News + Media

May 30, 2013
Vicki Ekstrom, MIT Energy Initiative

In the past decade, the massive expansion of China’s production and export of silicon photovoltaic (PV) cells and panels has cratered the price of those items globally, creating tension between China and the United States, and, more recently, China and the European Union. In a new study (see PDF), MIT researchers explain why these tensions could harm the broader solar industry and have spiraling effects for China-U.S. trade relations.

“China and the U.S., and China and the E.U., are in the midst of a blame game as the solar industry is on the brink of collapse — and the tensions could infect technology and commercial development globally,” says John Deutch, the lead author of the study and Institute Professor at MIT. “All the players should understand that the PV industry is globally linked, and jobs and profits are available for those who manufacture and for those who innovate. Given the complex but productive relationships, nations need to find a way to better work together rather than flirt with protectionist measures.”

Over the last decade, manufacturing of PV cells and panels expanded in China, boosting supply globally. The flood of solar panels, combined with a slipping subsidized demand for solar energy (especially in Europe), lowered the global market price to unsustainable levels, the study shows. Between 2009 and 2012, the price of crystalline silicon panels decreased from more than $2.50 per watt to less than $1 per watt, as China supplied 30 to 50 percent of U.S. PV imports.

The result? PV manufacturers globally haven’t been able to compete, Deutch and the study’s co-author, MIT professor of political science Edward Steinfeld, explain. In response, the U.S. Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission imposed substantial anti-dumping duties — tariffs imposed on low-priced foreign imports — on some Chinese manufacturers last November, following complaints from U.S. PV manufacturers who alleged that the Chinese were selling their products below fair market value. Around the same time, Europe issued an anti-dumping inquiry; it has also threatened to announce tariffs by June 6.

China has responded with its own allegations, also threatening to issue tariffs — this time, on the materials and technology imported to make the panels. Many of those imports come from the United States. China threatens these tariffs as its PV industry also faces trouble, according to the study: Net margins of panel suppliers in China fell to double-digit negative values in 2011 and remain there now, more than a year later. The study reports that Suntech Power Holdings — the largest PV-panel maker in the world — posted a loss of $495 million in 2012. (The company declared bankruptcy at the end of March.)

Deutch and Steinfeld explain that the two nations — China and the United States — are interdependent and form a “potentially productive global ecosystem for innovation.” When one side declines — as is happening in China, with its PV manufacturers — so will the other side, as is happening in the United States, with its technology and manufacturing tools, the study says. The researchers explain that there are opportunities for the two nations to together accelerate the worldwide deployment of solar PV for electricity generation.

“The two countries have different strengths and weaknesses,” Deutch says. “The U.S. is creating the technology and manufacturing tools and China is successfully, but not profitably, manufacturing devices based on today’s technology. If both countries look at the big picture, choose to focus on their strengths, and put aside the blame game, they have a real opportunity to boost global deployment of solar.”

Arun Majumdar, the vice president for energy at Google and former director of the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, says, “Deutch and Steinfeld’s factual and data-driven analysis shows that in the interdependent global market and supply chain of the solar industry, policies of individual governments that foster and leverage their domestic strengths to openly and fairly compete in the global market are better off in the long term to reach national goals of economic growth.”

Majumdar adds, “On the other hand, policies that distort the market via undue protectionism or disproportional investments to reach national goals could backfire and produce opposite outcomes.”

The study will become part of a larger report on the “Future of Solar,” to be released by the MIT Energy Initiative at a later date.

By: Steve LeVine

Environmental websites are buzzing that China, the world’s biggest emitter of carbon and other heat-trapping gases, is on the cusp of breaking the persistent logjam on global climate change policy by placing an absolute cap on its carbon emissions. Beijing’s impending move, writes Grist, would show that, compared with the US, “China is either the more mature of the pair, or just majorly sucking up to Mama Earth.”

The reports are inaccurate: Seven Chinese cities are enacting experimental carbon-trading programs as of 2014, and Beijing is fast reducing how much carbon is burned per unit of GDP (known as “carbon intensity”). But China hands in Beijing and the US tell me it has made no firm decision on capping absolute emissions. (The rumor began with a May 20 report by the reputable Chinese newspaper 21st Century Business Herald.)

Yet the hubbub underscores an expectation among environmentalists and others that Beijing is moving toward doing more to avoid the most catastrophic climate forecasts. Beijing already has ambitious goals for sharply reducing carbon intensity by 2015. Against the backdrop of rising local unhappiness with air pollution, China’s leadership has signaled the possibility of an even faster cleanup. Climate activists hope for another iterative jump by China—from a proportional approach to emissions reduction (reducing carbon intensity), to an absolutist strategy (a cap on total emissions).

“An absolute cap simply makes management simpler,” Deborah Seligsohn, a China expert at the University of California at San Diego, told me. “An intensity target depends on expected GDP, and so localities try to game it. They can’t game a cap.” That’s why a cap would be “a big deal domestically and internationally,” she said.

Since Deng Xiaoping launched China’s modern age in 1979, Beijing has prized economic growth over every other metric of success. No prominent expert believes that China’s emissions will decline this decade—David Fridley at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory told me that the only scenario for such a fast reduction is economic collapse or stagnation. The only hope is that China’s emissions growth can be tapered.

Many experts wonder how Chinese leaders will enact even the goals they have set. “Achieving these targets eventually would come at considerable economic cost, and so how China will strike a balance between local air pollution, which has become dire in some places, and the cost of controlling these pollutants is still unclear,” said John Reilly, an environmental economist at MIT.

Yet self-preservation is a powerful force. The tradeoff between economic growth and cutting emissions will become less stark if China’s leaders conclude that pollution is a serious political threat. Environmentalists are betting that China’s leaders will decide that it is.

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

MAY 22, 2013

As I explained earlier this week, questions related to any impact of human-driven global warming on tornadoes, while important, have almost no bearing on the challenge of reducing human vulnerability to these killer storms. The focus on the ground in Oklahoma, of course, will for years to come be on recovery and rebuilding — hopefully with more attention across the region to developing policies and practices that cut losses the next time.

The vulnerability is almost entirely the result of fast-paced, cost-cutting development patterns in tornado hot zones, and even if there were a greenhouse-tornado connection, actions that constrain greenhouse-gas emissions, while wise in the long run, would not have a substantial influence on climate patterns for decades because of inertia in the climate system.

Some climate scientists see compelling arguments for accumulating heat and added water vapor fueling the kinds of turbulent storms that spawn tornadoes. But a half century of observations in the United States show no change in tornado frequency and a declining frequency of strong tornadoes.

Does any of this mean global warming is not a serious problem? No.

It just means assertions that all weird bad weather is, in essence, our fault are not grounded in science and, as a result, end up empowering those whose prime interest appears to to be sustaining the fossil fuel era as long as possible. I was glad to see the green blog Grist acknowledge as much.

On Tuesday, I sent the following query to a range of climate scientists and other researchers focused on extreme weather and climate change:

The climate community did a great service to the country in 2006 in putting out a joint statement [from some leading researchers] on the enormous human vulnerability in coastal zones to hurricanes — setting aside questions about the role of greenhouse-driven warming in changing hurricane patterns….

In this 2011 post I proposed that climate/weather/tornado experts do a similar statement for Tornado Alley.

I’d love to see a similar statement now from meteorologists, climatologists and other specialists studying trends in tornado zones. Any takers?

Before you dive in to the resulting discussion, it’s worth reading Andrew Freedman’s helpful Climate Central piece, “Making Sense of the Moore Tornado in a Climate Context,” and a Daily Beast post by Josh Dzieza. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has posted a helpful new fact sheet, “Tornadoes, Climate Variability, and Climate Change.”

Read on for the conversation on tornadoes and global warming, with some e-mail shorthand fixed.

First, I’m posting the comments that were focused on policy, then those focused on the details of the science:

Roger Pielke, Jr., professor of environmental studies, the University of Colorado:

People love to debate climate change, but I suspect that the community’s efforts are far better placed focusing attention on warnings and response. That is what will save lives and continue the really excellent job that has been done by NOAA and the National Weather Service. I’d much rather see a community statement highlighting the importance of NOAA/NWS funding!

There will always be fringe voices on all sides of the climate debate. With the basic facts related to tornadoes so widely appreciated (unlike perhaps drought, floods, hurricanes), I think that those who see climate change in every breeze are not particularly problematic or worthy of attention.

Here are some of those basic facts:

1. No long-term increase in tornadoes, especially the strongest ones.

2. A long-term decline in loss of life (the past year saw a record low total for more than a century).

3. No long-term increase in losses, hint of a decrease.

4. To date 2013 has been remarkably inactive.

5. The Moore tornado may have been the strongest one this year, bad luck had it track through a populated area (Bill Hooke brilliantly explained the issue here).

6. That said, climatology shows that Moore sits at the center of a statistical bullseye for tornado strikes for May 20th.

Kerry Emanuel, professor of atmospheric science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (a signer of the 2006 statement):

I see the political problem with tornadoes as quite different from the hurricane problem we wrote about some years ago. To my knowledge, there are no massive subsidies to build in tornado regions, nor is insurance premium price fixing a big problem. Also, federal flood insurance is largely irrelevant to this problem. About the only thing in common is federal disaster relief, but it is hard to believe that people only build houses in huge swaths of tornado-susceptible territory because they believe they will be bailed out.

As you mention in your blog, the issues here revolve around such practical measures as safe rooms, and the role of government in mandating or subsidizing them. Perhaps one positive outcome of the latest horror story is that safe rooms in public buildings such as schools and hospitals will be mandated, given that they are apparently not all that expensive.

In my view, the data on tornadoes is so poor that it is difficult to say anything at all about observed trends, and the theoretical understanding of the relationship between severe thunderstorms in general (including hail storms) and climate is virtually non-existent. I regard this as a research failure of my profession and expect there will be a great deal more work on this in the near future. What little exists on the subject (e.g. the Trapp et al. paper from a few years ago) suggests that warming will increase the incidence of environments conducive to severe thunderstorms in the U.S. But this counts on climate models to get these factors right, and it may be premature to put much confidence in that.

Daniel Sutter, a professor of economics (focused on tornadoes), Troy University, offered the following thought after citing the Dot Earth comments of Kevin Simmons, his co-author on a recent book on tornadoes and society:

I would just add that the high cost per life saved through safe rooms which Kevin and I find in our research really indicates that tornado safety is about reducing and not eliminating risk. Safe rooms provide essentially absolute protection, but are expensive enough that many would likely judge them too expensive. We need to focus on ways to reasonably reduce risk. For instance, have engineers inspect schools and make sure the safest areas are indeed being used for shelter, or to see if there are relatively inexpensive designs that could strengthen interior hallways some.

I hate to say anything before I know for sure what the final story is from the Plaza Heights school, but the two schools yesterday appear to have provided pretty decent protection, especially since many homes around Briarwood school looked totally destroyed. Wind engineers have developed safe room designs which are great and engineering marvels, but we probably need designs that provide a good measure of safety at a portion of the price.0

Also with regard to your previous post about flimsy homes, consider the contrast between how cars and houses are marketed. Cars are sold under brand names, and we have a dual system of federal regulation of designs for safety and auto makers designing cars that are safer than federal regulations require, with certification by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Houses are mainly sold without brand names (I couldn’t tell you who built the house I own here in Alabama) with safety assurances coming through building codes. Many times we see that homes perform poorly in tornadoes or hurricanes, while during a commercial break on the Weather Channel last night there was a car ad touting the model’s crash test rating from the IIHS. If houses are indeed flimsy, there is probably a systematic reason for this.  Read more…

Cirrus clouds form around mineral dust and metallic particles, study finds.

By Coral Davenport

Kerry Emanuel registered as a Republican as soon he turned 18, in 1973. The aspiring scientist was turned off by what he saw as the Left’s blind ideology. “I had friends who denied Pol Pot was killing people in Cambodia,” he says. “I reacted very badly to the triumph of ideology over reason.”

Back then, Emanuel saw the Republican Party as the political fit for a data-driven scientist. Today, the professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is considered one of the United States’ foremost authorities on climate change—particularly on how rising carbon pollution will increase the intensity of hurricanes.

