Climate Climate & Energy

Forthwith debunked

Every silver lining has a cloud -- or so we are told.

Climate analyst Jesse Ausubel is getting a lot of press with his new, controversial, deeply flawed study, "Renewable and nuclear heresies" (available here with subscription, but you can get the main points from this 2005 Canadian Nuclear Association talk and the accompanying PPT presentation).

He says ramping up renewables would lead to the "rape of nature." His study concludes:

Renewables are not green. To reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy, such as wind, water and biomass, cause serious environmental harm. Measuring renewables in watts per square metre that each source could produce smashes these environmental idols. Nuclear energy is green. However, in order to grow, the nuclear industry must ... form alliances with the methane industry to introduce more hydrogen into energy markets, and start making hydrogen itself ... Considered in watts per square metre, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors.

Uh, no, no, and no. Jesse popularized the notion that the economy has been decarbonizing for many decades (see Figure 2 of the PPT). This has led him to make a bunch of serious mistakes.

Making electricity visible helps reduce consumption

Here's what might be an ingenious idea, as reported by Wired:

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:

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, […]

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.

Umbra on tidal power

Dear Umbra, Much is made of wind, solar, geothermal, and even wave power, but why doesn’t anyone talk about tidal power? It has more power than wind for the same turbine, without the eyesore of turbines, is totally renewable, and is predictable hundreds of years in advance. Yet nobody talks about it. What’s wrong with […]

Twenty-two Hours of Darkness and Two of Light

California utility commits to massive solar buy, B.C. deals with oil spill Call it the light and dark sides of the energy industry: yesterday, as news spread that a major California utility will make a ginormous solar buy, a British Columbia neighborhood was drenched in crude oil spewing from a broken pipe. Related? Only in […]

Making things out of wood sequesters carbon, turns out

One telling point that carbon tax advocates make against cap-and-trade systems is that they create an enormous incentive for rent-seeking. Now it seems the timber industry is getting in on the game. Via Greenwire (sub rqd), this has my BS alarm all a-ringin’: [Timber] Industry groups are lobbying Congress and making a public relations push […]

For reducing the climate crisis

There are ongoing debates about the best way to address global warming, with most centering on whether a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme is best (or some combination of the two). There are also some lively, though less extensive, debates about the extent to which we should balance our attempts to reduce global warming with mitigating its effects.

I would like to shift the focus a little and ask the question: which policies will best promote technological innovation? Simple demographics and economic trends make it impossible to significantly curtail greenhouse gas emissions without major technological advances.

How coal CO2 is different from oil CO2

Our top climate scientist has sent out a really, really long email (where does he find the time?), mostly discussing comments on his recent essay on coal. I think Hansen is the clearest thinker on climate among the top scientists in the field, so I will reprint the email, breaking it up into several postings. The first one addresses "Coal-CO2 versus Oil-CO2":