Carbon, Commuting and Coal
Last semester I had two West African students in my physics classes that had moved with their family to Tracy, California. In case you haven’t heard of Tracy, it’s a bedroom community town about 20 miles from the campus and even further from nearly all sources of employment. Both students were well on their way to the American dream (possibly a step down for at least one of them from the life they were living in Nigeria), complete with their own cars and part time jobs. Both attended my office hours regularly, and often stopped by just to say hello between classes. Both often asked for my advice in physics, their broader educational goals, and even their career goals. As far as I can tell, they have tried following most everything I suggested, except for one thing: carpooling to campus. In this respect, they are following a sacred tradition here in the urban edge—drive your own car! In twenty years here, I have never met a single student who carpooled regularly.
So what’s wrong with driving to campus? Well, according to a recent assessment of our baseline carbon footprint, between 70 and 80 percent of the carbon dioxide produced by our campus community is due to commuters (the ten percent uncertainty here is due to a lack of information on our part, not variation in their behavior). Obviously, our best institutional strategy in meeting national target of reducing our carbon emissions by 20% by 2020 would be to reduce individual commuting to campus—by carpooling, bus travel, bike riding and even…drum roll please…walking to campus. As my grandmother once told me “vould it kill you to walk a little bit?”
But dear Grandmother, from a small Jewish settlement in Russia, then the Bronx in New York City, never attended our suburban college. No one lives on campus, and as more students attend our campus and our parking lots swell, more carbon dioxide will fill the skies unless we can change decades old habits programmed in by the intentional design of a commuter campus several miles from the nearest commuter town. Having watched our students for two decades drive ever more miles. However, I have come up with another solution:
I call it the: “Drive Your SUV Everywhere” plan. Yes indeed. No need to consider a high mileage commuter hybrid vehicle. Get a Hummer if you want. Drive to school, to work, to the bagel shop around the corner, and finally to the coffee shop at the other end of the strip mall from the bagel shop with much better coffee. Forget trying to overwrite the 60 years of suburban planning in the deepest recess of our cultural memories. It is much easier to drive.
Ah, but what about the goal of reducing our carbon footprint by 20% by the year 2020? Should we just abandon that and live with the consequences? No polar caps, no polar bears, no snow in the mountains but more rainfall in the west, droughts in the southwest USA, economic migrations across the globe, population pressure on higher drought free area, plagues of locust and former vice presidents looking ever more forlorn. Just as certainly as the melting ice cube in my glass of whisky promises a sudden sharp rise in temperature if I don’t drink it all first, our prospects for living in a world free of climate related chaos seem slim to none if we don’t decrease our carbon dioxide emissions in a hurry. And I mean “we”—all the responsible parties on planet earth, and I mean in a hurry—as in before the ice melts in fifty years or so. In case you are wondering, you produce about 20 pounds of CO2 for every gallon of gas burned.
Now, hopefully, you are at least marginally enraged at what I am proposing. How can we drive all we want while the sword of Damocles hangs above our heads in the form of increased carbon dioxide levels? Perhaps it is because I neglected to mention the other part of my solution. I don’t have a catchy name for it yet, but the idea is simple: “Stop Burning Coal.”
So what is coal doing in this discussion of students driving their cars to Burger King and back to class? The answer is simple. About half of all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is due to coal burning. Of course this simple model doesn’t include the effects of deforestation and oceanic acidification—and all the other myriad ways in which the outer layers of our planet remove carbon dioxide from the air and sequester it in green and browns on the surface, and in minerals deep below. To make it simple (take a deep breath!), we are putting in about 20 gigatons of carbon dioxide every year and the planet is currently absorbing about 10 gigatons a year. The rate at which we are adding carbon is increasing daily, of course, and the rate at which the planet is absorbing it is falling daily. This is not hard math.