In January 2012, just before South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary, the Charleston-based Christian Coalition of America, one of the most influential advocacy groups in conservative politics, flew Emanuel down to meet with the GOP presidential candidates. Perhaps an unlikely prophet of doom where global warming is concerned, the coalition has begun to push Republicans to take action on climate change, out of worry that coming catastrophes could hit the next generation hard, especially the world’s poor.

The meetings didn’t take. “[Newt] Gingrich and [Mitt] Romney understood, … and I think they even believed the evidence and understood the risk,” Emanuel says. “But they were so terrified by the extremists in their party that in the primaries they felt compelled to deny it. Which is not good leadership, good integrity. I got a low impression of them as leaders.” Throughout the Republican presidential primaries, every candidate but one—former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who was knocked out of the race at the start—questioned, denied, or outright mocked the science of climate change.

Soon after his experience in South Carolina, Emanuel changed his lifelong Republican Party registration to independent. “The idea that you could look a huge amount of evidence straight in the face and, for purely ideological reasons, deny it, is anathema to me,” he says.

Emanuel predicts that many more voters like him, people who think of themselves as conservative or independent but are turned off by what they see as a willful denial of science and facts, will also abandon the GOP, unless the party comes to an honest reckoning about global warming.

And a quiet, but growing, number of other Republicans fear the same thing. Already, deep fissures are emerging between, on one side, a base of ideological voters and lawmakers with strong ties to powerful tea-party groups and super PACs funded by the fossil-fuel industry who see climate change as a false threat concocted by liberals to justify greater government control; and on the other side, a quiet group of moderates, younger voters, and leading conservative intellectuals who fear that if Republicans continue to dismiss or deny climate change, the party will become irrelevant.

“There is a divide within the party,” says Samuel Thernstrom, who served on President George W. Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality and is now a scholar of environmental policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “The position that climate change is a hoax is untenable.”

A concerted push has begun within the party—in conservative think tanks and grassroots groups, and even in backroom, off-the-record conversations on Capitol Hill—to persuade Republicans to acknowledge and address climate change in their own terms. The effort will surely add heat to the deep internal conflict in the years ahead.

Republicans have been struggling with an identity crisis since the 2012 presidential election. In particular, the nation’s rapid demographic changes are forcing the GOP to come to terms with the newly powerful influence of Hispanic voters and to confront the issue of immigration. For now, climate change isn’t getting anywhere close to that kind of urgent scrutiny from Republicans, at least not in public. GOP strategists say that Republican candidates hoping to win primary races, where the electorate tends to be older and more ideologically driven, are still best served to deny, ignore, or dismiss climate change.

Today, a Republican candidate “wouldn’t be able to win a primary with a Jon Huntsman position on this,” says strategist Glen Bolger.

The problem is, as polling data and the changing demographics of the American electorate show, it’s likely that the position that can win voters in a primary will lose voters in a general election. Some day, though, the facts—both scientific and demographic—will force GOP candidates to confront climate change whether they want to or not. And that day will come sooner than they think.

Already, the numbers tell the story. Polls show that a majority of Americans, and a plurality of Republicans, believe global warming is a problem. Concern about the issue is higher among younger voters and independents, who Republicans will need to attract if they want to win elections.

According to a pair of Gallup Polls in April, 58 percent of all Americans are worried about global warming, and 57 percent believe it is caused by human activities. Not surprisingly, responses reflect a partisan divide on the issue, but among Republicans, concern about global warming is rising. Gallup found that 75 percent of Democrats worry about climate change, compared with 59 percent of independent voters (up from 51 percent in 2010) and 40 percent of Republicans (up from 32 percent from that year).

A January poll of Republicans and Republican-leading independents conducted by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication said that a majority (52 percent) think climate change is happening; 62 percent favor taking action to combat climate change, such as taxing carbon pollution. Only 35 percent of the Republican respondents said they agree with the Republican Party’s position on climate change. (The party’s 2012 platform opposed any limits on greenhouse-gas emissions and suggested the science underlying projections of a warming climate is “uncertain.”)

Meanwhile, a March poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 69 percent of Americans believe the climate is already changing. On the more contentious question of whether fossil-fuel pollution is causing that change, the poll uncovered a generation gap: Only 28 percent of voters over age 65 accept the scientific consensus that such emissions are warming the Earth, while close to 50 percent of those under 50 accept it.

“These polls show that there are a lot of people who are inclined to vote Republican—and believe America should respond to climate change,” says Edward Maibach, director of the George Mason program. “Republicans aren’t inclined to respond to it right now, but in the future, if they don’t take these issues seriously, they’re inclined to alienate a lot of Republican voters.”

CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

Mother and daughter Roberta and Michele Combs are pillars of the Religious Right. Roberta, president and CEO of the Christian Coalition America, got her start in Republican politics working with celebrated strategist Lee Atwater. Michele, who was named Young Republican of the Year in 1989 and worked as a planner for events such as George W. Bush’s inauguration, is the coalition’s communications director. With their white-blond bouffant hair, penchant for fuchsia lipstick, soft South Carolina accents, and sterling conservative bona fides, the Combses are familiar presences in the ruby-red heart of the GOP establishment.

That’s why it’s so surprising to many that they are tackling climate change. But both women see global warming, and clean air and environmental protection more broadly, as issues that tie into their core conservative mission of protecting family values.

“This is an important issue for the Republican Party,” Roberta Combs says. “At one point in time, this was a Republican issue, but Democrats took it over.”

In 2010, Roberta led a Christian Coalition push for her friend Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to sign on to a Senate climate-change bill, as the measure’s sole GOP sponsor. Graham eventually pulled his support, but thanks in part to Roberta’s pressure, he’s remained one of the few Republicans to openly acknowledge climate change and to call on his party to look for a solution. He is sticking with his position even as he prepares to face South Carolina voters for reelection next year. 

“I think the Republican Party needs to embrace an environmental agenda,” Graham says. “When you ask a Republican candidate for president, what’s your environmental platform, what do they say? We need to be able to speak to this just as quickly as to do to reforming the tax code. Younger people, people under 30, this is a huge issue for them.”

Roberta was the Christian Coalition official who persuaded Emanuel, the MIT scientist, to speak with the GOP presidential candidates in January 2012. And she continues to employ her group’s grassroots muscle to muster conservative support for Republicans like Graham who support action to combat climate change, with the hope that eventually one will sponsor a bill that can pass.

“I think the Republican Party has got to move to the center. We should never leave our base, but we’ve got to be more open-minded and look at issues more American families care about,” Roberta says. “As the electorate changes, we’re not going to win as much. It’s a different generation, and the Republican Party has got to look at all of this and broaden its agenda if they want to continue to win elections.”

Last summer, Michele launched a new group, Young Conservatives for Energy Reform, aimed at amassing grassroots support for lawmakers and legislation addressing clean energy and climate change. She is channeling her network of connections among the Christian Coalition and the Young Republicans.  

She works closely with Brian Smith, a 32-year-old Air Force veteran and the chairman of the Midwest chapter, who is also a former cochairman of the Young Republicans National Federation, a training ground for party leaders founded in 1931. The energy group is structured like the Young Republicans, with volunteers staffing city, state, and regional chapters. So far, the group has state chairs in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas—all of which have Republican governors.

Over the past year, the group has held a dozen events in those and other states. In October 2012, it sponsored a get-together in Washington for GOP congressional staff. The gatherings—mostly of young professionals in their 20s, 30s, and 40s—feature hors d’oeuvres, cocktails, and a talk from retired Marine Gen. Richard Zilmer, who makes the case that both climate change and U.S. oil dependence are matters of national security, and that policies to cut fossil-fuel use are consistent with conservative values. Emanuel has also spoken at some of the events.

The goal, Michele says, is to build a database of voters who will, at some point, come forward to back Republican candidates who support cutting carbon pollution. “We are building a grassroots army of young conservatives around the country,” she says. “When the time comes, we’ll have the grassroots to organize around candidates or legislation, and we can activate them.”

PAYING THE PRICE

What Michele and Roberta want to do, in other words, is protect lawmakers such as Bob Inglis. Today, Republicans point to the former House member from South Carolina as the textbook tale of what happens when a red-state conservative dares to acknowledge climate change. 

Inglis, who left Congress in 2011, recalls the challenge his son, Rob, threw down to him a decade ago before he was to vote in his first election. He said, “I’ll vote for you, Dad, but you’ve got to clean up your act on the environment.’ ”

Inglis had never given much thought to the issue of climate change. As a by-the-books conservative, he says, “I accepted that if Al Gore was for it, I was against it, until my son challenged my ignorance on the subject.” Inglis spent the next few years educating himself on climate issues. He joined the House Science Committee and accompanied climate scientists on research trips to Antarctica and the Great Barrier Reef, where he saw firsthand the damages wrought by rising carbon pollution and warming temperatures. “I got convinced of the science,” he says, and, in 2009, Inglis cosponsored climate-change legislation with Republican Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona. The bill proposed an idea that had strong backing from environmentalists, including Gore, as well as prominent conservative economists. It would create a tax on carbon pollution but use the revenue to cut payroll or income taxes.

Inglis would pay dearly for his support of the so-called carbon-tax swap. The following year, he lost his primary election to a tea-party candidate, Trey Gowdy. And Inglis knows his position on the climate was the reason. “The most enduring heresy was saying, ‘Climate change is real and we should do something about it.’ That was seen as a statement against the tribal orthodoxy.”

“But,” he says, “these heresies and orthodoxies change so quickly. Back in 2010, I was voting for immigration reform; look how that’s changed. It’s going to be like that with climate change.”

Along with the evolving politics of immigration reform, Bob and Rob Inglis also see in their situation a kinship with Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, who jolted the party earlier this year when he came out in support of gay marriage. Portman changed his stance after conversations with his 21-year-old son, Will, who is gay.

“I hope there’s a parallel,” Bob Inglis says. “Rob [Portman] is a hero of mine. He loves his son. He’s willing to take risks for his son.” Unlike Inglis, Portman hasn’t yet had to face voters in a primary—and won’t until 2016. Given the rapid shift in public attitudes toward gay marriage, he may in fact suffer no repercussions. It wasn’t long ago that gay marriage served as a valuable wedge issue for the party (think George W. Bush in 2004)—much like placing limits on carbon is today. 

For the moment, however, Inglis has taken on the arduous task of bringing his party back to him. Last summer, he founded the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a nonprofit organization based at George Mason University, focused on convincing conservatives, particularly young ones, that climate change, caused by carbon pollution, is a serious threat—and on pushing for the carbon-tax swap as a fundamentally conservative economic solution. Since last fall, Inglis and a cohort of conservative economists have made their case at a dozen events, including talks at colleges and universities in Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi.

Last month, 21-year-old Republican Kevin Croswhite, a senior at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wis., who grew up in nearby Salem (both towns lie within in the district of Rep. Paul Ryan, the 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate) attended one of Inglis’s events—and was sold.

Croswhite has considered himself a conservative Republican since high school. As an economics major, he is a big believer in data: scientific, economic, and demographic. He is persuaded that his party’s rejection of the data on climate change will damage it politically.

“The country’s going to become more educated, and that’s not going to break our way, as a party, if we are denying what 90 out of 100 scientists say,” Croswhite argues. “If the scientific community is generally accepting of something, you need to trust that.”

While Combs’s and Inglis’s groups try to appeal to conservative Christians and young Republicans, another organization—the National Audubon Society—is reaching out to red-state conservatives in the West, linking the threat of climate change to the ideal of Theodore Roosevelt’s Republican conservatism, in a bid to appeal to hunters, fishers, ranchers, and other lovers of the outdoors. The venerable nonpartisan group has teamed with the Washington organization ConservAmerica to ask red-state voters to sign an “American Eagle Compact” calling for lawmakers to act on conservation policies, including climate change. The effort, which Audubon says is funded by a Texas Republican who has asked to remain anonymous, has so far garnered 55,000 signatures. 

“We’re trying to figure out how to partner with those people, so they can turn out in communities across the country, to activate them for support,” says Audubon President and CEO David Yarnold. “We want to make sure that when Republican legislators who support conservation and climate policy go home, they’re not just getting hollered at. We want to make sure they’re hearing from reasonable conservationists who say this is not a partisan issue.”

