more politically viable. What if, instead of the EPA allocating allowances directly to companies, it allocated allowances to communities, allowing those communities to auction off allowances to the companies, and local governments to keep the proceeds?

I don't have a good sense of how local governments work in a general sense, or what the legal relationship between federal and local government is and whether existing political arrangements would, from a practical point of view, allow such a system. I'm also pretty sure such a system would not be as efficient or effective a process as having the EPA do it - best-case, it would probably be bureaucratically unwieldy and allow each individual community to make individual, stupid decisions about allocation - which some of them might indeed do. Still, the classic version of CO2 cap-and-trade died an ignominious death, largely because its defenders couldn't articulate to voters what immediate, tangible benefits it will give them to balance out potential costs. Giving local governments allowances to allocate and/or auction off themselves would be one way of putting skin in the game at a community level, of making the proceeds from an auction system tangible to voters, and of giving communities a sense that climate action is something they have some on-going control of and ability to shape to their individual community's needs.

Message vs. audience

From my reading on Wednesday, which was more Climate War (Pooley), more stuff on environmental messaging strategy. Pooley describes the Alliance for Climate Protection's initial messaging strategy, which was intended to build their "brand" and establish them as a known, non-threatening brand (the Alliance is the group Al Gore spearheads):

They had established the brand but their message was getting buried under a mountain of look-alike ads from fossil fuel companies. In the Alliance's tracking polls, the percentage of people who saw the crisis as urgent was starting to fall off because of all of those oil, gas, and coal ads saying, It's solvable. Don't worry about it. We're on it. ExxonMobil had people in lab coats in their ads, and Americans trust scientists and technicians. The clean coal people had an "I believe" spot that looked and felt like an Obama commercial.

There are multiple kinds of strategy a messager can apply to messaging. One is the kind I talked about earlier, where, in essence, you fit the people to the message - you pick the people who will be receptive to the kind of message you want to send. This is the other kind, in which you fit the message to the people. My intuition is that the second kind is inherently less effective: anyone can do it, and it's unclear that one message fitted to a given audience is likely to be more sticky than another (whereas a message targeted at a group that is particularly prone to be receptive to that message may be very sticky indeed). If true, this is likely to be especially true of messages like the one described above, for the reason described above: whatever is catchy about a message targeted to many people at once is also likely vague enough to be easily imitated by competitors.

This is of course one of the many areas tangential to what I'm working on where I end up thinking, "There's probably research out there on this concept already," but don't actually have the time to follow up, since it is, in fact, tangential.

A thing I did not know...

Current reading: Smart Power, by Peter Fox-Penner.

Here's a random fact I did not know: power demand and power generation in a power system have to be kept in balance. There has to be as much power going in as there is coming out - neither more nor less. That makes sense. What I didn't realize (though it's logical when you think about it) is that this is actually achieved by turning off and on power plants. During slack demand, there are power plants that are shut off or idling. When peak demand hits, these plants get turned on. The plants that run all the time are the ones that are most efficient; the plants that get turned on to meet peak demand are the less efficient, often older plants which cost more money to run. This is the physical reason behind variable power pricing: peak power is not simply subject to higher demand, it's more expensive to produce.

Other potential ways of balancing include consumption management through tactics like demand response pricing, energy storage within the system, and distributed generation - all of which are components of the so-called "smart grid", and all of which we haven't historically had the tools to do effectively.

Existential threats in negotiation

One of my bibles for climate negotiation research is Scott Barrett's Environment and Statecraft, which is a tome filled with a very, very great deal of discussion of the game theory that people have used to think about environmental negotiation. I've fought my way through one read of it, and it's one of those books that I'm clearly going to have to go through multiple times to make sure I've worked through it thoroughly.

Here's one initial thought, however. Barrett's game theoretic models suggest that when looking at multilateral environmental treaty-making, the ability to get more and more people to sign on is decreasing with relationship to the benefit of the environmental mitigation in question, and increasing with relationship to the cost of the mitigation. That is, the larger the benefits of mitigation action required by a treaty, the fewer signatories you'll get, while the greater the costs of mitigation, the more signatories you'll get.

