Why bury coal?
Leaving coal and other fossil fuels unburned and underground is very important for the long-term safety and prosperity of humanity, as well as the future of natural ecosystems. The same is true for unconventional fossil fuels like oil sands and shale gas.
There are three major reasons to leave coal underground, along with unconventional oil and gas:
1) Burning all the coal could produce catastrophic climate change
If you ask a scientist how much more CO2 do you think we should add to the atmosphere, the answer is going to be none. All the rest is economics.
-Gavin A. Schmidt
Because of climate change, coal is no longer a source of energy that can be acceptable for humanity. Its continued use is incompatible with the stable climate upon which human prosperity and civilization depends.
The amount of warming the Earth will experience depends fundamentally on what portion of the planet’s total stock of fossil fuels humanity chooses to burn. The total quantity of carbon dioxide emissions that could result from burning different reserves of fossil fuels is shown here:
The higher the bar, the higher the risk for humanity and for natural systems.
Burning all that coal would produce far more warming than burning the world’s stocks of conventional oil and gas. Furthermore, the warming caused by burning those fuels could be enough to melt permafrost and methane hydrates, releasing the carbon dioxide in the rightmost bar. That possibility – known as runaway climate change – could conceivably render the Earth uninhabitable. Because of this risk, and the less severe but more probable risk of dangerous climate change of more than 2°C of warming, coal is dead as a safe and acceptable source of energy. Now, it needs to be buried by people who have the foresight to understand the risk it creates.
2) Coal, oil, and gas are non-renewable resources
Even ignoring climate change, humanity cannot rely on fossil fuels forever. If they are not abandoned, they will eventually run out and, long before that, people will find themselves expending more and more energy and wealth to track down the world’s most inaccessible fossil fuel reserves, located in places like the Arctic and the deep sea.
Even coal, the most abundant fossil fuel, is far from limitless in its quantity. Indeed, if coal use keeps increasing at 3.4% per year, the world’s reserves may only last for 60 years.
Moving beyond fossil fuels offers humanity the opportunity to end our dependence on an energy reserve that was inevitably going to run out anyhow. The question is not whether we make transition to renewable forms of energy, but when. For all manner of reasons, we stand to benefit from starting that transition immediately and with enthusiasm.
When you consider all the factors, coal costs more than people think. That cost includes deaths from air pollution, the destruction wrought by coal mining, the risks being imposed on future generations by greenhouse gas emissions, and more. These costs do not appear on utility bills or on the financial reports of coal companies, but they do have a concrete impact on real human lives and the integrity of natural systems.
In short, if we want a planet that remains hospitable to human beings, we need to bury coal. At the same time, we can benefit in many ways from doing that. The purpose of this site is to help that happen.
Most of the information on this page is summarized in this five minute video presentation.
The objections category contains posts that respond to the various counterarguments to the points above.
Last updated: 1 November 2010
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Simply using fossil fuels more efficiently will not solve our problems.
Here is a nice quote that relates to why we need to leave fuels unburned, not just burn fuels more efficiently:
Humanity’s cumulative emissions are what will determine how much climate change we experience, not how efficiently we burned this or that bit of coal, oil, or natural gas.
This chart from James Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren shows the size of possible emissions from global coal reserves, compared to those from oil and gas:
Notably, it does not include all forms of unconventional oil and gas, such as the oil sands, oil shales, and methane clathrates. Those reserves are substantial, and thus carry with them an additional risk of inducing catastrophic or runaway climate change.
“The resulting imperative is an immediate moratorium on additional coal-fired power plants without CCS. A surge in global coal use in the last few years has converted a potential slowdown of CO2 emissions into a more rapid increase. But the main reason for the proposed moratorium is that a CO2 molecule from coal, in effect, is more damaging than a CO2 molecule from oil. CO2 in readily available oil almost surely will end up in the atmosphere, it is only a question of when, and when does not matter much, given its long lifetime. CO2 in coal does not need to be released to the atmosphere, but if it is, it cannot be recovered and will make disastrous climate change a near certainty.
The moratorium must begin in the West, which is responsible for three-quarters of climate change (via 75% of the present atmospheric CO2 excess, above the pre-industrial level), despite large present CO2 emissions in developing countries. The moratorium must extend to developing countries within a decade, but that will not happen unless developed countries fulfill their moral obligation to lead this moratorium. If Britain should initiate this moratorium, there is a strong possibility of positive feedback, a domino effect, with Germany, Europe, and the United States following, and then, probably with technical assistance, developing countries.
