What is Climate Change Policy Now Trying to Achieve?
Almost all advocates of international climate change policy hope and expect that the Climate Change Conference to be held in Paris in November–December 2015 will reach an agreement to reduce global anthropomorphic greenhouse gas emissions. Yet more than 25 years of international climate change policy has failed to reach such an agreement; emissions, far from having been reduced, have greatly increased. In the author's view, no such agreement will be reached in Paris. Anticipating this, Lord Stern, a highly influential figure in international climate change policy, has restated the case for continuing with this policy while relinquishing the objective of reaching such an agreement, though it had previously been claimed that this was essential to ‘save the world’. Advocating the continuation of climate change policy while disavowing a formerly acknowledged condition of its success seems to represent a further stage in the abandonment of rationality in climate change policy formulation.
After Doha: What Has Climate Change Policy Accomplished?
At the end of the Doha Climate Change Conference and of the first commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, it is incontrovertible that 20 years of international climate change policy has failed to secure a reduction in global emissions. Bringing up to date an argument first made in 2007, this note explains this failure as a result of the legal position established by those negotiations. Contrary to general belief, it is not the case that no legally binding agreement over emissions has been established. One has been established, but it has been to grant to the major industrialising countries a permission to emit as much as they wish. The emissions of these countries have never been capped, and the operation of the Clean Development Mechanism, which, by the nature of its design, logically cannot prevent a growth of emissions, has been a failure. The increase of major industrialising countries’ emissions has made the policy of mitigating growth of global emissions impossible from the start and makes it impossible now.
Coal-based synthetic natural gas (SNG): A solution to China’s energy security and CO2 reduction?
Considering natural gas (NG) to be the most promising low-carbon option for the energy industry, large state owned companies in China have established numerous coal-based synthetic natural gas (SNG) projects. The objective of this paper is to use a system approach to evaluate coal-derived SNG in terms of life-cycle energy efficiency and CO2 emissions. This project examined main applications of the SNG and developed a model that can be used for evaluating energy efficiency and CO2 emissions of various fuel pathway systems. The model development started with the GREET model, and added the SNG module and an end-use equipment module. The database was constructed with Chinese data. The analyses show when the SNG are used for cooking, power generation, steam production for heating and industry, life-cycle energies are 20–108% higher than all competitive pathways, with a similar rate of increase in life-cycle CO2 emissions. When a compressed natural gas (CNG) car uses the SNG, life-cycle CO2 emission will increase by 150–190% compared to the baseline gasoline car and by 140–210% compared to an electric car powered by electricity from coal-fired power plants. The life-cycle CO2 emission of SNG-powered city bus will be 220–270% higher than that of traditional diesel city bus. The gap between SNG-powered buses and new hybrid diesel buses will be even larger—life-cycle CO2 emission of the former being around 4 times of that of the latter. It is concluded that the SNG will not accomplish the tasks of both energy conservation and CO2 reduction.