While Chris and I bicker in the comments, here’s some positive news.
For years, I’m groused that all the focus in energy policy has been on the AGW boogeyman – a boogeyman whose existence lots of people (including me) doubt, and lots of people flatly don’t believe in. Which made it an unproductive hook on which to hang changes in energy planning.
Someone got a cluebat, because here’s an article in the NY Times today:
Ms. Jackson settled on a three-pronged strategy. Invoking the notion of thrift, she set out to persuade towns to compete with one another to become more energy-efficient. She worked with civic leaders to embrace green jobs as a way of shoring up or rescuing their communities. And she spoke with local ministers about “creation care,” the obligation of Christians to act as stewards of the world that God gave them, even creating a sermon bank with talking points they could download.
“I don’t recall us being recruited under a climate change label at all,” said Stacy Huff, an executive for the Coronado Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America, which was enlisted to help the project. Mr. Huff describes himself as “somewhat skeptical” about global warming.
Mr. Huff said the project workers emphasized conservation for future generations when they recruited his group. The message resonated, and the scouts went door to door in low-income neighborhoods to deliver and install weatherization kits.
“It is in our DNA to leave a place better than we found it,” he said.
You don’t need to believe in, or even care about, climate change to agree that we need to change our patterns of energy use.
Back in ’06 I wrote:
From my point of view, there are three reasons energy is worth some serious investment:
1. Slow the rate of carbon emissions, in the off chance that they will have an impact on global warming.
2. Slow the rate of investment in jihad by the oil-rich Arab states, who have been the principal financiers of the spread of the core religious ideology that – when combined with alienation and anomie – leads to recruits who blow themselves and others up.
3. Shelter our domestic energy infrastructure from disruption – whether through embargo, terrorism, or system disruption caused by error or chance.
This program is a great example of what I talked about in that post – “The 3% Solution” to our energy issues.
Go read the NYT article, find a warmist and share it with them.
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Go read the NYT article, find a warmist and share it with them.
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AL, insofar as you actually bring up links like this instead of lying about the current state of climate science, I’ve got no problems with what you’re saying.
Actually, scratch that – while I’m sure the “hey, we can conserve energy for reasons other than AGW” thing gives people all kinds of warm fuzzies and tests well in focus groups, it _doesn’t_ actually address AGW. If all you’re after is energy independence, for example, then we can just burn a lot more coal (of which the US has plenty) and switch over to an electric fleet. That doesn’t actually do anything to deal with carbon emissions – if anything it makes it worse, just because of the carbon-heavy nature of coal.
That said, it’s still vastly superior to see you talking about this – which has leads into productive policy discussions – rather than the “the models have never been released!” canard.
On the flip side, “green” AGW-friendly solutions like wind and solar are an unrealistic path to energy independence, at least in the short term. The technology just isn’t advanced enough yet to provide power at the levels needed to replace fossil fuels. Conservation is also a laudable approach, but traditionally hasn’t yielded energy reduction results at the levels AGW believers warn must happen ASAP.
The French model of a heavily nuclear-centered energy infrastructure might be the ideal middle ground between the two approaches, combined with a switch to electric-powered vehicles. Unfortunately, the political framework needed to make that possible is only slowly changing to be more favorable; undoing decades of demonizing nuclear energy by the Green movement will take time.
After posting comment #3, I realized my display name was just ‘Chris’. I’ve swapped it for ‘Chris M’, hopefully that’s _slightly_ less confusing. 😉
Chris M, interestingly enough, Den Beste’s calculations in that article have been discussed on this board before.
They’re actually not all that accurate. Den Beste doesn’t actually understand the scale of the problem himself.
That said, kudos for trying to talk about actual facts here.
Thanks for linking back to that thread. We had a long discussion about those numbers (I’ll note again that if we do the math, it comes out to taking up something like 80% of Michigan – plenty close enough for napkin discussion. The numbers confusion consisted entirely of changes to assumptions, all of which were made by someone calling himself Chris, and I don’t mean Chris M.)
I’ll repost a quote from the same thread, from (er…) me:
bq. What we’re looking for is electrical generation that’s scalable to the point where we can replace hydrocarbon fuel sources… electric cars, electric heat. If we don’t get there… if we’ve set our sights low enough that we don’t even consider that we want to get there in the first place… we have to ask ourselves, why are we bothering at all? Save the money and deal with the climate change, if that’s the extent of what we can manage.
I don’t need to re-argue the points in that thread. Did solar plant efficiencies suddenly improve dramatically since last year? Did wind get a lot cheaper? Do you, in fact, have anything to contribute to the discussion that you haven’t already done?