LIGHTING THE WAY

While those groups work from the bottom up to help push Washington to move on climate issues, a constellation of prominent conservative economists is bolstering the cause. These conservatives include such intellectuals as Art Laffer, the former senior adviser to President Reagan; George Shultz, Reagan’s secretary of State; Gregory Mankiw, who was an economic adviser to the Romney campaign and the former chief economist for George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers; Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the president of the influential conservative think tank American Action Forum, a former head of Bush’s Council on Economic Advisers, and an economic adviser to Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign; and a host of other well-respected conservative economic thinkers.

Laffer spoke to National Journal by phone from his home in Tennessee, where he lives next door to Gore. The Reagan economist and the liberal global-warming crusader disagree on many issues but are united on the wisdom of a carbon-tax swap as good environmental and economic policy. “Al is a dear friend, and I think he’s a damned good public servant,” Laffer says. “I am ignorant-squared on climate change, but what I do believe is that the risks of reducing carbon in the environment are less than the risks of putting more carbon into the environment.”

Last year, Laffer wrote a detailed paper on how best to structure a carbon-tax swap, presumably as part of the broader tax-reform effort Congress appears to be moving toward. “What I believe in, and Al Gore believes in, is if you’re going to do a carbon tax, you need to offset it dollar-for-dollar with marginal tax reduction on income or employment,” he says. “Anyone who goes through what I just went through, they’ll agree with me. I’ve had more experience than anyone in the financial thinking on this.”

At the beginning of this Congress, a group of Republican lawmakers, along with a few coal-state Democrats, sponsored a measure that vowed they would never back a carbon tax, and given the antitax mood in Washington, prospects for such a tax appear dim. Still, both opponents and proponents concede that the idea will certainly be on the table if Congress makes a serious attempt at tax reform in the coming years.

Laffer said that as with so many of the policies he’s proposed before, the time will ripen for a carbon tax as it moves from impossible to inevitable. “My policies are always the North Star,” he says. “Right now, this is viewed as a third-order problem. But if we take over in 2016, this will have huge traction.”

Laffer spent last year promoting the idea on college campuses. The climate-change advocacy group Clean Air-Cool Planet flew Holtz-Eakin to New Hampshire to participate in living-room chats with voters about the economic costs of climate change and the economic benefits of addressing the problem.

In March, Schultz went to Capitol Hill to talk about climate change and push the carbon tax to congressional aides. In a standing-room-only gathering in the Rayburn House Office Building, he argued, “Good work on conservation and the environment is in the Republican genes; we’ve been the guys who did it.… My proposal is to have a revenue-neutral carbon tax.” Schultz got a standing ovation. Among the audience were staffers from the offices of Republican Reps. Phil Roe of Tennessee, Billy Long of Missouri, and Randy Neugebauer of Texas—ranked as the most conservative member of the House in a 2011 NJ survey.

A SLEEPING GIANT

It’s long been taken as a truism that the powerful oil lobby is the reason nothing happens on climate change in Washington. For many years, that was indeed true. In particular, Exxon Mobil, the nation’s largest oil company and a major contributor to Republican candidates, was associated with a campaign to fuel skepticism about climate science. From 1998 to 2006, Exxon Mobil contributed more than $600,000 to the Heartland Institute, a well-known nonprofit group that holds conferences and publishes books aimed at debunking the science of climate change. Exxon Mobil’s support of Heartland made sense. The oil company stood to take a financial hit from “cap-and-trade” climate-change proposals that would have priced carbon pollution from oil.

For a number of reasons, that equation is changing. Exxon Mobil has ended its support of Heartland’s agenda. It’s not that the oil giant has had a green awakening; it’s just that a series of internal changes have positioned the company to profit from at least some policies that price carbon emissions.

In 2010, Exxon Mobil bought the natural-gas company XTO Energy, which transformed the venerable oil producer into the world’s largest natural-gas producer. Around the same time, the company began making a noticeable shift in its climate policy. The reason: Natural gas, which is used to generate electricity, is the lowest-polluting fossil fuel, emitting just half of the greenhouse gases as coal, the world’s top electricity source. In the event of a tax on carbon pollution, demand for coal-fired electricity would freeze, while markets for natural gas would explode.

Every year, Exxon Mobil puts out a widely read report with projections on the global state of energy development. The most recent one included the assumption of a future price on carbon and a corresponding surge in natural-gas consumption. “We assume there’s going to be a price on carbon in the future, and that assumption drives our investment strategy,” says company spokesman Alan Jeffers.

And the position on climate change at Exxon Mobil that once helped fund the Heartland conferences? “We have the same concerns about climate change as everyone. The risk of climate change exists; it’s caused by more carbon in the atmosphere; the risk is growing; and there’s broad scientific and policy consensus on this,” Jeffers says.

In 2010, during Senate negotiations on the cap-and-trade bill, Exxon Mobil told the White House that it wouldn’t back that bill, but it would support legislation with a straight carbon tax, ideally, a carbon-tax swap along the lines of what Inglis and Laffer propose. Ultimately, of course, all of those attempts failed. And, today, Exxon Mobil is not actively lobbying for the tax. The company’s position remains the same, though, Jeffers says. “Our approach has been, if public policymakers have decided they want to put a price on carbon, we see a revenue-neutral carbon tax as the most efficient way to do that.”

In the 2012 campaign, Exxon Mobil gave $2.7 million in political contributions, with 88 percent going to Republicans. One of the world’s biggest and most profitable oil companies—a lobbying powerhouse and major influence in GOP politics, particularly in deep-red oil states—has accepted the science of climate change and figured out how to profit from a carbon-price policy. While Exxon Mobil won’t be leading the green revolution, its shift could make a difference in the way many Republicans approach the issue.

HEADING FOR THE HILLS

For now, however, no prominent Republican running for office in the next few years will want to get anywhere near a carbon-tax proposal, or even talk about climate change. While the rift in the party over global warming is becoming increasingly evident, most Republicans feel much more secure on the side that denies the problem.

That was made abundantly plain during the Conservative Political Action Conference in March, the annual Washington gathering that the GOP base uses to anoint its future leaders. Two leading speakers this year were Sen. Marco Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush, both of Florida, the state that scientists such as Kerry Emanuel warn is the most vulnerable to devastation from intensified hurricanes in the coming years.

Rubio was the undisputed star attraction, and his keynote speech sparked some of the loudest cheers when he denounced climate science in the context of condemning abortion.

“The people who are actually closed-minded in American politics are the people who love to preach about the certainty of science with regards to our climate but ignore the absolute fact that science has proven that life begins at conception,” Rubio said. A month earlier, in his response to President Obama’s State of the Union, Rubio had said, “When we point out that no matter how many job-killing laws we pass, our government can’t control the weather, [Obama] accuses us of wanting dirty water and dirty air.”

Bush’s CPAC speech had a decidedly different tone. He castigated his party for espousing hard-right views. “Way too many people believe Republicans are anti-immigrant, antiwoman, antiscience, antigay, anti-worker … and the list goes on,” he said. “Many voters are simply unwilling to choose our candidates, because those voters feel unloved, unwanted, and unwelcome in our party.”

Bush did not specifically mention climate change, although many on both sides of the aisle interpreted his remark about science as a signal that he’d be open to addressing the issue. Pundits praised the speech, but it was not a hit with his party. Bush spoke to a quiet room with a fair number of empty seats. Many in the audience members were checking their mobile devices. When he finished, Bush was met with a polite, modest smattering of applause. (Another Republican who has signaled support for climate-change legislation, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, wasn’t even invited to CPAC.)

At 41, Rubio personifies the next generation of Republican leadership, while Bush represents an older, perhaps out-of-date moderate mind-set—which means the party may very well be heading in the wrong direction when it comes to embracing climate science. Rubio’s view is likely to remain the mainstream one in the party in the short term, thanks to tea-party groups such as Americans for Prosperity, a super PAC founded by David and Charles Koch, the principal owners of Koch Industries, a major U.S. oil conglomerate.

Over the last several years, Americans for Prosperity has spearheaded an all-fronts campaign using advertising, social media, and cross-country events aimed at electing lawmakers who will ensure that the fossil-fuel industry won’t have to worry about any new regulations. The group spent $36 million to influence the 2012 elections.

“We’ve been having this debate with the Left for 10 years, and we welcome having the debate with these new groups. If there are groups who want to do a niche effort with the Republican electorate, we’ll win that debate,” says the group’s president, Tim Phillips. He’s not worried that organizations such as Combs’s Christian Coalition or economists such as Laffer will influence lawmakers—because AFP would hit any such candidate with an all-out negative campaign. “Let them bring a carbon tax on. They know it’s political death for them to bring this forward on their own.” 

There’s no denying the political power of groups like Americans for Prosperity. Still, despite its massive wealth, the super PAC failed to achieve either of its two chief political goals of 2012—unseating President Obama and claiming the Senate majority for Republicans.

The goal of grassroots efforts is to persuade Republicans that they’ll be rewarded if they take a stand in support of climate action—and that they could doom their party to minority status if they don’t. Advocates in the GOP realize that it’s too early and too fraught for Republicans seeking reelection to sound the alarm over the changing climate.

But out of sight on Capitol Hill, staffers say, conversations are taking place about how to go about doing that—eventually. “Most Republicans say the same thing behind closed doors: ‘Of course, I get that the climate is changing, of course I get that we need to do something—but I need to get reelected.’ Somehow they’re going to have to find a safe place on this,” says the Audubon Society’s Yarnold.

“We’re trying to get them to come out of the climate closet,” he says. “There’s no question they’re leaving votes on the table because of this. And they know it.”

Researchers explore possible consequences of greater biofuel use

The growing global demand for energy, combined with a need to reduce emissions and lessen the effects of climate change, has increased focus on cleaner energy sources. But what unintended consequences could these cleaner sources have on the changing climate?


Researchers at MIT now have some answers to that question, using biofuels as a test case. Their study, recently released in Geophysical Research Letters, found that land-use changes caused by a major ramp-up in biofuel crops — enough to meet about 10 percent of the world’s energy needs — could make some regions even warmer.

“Because all actions have consequences, it’s important to consider that even well-intentioned actions can have unintended negative consequences,” says Willow Hallgren, the lead author of the study and a research associate at MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. “It’s easy to look at a new, cleaner energy source, see how it will directly improve the climate, and stop there without ever considering all the ramifications. But when attempting to mitigate climate change, there’s more to consider than simply substituting out fossil fuels for a cleaner source of energy.”

Hallgren and her colleagues explored some of those consequences in considering two scenarios: one where more forests are cleared to grow biofuel crops, and one where forests are maintained and cropland productivity is intensified through the use of fertilizers and irrigation.

In both cases, the researchers found that at a global scale, greenhouse-gas emissions increase — in the form of more carbon dioxide when CO₂-absorbing forests are cut, and in the form of more nitrous oxide from fertilizers when land use is intensified. But this global warming is counterbalanced when the additional cropland reflects more sunlight, causing some cooling. Additionally, an increase in biofuels would replace some fossil fuel-based energy sources, further countering the warming.

While the effects of large-scale expansion of biofuels seem to cancel each other out globally, the study does point to significant regional impacts — in some cases, far from where the biofuel crops are grown. In the tropics, for example, clearing of rainforests would likely dry the climate and cause warming, with the Amazon Basin and central Africa potentially warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius.

This tropical warming is made worse with more deforestation, which also causes a release of carbon dioxide, further contributing to the warming of the planet. Meanwhile, Arctic regions might generally experience cooling caused by an increase in reflectivity from deforestation.

“Emphasizing changes not only globally, but also regionally, is vitally important when considering the impacts of future energy sources,” Hallgren says. “We’ve found the greatest impacts occur at a regional level.”

From these results, the researchers found that land-use policies that permit more extensive deforestation would have a larger impact on regional emissions and temperatures. Policies that protect forests would likely provide more tolerable future environmental conditions, especially in the tropics.

David McGuire, Professor of Ecology at University of Alaska Fairbanks, says these findings are important for those trying to implement mitigation policies to consider.

“Hallgren et al. caution that society needs to further consider how biofuels policies influence ecosystem services to society as understanding the full dimension of these effects should be taken into consideration before deciding on policies that lead to the implementation of biofuels programs,” McGuire says.

He finds Hallgren’s incorporation of reflectivity and energy feedbacks unique compared to similar studies on the climate impacts of biofuels.

Beyond the climate

While Hallgren focuses specifically on the climate implications of expanded use of biofuels, she admits there are many other possible consequences — such as impacts on food supplies and prices.

