“America is addicted to oil,” said George W. Bush in his 2006 “State of the Union address.
[Part one of this series can be found here.]
One year after the President made that statement the official annual energy report of the US government projects this:
So in 2006 the President says we are addicted to oil yet the official projection published the following year shows us using much more in the year 2030 than we do now. That’s not the behavior you wish to see after an addict admits having a problem. What’s going on?
Part one of this series focused on the reference case projection in AEO2007, Annual Energy Outlook 2007 with Projections to 2030. This post looks at the four main variants of the reference case used in the report — higher/lower economic growth and higher/lower projected fuel prices — then discusses why the report projects outcomes at odds not just with the President’s statement but contrary to common sense as well.
In each bar of the following charts, the darker colors represent 2005 level, the lighter shades the 2030 reference case projected level, and the rectangular box the minimum and maximum 2030 levels for the four variants of the reference case given in the report.
In all scenarios total consumption goes up 18 to 44%. The vast bulk of that growth is in fossil fuels — oil (“liquid fuels” in the chart), natural gas, and coal — which in 2030 will constitute from a low of 85% to a high of 88% of the total fuel mix compared with 86% today, not really a change at all. Oil alone will be 37 to 43% of the total compared with 41% today.
Not only is the USA an oil addict not getting effective treatment, it is a potentially hopeless fossil fuel addict as well.
Notice too how small the future changes in non-fossil fuels are projected to be.
Here we see the industrial sector having the widest variance in the future projections (nearly 12 quads difference between low and high projections) and the transportation sector (more than 97% oil-based) having the most growth.
This chart is the bottom line.
- Net oil and natural gas imports grow an additional 1 to 70% beyond today’s level. An acknowledged addict would be decreasing usage, right?
- Fossil fuel usage increases a lot.
- Renewables grow little, which is not to say they don’t grow (everyone projects their growth), but at the scale of national consumption they don’t play any significant role as far as the official projections of the US government are concerned.
- Carbon emissions growth corresponds directly to fossil fuel use. They increase dramatically.
why?
Why is the AEO2007 report so at odds with the President’s statement regarding oil addiction and all common sense understanding (in light of the IPCC summary report) about the need to reduce carbon emissions to pre-1990 levels in response to global warming? (All the data presented in AEO2007 uses 2005 as a baseline.)
A few things come to mind:
- global warming denial — but the President has said he believes global warming is real and mostly caused by human activity.
- AEO2007 authors are
- twisting the data to produce a report that reflects the current administration’s objectives.
- constrained by the assumptions inherent in the report’s mandate.
- simply facing up to the lack of any real-world constraints on consumption and carbon emissions combined with real-world pressure to expand the economy.
The last two points seem to be the most realistic to me. The report’s mandate says
Because analyses by EIA are required to be policy neutral, the projections in AEO2007 generally are based on Federal and State laws and regulations in effect on or before October 31, 2006 (although there are exceptions to this rule, as discussed below). The potential impacts of pending or proposed legislation, regulations, and standards — or of sections of legislation that have been enacted but that require implementing regulations or appropriation of funds that are not provided or specified in the legislation itself — are not reflected in the projections.
So,
The projections are business-as-usual trend estimates, given known technology and technological and demographic trends. AEO2007 generally assumes that current laws and regulations are maintained throughout the projections. [emphasis mine]
You have to wonder how many in the executive and legislative branches of government read this fine print.
For example, included in the AEO2007 model:
The new CAFE standards finalized in March 2006, which establish higher minimum fuel economy performance requirements by vehicle footprint for light-duty trucks…
But this is excluded:
…consideration of California Assembly Bill 32 …, which mandates a 25-percent reduction in California’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Implementing regulations have not been drafted and are not due to be finalized until January 2012.
Also excluded is the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative:
The governors of the seven States participating in the RGGI — Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Vermont — have committed to enact legislation individually for achieving the desired emission reductions under the agreement.
because:
Although the State RGGI caps and timelines are known, many aspects of their implementation remain uncertain, because the participating States have not yet enacted the necessary legislation. Therefore, the RGGI provisions are not modeled in AEO2007.
So the AEO2007 authors ignore some state and federal government initiatives because they have are not yet funded or fully fleshed out — a pragmatic stance to take since they can not know how those initiatives might pan out. In this sense AEO2007 projects a future based on what we are really doing now, not what we wish to do.