This at first seems counter-intuitive (it did to me, at least) but I think the intuition is this: all parties are assumed to be behaving strategically. Parties know that if the benefits of mitigation are greater, they can more confidently assume that other actors will choose to mitigate in order to attain those benefits. Therefore, they can more confidently choose not to sign, planning to free-ride. Conversely, when the costs are higher, you need more total benefits to balance out costs (remember, the benefits of mitigation are assumed to be public goods, so each party to a treaty pays only for its own share but receives benefit equal to the total benefits created by all parties), and treaties will fail to occur if they don't get enough signatories. Since potential signatories know this and (we assume) desire the total potential payoffs from a successful treaty, more will sign, in order to reach the tipping point.

There's a wrinkle to this, though, that Barrett doesn't address but which I think is important to climate negotiations. That is that if parties are facing an existential threat, the benefits of mitigation are essentially infinite. Logically, therefore, by Barrett's model, if willingness to sign treaties decreases as size of benefits to mitigation increases, it should be nearly impossible to get countries to sign on to treaties in cases where the treaties deal with an existential threat. Each country should be able to confidently expect that, even absent a treaty, each other country must nonetheless rationally choose to take every possible action to mitigate, because if the risk of not doing so is an existential one, it would be suicidal not to. The implication of this is that persuasive tactics at the international level that involve emphasizing the possible existential nature of the costs of failure to mitigate (and hence the size of potential benefits to mitigation) could actually be counter-productive.

I'm not sure I believe this as a representation of how states think in general - I'm not convinced states will typically play chicken in this way. But I think there's a variant that's plausible that assumes ambiguity. Let's say you're a Chinese government official, and  you're negotiating with European diplomats over an emissions reduction treaty. The European officials, along with a bunch of Western NGOs, are busily trying to convince you that climate change represents an existential threat and therefore you should do something about it - in spite of the fact that it could damage you materially by slowing growth and destabilizing you politically. You believe in a general sense in the problem, but are uncertain how seriously you take the immediacy and scale of it. You're a rising world power and don't want to get played, either into taking action that isn't really necessary, or into taking on more than your share of efforts that are necessary (thus assuming a competitive disadvantage). You think it's entirely possible that your negotiating partners might be exaggerating their true beliefs about costs in order to convince you to cooperate.

Under these conditions, refusal to cooperate is potentially the right move strategically. If the threat is truely existential, then it would be rational for the Europeans to do everything in their power to mitigate, whether or not you cooperate. If the threat is truely existential, they will be forced into shouldering the higher costs of early-learning-curve action. If they do, you have learned something about the real seriousness of the threat (and avoided early high costs - a bonus!). If they don't, you've learned something else - namely, that their own actions suggest they are in fact misrepresenting their beliefs about the real magnitude of the threat.

Addendum on electoral strategy

Part of what motivated me to do the breakdown of legislators below is that I feel like there's been less strategic thinking by the environmental movement about this sort of thing than I would expect. Possibly I just haven't been exposed to it enough - I didn't come to the climate problem out of interest in environmentalism, but out of interest in international relations and negotiation, and my interest in domestic politics is a secondary effect of the fact that domestic politics constrain international negotiation - but I haven't noticed a lot of it floating around.

By contrast, the other side is certainly doing this, and at an even more fine-grained level. I'm currently reading Eric Pooley's The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth. Pooley describes the strategy of the Information Council on the Environment (ICE - see what they did there?), an organization involved in the anti-climate-action movement:

The ICE's goal, according to a strategy paper written by its pollster, was to 'reposition global warming as a theory (not fact)' by targeting 'older, less-educated males' and 'younger, lower-income women' in congressional districts that get their electricity from coal.

