In today’s The Space Review, Stephen Fawkes notes that the space community needs to address carbon pollution. I want to applaud the use of hydrogen in the space shuttle–using about 400,000 gallons or 1/2 of one hundredth of one percent of all hydrogen used in the US each time it launches (one part in 20,000).

I also want to applaud Al Gore and Richard Branson for taking the lead on getting this problem solved for the whole world, not just the space and airline industries.

The gas coming out of a coal furnace is mostly carbon dioxide. Sequestration schemes need not look to capture and concentrate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere until power plant exhaust sources are exhausted. One way to sequester the CO₂ is to send it into the ground via the same kind of pipeline and into the same kind of well they find methane in. Al, Richard, buy defibrillators with the $25 million if you end up awarding your greenhouse prize for this idea.

The problem of 143 tons of kerosene is no big deal. Following a carbon neutral strategy would add about $2,000 to the price of an orbital ticket that is priced in the millions at today’s European carbon abatement price per ton.

Carbon is an opportunity, not a material liability. It is time for the suborbital and orbital space companies to declare that they will be carbon neutral and buy carbon offsets for their customers. Join Space Shot and Virgin and help eclipse Earthbound dangers as we develop space.

In the US, we send up about 6 thousand million metric tons of carbon a year. That’s 20 tons per person. Carbon offsets are trading in Europe right now for about $15/ton. If we put in place a $15/ton carbon tax and a $15/ton carbon sequestration subsidy that would create money flows of $90 billion from the carbon emitting sector (33% more generation cost at most for electricity which costs $280 billion a year) and small but growing flows into forestry, biomass, ethanol and sequestration and long-term storage. If that is not enough to lick carbon, perhaps a $200/ton tax/subsidy would. That would be a $0.60/gallon gas tax but shoot the price of coal up by a factor of 10. The former tax might have a total distortion on the economy of about $15 billion or what we pay for the space program. 0.1% of the economy. The trillion plus money flow needed for the $200/ton tax/subsidy would probably distort the economy on the order of the existing generation industry and perhaps reduce productivity by $280 billion. That’s about a one-off hit of 1/40 of GDP. If the net carbon tax were used to lower the existing tax burden on the non-carbon portions of the economy, the effect might be far less. I think it’s an overly expensive insurance policy at $4000 per person, but at $300 per person it’s no big deal.

Nader Elhefnawy gets half of the trend when he says that “The 1970s was a period of intense concern about natural resource shortages…. [but] commodity prices started dropping…. Julian Simon … [bet] that the prices of copper, chrome, tin, nickel, and tungsten would drop by 1990. Simon won the bet handily. Even more dramatically, the price of oil, which hit $40 a barrel by 1981, fell to $10 a barrel by 1998.”

In Simon’s The Ultimate Resource 2, he shows how ingenuity has always led prices to fall. Including the price of agricultural land.

Elhefnawy goes on to say:

Over the long term the energy, raw materials, and space of the solar system and beyond will need to be tapped if humanity is to go on expanding. Simple math dictates this. A two percent annual growth rate in energy production means a roughly eightfold increase in a century’s time, century after century, and current levels of energy production are already taxing the Earth’s ecosystem beyond its limits. (emphasis his)

No, actually not.

(more…)

(via Instapundit) Are we going to run out of power? No. Ronald Bailey thinks we can solve the power problem and the carbon problem in a decentralized fashion: “eliminate all energy subsidies, set a price for carbon, and then let tens of thousands of energy researchers and entrepreneurs develop and test various new technologies in the market.”

Make that carbon price market determined too. It’s a fallacy that we can’t support the Chinese and the Indians in a 9 billion person world in 2050 at US 1970 standards (about half of the US standards now and about twice what they will be for China and India in 2020 or four times now). Hybrids make cars more efficient. Sequestration will take the carbon we put in the atmosphere back out. Nukes, wind, solar, tides and biomass will all play a part. Excess demand? More exotic cases like wind farms in the open ocean, space solar, methane hydrates, shale, coal gasification, and so on open up. Note that if people want 35 TW of electricity in 2050, they will be willing to pay a little less than ten times what we pay now ($280 billion) to get our 3.5 TW. The reason they would pay less is because everything will be 44 years more efficient even though we are richer. That is, energy will be less expensive and energy services much less expensive in terms of human time if the past is any guide. In 1970, we were promised we would run out of everything by 2000. Nope. Standards of living will keep rising forever. Read The Ultimate Resouce 2 by Julian Simon.

