Energy Probe

Aldyen Donnelly: My stimulus package is greener than yours

Posted on February 8, 2010 by energyprbe

One of the big NDP and Liberal story lines is that the US is spending US $118-billion in stimulus funds on environmental initiatives, while Canada’s stimulus package has only Cdn $3-billion for green initiatives.

These numbers come from a table lifted from the World Resources Institute (WRI) website, and could not be less accurate. The website suggests that the data was provided by HSBC, but in a phone call with a WRI representative, who wishes to remain anonymous, I was told that while HSBC provided the estimates for some countries included in the table—including the US—the data for Canada was provided by International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD).

Official US and Canadian budget documents clearly show that:

the value of green initiatives in the US stimulus package totals just under US $93-billion, to be spent over the next 4 years, while

the value of green initiatives in the Canadian stimulus package totals just over Cdn $11-billion, most of which is to be spent over two years.

Given that the population and economy of Canada is about 10% the size of those of the US, the Canadian stimulus package is slightly more green than the US stimulus package and being spent about twice as fast.

US stimulus and other green spending details

From the WRI website: "In October 2008, Congress passed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, which extended existing incentives for wind, solar, and other renewable energy technologies. The bill also offered significant financial incentives for carbon capture and storage projects.”

The value of these incentives is deemed to be in the order of $13 billion over 4 years—2009 – 2013. This was deemed an "emergency" action because it brought forward to October, 2008 a decision to extend existing incentives—a decision that would not normally be made in the absence of the financial crisis—until March 2009 at budget time. These incentives come up for renewal/extension every five years.

Note that Bush was still President and Congress was dominated by Republicans when this decision was made, but presidential candidate Obama ran on a platform committing a Democratic Congress to extend/renew these incentives if/when they won the Nov 2008 election.

"In February 2009, Congress, with the encouragement of President Obama, passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (commonly known as the stimulus package), which provides at least $112 billion for investments in renewable energy, efficiency, smart grid, “green-collar” job training, and other emissions-reducing clean energy projects. Worldwide, this green investment by the U.S. is second only to China’s stimulus package in amount dedicated to green funding. An evaluation of stimulus packages by HSBC also found that only the U.S. plan provided a “real boost to renewables.” [WRI cites HSBC as the source of this information and dates it February 2009]

But the official US government estimate of the green spending component of the US stimulus bill (source: final US budget, as summarized by the US Budget Office) is US$93 billion, much of which is really putting the cost of continuing operations into the stimulus bill. Even when I combine the renewal/extension of existing programs with the stimulus bill, I get just under US$110 billion for the US green initiatives over the next 4 years.

I can only get up to US $112 billion if I reclassify normal ongoing annual federal spending on rail (Amtrack) and transit (which are at historical lows) as "green stimulus" spending.

Total US Stimulus Green Spending, as itemized by the US Budget Office: $93 billion:

$11 billion funding for an electric smart grid

$6.3 billion for state and local governments to make investments in energy efficiency

$6 billion for renewable energy and electric transmission technologies loan guarantees

$6 billion for the cleanup of radioactive waste (mostly nuclear power plant sites) [Note: This spending was required, by law, prior to the passage of this bill.]

$5 billion for weatherizing modest-income homes

$4.5 billion for the Office of Electricity and Energy Reliability to modernize the nation’s electrical grid and smart grid.

$4.5 billion for state and local governments to increase energy efficiency in federal buildings

$3.4 billion for carbon capture experiments

$3.25 billion for the Western Area Power Administration for power transmission system upgrades. [Note: This spending was required/committed prior to the passage of this bill.]

$2.5 billion for energy efficiency research [Note: This maintains pre-stimulus bill budgets.]

$2 billion for manufacturing of advanced car battery (traction) systems and components.

$3.2 billion toward Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants.

$500 million for training of green-collar workers (by the Department of Labor)

$400 million for electric vehicle technologies

$300 million for federal vehicle fleets, to cover the cost of acquiring electric vehicles, including plug-in hybrid vehicles.

$300 million to buy energy efficient appliances

$300 million for reducing diesel fuel emissions

$300 million for state and local governments to purchase energy efficient vehicles

$250 million to increase energy efficiency in low-income housing

$600 million to cleanup hazardous waste that threaten health and the environment [Note: This spending was required, by law, prior to the passage of this bill.]

