Eyeroller: a short comedy in three acts

I haven't been blogging much lately: I've been Tweeting. But given the recent back-and-forth over the NY Magazine climate change article and the instant suggestions about individual volunteerism e.g. that people should have fewer kids if they want to do something, I think it's time to repost this short play. (Originally from Crooked Timber comments.)


EYEROLLER: A short comedy in three acts

Act I:

FIRST PERSON: “I put solar panels on my roof. That cost a lot! Why are people always scolding people for not doing more? They should encourage them instead.”

EYEROLLER: “Micro-decisions about personal consumption or production will have no real effect, even en masse. The only purpose in talking about them is to give people something useless to do so that they can feel like they’re doing something.”

SECOND PERSON: “Of course you should tell people to put solar panels on roofs. That pressures the “market signals” to expand production and to further innovation, encourages politicians to get on board, etc., among other complex responses.”

EYEROLLER: “OK.. If we’re going to talk about complex responses and signals, let’s talk about what other signals the act of putting solar panels on your roof sends. It says that you’re interested in volunteerism, not collective action: it tells the market that you want middle-class equipment, not large-scale equipment.”

THIRD PERSON: “What? That’s unworthy. How could you say that putting up solar panels makes things worse?”

EYEROLLER: “Well, it might, and anyways if people invest in personal middle class solutions, they’re not going to want to also invest in community solutions.”

FORUTH PERSON: “Wait. Did you just say that I should have spent my money on the poor rather than putting solar panels up?”

(EYEROLLER rolls eyes.)

Act II

EYEROLLER: “We’re stuck inside a neoliberal system within which all messages get turned into messages about personal consumption and personal virtue based on consumption, even if they weren’t intended that way. It becomes impossible to say anything about incentive structures without this being interpreted as whether personal decisions are good or bad, or anything about whether putting solar panels up or not is really a good idea overall without this being interpreted as a personal attack on people who put up solar panels.”

FIFTH PERSON: “You described reducing overall energy use as a kind of Puritanism, but we need to reduce overall energy use so what’s wrong with using Puritanism to do that? It mobilizes certain limbic system anchors for collective social behaviors you need, like the appeal of common sacrifice as a form of civic action and the kind of righteousness you need for altruistic punishment of deviants.”

(EYEROLLER looks disconcerted.)

EYEROLLER: “Puritanism and its focus on individual virtue is part of this, yes. Are you sure that’s a good idea? Once you start mobilizing limbic system anchors for righteousness to punish deviants, it’s pretty difficult to control –“

THIRD PERSON: “Are you saying I’m a goody-goody? I want you to apologize.”

(EYEROLLER rolls eyes.)

Act III

EYEROLLER: “One more time. You can reach a kind of limiting case in which certain messages become literally unintelligible. Even if someone starts out thinking that they are doing public health work, how is the public going to interpret that? The public is going to see it as another opportunity for personal status competition–“

THIRD PERSON: “Are you trying to trash my reputation?”

EYEROLLER: “– everything comes back to a discussion of personal virtue and who has it, personal decisions and whether those are moral decisions –“

SECOND PERSON: “So you’re saying that people who put up solar panels are just motivated by feelings of moral superiority?”

EYEROLLER: “– and any kind of system critique can only be heard as personal critique — “

THIRD PERSON: “I have an orientation to public health in my work, and certainly that would never turn into just sanctioning people who didn’t agree with the program! Now talk about this how I want you to or I’ll tell the moderators on you.”

(EYEROLLER rolls eyes, but has a muscle spasm part way through, eyes pointing in different directions.)

EYEROLLER (in Captain Kirk tones): “FACE… FROZEN! Can’t stop … rolling eyes! CAN’T! STOP! ROLLING! EYES!”

Current results of global warming activism

Activism against anthropogenic global warming is an unusual case. Almost all left activism opposes powerful interests, but few issues are so scientifically well supported and dire in potential effect as this one. And it has a fairly simple goal: decarbonization.