A group of her colleagues explored the economic side of biofuel expansion as part of a study released last year in Environmental Science & Technology — a paper that was recognized as that journal’s Best Policy Analysis Paper of 2012.

The team, led by Joint Program on Global Change co-director John Reilly, modeled feedbacks among the atmosphere, ecosystems and the global economy. They found that the combination of a carbon tax, incentives for reforestation and the addition of biofuels could nearly stabilize the climate by the end of the century; increased biofuels production alone could cut fossil-fuel use in half by 2100.

But just as Hallgren found trade-offs when she dug deeper, so did Reilly and his team of researchers.

“The environmental change avoided by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions is substantial and actually means less land used for crops,” Reilly says. This leads to substantial rises in food and forestry prices, he says, with food prices possibly rising by more than 80 percent.

Hallgren says, “There is clearly no one simple cause and effect when it comes to our climate. The impacts we see — both to the environment and the economy — from adding a large supply of biofuels to our energy system illustrate why it is so important to consider all factors so that we’ll know what we’re heading into before making a change.”

"The warmer climate gets, the faster the climate zones are shifting. This could make it harder for plants and animals to adjust," said lead author Irina Mahlstein.

The study is the first to look at the accelerating pace of the shifting of climate zones, which are areas of the Earth defined by annual and seasonal cycles of temperature and precipitation, as well as temperature and precipitation thresholds of plant species. Over 30 different climate zones are found on Earth; examples include the equatorial monsoonal zone, the polar tundra zone, and cold arid desert zone.

"A shift in the climate zone is probably a better measure of 'reality' for living systems, more so than changing temperature by a degree or precipitation by a centimeter," said Mahlstein.

The scientists used climate model simulations and a well-known ecosystem classification scheme to look at the shifts between climate zones over a two-century period, 1900 to 2098. The team found that for the initial 2 ° Celsius (3.6 ° Fahrenheit) of warming, about 5 percent of Earth's land area shifts to a new climate zone. The models show that the pace of change quickens for the next 2 ° Celsius of warming, and an additional 10 percent of the land area shifts to a new climate zone. "Pace of shifts in climate regions increases with global temperature" was published online in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 21.

Certain regions of the globe, such as northern middle and high latitudes, will undergo more changes than other regions, such as the tropics, the scientists found. In the tropics, mountainous regions will experience bigger changes than their surrounding low-altitude areas.

In the coming century, the findings suggest that frost climates–the coldest climate zone of the planet–are largely decreasing. Generally, dry regions in different areas of the globe are increasing, and a large fraction of land area is changing from cool summers to hot summers.

The scientists also investigated whether temperature or precipitation made the greater impact on how much of the land area changed zones. "We found that temperature is the main factor, at least through the end of this century," said Mahlstein.

This story is adapted from a news article at esrl.noaa.gov.

Researcher Eric Martinot presents findings of two-year project at campus event

Professor Eric Martinot, the senior research director with the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies in Tokyo, told students and faculty at a seminar on April 18 that renewables have become “mainstream” and are “a major part of our energy system.”

Martinot just completed a two-year project entitled the Renewables Global Futures Report — a compilation of 170 face-to-face interviews conducted with industry executives, CEOs of renewable energy companies, utility leaders, government officials and researchers. 

“We’re still thinking about the future of renewable energy like it’s 1990 or like it’s the year 2000,” Martinot said. “Our thinking is just behind the reality of where renewables are today and where they are going based on existing market technology, cost and finance trends.”

Martinot gave an overview of various projections and scenarios from the oil industry, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and environmental groups. The data shows that investment in renewables is a key example of the current growth and expected trajectory. Renewable energy investment is predicted to double if not by 2020, then by 2040.

“For the last three years, since 2010, global investment in renewable energy has exceeded investment in fossil fuels and nuclear power generation capacity. That’s very surprising to most people,” he said.

Despite this growth, Martinot said, “existing sources of finance are not going to enable us to reach high levels of renewables. Bank lending and utility balance sheet finance are the two major current finance mechanisms and they are going to run out.” In the future we should expect to see new sources of investment — including pension funds, oil companies and community funds.

Renewables currently supply about 20 percent of global electricity — with hydropower making up about 15 percent of that and all other renewables (wind, solar, geothermal and biomass) making up five percent. Martinot sees potential in expanding renewables to heating and cooling in the near future.

“We have all of the technologies we need right now, we don’t need to wait for technology for high shares of heating and cooling from renewables, but this is going to involve huge changes in building construction, architectural practices, building materials, the whole construction industry,” he explained. “It can take decades for all of that to change. But we can do it.”

Integration of renewables into the grid, buildings, homes and vehicles is where he sees the greatest opportunities for investment, infrastructure and research.

“Power grids have been operated and designed for the last 100 years on the basis of two things: number one, energy storage is impossible and number two, that supply has to meet demand,” he said. Because of the variability of renewables, integration and management of both storage and demand are necessary.

Martinot believes we are on the path toward combating these challenges. “We’re seeing both of those turned on their head because energy storage has become practical and is being done on a commercial basis on a number of projects. We’re also seeing the so-called ‘demand response’ where you can actually adjust demand to meet supply, rather than the other way around.”

Utilities in Denmark and Germany, for example, are using new tools to manage the variability of wind and solar and are able to switch to natural gas and heat when needed.

The building sector is another opportunity to integrate current renewable energy sources with the demands of the typical family home. Martinot described homes of the future that utilize solar power for heating and hot water, electric vehicles with batteries used by the home for power and energy storage, passive heat storage in building construction, and geothermal heat pumps to power homes.

“If you were able to standardize this type of construction in architectural practices around the world this could lower the cost and make if more common in peoples’ homes,” he said.

Martinot admitted he’s bullish about renewables and has high hopes that we can reduce carbon emissions and provide affordable energy.

His research shows that we can be optimistic about the future of renewables as governments, utilities and energy companies are expanding investment, research and development in renewable power across a variety of sectors.

Read Martinot's complete presentation.

By: David L. Chandler

April 29, 2013

Earth Day talk details Massachusetts’ accomplishments since the governor’s MIT speech five years ago, and outlines new goals.

In an Earth Day address at MIT in 2008, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick outlined an ambitious set of goals that he said could achieve significant reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions and create businesses and jobs based on clean-energy solutions. In a follow-up talk this week, he described a series of successes in achieving these goals.

“Five years ago,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in introducing Patrick, the governor “delivered an inspiring challenge: He argued that the commonwealth could improve its environment and its economy by leading the way in energy efficiency and clean-energy innovation.”

In the ensuing years, Reif said, Patrick delivered on that promise: “Today, thanks to his leadership, Massachusetts ranks first in the nation in state-level energy efficiency.”

In addition, Reif said, “Harmful pollution and emissions are both declining, and clean-energy jobs are on the rise. Massachusetts has proven by example that we can have a strong economy and a healthy environment.”

Patrick said that five years ago, “We in Massachusetts took a fresh look at our energy future.” He noted that “with no oil, coal or natural gas of our own, we are at the end of the pipeline and are subject to the whims of a global energy market.”

To address that, Patrick pushed for three pieces of legislation, he said: “First, the Green Communities Act enabled us to set ambitious goals for renewable energy: 250 megawatts of solar by 2017 and 2,000 megawatts of wind by 2020.” (The commonwealth had previously produced only 3 megawatts each of solar and wind energy, he said.)

The second piece of legislation, called the Global Warming Solutions Act, set a series of goals for reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, calling for a reduction of 25 percent (from 1990 levels) by 2020, and a cut of 80 percent by 2050.

The third piece was the Green Jobs Act, aimed at “capturing the opportunities to foster innovation and create jobs,” Patrick said. Currently, 80 percent of money spent on energy in Massachusetts goes to out-of-state companies. But by creating new clean-energy businesses here, he said, “With the world in the midst of an energy revolution, we were convinced that if we got this right, the world would be our customer.”

In summarizing the outcomes of those actions, Patrick said, “I am here to report that it’s working.” For example, he said, “The American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy has ranked Massachusetts the No. 1 state in energy efficiency for two consecutive years — ahead of longtime leader California.”

The governor added, “We installed more than 100 megawatts of solar power last year alone — ranking us sixth last year in total capacity added.”

Not only has this been good for the environment, but it has been good business, he said: “There are nearly 5,000 clean-energy firms in Massachusetts today, employing some 72,000 people — an impressive 11.2 percent growth in jobs in just the last year.”

There’s more in store: With the nation’s first offshore wind farm about to be built in Nantucket Sound, and a test facility for turbine blades in Charlestown, he said, “The U.S. Department of Energy projects 20,000 jobs by 2020 in offshore wind. Why not host those jobs here in Massachusetts?”

Patrick also outlined a next crucial area of environmental sustainability: “We see water innovation as the next opportunity for Massachusetts to seize,” he said. “The same concentration of brainpower in this and other world-class universities and research facilities that spawned and feeds the life sciences and high-tech revolution in Massachusetts is at the center of this next big push in water innovation.”

Although the focus of the MIT Energy Initiative-sponsored talk was Earth Day and environmental issues, Reif’s introduction also alluded to the governor’s leadership since the Boston Marathon bombing. “I believe I can speak for the entire MIT community in saying thank you for your leadership over the past 10 days,” Reif said. “It has been a terrible and confusing time, and you offered calm, clarity, sympathy and reassurance.”

Patrick noted those events also, including his attendance at Wednesday’s memorial service: “Yesterday’s tribute to Officer Sean Collier was beautiful and fitting,” he said. But, he said, despite the tragic events, “One shining remnant of this experience has been the re-emergence of a strong sense of community, the notion of common stake and common cause.”

He said that in light of that, “I am convinced that there isn’t a single challenge that we face in this state or in this country that can’t be surmounted by a renewed sense that we have a stake in each other’s dreams and struggles.”

Watch the Governor's speech here.

By Charles C. Mann

New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle—and a nightmare.

As the great research ship Chikyu left Shimizu in January to mine the explosive ice beneath the Philippine Sea, chances are good that not one of the scientists aboard realized they might be closing the door on Winston Churchill’s world. Their lack of knowledge is unsurprising; beyond the ranks of petroleum-industry historians, Churchill’s outsize role in the history of energy is insufficiently appreciated.

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. With characteristic vigor and verve, he set about modernizing the Royal Navy, jewel of the empire. The revamped fleet, he proclaimed, should be fueled with oil, rather than coal—a decision that continues to reverberate in the present. Burning a pound of fuel oil produces about twice as much energy as burning a pound of coal. Because of this greater energy density, oil could push ships faster and farther than coal could.

Churchill’s proposal led to emphatic dispute. The United Kingdom had lots of coal but next to no oil. At the time, the United States produced almost two-thirds of the world’s petroleum; Russia produced another fifth. Both were allies of Great Britain. Nonetheless, Whitehall was uneasy about the prospect of the Navy’s falling under the thumb of foreign entities, even if friendly. The solution, Churchill told Parliament in 1913, was for Britons to become “the owners, or at any rate, the controllers at the source of at least a proportion of the supply of natural oil which we require.” Spurred by the Admiralty, the U.K. soon bought 51 percent of what is now British Petroleum, which had rights to oil “at the source”: Iran (then known as Persia). The concessions’ terms were so unpopular in Iran that they helped spark a revolution. London worked to suppress it. Then, to prevent further disruptions, Britain enmeshed itself ever more deeply in the Middle East, working to install new shahs in Iran and carve Iraq out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire.

Churchill fired the starting gun, but all of the Western powers joined the race to control Middle Eastern oil. Britain clawed past France, Germany, and the Netherlands, only to be overtaken by the United States, which secured oil concessions in Turkey, Iraq, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The struggle created a long-lasting intercontinental snarl of need and resentment. Even as oil-consuming nations intervened in the affairs of oil-producing nations, they seethed at their powerlessness; oil producers exacted huge sums from oil consumers but chafed at having to submit to them. Decades of turmoil—oil shocks in 1973 and 1979, failed programs for “energy independence,” two wars in Iraq—have left unchanged this fundamental, Churchillian dynamic, a toxic mash of anger and dependence that often seems as basic to global relations as the rotation of the sun.

