LITTLE ROCK — Limiting or even eliminating carbon dioxide emissions in the United States would do little to corral pollution worldwide, Robert Bryce of the Manhattan Institute told members of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday.
Global energy consumption increased by 28 percent from 2001-2010 and carbon dioxide emissions increased by 30 percent, Bryce said.
Over the same period, U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide dropped 4.4 percent. China’s carbon dioxide emissions increased by 4.6 billion tons, Bryce said.
“If United States [carbon dioxide] emissions went to zero over the last decade, global [carbon dioxide] emissions still would have increased by 7 percent or 1.8 billion tons,” Bryce said.
Bryce is a senior fellow in the Center for Energy Policy and the Environment at the Manhattan Institute. The institute is a conservative think tank with the goal developing ideas that increase economic choice.
The chamber’s meeting was at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock.
Despite global meetings in the past decade to discuss climate change and the reduction of carbon emissions, little has happened to establish worldwide standards, he said.
“There were no carbon caps put in place, no carbon taxes enacted,” Bryce said. “Europe embraced a cap and trade that has failed miserably.”
The reason such standards haven’t been enacted is because of the inability to control energy use by many countries, Bryce said.
But if the United States is to be serious about combating climate change, it needs to be a leader and an example, Glen Hooks, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, said in a telephone interview.
“With these developing nations, like India and China, who want to do what we did and bring themselves up to a higher standard of living, it’s hard for us to be credible when we say ‘You shouldn’t be so polluting’ when we’re not leading on that ourselves,” Hooks said.
The numbers about the increase in pollution in other countries can change if the U.S. takes the lead, Hooks said.
“I’m not convinced that this [carbon dioxide] problem is insurmountable,” Hooks said.
The emergence of shale natural gas production has increased the availability of energy worldwide, Bryce said.
“The shale revolution is changing the U.S. [energy outlook] in ways we could never have dreamed,” Bryce said.
Because of shale gas, the country is so loaded with hydrocarbon fuels that “we can’t even figure out how much we have,” Bryce said.
“The development of shale gas and shale oil is the single most important development in the U.S. energy scene and the global scene since the discovery of the East Texas Field in 1930,” Bryce said.
The number of natural gas wells in Arkansas has almost doubled since the development of Arkansas’ Fayetteville Shale formation began in 2004. The Fayetteville Shale, along with Texas’ Barnett Shale, the Marcellus Shale in Ohio and other shale plays, have led to an explosion in natural gas production.
Between 2007 and 2011, the cost of drilling the wells in the Fayetteville Shale for Southwestern Energy Co. has remained about the same, about $3 million per well, Bryce said.
But because of improvements in drilling, Southwestern cut the time to drill a well from 17 days to eight, Bryce said. But the company was able to double its production over the same period, Bryce said.
The price of natural gas has dropped from $6.33 per British thermal unit four years ago to about $3.75 today, Bryce said.
That is a savings of $200 million a day and $73 billion a year, Bryce said.
The discovery of shale gas could create more than 600,000 jobs in the country — and possibly several million jobs — in the next several years, Bryce said.
“This has been a windfall for the U.S. at a time when it was desperately needed when the rest of the economy was struggling mightily,” Bryce said.
Business, Pages 27 on 11/15/2012