The answer he was clearly looking for was “yes”—followed by specified steps to reach an explicit target, which could then be evaluated for feasibility. But that was not what he got.
Coal First
A few years ago, a Chinese-speaking friend and I hired a taxi to drive around Hebei, the Chinese province that surrounds Beijing. When the capital city set up for the 2008 Olympics, the government pushed out the scores of coal-powered utilities and factories that were polluting its air. Mostly, they moved to Hebei. The province ended up with many new jobs—and China’s dirtiest air. Because we were curious, we wanted to see what “China’s dirtiest air” looked like. I wondered if the mental images conjured by the phrase would prove to be exaggerated.
We hired a taxi for the day in Tangshan, Hebei’s biggest city. Visibility was at least a quarter mile—a good day, the driver told us. Haze gave buildings the washed-out look of an old photographic print. With the Olympics shift, formerly poor Tangshan had become China’s leading steel-manufacturing center. Now the edge of town held a murderer’s row of luxury-car dealerships: BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes, Lexus, Porsche. Most of the vehicles were displayed indoors. Those outside were covered with gray crud.
Rural Chinese are often reluctant to speak with foreign reporters. With good reason: local officials can be vindictive. We asked the driver to approach villagers who weren’t in sight of other villagers. Serving as translator, my friend would hop out, introducing himself while I hid in the back seat.
Coal was everywhere, people told us. One truck driver told me with a kind of mocking pride that we were breathing the world’s worst air. A university graduate in striped Hello Kitty socks remarked that every time she wiped her face the cloth had “black dirty stuff” in it. The stuff, she said, was PM2.5—techno-speak for aerosols that are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, the size most likely to lodge in the lungs. “Everybody is sick but the government would never report it,” she said. My friend and I gave a ride to a steelworker who told me that Tangshan had plans to clean itself up in thirty years or so. “We are a city of industry, a city of coal,” he said.
The high-speed train from Beijing to Shanghai crosses this part of Hebei on pylons thirty feet tall. Under the pylons, between power plants and factories, was a line of stunted vegetation. On this strip we saw an elderly shepherd who was urging his small flock of sheep and goats to eat the plants. The air made his animals sick, he told us. In late fall and early spring they always began to cough. He, too, got sick. Sometimes he was so sick he couldn’t rise from his bed and take his animals to the vet.
Coal-stained air is not confined to obscure locations in China’s flyover country. Designer anti-pollution face masks are increasingly common in great conurbations like Shanghai and Guangzhou. A company, Vogmask, sells masks on which companies can print their logos: smog as branding opportunity. Not long before my trip to Hebei, the 10 million inhabitants of the northeastern city of Harbin were enveloped by a tsunami of coal smog. Schools closed; people kept to their homes; highways shut down because drivers couldn’t see the road. During my visit I picked up a Beijing newspaper with a glossy ad insert for the city’s “first high-tech condominium project that realizes real-time control of PM2.5 levels.” The condo’s slogan: “Protect Your Lungs, We’re Taking Action!”
In the past few decades, China has lifted more than half a billion people out of destitution—an astonishing accomplishment. That advance was driven by industrialization, and that industrialization was driven almost entirely by coal. More than three-quarters of China’s electricity comes from coal. More coal goes to heating millions of homes, smelting steel (China produces nearly half the world’s steel), and baking limestone to make cement (China is responsible for almost half the world’s cement). In its frantic quest to industrialize, China burns almost as much coal as the rest of the world put together.
But that affluence has come with lethal concomitants. Outdoor air pollution in China, most of it from coal, contributes to about 1.2 million premature deaths per year, according to a major scientific study involving almost five hundred scientists in more than fifty nations. A Chinese-U.S.-Israeli research team has estimated that eliminating coal pollution in northern China would raise average life expectancy there by more than five years. (By contrast, wiping out all cancer would increase U.S. or European life expectancy by three years.) A “systematic review” in 2013 by ten Chinese researchers calculated that reducing PM2.5 to U.S. levels would cut the total death rate in big Chinese cities between 2 and 5 percent. A different way to say this is that in these places the side effects of breathing cause as many as one out of every twenty deaths.