A spreading moratorium on construction of dirty (no CCS) coal plants is the sine quo non for stabilizing climate and preserving creation. It would need to be followed by phase-out of existing dirty coal plants in the next few decades, but would that be so difficult? Consider the other benefits: cleanup of local pollution, conditions in China and India now that greatly damage human health and agriculture, and present global export of pollution, including mercury that is accumulating in fish stock throughout the ocean.”
Why ending coal emissions is 80% of the climate solution
1. The amount of carbon contained in coal is vastly more than in oil and gas.
2. Coal use is more concentrated and therefore more controllable than oil and gas
This chart does include a bar for unconventional oil and gas stocks, though it does not indicate how high it could be:
It just shows that estimated reserves of oil sands, shale oil, and methane hydrates could collectively emit more greenhouse gases than all the world’s coal reserves, and far more than conventional oil and gas reserves could.
“A market-based system would create decentralized incentives to do the right thing, and that’s the only way it can be done.
That said, some specific rules may be required. James Hansen, the renowned climate scientist who deserves much of the credit for making global warming an issue in the first place, has argued forcefully that most of the climate-change problem comes down to just one thing, burning coal, and that whatever else we do, we have to shut down coal burning over the next couple decades. My economist’s reaction is that a stiff license fee would strongly discourage coal use anyway. But a market-based system might turn out to have loopholes — and their consequences could be dire. So I would advocate supplementing market-based disincentives with direct controls on coal burning.“
Am I an activist for caring about my grandchildren’s future? I guess I am
Concerted action to tackle climate change will happen only if the public demands it for the sake of future generations
James Hansen
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 August 2010 16.59 BST
What had become clear was that our planet is close to climate tipping points. Ice is melting in the Arctic, Greenland and Antarctica, and on mountain glaciers worldwide. Many species are stressed by environmental destruction and climate change. Continuing fossil fuel emissions, if unabated, will cause sea levels to rise and species to become extinct beyond our control. Increasing atmospheric water vapour is already magnifying climate extremes, increasing overall precipitation, causing greater floods and stronger storms.
Stabilising climate requires restoring our planet’s energy balance. The physics is straightforward. The effect of increasing carbon dioxide on Earth’s energy imbalance is confirmed by precise measurements of ocean heat gain. The principal implication is defined by the geophysics, by the size of fossil fuel reservoirs. Simply put, there is a limit on how much carbon dioxide we can pour into the atmosphere. We cannot burn all fossil fuels. Specifically, we must (1) phase out coal use rapidly, (2) leave tar sands in the ground, and (3) not go after the last drops of oil.
Actions needed for the world to move on to clean energies of the future are feasible. The actions could restore clean air and water globally. But the actions are not happening.
“No. No. No to geologists and other “pundits” decoupling the issues of human energy systems from climate change.
Without the possibility of catastrophic climate change radically changing Earth’s environment in decades to a hundred years or so, creating a new global energy system would be a problem for the 22nd Century plausibly tackled in a leisurely way without failure posing an existential threat.
Plenty of coal to run high tech civilization at least another hundred years even with substantial economic growth by burning it in conventional coal-fired electric plants and making liquid hydrocarbon automotive fuels from it. It is planet-transforming climate change — from coal-burning plants now on track to be built by China, India and the U.S. that, de facto, will become the energy infrastructure of the middle and late 21st century — that makes a push to urgently transform of our energy system away from fossil fuels the challenge of the century.
Revelle and Seuss’s “Grand Geophysical Experiment” — they had the luxury in the late ’50s to define it in that geologically detached way — will dump thousands of gigatonnes of carbon from gas, oil and coal into the atmosphere as CO2 as they are burned for energy a million times faster than these fossil fuels were made by nature.
This pulse, and its impact on climate, is precisely the problem. It is what drives the need to research, develop, demonstrate and deploy carbon-neutral and sustainable energy sources to power civilization in the coming decades to the end of the century. Of course, the impacts of human climate change will persist over deep geological time, just as for example, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum warming did. But the urgency for energy policy is very near term. Surely geologists should be able to understand how different time scales affect the planetary environment. The human fossil fuel CO2 emissions spike is more like an asteroid impact than the slow degassing of CO2 from metamorphic decarbonization of carbonate rocks at subduction zones by the slow grinding away of plate tectonics.”
“The second is to argue, as the current government does, that new reserves will help to bridge the gap between old and new technologies: Lord make me chaste, but not yet. But it doesn’t matter how much renewable energy we produce: if we burn more than 60% of current fossil fuel reserves we get more than two degrees of warming. If we burn all of them and still look for more, we’ll get four, five or six degrees, regardless of our spending on nuclear power, wind or sunlight. You cannot stop climate breakdown with investment only. There needs to be disinvestment too. Developing new fossil fuel reserves also delays the transition to non-fossil energy, as it keeps the price of hydrocarbons down while ensuring that the value of green investments remains uncertain.”
