Climate Skeptic

This is a Plan?

This is from the Arizona Republic:

Two decades from now, Americans could get as much electricity from windmills as from nuclear-power plants, according to a government report that lays out a possible plan for wind-energy growth.

The report, a collaboration between Energy Department research labs and industry, concludes wind energy could generate 20 percent of the nation's electricity by 2030, about the same share now produced by nuclear reactors. Wind energy today accounts for about 1 percent of the nation's electricity.

To reach the 20 percent production level, wind turbines would have to produce 300,000 megawatts of power, compared to about 16,000 megawatts generated today. Such growth would envision more than 75,000 new wind turbines, many of them larger than those operating today. Turbines in offshore waters would produce about 54,000 megawatts.

I am sure we also could have 3 billion hamsters on little wheels hooked up to generators.  Or we could fill, as Al Gore wants, 5 million acres of Arizona desert with solar panels.  Of course I calculated the latter plan to cost about 20 trillion dollars.

Just because the megawatt numbers add up to some target, does not make it a feasible plan.  The cost per megawatt needs to be balanced against other potential sources of power, and technological deficiencies (e.g. no solar at night, no wind power when there is no wind) also need to be addressed. 

Solar Panel County

Via Tom Nelson and Schlotzville, comes this from our modern day Savonarola, Al Gore:

Gore mentioned a few statistics that drove home the notion that we actually have the capability to be oil free with existing technology. If, he said, we were to build on a 90 mile x 90 mile tract of land in the Southwest a field of solar panels, we would have enough electricity to power the entire United States. So, why don't we build it? What is stopping us?

Its kind of cool to think about - I always get excited about man-made structures you can see from space.  When I think about this, my mind keeps jumping to the Sunflower fields in Larry Niven's Ringworld.

So, is this feasible?  Well, I was suspicious, since I live in one of the best solar sites in the world (Phoenix) and could not even come close to making solar pay on my house, even with 50% subsidies. 

First, is it enough power?  Well, its turns out the answer is "sortof."  I looked around at solar panels, and decided to assume a 200 watt panel that was 13 sq ft and cost $900.  Actually, you can't quite get that panel today.  You can get a 200 watt panel that is that cheap, but bigger, or you can have one that is that small and more expensive.  But you will see soon that it does not matter.  I assumed a third of the 8100 sq. miles would be dead space between the panels, roads, transformers, access paths, etc.  I assumed you put the installation in the best solar sites in the southwest, which yield on average about 6 peak-sun-hour-equivalents a day.  I assumed a 20% loss in conversions and transformers.

So 8100 sq miles  x  2/3  x  200 watt/12sq ft  x  6 hours x 365 days x 80%  (with necessary unit conversions thrown in) yields 4.08 billion Megawatt-Hours of electricity, which is about exactly our current US generating capacity.  (Way to go!  Al got a number right!)

I say sortof for the following reason:  This does not cover elimination of fossil fuels in the transportation sector.  And it does not address the problem of how you store this power at night, which of course is a catastrophic problem for the idea.

Al doesn't know what is stopping us.  Well, other than the storage problem, one thing might be the cost.  Using the assumptions above, and assuming that installation costs (with land acquisition, transformers, inverters, roads, mounting, installation, etc) is as much again as the panel costs themselves, the total installation would cost just under $21 trillion dollars.  This is orders of magnitude more than a nuclear program of the same size would cost.  And presupposes the environmentalists would let you cover 5 million acres of desert with metal and silicon. 

Postscript:  Al Gore thinks its the oil companies at fault (of course):

Well, he gave one possible answer - the oil companies. Apparently, according to Gore, the oil companies drive up prices reducing supply and then depress them in a telling pattern. As soon as the political will swells to a light boil, the companies reduce prices/increase supply. And we, really the pols that be, fall for it all the time and the political will it is vanquished

LOL.  Environmentalists have one card to play - its the oil companies fault! - and they are going to play it every chance they can.  Of course, the boom-bust patterns in oil are characteristic of nearly every other commodity out there, which therefore presupposes that if oil prices are the result of manipulation, then every other commodity must be as well since their prices demonstrate the same patterns.  We see these patterns in commodities that politicians have never even heard of and in which they have never thought to exercise their "political will."  (political will in this context defined as use of government force against a segment of the populace).

