Here’s an interesting followup to last week’s post about about the uncertain links between recession and long-term climate change: Shakeb Afsah at Climate Data Due Diligence wrote to tell us that even though total carbon emissions from power plants fell in 2008, 
the carbon intensity of the power sector—that is, the amount of CO2 released per megawatt-hour of power produced—actually increased last year.
In the chart to the right, the yellow line at the top shows the tons of CO2 released per megawatt-hour of electricity produced by the nation’s power plants. And just as the recession kicked in in 2008, the CO2 intensity of the US power system—which had been steadily improving for the previous 4 years—went in the wrong direction.
Ultimately, of course, it’s the total CO2 emissions that matter, not the emissions intensity. But it’s still somewhat disheartening to see the carbon-intensity trend move in the wrong direction, since it doesn’t bode well for the performance of the power sector once the economy recovers. After all, the climate crisis is a very long term problem; we need to make real, tangible progress in our emissions performance no matter what the economy does in the short term. And that puts an even bigger premium on making sure that we’re making the right kinds of stimulus investments while the economy is down: we want to be sure we emerge from the recession in a better position than we were when we went into it. That makes the carbon intensity figure one that’s worth watching.
Brock Howell
Is it possible we’re a different economy that we thought: Carbon intesity must decrease in order to increase GDP?
Matt Leber
Ok, this is just an educated guess, but one big contributor might be paper companies. Huh you ask?While coal and natural gas generation were down, there was a sizable increase in petroleum liquids (up from 17,020 billion BTU in 2007 to 46,205 billion BTU in 2008) being used for electricity generation. Some of this increase is because paper producers are putting distillate into black liquor, a waste product, and burning it to create electricity. This is all being done to yield a whopping $8 Billion in tax credits for 2008. This practice is apparently so profitable that it has the potential to dramatically affect paper prices.The IRS is supposedly looking to correct this insane set of incentives, so hopefully this is temporary.Here’s a link to the Nation article mentioning the tax credit:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090420/hayesHere's a link to the EIA’s numbers on power production:http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/tablees2b.htmlI'm not sure how to break down the numbers by carbon intensity since much of the decreases in Coal & Natural gas are probably the least efficient plants. Anybody have an idea of how to get more detail here?
Clark Williams-Derry
My guess is that natural gas got expensive, so when demand fell the gas plants turned off but the coal plants kept going. The annoying thing, then, is that we’re still pricing coal as if it were cheap—we hide its true costs.
Matt Leber
That was the thought that made me look into this. However Coal was down more than Natural Gas. Gas actually came down in cost while coal increased in cost, although coal is still a far less expensive fuel.Without a really detailed look, we’ll probably never know why the performance went down. However, making sure that tax policy doesn’t give incentives to burn MORE fossil fuels would be a good place to start. Taken to the extreme, this would really make coal’s true costs shine. ;)Some good news to this gloomy topic: Wind is up 67%, “Other renewables” are up 22%, Solar (Thermal & Photovoltaic) is up a whopping 168%.