what is the future for global warming issue?

Global warming as a international environmental issue, needs global cooperation to lower its level. Besides all possible solutions mentioned before, there must be more solutions that can help us solve the problem. Further investments on scientific researches are essential. The key to global warming is that getting more involvements is crucial. When talking about the involvements, developed countries have more responsibility than less developed countries. Since they are stronger at financial and technological departments, developed countries should set a model that others can following them.

There is no doubt that the environment is becoming more and more valuable now. More struggles will form during solving process, so that a more powerful institution is expected to build up in the future; which has a strong control over all countries. At most circumstances, the role of the institution is expected to be a peace maker that help all the countries to solve the issue successfully and effectively.

On the other hand, personal actions are also very helpful to lower the threats of global warming. Education of younger generation can work more for the future of entire ecosystem.

Carbon tax: a price control mechanism

There is another alternative way to lower the speed of global warming process is a price-type control mechanism. To be more specific, it is internationally harmonized carbon tax. William D. Nordhaus’ study is on analyzing about “the relationship to ultimate targets, performance under conditions of uncertainty, volatility of induced carbon prices, the inefficiencies of taxation and regulation, potential for corruption and accounting finagling, and ease of implementation.”(26) His conclusion is that the price-type approaches work far more effective comparing with quantity-oriented mechanisms such as the Kyoto Protocol. 

         About the price approaches to climate change, the principle subject been discussed in the paper is called harmonized carbon taxes. It is “a dynamically efficient Pigovian tax that balances the discounted social marginal costs and marginal benefits of additional emissions.” (35) From the context of his research, under the price control approaches, there are no binding limits of the emission, which is different with the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol sets a limit level of carbon emission for all members. On the contrary, the price approaches is a widely agreement of countries that they have a carbon price or carbon tax as an internationally used penalty for carbon emissions. Under this approaches, there is no allowed emission quota, no trading between members of the emission; this represents that countries have to pay for every single ton of carbon dioxide that they produced. This is a powerful constraint for both developing countries and also developed countries. Under the price-type method, all countries now have to pay for what they have done to the environment by dumping extra carbon dioxide.

Nordhaus, William D. "To Tax or Not to Tax: Alternative Approaches to Slowing Global WarmingTo Tax or Not to Tax: Alternative Approaches to Slowing Global Warming." Review of Environmental Economics and Policy 1.1 (2007): 26-44. Print.

Benefits of the global carbon market

The greatest benefit of creating a global carbon market is that it can reduce the carbon emission effectively. This method can achieve a much better outcome than depend on individual country’s direct influence on reducing the carbon dioxide emission. Countries can seek financial subsidy from selling carbon emission quota if they have extra ones. On the other hand, most of the developed countries need more emission quota due to the out of date infrastructures and large footprint on average, which caused by the luxury living style. When we put poor countries together with developed countries, it is doubtless that, on average, those developed countries have much higher carbon emission on average. (Tavoni, 5394)

(http://www.csrplus.co.uk/blog/?p=3175)

The motivation of installing cleaner technology will be larger compared with no economic benefit, before the appearing of global carbon market. Under the global carbon market, even though it cost an enormous amount of money and also time, it is still worthwhile for developed countries to do so. This will help to increase the rate of updating existing infrastructures in developed countries, although the cost is remarkably high. If the developed countries do not replace the past and high energy concentrated infrastructures by new ones, penalty may be extremely high. The result is that they will have to pay for the penalty every year. The global market can provide an opportunity to balance out the carbon emission globally. At the same time, maintain a theoretical and rational emission level to promote human save the earth.

On the other hand, the carbon cycle will be fully open to all without any regulation, which may lead to the tragedy of maximum exploitation. When we look at the carbon market, a protocol like Kyoto Protocol is particularly valuable to the entire global economy chain. The protocol now imposes restrictions on most countries that are in the protocol; this will limit some expansion of the factories and similar industrial developments. At that time, not only it is extremely difficult to control the global carbon emission, but also prevent the situation become even worse. Giving a subsidy for countries that contribute lowering carbon emission and posing penalties on the ones that do not follow the rules, it works much better than only depend on consciousness especially when it applies to poor countries.

Tavoni, Massimo, Brent Sohngen, and Valentina Bosetti. "Forestry and the Carbon Market Response to Stabilize Climate." Energy Policy 35.11 (2007): 5346-353. Print.

Problems with the Global Carbon Market

           After the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, there are a lot of concerns about whether the protocol truly works for lowering the emission of makes the situation even worse. The key issues with the carbon market are how can we define the owners, products and modes of ownerships, when countries selling and buying emission credits from others. Lohmann talks about that the objects of accounting are difficult to choose, besides the ways to count and what should not be counted with the process of establishing the ownership. In his paper, he talks about the failures of the carbon market system.

