Articles by Joseph Romm

'Climate change' is climate change by any other name

In his famous essay, "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell wrote: "The English language ... becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts." He warns that "Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." The importance of language and rhetoric is a subject near to my heart.

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

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Washington, D.C., is to the English language what Paris is to fashion. Every season, perfectly good words go out of style and new ones are trotted out on the national runway of rhetoric. Some words are considered so worn out, politically incorrect, or laden with baggage that they can no longer be used in public discourse. When that happens, people like me find ourselves scrambling for suitable synonyms.

That was the case a few years ago with "sustainable development." I operated the Center of Excellence for Sustainable Development at the U.S. Department of Energy, helping communities understand and apply the practice. Before long, signals came down from Capitol Hill that the words "sustainable development" had become the kiss of death for any program that used them. The term "smart growth" was invented to take "sustainability's" place.

More recently, Congress has avoided using the word "climate" in legislation that clearly is meant in part to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions -- legislation such as the "Energy Security and Independence Act of 2007." The Bush people call torture "enhanced interrogation" and call kidnapping "rendition." Healthy Forests and Clear Skies became the titles of the Bush Administration's programs to cut trees and pollute the air, respectively.

Our elected leaders aren't alone in manipulating the English language. Lobbyists and extremists, left and right, regularly play the game too, to obscure facts, incite emotions, insult opponents, or get attention from the media, where conflict is red meat.

Coal executives try to persuade us there's such a thing as "clean coal" and oil executives talk about "energy independence" when they really mean more drilling. In 2003, Orwell protégé Frank Luntz counseled in a confidential memo that the Administration and conservatives should stop using the term "global warming" because it was too frightening. Luntz suggested that Republicans refer to themselves as "conservationists" rather than "environmentalists," since the latter term, in Luntz's view, is associated with tree-hugging and extremism.

Nukes may become troubled assets, ruin credit ratings

Part 1 presented a new study that puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour -- triple current U.S. electricity rates!

Nuclear plants with such incredibly expensive electricity and "out of control" capital costs, as Time put it, obviously create large risks for utilities, their investors, and, ultimately taxpayers. Congress extended huge loan guarantees to new nukes in 2005, and the American people will be stuck with another huge bill if those plants join the growing rank of troubled assets.

The risk to utilities who start down the new nuke path is also great. A June 2008 report [PDF] by Moody's Investor Services Global Credit Research, "New Nuclear Generating Capacity: Potential Credit Implications for U.S. Investor Owned Utilities" (PR here [PDF]), warned that "nuclear plant construction poses risks to credit metrics, ratings," concluding:

The cost and complexity of building a new nuclear power plant could weaken the credit metrics of an electric utility and potentially pressure its credit ratings several years into the project, according to a new report from Moody's Investors Service ...

Moody's suggests that a utility that builds a new nuclear power plant may experience an approximately 25% to 30% deterioration in cash-flow-related credit metrics.

And this would likely result in a sharp downgrading of the utility's credit rating.

The application by Florida Power & Light for a large nuclear plant came in at a stunning $12 to $18 billion, and the utility concedes that new reactors present "unique risks and uncertainties," with "every six-month delay adding as much as $500 million in interest costs."

The report Climate Progress published this week, Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power [PDF] by power-plant cost expert Craig Severance, has an extended discussion of the business risks to utilities and hence investors:

American Enterprise Institute endorses tax credits for super-efficient, furnace-free homes

If the American Enterprise Institute starts acknowledging that residential energy efficiency has a "positive rate of return" -- and advocating federal support to capture the full energy savings possible -- perhaps the world is changing.

Then again, it may just be temporary institutional schizophrenia, since others in AEI continue to assert (without any supporting evidence), "No matter what you've been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly."

Kevin Hassett, AEI's director of economic-policy studies, has a Bloomberg News column that I excerpt below, because of its surprising degree of common sense -- and because he cites actual research:

U.S. coal supply may last only 10-20 years

The imminent reality of peak oil production should be clear to all by now.

Now some very serious people are suggesting that there is a lot less accessible coal out there than most folks believe. If we are nearing peak coal (and peak oil), then we would need to embrace the rapid transition to a clean energy economy almost as urgently as we need to embrace it to avoid destroying the climate.

Let's start with the U.S. Geological Survey's stunning 131-page analysis from December, "Assessment of Coal Geology, Resources, and Reserves in the Gillette Coalfield, Powder River Basin, Wyoming" [big PDF]:

The Gillette coalfield, within the Powder River Basin in east-central Wyoming, is the most prolific coalfield in the United States. In 2006, production from the coalfield totaled over 431 million short tons of coal, which represented over 37 percent of the Nation's total yearly production.

The "total original coal resource in the Gillette coalfield" without applying any restrictions, "was calculated to be 201 billion short tons." Then USGS subtracts out the inaccessible coal, and then mining and processing losses, which leaves 77 billion tons, and finally:

Coal reserves are the portion of the recoverable coal that can be mined, processed, and marketed at a profit at the time of the economic evaluation. With a discounted cash flow at 8 percent rate of return, the coal reserves estimate for the Gillette coalfield is 10.1 billion short tons of coal (6 percent of the original resource total) for the 6 coal beds evaluated.

Ouch! And this analysis was done at a time of soaring coal prices.