Much the same is occurring in India. Already the world’s fastest-growing economy, India will become the world’s most populous nation (probably by 2022) and its biggest economy (possibly by 2048). It, too, runs on coal—with similar consequences. New Delhi, ringed by coal plants, is said to have the world’s most polluted air, worse than anything in China. India’s outdoor air pollution causes 645,000 premature deaths a year, according to a 2015 Nature study. Even in the United States, which uses less coal than other big nations, coal pollution leads to as many as 25,000 deaths per year.
Bear this all in mind when thinking about Senator Domenici’s question: What is the plan? The uncertainties about climate sensitivity make the question especially confounding. Sometime before the end of this century, if nothing changes, the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere will double from its pre-industrial level. If doubling carbon dioxide levels leads to a 2.7°F average temperature increase—the lower bound of the climate-sensitivity estimate—then the world has many decades to cut fossil-fuel use sharply. Societies can take their time and move carefully. But if doubling carbon dioxide levels causes a rise of 8.1°F, the transition must be much faster—a disruptive slam-down of the brakes. The two courses are completely different. What should societies do?
One way to chart a path, point out Wagner and Weitzman, the economists, is to look carefully at the climate-sensitivity estimates. When the IPCC says that the likely consequence of doubling carbon dioxide is a temperature rise between 2.7°F and 8.1°F, the scientists have a specific definition in mind for “likely.” Skipping the mathematical complexities, it boils down to saying that the scientists estimate there is a roughly two-thirds chance that the temperature rise will be between these two numbers. But that means there is a one-out-of-three chance that the effect will be outside this range. Very roughly speaking, this translates into a one-out-of-six chance that nothing much will happen—and a one-out-of-six chance of complete disaster, with chunks of the planet becoming nearly uninhabitable. That small but real chance of catastrophe is the key, Wagner and Weitzman argue.*9
On a personal level, people deal with this sort of risk all the time. They know that they face a small but real chance of personal calamity: a home robbery, a car accident, a cancer diagnosis. To manage the risk, people buy insurance. Insurance mitigates the consequences of terrible but unlikely problems. Few people are upset if they pay for fire insurance and their house does not burn down, or if they buy life insurance and fail to die. They happily invested money for security against the risk of disaster.
Managing risk is not entirely, or even primarily, a matter of hying to an insurance agency and signing a policy. Installing good locks and having a big dog are as much a form of managing the risk of burglary as buying theft insurance. Wearing a seat belt is far more effective at reducing the chance that a car crash will have catastrophic consequences than even the best auto insurance. For people in flood-prone areas, the same is true for sump pumps and flood insurance.
At the same time, people don’t buy insurance against every potential calamity. Homes can be made almost perfectly theft-proof by turning them into fortresses, but for most householders the costs would be high enough to force them to forgo other worthwhile goals, like building a nest egg for retirement or education. Instead, people seek to ward off major threats while sacrif
icing as few other goods as possible—get the biggest bang for the buck, to use the operant cliché. Best of all is when the insurance measure also accomplishes some other goal. Systems analysts call this “alignment.” One way of preventing break-ins is to install windows that are hard to open from the outside. These same windows seal the room better than loosely fitting windows, preventing drafts and thus both making the room more comfortable and lowering heating and cooling costs. The security goal aligns with the goal of making the building pleasant and cheap to use. Another example involves incandescent bulbs, which routinely set off fires because people drape towels and clothes over them. Replacing hot 100-watt incandescent lights with cool 15-watt LED lights cuts the risk of disaster at the same time that it cuts energy bills. In this way, LED lights are examplars of alignment, which is why architects embrace them.