So Back to Coal. The hard data is a bit hard to come by globally, but here is an interesting statistic according to environmentamerica.org: “In 2007, power plants released 2.56 billion tons of CO2, equivalent to the amount produced by 449 million of today’s cars. This represents 42 percent of the total U.S. CO2 emissions in 2007.” That is a lot of cars–but since fuel economy has improved while coal output is relativity constant, I suspect we are very close to the nice round number of 500 million coal equivalent cars in 2010, far more than the 65 million or so cars on the road in the USA. Trucks, busses, trains, planes and cargo ships are actually quite a bit better at creating carbon dioxide than commuter cars–and don’t forget that we also convert quite a bit of petroleum to CO2 without driving anywhere ( by making electricity, manufacturing processes, and just letting it evaporate). So the truth is, coal produces about the same amount of carbon dioxide as all petroleum sources together. If you are interested in the exact breakdown, here is a graph from the US EPA:
As of 2006, coal was in the lead, with fossil fuel use a close second. Surprisingly, this trend is similar on a global scale, as the graph below from Wikipedia commons illustrates:
So why pick on coal? Well, if you like breathing clean air, or eating food untainted by mercury and other toxic metals, or if you like your mountains with their tops on them then coal is a good industry to pick on. Also, if you not a big fan of ash flows, acid rain, respiratory ailments, general air pollution, and just plain ugliness, then coal is wearing a very large bull’s eye. See the Environmental impacts of coal power: air pollution by the Union of Concerned Scientists for a very effective short list of evils. Also, pretty soon, we will make the shift to cars and other vehicles that do not run on petroleum produces or even ethanol (another topic to pick on for another day). Thus, electricity generation will become the primary source of carbon dioxide in the long run, and since coal is how most the electricity on the planet is generated, we will soon be looking at a sharp spike in carbon emissions, following by a series of bad air days, calving glaciers, and likely a spike in the cost of hard liquor as well.
For now, here the complete IPN (integrated proposal in a nutshell): Stop using coal and create electricity from the sun. In return, you can drive all you want, and the carbon problem will disappear eventually. Really!? Of course, I’m not giving the renewable industry its due here. Photovoltaics, thermal electric conversion, wind, and geothermal provide the promise of a carbon neutral future without the worry of meltdowns or increasing uglification. Hopefully, the ruthless for-profit corporations of the world will find a way to shower money upon their shareholders with renewable energy sources, rather than using the recent supreme court decision to unseat environmentally leaning lawmakers and maximize our use of coal instead.
There is actually some science behind this. As Jim Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science, pointed out in a recent paper in SourceWatch, “Most of the carbon dioxide from oil and gas usage is emitted by small sources (i.e., vehicle tailpipes) where it’s impractical to capture it. Nor does it seem likely that Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United States, and other major oil producers will decide to leave their oil in the ground. Therefore, the only practical way to prevent carbon dioxide levels from exceeding 450 ppm is to phase out coal power except at plants where carbon emissions are captured and stored.” In case you are wondering, 450 ppm by the way is the level at which the ice caps have been known the melt every single time in the past 10 million years or so, creating a chaotic climate cycle that radically altered both the flora and fauna of the Neighborhood—everyone’s neighborhood.
So what I am really saying is that if you think carbon levels okay as they are, then you can drive ever more than you do now—and have a bigger gas guzzler than you do now if we phase out coal. It will be easier than getting my students to carpool to school.
But, there is one last thing. Well, at least one–I don’t recall hearing about any actual decrease in coal use around the world. Lots of talk, but not a lot of action. There are roughly 1500 coal fired power plants in the USA alone. If one goes out of production, we can drive about 300,000 more cars annually and keep the carbon dioxide levels where they are. That’s an extra 30 or so miles per year for the average driver. Take all the coal fired plants out of production and we can really go to town! Each commuter can drive about 30,000 miles more—as long as the truckers, pilots, and captains of the USA don’t demand their fair share as well. Or, we can carpool, ride our bikes, take public transportation, walk, use land responsibly, and phase out coal and make a dent in anthropogenic warming. Instead of producing twice as much as the planet can store, we can be in equilibrium.
Eric Harpell studied Astronomy and Physics at UC San Diego and UCLA and has managed to stay in school for over twenty years by teaching at Las Positas College in Livermore, California, and less frequently at Mills College in Oakland. Besides teaching and writing, Eric spends his time with his daughters, reading, traveling, and imaging life without cars.