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Energy and Environment ... Why Obama’s top scientist just called keeping fossil fuels in the ground ‘unrealistic’ ... Keep-It-in-the-Ground Movement ‘Unrealistic’
Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess
President Obama walks with John Holdren, assistant to the president for science and technology, at the White House in March 2014. (Win McNamee/Getty Images) White House science adviser John Holdren’s comment Monday that it was “unrealistic” to halt fossil fuel extraction altogether in the U.S. may have seemed like stating the obvious. But it has further highlighted the tensions that exist even among top American policy makers and environmental advocates concerned about curbing the rate of climate change.
Bernie Sanders and his followers, influential green movement leaders like Bill McKibben and powerful organizations like the Sierra Club, have been pushing a “keep it in the ground” approach. For these advocates, a future strongly dependent on wind, solar and batteries can’t come fast enough. And they have led campaigns not only to oppose fracking for natural gas but also to block — successfully — the Keystone XL pipeline. Most recently, Sanders’s supporters have been deeply engaged in a push to make the Democratic Party’s official platform more strongly reflective of this point of view, although they were unsuccessful in trying to incorporate a fracking ban into the platform.
Yet Obama administration officials and many energy policy wonks continue to suggest that we will need to rely on burning natural gas, nuclear energy and even outfitting coal plants with carbon capturing technologies for some time. In contrast to “keep it in the ground,” their approach has sometimes been labeled “all of the above.” Meanwhile, Clinton has called natural gas, in particular, a “bridge” to a cleaner energy future.
Sanders’s supporters did score a few victories in the recent platform-writing process by passing amendments endorsing a price on carbon, methane and other greenhouse gases and supporting the rights of local communities to ban fracking. Those “unity amendments” were implicitly backed by presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
The tension was reawakened yesterday at this week’s annual conference held by the Energy Information Administration. According to a Tweet by Brian Scheid, a reporter for Platts, Holdren yesterday called the “keep it in the ground” movement “unrealistic” in his keynote speech at the conference.
John Holdren, director of White House Office of Science and Tech Policy, calls 'keep it in the ground' movement 'unrealistic' #EIAConf
Morning Consult also reported that Holdren stated, “The notion that we’re going to keep it all in the ground is unrealistic. We are still a very heavily fossil-fuel dependent world.”
“When asked whether it was feasible to leave all the remaining fossil fuels in the ground, Dr. Holdren noted that it is not, because the U.S. — and the world — still depend on fossil fuels for more than 80 percent of all the primary energy we use,” said White House spokeswoman Lindsey Geisler said in an email. “It’s not practical or affordable to replace the huge, fossil-fuel infrastructure with nuclear and renewables overnight, no matter how badly we may want to. As a result, the U.S. will be using fossil fuels for decades to come, albeit, one hopes, with the share of non-fossil supplies increasing over time.”
Edico Genome is a company that navigated off the beaten path by going to a data source that almost no one else was using. In one sense, Holdren’s remarks could be viewed as simply stating what’s already known. Indeed, wind and solar provided a little over 5 percent of U.S. electricity last year. Meanwhile, a key driver of the recent U.S. trend toward “cleaner” energy has not been burning less fossil fuels, but rather the swapping of one fossil fuel for another.
More specifically, very cheap natural gas prices, which have driven fracking and the exploitation of huge new “unconventional” shale gas reserves, has led to a shift in how we get power. More and more, utility companies are switching away from burning coal for electricity and toward burning gas. According to the EIA, 2016 is likely to be the first year in which the country as a whole gets more of its electricity from gas than from coal.
And that has significant greenhouse gas emissions implications, as natural gas burns cleaner than coal and only produces about half as much carbon dioxide emissions per unit of energy.
“Facts are facts: America is leading the world in oil and natural gas production and in lowering carbon emissions, which are at 20-year lows, because of clean-burning natural gas,” said Eric Wohlschlegel, director of media relations and communications at the American Petroleum Institute, regarding the Holdren statement. “American voters support increased oil and natural gas production. They understand that the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine and that an all of the above energy strategy is needed to power our future. Keep-it-in-the-ground tactics aimed at misleading the public present a false choice, especially when there’s overwhelming support for American energy production.”
In the transportation sector, meanwhile, cleaner options like electric cars or cars that run on high volumes of biofuels are even further away from achieving market dominance than wind and solar are in the electricity sector. So when Holdren reportedly called the “keep it in the ground” movement “unrealistic,” it was simply a statement that there is no way we are going to get off fossil fuels in the near term.