Now look at the numbers for climate change. Humans produce four main types of climate-altering gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and a bunch of fluorine-containing gases (these have names like hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride). Of these, carbon dioxide is the focus of most concern. The other three types actually absorb more infrared radiation, molecule for molecule, but they don’t stay in the air as long (the exception is some of the fluoride-containing gases, but they are not yet present in large quantities). Methane has as much as eighty times the effect on climate as an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide, but a typical methane molecule will only remain in the atmosphere for ten to twenty years. Carbon dioxide molecules, by contrast, will keep floating about for centuries, even millennia. They are a problem that doesn’t go away.
About 85 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions come from fossil fuels, and about 80 percent of those come from just two sources: coal (46 percent) in its various forms, including anthracite and lignite; and petroleum (33 percent) in its various forms, including oil, gasoline, and propane. Coal and petroleum are used differently. Most petroleum is consumed by individuals and small businesses as they heat their homes and offices and drive their cars. By contrast, coal is mainly burned by heavy industry: coal produces the great majority of the world’s steel and cement and 40 percent of its electricity. The percentages vary from place to place, but the pattern remains. Coal provides about two-thirds of China’s energy, but almost all of it is used by big industries. Coal provides less than a fifth of U.S. energy, but again almost all of it is for industry. In both places petroleum consumption is on a smaller, more individual scale.
The implications are profound. Oil and gasoline use is diffuse, scattered in the global crowd. The world has 1.3 billion vehicles and perhaps 1.5 billion households. Cutting emissions from these cars and homes means changing the daily lives of billions of people, a mind-boggling thought. Reducing global coal emissions, by contrast, means dealing with 3,300 big coal-fired power plants and several thousand big coal-driven steel and cement factories.*10 The task is huge, but it is at least imaginable—and it targets almost half of the world’s emissions at a stroke. Fix coal, the idea is, then go, if needed, to the next thing. That’s the way to insure against the small but real possibility of catastrophe.
This is not a new insight. Economists have said the same for years. Nor is it a “war on coal.” Cars and trucks brought enormous benefits to people, but they also had lethal concomitants: fatal crashes and air pollution. To cut these harms, governments told automakers to put seat belts and catalytic converters in their vehicles. The companies griped about the costs, but governments were not waging a “war on cars.”
Focusing on coal emissions is cost-effective, because it aligns with several other problems. Even if climate change turns out to be less dangerous than activists fear, coal emissions are an urgent public health issue; controlling them could prevent several million premature deaths a year. Focusing on coal even aligns with other climate-change problems. In addition to pouring gouts of carbon dioxide into the air, coal plants release a fine soot that researchers call “black carbon.” Black-carbon aerosols rise high into the air; because they are black, sunlight heats them, which in turn heats the air around them. The particles interact with clouds, augmenting their ability to trap heat. The soot lands on glaciers, covering them with a thin black film. Rather than reflecting sunlight, smoky ice absorbs it and melts. Already the dusting of black is helping to liquefy the poles and the Himalayan icepack. Meltwater from the Himalayas provides water for about 1.5 billion people. In 2013 an international team calculated that black carbon was, after carbon dioxide, the most important contributor to climate change.
Logically speaking, there are two ways to control the side effects of coal: clean up coal plants or shut them down. Which tactic people prefer is a good indication of whether they are Wizards or Prophets, hard-path Borlaugians or soft-path Vogtians. Cleaning up coal is the province of Wizards, who extol a technology known as “carbon capture and storage,” or CCS. Conceptually speaking, CCS is simple: industries burn as much coal as before, but remove the pollutants. Already they filter out toxic gases. Now they extract carbon dioxide and pump it underground, where it is stored for eons.
The best-known carbon-capture technique is “amine scrubbing.” It involves bubbling the exhaust from burning coal through a solution of water and monoethanolamine (MEA). MEA is unpleasant: toxic, flammable, and caustic, with an acrid smell. But it bonds to carbon dioxide, separating it from the other gases in the exhaust. The process creates a new chemical compound called, uneuphoniously, MEA carbamate. The MEA carbamate and water are pumped into a “stripper,” where the solution is boiled or the pressure is raised. Heat or pressure reverses the reaction, breaking up the MEA carbamate into carbon dioxide and MEA. Carbon dioxide gushes out, ready for burial; MEA returns to combine with the next batch of coal exhaust.