All of this was called into question by the voyage of the Chikyu (“Earth”), a $540 million Japanese deep-sea drilling vessel that looks like a billionaire’s yacht with a 30-story oil derrick screwed into its back. The Chikyu, a floating barrage of superlatives, is the biggest, glitziest, most sophisticated research vessel ever constructed, and surely the only one with a landing pad for a 30-person helicopter. The central derrick houses an enormous floating drill with a six-mile “string” that has let the Chikyu delve deeper beneath the ocean floor than any other ship.

The Chikyu, which first set out in 2005, was initially intended to probe earthquake-generating zones in the planet’s mantle, a subject of obvious interest to seismically unstable Japan. Its present undertaking was, if possible, of even greater importance: trying to develop an energy source that could free not just Japan but much of the world from the dependence on Middle Eastern oil that has bedeviled politicians since Churchill’s day.

In the 1970s, geologists discovered crystalline natural gas—methane hydrate, in the jargon—beneath the seafloor. Stored mostly in broad, shallow layers on continental margins, methane hydrate exists in immense quantities; by some estimates, it is twice as abundant as all other fossil fuels combined. Despite its plenitude, gas hydrate was long subject to petroleum-industry skepticism. These deposits—water molecules laced into frigid cages that trap “guest molecules” of natural gas—are strikingly unlike conventional energy reserves. Ice you can set on fire! Who could take it seriously? But as petroleum prices soared, undersea-drilling technology improved, and geological surveys accumulated, interest rose around the world. The U.S. Department of Energy has been funding a methane-hydrate research program since 1982.

Nowhere has the interest been more serious than Japan. Unlike Britain and the United States, the Japanese failed to become “the owners, or at any rate, the controllers” of any significant amount of oil. (Not that Tokyo didn’t try: it bombed Pearl Harbor mainly to prevent the U.S. from blocking its attempted conquest of the oil-rich Dutch East Indies.) Today, Churchill’s nightmare has come true for Japan: it is a military and industrial power almost wholly dependent on foreign energy. It is the world’s third-biggest net importer of crude oil, the second-biggest importer of coal, and the biggest importer of liquefied natural gas. Not once has a Japanese politician expressed happiness at this state of affairs.

Japan’s methane-hydrate program began in 1995. Its scientists quickly focused on the Nankai Trough, about 200 miles southwest of Tokyo, an undersea earthquake zone where two pieces of the Earth’s crust jostle each other. Step by step, year by year, a state-owned enterprise now called the Japan Oil, Gas, and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC) dug test wells, made measurements, and obtained samples of the hydrate deposits: 130-foot layers of sand and silt, loosely held together by methane-rich ice. The work was careful, slow, orderly, painstakingly analytical—the kind of process that seems intended to snuff out excited newspaper headlines. But it progressed with the same remorselessness that in the 1960s and ’70s had transformed offshore oil wells from Waterworld-style exoticisms to mainstays of the world economy.

In January, 18 years after the Japanese program began, the Chikyu left the Port of Shimizu, midway up the main island’s eastern coastline, to begin a “production” test—an attempt to harvest usefully large volumes of gas, rather than laboratory samples. Many questions remained to be answered, the project director, Koji Yamamoto, told me before the launch. JOGMEC hadn’t figured out the best way to mine hydrate, or how to ship the resultant natural gas to shore. Costs needed to be brought down. “It will not be ready for 10 years,” Yamamoto said. “But I believe it will be ready.” What would happen then, he allowed, would be “interesting.”

Already the petroleum industry has been convulsed by hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”—a technique for shooting water mixed with sand and chemicals into rock, splitting it open, and releasing previously inaccessible oil, referred to as “tight oil.” Still more important, fracking releases natural gas, which, when yielded from shale, is known as shale gas. (Petroleum is a grab-bag term for all nonsolid hydrocarbon resources—oil of various types, natural gas, propane, oil precursors, and so on—that companies draw from beneath the Earth’s surface. The stuff that catches fire around stove burners is known by a more precise term, natural gas, referring to methane, a colorless, odorless gas that has the same chemical makeup no matter what the source—ordinary petroleum wells, shale beds, or methane hydrate.) Fracking has been attacked as an environmental menace to underground water supplies, and may eventually be greatly restricted. But it has also unleashed so much petroleum in North America that the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based consortium of energy-consuming nations, predicted in November that by 2035, the United States will become “all but self-sufficient in net terms.” If the Chikyu researchers are successful, methane hydrate could have similar effects in Japan. And not just in Japan: China, India, Korea, Taiwan, and Norway are looking to unlock these crystal cages, as are Canada and the United States.

Not everyone thinks JOGMEC will succeed. But methane hydrate is being developed in much the same methodical way that shale gas was developed before it, except by a bigger, more international group of researchers. Shale gas, too, was subject to skepticism wide and loud. The egg on naysayers’ faces suggests that it would be foolish to ignore the prospects for methane hydrate—and more foolish still not to consider the potential consequences.

If methane hydrate allows much of the world to switch from oil to gas, the conversion would undermine governments that depend on oil revenues, especially petro-autocracies like Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Unless oil states are exceptionally well run, a gush of petroleum revenues can actually weaken their economies by crowding out other business. Worse, most oil nations are so corrupt that social scientists argue over whether there is an inherent bond—a “resource curse”—between big petroleum deposits and political malfeasance. It seems safe to say that few Americans would be upset if a plunge in demand eliminated these countries’ hold over the U.S. economy. But those same people might not relish the global instability—a belt of financial and political turmoil from Venezuela to Turkmenistan—that their collapse could well unleash.

On a broader level still, cheap, plentiful natural gas throws a wrench into efforts to combat climate change. Avoiding the worst effects of climate change, scientists increasingly believe, will require “a complete phase-out of carbon emissions … over 50 years,” in the words of one widely touted scientific estimate that appeared in January. A big, necessary step toward that goal is moving away from coal, still the second-most-important energy source worldwide. Natural gas burns so much cleaner than coal that converting power plants from coal to gas—a switch promoted by the deluge of gas from fracking—has already reduced U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions to their lowest levels since Newt Gingrich’s heyday.

Yet natural gas isn’t that clean; burning it produces carbon dioxide. Researchers view it as a temporary “bridge fuel,” something that can power nations while they make the transition away from oil and coal. But if societies do not take advantage of that bridge to enact anti-carbon policies, says Michael Levi, the director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations, natural gas could be “a bridge from the coal-fired past to the coal-fired future.”

“Methane hydrate could be a new energy revolution,” Christopher Knittel, a professor of energy economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me. “It could help the world while we reduce greenhouse gases. Or it could undermine the economic rationale for investing in renewable, carbon-free energy around the world”—just as abundant shale gas from fracking has already begun to undermine it in the United States. “The one path is a boon. The other—I’ve used words like catastrophe.” He paused; I thought I detected a sigh. “I wouldn’t bet on us making the right decisions.”

A few years after I graduated from college, I drove with a friend to Southern California, a place I’d never been. I saw a little of Los Angeles, then went north and spent a few days bumbling through the San Joaquin Valley. Going about Bakersfield one night, I got hopelessly lost and ended up at a chain-link fence. Behind the fence were thousands of oil pumps, nodding up and down like so many giant plastic drinking birds. Enshrouding the pumps was a spiderweb of pipes and electrical wires, vast and complex beyond reason, lights and machinery stretching out across the desert farther than I could see. A giant, hypermodern petroleum operation barely 100 miles from Los Angeles! I couldn’t believe it. As I stood gawping, a policeman drove by. I asked him when this complex had sprung up. He looked at me like I was an idiot. “They’ve been drilling here since 1899,” he said.

I was standing by the Kern River oil field, one of the best-known petroleum deposits in the United States. Because I had somehow missed geology in school, I had been left with the vague idea that oil is found in big subterranean pools, like the underground lake where Voldemort conceals part of his soul in the Harry Potter series. In fact, petroleum is usually contained in solid sandstone or limestone strata, which are riddled, spongelike, with minute pores. Or it can occur in thin sheets between layers of shale. Looking at the nodding wells, I had the notion that they were drawing a uniform substance from the ground, a black liquid like the inky water in Voldemort’s lake. Instead, petroleum occurs as a crazy stew of different compounds: oil of various grades mixed with methane, ethane, propane, butane, and other hydrocarbons. Squashed into stone hundreds or thousands of feet underground, this jumble of liquid and gas is usually under great pressure. Layers, or “caps,” of impermeable rock prevent it from seeping to the surface. When drilling bores through the caps, petroleum shoots up in orthodox gusher fashion.

For a long time, companies collected oil and discarded the methane that burbled up with it, often by burning the gas in a cinematic flare atop special derricks, or even simply dumping it into the atmosphere. People did use natural gas for energy—gaslights have existed since the days of Jane Austen—but transporting it was costly. Unlike liquid oil, which could be poured into containers and carried on a railroad network that had already been built and paid for by somebody else, gaseous methane had to be pumped through sealed tubes to its destination, which required energy firms and utilities to lay thousands upon thousands of miles of pipeline. Not until the Second World War and war-production advances in welding did this effort gather speed. (Methane can be cooled into a liquid and transported in pressurized tanks that are loaded and unloaded in special facilities, but this is also expensive.) Oil from wells in Texas is readily dispatched via tanker to Europe or Asia, but even today, natural gas from the same wells is often effectively limited to use in the United States.

From the beginning, it was evident that the Kern River field was rich with oil, millions upon millions of barrels. (A barrel, the unit of oil measurement, is 42 gallons; depending on the grade, a ton of oil is six to eight barrels.) Wildcatters poured into the area, throwing up derricks, boring wells, and pulling out what they could. In 1949, after 50 years of drilling, analysts estimated that just 47 million barrels remained in reserves—a rounding error in the oil business. Kern River, it seemed, was nearly played out. Instead, oil companies removed 945 million barrels in the next 40 years. In 1989, analysts again estimated Kern reserves: 697 million barrels. By 2009, Kern had produced more than 1.3 billion additional barrels, and reserves were estimated to be almost 600 million barrels.

What does it mean when oil companies say they have so many million barrels in reserves? How much energy is in the ground? When will we begin running out? As the history of the Kern River field suggests, these questions are not easy to answer. Indeed, Ph.D.‑toting experts have bombarded Americans for half a century with totally contradictory responses. On one side, pessimists claim that the planet is slowly running out of petroleum. “Turn down the thermostat!” they cry. “Stuff insulation in your walls!” “Buy a hybrid!” “Conserve!” From the other side come equally loud shouts insisting that there are vast, untapped petroleum deposits in Alaska and Alberta and off the coast of Virginia, that geysers of natural gas exist in the shale beds of Pennsylvania and North Dakota, and that huge oil patches await extraction in the deep ocean. “Drill, baby, drill!” “The end of oil!” Al Gore or Sarah Palin, Cassandra or Pollyanna, which side is right? The back-and-forth would be comical if the stakes didn’t involve the fate of human civilization.

When gasoline supplies drop, TV news reporters like to wring their hands at the drivers mobbing the corner Exxon. But the motorists’ panic reflects a basic truth: economic growth and energy use have marched in lockstep for generations. Between 1900 and 2000, global energy consumption rose roughly 17-fold, the University of Manitoba environmental scientist Vaclav Smil has calculated, while economic output rose 16-fold—“as close a link as one may find in the unruly realm of economic affairs.” Petroleum has wreaked all kinds of social and environmental havoc, but a steady supply of oil and gas remains just as central to the world’s economic well-being as it was in Churchill’s day. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the United States has experienced 11 recessions since the end of the Second World War. All but one were associated with spikes in energy costs—specifically, abrupt jumps in the price of oil.

Understanding this dependence, the oil industry was shaken by a speech in 1956 by M. King Hubbert, a prominent geophysicist at Shell Oil. When a company moves into a field, it grabs the easy, cheap oil first. Tapping the rest gets progressively more difficult and expensive. Eventually, Hubbert observed, conditions get so tough that production levels off—it peaks. After the peak, decline is unstoppable, the fall as ineluctable as the rise. Hubbert used his theory to predict that the crude-oil yield in the continental United States would flatten between 1965 and 1970 (he didn’t include Alaska and most offshore oil areas). Coming at a time when estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey and the petroleum industry were constantly rising, this claim was derided; indeed, Hubbert claimed that just before giving his speech, a Shell official tried to get him to back off.