$200 million to cleanup petroleum leaks from underground storage tanks [Note: This spending was required, by law, prior to the passage of this bill.]

$100 million to evaluate and cleanup brownfield land [Note: This spending was required, by law, prior to the passage of this bill.]

$400 million for the Geothermal Technologies Program

$4 billion to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for repairing and modernizing public housing, including increasing the energy efficiency of units.

$100 million to help remove lead paint from public housing [Note: This spending was required, by law, prior to the passage of this bill.]

$1.38 billion for rural drinking water and waste disposal projects

$4.6 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers for environmental restoration, flood protection, hydropower, and navigation infrastructure projects

$4.5 billion to the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) for energy efficiency and renewable energy.

$4.2 billion to repair and modernize Defence Department facilities.

$4 billion toward the establishment of an Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings within the GSA.

$4 billion for the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (wastewater treatment infrastructure improvements)

$4 billion for public housing improvements and energy efficiency ( Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)).

$2 billion for the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (drinking water infrastructure improvements)

And for Canada:

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Lawrence Solomon discusses climate change on "The Agenda"

Posted on February 8, 2010 by energyprbe

Energy Probe

February 8, 2010

Energy Probe’s Lawrence Solomon was recently on “The Agenda” discussing the future of climate change in the wake of the failure at Copenhagen to reach a new agreement and the leaked email scandal at the University of East Anglia.The show originally aired on January 28th. 2010.

Lawrence Solomon: IPCC faces another desertion – its own past chair!

Posted on February 7, 2010 by energyprbe

The past chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has joined the growing list of IPCC critics. According to the Sunday Telegraph, Rajendra Pachauri, the disgraced current IPCC chair, now faces criticism from his immediate predecessor, Robert Watson. The Telegraph reports that Watson “stressed that the chairman must take responsibility for correcting errors.” In another indication that Watson is taking pains to distance himself from the organization he once headed, the Sunday Times, in a story entitled “Top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility”, reports that Watson warned the IPCC that it must tackle its blunders.

Watson’s comments come on the heels of another glaring embarrassment to come out of the IPCC, this time a claim that global warming could cut crop production in north Africa by up to 50% by 2020. “Any such projection should be based on peer-reviewed literature from computer modelling of how agricultural yields would respond to climate change,” Watson stated. “I can see no such data supporting the IPCC report.” In this latest high-profile IPCC gaffe, which has been repeated around the world, including by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the IPCC seems to have relied on a 2003 report from a Winnipeg-based think tank called the International Institute for Sustainable Development. The report, which was not peer-reviewed, in turn seems to have relied on submissions to the UN by civil servants from Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, which also appear not to have been peer-reviewed.

Apart from his post as past IPCC chair, Watson is also the UK’s highest level environmental scientist, as Chief Scientist at the UK’s environment ministry. Prior to his current position, which he assumed in 2007, Watson was Chair of Environmental Science and Science Director of the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia, the same university caught up in the Climategate scandal.

Watson’s new-found scepticism of the science being produced by the IPCC represents an ironic reversal. In 2002, he remarked that “The only person who doesn’t believe the science is President Bush.”

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, February 07, 2010

Sources for this column:

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: Speech entitled Adapting to Climate Change

Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report

Vulnerability of North African Countries to Climatic Changes: Adaptation and Implementation Strategies for Climate Change

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IPCC: Beyond the Himalayas

Posted on February 7, 2010 by energyprbe

(Feb. 7, 2010) Climategate is one of many known failings by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Continue reading →

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IPCC: Beyond the Himalayas

Posted on February 7, 2010 by energyprbe

(Feb. 7, 2010) Climategate is one of many known failings by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Continue reading →

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IPCC: Beyond the Himalayas

Posted on February 7, 2010 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
February 7, 2010

Climategate is one of many known failings by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Two years ago, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was the world’s most celebrated organization, guardian of the world against the peril of climate change and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for “its outstanding scientific work!”

Today, the IPCC stands among the world’s most infamous organizations, its reputation in tatters, unable to respond to a growing chorus of critics because the critics now include many of its once-fiercest champions, among them its own scientists, and because its chairman and chief spokesman, India’s Rajendra Pachauri, is himself thoroughly disgraced. “The IPCC needs to regain credibility. Is that going to happen with Pachauri?,” asks John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK, “I don’t think so.”