A reasonable person might suppose that the surge in prices followed by a drop a number of years later is better explained by the time delay in increasing oil production after oil prices spike. In many ways, Al's theory is simply delusional.  If your friend started trying to tell you, in all seriousness, that every action Microsoft takes is actually aimed at thwarting him personally, you would think him insane.  But this is effectively Gore's argument, showing the immensity of the politician's ego.  Oil prices move not because of supply and demand, but because of us politicians.  Every tick up and down is carefully managed to thwart us brave Congressmen!

I had a long post here on why conspiracy and manipulation can't possibly drive oil prices but for the shortest possible periods.

Update:  Here is my spreadsheet if anyone thinks I made an error in the numbs.  Download solar.xls

CO2 Suffocating the Environmental Movement

Bird Dog has a good post that follows up from mine on the CO2 obsession sucking the life out of more pressing environmental issues that are more amenable to being fixed.

Cost of CO2 Reductions

In this terrific little 7-minute video, Steven Hayward helps us understand just what a drastic task it will be to cut CO2 emisions by 80% in fifty years (the target advocated by many catastrophists and adopted by both Democratic candidates).  I don't think hanging out the laundry is going to be quite enough.  He makes the same point I made a while back, that this target implies a per capita CO2 emission level this country last experienced in 1875, and one that can only be found in the dirt poorest countries of the world.  (HT:  Tom Nelson)

Al Gore Saved Biofuels

The NY Sun writes:

Mr. Senauer said climate change advocates, such as Vice President Gore, need to distance themselves from ethanol to avoid tarnishing the effort against global warming. “Crop-based biofuels are not part of the solution. They, in fact, add to the problem. Whether Al Gore has caught up with that, somebody ought to ask him,” the professor said. “There are lots of solutions, real solutions to climate change. We need to get to those.”

But Al Gore brags about being biofuel's number one supporter, nay, their "savior:"

Vice-President Al Gore
Third Annual Farm Journal Conference, December 1, 1998
http://clinton3.nara.gov/WH/EOP/OVP/speeches/farmj.html

"I was also proud to stand up for the ethanol tax exemption when it was under attack in the Congress -- at one point, supplying a tie-breaking vote in the Senate to save it. The more we can make this home-grown fuel a successful, widely-used product, the better-off our farmers and our environment will be."

Is the Global Warming Hype Killing Environmentalism?

Cross posted from Coyote Blog:

Of late, I have been getting the strongest sense that the global warming hysteria is sucking all the oxygen out of the rest of the environmental movement.  Quick, what is the last environment-related article you read that didn't mention global warming?

Here is an example:  I give a lot of my charity money to groups like The Nature Conservancy, because I personally value preservation of unique areas and habitats and I don't sit around waiting for the government to do it for me.  But it has become almost impossible of late to drum up enthusiasm from contributors for such causes, unless the land can be labeled a carbon-sink or something.  In fact, the global warming hysteria has really been a disaster for private land conservation because it has caused politicians to subsidize ethanol.  This subsidy is bringing much more wild land into cultivation in this country and has been the single biggest driver for deforestation in the Amazon over the last decade. 

Or take China.  China's cities are an unhealthy mess.  But focus on global warming has led environmentalists to take the position with China they have to stop coal combustion and growth in auto-miles entirely.  This is a non-starter.  There is no WAY they are going to do this.  But it is much more achievable to start getting China focused on a Clean-Air-Act type of attack on vehicle and coal plant emissions of real pollutants like SO2.   China could be made much more healthy, as the US has done over the last 30-60 years, but instead of working with China to get healthier, the focus is on getting them to shut down their growth altogether.

The UPI published a survey of people's environmental priorities:

1. drinking water
2. pollution of rivers, lakes, and ecosystems
3. smog
4. forest preservation
5. acid rain
6. tropical rain forests
7. national parks
8. greenhouse emissions
9. ozone layer
10. nature around "my" home
11. urban sprawl
12. extinction.

I feel like #1 is overblown based on a lot of media scare stories, but most of the top 6 or 7 would all be things I would rank well above global warming fears as well.  There are still real issues to be dealt with in these areas which can have far more of a positive impact on health and quality of living than CO2 abatement, but they are being suffocated by global warming hype.

You Mean There is a Cost?

Via the Junk Science Blog:

EPA’s analysis of the Lieberman-Warner (LW) global warming bill is out — and it ain’t pretty.

EPA estimates that LW may reduce GDP by $2.9 trillion in 2050 while reducing atmospheric CO2 by around 25 ppm by 2095.

What a bargain — reduce GDP by an estimated 6.9 percent for no meaningful change in atmospheric CO2!