We can then conclude:
Since the 2006 State of the Union speech over a year ago, nothing has been done in any meaningful way at the federal or state levels to reduce our dependence on imported oil or reduce carbon emissions. This is not to say initiatives are not underway, only that there are no concrete, tangible, definitive measures to point to.
next up
In the next installment of this series I’ll take a look at what the report doesn’t say as well as some ways politicians spin the numbers to make us feel good when nothing useful is being accomplished.
I also want to explore some of the positive things states are doing, like the California bill and RGGI mentioned above, while leadership on the federal level is AWOL.
Photo cropped and scaled from mybloodyself’s photostream, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License
Static analysis is pretty standard and also pretty problematic. For instance when they propose a change in the tax rate and do the budget projections they assume that rate change has no effect beyond the arithmetic. What you seem to be highlighting is that these reports exclude a whole swag of possible changes in behaviour. In short they are simplistic projections.
When it comes to the utterances of your president I think you should also allow for the fact that he is a politician and so his message will often vary widely depending on the audience he is attempting to please on any given day. Sad but true.
P.S. What sort of chimney is in your photo? I only ask because CO2 is invisible and your picture looks like some sort of steam vent rather than a chimney from a power station.
Regarding your comment #1, Terje, I’m not sure what your point is.
Re: #2: I chose the chimney to represent industrial output. I’ve no idea what this particular one is connected to. In any case I’m not aware that any stack or tailpipe ever vents 100% CO2.
Most power stations I have ever seen vent nothing that is actually visible to an observer although the cooling stacks do put out steam. I’m guessing that your picture is actually of some industrial process where steam is being released. Given that water vapour is a greenhouse gas I suspose it is still topical.
On point one I was just saying that this problem (governments contradicting themselves) is part of a broader pattern.
The picture at the following link is of the largest coal fired power station in NSW Australia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bayswater_Power_Station_with_coal.jpg
The tall concrete towers in the picture are emmiting the exhaust gasses from the coal fires within. The emissions are all entirely invisible and there is nothing for an observer to see. The short concrete towers are the cooling stacks and above them you can see steam.
Congratulations, once again, on account of a job well done. A brilliant article. – As for responding to any of the numerous questions you are posing here; I honestly don’t know what to say. You have certainly managed to cover the development insanity to my (harr! harr!) satisfaction.
We’ve managed to develop a global culture of fossil-fuels addiction. It’s a bad habit, I know. But even though many people have, as of recent, come to agree with the notion of “fossil-fuels addiction” and readily admit to the biproduct of global warming leading to climate change, it seems to be impossible for whole societies of humans to deal with the habit in a rational way. And quit!
Because quitting!?? What would that mean? Ahhh. – Too much, man. Too much, too much.
Magne, thanks for the appreciation. Reading and analyzing that report was not fun. Well, part of it was fun, I do enjoy in a rather primitive way consuming data.
When 85% of your energy use comes from fossil fuels, as is the case in the USA, how do you begin to make a dent? One can hope and wish for fusion research to finally come through (it’s been 30 years out for each of the last 30 years) or for renewables to have a spurt of growth. But few people, I think, understand the magnatude of 85 quads, the amount of fossil fuel energy used in the USA today, and what it really entails to replace it with something sustainable.
I should be more accurate. What I mean is:
While lots of people understand the scale of the problem (85 quads) they are relatively few with respect to the electorate. Until we are able to elect and support politicians who will take a realistic stance on reducing consumption and increasing spending on renewables, little change will occur.
[...] [update: see also part two of this series] [...]
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/news/record.cfm?id=269618
Targets
The Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act requires that the U.S. reduce its emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. By 2030, the U.S. must reduce its emissions by 1/3 of 80 percent below 1990 levels; by 2040, emissions must be reduced by 2/3 of 80 percent below 1990 levels; and by 2050, emissions must be reduced to a level that is 80 percent below 1990 levels.
In the event that global atmospheric concentrations exceed 450 parts per million or average global temperatures increase more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial average, EPA can require additional reductions. The National Academy of Sciences will report to EPA and the Congress regarding whether such events have occurred.
Bernie Sanders (senator from Vermont) and Barber Boxer (senator from California) introduced the bill you link to, Magne. If only it had a chance of passing — cynical me thinks it won’t even make it out of committee to get a vote on the floor.
Sanders is perhaps the most unique of the 100 senators. He openly says he’s a socialist. We need more like him (socialist or not), people willing to speak truth to power.