So it's possible to ask: how successful has activism around global warming been? This has two sub-questions: 1) is the world on track towards decarbonization, 2) if so, did activism bring this about or speed the process up. As far as I can tell, the answers are equivocally yes to the first and no to the second.

In a sense there were always two basic models of how decarbonization might happen. The first is the activist, or political model, in which people respond to science by organizing themselves and effectively demanding political change. The second is the technocratic, or techno-optimist, one in which experts respond to science by investing more and more money into development of renewable power sources so that they become cheaper than fossil, after which fossil gets replaced by the planners who actually control critical infrastructure. We appear to be on track for the second: renewable power is now cheaper than coal without subsidies and without even pricing in coal's externalities. Once it gets even more cheap, and with another round of battery development, I think it's on track to replace gasoline in cars as well.

How did this happen? Part of it is physics and engineering: it turned out to be technically possible. Part of it is that activists were never able to overcome resistance by elites and by national populations for whom this never became a core political issue. Neither one of these was inevitable. The history of this is waiting to be written, but I suspect that important turning points are going to be:

1. Formation of the IPCC. For experts to respond to science, science has to be very well founded. The IPCC reports are pretty much inarguable, scientifically.

2. Poor elite resistance to subsidies. It's easy for elites to stop an industry from being shut down, but it's difficult for them to prevent subsidies for new industries from being added. The machinery of local interest, political set-asides and so on has purposefully been made easy to run because it normally favors elites, and ways of stopping it were made difficult. This resulted in the early round of funding for renewable power.

3. China's investment in solar panels. To make new technologies cheap you have to ramp up production. This was done by Chinese state fiat -- as with almost all energy infrastructure, the market really had little to do with it. The Chinese state had the capital to do this and the ability to take speculative risks that, in actuality, capitalist multinationals are almost never willing to take. Someone who knows more than I do will have to figure out whether this was primarily due to industrial policy / support for national industry, as a way of combating Chinese coal air pollution, as an actual way to address this problem, or whatever.

4. Possibly, the Paris Agreements. Not that they actually agreed to do anything definitive, but they agreed on something more important: that the science was settled and the problem had to be addressed. It was pretty much the death knell of international denialism.

Why did activism, broadly speaking, fail? Part of it was industry support for denialism, and the concomitant tribal adoption of it as a position of the right wing in the U.S. But this is a huge, international problem, and the left in the neoliberal era really didn't have an international presence. There was no organization that was critical to people's lives for them to accrete around on this issue.

Look at what is happening now in the U.S.: both one of the more conservative countries on the planet and one of the most influential. We just had an election in which global warming policy was one of the clearest differences between the candidates, and it wasn't important. And right now if the left is unified around anything, it's unified in support of the DAPL protests, but this protest is highly fragile -- I recognize the current state of it from the Occupy days. Once people who will support a protest are all in, that defines the boundary of who will respond to a protest being quashed. If the state fully comes in and destroys the protest, there will not be an uprising of additional support from people angered by the police action, there will only be resistance from the people who are already supporters. More generally, Obama's neoliberal era resulted in a lot of incremental, executive-power advances with no popular organization backing them, and when Trump takes power, there are no effective barriers to them being reversed, whether it's lowering car fleet mileage requirements, using the Clean Air Act, or starting up Keystone XL again. There are also ongoing efforts at "inside game" activism: pressuring corporations to make changes, divestment focussed on energy companies, and so on, which seem to me to have some effect but not yet a large one.

Activism is, of course, ongoing. It can't be dropped: the final results of how much warming we get are highly dependent on how soon decarbonization happens and the decisions made in the next decade. If activism can speed that up at all, it has to be done. And protests like #NoDAPL are local and have very important local effects that can't be abandoned. But both the elites and the general public have made activism around this quite difficult, and I think that it's likely that it's going to be one of those things that had to be tried but that in the end didn't have a critical effect.

Climate endgame

The Paris Agreement is going to have all sorts of pessimistic things said about it, many of them justified. We're probably going to spend the rest of our lives making the goals of it become realized as actual facts. But I don't see any likely way in which this isn't the climate endgame. The world system has substantially agreed that we're going to transition away from carbon. We also have the technology to do it. My best guess is that by 2050 it will be mostly done. This is very good news.

