Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is among the technologies with greatest potential leverage to combat climate change. According to the PRISM analysis, a technology assessment performed by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), wide deployment of CCS after 2020 in the US power sector alone could reduce emissions by approximately 350 million tonnes of CO₂ per year (Mt CO₂/yr) by 2030, a conclusion echoed by the McKinsey U.S. Mid-range Greenhouse Gas Abatement Curve 2030. But building CCS into such a formidable climate change mitigation “wedge” will require more than technological feasibility; it will also require the development of policies and business models that can enable wide adoption. Such business models, and the regulatory environments to support them, have as yet been largely undemonstrated. This, among other factors, has caused the gap between the technological potential and the actual pace of CCS development to remain large.

The purpose of the present work is to quantify actual progress in developing carbon storage projects (here defined as any projects that store carbon underground at any stage of their operation or development, for example through injection into oil fields for enhanced recovery or in saline aquifers or other geological formations). In this way, the real development ramp may be compared in scale and timing against the perceived need for and potential of the technology. Some very useful lists of carbon storage projects already exist – see, for example, the IPCC CCS database, the JP Morgan CCS project list, the MIT CCS database, and the IEA list. We seek to maintain an up-to-date database of all publicly-announced current and planned projects from which we can project a trajectory of carbon stored underground as a function of time. To do this, we estimate for each project the probability of completion as well as the potential volume of CO₂ that can be stored as of a given year.

PESD senior fellow and Nobel laureate in Physics, Burton Richter, explains why an inclusive internationalization policy of both ends of the nuclear fuel-cycle can provide much needed carbon-free energy while limiting the potential for the proliferation of nuclear weapons. He insists that the nuclear proliferation problem can be remedied by a tightly monitored program through international policy and diplomacy where incentives to tame proliferation are increased, inspections are more rigorous, and a sanctions program is agreed upon and adhered to.

New evidence that the climate system may be especially sensitive to the build-up of greenhouse gases and that humans are doing a poor job of controlling their effluent has animated discussions around the possibility of offsetting the human impact on climate through ‘geoengineering'. Nearly all assessments of geoengineering have concluded that the option, while ridden with flaws and unknown side effects, is intriguing because of its low cost and the ability for one or a few nations to geoengineer the planet without cooperation from others.

I argue that norms to govern deployment of geoengineering systems will be needed soon. The standard instruments for establishing such norms, such as treaties, are unlikely to be effective in constraining geoengineers because the interests of key players diverge and it is relatively easy for countries to avoid inconvenient international commitments and act unilaterally. Instead, efforts to craft new norms ‘bottom up' will be more effective. Such an approach, which would change the underlying interests of key countries and thus make them more willing to adopt binding norms in the future, will require active, open research programmes and assessments of geoengineering.

Meaningful research may also require actual trial deployment of geoengineering systems so that norms are informed by relevant experience and command respect through use. Standard methods for international assessment organized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are unlikely to yield useful evaluations of geoengineering options because the most important areas for assessment lie in the improbable, harmful, and unexpected side effects of geoengineering, not the ‘consensus science' that IPCC does well.

I also suggest that real-world geoengineering will be a lot more complex and expensive than currently thought because simple interventions-such as putting reflective particles in the stratosphere-will be combined with many other costlier interventions to offset nasty side effects.

Despite over a century of investment in electric power systems, there are roughly 1.6 billion people who lack access to electricity service, mainly in rural areas. While there are some open questions regarding the precise cause and effect relationships between rural electrification and human welfare, it is generally considered an important social, economic, and political priority to provide electricity to all.

Rural electrification is a challenging task because it involves delivery of a service to populations that are remote and dispersed and whose consumption is low. This means it is generally more expensive while at the same time the customer base is generally poorer and less able to pay the full cost of service. Combine these factors with utilities that are often poorly managed and have limited finances, and it is often not feasible to expect extension of the grid to unserved rural populations in the near future. Such conditions are also challenging for the development of new renewable energy technology markets.

This paper discusses the role that electricity plays in the development process and its importance in rural areas; the contest between centralized and distributed solutions and their relative competitiveness; the previous experience and research on distributed generation and which business models fare successful; and broader lessons that can be extracted from the work.

China has been highly successful in electrifying rural areas in the past half century. Institutional structure and its reform are important for investment and, therefore, development of rural electrification. Over time, there have been three major institutional changes initiated by the central government; When the People's Republic was founded in 1949, it was short of capital, technology and management professionals to promote rural electrification, so rural electricity had a separate administrative system from the urban areas.

From 1949 to 1977, China established a comprehensive vertical system of rural electricity administration under strict central planning. At the end of the 1970s, with the adoption of economic reform policy, the central government handed over the management of the local electricity system to local government. County level has proved the most effective implementation unit for both planning and project implementation of the rural electricity system. From 1998 to 2002, the central government has been separating local electricity supply from local governments to facilitate the commercial operation of the utility market. After 2002, the rural electricity system was merged with the urban system, forming an integrated national electricity administrative system in China.