Scaling up this process is not easy. Big power plants produce huge amounts of carbon dioxide, and need big structures to capture it: multistory metal towers festooned with pipes and valves. Constantly boiling a silo’s worth of toxic chemicals in a stripper requires a great deal of energy. Common estimates are that this kind of carbon capture will gobble 10 to 15 percent of a power plant’s output. Given that even the most efficient coal plants translate less than 50 percent of the energy in coal into electricity, deploying CCS means that power plants will consume 20 to 30 percent more of the black stuff—at minimum. Mitigating the environmental costs of digging up and burning coal in this way means digging up and burning even more coal.
The industry jargon for these costs is “parasitic.” (Sample usage, from an energy consultant: “Holy crap, the parasitics are awful.”) Often parasitic costs are estimated at $90 to $100 per ton of stored carbon dioxide. A single 500-megawatt power plant emits roughly 3 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. Arithmetic suggests that sticking all that gas from the world’s thousands of plants in the dirt would cost $2 trillion a year, a figure that doesn’t include the billions required to build the carbon-capture facilities in the first place. This back-of-an-envelope calculation rests on implausible assumptions: coal plants of identical size, no technical progress, no economies of scale, no plant conversions to lower-emission natural gas, and so on. But the overall conclusion—that carbon capture based on present technology faces big obstacles—is all too plausible.*11
The Wizardly argument for CCS boils down to: (1) the technology is new, and its cost will come down, as was the case with photovoltaics; (2) it is unwise and even unethical to assume that China, India, and other developing nations, having just built hundreds of big coal plants, will tear them down and replace them—they just don’t have the money. Thus the only hope for cutting coal emissions there is to deploy CCS.
CCS for existing coal plants is not enough. More than a billion people worldwide lack adequate access to electricity. Three hundred million of them live in India—a quarter of the nation’s population, generally rural and poor, the world’s biggest pool of the literally powerless. Most of these people use kerosene for lighting and burn wo
od or dung to cook food. Different groups have tried to estimate the fatalities from the fumes: between 500,000 and 1.3 million Indians a year, depending on the assumptions of the researchers. Providing power to these people is “a priority in every imaginable way—human, economic, and political,” says Navroz Dubash, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. Partly in consequence, India’s electricity demand is expected to double by 2030.
How will that power be provided? As of now, in theory, by coal. According to the World Coal Association, almost 2,400 more coal power-plant units are under construction or planned, though it is anyone’s guess how many will be built.
Wizards typically believe that a big increase in coal would be a mistake. But the answer is not to leave the hard path, but to improve it by going nuclear. Nuclear plants produce no carbon dioxide at all (except the emissions released in making the cement and steel for the plant and the exhaust of plant workers’ automobiles), which is why many technology-oriented environmentalists are ardent nuke boosters. Prominent examples in the English-speaking world include Steven Chu, futurist Stewart Brand, biologist Tim Flannery, planetary scientist James Lovelock, climate researchers James Hansen and Jesse Ausubel, physicist Raymond Pierrehumbert, and environmental scientist John Holdren, science adviser to the Obama administration. “If you’re worried about climate change, and I am, nuclear is the greenest alternative,” Brand told me.
Nuclear power plants are extremely costly to build, but Wizards argue that putting CCS in coal plants drives up construction costs to the point where a new nuclear plant and a new coal plant have about the same price tag. And once they are running, most scientists say, nuclear plants have proven more reliable, cheaper, and safer than coal plants. Because terms like “reliable,” “cheaper,” and “safer” can be vague, let me explain what engineers and physicists mean by them. In general, these people support nuclear power, so what follows is effectively a positive brief for it.
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