Unrealistic Goals

A couple of stories over the long weekend highlighted growing disconnects between major elements of energy and environmental policy and what is actually possible in the real world. The first concerns China's gambit that committing to a carbon-intensity target that could be met with initiatives already under way might be sufficient to induce the US and EU to sign up for deeper cuts in actual emissions--and incidentally release a flood of "carbon debt" payments from the OECD to the developing world. Meanwhile a pair of articles on ethanol highlight the infeasibility of the biofuel mandates established by the US Congress a few years ago and about to be embedded in new EPA regulations. In both cases, practical reality is at odds with the aspirations of regulators in ways that threaten to undermine support for less ambitious but more achievable efforts.

The Copenhagen climate meeting, officially the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, begins in one week. Politicians and diplomats have been scrambling to avert the possibility that after two years of work on the details of the framework set in Bali, the meeting might conclude without producing an agreement that could take the place of the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Last-minute actions by the world's two largest emitters may have rescued the conference from this fate, in the form of a pledge by President Obama that the US will reduce its emissions by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 and a commitment by China to reduce its emissions per unit of economic activity by 40-45% below 2005 levels. But while this might save Copenhagen from irrelevance, it illustrates how far the available degrees of freedom for action in countries that must keep their economies moving forward fall short of what would be required to halt the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and begin to reverse it.

As it is, President Obama is taking a considerable risk in offering emission cuts that have not been approved by Congress, which might not be inclined to stick out its neck quite so far going into a tough mid-term election that will hinge on the economy and employment. While China's offer represents a serious first step, a similar focus on "carbon intensity" by the previous US administration was met with derision by environmentalists. The problem is that the level of emissions this would yield if China's economy continues to grow at 8% per year or more is incompatible with scenarios for limiting peak CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million and eventually restoring them to pre-industrial levels. If we can't avoid blowing past the 450 ppm limit that was the basis of the Bali framework, then growing efforts to shift the official goalpost back to 350 ppm--a level we passed in 1988--look like King Canute ordering the tide not to rise. Expect a great deal of attention to be focused on these numbers in the next couple of weeks.

The disconnect on US ethanol policy is even more pronounced, because the current path can only be sustained for a few more years. An op-ed in Saturday's New York Times reminds us of the shortcomings of our current reliance on ethanol produced from corn, while comments by the CEO of Shell, a major investor in next-generation biofuels, makes it clear that the extremely ambitious targets for cellulosic ethanol and other non-food-based biofuels that the Congress mandated in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 are extremely unlikely to be met. And even before that shortfall becomes serious, the nation's distilleries will exceed the capacity of current US motor gasoline sales to accommodate all the ethanol they can produce, unless the government also lifts the 10% blending limit.

While we can argue about whether that ought to happen, the bigger issue is that these two developments expose the failure of the key assumptions under which the Congress crafted the Renewable Fuel Standard: E85 has turned out to be a dud in the marketplace for good reasons--consumers have figured out that a fuel that costs more dollars to go fewer miles is a bad deal--and it turns out to be really hard to make fuels on a large scale or at an affordable cost from non-food biomass. The appropriate response when your expectations of the future turn out to be so badly wrong would be to freeze the status quo in place while revamping the standard to reflect more realistic assumptions, not to enshrine the false assumptions in new EPA rules that will drive up fuel costs for consumers without doing a thing to improve the environment.