If we are to solve the climate problem, our current generation of conventional, CO2 intensive coal plants must be our last. A price on carbon as part of a larger strategy to move into non-emitting sources is clearly critical. However, the urgency of the climate change challenge means we cannot wait for the coal problem to be solved through such pricing mechanisms alone. For the next 20-30 years, we must pursue a set of complementary strategies that will transition the electricity grid away from coal over the long-term while reducing its destructive environmental impacts as much as possible in the short term. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a critical part of such a strategy. In practice, this means that new coal plants should only go forward under a narrow set of conditions.
First, on a generator-by-generator basis, new coal plants should be the option of last resort. Even under optimistic assumptions, CCS is projected to capture well below 100% of CO2 emissions; many believe it will capture less than 80% even under optimistic scenarios. Thus, even with CCS, coal will always be a liability from the perspective of climate change. Cleaner renewable energy sources and demand reduction through energy efficiency should be the first alternatives whenever possible.
Second—and as soon as possible—all new coal plants should be designed and engineered to capture the majority of their CO2 emissions for either long-term storage or industrial use. This requirement would facilitate a rapid transition to broad-scale underground CO2 storage if and when the technology and infrastructure make it possible. Currently, “carbon capture ready†is poorly defined; often it means only that a utility has set aside acreage for capture facilities. Carbon capture needs to be built into the plant design, and implemented on day one.
Third, we should not build new coal plants in locations where the surrounding geology is not conducive to long-term underground CO2 sequestration, or where a lack of CO2 pipeline infrastructure would mean massive and costly delays for adequate CO2 storage. Nationally, the U.S. has huge sequestration potential—some have called it the “Saudi Arabia of sequestration.†But just as wind is not universally feasible, neither is sequestration. New large-scale CO2 pipelines are not currently being developed, and are likely to be prohibitively expensive in many cases.
Finally and most important, we must immediately embark on a “crash program†to develop and deploy carbon storage capability on a massive, global scale. Underground storage is the only option on the table for dealing with CO2 emissions from fossil fuel power plants. We now know enough about CCS siting, regulatory and liability challenges to quickly move towards industry-scale demonstrations. But CCS will require billions—not millions—in research funding. The G8 goal of 20 CCS demonstration projects requires funding on the order of $1-1.5 billion per project. Investments on that scale will not happen fast enough without public subsidies, which should be a priority for the next Administration.
A brief history of WRI
The founders of the World Resources Institute (WRI) were aware of the urgent need for research and solutions to the many serious global environmental, resource, population and development problems around the world. The most serious of the world’s environmental threats –deforestation, desertification, and global climate change must head any list — are not the problems to which the United States and other industrial countries turned priority attention when environmental concerns emerged forcefully in the 1960s and 1970s. While these serious threats have been recognized for some time, they represent new policy and political challenges for the United States and many other countries, challenges that are more global in scope and international in implication. In this sense they are, indeed, a new agenda.
To address these issues, WRI’s founders saw the need for an institution that would be independent and broadly credible, not as an activist environmental membership organization, and that would carry out policy research and analysis on global environmental and resource issues and their relationship to population and development goals. That research and analysis had to be both scientifically sound and politically practical. It had to command the respect of the scientific community and the attention of the key decision-makers in both the public and private sectors, in this country and abroad. The institution would not duplicate, but draw on the expertise already in place in academic and other centers here and abroad. Yet it would produce work that policy-makers would find useful and realistic, and it would lead the way in trying to build the constituencies — both public and private — required to act on its analyses and recommendations.
The Institute was launched June 3, 1982 when the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago announced it ‘ will provide $15 million to help finance the first five years of operation of a newly created not-for-profit organization,’…the World Resources Institute, ‘a major center for policy research and analysis addressed to global resource and environmental issues.’ It was organized as a nonprofit Delaware corporation that could receive tax-deductible gifts and contributions under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code.
The Institute’s first president was James Gustave Speth, former chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality and later professor of law at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He held this position until January 1993. Jonathan Lash, senior staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) from 1978 to 1985, is the current president.
Source: World Resources Institute WRI