In various arguments among people on the left, many people were of the opinion that the neoliberal world system couldn't do this (and many will presumably continue to hold this opinion, the example of the Montreal Protocol implementation notwithstanding). I think that this was always a misdiagnosis of which class holds power and how that power is used. The managerial-bureaucratic neoliberals who are essentially in power everywhere are not James Bond villains who want to destroy the world so that they can rule a small fragment of it, or simple lackeys who are unable to go against any component of existing brick-and-mortar wealthy interests when the rest of their class has a rational interest in self-preservation. They already rule the system, and their continued rule is perfectly compatible with conversion over to clean energy, which they will continue to control the major infrastructure for. The apparent helplessness that they evince when confronting problems whose resolution would not be to the benefit of the 1% does not have to operate here, because nothing about fixing the climate problem -- which is the most important of our time and really does have to be fixed -- changes the mechanics of their control.

XLent

With the benefit of hindsight I can say a few things about the rise and fall of Keystone XL.

First, about one of the ideas I've written about here that I think has held up best, Infrastructuralism. No lasting gains are going to come about through a carbon tax, trading system, or permit-selling regime. All of these will be subverted as soon as they take effect, if ever. The lasting changes come out when infrastructure is built or not built, because those choices lock in decisions for 30 years.

As Keystone XL illustrates, the major infrastructure-building decisions are never simply made by the magic of the marketplace. They only happen with the active cooperation of government. Even if government somehow absented itself from the decision, there would be no way to build a project like this without governmental use of eminent domain. So the public is already involved in approving or disapproving of all of these projects, no matter how much someone may tell you that they are the result of economic factors beyond our control.

The same goes for the simplistic statements about how commodities have a "global price", as if this just magically happens without extensive publicly supported building projects to make it happen. Without Keystone XL, that oil will have to be shipped by rail and truck, which are more expensive. There is nothing natural about a global price for something that doesn't vary as you cross geographic barriers: it only happens with massive public barrier-removing projects such as the various conflicts fought to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to tankers.

Politically, the story of Keystone XL is a story of -- what is the opposite of leadership? Followership, perhaps. It was always a decision that Obama could make on his own, which was exactly why it was a good issue for 350.org to take up. It dragged on for seven years, and only happened with the combination of a lame-duck President, a change of parties in power in Canada so that we wouldn't deeply offend anyone there, a back-off from the company sponsoring it in the form of their request to suspend, and an upcoming international conference before which Obama wanted some form of face-saving gesture for how little he's done.

What else could have been done with those 7 years? Clearly, the Keystone XL decision has a large symbolic component, and is supposed to lead to increasingly easier decisions to stop infrastructure of this kind. But we can't wait another few years before the next major project is dropped. Making people spend nearly all of the available activist pool in the U.S. on this one project for 7 years was a major cost, one which Obama made us pay with the assistance of supposedly left groups like the AFL-CIO, which supported Keystone XL because of a few jobs. What's going to happen when we have to close down every coal mine? Because that's going to have to happen, sooner than you probably think.

Greenhouse 100

The latest project that I've worked on, PERI's Greenhouse 100, is here. It's a publicly accessible EPA database of greenhouse gas polluting facilities, summed up by parent company. I think that it's the first list of its kind that includes both power plants and other industries.

Infrastructuralism

What would work best as a preventative to anthropogenic global climate change? According to most economists -- including, in particular for the purposes of this post, John Quiggin -- it's carbon taxes. I don't think so. For that matter, I don't think that any number of other favorite solutions have a good chance of working.

To make long argument short, I favor a model that goes something like this: people use whatever infrastructure is available. In a contemporary society, major infrastructure is essentially a command-and-control activity of government. Therefore what needs to happen is: a) scientists convince the public that change is needed, b) the public tells their governments that change is needed, c) governments issue orders to replace one kind of infrastructure with another. Emissions trading schemes and carbon taxes are basically market fetishism, because the vast majority of users of energy, including businesses, do not have the ability to choose differently enough within the existing infrastructure to make a difference. Demand elasticity only goes so far, and not far enough. Only if the cost of an ETS or carbon tax builds up enough to force a major rebuild of infrastructure would they work. But that is unlikely to happen, because a government in which people are feeling that much pressure from the ETS or carbon tax will respond to that pressure by revoking it.