What caused a fall from grace so sudden that IPCC’s insiders now demand Pachauri’s ouster, and that leads the Indian government to set up an “Indian IPCC” as a national alternative to the IPCC, declaring that it “cannot rely” any longer on the organization that its own representative heads?

One answer is Climategate — the unauthorized release of emails in November that showed the duplicity of scientists associated with the IPCC. Unquestionably, Climategate opened the floodgates to the torrent of scandals that have since poured out, seemingly without end. Many of the new scandals, some of them sporting “-gate” as a suffix, were little known before the Climategate emails were released; many were well known, but not publicized by a compliant press. Their sheer number deserves cataloguing.

Glaciergate: The post-Climategate scandal with the greatest repercussions involves a scientifically impossible yet much-touted IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by the year 2035. This claim originated in a conversation in 1999 between a UK journalist and an Indian glaciologist, who made an off-hand remark about India’s glaciers disappearing. The World Wildlife Fund then cited this glaciologist’s speculation in a fundraising and advocacy campaign in 2005. Then the IPCC cited the World Wildlife Fund’s campaign material as the source for the imminent end of the Himalayan glaciers.

At no point did the IPCC require anything remotely resembling peer-review to test the speculation that the end of the Himalayan glaciers was nigh, and this was deliberate. As Murari Lal, the IPCC’s coordinating lead author for the glacier chapter explained, he knew the work hadn’t been verified but felt scary scenarios were needed to rouse public concern: “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

More WWF: The IPCC’s reliance on the World Wildlife Fund as an authority in Glaciergate was no anomaly. Blogger Donna Laframboise thought to do a search on the IPCC’s own site of “WWF” and found it turned up dozens of times, and was a source on everything from mudflows and avalanches to fish in the Mesoamerican reef.

Greenpeace et al.: Ms. Framboise then checked out Greenpeace and found that this advocacy organization, too, was an IPCC source. For example, Greenpeace’s report, The Pacific in Peril, was the sole source for a claim that linked global warming to coral reef degradation. On a roll, she then found that members of other advocacy organizations, such as people from David Suzuki Foundation, Environmental Defense and Friends of the Earth were among the IPCC’s “expert reviewers.”

Ice-capped mountains: The IPCC relied on even sketchier sources in deciding that ice was disappearing from the world’s mountain tops. In blaming global warming for the loss of mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa, the IPCC’s most recent 2007 report cited two papers as the basis for its conclusions. One was authored by a geography student and climate change campaigner who was trying for the equivalent of a master’s degree at Switzerland’s University of Berne. The student made his case on the basis of interviews with mountain guides in the Swiss Alps. The second paper was a popular article in Climbing, a magazine for mountain climbers that quoted mountaineers about the changes they had observed.

Sea-levels: This week, the Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency revealed that the IPCC blundered in its 2007 report in claiming that 55% of the Netherlands lay below sea-level. IPCC scientists who were evidently out of their depth had added the area of the Netherlands below sea-level to the area susceptible to flooding, not realizing that these areas overlap. To the embarrassment of the Dutch Environment Minister, her department then based Dutch environmental policy on the IPCC’s mangled stats of her country. The correct stat: 20% of The Netherlands is susceptible to flooding should global warming cause sea levels to rise.

Urban Warming: Also this week, the IPCC stands accused of relying on a bogus 20-year-old study that discounted a mountain of evidence that cities become reservoirs of heat, making them warmer than the surrounding countryside. The study that found this “urban heat island effect” to be minimal based its claim on a long series of temperature measurements from 84 Chinese weather stations, half in the countryside and half in cities. The co-author of this study, Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit of Climategate fame, for years resisted Freedom of Information requests by skeptics seeking to obtain the locations of the 42 rural stations. It now appears that the documents needed to validate the Jones study no longer exist.

Climategate USA: Last month, evidence emerged that the manipulation of weather data by the UK’s Climatic Research Unit had a no-less impressive counterpart on this side of the Atlantic. Two U.S. government agencies, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, are implicated in a massive and unannounced re-do of data from weather stations around the world. In the 70s, these two agencies obtained their temperature data from 6,000 weather stations around the world. By 1990, they had discarded three-quarters of the weather stations, leaving but 1500. Most of the discarded stations were cold-weather stations. The remaining 1500 then acted as surrogates for the discarded 4500.

