Tuesday, January 31, 2012

A Bridge Fuel Built on a Weak Foundation

By Press Action

Center for American Progress Chairman John Podesta, who served as White House Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton, co-authored a report with former U.S. Sen. Timothy Wirth titled “Natural Gas: A Bridge for the 21st Century.” In the August 2009 report, Podesta and Wirth argued that “enhancing the role of natural gas is valuable for many reasons.”

“Natural gas can serve as a bridge fuel to a low-carbon, sustainable energy future,” Podesta and Wirth wrote. “Using clean domestic natural gas will also enhance our economy. Since it is produced in the United States, higher gas demand will create more jobs, and using domestic gas in lieu of imported oil would reduce our trade imbalance, keeping energy dollars at home instead of exporting oil dollars overseas.”

Podesta and Wirth called for the increased use of natural gas by requiring that the carbon price and other costs be included “when determining the dispatch order for moving electricity onto the grid to prioritize natural gas and other clean electricity.”

(Last fall, Podesta stepped down as president of the Center for American Progress but stayed on board as its chairman.)

Joe Romm, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and served as an acting assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy in 1997, argued in a Jan. 24 post on the ClimateProgress.org blog that “building lots of new gas plants doesn’t make much sense since we need to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the next few decades if we’re to have any chance to avoid catastrophic global warming.” The title of the blog post was “Natural Gas Is a Bridge to Nowhere—Absent a Serious Price for Global Warming Pollution.”

(The invaluable ClimateProgress.org blog, edited by Romm, is part of Think Progress, which is a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, an affiliate of the Center for American Progress. The Center for American Progress is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit group, while the Center for American Progress Action Fund is a 501(c)(4) group.)

In his blog post, Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said the “fact that natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere” was first demonstrated by the International Energy Agency in a June 2011 report on gas titled “Are We Entering a Golden Age of Gas?” The IEA study, which had both coal and oil consumption peaking in 2020, “made abundantly clear that if we want to avoid catastrophic warming, we need to start getting off of all fossil fuels,” he said.

“Natural gas isn’t a bridge fuel from a climate perspective,” he explained. “Carbon-free power is the bridge fuel until we can figure out how to go carbon negative on a large scale in the second half of the century.”

Natural gas might have been a bridge to a low-carbon future 30 years ago when the term was first introduced, Romm wrote. But natural gas’ primary value today would be to reduce the cost of meeting a near-term CO2 target in the U.S. in the context of a rising CO2 price, he said.

Given the seemingly contradictory titles to the August 2009 report and the January 2012 blog post, Press Action emailed Romm, asking him if the Center for American Progress has changed its view on the role of natural gas in fighting global warming.

Romm responded: “I do not actually speak for CAP. My blog is 100% independent.”

Romm also noted that both Podesta and Wirth strongly supported the Waxman-Markey climate bill in 2009. The bill, officially known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act, called for a reduction in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions of 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 and a reduction of about 80% by 2050.

“It is CAP policy that we should have a high and rising price for CO2 necessary to achieve a 17% reduction by 2020 and 80% by 2050,” Romm said. “Even I supported gas—in existing underutilized plants to replace coal power to achieve the 2020 target.”

As for whether CAP has changed its official stance on the role of natural gas in averting catastrophic global warming since it released the 2009 report, Romm responded, “I’m not sure anything has changed other than the fact that we don’t have a climate bill.”

“If you talk to Podesta, I am quite certain he will tell you that he continues to strongly support a carbon price—but I don’t speak for him or CAP,” Romm said.

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