Excellent graphic and discussion!
It has replaced this as my desktop background at home and at work.
“Lately science has shown us that contemporary industrial civilization is not sustainable. Maintaining our standard of living will require finding new ways to produce our energy and less ecologically damaging ways to produce our food. Science has shown us that Rachel Carson was not wrong.
This is the crux of the issue, the crux of our story. For the shift in the American environmental movement from aesthetic environmentalism to regulatory environmentalism wasn’t just a change in political strategy. It was the manifestation of a crucial realization: that unrestricted commercial activity was doing damage – real, lasting, pervasive damage. It was the realization that pollution was global, not just local, and that the solution to pollution was not dilution. This shift began with the understanding that DDT remained in the environment long after its purpose was served. And it grew as acid rain and the ozone hole demonstrated that pollution traveled hundreds or even thousands of kilometres from its source, doing damage to people who did not benefit from the economic activity that produced it. It reached a crescendo when global warming showed that even the most seemingly innocuous by-product of industrial civilization – CO2, the stuff of which plants depend – could produce a very different planet.
To acknowledge this was to acknowledge the soft underbelly of free market capitalism: that free enterprise can bring real costs – profound costs – that the free market does not reflect. Economists have a term for these costs – less reassuring than Friedman’s “neighbourhood effects.” They are “negative externalities”: negative because they aren’t beneficial and external because they fall outside the market system. Those who find this hard to accept attack the messenger, which is science.
We all expect to pay for the things we buy – to pay a fair cost for goods and services from which we expect to reap benefits – but external costs are unhinged from benefits, often imposed on people who did not choose the good or service, and did not benefit from their use. They are imposed on people who did not benefit from the economic activity that produced them. DDT imposed enormous costs through the destruction of ecosystems; acid rain, secondhand smoke, the ozone hole, and global warming did the same. This is the common thread that ties these diverse issues together: they were all market failures. They are instances where serious damage was done and the free market seemed unable to account for it, much less prevent it. Government intervention was required. This is why free market ideologues and old Cold Warriors joined together to fight them. Accepting that by-products of industrial civilization were irreparably damaging the global environment was to accept the reality of market failure. It was to acknowledge the limits of free market capitalism.”
Oreskes, Naomi and Erik Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. p.237-8 (hardcover)
“Governments must recognize this stark fact: burning all fossil fuels would increase carbon dioxide to more than 550ppm and create a different planet – a desolate, ice-free planet with sea levels 75 metres higher than today.”
-James Hansen
Hey, what’s the source of that excellent (or rather terrifying) graphic comparing potential emissions from different sources including non-conventional?
I am trying to find exactly where I got it from. I think a similar or identical chart is in Storms of my Grandchildren. One scholarly source on Hansen’s general argument:
Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?
Authors: J. Hansen (1 and 2), M. Sato (1 and 2), P. Kharecha (1 and 2), D. Beerling (3), R. Berner (4), V. Masson-Delmotte (5), M. Pagani (4), M. Raymo (6), D. L. Royer (7), J. C. Zachos (8) ((1) NASA GISS, (2) Columbia Univ. Earth Institute, (3) Univ. Sheffield, (4) Yale Univ., (5) LSCE/IPSL, (6) Boston Univ., (7) Wesleyan Univ., (8) Univ. California Santa Cruz)
Subjects: Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph)
Journal reference: Open Atmos. Sci. J. (2008), vol. 2, pp. 217-231
DOI: 10.2174/1874282300802010217
Cite as: arXiv:0804.1126v3 [physics.ao-ph]
Storms of My Grandchildren
James Hansen
Scroll down to: “FIGURE 22. Fossil fuel and net land-use emissions (1751-2008).
(This date was incorrect in the first printing of “Storms”.)
(Data from Hansen et al., “Target Atmospheric CO2.” See sources
for chapter 8.)
Also in PDF.”
That’s still not the one with the estimated ‘Other’ bar, with tar sands, shale oil, and methane hydrates. I will keep hunting for the source of that version.
Does anyone have a paper copy of Storms on hand? Mine has been lent out.
THE natural processes which dispose of carbon dioxide are, in aggregate, rather slow, which means that an increase in the atmosphere’s carbon-dioxide level will, left to itself, last a long time. David Victor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, has a keen eye for such simple basics and the uncomfortable ways they may fit together. He sees this one as underlying all three of the things that make climate change a particularly pernicious sort of problem.