And let's take the carbon tax argument to its limit. Quiggin writes that "The alternative solution is to make those responsible for carbon emissions pay a price, just as they do for goods and services of all kinds." What good or service are they paying for? Unless they are paying to replace carbon infrastructure with non-carbon, then what they are really paying for is ecosystem services. Imagine a situation in which global climate change goes on unchecked, but in which economists announce that the people doing the polluting have properly paid for their damages, in monetary terms, to other people. Is that really acceptable? No. Aside from the moral or ethical valuations involved, ecosystems can't really be replaced by money (i.e. human activity) just in physical terms.

Quiggin, in the linked blog post, writes that those who favor what is being called "direct action" in Australia do so primarily because they are either business-linked/conservative or because they are climate change deniers. I am neither of those, and wouldn't want to give aid or comfort to them. But it's my sense that this support of "direct action" on their part is purely instrumental, because they perceive that in their current politics it is least likely to lead to any action at all. You see this in the U.S. in the other direction, where measures against climate change were originally proposed to be regulatory, and so the right wing "favored" emissions trading schemes. When it looked like those might have a chance of actually being implemented, they went to pure denialism. So I don't think there's any point in disfavoring regulatory/command-and-control change just because they favor a do-nothing version.

Quiggin uses the usual invisible hand imagery of economics when he writes that "This problem raises a vast number of possible options, and the problem is to choose which will achieve the necessary reductions in emissions with the least possible disruption and economic cost. This is a difficult problem. [...]" Therefore, turn it over to the market (in the main) rather than the experts. But there is a large amount of fictitious economic activity that goes on, at least in the U.S., to camouflage the fact that major energy infrastructure is in fact an activity already decided by a few experts. Want to build a coal-burning electric power plant? In no sense is a "market" really involved. The government is involved from start to finish. How about a gasoline refinery? In fact, the major inputs to the system are government-controlled in all but name, with corporate ownership mostly being there for purposes of crony capitalism.

Someone might reply that the millions of decisions take place on the consumption side, with all of those light bulbs being replaced, car miles being driven to a greater or lesser extent, heaters being turned up or down, and small solar panels being put on roofs. None of that makes enough difference. If the electricity is being supplied by a coal-burning plant, people will use it somehow. If the roads have gasoline stations and infrastructure and no electric infrastructure, people will use up whatever gas is available, for the wider sense of "available" meaning "all that can be gotten out of the ground".

Conversion of our societies from carbon fuel to non-carbon is really a communal, global cost. Governments are how contemporary societies decide on and pay those kinds of costs. Trying to get the government to hand it off to the market is just the economist with a hammer thinking that everything looks like a nail.

Treaties can work

The recent news about climate change in the U.S. has been dominated by the EPA appeals panel's decision to block a coal plant's permit, which has stopped permitting of about 100 U.S. coal plants until the Obama administration can decide what to do about them.

But this press release (via Michael Tobis) struck me as being quite important too. Countries are agreeing to destroy stocks of CFCs, which cause global warming, under the Montreal Protocol, which was designed to address stratospheric ozone depletion. The end effect could be quite significant: 6 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalents with possibly more later.

As I wrote before, I'm not going to deal with global warming denialism with regard to science -- there will always be Flat Earthers. But there's a more subtle form of denialism that says that we can't do anything about global warming. This manifests itself, among other ways, in a conviction that countries can't agree to manage their infrastructure: their national interests will differ too much, or it will be too expensive, or, if they agree, they'll cheat. The Montreal Protocol is a standing rebuke to those people. In fact, the Montreal Protocol has worked as I expect global warming agreements to -- once people make a commitment to change an industry, it can change quite quickly, and people naturally use the new infrastructure without a lot of voluntary coaxing or permit trading. The CFC stocks planned to be destroyed are being destroyed because once people built alternatives, no one really needs them.