Hubbert, not the least self-confident of men, stood his ground, even after he left Shell and in 1964 went to work for the Geological Survey. Unluckily for him, his most prominent critic was now his boss: Vincent E. McKelvey, a long-serving geologist at USGS who would become its director in 1971. As the University of Iowa historian Tyler Priest has documented, McKelvey’s USGS issued a stream of optimistic assessments about the country’s oil future. So did its counterparts in the oil industry. Meanwhile, Hubbert cranked out papers taking the opposite stance, none of them published by the Geological Survey. Inevitably, the dispute grew personal. Three days after McKelvey became the USGS director, he took away Hubbert’s secretary, a harsh measure in the days before e‑mail. According to Priest, Hubbert ended up having to write all his correspondence in longhand; his wife typed his reports at home. Hubbert struck back by helping to kill McKelvey’s nominations to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In a blow to McKelvey, Hubbert’s prediction proved to be correct. As domestic crude-oil production peaked and then fell, former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall mocked the sunny claims from the Geological Survey as “an enormous energy balloon of inflated promises and boundless optimism [that] had long since lost touch with any mainland reality.” If Udall were reappointed Interior secretary, he said, “the first thing I would do would be to kick McKelvey out.” In 1977, newly elected President Jimmy Carter, a Hubbertian, forced McKelvey to resign—the first such ouster, Priest notes, “in the Survey’s 98-year history.”

Hubbert’s message of scarcity resonated at a time when the United States was haunted by the specter of Middle Eastern oil blockades. In a nationwide address, President Carter proclaimed that the planet’s proven oil reserves could be consumed “by the end of the next decade.” To forestall the disaster, he fired a volley of energy-efficiency measures: gas-mileage regulation, home-appliance energy standards, conservation tax credits, subsidies for insulation and weatherization. Congress enacted incentives and restrictions to induce industry to switch from supposedly scarce oil and natural gas to coal, which the U.S. has in abundance.

Alas, petroleum firms found so much crude oil in the 1980s that by the 1990s, prices (after adjusting for inflation) had fallen to one-fifth of what they had been during the Carter administration. Estimates of reserves rose and rose again. Energy conservation faltered; oil and gas were too cheap to be worth saving.

The argument has nonetheless continued, pessimists and optimists hammering at each other like Montagues and Capulets. Most of the Hubbertians are physical scientists; most of the McKelveyans, social scientists. Central to the conflict is their differing concepts of a reserve. Recall, as an example, the Kern River field. Its thousands of nodding pumps are siphoning up oil so thick and heavy that it almost doesn’t float on water. Although drillers knew from the first that the field was abundant, they could barely wrest any of this goop from the ground, a factor reflected in the first estimate of the reserve (47 million barrels of recoverable oil). Between that estimate and the second (697 million barrels), engineers developed a precursor to fracking: shooting hot steam down Kern River wells to thin the oil and force it out of the stone. At first, the process was hideously inefficient: heating the water to produce the steam required as much as 40 percent of the oil that came out of the wells. Burning unrefined crude oil released torrents of pollution: nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide. But it squeezed out petroleum that had seemed impossible to reach.

At the same time, the industry learned how to burrow farther into the Earth, opening up previously inaccessible deposits. In 1998, an oil rig near the Kern River field drilled thousands of feet deeper than any previous attempt in the area. At 17,657 feet, the well blew out in a classic gusher. Flames shot 300 feet in the air. The blast destroyed the well and everything else on the site. Even after the fire burned out, petroleum flooded from the hole for another six months. Energy firms guessed that the blowout hinted at the presence of big new oil-and-gas deposits. Earlier assessments had missed them because of their great depth. Investors rushed in and began to drill.

To McKelveyan social scientists, such stories demonstrate that oil reserves should not be thought of as physical entities. Rather, they are economic judgments: how much petroleum experts believe can be harvested from given areas at an affordable price. Even as companies drain off the easy oil, innovation keeps pushing down the cost of getting the rest. From this vantage, the race between declining oil and advancing technology determines the size of a reserve—not the number of hydrocarbon molecules in the ground. Companies that scrambled to follow the Kern River gusher found millions of barrels of deep oil, but it was mixed with so much water that they couldn’t stop the wells from flooding. Within a few years, almost all the new rigs ceased operation. The reserve vanished, but the oil remained.

This perspective has a corollary: natural resources cannot be used up. If one deposit gets too expensive to drill, social scientists (most of them economists) say, people will either find cheaper deposits or shift to a different energy source altogether. Because the costliest stuff is left in the ground, there will always be petroleum to mine later. “When will the world’s supply of oil be exhausted?” asked the MIT economist Morris Adelman, perhaps the most important exponent of this view. “The best one-word answer: never.” Effectively, energy supplies are infinite.

Sweeping claims like these make Jean Laherrère’s teeth hurt. Laherrère spent 37 years exploring for oil and gas for the French petroleum company Total before co-founding the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. ASPO was born after Laherrère and Colin Campbell, another retired petroleum geologist, predicted in 1998 that “within the next decade, the supply of conventional oil will be unable to keep up with demand.” Given the record-high petroleum reserves of the time, the claim was gutsy. Campbell and Laherrère insisted that talk of ever more oil was nonsense. In the 1980s, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the intergovernmental cartel that controls most crude oil, discussed allocating sales on the basis of member states’ reserves: the bigger a nation’s reserves, the more oil OPEC would let that nation sell. In such a system, countries would have every incentive to overstate their holdings. As Campbell and Laherrère noted, six of the 11 OPEC members abruptly hiked their reserve estimates during these discussions. Incredibly, some nations more than doubled their estimates, without a word of explanation for why they now had so much more oil in the ground. (OPEC eventually decided not to allocate oil in this way.) The supposed glut was a charade, Laherrère told me when we spoke in February. The reserves didn’t exist. “We said the [plateau in oil production]would begin before 2010, and we were correct.”

Far from being infinite, Laherrère said, petroleum supplies are finite by definition. The Earth contains only so many hydrocarbon molecules that can be extracted by human effort. “Once we have used up the easy oil, new types of cheap energy will not appear by magic. We will keep drilling for oil, and it will not be easy to get. Look at the enormously expensive equipment they use now only to keep up production.”

Oil prices soared, as if on cue, after Laherrère and Campbell’s prediction. By 2008, they had hit levels unseen since the Carter administration. “The supply of oil is limited,” President George W. Bush declared that year, echoing his predecessor. “There is a growing consensus that the age of cheap oil is coming to an end,” announced the British government’s Energy Research Centre. “A peak of conventional oil production before 2030 appears likely and there is a significant risk of a peak before 2020.” Bookstore shelves shudder beneath the avalanche of warnings: The Big Flatline: Oil and the No-Growth Economy. Peak Oil and the Second Great Depression (2010–2030). The End of Growth. The Crash Course. Peeking at Peak Oil. (All have come out in the past three years.)

McKelveyans remain undeterred. Morris Adelman is in failing health and could not speak to me, but I reached two of his students, Michael Lynch and Philip K. Verleger. Lynch, the president of the energy-consulting firm SEER, agreed with Laherrère that reserve estimates are sometimes manipulated for financial reasons—Shell’s chairman resigned in 2004, after the company was caught misstating its reserves—but didn’t think it mattered much. “Shell is still pumping oil,” he said. “The peak-oil people always say, ‘Look at this super-technological rig—see how expensive the equipment is now.’ I see it and think, Look at how good we’ve gotten at doing this.” Lynch added, “The airlines have jettisoned their wooden biplanes and now use 747s. That’s not because we’re running out of sky and it’s harder to fly. It’s because the technology is getting better and increasing our reach.”

More important, to Verleger’s way of thinking, the peak-oil battle has become irrelevant. Verleger, a former economic official in the Ford and Carter administrations, is now a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. Since Hubbert’s time, the dispute has focused on “conventional” petroleum, the type found in regular oil wells, most of which is in the Middle East and controlled by OPEC. Production of conventional oil has indeed plateaued, as Hubbertians warned: OPEC’s output has remained roughly flat since 2005. In part, the slowdown reflects the diminishing supply of this kind of oil. Another part is due to the global recession, which has stalled demand. But a third factor is that OPEC’s conventional petroleum is being supplemented—and possibly supplanted—by what the industry calls “unconventional” petroleum, which for the moment mainly means oil and natural gas from fracking. Fracking, Verleger says, is creating “the biggest change in energy in almost 100 years—a revolution.” That revolution, in his view, will have a big winner: the United States.

The argument is simple. The need to import expensive foreign oil has been a political and economic burden on the United States for decades. Today, though, fracking is unleashing torrents of oil in North Dakota and Texas—it may create a second boom in the San Joaquin Valley—and floods of natural gas in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. So bright are the fracking prospects that the U.S. may become, if only briefly, the world’s top petroleum producer. (“Saudi America,” crowed The Wall Street Journal. But the parallel is inexact, because the U.S. is likely to consume most of its bonanza at home, rather than exporting it.) Oil may cost more than in the past, but prices will surely stabilize. No more spikes! Still more important, this nation is fracking so much natural gas that its price today is less than a third of its price in Europe and Asia—a big cost advantage for American industry. As companies switch to cheap natural gas, a Citigroup report argued last year, the U.S. petroleum boom could add as much as 3.3 percent to America’s GDP in the next seven years.

Until about 1970, the United States produced almost enough petroleum for its own needs. Then, just as Hubbert predicted, domestic oil production began to wane. Suddenly the United States was vulnerable. OPEC had launched an oil embargo in 1967, but it had next to no effect, because the U.S. produced so much of its own oil. Six years later, with U.S. imports surging, OPEC launched a second embargo. Oil prices quadrupled—and caused a massive panic, complete with fistfights at gas stations that were broadcast and rebroadcast on local TV news. “Energy independence!” was the new call from Washington. Perhaps the only ideal shared by Nixon, Carter, and Reagan, it became the holy grail of American politics. George W. Bush, flanked by Democrats, signed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007; Barack Obama, fighting with Republicans, has repeatedly touted the need to “get America closer to energy independence.”

Largely because of little-noticed research by government agencies and small companies, that goal is within sight, says Leonardo Maugeri, a former director of the petrochemical division of the Italian energy firm Eni. The United States will still import oil, he argued last summer in a report from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. But domestic production will increase so much that by 2020, all of this country’s oil needs “theoretically could come entirely from the Western Hemisphere.” Within a decade, in other words, the U.S. could, if it wanted, stop importing oil from the Middle East. In November, the International Energy Agency agreed, though it pushed the date of independence to 2035. The fracking-led oil-and-gas boom, Philip Verleger said in January, will lead to an American “economic Renaissance.” The United States will at last escape the world made by Churchill, at least for a while.

Nations like Japan, China, and India will still be stuck in that world, as will much of Europe and Southeast Asia. Many of these nations do not have shale deposits to frack, the requisite technological base, or, even if they have both the shale and the technology, the entrepreneurial infrastructure to finance such sweeping changes. Nonetheless, they want to be freed from their abrasive reliance on OPEC. The United States and Canada, mindful that the good times will not last forever, are also hunting for new supplies. All have been looking with ever-increasing interest at a still-larger energy source: methane hydrate.

The land sheds organic molecules into the water like a ditchdigger taking a shower. Sewage plants, fertilizer-rich farms, dandruffy swimmers—all make their contribution. Plankton and other minute sea beings flourish where the drift is heaviest, at the continental margins. When these creatures die, as all living things must, their bodies drizzle slowly to the seafloor, creating banks of sediment, marine reliquaries that can be many feet deep. Microorganisms feed upon the remains.

In a process familiar to anyone who has seen bubbles coming to the surface of a pond, the microbes emit methane gas as they eat and grow. This undersea methane bubbles up too, but it quickly encounters the extremely cold water in the pores of the sediment. Under the high pressure of these cold depths, water and methane react to each other: water molecules link into crystalline lattices that trap methane molecules. A cubic foot of these lattices can contain as much as 180 cubic feet of methane gas.

Most methane hydrate, including the deposit Japan is examining in the Nankai Trough, is generated in this way. A few high-quality beds accumulate when regular natural gas, the kind made underground by geologic processes, leaks from the earth into the deep ocean. However methane hydrate is created, though, it looks much like everyday ice or snow. It isn’t: ordinary ice cannot be set on fire. More technically, ice crystals are typically hexagonal, whereas methane-hydrate crystals are clusters of 12- or 14-sided structures that in scientists’ diagrams look vaguely like soccer balls. Methane molecules rattle about inside the balls, unable to escape. The crystals don’t dissolve in the sea like ordinary ice, because water pressure and temperature keep them stable at depths below about 1,000 feet. Scientists on the surface refer to them by many names: methane hydrate, of course, but also methane clathrate, gas hydrate, hydromethane, and methane ice.