(Source: http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/english/beyond/global/chapter14.html)

            The Kyoto Protocol “translate public concern about climate change into greenhouse gas emissions permit and credit prices. The earth’s carbon dump would gradually be made economically scarce through limits on its use imposed by states. A market would be built for the new resource by creating and distributing tradable legal rights to it. Bargaining would then generate a price that would reflect the value society placed on carbon dump use and ‘denote the financial reward paid to reduce …emissions’. Emitters who found ways of using the dump more efficiently could profit by selling their unused rights in it to more backward producers. Emitters could also develop new dumps. The market would ‘help society find and move along the least-cost pollution-reduction supply curve’ (Sandor et al., 2002, p. 57)” (Lohmann, 205).

He gave three study cases regarding of how people fail to frame the market in South America, South African and East Asia. The common points of these places are that they are new places of dumping carbon; these places are less developed countries and the level of acknowledgement on potential threats is extremely low. The result of these features is that the process of development is much slower than the expecting level due to inequality of getting other goods at the local level, comparing with developed countries.

For lowering carbon emission, the global carbon market is a great beginning to start with, though more supervision on every member and more details on regulations are needed. It is crucial to start fix problems instead of neglecting them. For a protocol that needed globally cooperation, there are a lot of issues that need to figure out, such as “Sellers and buyers have to be identified and isolated by simplifying attributions of causality or responsibility and developing instruments of ownership. The displacements and institutions needed for running the system—negotiating arenas, legal processes, communication mechanisms, measuring instruments, police—are formatted as ‘transaction costs’ (Coase, 1937), which are then minimized, and foundations laid for securities and commodities exchanges as well as futures and options markets.” (Lohmann, 210)

The very first thing is to quantify industrial emission of carbon dioxide when trading the emission quota as a commodity. This procedure requires vast amounts investments on measuring infrastructures. How to split the costs for that is crucial, especially most people think that the global north should take more responsibilities than global south, where more poor countries are located. Will the developed countries willing to spend extra money on lowering carbon emission, when most of them are struggling with getting off from economic crisis? There are six gases that mentioned in the Kyoto Protocol: CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride (Wara, 595), but the whole market system only concentrated on the emission of carbon dioxide. Further improvements may need to focus on the other five gases’ emission.

Reference: 

Lohmann, Larry. "Marketing and Making Carbon Dumps: Commodification, Calculation and Counterfactuals in Climate Change Mitigation." Science as Culture 14.3 (2005): 203-35. Print.

Wara, Michael. "Is the Global Carbon Market Working?" Nature 445.7128 (2007): 595-96. Print.

Depend on economic approach to lower the emission? (Part 2)

        CDM stands for Clean Development Mechanism. In 2003, Kyoto Protocol established a market for international trading and lowered carbon dioxide emission by giving subsidies to less developed countries. When developing countries adopting latest technologies that are environmentally friendly and saving more resources, they will receive payments for contributing reducing the emission level. When countries like China, India and South Africa successfully reduce their carbon release and is lower than the emission allowance that assigned on them, they have extra credits of emitting CO2. These credits can be sold to countries that need additional credits, especially for developed countries.


(More information about CDM: http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/mechanisms/clean_development_mechanism/items/2718.php)

       So why developed countries are the ones that buying extra credits and always exceed the limits? The key is that for replacing all facilities and infrastructures; this is extremely costly for them but to maintain these facilities, the total amount of CO2 emission will exceed the limits. (Nature, 2007) From my perspective to say, this is a loophole in the procedure for not getting developed countries’ involvements with the greatest number of emission released from them. Approaches to fix this problem need both less developed and developed countries participation. For all the countries, that following the protocol, further adjustments and legislation are required with the constantly increasing of population. 


        First, all countries particularly developing countries have to establish policies to slow down the growth rate of population. The roots for a lot of problems are the constantly increasing population. For developed countries, a time limit would be necessary for them to replacing previous by latest technologies. A somewhat longer period would offset the effects of replacing all facilities within a short time. Otherwise, the effects of lowering the carbon emission will not be so large with developed countries using their old technologies.

        In the end, lowering all emission quotas for everyone will be necessary for every country. This can urge the production from resource concentrated to technology concentrated which may be friendlier to the ecosystems.

(source: http://www.unep.org/publications/ebooks/kick-the-habit/Default.aspx?bid=ID0EUDAI#ID0EIEAI)

Depend on economic approach to lower the emission? (Part 1)

Economy approach is another way to reduce the carbon emission, which is a passive way to do. This posed on a restriction on every member that within the protocol. Depending on penalties instead of consciousness of human, who is ever in the market has to follow rules in order to maintain a position. When companies and countries selling and buying carbon emission permit from each other, it is more likely to produce a cost-effective market that may decrease the carbon emission level of all. It is an excellent start to replace the services that are unsuitable for environment and ecosystems by eco-friendly ones.

When we can make different things into equations that can weigh both sides at the same time, it is possible to exchange those things between places and people. Then, the carbon market forms from neoliberal philosophy. “If you know that saving the Amazon is better for the atmosphere than keeping one car off the road, then you ought to be able to calculate how many cars are equivalent to saving the Amazon. The calculations may be difficult, but I do not see why the problems should be insurmountable” (Dr Richard Tipper, Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management).