WSJ calls for tradeable fishing quotas too. Here’s what I had to say about this when NY Times columnist Tierney called for it too.

The space economy keeps trying to justify itself with big ideas like Lunar solar power or a sun shade. The price of carbon offsets is only $5-$15 bucks per ton. This is very very inexpensive. We can continue to burn carbon like there’s no tomorrow and sequester it by pull CO2 out of the air. Kind of like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s atmosphere plant. Sequestration could be done for around $200/ton with unlimited tonnage (basically pumping the gas into the ground, like old natural gas fields, or making Calcium carbonate or something). For these other strategies to be worth exploring, they have to have the potential to be cheaper per ton of CO2 equivalent. I.e., less rays is equivalent to less of a greenhouse blanket. As we found out with sulfur dioxide, the cost ends up being less than 10% of what you might expect. (On the other hand, the benefits are also likely to be far lower.)

Earth’s albedo is already 30% according to Wikipedia. To increase the Earth’s albedo to 32%, to first order, we would have to cover 2% of the Earth’s dark surface with light colored material. How about big plastic floating buoys anchored to the sea floor in places where there are few days of cloud cover? Earth is 500 million square kilometers. We’d need to cover 10 million. A 30mx30m blue tarp at Tarp USA would cost about $450 or $0.50/square meter. The total cost would be about $5 trillion. Surely an overestimate given the mass production. Compare that to today’s launch cost of the 20 million tons that Space.com is putting as its lead story or $400 trillion. The story posits we can use an electromagnetic launcher. But most of the energy to run the launcher (and the drag) would end up as waste heat in our atmosphere (an exercise). If we can produce that much power cleanly, how about we just use the $400 trillion (or his number $3 trillion) to buy clean energy that produces no carbon and retire the carbon producing stuff. The cleanup job would also be a lot easier for the ocean tarps if we overshot and started an ice age.

If we can decrease the cost of getting to Earth-Sun L-1 by a factor of 100 to $200/kg, then we can just fly 2% of us to L-1 and generate 2% less greenhouse gas and 2% less waste heat. 120 million people weigh only 12 million tons. Of course there would need to be some stuff there for them to live on, but it begs the question of the need for such a weird brute force solution to solar flux.

We won’t be eating soylent green instead of fish any time soon according to John Tierney. Property rights in the pool called “transferable quota” are making overfishing unprofitable. Better would be aquaculture and fee simple ownership of entire fisheries. Maybe property rights could be the cure for the underdevelopment of human spaceflight.

If you graph human population, we will make up every particle in the universe before too long.

Corn prices are up to $3 a bushel and may be headed to $4 for a while (about double last quarter). More corn will soon be going into ethanol than shipped to foreigners. It’s a milestone. Lefties are screaming louder about alternative fuel subsidies than farmers for corn price supports. Long term we ought to be able to plant zillions of acres of corn. Marginal lands at $2/bushel seem pretty awesome at $4/bushel. That in turn drives down the price so zillions will also be a temporary phenomenon. Short and medium term, higher corn prices raises the price of other food. A pound of beef needs six pounds of corn or about $0.25/pound higher producer cost. A dairy cow needs 10 pounds of corn a day to produce about 5 gallons of milk which adds $0.08/gallon to the producer cost of milk. A pound is about 1/70 - 1/55 of a bushel depending on whether we are talking ears. Talking ears. I’ll drink to that too.

Dune-style water from the air. Desalination eat your heart out.

Here’s my plan: Nuclear power. Big buildings. Hydroponics. Water from the air. Call it 100 billion carrying capacity easy. Where is the carrying capacity failure?

Richard Branson, ever the trend spotter, has pledged $3B in green investment. In the UK, they are beating the drum for a new CO₂ reduction treaty.

For this to work, it will need to be paid for x% by emitters, y% by users and 100-x-y% by countries that will benefit from abatement.

Air travel comprises 3% of emissions. Financial Times says get out of my face. 

(more…)