Warmer and Richer

It is finally good to see someone making this point:  That even if one accepts the worst of the IPCC scenarios (which I do not) the cost of CO2 abatement, particularly in terms of lost economic growth, is far higher than the cost of rising temperatures -- ESPECIALLY for the poor.

“The surprising conclusion using the Stern Review’s own estimates,” Dr. Goklany writes, “is that future generations will be better off in the richest but warmest” of the I.P.C.C.’s scenarios. He concludes that cutting emissions will do much less good than encouraging sustainable development in poor countries and policies of “focused adaptation” to deal with disease and environmental problems like coastal flooding. For a fifth the cost of the Kyoto Protocol, he calculates, these adaptation policies could yield more immediate and also long-term benefits than would a policy that entirely halted global warming (which would cost far, far more than Kyoto). He argues that this path isn’t merely an economic but also a moral imperative:

For the foreseeable future, people will be wealthier—and their well-being higher—than is the case for present generations both in the developed and developing worlds and with or without climate change. The well-being of future inhabitants in today’s developing world would exceed that of the inhabitants of today’s developed world under all but the poorest scenario. Future generations should, moreover, have greater access to human capital and technology to address whatever problems they might face, including climate change. Hence the argument that we should shift resources from dealing with the real and urgent problems confronting present generations to solving potential problems of tomorrow’s wealthier and better positioned generations is unpersuasive at best and verging on immoral at worst.

He also makes a point I have made for a long time -- that the case for strong abatement is more of an aesthetic choice than a practical one.  There are a core of people who don't like the fact, aesthetically, that man has somehow modified Gaia.

Here is a link to the report itself

I Don't Think it Mattered

A while back, the US Congress decided it was important to be seen as carbon neutral:

As government waste goes, $89,000 will barely register on the meter. However, it did provide a relatively inexpensive demonstration on the costliness of political fads and the vacuousness of carbon-offset markets…

In November, the Democratic-led House spent about $89,000 on so-called carbon offsets. This purchase was supposed to cancel out greenhouse-gas emissions from House buildings…

Some of the money went to farmers in North Dakota, for tilling practices that keep carbon buried in the soil … farmers were already doing this, for other reasons, before the House paid a cent.

Other funds went to Iowa, where a power plant had been temporarily rejiggered to burn more cleanly. But that test project had ended more than a year before the money arrived…

I don't think Congress cared one bit where the $89,000 was spent.  They were spending $89,000 for the tag "carbon neutral" -- for the name itself.  If the money was [quietly] dumped in a storm sewer or if it the sum had been broken down into $100 bills and used to light the after-dinner cigars at the latest Sierra Club meeting, it wouldn't matter to Congress one bit.  They were buying an $89,000 fig leaf.

The Technocratic Trap

Technocrats tend to hate and/or distrust bottom up economic solutions that result from a spontaneous order resulting from changing pricing signals and incentives.  As a result, technocrats in government tend to not only want a problem solved, but solved their way.  They get just as mad, or even more upset, at a problem solved by the market in a way in which the don't approve than they get from the problem going unsolved altogether.

TJIC brings us a great example of this technocratic trap as applied to CO2 abatement:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/article…

Greenhouse gas emissions from Northeast power plants were about 10 percent lower than predicted during the last two years…

But the decrease may have some unanticipated consequences for efforts to combat global warming: It could have the perverse effect of delaying more lasting reductions, by undercutting incentives intended to spur power plants to invest in cleaner technologies and energy efficiency…

I wonder if environmentalists are really as pathetic and perpetually grumpy as they always sound, or if that’s just some sort of kabuki political theater?

Massachusetts and nine other Northeast states are part of a landmark pact called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that is designed to cap power plant emissions in 2009 and then gradually reduce them by 10 percent over the next decade. Power plants will have to buy emission allowances…

But if emissions are significantly lower than the cap, there would be less demand for allowances, driving down their price and giving power plants little financial incentive to invest in cleaner and more efficient technologies…

It’s almost as if people are hung up on the means, and not the ends.

Oh noz, the industry has realized that the cheapest way (which is to say “the way that bes preserves living standards) to cut carbon emissions is to switch from coal to natural gas…which means that they’re not taking the more expensive way (which is to say “way that destroys living standards”) that we want them to. Boo hoo!

“If the cap is above what power plants are emitting, we won’t see any change in their behavior,” said Derek K. Murrow, director of policy analysis for Environment Northeast, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization. “They just continue business as usual.”

