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Fossil fuels
The simplest way to sequester carbon is to preserve trees and to plant more of them.
SHIKARPUR: Consumption of fossil fuels increases by about one per cent a year. The steps being taken by the government will not at all be able to prevent global warming in the near future.
The challenge is that we have to manage the probable effects of this phenomenon while taking steps to prevent climate changes in future.
There are two major approaches to slowing the build-up of greenhouse gases. The first is to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by storing the gas or its carbon component somewhere else. This is called carbon sequestration. The second major approach is to reduce the production of greenhouse gases.
The simplest way to sequester carbon is to preserve trees and to plant more of them. Trees, especially those which are young and fast-growing, use considerable amounts of carbon dioxide. Worldwide, forests are being cut down at an alarming rate, particularly in the tropics. In many such areas, there is little chance of regrowth since the land loses fertility or is changed to other uses, such as farming or building homes.
Reforestation could offset these losses and counter part of the greenhouse build-up. Carbon dioxide gas can also be sequestered directly. The gas has traditionally been injected into oil wells to force more petroleum out of the ground or seabed. Now, it is being injected to isolate it underground in oil fields, coal beds or aquifers.
Engr. Dilbar Detho
Published in The Express Tribune, August 20th, 2012.
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Discussion of reforestation as the entire answer, and any discussion of sequestration outside of the context of a fossil carbon fee, is very helpful to the trillion dollar fossil fuel industry.
Reforestation is well and good, but it hardly gets to the root cause of the problem. A more direct approach to global warming is to reduce our contribution to the problem. That is fossil carbon.
Carbon dioxide concentration has risen in remarkable lockstep with our increased use of fossil carbon fuels. Non-fossil carbon released from land use changes or burning biomass for fuel is automatically controlled by circumstances. The regeneration time for non-fossil carbon from recent biological processes is a year or several years so that it cannot possibly throw off the balance of the carbon cycle as fossil carbon does now!
Fossil carbon emissions are harmful, so why does it cost nothing to dump them into the atmosphere? We need to impose a cost on fossil carbon to reflect its harm. We cannot and should not impose the cost instantly. It should start low, and rise every year.
But in order to allow the free market to accurately act on fossil carbon’s real harm, it would be best if the money were returned broadly to the rest of the economy, as equal monthly climate insurance dividend checks to all adult citizens or as payroll tax
cuts. This would enable the free market, the entire American economy, with 300 million players, to drive investment in better use of low-fossil and non-fossil energy. Those who acted quickly and efficiently in changing to new energy and using it better would profit at the expense of the laggards. This is how the capitalist system works.
The free market capitalist system, not government, would do the analysis to determine the best mix of non-fossil energy, among nuclear, wind, solar, storage, efficiency, biofuels, and anything else. (This analysis would even include sequestration. The fee price on fossil carbon could be paid for each ton of CO2 a sequestration project could promise to lock away for eternity. I doubt any sequestration will be profitable. But the only way to let the market decide is to account for fossil carbon’s harm.)
We would also be protected from unfair trade competition by other countries who let fossil carbon harm be unaccounted for. Tariffs on fossil heavy imports and subsidies on fossil heavy exports would be perfectly legal under this plan. Other nations would have incentive to follow along to avoid those, and to avoid our possibly fudging our estimates of the fossil-energy-intensity of their and our goods in our favor by a plausibly deniable 1 or 2 percent.
A rising, revenue-neutral fossil fee and dividend is an established idea, supported by conservatives, scientists, and green activists alike. As a market-powered keystone of climate policy, it is a favorite of conservatives who acknowledge science and respect human life.
Reagan Sec. of State George P Shultz:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/july/george-shultz-energy-071212.html
Citizens Climate Lobby:
http://citizensclimatelobby.org/
Bog Inglis, R-NC:
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h2380/text
James Hansen, NASA:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/12/james-hansen-carbon-emissions
Art Laffer, father of supply-side economics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHtKI6oIsik
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I apologize for putting forth my last comment as if I was speaking to an American audience. I confess I was negligent in my reading of this web page’s material, other than Mr. Detho’s consummate English prose. I hope my essay’s themes can be easily applied in the context of Pakistan. I also apologize for inferring the writer was defending fossil fuel. Even so, Pakistan’s methane producers should not be discouraged by any carbon fee and dividend plan because, as I mentioned, fossil carbon exports to the world market would be effectively untouched by it.
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