Update: and see this (via John Quiggin). I expect that market mechanisms to reduce carbon emissions will prove to be just as reliable and well-behaved as every other market just now.

eGRID

This is the second post in a series on global warming data, about the basics of U.S. EPA's eGRID database.


eGRID's home page claims that it is “the preeminent source of air emissions data for the electric power sector,” and as for as the U.S. is concerned, that is probably true. It contains air emissions data for nitrogen oxides (Nox) and sulfur dioxide (SO2), which are of concern because they contribute to ground-level smog and acid rain. It contains data on emissions of mercury, a persistent bioaccumulative toxic. And it contains data on emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O). It also has information on how much power is generated, and how much fuel of each type is used, so that you can see how efficient each plant is.

eGRID is an odd database in that it's not a data collection; no one ever fills out a form to report their emissions to eGRID. Instead, it's a combination of data from various data collections, together with model estimates. Most of the data that go into eGRID were originally collected through a scatter of databases held by EPA and the Department of Energy. For EPA for the last decade or more, it's been very difficult to get any new, major data collections, so information has to be cobbled together from a number of sources, none of them designed to exactly address the problem.

One of the advantages of a yearly data collection is that it has to be released every year. The primary disadvantage of eGRID, in the past, was that it came out irregularly and by the time it came out it sometimes used old versions of the data sources that it drew from. For instance, it's been released about once a year since 1998, except that it wasn't between May 2003 and Dec 2006. The Dept. of Energy databases that it draws from currently seem to be available up through 2006, and eGRID only has data through 2005. Still, a version has just been released – as of October 2008 – and that makes it up-to-date enough for all but the most picky and expert uses.

One of the large advantages to using eGRID is that some data quality work has been done to match the various databases together. I had to do that once, for a report for an environmental group that we couldn't use eGRID data for, and it's something that you don't want to do unless you have no other choice. Even more important, it upgrades all plant ownership, parent company, merger data and so on to a single date: December 31 2007 in this case. Electric utilities try all sorts of tricks to confuse their paper trail or to take advantage of regulatory exemptions or make financial maneuvers; there has been a lot of buying and selling of power plants among various entities. Making sure that all of that is upgraded to a single date is a significant advance. What this means is that, for instance, a power plant that last reported in 2005 will be listed in eGRID as being owned by whichever company owned it on Dec 31 2007, not by whatever company owned it in 2005.

eGRID is used in all sorts of regulatory initiatives, for environmental disclosure, and in governmental and nonprofit electricity-information Web sites such as Power Profiler, Power Scorecard, or CARMA. If you have a casual interest in your local electric power, you're probably better off with one of those. But it's good for some people to look at eGRID, because more information is available through it directly, and because it sets the baseline that so many people work from.

There are a couple of reasons why eGRID may not be the best source for generally tracking electricity, as opposed to tracking sources of emissions due to electricity generation. For one thing, it doesn't include any purchases of power, e.g. from Canada. For another, the net generation amounts that it reports subtract generation used by the power plant itself, but don't take transmission and distribution losses into account, so the electricity that people actually use will have a lower efficiency with respect to emissions than is reported in eGRID.

So how do you use eGRID? It's really just a set of three Excel files, so all you do is download them and open them on your computer – you can use OpenOffice. The most basic file holds information for each generating plant, and for subunits within plants. A second file, the aggregation file, adds things up – it combines individual plants into totals by state, owner, operator, parent company, grid, and for the whole U.S. That has almost all of the same data fields as the plant file, so once you learn one of them, you learn the other. The third of the files is for state imports and exports, and you can probably ignore it.

(Note, though, that the aggregation file handles parent companies badly, in my opinion. The people who made eGRID considered a parent company to be a holding company, not whatever company ultimately controls the plant, including the plant itself if there is no other owner. Therefore, some plants in eGRID don't have parent companies. That means that the parent company file, unlike the other aggregations, doesn't add up to the total of the individual plants. I may try to get the people who make eGRID to change this, put in a parent company for every plant, and indicate whether a parent company is a holding company or not with some kind of data field.)