Fundamentally, getting a favorable vote on something controversial is a question of pulling together enough votes, and you do it in the context of a terrain of interests which influence which votes are easiest and hardest to move. Outside actors trying to move votes do best, I think, if they're responsive to the terrain they're working in. But it's not my impression that the environmental movement has gamed this out very much - perhaps because they don't see this as a strategic interaction but rather as a morally driven effort to disseminate the truth. From that point of view, truth is truth whether your district produces a lot of coal or not.

There may indeed be something to be said for that attitude. But I think the environmental movement is at this point losing the information war regarding climate change, and I wonder how much of that is due to facing more strategic approaches from the other side.

Domestic-level fossil-fuel interests

This began life meant to be a quick-hit post with a simple look at numbers; it ballooned into a post that was too long, and yet not long enough to actually do the subject justice. C'est la vie...

Something I've been trying to do better lately is understanding what the electoral strategy of climate politics looks like in the US. In a general sense, right now, it involves electing people friendly to environmental legislation. But some legislators are inherently more likely to be friendly than others. In theory, all legislators - regardless of party or personal inclination - should find it difficult to vote for climate legislation if they come from states with major stakes in fossil fuels. In particular, coal and oil producing states. So, looking at those:

The key coal states, in order of production as of 2000, are

Wyoming - 339 thousand tons of coal per year
West Virginia - 158 thousand tons of coal per year
Kentucky - 131 thousand tons of coal per year
Pennsylvania - 75 thousand tons of coal per year
Texas - 49 thousand tons of coal per year
Montana - 38 thousand tons of coal per year

After that, you have Illinois, Virginia, North Dakota, and Colorado, all between 29 and 33 thousand tons. For these states, particularly Illinois and Virginia with their larger economies, it's likely that the coal industry isn't decisively important, though it may have an effect.

The key oil states are:
Alaska - 665 thousand barrels per year
(80 percent of Alaska's economy comes from fossil fuels. An Alaskan senator simply can't vote for fossil fuels limitations.)
Texas - 393 thousand barrels per year
California - 240 thousand barrels per year.
Louisiana - 84 thousand barrels.

(Of these, it's pretty clear that in California's policy leanings haven't been too strongly influenced by its oil industry; if I did this analysis more seriously, I'd redo these numbers as percent-of-state-economy, which I'm pretty sure would wash California out, but I couldn't find a quick source for those numbers.)

So for emissions mitigation purposes, let's say you would expect to have a lot of trouble in 8 states: Wyoming, West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Texas, Montana, Alaska, and Louisiana.

But I'm not sure the facts bear this prediction out very strongly.

In the House, we can look at the vote on the Waxman-Markey climate bill. What we see there is that 85% of non-fossil-fuel-state Dems voted yes, while 66% of fossil-fuel-state Dems voted yes (there were only 8 Republican yes votes, none of them from fossil fuel states, so it's hard to say much about Republican votes other than the obvious observation that climate change doesn't align with the Republican platform).

So there's an effect, perhaps, but it's not as strong as I might have predicted. And the 8 fossil-fuel states are a pretty conservative bunch to start with; it's not really clear that the difference is due to anything more than general difference in local ideological center. In Texas, 9 out of 12 Democratic reps voted yes; if anything, that seems an impressive showing for a state as conservative as Texas. One might argue that the 19 fossil-fuel-state reps that voted yes had an effect on the bill, pulling it toward the center and away from stronger measures during negotiation for their votes. In fact, there's certainly some truth to that in an abstract sense, but given that there were 34 non-fossil-fuel-state Democrats who voted no (vs. 10 from fossil fuel states), it seems there were plenty of conservative Dems available to act as potential centrist weights even without the fossil fuel state reps.