In Canada, for example, the U.S agencies discarded data from 565 of 600 stations, including most high up in the Rockies or in Canada’s northern territories. In Bolivia, a country in the Andes, every last weather station was discarded. To get Bolivian temperatures, NASA and NOAA used readings from 1200 miles away — from the Amazon and the beaches of Peru.

The Amazon Jungle: Last week, the IPCC came under fire for claiming that the entire Amazon was threatened by climate change, an exaggeration of a study that merely claimed that “up to 40% of Brazilian rainforest was extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall,” drying out the forests and making them susceptible to fires.

Not that the study the IPCC relied upon was itself unimpeachable. The report, A Global Review of Forest Fires, was co-authored by a freelance journalist and environmental activist who had worked for organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. The other co-author was a WWF campaigner.

Stern Review: Another study that the IPCC relied upon – The Stern Review, written by a prominent former World Bank economist, commissioned by the UK Treasury, and published by Cambridge University Press — had all the trappings of authority. Yet its dire estimates of the financial costs of climate change were so extreme that it was castigated by some of the world’s leading climate change economists when it was initially published. Last week, more errors came to light that also point to an academic cover-up, designed to avoid embarrassment.

Between the time The Stern Review was first released in October 2006, and its publication in book form by Cambridge University Press in January 2007, various unsupportable claims were scrubbed, including claims that North West Australia had been hit by stronger tropical typhoons in the previous 30 years, that southern regions in Australia had lost rainfall due to rising ocean temperatures, that air currents adversely affected Australian rainfall, and that savannahs would increasingly take over Australian terrain. A typo that exaggerated the cost of hurricanes by a factor of 10 was also corrected.

Remarkably, a formal erratum or corrigendum — mandatory in academia when corrections or changes are made — was not published in the case of The Stern Review. “Such a practice is very much a whitewash of the historical record,” commented the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr, one of the many Stern Review critics. “One would assume — and expect — that studies designed to inform government (and international) policy would be held to at least these same standards if not higher standards.”

Post-Climategate, we are being deluged with a stream of scandals that utterly destroy the notion that the IPCC ever operated to high scientific standards. The evidence existed pre-Climategate too, even if we didn’t pay it much heed. We saw it in false claims that malaria and other vector-borne diseases would spread under a warming climate, that water shortages would stress Third World societies, that hurricanes and other extreme weather events would play havoc with our economies and our safety, with computer models that failed time and again to predict anything, whether the recent expansion of the Arctic ice mass or the cooling temperatures that we’ve seen over the last decade. Most famously, we saw it in the hockey stick, that discredited IPCC icon that purported to show that temperatures had been stable for most of the last millennium before shooting up in the last century. Fittingly, its shoddiness was reconfirmed by the Climategate emails, which revealed the desperate efforts made by the IPCC scientists to “hide the decline” in temperatures that the hockey stick’s proxy data actually showed.

The IPCC was no more credible then than we know it to be now. The Indians understand that they cannot rely on the IPCC any longer. The rest of the nations of the world need to be likewise enlightened.

Read the sources for this column.

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Campus climate orthodoxy

Posted on February 4, 2010 by energyprbe

(Feb. 4, 2010) Editor’s note: Lawrence Solomon’s column, Keeping Canadian Students In The Dark On Climate, provoked some interesting responses on our online blog, FP Comment, and the National Post’s editorial blog, Full Comment. Some have been reproduced below. Continue reading →

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Campus climate orthodoxy

Posted on February 4, 2010 by energyprbe

Financial Post
Financial Post
February 4, 2010

Editor’s note: Lawrence Solomon’s column, Keeping Canadian Students In The Dark On Climate, provoked some interesting responses on our online blog, FP Comment, and the National Post’s editorial blog, Full Comment. Some have been reproduced below. They have been edited for grammar. Real names, where available, have been used, but some are signed only with online handles.

There has been one formal debate at the University of Western Ontario between myself, Prof. Graham Smith, and Prof. Gordon McBean, both of the geography deptartment. I myself was on the skeptical side and McBean, as an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change participant, argued in favour of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). As with all such debates, the skeptical side won, but did little to alter the prevailing mindset.

