Climate Solutions: Actions 21-28

Published: December 10, 2009, 2:46 pm

Updated: May 7, 2012, 11:45 am

Topics:

Climate Change (main)

Guiding and Fostering Multidisciplinary Research

Action 21: The US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP)—What Do We Want from the Next Administration?

The USGCRP was created during the latter part of President Reagan’s administration when the scientific community, other expert observers, and the public policy communities noted that there were trends and changes, often on global scales, that exceeded historic patterns. For example, marked changes in weather and climate, a rush of historically rural societies to more urban regions and other demographic shifts, changes in tropical rain forests and other accelerating alterations in land use, and disruptions to the structure and biodiversity of ecological systems were being observed and reported in the scientific literature and the media.

Research

Task 1 The federal budgetary process should more effectively represent the needs of the nation to address the issues of climate and global change.

Task 2 The USGCRP should be reframed to better address the 21st century opportunities and challenges:

• Enhance focus on adaptation research and response strategies.
• Enhance focus on mitigation research and response strategies.
• Enhance support for international, national, and regional-scale climate and global change assessments and related analyses.
• Enhance support for observation and monitoring of essential climate and global change variables.
• Enhance support for capacity building within schools, universities, and the general concerned public.
• Enhance effectiveness of decision-support and communication activities.

Task 3 Implement the recommendations of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.

Task 4 Enhance research, assessment, and communication activities at regional to local scales.

Task 5 Enhance and broaden the social science research agenda.

Task 6 Enhance implementation of the statutory mandate for the USGCRP.

Task 7 Invest in and amplify the use of the collaborative capabilities of Web-based systems for real-time data and monitoring.

Task 8 Reform the management of the USGCRP.

Action 22: Availability of Technology to Mitigate Climate Change

Global emissions of GHGs are increasing at an unsustainable rate. The current driving forces for CO₂ emission growth are economic and population growth, which are powerful and not likely to change. It will be necessary to counteract these vectors by moving as quickly as possible toward technologies that generate fewer GHG emissions per economic activity and per capita. This would need to be accomplished in all the key sectors: power generation, transportation, building, and industrial. The following issues should be considered:

• Which are the most important sectors for which technology has the greatest potential for mitigating GHG emissions?
• What are the most promising technologies by sector, what is the state of their development, and is the research community focusing on these most promising technologies?
• For these key technologies, what are the remaining technical, economic, and environmental challenges?
• What has been the history of funding for such technologies, and is it deemed adequate to the challenge?
• What should be the relative roles for govvernment, industry, and academia in developing and deploying key technologies?
• If additional resources were made available to accelerate technology development in a timescale consistent with the challenge, where should they be invested?
• How important is fundamental research versus pilot and full-scale research/development/demonstration activities?

Policy

Task 1 Energy efficiency is the low-hanging fruit that can lead to the greatest reduction in CO₂ at least cost, particularly in transportation, appliances, and buildings. The federal and state governments should develop new incentives (and remove disincentives), promulgate new regulations, and foster changes in public behavior to decrease emissions from energy use by 1% to 2% per year.

Task 2 The administration and Congress should greatly increase funding, by at least doubling it, to promote implementation via development and demonstration of technologies that are commercial or near commercial to reduce carbon emissions at the fastest possible rate.

Task 3 The US Climate Change Technology Program (CCTP) should lead in setting priorities for the implementation of such technologies. Priority should be given to projects that address more than one issue; for example, carbon- free power production supports carbon-free transportation and simultaneous production of biomass energy with carbon capture.

Task 4 The federal government should address two widely acknowledged problems slowing progress toward attainment of stabilized GHGs: lack of a price in the marketplace on GHG emissions and the underinvestment in GHG-reducing solutions, including plant, equipment, best practices and services, and advanced GHG-reducing technology and related R&D.

Task 5 The administration and Congress should explore a new investment-stimulating mechanism that might address both problems. The new mechanism would be privately held environmental security accounts, or ESAs, modeled loosely after individual retirement accounts. Each participating entity or individual would pay into its ESA a fee (not a tax) based on the amount of its GHG emissions. Accrued funds would be made available for investment by the ESA account holder to grow the ESA tax free, or they could be withdrawn, provided that the funds were applied in ways that furthered the goals of environmental security. A fee schedule would be set by national legislation, which would authorize the ESAs and establish the criteria for the withdrawal of the funds.

Task 6 The ESA mechanism would create a price in the marketplace on GHG emissions, setting into motion private creativity to reduce such emissions. It would also provide a source of funds (or collateral for third-party financing) for payer-directed investments in GHG-reducing solutions.