Still, that stance diverges from that of environmentalist allies. “Science shows clearly that if we want to protect the health of our communities from dangerous pollution and the serious threats of the climate crisis, we have to start keeping dirty fossil fuels in the ground now,” said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, in response to Holdren’s statement. “That clearly means that gas cannot be a bridge fuel, and the Obama Administration’s efforts to mitigate the threat gas posed through methane safeguards and fracking standards shows they recognize the dangers of this pollutant.”
Indeed, top administration officials have emphasized the need to reexamine the climate implications of fossil fuel extraction from federal lands and waters, but have not yet embraced the idea of banning these activities altogether. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, a former petroleum engineer, has said that government officials need to recognize that some of the nation’s fossil fuels must remain untapped if they are serious about combating global warming, and the department just imposed stricter rules on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
But several aspects of the department’s energy leasing program have continued under stricter safety standards, including offshore oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico. Those activities are a major source of revenue for the federal government.
Chris Mooney reports on science and the environment. Follow @chriscmooney
Juliet Eilperin is The Washington Post's White House bureau chief, covering domestic and foreign policy as well as the culture of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She is the author of two books—one on sharks, and another on Congress, not to be confused with each other—and has worked for the Post since 1998. Follow @eilperin
Obama Adviser: Keep-It-in-the-Ground Movement ‘Unrealistic’
https://morningconsult.com/2016/07/11/obama-adviser-keep-ground-movement-unrealistic/
President Obama’s top science adviser on Monday said natural gas will be an important bridge fuel for decades and called the “keep-it-in-the-ground” movement unrealistic.
His gradual, modest vision for moving away from fossil fuels differs greatly in tone from some more liberal environmentalists.
The administration is dedicated to cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but it also believes natural gas has a role to play in the fight against climate change, said John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, at the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s annual conference.
“The notion that we’re going to keep it all in the ground is unrealistic,” Holdren said. “We are still a very heavily fossil-fuel dependent world.”
In addition to the United States’ dependence on fossil fuels, Holdren pointed to natural gas’s role in helping cut greenhouse gas emissions, at least when compared with coal. Holdren said natural gas will be a net positive, in terms of cutting emissions, for the next “30 or 40 years.”
“I subscribe to the view that natural gas is a very helpful bridge fuel to a much lower emissions future,” Holdren said.
Holdren’s comments come as natural gas seems to be in President Obama’s crosshairs. The Environmental Protection Agency released a final rule in May regulating new sources of methane emissions from natural gas systems, and it has started developing a much broader rule for existing sources. While the public discussion on climate change tends to focus on carbon emissions, Obama has turned more attention toward methane, which is emitted less prolifically but packs a stronger punch in terms of greenhouse gas effects.
Holdren said the upcoming methane regulations could cut a substantial amount of emissions, but they would only affect “a relatively small number of bad actors.” That’s an especially positive viewpoint compared with the industry’s complaints that the regulations are unnecessary and costly.
Holdren said he thinks the United States can outpace the EIA’s projections on renewable energy growth. The agency’s baseline case scenario calls for a 46.8 percent increase in renewable energy consumption from 2012 to 2040, although that projection doesn’t account for the effects of the Clean Power Plan or the Paris climate agreement.
But even if the U.S. beats that projection, Holdren said renewables alone won’t do enough to cut emissions. It’s also important to develop carbon-capture technologies and other tools for making fossil fuels more efficient, he said.
“When I look at the future of energy technology, I am looking at advanced technologies for fossil fuels, as well as expansion of nuclear, renewables, and of course heavy emphasis on improving efficiency,” Holdren said.
He said the U.S. also needs to find a solution about how to store spent nuclear fuel in a central location. Otherwise, no communities will want nuclear plants because they will simply become fuel repositories, he said.
Holdren’s speech was relatively friendly toward fossil fuels, considering that the administration has made climate issues a major focus of Obama’s final year in office. Nevertheless, Tesoro Corporation CEO Gregory Goff offered a scathing rebuke of the administration in his speech, which came directly after Holdren’s. Goff criticized the White House’s “all-out war” on fossil fuels, which he said has “reached tsunami proportions.” He added that Obama has engaged in “excessive rulemaking premised on contrived legal authority.”
Holdren and Goff weren’t on stage at the same time, but Goff’s speech served as a standard rebuttal to the administration’s usual talking points against fossil fuels. Obama vowed in his State of the Union address in January to “change the way we manage our oil and coal resources, so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet.”