This month, with Russia’s ratification, the Kyoto Global warming treaty is at long last going into effect. European nations are preparing to meet their greenhouse reduction targets under the treaty. Is it time for Americans to rethink the question of radically cutting our own CO2 emissions, to protect the global future?
TXU, a Texas-based energy company, proudly tells us that its programs to avoid, reduce or sequester greenhouse gases have tripled, from 7.5 million tons per year in 1990 to more than 22 million tons per year since 2000.
In the process, TXU has:
- become the 5th-largest wind power buyer in the U.S.
- shifted to more low-sulfur fuels.
- captured methane (20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2) emitted from landfills.
- cut NOX emissions at its plants by 61 percent, in part by installing a costly Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) unit at one major facility.
- offered cut-rate mass transit tickets to its employees, and supported employee carpooling.
- helped local schools to upgrade the fuel-cleanliness of their school buses.
- sponsored the nation’s largest nonprofit urban tree farm, in Dallas, both to improve air quality and sequester more carbon in the local soils. Seedlings from the tree farm are also made available for local schoolyards, highway rights of way and parks.
All this is impressive, but let’s put it in perspective. Here are the relative contributions of the various greenhouse-risk reduction programs:
- Capturing landfill methane – 1 percent
- Buying renewable energy – 3 percent.
- Demand reduction programs – 3 percent
- Fuel blending with low-sulfur coal – 3 percent.
- Improved plant efficiencies – 5 percent.
- Opening a new nuclear power plant at Comanche Peak (1990) – 85 percent.
Virtually all of TXU’s success in combating CO2 emissions has come through opening the nuclear plant.
Nor are the European nations, Japan or Canada having much success in displacing fossil fuels. Britain gets Kyoto credit for shutting down its antique, costly coal mines and shifting to the natural gas it discovered in the North Sea-before it signed Kyoto. Germany gets Kyoto credit for shutting down Communist East Germany’s soft coal power plants-again before Kyoto was written.
Now, Europe and Japan are planning to buy credits from Russia’s closedown of the old Soviet factories to meet their greenhouse reduction goals for 2012—without significantly reducing their actual greenhouse gas emissions.
So far, none of the Kyoto countries has actually made significant cuts in its greenhouse emissions to meet the treaty’s small “opening wedge” reduction of 5.2 percent from 1990 levels. Nor were Kyoto members able to agree on any further CO2 reductions for the years after 2012 at their Buenos Aires conference last fall.
No wonder the Swedish Liberal Party recently announced it wants to reverse the ongoing phase-out of Sweden’s nuclear power plants. The party says it was told Sweden’s power would increasingly come from sun and wind, but the actual shift has been to oil and gas.
That’s the stark reality of the CO2 story.