That was a really good thread…
Avatar, I’m not at all sure where you got the conclusion that Den Beste was right based on that thread. You don’t want to re-argue the points of that thread, fine… but the number we _actually_ came up with was 2% of the land in New Mexico and Arizona to completely power the entire Southwest using current efficiencies. I’d say that pretty well rebuts your quote above, and people can read through the entire thread to decide for themselves.
But, hey, if we’re quoting ourselves:
bq. …but insofar as this thread’s gone from “solar requires an area the size of Michigan!” and “solar is orders of magnitude more expensive” and “there ARE no electric cars” to “well, it’s politically difficult to get land for solar (but probably vastly less difficult than getting land for high-level radioactive waste storage)”, I’d say the burden of proof – the burden of proof that human ingenuity cannot feasibly get vast amounts of power from sources other than fossil and fission – is on you guys.
That said, that thread ended with you arguing that kite-based turbine generation wouldn’t work because people wouldn’t be able to use emergency medical helicopters… but that long-term nuclear waste disposal wasn’t really an issue.
Good luck with convincing people on that line of thought.
Look, the problem of nuclear waste containment and storage is _solved_. It requires no new science. It requires no new technology. All it requires is a few processing plants, a few really, really heavily-shielded trucks, and people like you to quit pretending that the nuclear waste would suddenly burst out of its hole and go on a city-destroying rampage. Come on, we’re already talking legislation that’s expected to cost trillions of dollars; lead is NOT that expensive.
And again, you say “power” but you use electrical power numbers only; that’s only 10% or so of our total power consumption, and as we noted before, it’s not the bit that generates the most carbon. If we’re not worried about providing alternatives to power usage that aren’t specifically electrical power, we’re simply not ever going to do anything about carbon emissions, in which case, you might as well quit arguing the scientific case. If even YOU don’t have the will, then there isn’t a way.
I’ll reiterate this for you, because it’s a year later and you still haven’t grasped the point. We could invent a magical widget tomorrow that replaced 100% of our current electrical generation capacity with a system powered by nothing but Murray turning a crank once every two years, and that would still only reduce our CO2 emissions by, say, 10%. That’s less than a decade of growth (well, maybe a decade under Obama…) If global warming is a problem of the size that you suggest, then that’s not going to do the trick; talking about spending megabucks to only get that result is precisely the sort of “Don’t tell me the math, I don’t understand it anyway” thinking that SDB was complaining about.
In reality, if we had such an electrical system, we’d also be using electric cars, electric heat instead of gas, and other applications which would get our emissions profile to the point where it might actually do some good. (We’d probably have to hire someone to help Murray crank…) If solar’s going to save the world, it has to do THAT, not just replace electric plants.
Nuclear could do that. It would be expensive, but not stupid-silly amounts of money. It would require a lot of work to store all the waste safely, but not nearly as much as any of the other possible solutions on the table.
And you forget the priorities here. It’s not incumbent on ME to convince people that nuclear is the answer; I’m okay with the status quo. I figure even in a scenario where the global warming science is completely correct, there’s almost certainly no political solution and that we’re probably better off living with it than trying to stop it. You’re the one trying to convince people like ME to do things about it, right? But if nuclear is a pretty good partial solution to the problem you’re talking about, and we’re not even considering it, that’s an even better indication that we don’t consider this to be a real problem than Al Gore flying around by private jet.
Chris:
2% of New Mexico and Arizona is 4700 square miles, so if you could get construction and equipment costs down to $2 million per acre, your system costs $6.016 trillion. That’s enough money to fund all of Canada for 20 years.
Annual cleaning and maintenance of 4700 square miles of equipment?
Avatar-
You seem to be living in an alternate reality where things are subtly different from how they are here. Let me make a few observations:
bq. All [dealing with nuclear waste] requires is a few processing plants, a few really, really heavily-shielded trucks, and people like you to quit pretending that the nuclear waste would suddenly burst out of its hole and go on a city-destroying rampage.
First off, “people like me”? We’ve been arguing this for a while – where have I said anything one-tenth as derogatory towards nuclear power as you’re suggesting? I do have _concerns_ about it – from that thread a year ago, Mark B was actually the one talking about safety margins greater than the existence of human civilization, and yes, I think anyone who doesn’t at least pause at those numbers is a fool. And I’ll note that worrying about nuclear waste isn’t just limited to the horrible greens – even John McCain, who was _in favor_ of Yucca Mountain, said that he didn’t think the waste should be transported there through Arizona. Is the NIMBY on this issue overblown? Maybe (although it didn’t come from nowhere – read up on Hanford operations sometime). But deserved or not, it’s not going anywhere soon, and that _is_ something nuke advocates need to deal with.