Task 7 Compared with a tax (or equivalent cap and trade mechanisms), where revenues are collected by government and redistributed politically, the ESA mechanism could prove to be more environmentally effective and, perhaps, less objectionable to payers. The adverse effects of the higher near-term costs might be offset intra-entity by the stimulating longer-term benefits of new investment. Analysis would be needed to estimate macroeconomic and sectoral effects on the economy and international competitiveness. Pilot programs could be carried out to test the concept, work out administrative procedure, and identify costs.

Research

Task 8 The administration and Congress need to triple the level of funding for strategic research to develop the next generation of end use and production energy technologies with efficiencies to meet the 2100 goal at a low enough cost that they can be adopted by lesser-developed economies. Emphasis should be on renewable energy and energy enablers such as energy storage (batteries, capacitors), plug-in hybrids, hydrogen, and gas separation membranes. The CCTP should provide the road map for ensuring the balance of funding technologies at the fundamental, strategic, and demonstration levels and for providing the correct mix of participation by government, industry, and academia.

Task 9 Federal agencies such as the DOE, EPA, USDA, and Department of Defense should be involved in prioritization and management of these technologies. On the research side, it is important to utilize all relevant federal capabilities, such as the EPA Office of Reserach and Development’s technology assessment and environmental characterization expertise. Opportunities for synergy between the climate change mitigation programs of different agencies might be promoted by providing resources for rotating positions at CCTP for key researchers from the participating agencies.

Task 10 The DOE should develop regional climate change commercialization centers that can adapt mitigation technologies to local climates, topographies, vegetations, and demographics. The role of the regional centers would be to apply modeling to determine the effects of climate change on the local climates to assist in

• setting standards for efficiency that take into account future changes
• mapping of wind, solar, and biomass resources in order to promote the optimum utilization of renewables
• planning adaptation strategies

Action 23: CO₂ Capture and Storage (CCS)—How Can It Play a Major Role in Mitigating Climate Change?

There is rapidly growing national and international interest in the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) as part of a climate change mitigation strategy for controlling CO₂ emissions from coal-fired power plants and other large industrial sources. All three components of the CCS system — CO₂ capture, pipeline transport, and geological storage (sequestration) — are found in industrial operations today, and there are now several projects worldwide that each capture and sequester a million tons of CO₂ or more per year. However, CCS technologies have not yet been applied to a large-scale power plant, nor has the integration of capture, transport, and storage at a commercial scale yet been demonstrated in the United States. Current CCS technologies also incur significant costs and energy penalties. A number of important technical, economic, legal, regulatory, and public acceptance issues therefore must be resolved before CCS can be widely deployed as a part of a climate change strategy.

Research

Task 1 The private sector, in collaboration with the federal government, should conduct multiple commercial-scale demonstrations of integrated CCS systems at power plants with geological sequestration to validate large-scale performance and reliability. Projects should span a range of power plant and CO₂ capture types (e.g., combustion, gasification systems), new and retrofit applications, and a range of geological formations (e.g., deep saline formations, depleted oil and gas fields).

Task 2 A financing mechanism should be developed by government and industry to fund these projects.

Task 3 The federal government and the private sector should collaborate to conduct risk assessments of geologic sequestration to identify data needed by the insurance industry and regulatory agencies concerned with site approval and risk management.

Task 4 Congress should significantly increase funding for basic and applied R&D to develop new and advanced (lower-cost) CO₂ capture and storage technologies.

Task 5 The EPA and DOE should develop life cycle assessment tools for CCS projects covering all aspects from resource requirements through geological storage, including impacts of capture and storage systems involving mixtures of CO₂ and other acid gases.

Education

Task 6 The public and private sectors, including universities and environmental organizations, should jointly undertake an initiative of education and dialogue to facilitate public awareness or acceptance of potential future deployment of CCS technologies.

Task 7 Scientists and engineers should increase their efforts to work with and educate policymakers and regulators about CCS (including the risks, benefits, and additional needs). http://www.climatetechnology.gov

Action 24: Counting Carbon—Tracking and Communicating Emitted and Embodied Greenhouse Gases in Products, Services, Corporations, and Consumers

As corporations, countries, consumers, and communities attempt to measure and report their greenhouse gas footprints, they face many daunting challenges, particularly in the United States, where awareness lags and emissions (sometimes embedded in products imported from abroad) soar. There are many challenges and opportunities in measuring and conveying to stakeholders the quantities of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, sometimes hidden in the life cycles of various products or services. Such information can assist individuals, companies, communities, and nations in meeting specific goals and fostering more energy-efficient and climatically savvy societies.

Policy

Task 1 Those working to track and reduce emissions should keep an eye on the big picture and high-magnitude solutions and not be distracted by noise and minutia. The variety and scale of factors can be overwhelming.