The global carbon market is a business that combines government regulation and trading permits in one market. This can prevent the market filled with too much government’s interventions that may cause market failures. The most significant protocol of the carbon market is the Kyoto Protocol, which is put into force on 2005. 37 countries following the protocol, they committed that they will cut the mission of six kinds of all six Kyoto Protocol gases: CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, per fluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride. 





Reference:  "Anarchism and the Peak oil argument - Anarkismo." Insert Name of Site in Italics. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2011 <http://www.anarkismo.net/article/2672>.

Recent news on global warming (1)

Skeptic finds he now agrees global warming is real

This paper talks about that Richard Muller, who is a brilliant physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years and finally changes his mind. The research that he did in two years is about the world’s surface temperatures. He searched books that are further back, which can trace, back to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.  Two main criticism are examined during the research. “One is that weather stations are unreliable; the other is that cities, which create heat islands, were skewing the temperature analysis.” (Borenstein) In this research that did by Muller, there is nothing about searching for evidence of causes for global warming neither more projection nor how the future situation will be.

He planned to find evidence to prove that the mainstream scientists are wrong about global warming. The result turns out that the temperature of the Earth is 1.6 degrees higher than 60 years before. This perfectly matches with NASA’s data.  With more and more researches under taken, leading skeptic scientists are no longer talking about that the globe is not getting warmer. They switch their central argument on how much the temperature raised by human influence. For skeptics, global warming is not a significant issue and it is worthless to spend money to prevent it happen. 

"Skeptic Finds He Now Agrees Global Warming Is Real - Yahoo! News." Yahoo! News - Latest News & Headlines. Web. 05 Nov. 2011.

“Clean-coal”---Pre combustion

Some ideas before get into further:

---integrated gasification combined cycle (from thermo to chemical)

---expose coal to controlled amounts of O2 and high temperature steam

---coal breaks down without burning and energy is released as hydrocarbon converting to CO, H and other gases

---a products from electricity to hydrogen generated

More details on pre-combustion technology:

            Pre-combustion technologies involve removing CO2 before combustion the coal and the only product is hydrogen. Why we need hydrogen? Obviously that the hydrogen combustion does not emit any CO2 the only product is H2O and release heat at the same time.  The whole idea is to achieve a zero emission of CO2 goal in the future. Once there is less inputs of CO2, we can maintain the current CO2 level and prevent any worse situation will happen.

            The process consists of three stages. Methane or gasified coal that any kind of hydrocarbon fuel or mixture is injected into power plants and converted into CO that is the first step. And then, the shift conversion happens: let CO react with water and then we get CO2. At last, the carbon that contained in CO2 is separated from the hydrogen. The CO2 will be transferred to other places to store securely.  

Another way to lower the CO2 emission level: Post-combustion capture

What exactly is post-combustion capture?

            According to Herzog, “this refers to the capture of CO2 prior to combustion. This is not an option at the pulverized coal (PC) power plants that comprise most of the existing capacity. However, it is an option for integrated coal gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plants. In these plants, coal is first gasified to form synthesis gas (syngas, a mixture whose key components are carbon monoxide and hydrogen). The syngas then undergoes the water-gas shift, in which the CO reacts with steam to form CO2 and additional H2. The CO2 is then removed, and the hydrogen is diluted with nitrogen and fed into a gas turbine combined cycle. The advantage of this approach is that it is much less expensive than the post-combustion capture process. The disadvantages are that there are only a few IGCC plants in the existing coal fleet and IGCC plants are more expensive than PC plants when costs of CO2 capture are not included.”

            There are pros and cons with post-combustion capture.

Pros:

1.     it’s easy to spread to industrial and power plant stations with renovations(UK 400 MW retrofit by 2014)

2.     it has already existed for more than 60 years

3.     it’s adaptable to current fossil fuel plants

4.     Cryogenic capture reduces cost by 40% in experimental plants

Cons:

1.     it’s a high cost program for dealing with the solvents, generating the machine and also using a lot of water, leading to other problems with the replacement

2.     this technology has not been widely used and lacking of experience on large scale

3.     it has large footprint

Reference: Herzog, Howard, Jerry Meldon, and Alan Hatton. "Advanced Post-Combustion CO2 Capture." Clean Air Task Force. (2009): 3-38. Print.

More detials on CCS (Carbon Capture & Sequestration )

       

This video shows how carbon capture & sequestration work in the reality. The main body is the same as last blog I have wrote, but by watching this video you will easily understood the progress of CCS within minutes. We can see from the video that injecting the CO2 into oil fields, it tends to rise, as it is lighter than surrounding materials. But the cap rock prevented the CO2 of any further emission. The cap rock layer is impervious barrier that can keep CO2 underground forever. Over time, the CO2 will dissolve with oil remaining or salt water and then sink to the bottom of the layer. After thousands of years, the CO2 and naturally minerals react with each other and form stable minerals such as CaCO3. This process will help people prevent the re-entry of carbon back to natural cycle again. On the other hand, this video reveals the fact that when we injecting CO2 into oil fields, it can help us produce more undiscovered oil than before. And this oil recovery process may enhance the oil that might be recovered by 15%!!! There is monitoring process of the migration of CO2 in the subsurface that helps people find any leakage before, during and after injection of CO2.