That said, would I accept increased nuclear production as part of a grand bargain on climate change? Absolutely.
bq. And again, you say “power” but you use electrical power numbers only; that’s only 10% or so of our total power consumption, and as we noted before, it’s not the bit that generates the most carbon.
Nope, sorry, not the case in this reality. Try the chart on page 16 – total power generation counts for about 35% of carbon emissions. That being the case, the rest of your logic on the subject tends to fall on its face.
bq. In reality, if we had such an electrical system, we’d also be using electric cars, electric heat instead of gas, and other applications which would get our emissions profile to the point where it might actually do some good. (We’d probably have to hire someone to help Murray crank…) If solar’s going to save the world, it has to do THAT, not just replace electric plants.
Yes, we probably need to/want to move more transport to electric, which requires more energy generation, but at the same time, electric motors are more efficient, which reduces the total energy we need. And Den Beste’s point was “we don’t have enough land for solar”, but point that was proven false on that thread. There are certainly engineering problems to be solved, but they’re not the complete impossibilities that you guys are selling.
That said, you’re right that we have been over this in the other thread, and you’re absolutely right that nothing much has changed in the past year… but you haven’t gotten any more right about things in the meantime.
bq. And you forget the priorities here. It’s not incumbent on ME to convince people that nuclear is the answer; I’m okay with the status quo. I figure even in a scenario where the global warming science is completely correct, there’s almost certainly no political solution and that we’re probably better off living with it than trying to stop it. You’re the one trying to convince people like ME to do things about it, right?
Well, no, I don’t have to convince you – the Supreme Court cleared the way for the EPA to start regulating CO2 emissions regardless of whether cap-and-trade gets passed. This is coming whether you like it or not; conservatives would have probably been _better off_ with the watered-down bill that was being debated, and it probably would have been better from a world-leadership standpoint, but I’ll take what I can get.
That said, I can’t get the vast majority of people here at WOC to even agree on basic facts (like your come-from-nowhere assertion that power emissions are only 10% of the total.) That being the case, I’m sure as hell that I’ll never convince people like YOU to do anything. I’m mostly just arguing this for fun, and as a service for random passers-by who might otherwise be confused by false information.
Cheers.
Glen, if we’re going to play the money game, let’s just cut to the chase: most of the articles I’ve seen put solar at grid parity in the Southwest US by the middle of the decade, without subsidies. That simply means that solar _will be_ constructed, regardless of what it does to CO2 emissions, or what you believe, or don’t believe about AGW.
Chris, the fact that STUFF COSTS MONEY is not a game.
I’m glad that solar is being constructed. I hope that more is constructed. But let’s not pretend that anybody is going to cover 3 million acres of the Southwest with a kerjillion dollars of high-maintenance equipment. The problem of nuclear waste storage is ridiculously trivial compared to that.
Glen, throwing ridiculous numbers like 6 trillion dollars up in the air is what makes this a game.
And, yes, people are going to cover millions of acres of the desert with solar power equipment. The whole definition of “grid parity” is that it’s as cheap to do that as it is to build a new coal plant. The Den Beste-bashing thread had a link to an article that pointed out that the BLM had permit requests for about a million acres of solar development _two years ago_, well before we even hit parity. You think other millons of acres won’t follow as solar gets cheaper?
As for “high maintenance?” Dude, they’re getting to a point where they can print solar cells out on giant rolls, like newspaper. No, that’s not the high efficiency stuff, but even high-efficiency cells just need to be put on poles, maybe with a simple rotating mechanism for tracking, and wired up. That’s hardly rocket science.
That said, would I accept increased nuclear production as part of a grand bargain on climate change? Absolutely.
Chris, why would you — you specifically, not unspecified other people who are still antsy over nuclear power for whatever reason — only accept increased nuclear “as part of a grand bargain”? Increased nuclear is, as has been established, the most practical and immediately available option for genuinely improving the situation. You should be “accepting” it right away instead of dismissing it, if you’re really worried about global warming. In fact, you should be advocating it.
Chris,
Thanks for posting that report. Verrrrry interesting, and we’ve got a number mismatch – if CO2 created by electricity generation is that much of a share of the total, that argues pretty strongly that there’s a big accounting mismatch somewhere between your total and the one that SDB had originally.
I think you’re underrating the cost of maintaining a solar energy plant – it’s not just a matter of setting up mirrors and letting them sit there. (This goes double for molten sodium solar plants!) Nobody’s using the photovoltaics for large-scale energy generation; they’re mostly useful for areas where running the wires would impose a big cost.
