Greenhouse Gas Targets Best Set With New Rating System

Several months ago McIlvaine introduced the Universal Environmental Burden Index. This tool will greatly enhance decision making relative to power generation alternatives. Now the concept has been expanded to cover the entire gamut of sustainability issues. Money spent for global warming reduction will be money not spent on healthcare and other initiatives to improve life quality. Therefore an approach is needed which covers all sustainability aspects.

The new McIlvaine Universal Sustainability Rating System introduces methods for measuring life quality and factoring in national versus international benefits (tribal discounted value). This system will allow rational rather than emotional choices among generation options. It should be used by regulators in setting greenhouse gas caps.

Corporations and governments are making major decisions relative to sustainability issues including energy efficiency, employee relations, global warming, health and safety. A number of sustainability evaluation tools have been developed. However, compartmentalization is a major flaw in all of them. The reason is that the relative importance of environment, worker safety, etc. is predetermined. But there are many situations where environment may be the dominant sustainability factor.

The Universal Sustainability Rating System eliminates the compartmentalization and normalizes all sustainability factors in a point system based on life quantity and quality values.  An individual willingly rides in automobiles knowing that statistically over the years it will reduce his life by seven months. He takes many justifiable risks based on the value of life quality over quantity. 

This willingness to trade quality for quantity can be converted to points that rate any impact. One example would be the decrease in life quality for the Cape Cod resident whose sea view is affected by an offshore wind turbine or the island native who must be displaced by rising sea levels. It can be used to rate a donation to an art museum by a corporation or even the improvement in working conditions for developing country exporters.  Even a thorny issue such as the extinction of a species can be rated by asking how many minutes of life would the average person be willing to sacrifice for the survival of a species such as the polar bear. The answer is likely to be considerably different than the same question posed for a malaria bearing mosquito.

Greenhouse gases and pollutants are addressed with the use of a Universal Environmental Burden Index http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/UEBI/subscriber/Default.htm .

The sustainability ratings are adjusted to present values.  Here is an example where a decision has to be made to either replace an old coal-fired power plant with a new one now or to wait 10 years and then replace the old coal-fired power plant with wind turbines. A third alternative is to replace the old coal-fired power plant with a new one and then replace the new coal-fired power plant with wind turbines after 20 years.

The replacement of an old coal-fired power plant with a new coal-fired power plant causes a 30 percent reduction in CO₂ quickly. By waiting 10 years prior to replacement with a wind turbine there is no CO₂ reduction for the first decade but then 100 percent reduction for the next three decades. But using the standard 3%/yr discounting of future benefits, the value over 40 years is 9 million points vs. 5.7 million for the new coal-fired power plants. So the discounting greatly narrows the turbine advantage.

The best scenario is the immediate replacement with a new coal-fired power plant and then replacement with wind turbines after 20 years. The actual CO₂ reduction is 26 million tons vs. 30 million tons with the wind turbine only scenario. However, with the discount to present value the coal/wind turbine sequence scores 9.9 million points vs. only 9 million for the wind turbine only option.

There are also very substantial sustainability points achieved through the reduction of other emissions when replacing an old coal-fired power plant with a new one. The cost per sustainability point is also very low. More details on this calculation are shown at:  http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/brochures/latest%20news/replace_coal_plants/Replace_old_coal_plants.pdf

Another factor which has been introduced is the “tribal discounted value”.  The individual is willing to sacrifice more life minutes for a family member (tribe) than for others of his nationality.  He is generally more willing to sacrifice life minutes for his nation than for people in other nations. Global warming will have more negative impacts in other countries than in the U.S.  Fine particulates on the other hand cause thousands of deaths per year within the U.S.

The Universal Sustainability Rating System provides the option to discount point totals using the tribal discount. At the very least it will make clear the degree to which policy is shaped by national vs. world goals.  National self interest has historically played a role in governmental policy, so there is no reason to believe that it should not be considered in determining greenhouse gas caps.

The following table shows the calculations of the present discounted value of deaths 50 years from now and also the tribal discounting for two initiatives. One greatly reduces global warming. The other reduces PM_2.5 in the U.S.

Sustainability Points for Two Initiatives

*Each life is worth 350,000 sustainability points

In the northern hemisphere including the U.S. cold-related deaths far outstrip heat-related deaths. So with global warming any increase in heat-related deaths 50 years from now will likely be offset by fewer cold-related deaths. On the other hand the reduction in PM_2.5 could save 30,000 lives per year in the U.S. Even on a discounted basis this is the equivalent of 10,000 lives. So with an extreme tribal discount perspective the money should be spent on PM_2.5 reduction in the U.S. and not on global warming.

Americans do place values on lives of people in other nations. But an American life is at least three times as important as the life of someone in a remote country. You don’t need a poll to determine this. Immigration policy and aid to other nations are clear indications of this prejudice. So a U.S. tribal discount of 66 percent is applied to the lives saved by reducing heat-related global warming deaths worldwide in 2059. The result is that the total positive impact of reduced global warming on heat-related deaths is only 1000 lives.

This analysis would reveal an even higher ratio of burden reduction through investment in fine particle (PM_2.5) reduction than in global warming if calculations were made for the intervening years.  The increase in heat-related deaths from global warming would assumably increase slowly each year for the next 50 years while 50,000 Americans are now dying from diseases associated with PM_2.5. The above table only reflects the situation in the year 2059 and not the cumulative point totals. If the new PM_2.5 regulatory effort results in 1000 lives saved in the U.S. next year, it will offset much of the entire global heat-related global warming program for the next 50 years.  We are not arguing that it is justifiable to place a priority on welfare of Americans.  But if all the U.S. political policies are based on the welfare of Americans, there is no reason to single out greenhouse gases as an area where the logic does not apply.

The Universal Sustainability Rating System is described in Power Plant Air Quality Decisions.  More information on this service is available at: http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/brochures/energy.html#44i .

Bob McIlvaine

President

847-784-0012 ext. 112

rmcilvaine@mcilvainecompany.com