With 2017 officially over, I thought I would look back at a couple of predictions I made regarding our current administration’s energy policy and the state of our climate, and see how they played out. Prediction is an important part not only of science but of analysis in general. If the insights are solid, they should hold up not only to scrutiny at the time they are made but also to the tests that time puts them through. Sometimes the unexpected still happens, of course, in which case you re-evaluate your previous opinions and beliefs and learn from what you got wrong.
I’ll start with a Facebook post I made the week after the 2016 election, based on a conversation I had with a colleague:
“One of the physics professors at Adelphi asked me how I thought the election would affect our energy production (and subsequently our CO2 emissions). I have a few thoughts that I figured I'd share.
1. For economic reasons, the coal industry has shrunk over the last decade. For economic reasons, the coal industry will not have a resurgence (all statements to the contrary by the President-elect notwithstanding).
2. The natural gas industry will meet with a friendly reception. Not getting into the debate on fracking for the time being (like it or not, there will be a lot of it), methane burns cleaner than other fossil fuels but it causes a significant climate impact when released to the air directly. There is plenty of scientific data at this point to suggest that the EPA's current methane emissions estimates -- and keep in mind, this is Obama's EPA -- are too low by close to a factor of two. This is a problem for all sources of methane, including the gas industry. A big issue that needs to be addressed is the combination of a surge in production with some seriously old infrastructure. (I explained it to my students this way: More than half the existing gas pipelines are older than I am, and as much as I hate to admit it, I'm not that young anymore.) Trump says he's all about infrastructure. We'll see.
3. Renewables will get a less friendly reception, but the good news is that they are in a position to survive that -- utility-scale solar is already cost-competitive with coal and gas. And if storage batteries can be made cheaply, they may even thrive.
4. Where renewables will face the most trouble is government-funded research. In September, I had the great pleasure of taking my class to Brookhaven Laboratory to see the solar-related projects there. I worry that projects like that are very vulnerable now.
5. The status quo will hold where CO2 emissions are concerned. While basic reality dictates that we cut our emissions with a sense of urgency, and that won't happen, CO2 emissions have actually dropped a little in recent years and I don't see them going back up.”
Regarding the first point, the economic health of the coal industry has not improved any in the past year. In fact, according to Lazard's most recent analysis of the levelized cost of energy, the cost of coal has remained steady over the past year while the costs of natural gas, utility-scale solar, and wind have all dropped. So coal’s foothold in the energy sector is indeed getting more and more tenuous.
I was a bit off on the second point, however. I would have thought that anybody interested in defending fossil fuels would sing the praises of natural gas very loudly, given that it is cleaner than coal (it emits about half as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy released) and that it is presently cheaper than coal with a widening gap in price between the two. But that is not what happened. Instead, a Notion of Proposed Rulemaking submitted by the Department of Energy in September suggested offering tax breaks to power plants that could maintain 90 days worth of fuel on-site. This proposal attempted to tilt the energy market away from natural gas plants, whose fuel supplies are generally piped in as needed, and towards coal and nuclear plants. Just yesterday, though, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected the proposal; it makes bad economic sense, in addition to making terrible environmental sense. Lobbying for the coal industry does score political points in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio that were critical to Trump’s electoral victory in 2016, however, so at this point I would expect the President to make similar attempts to prop up coal in the near future. Moving ahead to the last sentence in my second point, Trump has yet to make a serious move on infrastructure. So I guess we'll still see.
The third point was pretty accurate on the whole. Utility-scale scale solar and wind remain competitive, and their costs continue to drop. The price of utility-scale solar with battery storage dropped substantially, from $92 per megawatt-hour to $82 per megawatt hour. Ultimately the battery storage is necessary for renewables to overcome the obstacle of intermittent generation (meaning you don't get electricity from a solar panel when there is no sun or from a windmill when there is no wind). A fully clean energy sector simply cannot happen without it. There are no obvious policy obstacles standing in the way of renewables right now; in fact, the only real obstacle is the price of natural gas.
Thankfully, there has been no major push to cut funding for renewables-related research to date. I do still worry, though, that those projects are vulnerable.
I should have specified in my fifth point whether I was talking about global emissions of carbon dioxide, or specifically American emissions. According to the recent estimates of the Global Carbon Project, American emissions in 2017 dropped slightly by approximately -0.4%. Global carbon dioxide emissions have unfortunately gone up, however, primarily due to an uptick in the Chinese economy. This underscores the need for more urgent and aggressive action across the board in reducing carbon emissions. It’s pretty clear that our current administration won’t lead that charge, but some states are stepping in to fill the void.
The next prediction I would like to talk about comes from the blog post I made titled Breaking the “Icy Silence.” The post discusses the drop in temperatures in the later part of 2016 that corresponded with the end of the very strong El Niño event that contributed to three straight years of record warmth.
“As for the drop, the 2015-2016 El Niño has certainly ended, but the present state is closer to neutral than to a full-blown La Niña event. This suggests that ENSO-neutral conditions presently result in a temperature anomaly at, or maybe a little bit above, 0.80ºC. Were this state of general neutrality to continue for the rest of the year, 2017 would wind up comfortably being the third warmest on record, but that ultimately depends on whether or not a strong La Niña ultimately happens.”
A strong La Niña event did not materialize early in 2017. Instead a weak El Niño emerged in late spring, making it look for a while that 2017 might wind up being the second warmest year on record. But the El Niño quickly dissipated and now it looks like the La Niña is finally happening. As of November (the December data needs to be processed and won’t be available until the middle of the month), 2017 had a mean temperature anomaly of approximately 0.84ºC relative to the twentieth century mean— comfortably the third highest on record. NOAA is predicting a weak to moderate La Niña event that will last through the winter. I’m going to predict that this will cool the air off enough to make 2018 the fourth warmest year on record when all is said and done. We’ll see how that prediction looks this time next year.
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