National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency, a report by the Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force on Energy, concludes that the “lack of sustained attention to energy issues is undercutting U.S. foreign policy and U.S. national security.” The report goes on to examine how America’s dependence on imported oil—which currently comprises 60 percent of consumption— increasingly puts it into competition with other energy importers, notably the rapidly growing economies of China and India.

The task force was chaired jointly by James R. Schlesinger, a former secretary of defense and secretary of energy, and John Deutch, former director of Central Intelligence and undersecretary of energy, and drew from industry, academia, government, and NGOs. PESD Director David Victor directed the task force and FSI senior fellow by courtesy James Sweeney, director of Stanford’s new Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency, served as a member.

The task force unanimously concluded that incentives are needed to slow and eventually reverse the growth in petroleum consumption, particularly in the transportation sector, but was unable to agree on which specific incentives—such as gasoline tax-funded energy technology R&D, more stringent and broadly applied Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency (CAFE) standards, and a cap-and-trade permit system for gasoline—would most effectively achieve this result.

The task force report included additional recommendations regarding the supply and consumption of energy including the following:

• Encourage oil supply from all sources
• Promote better management and governance of oil revenues
• Remove the protectionist tariff on imported ethanol
• Increase the efficiency of oil and gas consumption in the United States and elsewhere
• Switch from oil-derived products to alternatives such as biofuels
• Make the oil and gas infrastructure more efficient and secure
• Increase investment in energy technology R&D
• Promote the proper functioning and efficiency of energy markets
• Revitalize international institutions such as the International Energy Agency (IEA)

The report stressed that the U.S. government must reorganize to integrate energy issues with foreign policy to address the threats to national security created by energy dependence. The task force offered a number of recommendations to better promote energy issues in foreign policy deliberations as follows:

• Establish an energy security directorate at the National Security Council to lead an interagency process to influence the discussion and thinking of the NSC principals
• Fully inform and engage the secretary of energy on all foreign policy matters with an important energy aspect
• Include energy security issues in the terms of reference of all planning studies at the NSC, Defense, State, and the intelligence community

The task force restricted its inquiry to the challenges of managing U.S. and global dependence on imported oil and gas and did not address other important energy security issues such as nuclear proliferation and global warming.

Climate change is a global phenomenon, but the institutions needed to implement effective policy reside mainly with national governments. This mismatch explains why serious efforts to control emissions of greenhouse gases, such as markets for emission credits, are fragmented across national and regional lines. Climate policy is emerging from the bottom up rather than through globally orchestrated treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol. The authors of this Policy Forum state that fuller efforts to control emissions will require serious engagement of the United States and developing countries, as well as viable schemes for integrating the many fragmented policies that are arising as governments grapple with the climate challenge.

When addressing an externality such as air pollution, regulators can control policy inputs (e.g., pollution taxes and technology standards) or outputs (e.g., emission caps). Economists are familiar with this debate, known broadly as "prices vs. quantities," but analysts of international environmental agreements have rarely focused sustained attention to such questions. Using an inventory of all international air pollution agreements, we document the historical patterns in instrument choice. Those agreements that require little effort beyond the status quo are usually codified in terms of effort, but agreements that require substantial actions by the parties nearly always deploy a cap on emission quantities as the central regulatory instrument.

We suggest that this concentration of experience with emission caps and paucity of serious efforts to coordinate policy inputs may explain why the architects of international environmental agreements appear to believe that emission caps work best. We illustrate what's at stake with the example of international efforts to control the emissions that cause global climate change. We also show that the conventional history of the agreement that is most symbolic of the superiority of emission caps - the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer - has wrongly overlooked a little-known provision that operates akin to a "price" instrument.

This paper was published by Energy Policy in January 2005.

The study examines the dynamics of carbon emissions baselines of electricity

generation in Indian states and Chinese provinces in the backdrop of ongoing electricity sector reforms in these countries. Two Indian states-Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh, and three Chinese provinces-Guangdong, Liaoning and Hubei have been chosen for detailed analysis to bring out regional variations that are not captured in aggregate country studies. The study finds that fuel mix is the main driver behind the trends exhibited by the carbon baselines in these five cases. The cases confirm that opportunities exist in the Indian and Chinese electricity sectors to lower carbon intensity mainly in the substitution of other fuels for coal and, to a lesser extent, adoption of more efficient and advanced coal-fired generation technology. Overall, the findings suggest that the electricity sectors in India and China are becoming friendlier to the global environment. Disaggregated analysis, detailed and careful industry analysis is essential to establishing a power sector carbon emissions baseline as a reference for CDM crediting. However, considering all the difficulties associated with the baseline issue, our case studies demonstrate that there is merit in examining alternate approaches that rely on more aggregated baselines.