Most of my students have seen Gore’s movie at least three times by the time they get to 2nd year university. Until my course, they are unaware of any counter arguments and have not seen any films other than Gore’s, not the Great Global Warming Swindle nor Not Evil Just Wrong. The record was one poor student who had been shown Gore’s film seven times.

The overwhelming mantra remains AGW and the implications of Climategate and the data scandals revealed by the audit activities of Climate Audit and Watts Up With That are dismissed as irrelevancies. It is not possible to overstate the level with which the dogma of AGW is all pervasive and stifling. In 2008, after I gave a talk to alumni dismissing AGW as an eco-myth, I was publicly castigated in the campus newspaper and McBean reacted with a letter (for which he had signed support) calling for censure of both mine and any future contrary perspectives on campus.

My reaction has been to publish my blog, ecomyths, to continue to talk to all groups who do have open minds and to teach ever increasing numbers of undergraduates who vote with their feet and do search out perspectives and different ideologies. My teaching ratings remain the highest in my department and I have received multiple awards for teaching excellence.

The problem is not with inquiring, young minds but with atrophied, closed-minded incumbents of ivory towers (who would never, ever read the Post!).

Graham Smith, professor of geography, University of Western Ontario.

My son took a course at the University of British Columbia last year, his freshman year, on how global warming is man-made. The so-called “professor” was completely doctrinaire. She began the course by airing An Inconvenient Truth and hammered away throughout the semester on the catastrophic evils of industrialization. Dissenting views were neither considered nor tolerated in the “discussions” that followed. Al Gore was her messiah. Students regurgitated her point of view to pass. I was appalled.

Once upon a time, intellectual honesty was the hallmark of the academy in Canada. That was the noble standard during my seven wonderful years at two Canadian universities. Sadly however, that noble standard has been abandoned; at least at UBC. Higher education is precisely about controversy and dissent, not the promulgation of dogma and intolerance.

That someone so intellectually bankrupt has standing at Westbrook’s glorious old institution is pure travesty. Shame on UBC.

Desk Jockey

I was recently asked to give the skeptic side of AGW to an adult learning class. The teacher had been giving the class the dogma, right from the Ontario Ministry of Education textbook. All the class were believers of the faith.

I started by writing on the board, “Is there anything in the climate today that is beyond normal variation?” I had the class give the classic list of alarmist items.

I then spent the next two hours going through the actual evidence of each with references to peer reviewed papers.

By the end of the session we had crossed out every single item on their list and the class including the teacher, agreed AGW is a scam. They are all outraged that thay have been had by the AGW True Believers.

I’ve been asked to come back for the next class.

J.R. Wakefield

I am not in the least surprised Lawrence Solomon had no skeptics in the audience, though I believe there are probably many at the university. The issues with climate change are scientific issues. The students at a university who study things like physics, mathematics and engineering and hence understand the science of global warming, have a very heavy workload and don’t go to things like this debate. Your audience was almost certainly populated by polisci and history majors who relish in and are great at debating. People in science don’t believe in political debates about science.

The truth will come out in time. Truth doesn’t care about the quality of one’s argument or how well one swayed the audience. Truth is not a liberal or conservative. If an argument is wrong, it will eventually be shown to be wrong. It may take 40 years like the Piltdown man, or 30 years like global warming, but truth will come out.

JGEfromSudbury

Let’s not fool ourselves about Canadian universities. They are not places of original thought, they are places where professors regularly ram politically correct dogma down the throats of students. The unfortunate thing is that kids today are being brainwashed all the way from kindergarten to university. Have you ever noticed the eco-art that is made by these kids and posted in public places? It’s all about the green religion. Don’t get me wrong on this, caring for the planet is important but you can be sure that these kids are being force fed a lot of tripe about AGW.

I think it is time to clean house in the education system from elementary school right through to university. If we don’t then we will continue to see the kids coming out of these institutes parroting what the social engineers deem acceptable.

BWA

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Aldyen Donnelly: Cap and trade: A history

Posted on February 2, 2010 by energyprbe

In my opinion, the science on climate change is now irrelevant—even though I’m a believer.

Every time the US has implemented a cap and trade regulation—the first one was in1977—its primary political objective was trade protectionism. And every time the US has done so, the measure has successfully drawn investment capital away from nations on which Americans have traditionally relied for imports into the US.

