Getting to 17%

The Waxman-Markey bill requires a 17% drop in carbon emissions by 2020.  Joe Romm explains how we can get there:

Clean energy deployment from the stimulus....carbon dioxide emissions will be some 2% lower in 2020 than in 2005....Obama’s recent fuel economy deal....Let’s call that another 2% emissions drop....Then we have Waxman-Markey itself.  It achieves huge energy efficiency savings....That’s another 5% drop.

....Let’s say 1% of the target will be met with domestic offsets....Let’s say 1% of the target will be met with international offsets....cofiring biomass....2% of the 2020 target.

That's about 13% already, and the rest of the reduction can be met simply by utilizing existing gas-fired electric plants at a higher rate than we do now:

It now appears likely that, thanks to unconventional supplies, natural gas alone could meet a great deal of the Waxman-Markey CO2 target for 2020 — without requiring gobs of new power plants to be sited and built or thousands of miles of new transmission lines.

....Today, dirty coal plants are being “dispatched” (or utilized) to provide electricity by grid operators first, while natural gas plants that could provide electricity with far lower emissions of carbon dioxide remain unutilized or underutilized — even though their electricity costs are only slightly higher.  This is occurring in at least two regions of the country, according to a major under-reported May study by the Energy Information Administration, “The Implications of Lower Natural Gas Prices for Electric Generators in the Southest.”  A cap on CO2 emissions and even a low price of CO2 will switch the dispatch order, generating large emissions savings at low cost (if the gas is available, as now seems likely).

Joe suggests that a carbon price of around ten bucks a ton — which is pretty low — is all that we'd need to motivate utilities to change the dispatch order of their plants enough to meet the rest of the 17% target.

Bottom line: meeting the Waxman-Markey targets for 2020 is pretty easy.  We'll have over a decade to start getting ready for the harder measures it takes to make serious cuts.  Doom mongers, take note.

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