US Drastically Cuts Carbon Emissions

Good job, guys. Well done. Keep it up.

I think Americans deserve about 1,000 gold stars each for cutting their carbon emissions to 1994 levels. Too bad Obama didn’t mention this in his speech last week. A substantial number of Americans have made small and large lifestyle changes in an effort to reduce their carbon footprint. Surely this deserves some acknowledgement. That’s how you get people to continue appropriate behavior, by acknowledging and rewarding it.

Curious the corporate media didn’t mention it either in their coverage of the President’s “groundbreaking” climate initiative. However both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Bloomberg’s Sustainable Energy in America 2013 Factback confirm it: US CO2 emissions for 2012 were the lowest they have been since 1994. This is quite a remarkable accomplishment, especially since the US is one of the few developed countries without a national climate policy (until last week).

Typically the business press attributes the drop in CO2 emissions to economic factors. They seem reluctant to acknowledge that (despite federal inaction) more than 1,000 US cities and many states signed up to the Kyoto Protocol (to reduce CO2 emissions to 7% below 1990 levels by 2012). The Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto Treaty Clinton signed in 1997. However thanks to a 2005 initiative by US Conference of Mayors, cities in every state committed to reduce their CO2 emissions.

Clearly economics also played a major role. Economic explanations for the drop in the US carbon footprint include

A reduction in overall economic activity due to the recession.
A reduction in automobile use due to higher gas prices.
The replacement of older coal-fired power plants with new ones run on cheaper and cleaner natural gas. Gas-fired power plants supplied 31 percent of US electricity in 2012, an increase of 9 percent from 2008.
A reduction in energy use in homes and commercial buildings, thanks to federal, state and local subsidies for energy efficiency measures.
A big jump in renewable energy generation due to cheaper component costs (e.g. Chinese solar photo voltaic cells).

Can the US Continue to Reduce Emissions?

The bad news is that the US is still the world’s second largest carbon emitter, behind China. Moreover the Department of Energy forecasts that CO2 emissions will increase again as the economy recovers. They predict a 2% increase for 2013 and a 0.7 percent increase in 2014.

Eduardo Porter. writing in the New York Times, cites a November PricewaterhouseCoopers report recommending that the US can only avert catastrophic climate change through a six-fold improvement in the US rate of “decarbonisation.” He points out that US fuel economy performance for cars and trucks is still among the worst in the developed world. Plus only 7 percent of the nation’s energy comes from renewable sources, which is much lower than in other advanced nations.

Also as Russell McClendon reminds us in Forbes,  the replacement of coal with natural gas in power plants is extremely controversial. Although burning natural gas produces half the carbon emissions of coal, there are major environmental and health hazards linked to fracking, the technology used to extract natural gas from shale formations. Fracking is associated with emissions of methane, an even more dangerous greenhouse gas, and hazardous groundwater contamination. Aging corroded gas pipelines present additional hazards of their own.

Will Obama’s Climate Initiative Reduce Emissions?

A lot depends on whether the President gives the go ahead to the Keystone XL pipeline. This would transport tar sands oil from Canada to Gulf Coast refineries. Tar sands oil is the dirtiest fossil fuel there is. Owing to the immense amount of energy used to extract it, Climate Progress estimates the Keystone pipeline will increase carbon emissions by as much as 51 coal-powered plants.

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the Keystone XL southern extension is already 75 % complete, thanks to an executive order Obama signed in March 2013.