The US "energy security" and cap and trade bill is now Obama’s top priority, because it is the only mechanism on the agenda that could support his stated objective of doubling US exports by 2020.

Regardless of the fact that I am wedded to the environmental agenda, I never debate the science with my clients. Accepting the environmental argument does make it a little easier for me to do my job. But I agree the science is uncertain, and I do not ask my clients to join me in my environmental position.

The real question businesses and Canadian governments should be asking, in my view, is: how do we defend our economy against this repeatedly successful US protectionist measure?

"Cap and trade" was invented by a fellow named Stuart Eizenstat—a brilliant and most interesting fellow. Eizenstat is now 67, but still working as a trade and MI lawyer in New York. He was President Jimmy Carter’s domestic policy advisor when he first came up with "cap and trade" to protect US interests. A rabid Democrat, he was still called in by Reagan to act as special ambassador to Europe to diffuse a couple of major trade crises. He started with the Clinton administration in the White House as internal economic advisor. From1993 through 1996 he was US Ambassador to the EU. From 1998 through 2001 he was Deputy Treasurer of the United States.

In 1994 I sat in an industry briefing during which he walked the audience through "cap and trade" and how the climate change issue could be used to reverse the US’s balance of energy trade.

In September 1994, when Eizenstat briefed a number of US industrial interests and consultants on the trade role of "cap and trade", the price of a barrel of oil was only $11. One of the reasons the US economy was booming was the low price of oil. In his briefing, Eizenstat forecast that growing Chinese and Indian demand would drive that price up to somewhere between $50 and $100/barrel by 2005, and also that US would be relying on unstable Persian Gulf nations for over 50% of its oil demand.

To put this in context, in the 1970s the OPEC nations were able to pull off the "oil shock" when their share of US consumption was under 10%.

Eizenstat said he had also determined that after the first Gulf War, the US was going to have to maintain a growing military presence in the Persian Gulf—in perpetuity—to manage the growing potential for conflicts that could disrupt US oil supply. He said that he calculated that the current and short-term US defence and security expenditures directly related to security of oil supply equated to roughly US$40/bbl. He argued, therefore, that Americans were already paying more than any other nations for gasoline—just that most of the price they were paying did not appear at the pump and came out of general tax revenues.

He explained how the US government could use GHG cap and trade to compel foreign carbon-based commodity suppliers to at least partially bear the US’s costs of investing in domestic development that would wean the US consumer off imported oil and other key GHG-intensive commodities—most notably aluminium, iron, steel, beef and pork. In this briefing Eizenstat walked us through how cap and trade had been used to reverse the US balance of trade in gasoline and refrigerants.

Most of the people in the room rejected Eizenstat’s forecasts out of hand—myself included. I did, however, completely brief my client. When I came home, I said: "I really do not agree with Eizenstat’s analysis. But that is irrelevant. This is one of President Clinton’s closest advisors. We need to understand that Eizenstat’s analysis is driving the US cap and trade agenda, whether or not it is accurate."

Of course, we can now see that he was correct on all counts.

Surprisingly, Eizenstat is not well known for his role in US trade. He is an observant Conservative Jew who made every President for whom he served agree to one employment condition: that he be allowed, on government time, to try to recover "holocaust art" and restitution for victims of other holocaust crimes. This was a personal objective that he imposed on his White House bosses. He was finally successful and is a great hero in both the US and Europe for his success in this—his top priority personal objective.

The respect with which many Europeans hold him is part of what makes him such an important asset in US-EU negotiations of all kinds.

If any readers ever have time and or any interest in looking deeper into this very cloudy file, go here.

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Aldyen Donnelly: The oil sands should be shut down, right?

Posted on February 1, 2010 by energyprbe

No. This is a gasoline versus diesel fuel story.

Note that 100% of the transportation sector GHGs realized in Europe between 1990 and 2007 derive from the shift of the passenger vehicle fleet from gasoline (‘petrol") to ultra low sulphur diesel fuel. Alberta’s oil sands are relatively high (but not the highest) GHG generators if they are used to make gasoline.

But wellhead-to-tailpipe GHGs fall, significantly, when we convert oil sands feedstocks to ultra low sulphur diesel and incent the passenger vehicle market to shift—as Europe has done—from gasoline to diesel consumption.

