Forget what you know about carbon emissions

Governments around the globe are firming up their positions of climate change issues prior to the UN discussions in December in Copenhagen.

But some of the newest technologies coming out of research institutions such as the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego have the potential to render some of those decisions obsolete.

Scripps scientists are developing the tools to pinpoint the source of emissions, potentially making carbon taxes a more feasible instrument than cap-and-trade systems. Another Scripps researcher is highlighting a phenomenon that calls for cheap modifications to diesel engines and factories that could take a 15 percent hit out of today's greenhouse emissions—if only some of the wording behind emissions regulations can be altered.

Tony Haymet, director of Scripps, says the U.S. has some catching up to do on climate discussions, or it risks being left out of the equation.

Haymet spoke to the Cleantech Group about the newest technologies changing the game in greenhouse gas measurement, reduction, sequestration and prevention.

You spoke at the Cleantech Forum San Francisco about the of the possibility of a curtain that could show the CO2 an industry, company or state is actually emitting (see What’s on your cleantech innovation wish list?). What technology is available now?

We can only do a state, and it’s a virtual curtain, but instead of just measuring global CO₂, and saying the global CO₂ concentration is 390 parts per million, it would be a way of seeing what California’s contribution is to that global quantity.

How do you measure that?

The technology that has been developed at Scripps is a combination of measuring devices with computer program. It’s basically a weather program that runs backwards five or seven days, so it tells you where that air has come from.  And so this idea has been tested out by Professor Ray Weiss, he’s published paper on a post-Montreal refrigerant, a gas that didn’t exist before we got rid of CFCs, and so we know it was generated by humans. He’s been able to sit at Trinidad Head in Northern California and watch which air pockets contain that gas, and which don’t. There may be other technologies out there. I’m just familiar with one technology. The fact that someone’s figured out how to do it usually means a lot of people are about to figure out how to do it.

That type of technology changes the game because it’s good to know. It remains to It remains to be seen whether this technology can be brought down to a smaller spatial scale. If we could bring it down to the L.A. basin, what could we learn from it and what would we be able to do with that kind of data? It’s all about knowing greenhouse gas emissions at a more local scale instead of a single number for the globe. It invites the question: How small we can go? That data opens the door for other kinds of regulatory systems and rewarding people that make more than their share of cuts and leaning harder on people that don’t.

So between a carbon tax and carbon trading system, which do you think is worth betting on at this point?

I think that both a cap-and-trade system and a carbon tax are quickly effective means of reducing CO₂ emissions. I happen to come down on the side of a carbon tax because of several reasons. The first is simplicity. If CO₂ isn’t going down fast enough you raise the tax. We have good experience with that. If you tax cigarettes, we know that people stop smoking. If you tax alcohol, people buy less. If you tax very expensive cars, as some countries have, people buy fewer of those cars. It’s a well tested fairly blunt instrument. How much carbon people burn is very easy to calculate: it’s how much gas you buy at the gas pump and how much electricity you use at home, so there’s no big monitoring system that’s necessary to put in place.

My main point is it’s very easy to see how innovation is good for that system, so if you are smart enough to  figure out a way to make energy without making CO₂ you can explain to a customer how much energy they will save because they don’t have to pay the CO₂ tax. It’s a brilliantly transparent way of getting innovators in the field. In a cap and trade system the role of innovation is quite murky, in fact in some cap and trade systems like fisheries it’s actually a problem when someone has an innovation. Also with cap and trade systems you have to verify people are doing what they say they are doing, so you need elaborate machinery presumably at the government level that actually verifies a company that says it’s going to emit a certain number of tons of CO₂ actually does that, and I’m viscerally opposed to those kind of bureaucracies.

Having said that, so far the carbon tax losing out to the cap and trade system. Members of the U.S. Congress have announced they’re going to have a cap and trade bill ready by the middle of the year (see Obama administration could fast track cap-and-trade, RPS in '09). Europe already has one, California has one, RGGI the Northeast consortium has been auctioning off credits for their cap and trade system. Australia is about to implement a very complicated system where every industry has a special deal.

But the European system is in trouble because of the economic downturn (see Indian firms drop carbon trading plans in favor of renewable projects). The price has plummeted to $9 a ton. You really need system that works in economic up times and down times, and a tax is certainly that. I kind of like to call it a user fee, but the common language is tax.

You also mentioned that carbon soot is the low hanging fruit of the emissions-reduction sector. It’s easily captured but responsible for about 10 percent of the global warming problem sector. Why don’t you think carbon soot is part of the discussion?

I think it’s too new. I think it’s great thing to do. I hope we do it; I’m sure eventually we will. My argument is I think it's the first thing we should do.

It’s relatively recently that [Scripps atmospheric scientist V.] Ramanathan has started to prove to the rest of us that this is really a major second tier contributor to global warming. It’s not in the 1998 Kyoto Protocol. Once you have an international framework, it’s hard to upset it when someone comes along. When you have these rigid systems, it can actually take quite a while to change them.

There’s this sort of bizarre categorization of an international agreement is an agreement about greenhouse gases. This happened to be a greenhouse material that’s particles and an aerosol not a gas. Some people say you can’t even talk about it in that framework. That’s a legalistic approach, but it’s one that bears heavily on the minds of some of the negotiators. I hope people will get on board the bus and join Ramanathan and his colleagues in saying it’s something we have to deal with before December.

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