Research

Task 2 The measurement of emitted and embodied GHGs should be standardized, and transparency should be ensured, using techniques and strategies such as those developed by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Carbon Disclosure Project.

Task 3 Standardize and simplify data gathering without sacrificing quality and integrity, perhaps by following WRI’s approach, which is already taking the lead at developing standards and protocols for data.

Task 4 More data must be produced and assured for quality. Existing and emerging tools and technology should be employed. These include “smart metering” in homes and the BEES calculator tool (see the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability software, http:// www.bfrl.nist.gov/oae/software/bees/). Case studies of particular products to build should be highlighted.

Education

Task 5 Awareness should be raised by training and education of corporations and consumers, supported by coordinated, multidisciplinary efforts to convey the service life cycles of specific products, including their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions.

Task 6 Training programs should be developed to increase expertise in tracking, reporting, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Task 7 Opportunities should be provided to individuals and corporations for sharing information, including a clearinghouse of information and resources. www.nist.gov

Action 25: Ocean Fertilization for Carbon Sequestration

Ocean iron fertilization is the process by which iron is deposited onto the surface of the ocean to stimulate a large bloom of phytoplankton in order to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere by photosynthesis. This mimics a natural process that happens via dust storms, coastal interaction, and deep water upwelling. Iron is a necessary trace nutrient used in photosynthesis and is the primary limiting factor to plankton growth in much of the world’s open oceans far from land. Carbon sequestration occurs as dead phytoplankton or fecal pellets from zooplankton sink into the deep ocean. This process of sequestration is known as the “biological pump,” and it has been the Earth’s primary atmospheric carbon removal mechanism since photosynthesis first began over 1 billion years ago — contributing to the storage of nearly 86% of the world’s mobile carbon in the deep ocean.

Like all plants, phytoplankton require various nutrients to grow. In the central ocean basins, the scarcest of those nutrients is iron, only episodically supplied by large wind-driven dust events. Ocean fertilization involves the use of ships to apply trace amounts of iron to these iron-limited regions of the ocean. This process has been demonstrated in 12 publicly funded experiments since 1993 to effectively trigger large bloom events, which may accelerate the transfer of CO₂ to ocean depths.

Recently, several commercial entities have proposed the use of iron fertilization to sequester CO₂ and to generate carbon offsets for sale in the voluntary carbon market and/or eventually the regulated market. What combination of scientific research and public dialogue is needed for informed decision making about iron fertilization?

Research

Task 1 It is essential that both iron fertilization experiments and any potential commercial fertilization in the ocean be regulated internationally to assure that the environmental impacts of the activity are understood and, in the case of commercial fertilization, that offsets for emitted carbon are legitimate.

Task 2 Fertilization activities should be monitored for compliance with regulations.

Task 3 The scientific community should evaluate ocean areas to determine whether any are inappropriate for fertilization because of negative environmental impact (e.g., marine protected areas) or for oceanographic reasons (e.g., areas with upwelling that would prevent sequestration).

Task 4 Research on the environmental impacts of ocean iron fertilization should include the entire water column and the open ocean food web.

Task 5 Biological monitoring of iron fertilization of the ocean should include genomic approaches that provide better evidence of impact on organisms than only sampling and standard identification.

Task 6 The scientific community should evaluate the long-term impacts of fertilization, even if it becomes accepted for carbon credits.

Task 7 The scientific community should identify the parameters and metrics that are necessary to demonstrate sequestration and to identify environmental impacts.

Education

Task 8 There should be a dialogue about concerns over ocean iron fertilization with international scientific, conservation, government, and business communities.

Action 26: Geoengineering as Part of a Climate Change Response Portfolio

Geoengineering refers to the deliberate modification of the environment. It has been suggested that, in order to reduce the magnitude of future anthropogenic (largely CO₂-induced) warming, humans might deliberately reduce the net amount of incoming solar radiation received by the Earth by putting reflectors in orbit around the planet, by injecting aerosols or aerosol precursors into the stratosphere, or by changing the albedo (reflectivity) of marine clouds by using artificially produced cloud condensation nuclei. While these ideas have been around for many decades, they have recently received renewed attention because of the rapidity of current climate change and the increased confidence in projections of substantial future change. Geoengineering must be viewed, therefore, as a possible complement to mitigation. It may either be held in reserve as a means to ward off major changes should the climate system be judged to be heading for an otherwise irreversible “melt down” or, if the technological challenges of timely mitigation be judged too difficult, be employed as a way to gain time to develop and implement appropriate new climate-neutral technologies.

Policy

Task 1 Geoengineering (solar radiation management) is not now well enough understood to be considered as an option that is complementary to mitigation and adaptation for dealing with global warming.

