U.S. Government Significantly Underestimating Costs of Climate Change and Dirty Energy

DeSmogBlog
A new study released today shows that the U.S. government is using faulty calculations and outdated information to determine the costs of energy and climate change in America. The study was written by Chris Hope from the University of Cambridge and Laurie Johnson of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences.
Current government models would have us believe that fossil fuels provide the cheapest sources of electricity for the United States, but the new study says that the numbers being used are misleading, as they do not take into account all of the costs, specifically those related to climate change, that these sources of energy carry.
… Regulatory agencies are using a faulty model to estimate carbon pollution damages that all but ignores the economic damages climate change will inflict on future generations.
After valuing these costs more completely, our study finds that carbon pollution will impose damages between 2.6 to more than 12 times higher than the government’s main estimate. The government put the value of the damage caused by carbon pollution at $21 per ton of CO2, whereas our revised estimates place the cost at between $55 and $266 per ton. Importantly, even these revised estimates may be too low: they correspond to what might happen if future temperature increases are in the middle of scientists’ projections—not any of the worse-case scenarios they warn us about. Additionally, the model left out many damages that couldn't be quantified.
As Laurie Johnson points out, the estimates from the government are hugely significant, as they are the primary drivers behind the government’s climate change and emissions policies. Setting the costs too low will cause fewer actions and regulatory controls to be put in place, thereby exacerbating the problem.
The charts below show the discrepancies between the government’s models and the revised models from the report:
As the charts clearly show, ignoring the cost of emission damages benefits the coal and natural gas industries tremendously. But when you factor in the costs that the emissions impose on our health and our environment, the clean energy technologies are clearly the best way to go.
The NRDC says the following about the cost analysis:
At our two lowest discount rates (1 and 1.5 percent), we find that the real cost (i.e. generation costs inclusive of pollution damages) of building new electricity generation from natural gas (what the market currently favors) is higher than for wind or natural gas with carbon capture and storage technology (CCS.) At 1 percent, solar photovoltaic and coal with CCS would also be cheaper. These findings are driven by differences in climate change costs only, as SO2 pollution from coal with capture is small, and negligible for natural gas. When the government’s (higher) discount rates are used, conventional natural gas appears to be cheaper than these cleaner technologies.
I was surprised with my results for replacing existing generation: at all of our discount rates, it would be cheaper on average to replace the coal fleet with cleaner sources than to continue operating it. The fleet emits so much CO2 (coal accounts for over one third of all U.S. emissions) that the avoided climate damages alone outweigh the apparent cost advantage of maintaining existing infrastructure.
At all of our discount rates, it would be advantageous to replace the existing coal fleet with wind plants, with natural gas plants, or with natural gas plants equipped with CCS. At a discount rate of 1 or 1.5 percent, solar photovoltaic and coal with CCS are also preferable to running the existing plants.
Interestingly, at the two lowest discount rates (2.5 and 3 percent) used in the government’s analysis, the real cost of maintaining the coal fleet is higher than replacing it with conventional natural gas plants. At its lowest rate (2.5 percent), wind and natural gas using CCS would also be economically efficient.
The numbers and calculations included in the study show us that long-term investment in renewable energy will pay off significantly for individuals, the government, and the economy. But those are long term benefits, not short term, which is always a tough sell for investors (the investors in this case being citizens, government entities, and energy companies).
As long as corporations are able to make higher profits using fossil fuels, they will continue to do so. The cost burden is shifted from the corporations to the federal government and taxpayers. The only exception is when corporations are either fined or sued for damages related to pollution, which is not common or costly enough for them to make a change.
Visit EcoWatch’s CLIMATE CHANGE page for more related news on this topic.
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A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
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