Bullet Points: Energy Policy in Light of a New President & Congress

ENERGY POLICY IN LIGHT OF A NEW PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS
David Hawkins (Director, Natural Resources Defense Council Climate Center);
Joel Beauvais (Majority Counsel to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming)

• President Obama has proposed creating 459,000 jobs by investing in clean energy, doubling the production of alternative energy in the next 3 years, modernizing 75+% of the federal buildings, and improving the energy efficiency of 2 million homes
• Climate change is a critical issue because we cannot have a strong economy without a stable climate
• An energy policy that ignores factors that impact climate change will fail
• On economic security, the US needs to capture markets for new technology
• The US needs to focus on delivering a manufacturing sector that will produce high-efficiency vehicles and smarter appliances that the world will want to buy
• Technologies to create smart power distribution systems will be increasing demand globally
• 31 states have either substantial coal production or use 70+% coal in their electric power mix, which makes it challenging for Congress to pass legislation that would increase the cost of coal production and use through carbon capture and disposal (CCD)
  • CCD is a technique for separating out CO2 from power plant streams, compressing it, and then injecting it into geologic formations where it is intended to remain indefinitely
• CO2 has a long half-life in the atmosphere, so simply slowing the rate of exploitation is not going to solve the climate problem
  • About one half of the CO2that was put into the atmosphere through World War I remains in the atmosphere today
• Currently, there are 1300 gigawatts of coal capacity globally
• Coal production costs would increase by ~40% when carbon capture technologies are implemented at a coal plant
• ~60% of the cost of electricity on an electricity bill is the production cost, with the remainder constituting transmission and distribution expenses and energy losses
• Based on input-output models, funding spent on green jobs would create four times the number of jobs as those dollars spent in the oil sector, and the pay range was substantially better by comparison to alternatives, with an estimated 1.3% impact on unemployment
• The US produces ~250,000 barrels a day of oil from CO2 injection projects; ten times that amount could be produced if enough CO2 were available
• A well-designed climate policy would create the incentives needed to deploy CCD technology