Finally, the best potential "sink" for refinery CO2 is into bioreactors that make biodiesel from algae. This biodiesel can be run through refinery hydro-crackers to stabilize the biofuel for use in cold climates, then blended with petroleum-based ultra low sulphur diesel.

When we combine the same passenger vehicle fuel switch strategy with the integration of the biodiesel blend into the fuel supply for commercial and heavy duty diesel trucks, Canada can achieve a much deeper reduction in transportation sector GHGs than Europe has achieved, in less time and at lower cost. If we shut down the oil sands, this solution falls out of reach.

Please note that Ontario’s three refineries increasingly rely on oil sands feedstocks. It is not just Alberta resource producers that are at risk when "oil sands shutdown" is suggested. All three Ontario refineries would also likely shut-down, as a result. If they do not shut down and we cut eastern Canadian refiners off from the Alberta oil sands feedstocks, they will become increasingly dependent on potentially higher GHG Nigerian and Venezuelan crude oil imports.

Therefore, a rational Canadian GHG management plan would possible be entitled: "Canada: Diesel Nation". Of course, I would not have made this recommendation before ultra low sulphur diesel was made available in Canada. Now that we have lowered the sulphur levels in Canadian diesel fuel supply, diesel passenger vehicles can operate efficiently after catalytic converters and fine particulate traps have been installed to also reduce smog-creating emissions. These established add-on technologies could not function in combination with higher sulphur diesel.

How Do Oil sands GHGs Compare to Other Crude Feedstock Supplies?

Upstream extraction, transport and upgrading ("recovery") GHGs are higher than the range of oil sands GHG factors (illustrated by high and low technology options in the last two columns in the following graph) for 27%of current US crude oil supplies. Most notably, GHGs associated with the recovery of 2/3 of California onshore crude oil supply are substantially higher than the GHGs associated with crude feedstocks originating in the Alberta oil sands.

The California Low Carbon Fuel Standard disguises this agreed fact by assigning a single common recovery GHG factor to all crude feedstocks used in California refineries (65% Saudi, Mexico, 25% California thermal, 10% other). Then the LCFS assigns a discrete and conservative (high) GHG factor to feedstock from the Alberta oil sands. This procedure creates a cross-subsidy for California crude—a subsidy that is largely born by suppliers of crude oil from Saudi Arabia and Mexico.

The graph of refining GHG emissions below actually overstates the refining GHGs associated with most of the oil sand-originating feedstocks that are used in the US. This is because most oil sands feedstocks are used in refineries that are designed to maximize diesel/distillate output.

The GHG factors immediately below reflect the use of oil sands feedstocks in refineries geared to maximize gasoline, not diesel, output.

On average, GHGs from refineries that convert oil sands-originating feedstocks primarily into diesel and distillates discharge up to 15% less GHGs, per MJ of finished product, than refineries that convert that feedstock into gasoline (as illustrated in the second graph below). But there is little difference between gasoline and diesel upgrading/refining emissions for the other feedstocks.

When we look at actual wellhead to gas pump for gasoline, considering the actual mix of gasoline and diesel produced in the US from these feedstocks, the GHG factor for gasoline made from Alberta oil sands-originating crude is—as expected—slightly higher than the US average (107.6grams of CO2 per megajoule of energy produced). But it is not as high as the GHG factor for gasoline derived from California heavy oil (2/3 of California onshore oil production). And the differential, relative to the US average, is 3.7%, not the oft-cited 15%.

This 3.7% difference is not statistically significant given the estimation error associated with any GHG estimation exercise.

If all Alberta upgraders and refineries co-generated steam and/or hot water for district heating, the GHG factor for even gasoline derived from oil sands feedstocks would drop well below the US average.

So if we ruled that all Alberta upgraders had to add heat co-generation at existing upgraders and refineries to supply new district heating systems—using well-proved and tested technologies—and we commercialize diesel from algae (already being done at a cement plant in Ontario), and if we incented the Canadian passenger vehicle fleet to replace gasoline-powered vehicles with Canadian diesel (adding another 15% to 40% reduction in tailpipe emissions to the reductions we will have realized in wellhead to gas pump emissions), Canada could very cost-effectively realize a substantial reduction in Canadian transport sector GHGs.

Read part II.

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