Electricity, Emissions, and Pricing Carbon - Beyond Smoke and Mirrors - page 132

with the exception of France. France gets most of its
electricity from greenhouse-gas-free nuclear power and
has much lower emissions per unit GDP and very much
lower emissions from the electricity sector. I will come
back to this in the chapter on nuclear power.
There are only four ways to go about reducing the
emissions from electricity generation:

Emit less greenhouse gas by making electricity gener-
ation more ef cient (less fuel for the same electrical

output);

Catch the greenhouse gases and store them away
(carbon capture and storage or CCS);

Use electricity more ef ciently (less demand means less

generation which gives lower emissions);

Substitute lower- or zero-emission sources for what we
use now (solar, wind, or nuclear power, for example).

ciency of the existing electrical gen-
erating system which is not nearly as good as it could be,
then look at what happens when gas displaces coal, go on
to what the charge for carbon emissions might be if the
costs to society that come from emissions were to be
included in the price of electricity generated from fossil
fuels, and end with catching and storing the greenhouse
gases, something I am skeptical about, but which has such
potential that it is worth a try. End-use ef

I start with the ef

ciency and
carbon-free or low-carbon sources are discussed in later
chapters.
The reason for the inef ciency in generation and the

larger-than-needed emissions that go with it is a combin-
ation of low fuel costs for fossil-fueled generation plants,