In the face of such slow removal, the level of the gas can’t be lowered simply by stabilising the rate of emission; instead emissions must be cut nearly to zero. Because the harm the gas does is slow and cumulative, the benefits for any such cuts in emission will be delayed and uncertain, whereas the costs are all up front. And gas’s longevity means it is spread more or less evenly around the world, with the result that the fate of a country’s climate depends not on its own emissions, but on those of the world as a whole. A challenge that requires fundamental shifts in the energy economy for the sake of benefits that will be both a long time coming and subject to a pernicious free-rider problem was never going to be an easy one to solve. Little surprise that the world isn’t up to it.
‘Huge’ fish kill, power plants linked
Toll at U.S. generating station water intakes called astronomical
Doug Schmidt, The Windsor Star
…
Meisenheimer said his organization’s members have long known that power plants are guilty of killing large numbers of adult and juvenile fish, larvae and eggs -they just didn’t know how high.
The numbers, according to an investigation by the Chicago Tribune, are staggering and represent a threat not only to commercial and sport fisheries, but to the Great Lakes ecosystem as a whole. Accessing industry reports through the Freedom of Information Act, the Tribune discovered that numerous older power plants have been exempted from environmental regulations designed to prevent enormous industrial fish kills. These older plants, employing socalled “once-through” cooling, pump massive amounts of water from lakes and rivers through the screens of water intake systems, some so powerful they could fill an Olympic swimming pool in less than a minute.
Young fish “have to run the gauntlet of these generating stations -huge numbers get sucked in,” said Meisenheimer.
The FirstEnergy Bay Shore coal plant on the Maumee River shoreline near Toledo, Ohio, for example, kills an estimated 46 million adult fish annually, as well as 2.4 billion eggs, larvae and young fish. Not far away, at the mouth of another important Lake Erie tributary, the Monroe coal plant in Michigan kills more than 25 million fish and almost a half-billion fish eggs and other organisms each year.
The Maumee, one of the Great Lakes’ most biologically productive rivers, is the source of probably “as much as a third” of all the walleye in Lake Erie, said Meisenheimer. This year’s Ontario quota for walleye, a valuable commercial catch, is about one million fish, down substantially from the high of 3.5 million in 2003.
Schmidt,G.A., Ruedy,R.A., Miller, R.L. and Lacis,A.A. 2010. Attribution of the present day total greenhouse effect. JGR 115, D20106, doi:10.1029/2010JD014287, 2010; Lacis,A.A., Schmidt,G.A., Rind,D. and Ruedy, R.A. 2010. Atmospheric CO2: Principal control knob governing Earth’s temperature. Science 330:356-359.
Two recent studies confirm that while only 25 percent of the Earth’s planetary greenhouse effect is caused by the presence of long lived greenhouse gases (particularly CO2), the natural greenhouse effect would collapse without these gases. Furthermore, CO2 concentrations are the primary control for the magnitude of this effect.
Public discussions about the natural greenhouse effect and climate sensitivity to rising CO2 concentrations often indicate a misunderstanding of the roles of long lived greenhouse gases (LLGHGs) relative to those of water vapour and cloud feedbacks within the climate system. Two new studies undertaken by scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies have provided some updated estimates for these roles and reinforce the central role of LLGHGs in the greenhouse effect. In one of these, a team of scientists led by Gavin Schmidt undertake a review of related scientific literature and use the radiation component of their GISS global climate model to examine the role of each of the key components of the greenhouse effect for current and 2xCO2 conditions. They find that for current conditions, water vapour represents 50% of the effect, clouds 25% and CO2 20%. The remaining five percent is due to the minor roles played by other radiation absorbers. While the total effect increases significantly under doubled CO2 conditions, the ratios essentially remain the same. The second study, led by Andrew Lacis, emphasizes the importance of the initial radiative forcing caused by CO2 and the other minor LLGHGs in sustaining the natural greenhouse effect and in causing changes in its magnitude. They show that, without this initial forcing, the greenhouse effect would collapse, leaving the Earth a frozen planet. Increases in CO2 are also the primary driver of enhanced greenhouse effects and the resulting rise in surface temperatures. That is, while the roles of water vapour and cloud effects are very important in the net greenhouse effect, they function as feedbacks rather than primary drivers of change.
Summary courtesy of Environment Canada
Davis, S.J., K. Caldeira, and H.D. Matthews. 2010. Future CO2 emissions and climate change from existing energy infrastructure. Science 10 September, 2010 Vol 328 pp 1330-1333.
The long lifetime of existing transportation and energy infrastructure means that continued emissions of CO2 from these sources are likely for a number of decades. This ‘infrastructural inertia’ alone is projected to produce a warming commitment of 1.3°C above the pre-industrial era. This result emphasizes that extraordinary measures will be required to limit emissions from new energy and transportation sources if global temperature is to be stabilized below 2°C.