Research

Task 2 More research on the efficacy, effects, and ethical considerations of geoengineering is needed.

• A well-managed, multiagency program focused on geoengineering should be established.
• This research should be multidisciplinary, including the climate system, biological, and ecosystem aspects.
• The research program should study governance questions and ethical issues.

Task 3 A geoengineering research program should not be at the expense of a much larger increase in research about mitigation and adaptation. Geoengineering should only be considered in emergencies if those larger programs are inadequate.

Task 4 To be accepted and monitored by the people of the world, the research needs to be published in the peer-reviewed, open literature, and the research program should be internationally sponsored.

Task 5 Large-scale field experiments of geoengineering measures should not be carried out until detailed theoretical assessments are conducted of how they would work and their possible consequences .

Task 6 The capability for long-term monitoring of the climate system, particularly by satellites, needs to be maintained and enhanced so that climate change, and the effects of any geoengineering approaches, can be measured and detected in an accurate and robust manner.

Task 7 Beyond solar radiation management, other novel approaches to counterbalancing climate change and its impacts should be explored.

Action 27: Looking into the Past to Understand Future Climate Change

The Earth’s climate history is invaluable to understanding future change and guiding policy. Paleoclimatology is a multidisciplinary field that uses past geologic records to understand changes in climate; this understanding can help guide decisions about adaptation and mitigation. For example, for sea level rise, the geological record provides information that enables scientists to determine realistic levels of risk, in both time scale and magnitude. The past also reveals links between sea level rise and “rapid ice melt,” between climate change and ocean circulation, and between atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and global and regional climate change. Changes in droughts and floods and their impacts on past societies can indicate ecosystems’ abilities to adapt to climate change. Understanding the sensitivity of Earth’s climate to greenhouse gases will help policymakers to determine the levels of mitigation that will be required.

Research

Task 1 The scientific community should develop integrated land-based (e.g., ice cores and lake cores) and ocean-based (e.g., sediments from scientific ocean drilling, corals) paleoclimatic data sets.

Task 2 The federal government should create funding mechanisms and institutional arrangements to encourage researchers of climate/ ocean dynamics and those making paleoclimate observations to collaborate to improve climate models.

Task 3 Research is needed to understand the sensitivity of ice sheets to climate change and their impact on sea level.

Education

Task 4 Scientific professional organizations should train and encourage scientists to communicate paleoclimate research to policymakers, educators, and the public at large.

Task 5 Publishers should incorporate paleoclimate research into environmental science textbooks.

Task 6 Scientific societies should increase the number of Congressional Science and Technology Fellowships.

Action 28: A National Strategy for Wildlife Adaptation to Climate Change— What Should It Include?

Proposed climate change legislation calls for development of a “national strategy” for assisting wildlife and ecosystems, both terrestrial and marine, to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Such legislation would provide significant new funding for conservation activities, land acquisition, and other actions to implement such a strategy. Efforts to define a national strategy raise challenging scientific and policy questions. What should such a national strategy include? What should be its goals, and how should it measure progress toward achieving them? What does “adaptation to the impacts of climate change” mean? What actions and approaches should such a strategy include to help wildlife and ecosystems faced with disruption by a changing climate, and who should implement such actions? What scientific research is needed to help define such a national strategy and to refine it as it is implemented over the course of decades? A national strategy for wildlife adaptation should include the goals and provisions outlined below.

Policy

Task 1 Protect biodiversityand the ecological and evolutionary processes that produce and maintain it.

Task 2 Employ a transparent process that is iterative and adaptive, supported by research and monitoring of ecosystem structure and functioning.

Task 3 Ensure early action to invest in habitat conservation, including buying land.

Task 4 Include a quick response mechanism for ecological catastrophes and other episodes.

Task 5 Ensure coordination with all stakeholders, including Mexico, Canada, and other countries, and integrate with strategies to address the impacts of climate change on public health and the built environment.

Task 6 Focus on a broad range of stresses on wildlife (non-climate as well) to promote resilience.

Task 7 Integrate with and implement the strategy through planning and management for federal lands.

Task 8 Consider international biological diversity and opportunities to provide assistance to other countries.

Research

Task 9 Create an unbiased, IPCC-like commission to identify the best available science.

Education

Task 10 Develop a strategy for education, communication, and public outreach.

This is a chapter from Climate Solutions Consensus. Previous: Actions 1-20|Table of Contents (Climate Solutions: Actions 21-28)|Next: Actions 29-35

Citation

Wiegman, L., & Blockstein, D. (2012). Climate Solutions: Actions 21-28. Retrieved from http://editors.eol.org/eoearth/wiki/Climate_Solutions:_Actions_21-28