(a) Umm…you’ve already seen a change in their behavior

(b) what do you want? Lower carbon emissions, or to force them to use some pet technology?...

Officials of states involved in RGGI and energy specialists are discussing ways to ensure that allowances have enough value to spark investments in cleaner technologies.

Again, the insistence on technologies. Why?

One solution would be to lower the cap, but that’s likely to be politically difficult…

Laurie Burt, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, said she and other state officials are aware of the problem and discussing ways to solve it.

What problem?

Read it all.

Burying Trees

[Cross-posted from Coyote Blog]

A few weeks ago I argued that if we really thought that CO2 was the biggest threat to the environment (a proposition with which I do not agree) we should not recycle paper or Christmas trees - we should wrap them in Saran Wrap and bury them.  Earlier I wrote this:

Once trees hit their maturity, their growth slows and therefore the rate they sequester CO2 slows.  At this point, we need to be cutting more down, not less, and burying them in the ground, either as logs or paper or whatever.  Just growing forests is not enough, because old trees fall over and rot and give up their carbon as CO2.  We have to bury them.   Right?

I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek, trying to take CO2 abatement to its illogical extreme, but unfortunately the nuttiness of the environmental movement can outrun satire.  These folks advocate going into the forests and cutting down trees and burying them:

Here a carbon sequestration strategy is proposed in which certain dead or live trees are harvested via collection or selective cutting, then buried in trenches or stowed away in above-ground shelters. The largely anaerobic condition under a sufficiently thick layer of soil will prevent the decomposition of the buried wood. Because a large flux of CO2 is constantly being assimilated into the world as forests via photosynthesis, cutting off its return pathway to the atmosphere forms an effective carbon sink....

Based on data from North American logging industry, the cost for wood burial is estimated to be $14/tCO2 ($50/tC), lower than the typical cost for power plant CO2 capture with geological storage. The cost for carbon sequestration with wood burial is low because CO2 is removed from the atmosphere by the natural process of photosynthesis at little cost. The technique is low tech, distributed, easy to monitor, safe, and reversible, thus an attractive option for large-scale implementation in a world-wide carbon market

Its a little scary to me that I can anticipate this stuff.

Another Government Boondoggle

The NY Times has an interesting article on the government subsidized boondoggle to build a zero-emissions coal plant.  First, we see all the usual aspects of what happens when the government steps in to fund non-economic projects no private investor would touch:

But choosing the location was perhaps the least daunting step. The project, announced by President Bush in 2003, seems to be in perpetual creep mode. The budget, as Matt Wald wrote yesterday, has ballooned 50 percent (because of the worldwide shortage of basics like cement). The timetable has slid. Components are being shed. The portion of the eventual $1.8 billion cost paid by the government is shrinking.

Though I have never studies the numbers in depth, it has been my intuition (from years working as an engineer with power plants and oil refineries) that it will be almost impossible to make this technology economic.  Apparently, others agree:

There are plenty of experts who still doubt that capturing carbon dioxide and putting it in cold storage will ever work at a meaningful scale. Vaclav Smil at the University of Manitoba has calculated that capturing, compressing and storing just 10 percent of current CO2 emissions — here and now — would require as much pipeline and plant infrastructure as are now used worldwide to extract oil from the ground. And oil is a pricey commodity while carbon dioxide is a waste gas.

Handling and compressing gasses are a lot more difficult than liquids, and liquefying them may take almost as much energy as you get out of the combustion.  So, what does the government do if a technology is so uneconomic and unworkable that it can't even scrape up enough money to subsidize one plant?  Why, it mandates the technology:

Mr. Hawkins said adequate construction of CO2-trapping plants would happen more swiftly if a “performance standard” requiring this technology were added to climate legislation like the Warner-Lieberman bill being considered in the Senate. Such a provision would require new coal-plant construction to incorporate such systems and spread the cost over the economy so utilities aren’t hit too hard.

Such a mandate would effectively end the construction new coal plants, which may in fact be the motive of supporters. 

This is what happens when government tries to pick winning technologies.  If carbon combustion is really bad (a proposition with which I do not agree) then a carbon tax needs to be instituted, so that individuals can figure out on their own which carbon combustion is the most economic to eliminate and with what technologies.  If the government insists on picking winners with subsidized technology programs, then nuclear strikes me as much more fruitfull, as it is already proven and close to economic and investment can be concentrated on marginal problems like waste disposal, rather than fundamental problems like "will this approach even work."