Estimates of the global supply of methane hydrate range from the equivalent of 100 times more than America’s current annual energy consumption to 3 million times more. A tiny fraction—1 percent or less—is buried in permafrost around the Arctic Circle, mostly in Alaska, Canada, and Siberia. The rest is beneath the waves, a reservoir so huge that some scientists believe sudden releases of undersea methane eons ago set off abrupt, catastrophic changes in climate. Humankind cannot tap into the bulk of these deep, vast deposits by any known means. But even a small proportion of a very big number is a very big number.

Hydrates were regarded purely as laboratory curiosities until the 1930s, when a Texas petroleum researcher realized that they were clogging natural-gas pipelines in cold weather. Three decades later, exploration in Siberia revealed gelid bands of methane hydrate embedded in the tundra. Meanwhile, oceanographers were observing anomalies in sonar readings of the seafloor. Some areas of the bottom bounced sound waves back more sharply than one would expect from muddy sediment. It was like waving a flashlight in a dark room and being startled by the flash from a mirror. Three geologists suggested in 1971 that these reflective zones were layers of methane hydrate. Not until 1982 did researchers obtain a large chunk of methane hydrate—a three-foot section of a core sample. The gas inside was 99.4 percent methane. That year, the United States established a methane-hydrate research program.

The investigation was a small, belated part of a global push into unconventional petroleum that had been spurred by the oil shocks of the 1970s. For civilians, understanding unconventionals is difficult, not least because of the taxonomic hodgepodge the industry uses to describe them: tar sands, tight oil, heavy oil, shale gas, coal-bed methane, shale oil, oil shale. (Exasperatingly, shale oil is different from oil shale.) All of these different flavors of petroleum are “unconventional” simply because in the past they were too hard to pull from the earth to be worth the bother. Nowadays technology has made many of them accessible.

With the odd exception, unconventionals can be broken into two rough categories: forms of petroleum that are heavier and less refined than the crudest of crude oil, and forms that are lighter and more refined than crude oil. Both are worth huge sums and entangled in dispute, much like conventional petroleum. But the second category, which includes the natural gas from methane hydrate, seems likely to play a much larger role in humankind’s future—economically, politically, and, most of all, environmentally.

The first, heavy category consists of petroleum that must be processed on-site to be transformed into oil. Tar sands, for instance, consist of ordinary sand mixed with bitumen, a sludgy black goo that hasn’t withstood enough geological heat and pressure to be converted fully into ordinary oil. The most important tar-sand deposits are underneath an expanse of subarctic forest in central Canada that is roughly the size of England; they make up the third-biggest proven oil reserve in the world. In most cases, mining tar sands involves drilling two horizontal wells, one above the other, into the bitumen layer; injecting massive gouts of high-pressure steam and solvents into the top well, liquefying the bitumen; sucking up the melted bitumen as it drips into the sand around the lower well; and then refining the bitumen into “synthetic crude oil.” Refining in this case includes removing sulfur, which is then stored in million-ton, utterly useless Ozymandian slabs around mines and refineries.

Economists sometimes describe a fuel in terms of its energy return on energy invested (EROEI), a measure of how much energy must be used up to acquire, process, and deliver the fuel in a useful form. OPEC oil, for example, is typically estimated to have an EROEI of 12 to 18, which means that 12 to 18 barrels of oil are produced at the wellhead for every barrel of oil consumed during their production. In this calculation, tar sands look awful: they have an EROEI of 4 to 7. (Steaming out the bitumen also requires a lot of water. Environmentalists ask, with some justification, where it all is going to come from.)

Conveying tar-sands oil to its biggest potential markets, in the United States, will involve building a huge pipeline from Alberta to Texas, which has attracted vituperative opposition from environmental groups and some local governments. The U.S. State Department has long delayed issuing permits to allow this pipeline to cross the border, a stall that has outraged energy boosters, who charge that the Obama administration is spitting in the soup of Canada, America’s most important ally. The boosters say little about the two 100 percent Canadian pipelines—one to shoot tar-sands oil to a port in British Columbia, a second to Montreal—that 100 percent Canadian opposition has stalled. All the while, indigenous groups in central Canada, people armed with special powers granted by the Canadian constitution, have carpet-bombed tar-sands country with lawsuits. Regardless of the merits of the protesters’ arguments, it is hard to believe that they will be completely ineffective, or that tar-sands oil will flow freely anytime soon.

Much more prominent is the second unconventional category, the most important subcategory of which is the natural gas harvested by fracking shale. Every few years, the U.S. government produces a map of American shale beds. Flipping through a time series of these maps is like watching the progress of an epidemic—methane deposits pop up everywhere, and keep spreading. To obtain shale gas, companies first dig wells that reach down thousands of feet. Then, with the absurd agility of anime characters, the drills wriggle sideways to bore thousands of feet more through methane-bearing shale. Once in place, the well injects high-pressure water into the stone, creating hairline cracks. The water is mixed with chemicals and “proppant,” particles of sand or ceramic that help keep the cracks open once they have formed. Gas trapped between layers of shale seeps past the proppant and rises through the well to be collected.

Water-assisted fracturing has been in use since the late 1940s, but it became “fracking” only recently, when it was married with horizontal drilling and the advanced sensing techniques that let it be used deep underground. Energy costs are surprisingly small; a Swiss-American research team calculated in 2011 that the average EROEI for fracked gas in a representative Pennsylvania county was about 87—about six times better than for Persian Gulf oil and 16 times better than for tar sands. (Fracking uses a lot of water, though, and activists charge that the chemicals contaminate underground water supplies.) Because of fracking, U.S. natural-gas reserves have jumped by almost three-quarters since 2000.

Shale gas has its detractors. Far from being a game changer, Jean Laherrère told me, shale gas is a “Ponzi scheme” in which oil companies acquire largely fictional methane deposits to polish their balance sheets for Wall Street. A February study from the Post Carbon Institute, an anti-fossil-fuel think tank, dismissed shale gas as, at best, “a temporary reprieve from having to deal with the real problems”; the group’s general tenor is indicated by the special URL it set up for the report: shalebubble.org. But these views are not widely shared. Two days after I last spoke with Laherrère, the head of the U.S. Energy Information Administration told a congressional hearing that the additions to America’s energy reserves ballyhooed in the agency’s most recent report “were—by a large margin—the highest ever recorded since EIA began publishing proved reserve estimates in 1977.”

As Economics 101 would predict, the arrival of vast quantities of methane from fracking has already made U.S. natural-gas prices plummet. In response, hundreds of wells have shut down, preserving methane deposits that can be tapped someday in the future. But U.S. natural-gas production has hardly been affected. Neither has demand: more and more industries, attracted by low prices, are switching to gas from oil and coal—especially coal.

Today, a fifth of U.S. energy consumption is fueled by coal, mainly from Appalachia and the West, a long-term energy source that has provided jobs for millions, a century-old way of life—and pollution that kills more than 10,000 Americans a year (that estimate is from a 2010 National Research Council study). Roughly speaking, burning coal produces twice as much carbon dioxide as burning the equivalent amount of natural gas. Almost all domestic coal is used to generate electricity—it produces 38 percent of the U.S. power supply. Fracking is swiftly changing this: in 2011, utilities reported plans to shut down 57 of the nation’s 1,287 coal-fired generators the following year. Largely in consequence, U.S. energy-related carbon-dioxide emissions have dropped to figures last seen in 1995. Since 2006, they have fallen more than those from any other nation in the world.

The U.S. coal industry has taken to complaining of a “war on coal.” But the economic hit has been less than one would expect; U.S. coal exports, mainly to Europe, almost doubled from 2009 to 2011. In the sort of development that irresistibly attracts descriptors like ironic, Germany, often touted as an environmental model for its commitment to solar and wind power, has expanded its use of coal, and as a result is steadily increasing its carbon-dioxide output. Unlike Americans, Europeans can’t readily switch to natural gas; Continental nations, which import most of their natural gas, agreed to long-term contracts that tie its price to the price of oil, now quite high. “It’s like someone said, ‘We’ll sell you all the tea you want, based on the price of coffee,’ ” Michael Lynch, the energy consultant, told me. “And you said, ‘What a great idea! I’ll lock myself into it for decades.’ ” He laughed. “Truly, you can’t make this stuff up.”

Here I should confess to personal bias. Twelve years ago, a magazine asked me to write an article about energy supplies. While researching, I met petroleum geologists and engineers who told me about a still-experimental technique called hydraulic fracturing. Intrigued, I asked several prominent energy pundits about it. All scoffed at the notion that it would pay off. To be fair, some early fracking research was outlandish; three early trials involved setting off atomic weapons underground (they did produce natural gas, but it was radioactive). I don’t want to embarrass anyone I spoke with. I failed to exercise independent judgment, and did not mention hydraulic fracturing in my article, so I was just as mistaken. But I also don’t want to miss the boat again. Even though plenty of experts discount methane hydrate, I now am more inclined to pay attention to the geologists and engineers who foresee a second, fracking-type revolution with it, a revolution that—unlike the shale-gas rush, mostly a North American phenomenon—will ripple across the globe.

Japan, which has spent about $700 million on methane-hydrate R&D over the past decade, has the world’s biggest hydrate-research program—or perhaps that should be programs, because provincial governments on Japan’s west coast formed a second hydrate-research consortium last year. (Several researchers told me that the current towel-snapping between Beijing and Tokyo over islands in the East China Sea is due less to nationalistic posturing than to nearby petroleum deposits.) In mid-March, Japan’s Chikyu test ended a week early, after sand got in the well mechanism. But by then the researchers had already retrieved about 4 million cubic feet of natural gas from methane hydrate, at double the expected rate. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry is eager to create a domestic oil industry; at present, the nation produces just one one-thousandth of its own needs. Perhaps overoptimistically, the ministry set 2018 as a target date for commercializing methane hydrate. India and South Korea are following along, each spending as much as $30 million a year on hydrate experiments; the Korean program is growing especially aggressively.

By contrast, the U.S. Department of Energy program is small—its annual budget is about $15 million, most of which is devoted to basic research on gas hydrates’ formation and location. About $2.4 million goes to U.S. Geological Survey methane-hydrate researchers, who have been test-mining onshore deposits in frigid Alaska and northwestern Canada. Based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and Denver, Colorado, the USGS program has about eight full-time researchers, as well as collaborators from Japan, Canada, Germany, India, and several oil companies.

Although most U.S. research has been in the far north, the most promising U.S. deposits are in the Gulf of Mexico. Hydrates are thought to blanket about 174,000 square miles of the gulf, an area about the size of California. At least part of the deposit, seepage from conventional hydrocarbon reservoirs, is top-quality stuff, though nobody has any idea how much is actually recoverable. What is known, says Timothy Collett, the energy-research director for the USGS program, is that some of the gulf’s more than 3,500 oil and gas wells are in gas-hydrate areas. Extracting these hydrates, in his view, is the logical next step. “To keep feeding the infrastructure, you have to maintain a certain return. Otherwise, you’ll abandon it,” he told me. “For the individual manager of a large installation with a multimillion-dollar budget, it might be well within your interest, as you go into decline on deepwater production, to start looking at gas hydrate.”

If one nation succeeds in producing commercial quantities of undersea methane, others will follow. U.S.-style energy independence, or something like it, may become a reality in much of Asia and West Africa, parts of Europe, most of the Americas. To achieve this dream, history suggests, subsidies to domestic producers will be generous and governments will slap fees on petroleum imports—especially in Asia, where dependence on foreign energy is even more irksome than it is here. In addition to North America, the main sources of conventionally extracted natural gas are Russia, Iran, and Qatar (Saudi Arabia is also an important producer). All will feel the pinch in a methane-hydrate world. If natural gas from methane hydrate becomes plentiful and cheap enough to encourage nations to switch from oil, as the Japanese hope, the risk pool will expand to include Brunei, Iraq, Nigeria, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and other petro-states.