But the plant file is probably the most useful. EPA doesn't like to release information about individual plants, or companies, within its general summary documents which are all that most people see if they see anything. It likes to release numbers about states, regions, industries, and so on, but saying that specific company ABC is responsible for x percent of pollution? You'll very rarely see that from EPA. So you'll have to dig it out for yourself.

The plant file contains sheets on generators and boilers: components of plants. Most users will probably skip those, although it's worth noting that they include years when the equipment went in service, which can be important for some things. But you'll probably want the information on plants themselves. There's about 5000 of them. You can look at the eGRID technical docs to explain the data elements.

What are some of the more useful data elements? Well, for the purpose of global warming, I'll look at CO2, ignoring methane and N2O for now. That's “plant annual CO2 emissions (tons)”, or PLCO2AN. A quick descending sort of the sheet by that field, and the top plant is the Scherer plant in Georgia, whose parent company is Southern Co. With 26 million tons of CO2, that's one percent of the total CO2 emissions for the whole database right there. There's only 68 plants that emitted more than 10 million tons. Those 68 plants account for 36% of the total emissions from electricity generation. That's about 12% of the total U.S. CO2 emissions from all sources, including cars, industry, houses, and residential electricity used by those light bulbs that people are always telling you to change whenever you say that we need to do something about global warming.

But those plants generate electricity too, of course. How much? Well, there the whole thing is complicated by the fact that a single power plant might generate electricity from a wide range of fuels. So just totaling up all the electricity from those plants is going to be a bit off. But I can total up the net generation from combustion sources for them. It's 31% of total U.S. generation from combustion sources – we're getting 36% of the CO2 for 31% of the power from combustion. It's 22% of our power from all sources.

What I'd like to see for these top plants is how efficient they are in burning coal. Coal is worse, from a CO2 standpoint, than natural gas, and coal burning efficiency varies by the equipment and the grade of coal used. But I can't quite see how to do it. The database includes an efficiency number that divides emissions of CO2 by the net generation from all combustion sources, but that includes oil and gas as well as coal. There's a net generation only from coal number, but there doesn't appear to be a CO2 emissions only from coal number, so I don't see how to figure out an emissions rate that includes only coal in both the numerator and denominator. Perhaps I could get it by digging into the boiler and generator data – but this post is too long as it is.

So, finally, here's a table of the 6 largest plants for 2005 for CO2 emissions, those with more than 20 million tons. You could get these yourself through the eGRID tables, but I might as well list them here for Google indexing purposes:

Top U.S. CO2 Emitting Electric Power Plants, 2005

State	Plant name	Plant operator	Parent company	2005 CO2 tons
GA	Scherer	Georgia Power Co	Southern Co	26,040,793.5
AL	James H Miller Jr	Alabama Power Co	Southern Co	22,509,466.8
GA	Bowen	Georgia Power Co	Southern Co	22,156,373.7
IN	Gibson	Duke Indiana Inc	Duke Energy	21,746,394.3
TX	Martin Lake	TXU Generation Co LP	Energy Future Holdings (TXU)	21,593,119.5
TX	W A Parish	NRG Energy		20,703,129.9

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Global warming -- U.S. sources

This post explains what global warming source data is and why you might be interested in it in a U.S. context.

Global warming -- or anthropogenic global climate change, to be more exact -- is one of the most critical contemporary environmental problems.  It's also one that the Obama administration has promised to do something about.  It's safe to assume that in a couple months, various proposals are going to begin to fly.  What data do we have that would bear on these proposals?  Over those months, I'm going to go over some of the material here.  It's a good excuse to refamiliarize myself with it, since the last time I worked with it was in 2003.

I'm not going to address the science at all, or engage in any way with global warming denialists.  The evidence that this is a real and important problem is unequivocal at this point, and anyone wanting more information on it should check out the IPCC, or if they prefer a group blog, RealClimate, or if they prefer more chatty, individual blogs:  Deltoid, Stoat, Rabett Run, Only In It For the Gold, or More Grumbine Science.