I think the EPA will have a hell of a time regulating CO2 under its current legal authority. Frankly, it doesn’t work like a pollutant. Ironically, “reasonable” regulations are very likely to get challenged on the basis of being too lax – the law has some fairly draconian limits for which emitters need to be regulated (perfectly reasonable limits for things like SO emissions, but CO2 doesn’t work on the same scale). If the black-letter law says “you must treat CO2 as a pollutant” and elsewhere it also says “you must regulate all emitters who emit over 10 tons”, it’s unreasonable to insist that the first part is inviolate but the second part can be ignored.
(number pulled out of the air, but I do remember reading that the statutory limits were quite low, so we’ll see how legal challenges go…)
M. has an excellent point. Nuclear and solar need not be in opposition, after all. There are plenty of places where solar isn’t viable because of weather conditions, and even where it is viable, there’s still a need for reliable base load – even in Nevada, it rains sometimes. We could build more nuclear plants and still work on solar energy too.
You have a good point in that you yourself aren’t anti-nuclear. But you’ve got to admit, as a matter of intellectual honesty, that the environmental movement as a whole is anti-nuclear. If you’re really being honest, you’d admit that most of that sentiment is driven by emotion, if not hysteria, rather than a rational appraisal of the risks and costs of nuclear power…
M., I think I at least partially explained my reasoning on nuclear power in the paragraph prior to the “That said…” bit you quoted. But just for the record (because it comes up in Avatar’s latest too…)
– The length of the problem involved. The entirety of human civilization is shorter than some of the half-lives of some of the waste that’s being produced. No matter how good we _think_ our procedures are, we don’t have anywhere near the experience to be _certain_. This is not an entirely unique problem (there are toxic chemicals that have similar storage issues) and it’s not necessarily one that, in and of itself, should be a deal-breaker for nuclear. But it’s one that does – and should – put at least a partial damper on my enthusiasm for nukes.
– The very high level of competence we’d have to carry out on a regular basis during nuclear production – which is not a level of competence we, as a nation, have shown that we can handle thus far. Again, read up on the actual (and yes, non-hysterical accounts) of the history of US nuclear power and research. You’ll quickly see that one of two things happens: we have private industry cutting corners in an effort to raise profits, or we have public employees who aren’t doing their jobs well because, hey, what the hell, it’s a government job. To really embrace nuclear, I’d have to be a lot more convinced than I currently am that Homer Simpsons in the nuclear industry aren’t just a rarity, but an actual impossibility.
(And yes, France has a sterling record on this kind of thing, but France also makes government-run high-speed rail work really well. In one case or another, liberals and conservatives seem united in their belief that there’s something about the French model that just wouldn’t translate to the US.)
– The downsides of nuclear power aren’t something that more R&D can really address – fission will inevitably produce waste products, it’s part of the basic physics. The problem with most green, renewable technologies is that they’re not very efficient, and that _is_ a limitation that can and is being addressed through research. In 50 years, it’s entirely likely that we’ll have cheap, easy-to-deploy 50% efficient solar cells (potentially even ones that work in the IR range, which would be huge). That’ll go a long way to making solar not just competitive, but clearly superior to just about any other energy production system. In 50 years, in contrast, fission will still be producing waste that’s just as dangerous as what we’ve got today.
– Are people more worried about nuclear waste than they probably should be, based on emotion? Yes. Is that political reality going to change anytime soon? Is there anything we can really do to change that attitude in any major way, in any immediate time frame? Nope, probably not. For that reason, politically, chasing after nuclear seems to be something of a fool’s errand, compared to the problem of just getting people to understand AGW. If buying into nuclear helps get a few more conservative votes on a carbon tax, or on cap-and-trade than we otherwise would, great, but it’s not something I’d want to spend effort on in and of itself.
That said, Avatar, three things:
– I’m not entirely sure where that 10% figure (of total carbon emissions from power generation) came from – you quote it in that thread from a year ago, but I can’t find it in any of the Den Beste posts that are linked. If you want to show me exactly where it comes from, great, but if Den Beste did say that power emissions are only 10%, then that’s yet another reason why his calculations are faulty.
– It’s true that thermal solar isn’t maintenance free, but neither are coal plants (to say nothing of nuclear!) And not many people are using photovoltaic for power generation _yet_, but that’s exactly what’ll be occurring when we get to grid parity.
– It’s hard to quantify, but I think if you take a look at the modern environmental movement it’s moved from virulently anti-nuke (e.g. Greenpeace in the ’70s and ’80s) to far more conflicted and divided on the benefits and drawbacks of nukes (for many of the same reasons I outlined above). Which brings me back to my original point that both myself and most environmentalists would accept a tradeoff that increased nuclear production while at the same time promoting renewables and discouraging carbon-intensive industry.