The results in those nations would be turbulent. Petroleum revenues, if they are large, exercise curious and malign effects on their recipients. In 1959, the Netherlands found petroleum on the shores of the North Sea. Money gurgled into the country. To general surprise, the flood of cash led to an economic freeze. Afterward, economists realized that salaries in the new petroleum industry were so high that nobody wanted to work anywhere else. To keep employees, companies in other parts of the economy had to jack up wages, in turn driving up costs. Meanwhile, the surge of foreign money into the Netherlands raised the exchange rate. Soaring costs and currency made it harder for Dutch firms to compete; manufacturing and agriculture faltered; unemployment climbed, except in the oil industry. The windfall led to stagnation—a phenomenon that petroleum cognoscenti now call “Dutch disease.”

Some scholars today doubt how much the Netherlands was actually affected by Dutch disease. Still, the general point is widely accepted. A good modern economy is like a roof with many robust supporting pillars, each a different economic sector. In Dutch-disease scenarios, oil weakens all the pillars but one—the petroleum industry, which bloats steroidally.

Worse, that remaining pillar becomes so big and important that in almost every nation, the government takes it over. (“Almost,” because there is an exception: the United States, the only one of the 62 petroleum-producing nations that allows private entities to control large amounts of oil and gas reserves.) Because the national petroleum company, with its gush of oil revenues, is the center of national economic power, “the ruler typically puts a loyalist in charge,” says Michael Ross, a UCLA political scientist and the author of The Oil Curse (2012). “The possibilities for corruption are endless.” Governments dip into the oil kitty to reward friends and buy off enemies. Sometimes the money goes to simple bribes; in the early 1990s, hundreds of millions of euros from France’s state oil company, Elf Aquitaine, lined the pockets of businessmen and politicians at home and abroad. Often, oil money is funneled into pharaonic development projects: highways and hotels, designer malls and desalination plants. Frequently, it is simply unaccounted for. How much of Venezuela’s oil wealth Hugo Chávez hijacked for his own political purposes is unknown, because his government stopped publishing the relevant income and expenditure figures. Similarly, Ross points out, Saddam Hussein allocated more than half the government’s funds to the Iraq National Oil Company; nobody has any idea what happened to the stash, though, because INOC never released a budget. (Saddam personally directed the nationalization of Iraqi oil in 1972, then leveraged his control of petroleum revenues to seize power from his rivals.)

Shortfalls in oil revenues thus kick away the sole, unsteady support of the state—a cataclysmic event, especially if it happens suddenly. “Think of Saudi Arabia,” says Daron Acemoglu, the MIT economist and a co-author of Why Nations Fail. “How will the royal family contain both the mullahs and the unemployed youth without a slush fund?” And there is nowhere else to turn, because oil has withered all other industry, Dutch-disease-style. Similar questions could be asked of other petro-states in Africa, the Arab world, and central Asia. A methane-hydrate boom could lead to a southwest-to-northeast arc of instability stretching from Venezuela to Nigeria to Saudi Arabia to Kazakhstan to Siberia. It seems fair to say that if autocrats in these places were toppled, most Americans would not mourn. But it seems equally fair to say that they would not necessarily be enthusiastic about their replacements.

Augmenting the instability would be methane hydrate itself, much of which is inconveniently located in areas of disputed sovereignty. “Whenever you find something under the water, you get into struggles over who it belongs to,” says Terry Karl, a Stanford political scientist and the author of the classic The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States. Think of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, she says, over which Britain and Argentina went to war 30 years ago and over which they are threatening to fight again. “One of the real reasons that they are such an issue is the belief that either oil or natural gas is offshore.” Methane-hydrate deposits run like crystalline bands through maritime flash points: the Arctic, and waters off West Africa and Southeast Asia.

In a working paper, Michael Ross and a colleague, Erik Voeten of Georgetown University, argue that the regular global flow of petroleum, the biggest commodity in world trade, is also a powerful stabilizing force. Nations dislike depending on international oil, but they play nice and obey the rules because they don’t want to be cut off. By contrast, countries with plenty of energy reserves feel free to throw their weight around. They are “less likely than other states to sign major treaties or join intergovernmental organizations; and they often defy global norms—on human rights, the expropriation of foreign companies, and the financing of foreign terrorism or rebellions.” The implication is sobering: an energy-independent planet would be a world of fractious, autonomous actors, none beholden to the others, with even less cooperation than exists today. 

None of this is what makes Christopher Knittel use words like catastrophe. What Knittel is thinking of is, so to speak, the little black specks of Yulin, China. Five years ago, I traveled with a friend to Yulin, in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, not far from Mongolia. We visited the Great Wall, which passes just north of town. In that area, the wall itself had mostly crumbled to nothing, except for the watchtowers, which stuck up every half mile or so. People in one tower were supposed to be able to signal to the next, passing on messages like ships at sea.

When I climbed up one eroded tower, I was surprised to find that I couldn’t see its neighbor. There were little black specks all over my glasses. I cleaned the lenses, but was still unable to make out the next tower. The black specks were not just on my glasses.

Walking around town, my friend and I had noticed that almost every home had a pile of coal outside, soft dark chunks that people shoveled into stoves for cooking and heating. Thousands upon thousands of coal fires were loading the air with tiny dots of soot. Scientists have taken to calling these dots “black carbon,” and have steadily ratcheted up their assessments of its harm. In March, for instance, a research team led by a Mumbai environmental group estimated that black carbon and other particulate matter from India’s coal-fired power plants cause about 100,000 deaths a year.

Environmentalists worry even more about black carbon’s role in climate change. Black carbon in the air absorbs heat and darkens clouds. In some places, it alters rain patterns. Falling on snow, it accelerates melting. A 31-scientist team from nine nations released a comprehensive, four-year assessment in January arguing that planetary black-carbon output is the second-biggest driver of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change; the little black specks I found on my glasses and clothes have roughly two-thirds the impact of carbon dioxide.

Natural gas produces next to no soot and half the carbon dioxide coal does. In coal-heavy places like China, India, the former Soviet Union, and eastern Europe, heating homes and offices with natural gas instead of coal would be a huge step. An MIT study chaired by Ernest Moniz, whom President Obama nominated for energy secretary in March, called natural gas “a cost-effective bridge” to a “low-carbon future.”

The Chinese government is aware of this, which is one reason it is pursuing both shale gas and methane hydrate. But environmentalists are less enthusiastic than one might imagine about the prospect of weaning ourselves from coal with gas. The reason is that methane itself—unburned natural gas—has a much greater capacity to trap solar heat than carbon dioxide does. (Because methane does not remain in the air as long as carbon dioxide, the precise comparison depends on the chosen time frame; researchers typically say that methane is about 20 or 30 times more potent.) Activists fear that the negative effects of obtaining natural gas could swamp the positive effects of burning it. They are entirely correct, although perhaps not in the way they suppose.

Almost every friend and neighbor I have spoken with about methane hydrate asked whether tapping these undersea deposits could release vast amounts of methane all at once, disastrously altering the planet’s environment. According to Carolyn Ruppel of the Geological Survey, these fears are understandable—but misplaced. If things go awry in a hydrate operation, some of the methane will escape into exactly the cold temperatures and high pressures that trapped it to begin with. Some will be consumed by bacteria, producing carbon dioxide, which dissolves in water; this raises the ocean’s acidity, but not enough to have much effect. Any remaining methane will rise out of the sediment and, like the carbon dioxide, dissolve harmlessly in the ocean. (None of this should be confused with a different source of methane: the decayed vegetation in permafrost, which will release methane if the permafrost thaws.)

The real concern, Ruppel and other researchers told me, is less an explosive methane release from under the Earth’s surface—the environmental disaster that might have caused havoc eons ago—than a slow discharge at ground level, from the machinery that will pull methane hydrate out of the seafloor. The problem already exists with fracking. “The rule of thumb is that if a well leaks more than about 3 percent” of its methane production into the air, “natural gas actually becomes dirtier than coal, from a climate-change perspective,” says Ramez Naam, the author of The Infinite Resource, a just-published book about the race between environmental degradation and technological innovation. “The amazing thing, though, is that we don’t have any data—nobody is required to monitor methane at the well. So there’s just a few studies, which vary tremendously.” Worse still, the aging natural-gas infrastructure is riddled with holes and seeps; early this year, a survey of gas mains along Boston’s 785 miles of road, the first-ever such examination, found 3,356 leaks. Last August, the Environmental Protection Agency amended the Clean Air Act to require well operators to recapture some methane; because nobody knows how much natural gas is gushing into the air, the new rules’ impact is uncertain.

Still, fixing leaks is a task that developed nations can accomplish. “In the United States,” Lynch says, “it is possible to hire inspectors and send them out in white vans to measure methane emissions. They can tell companies to spray more silicone in the wellheads. Maybe the companies will kick and scream about the bureaucracy and cost, but this is something that can be done.”

What we can’t do, or at least not readily, is overcome the laws of economics. More...

By: Janet Pelley                                                                                                                                                                                        March 28, 2013

By 2100, the world population will pass 10 billion people. How can we sustain that population, while throttling back climate change? Some scientists think part of the answer is to plant forests and grow biofuel crops, allowing us to use land to sequester carbon. But those changes in land use also could crowd out food crops, raising the cost of food. In ES&T’s Best Policy Analysis Paper of 2012, researchers model the feedback between the atmosphere, Earth’s ecosystems, and the global economy to show that a fossil fuel tax plus incentives for reforestation and biofuels nearly stabilizes the climate by 2100. Unfortunately, the team reports that the trade-off is a hefty rise in food prices (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es2034729).

John Reilly, an energy economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his team realized that any analysis of climate policies, such as a carbon tax or incentives for reforestation, is complicated by the fact that land use policy, climate, and the economy are tightly linked. For example, as the climate warms, plant productivity changes, which in turn affects people’s decisions about land use, he says. “Thinking of that complex set of interactions and trying to understand what was going on was the motivation for the study,” Reilly says

Previous studies have narrowly focused on one land use at a time, such as finding the best policies to sequester more carbon in forests but ignoring spillover impacts on cropland. Also these studies did not take into account the interactive and downstream effects of a worldwide carbon tax.“Reducing greenhouse gases with a carbon tax will increase energy costs, and energy is a big input in agricultural production,” Reilly says.

His team decided to study a combination of policies—a carbon tax and incentives for reforestation and biofuels—and ask what the effects would be on the climate, food prices, and land use.

To do so, they developed a set of three models that feed data among one another. First, a global economic model, provided by the MIT team, predicts food prices, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions every five years. Next, those emissions estimates drive a climate model that simulates future climate conditions. These climate outputs, such as carbon dioxide and ozone concentrations, then feed into an ecosystem model, developed by Jerry M. Melillo and his team at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The ecosystem model generates changes in crop and forest productivity. The economic model then uses these productivity changes, along with expected demand for products produced from the land, to reassess land and energy use, which then determines the next set of greenhouse gas emissions estimates. And the cycle continues.

The team members ran their models through the year 2100 under several different policy scenarios. They found that if humanity sticks with the status quo and attempts no change in climate policy, CO2 concentrations reach 900 ppm by 2100, and global mean temperature hits 5.8 °C above preindustrial levels. However, a worldwide tax on fossil fuel emissions limits the CO2 concentration to 520 ppm and holds temperature rise to 2.7 °C. These metrics are still above the targets set by the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, which are a 2 °C temperature increase and CO2 levels around 450 ppm CO2.

When the team added incentives for reforestation and biofuels to a tax on energy, CO2 concentrations reach only 490 ppm and global temperature increases 2.2 °C over preindustrial levels by the end of the century. But Reilly says these better climate statistics come at a price: Competition for agricultural land from reforestation and biofuels boosts food prices by 80%.

Stephen Polasky, an environmental economist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, says that this paper reveals that policy makers cannot think of energy and food policies as independent.

Even though the scenarios in the paper are far more aggressive than any proposed policies suggested right now, fossil fuel use in the models never drops to levels scientists say we need to stabilize the climate, says Steve Running, a terrestrial carbon scientist at the University of Montana. He also says the paper highlights how any solution to the climate problem requires choices and trade-offs when it comes to land use.

Reilly hopes that others will adopt his team’s modeling practices to find sensible polices to improve the climate.

The authors declare no competing financial interest.

Most efforts to address carbon emissions focus on preventing them from entering the atmosphere in the first place. But how to get rid of CO2 already there? Start-ups are developing prototype air-capture systems.