The Senate is a little harder. There were eight senators from the fossil fuel states prior to the 2010 elections, and near as I can figure based on a quick pass, they break down like this, in terms of general attitude toward climate legislation (I've listed them in descending order of apparent enthusiasm):

YES or Lean YES:
Baucus (Montana)
Tester (Montana)
Casey (Pennsylvania)

MAYBE
Specter (Pennsylvania)
Begich (Alaska)

NO or Lean NO
Rockefeller (West Virginia) (could possibly be classed as a MAYBE)
Byrd (West Virginia) (could possibly be classed as a MAYBE)
Landrieu (Louisiana)

Only Landrieu is a really clear no; she voted against cloture on Lieberman-Warner. Byrd and Specter didn't vote. Begich wasn't in office yet. Baucus, Tester, Casey, and Rockefeller voted for cloture, but Rockefeller later signed a letter stating that he'd voted for cloture, supported climate action in general, but couldn't support final passage of Lieberman-Warner specifically. 10 senators signed this letter; of the 10, only Rockefeller was from a fossil-fuel state.

What this suggests to me is that within the fossil fuel group, there are 2-3 yes votes on climate legislation; 2-3 maybes that could be convinced under the right circumstances; and 2-3 no votes.

I frankly expected to see stronger effects on environmental voting. Initial thoughts on why not? Well, one could argue that Montana shouldn't be in the group; its coal production is the smallest of the group, though that's in the context of a small total state economy. If we remove Baucus and Tester from the Senate group, we remove the two strongest fossil fuel yes votes, and the effect looks stronger on the Senate side. On the House side, the solution is likely to look at the specific districts involved and see which, if any, are really involved in the fossil fuel industries in their states; most are in Pennsylvania and Texas, larger economies with many other contributing industries, and many of the Democrats are likely from urban areas that may not depend in obvious ways on fossil fuel production. In other words, the answer may simply be that the Democrats already have very few real holdings in fossil fuel producing areas, period.

Anyway. Next steps, when I get around to it: get fossil fuel numbers as a percentage of state economy and see how that affects the picture; look at individual House districts.

Energy subsidies

In the category of stuff you already knew, I love this chart on levels of subsidies for clean energy, corn ethanol, carbon capture, and fossil fuels:

Environmental Law Institute (www.eli.org/Program_Areas/innovation_governance_energy.cfm)

The take-away message: the US government is not simply doing less than it should be to support renewable energy. The US government is actively spending to support fossil fuels  relative to renewable energy ($70.2 billion vs. $12.2 billion). In fact, it’s spending to subsidize foreign fossil fuel production alone, relative to renewable energy: the Foreign Tax Credit (at $15.3 billion), is in and of itself larger than the amount spent on renewable energy.

How fast is China moving?

"China hits rocky road over diesel demand" doesn't sound like the most interesting thing you might read today, but I think it might be something I've been looking for for a while. Key quote: "The Chinese government is rationing electricity supply as it rushes to meet ambitious energy and environmental targets by the year's end, hence boosting demand for diesel, power generators, and even candles as the country scrambles for extra power."

There's been something of a narrative for a while that the Chinese, although unwilling to sign anything on the international treaty front, are nonetheless actually moving just about as fast as they can to curtail energy use. This is, I think, the story China itself would tell; and there's certainly a lot going on in China. But one also wants to be careful not to be diplomatically naive. It's in China's best interest to tell that story, but is it true? Could China move faster if it had incentives to do so? How would you tell the difference?

This is one possibility. If the Chinese government is pushing efficiency requirements so hard that companies are actually going off-grid and buying up diesel in quantities big enough to cause local diesel shortages and warrant international notice, it seems unlikely that there are a lot of easily accessed, unexecuted alternative efficiency measures available to them, at least in the short term.

In this case, it looks like it may be a temporary effect caused by a strong push to meet some targets - so it's not clear whether this is unavoidable crunch or just a failure to manage well over the long term resulting in a short term crisis. And you'd also want to look at whether companies had in fact made use of available efficiency measures before turning to local generation (if they hadn't, it would suggest there was just something broken about the process.) But in a general sense, spillover into costly stop-gap measures like this seems like the kind of evidence you might look for to assess whether reform was approaching its maximum rate or not.