The questions I'm going to look at bear more on politics and infrastructure.  Where are the largest sources of the problem?  Who owns them?  How can people get information that helps them figure out their local power structure, if it comes down to local or state politics rather than national politics?

Global warming is caused by releases of greenhouse gasses, primarily carbon dioxide, CO2.  The overall U.S. estimates of human sources of these gasses are in the U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory.  Looking at its Executive Summary, the total sources for 2006, the latest year available, were about 7000 Tg Co2 equivalents.  (Don't worry about the units for now; just think of it as 7000 something.) Where did that come from?  2,300 was from electricity generation.  1,850 was from fossil fuels burned for transportation.  860 was from fossil fuels burned for industrial use, 330 residential, and all other types of sources were smaller.   That means that roughly a third of the problem is from electric power plants, a quarter is from cars and other vehicles, and about a tenth from large industrial uses.  Those three together make up more than 70% of the problem.

And those three types of sources are susceptible to infrastructural / political intervention.  Affected industries' preferred defenses involve either saying that the market should decide, or diffusing responsiblity to consumers -- as if individual volunteerism like replacing light bulbs or turning down the thermostat a few degrees or driving a few less miles could really have enough of a cumulative effect to matter.  (These actions can help, yes, but in the end you need to change infrastructure.  I may get into that in a future post.)  But no one builds a large power plant without governmental involvement; it's not really a market decision.  The miles per gallon of car fleets is already regulated.  And individual, large sources respond to pressure from organized communities.

Electricity generation is clearly the largest single piece.  What is the picture for current sources?  Here's the best map I could find, for 2005:

That map is from eGRID, one of the best U.S. databases available when it's up-to-date.  You may not be able to read the legend, but the black color is coal, the worst fuel from a greenhouse gas perspective.  There's a few major things to notice.  First, large hydro, the blue color, already dominates the areas where it's available.  Nuclear, in red, has a substantial presence, but no more is going to be built any time soon.  California and New England are already starting to diversify.  The Mountain West and midwest isn't, but the emissions are comparatively small there in any case.  The most immediate problem areas are Texas and the Illinois/Indiana/Ohio/Pennsylvania corridor.

The political situation in Texas may not be the greatest, but Texas has abundant potential solar and wind energy resources, and my guess is that it's going to take advantage of them.  The corridor is where I think local or state action might be most important.

What kind of information might assist in that action?  Well, with a database like eGRID, people can identify which actual plants, owned by which companies, are producing the majority of the problem.  And then there's a number of different outcomes people can push for -- shutting down coal plants and building renewable energy plants are only the most obvious ones.  One type of early intervention can be made through efficiency improvements at existing power plants.

Imagine a set of ten coal-burning power plants, all alike.  If you want to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% and keep the same electricity generation, one way to do it is to shut one of them down and build a renewable power plant with the same output.  But another way is to increase the efficiency at which the plants convert coal into electricity by about 10% so that you can shut one of them down and not build anything.  We're going to want to eventually shut the coal plants down and replace them, of course.  But putting in new equipment, such as more efficient turbines, can be cheaper and quicker for the initial stages.

A database like eGRID has information on every individual electric generating plant in the U.S. -- power generated, greenhouse gas emissions, and even some information on how up-to-date the equipment is.  Using it, people can change the problem from a big, fuzzy one involving "large power companies" into one in which they know where their power is being generated, where the greenhouse gas sources are, and which source contributes what.  That suggests points of potential pressure.

Perhaps that pressure won't be necessary -- perhaps a national cap-and-trade program will be implemented, and the problem will magically be solved by pseudo-market means.  (I have my doubts about that, too.)  Perhaps the data won't really be useful to local or state groups, or will be insufficient.  Perhaps they will be useful to national policy people, although they have their own researchers for summarizing this kind of thing. But the particular tool of public access to data is the area that I know something about, so I'm going to assume that it's going to be useful to someone.

The next post in this series will be about eGRID.

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