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Dumb arguments rear their heads yet again
A reader pointed me to a letter in the South China Morning Post, "Cold water on the warming debate" (subs. req'd). The writer, a senior research fellow of the HK Institute of Economics and Business, rehashes a number of mistaken arguments I hear all too often:
Many people fail to knit together these two strands - climate change and the exhaustion of fossil fuels. If they did, they would see that the energy crisis, which is predicted as a result of the exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, contains the seeds of the resolution of the global warming crisis. As fossil fuels become scarcer, their price is sure to rise. We see this already. Under market forces, this will accelerate substitution, largely towards nuclear energy. This will, in turn, redress the climatic concerns.
No. Conventional oil may be peaking, but the world has plenty of affordable coal, far more than is needed to destroy the climate (which is Hansen's point). The climate problem is not self-resolving. Indeed, peak oil may drive us to liquid coal, a climate disaster. The article continues:
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Can’t we offset something other than carbon?
Lordy, this is getting out of hand: Under the agreement announced Wednesday, the Forest Service and the National Forest Foundation will allow individuals or groups to make charitable contributions that will be used to plant trees and do other work to improve national forests. … Under the new program, known as the Carbon Capital Fund, […]
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Britain’s gonna build some
Britain’s building five new "eco-towns": The towns, each with a minimum of 5,000 to 10,000 houses, will be built to meet zero carbon standards and will each showcase a specific project promoting energy preservation or green technology, the Communities and Local government office said. Projects to be showcased could include use of communal heat pump […]
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A big train wreck leaves it all over the place
Gristmill reader Grevangelical was in Ukraine when this happened, and he says people there are nervous about it. Wonder why? Deputy Prime Minister Olexander Kuzmuk, who on Tuesday compared the spill to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, has since insisted there is no health risk to surrounding villages … By the way, the highly toxic […]
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New coal-fired plants are unlikely
This from the Wall Street Journal today:
From coast to coast, plans for a new generation of coal-fired power plants are falling by the wayside as states conclude that conventional coal plants are too dirty to build and the cost of cleaner plants is too high.
If significant numbers of new coal plants don't get built in the U.S. in coming years, it will put pressure on officials to clear the path for other power sources, including nuclear power, or trim the nation's electricity demand, which is expected to grow 1.8% this year. In a time of rising energy costs, officials also worry about the long-term consequences of their decisions, including higher prices or the potential for shortages.
As recently as May, U.S. power companies had announced intentions to build as many as 150 new generating plants fueled by coal, which currently supplies about half the nation's electricity. One reason for the surge of interest in coal was concern over the higher price of natural gas, which has driven up electricity prices in many places. Coal appeared capable of softening the impact since the U.S. has deep coal reserves and prices are low.
But as plans for this fleet of new coal-powered plants move forward, an increasing number are being canceled or development slowed. Coal plants have come under fire because coal is a big source of carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed for global warming, in a time when climate change has become a hot-button political issue.For the full text, click here (and click soon, as the WSJ only gives free access for a few days).
This is more fodder in support of earlier Grist posts here and here.
It is also worth noting that -- notwithstanding WSJ's reportage -- this isn't really driven by new environmental considerations as much as by 30-year-old environmental considerations, when we effectively stopped building new coal plants but still had enough reserve margin in the system to keep increasing coal use without new construction.
Current increases in capital costs are largely to comply with the Clean Air Act -- which the old grandfathered plants were exempted from. Carbon control is clearly a big uncertainty moving forward, only likely to increase the costs further, but it is striking that we're seeing so much price increase and uncertainty in coal-derived power even without it.
This points out a larger issue with power plant regulation. Namely, these plants last a long time. The Clean Air Act was well intended, but it took three decades for it to start to impact the use of dirty coal, by virtue of the fact that it only impacted new facilities. Compare this to new vehicle regs, where the much shorter lifetime of cars means that we can get a quicker phase-out. Thus, we can eliminate leaded gasoline quickly, but can't really impact SOx and NOx from central plants for much longer.
This is precisely why the auction vs. allocation issue is so important for greenhouse-gas control. Every carbon cap-and-trade system that grandfathers in the old plants' right to pollute (witness Kyoto & RGGI as examples thereof) is going to face similar delays in carbon reduction -- delays that we cannot afford.
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The worst good news/bad news tale ever told
The bad news is that we're doing it by eating the fish that are eating the concentrated mercury in the food chain, further concentrating it in ... us. Mad as hatters we are!
This could also have been titled, "Another reason that coal is the enemy of the human race (or at least those members of it that like to eat)."
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Grist gets results
When I interviewed Richard Louv — author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder — back in 2006, he jokingly said, "If we were really interested in education reform we’d have a ‘No Child Left Inside’ movement." Well lookee here: John Sarbanes (D-Md.) has just introduced the No Child Left […]
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Moderate senators are ready to get on board
As Joe mentioned yesterday, four moderate-to-conservative senators — John Warner (R-Va.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.), and Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) — just proposed a measure to achieve "Cost-Containment for the Carbon Market." I wanted to spend a bit of time on what’s in it and what it means. You might think, given the business-friendly […]