– The downsides of nuclear power aren’t something that more R&D can really address – fission will inevitably produce waste products, it’s part of the basic physics.
But as has been mentioned repeatedly, this problem is solved. Seal it in glass, drop it in Yucca Mountain. The end. We know how radioactive waste works, we know what it does; it’s basic chemistry. Complaining about nuclear waste at this point is like complaining about sewage. Yes, it’s unpleasant stuff that can cause problems if you’re careless with it, but we know how to handle it safely. There’s no reason for our dislike of nuclear waste to prevent us from building nuclear power plants, any more than there’s a reason for our dislike of sewage to prevent us from putting toilets in our houses.
Are people more worried about nuclear waste than they probably should be, based on emotion? Yes. Is that political reality going to change anytime soon? Is there anything we can really do to change that attitude in any major way, in any immediate time frame? Nope, probably not. For that reason, politically, chasing after nuclear seems to be something of a fool’s errand, compared to the problem of just getting people to understand AGW.
Polling numbers for support of nuclear power are substantially higher than polling numbers for those who think global warming is a serious problem. By your logic, AGW is more of a fool’s errand than nuclear power.
M, few things:
– If you’re trying to argue me into supporting nuclear power, then you’d do better to address all my points on the subject, rather than just picking one point (which you’re actually misinterpreting) and running with it.
– That said, you are misinterpreting that line. The “encase it in glass and put it in a hole” solution may or may not work – see what I was saying about “timeframes longer than human civilization” and “universally high degree of competence required” – but even if it did, it’s still a hassle we’d have to deal with when it comes to nukes. Just because we know of a way to deal with the waste doesn’t make doing so a trivial problem. It is _not_ a problem that we have to deal with w/r/t renewables, and in the long run, renewables will likely be more attractive than nuclear. (And the sooner we start large-scale deployment, the more R&D will go up and manufacturing costs will go down, so…)
– Some interesting things about that polling: the nuclear question didn’t really address the waste issue, which is where the rub lies. Nuclear is very much a NIMBY issue, so it’d be interesting to see how the responses change when the questions are “would you support a new nuclear plant being built within 100 miles of you” and “would you support nuclear waste being stored in your state.”
And yes, AGW support is dropping like a stone, but it seems really likely that’s the result of the bad economy and the current political cycle. Awareness of AGW was far higher during the 2006 and 2008 elections.
What’s more, it seems pretty obvious that most people don’t know what the hell is going on with AGW – note that the question on what people believe _scientists_ believe has also fallen recently. Whatever your actual believes on AGW, it is the case that there’s a robust scientific consensus that has not changed, and believing otherwise is a pretty clear sign of ignorance.
That said, can the public be made to understand that AGW is a problem that we need to address? Maybe not. But that doesn’t change the facts of the matter any, or make pressing for change any less important.
Fair enough, Chris. My responses:
First, I find the requirement that the waste be secured for a period of time longer than human civilization to be absurd. Many other industrial processes — including some that manufacture components of renewable energy systems — output dangerous waste which will remain dangerous forever, yet we don’t require that they somehow be secured until the Sun turns into a red giant and swallows up the Earth. Therefore I deny the utility of this particular requirement. That being said, when you say that “encase it in glass and put it in a hole” won’t work, I have to ask why you think that. Again, it’s simple chemistry and physics; it’s stuff we know.
Second, yes, competency is required. As it happens we do lots of things competently in this country. If we were putting Senators in charge of the nuclear waste I’d worry, but out in the real world we have plenty of good people who keep infrastructure functioning, who keep planes from crashing into each other, who manage infectious disease labs and worse. You can certainly say “well, what if we put idiots in charge of the nuclear waste?” to which my response would be, what if we put idiots in air traffic control towers? If the rot is that deep we have much more immediate problems than what’ll happen to some low-level nuclear waste a thousand years from now.
That being said, I will cheerfully grant that — in a scenario where we vastly expand nuclear power — somewhere a truck will roll and some waste will leak, no matter how carefully we work to avoid that. Accidents happen and grownups accept that fact. If we use coal, some miners are going to die in cave-ins. If we use renewables, poisonous materials from building solar panels will leak into the groundwater. Tradeoffs are part of life. If we can keep the negatives down to a minimum, and I’m fully confident that in the case of nuclear power we can do it, then it’s worth going ahead.
Third, you haven’t convinced me that your dismissal of nuclear popularity and AGW unpopularity is anything more than wishful thinking. Of course, my agreement with that poll is the same thing. Either of us could be wrong, but there’s the data; that’s all I’m saying.