Climate modeling has demonstrated that even if atmospheric composition was fixed at current levels, continued warming of the climate would occur due to inertia in the climate system. This form of climate change commitment has become widely recognized. Davis et al. focus attention on inertia in human systems, by asking ‘what CO2 levels and global mean temperature would be attained if no additional CO2-emitting devices (e.g., power plants, motor vehicles) were built but all the existing CO2-emitting devices were allowed to live out their normal lifetimes?”. Barring widespread retrofitting or early decommissioning of existing infrastructure, these committed emissions represent ‘infrastructural inertia’. The authors developed scenarios of global CO2 emissions from existing infrastructure directly emitting CO2 to the atmosphere for the period 2010 to 2060 (with emissions approaching zero at the end of this time period) and used the University of Victoria Earth System Climate Model to project the resulting changes in atmospheric CO2 and global mean temperature. Projections with low, mid and high emissions scenarios led to projected global average warming of 1.3°C (1.1° to 1.4°C) above the pre-industrial era. Since new sources of CO2 are bound to be built in the future in order to satisfy growing demands for energy and transportation, the committed warming from existing infrastructure makes clear that satisfying these demands and achieving the 2°C target of the Copenhagen Accord will be an enormous challenge.
Summary courtesy of Environment Canada
An Underground National Park
July 19, 2011
To prevent climate breakdown, we need to declare most of the fossil fuels in the earth’s crust off-limits.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 19th July 2011
Earth’s Climate History: Implications for Tomorrow
By James E. Hansen and Makiko Sato — July 2011
The past is the key to the future. Contrary to popular belief, climate models are not the principal basis for assessing human-made climate effects. Our most precise knowledge comes from Earth’s paleoclimate, its ancient climate, and how it responded to past changes of climate forcings, including atmospheric composition. Our second essential source of information is provided by global observations today, especially satellite observations. which reveal how the climate system is responding to rapid human-made changes of atmospheric composition, especially atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). Models help us interpret past and present climate changes, and, in so far as they succeed in simulating past changes, they provide a tool to help evaluate the impacts of alternative policies that affect climate.
Paleoclimate data yield our best assessment of climate sensitivity, which is the eventual global temperature change in response to a specified climate forcing. A climate forcing is an imposed change of Earth’s energy balance, as may be caused, for example, by a change of the sun’s brightness or a human-made change of atmospheric CO2. For convenience scientists often consider a standard forcing, doubled atmospheric CO2, because that is a level of forcing that humans will impose this century if fossil fuel use continues unabated.
We show from paleoclimate data that the eventual global warming due to doubled CO2 will be about 3°C (5.4°F) when only so-called fast feedbacks have responded to the forcing. Fast feedbacks are changes of quantities such as atmospheric water vapor and clouds, which change as climate changes, thus amplifying or diminishing climate change. Fast feedbacks come into play as global temperature changes, so their full effect is delayed several centuries by the thermal inertia of the ocean, which slows full climate response. However, about half of the fast-feedback climate response is expected to occur within a few decades. Climate response time is one of the important ‘details’ that climate models help to elucidate.
Total conventional fossil fuel emissions (purple) and 50% of unconventional resources (blue)
Source
This chart from this IPCC presentation re-affirms the above – namely that coal and unconventional oil and gas are the fossil fuels to worry about most, from the perspective of avoiding dangerous climate change:
Projections of when temperature change will exceed 2 °C above pre-industrial levels
Manoj Joshi, Ed Hawkins, Rowan Sutton, Jason Lowe & David Frame
Nature Climate Change 1, 407–412 (2011) doi:10.1038/nclimate1261
Published online 23 October 2011
Climate change projections are usually presented as ‘snapshots’ of change at a particular time in the future. Instead, we consider the key question ‘when will specific temperature thresholds be exceeded?’ Framing the question as ‘when might something happen (either permanently or temporarily)?’ rather than ‘what might happen?’ demonstrates that lowering future emissions will delay the crossing of temperature thresholds and buy valuable time for planning adaptation. For example, in higher greenhouse-gas emission scenarios, a global average 2 °C warming threshold is likely to be crossed by 2060, whereas in a lower emissions scenario, the crossing of this threshold is delayed by up to several decades. On regional scales, however, the 2 °C threshold will probably be exceeded over large parts of Eurasia, North Africa and Canada by 2040 if emissions continue to increase — well within the lifetime of many people living now.
Here’s all you ever really need to know about CO2 emissions and climate:
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