Climate Policy

This year’s American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting will be held online, making it one of the world’s largest virtual scientific conferences ever. Held December 1-17 (with most scientific programming taking place December 7-11) and presenting more than 1,000 hours of content, AGU20 will feature live and pre-recorded oral presentations and virtual posters from leading Earth and space science researchers. The conference theme is “Shape the Future of Science."

AGU Fall Meeting goes online for 2020
Use of natural gas and oil as a source of feedstocks

Abstract: Greenhouse gas (GHG) implications of natural gas and oil differ when they are used for combustion or as a feedstock. In addition to the growing demand for feedstocks that are converted into products (such as plastics and fertilizers), climate policies that penalize GHG emissions may incentivize a switch from burning natural gas and oil to their feedstock use.

Using an enhanced version of the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model, we examine several scenarios to assess natural gas and oil use as feedstock and find that global feedstock use grows 2-3 times by 2050 relative to 2015 levels.

In a scenario consistent with reaching 2°C goal set by the Paris Agreement, the share of natural gas used as a feedstock grows from about 5% in 2015 to about 15% in 2050 and the share of oil used as a feedstock grows from about 10% in 2015 to about 17% in 2050. In a scenario consistent with reaching 2°C goal set by the Paris Agreement, the share of natural gas used as a feedstock in 2050 is 86% larger than in the no-policy Reference. The corresponding increase in a share of oil used as a feedstock is 40%. USA, Europe, and the Middle East remain as the major regions for feedstock use, but China, India, and Africa grow fast to become major feedstock use centers. 

Future energy: In search of a scenario reflecting current and future pressures and trends

Abstract: Growing societal pressures, technological trends and government and industry actions are moving the world toward decarbonization and away from “business-as-usual." As such, the concept of a single/obvious “business as usual” or “reference” scenario is no longer relevant. Instead, there are multiple plausible futures that should be explored.

We contribute one such scenario that carefully considers emissions-reduction trends and actions that are likely in the future, absent a globally coordinated mitigation effort. We explore the long-term implications for energy, emissions and temperature outcomes if the world continues to address climate change in the way it has so far—through piecemeal actions and growing social and technological pressures. This Growing Pressures scenario results in a central scenario outcome of about 3°C of surface temperature warming, which is higher than the “well below 2°C” level aspired to by the Paris Agreement, but lower than many widely used “no-policy” scenarios.

Ongoing and growing pressures of change, the roots of which are clearly visible today, could deliver a plausible energy transition scenario to near-zero emissions that plays out over the coming century. While a more aggressive transition is clearly required, this finding highlights the need to bring actions forward in time to achieve an improved outcome making use of clearly identifiable policies and technologies.

The electrification of private cars and light trucks—the vast majority of which are now powered by internal combustion engines (ICEs)—will be critical to efforts to keep global warming well below 2°C or 1.5°C, the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement. Replacing today’s fleet of gasoline and diesel ICEs with plug-in hybrid (PHEV) and battery (BEV) electric vehicles (EVs) could practically eliminate emissions from these light-duty vehicles as part of a broader strategy to decarbonize the transportation sector.

Accelerating electrification of private cars, light trucks
Aggregation of gridded emulated projections at the national or regional level: rainfed and irrigated crop yields and irrigation water requirements

Abstract: This paper describes an update to the tool developed by Blanc (2017b) which allows users to calculate emulated rainfed crop yields projections for four crops and five different global gridded crop models (GGCMs) at the regional level. This updated tool allows users to also estimate irrigated crop yields and corresponding irrigation water requirements under user-given climate change scenarios. As with the previous version, users must be careful when selecting scenarios and ensure that they are within the range of the climate change scenarios used to estimate the response functions in Blanc (2017) and Blanc (2020).

References:

Blanc, É. (2017a). Statistical Emulators of Maize, Rice, Soybean and Wheat Yields from Global Gridded Crop Models. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 236, 145–161. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2016.12.022

Blanc, É. (2017b). Aggregation of Gridded Emulated Rainfed Crop Yield Projections at the National or Regional Level. Journal of Global Economic Analysis, 2(2), 112–127. https://doi.org/10.21642/JGEA.020203AF

Blanc, É. (2020). Statistical emulators of irrigated crop yields and irrigation water requirements. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 284, 107828. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2019.107828

According to the United States Energy Information Agency, a boom in shale gas extraction led to a dramatic decline in coal use in the U.S. power sector within a single decade. Between 2007 and 2016, the nation’s coal-fired generation and consumption fell by nearly 40 percent, replaced largely by cheaper natural gas. Substituting this cleaner-burning fuel reduced U.S. carbon dioxide emissions considerably, suggesting to some that the shale gas boom may well reduce these emissions for the long term.

Bridge fuel or bridge too far?

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