Bill McKibben’s crazy logic: He says wind is cheap as coal. Jo Nova says “so who needs a carbon tax then?”
To which I say, fantastic. If wind power is as cheap as coal, we don’t need a carbon tax, emissions trading schemes, renewable targets, or other subsidies … people will use wind simply because it is cheaper. Alternatively, Bill is talking out of his hat.
Kill the schemes, cut the subsidies. Bring it on. I say!
More at JoNova
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I don’t think the logic here is well thought out:
Thank Global Warming For Softening The Blow Of Hurricane Sandy
Beyond the general hurricane trends, it is quite possible global warming had a very direct, beneficial impact on Hurricane Sandy. Scientists have documented that global warming has increased upper-atmospheric wind shear, which rips apart hurricanes before they can grow to major hurricanes.
That might be true when Sandy was over the tropical Atlantic, where the effect is documented, but in its post tropical stage, when most of the damage was done, it really didn’t have an effect. The “Fujiwhara effect,” probably had more to do with the damage path than anything. Watch this animation.
More at Chicago Tribune
Related: Atlantic Hurricane Season Quietest in 45 Years
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Taxpayer-Funded Solar Company Leaves Environmental, Financial Mess
By Paul Chesser, National Legal & Policy Center, 10/28/2013
It may be the height of irony that a company that was supposed to soar to the top of the new clean energy economy, with the help of U.S. taxpayers to undergird President Obama’s stimulus visions, has instead left both an environmental and financial mess after its demise.
Yet that’s exactly the case with miserable failure Abound Solar, which the president’s Department of Energy thought so much of, they awarded it a $400 million loan guarantee. That proposition quickly soured and the government halted payouts after about $70 million. The company went bankrupt in June 2012, leaving taxpayers out between $40 million and $60 million that was never recovered.
There was other collateral damage, not the least of which was a huge toxic mess from unused panels and abandoned chemicals at Abound’s former facilities.
Read the rest here: http://bit.ly/16h3ouz
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NOAA’s fmr. Jane Lubchenco: The climate change era is already upon us
We’re beyond debating the existence of climate change. Impacts we’re seeing now should compel us to reduce emissions further and start planning in earnest. It’s time to quit dithering.
Problem is, much of that is predicated on starting points from the urban polluted surface temperature record:
http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2013/10/opinion-lubchenco-lovejoy-climate-departures
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Shades of RGGI: US States & Canadian Province Sign Clean Energy Agreement
In an agreement announced Monday, the governors of California, Oregon, Washington and the environment minister of British Columbia, Mary Polak, will place a price on greenhouse gas pollution and mandate the use of cleaner-burning fuels.
– AP
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While the west wails about trying to control CO2, other parts of the world still have real problems. There is so much pollution in China and India that it is causing computer motherboards to fail due to corrosion.
Intel engineers spotted the problem a few years ago, when the company noticed an unusual number of customers from China and India returning computers with failed motherboards, the component that houses the microprocessor brains.
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2022132181_intelcorrosionxml.html
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Time to write more letters then, lest it become Dana 24/7:
BBC coverage criticised for favouring climate change sceptics
A letter from the BBC in response to the science committee’s criticism defends airing ‘misinformed’ arguments
More at the Grauniad
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NSIDC experiencing technical difficulties, please stand by:
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Tom Nelson writes:
I’m confused again: If the Arctic is at its warmest in 120k years, why the suggestion that 120 meters of Antarctic ice has built up over the last 1,000 years?
Antarctic drilling project to get to core issues of climate change
The team will drill three ice cores, one 400-metre core with data between 2000 and 3000 years old, and two 120-metre cores, which will cover atmospheric conditions over the past 1000 years.
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I don’t know about the rest of you, but one links side article was about Brittany Spears’ music used to repel pirates. Is there a musician I could play that would kept the rapid warmists at bay?
“rabid”
And another question to go along with Tom Nelson’s. If it is at its lowest, why is the historical evidence of farming in Greenland still under permafrost? did they possess a more advanced farming technique than known to man today?
Is there a musician I could play that would kept the rapid warmists at bay?
Ice T, LL Cooljay, Coolio? Trouble is they would drive me away!
Wull, ya see … the EVIL Kock Brothers and the Church of Big C are religiously devoted to burning fossil fuel, even when there is cost parity. Therefore, we need to subsidize the alternatives to level the playing field. / sarc
Typo Kock -> Koch (maybe a bit of a Freudian slip embedded in sarcasm as well … ).
Climate change is real!
Filed under no [foolin” Sherlock.
Hmmm….according to IJIS website, Arctic sea ice extent is ripping along! The latest value = 8,414,854 km2 (October 28, 2013) Maybe the folks at NSIDC don’t want us to see what’s going on up there?
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
see Our Hidden History of Corporations in the United States
There were 67 ice cores drilled in Antarctica just a year ago. I guess the problem is they didn’t find anything ususual.
http://www.the-cryosphere.net/7/303/2013/tc-7-303-2013.html
The danish are still measuring the Arctic ice. Follow http://www.dmi.dk/groenland/arktis/havisareal/
They also follow the mass balance of the Greenland ice core ‘Indlandsisens massebalance’.
“Beyond the general hurricane trends, it is quite possible global warming had a very direct, beneficial impact on Hurricane Sandy. Scientists have documented that global warming has increased upper-atmospheric wind shear, which rips apart hurricanes before they can grow to major hurricanes.”
So now that the observations clearly show few to no major hurricanes hitting landfall in the US for the last 8 years, and yet the AGW prediction was that major hurricanes would be more common, the warmists are reversing course midstream suggesting that global warming is possibly stopping major hurricanes from developing.
Should we really be surprised by such a reversal, since now that global cooling is beginning to set in, the warmists are blaming global warming on the increasing cold and snow?
What new reversals will pop up in the future in the CAGW camp?
You will always have that “Environmental, Financial Mess”
http://climal.com/resistance-climate-justice.php
McKibben the gift that keeps on giving. LOL,LOL,LOL
TImothy Sorenson says:
Is there a musician I could play that would kept the rapid warmists at bay?
“Rapid” or “rabid” makes little difference here. You would have to be “rabid” to believe that no warming over 15 years is “rapid” warming.
To encourage industry to invest in the infrastructure. McKibben is probably referring to running costs, not outlay. Energy producers are not going to switch fully to wind power when they already have an energy infrastructure (coal). If the outlay + running costs per annum becomes cheaper than coal, then companies might have a reason. But coal is cheap to run and the infrastructure is already there, so they’d need some kind of incentive. Like a carbon tax. Or, as Tony Abbott prefers, you give them money to do it.
Yup CRS, DrPH – I reckon the NSIDC are in tampering mode again 😉
Wall Street Journal: Oct. 30, 2013, Opinion
The Coming Carbon Asset Bubble
Fossil-fuel investments are destined to lose their economic value. Investors need to adjust now.
Al Gore And David Blood
This carbon bubble is not dependent upon a (failed) carbon trading market. Governments can cause the bubble to pop, much as ill conceived regulations on the mortgage markets popped the financial bubble.
I’d say regulation is shrinking the value of coal reserves beyond all reason right now. The EPA will continue down this road.
His second point is that renewable technologies will strand fossil fuel reserves. BS.
Gore’s third point exposes the flaw in his ruse
Just how long could that last when people get cold, hungry, or just impatient to get from here to there?
Cliff Robertson’s speech at the end of Three Days of the Condor (1975) is a fitting answer to Gore’s Foxy-Loxy tale.
Higgins: It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then? …Not now. THEN! Ask ’em when they’re running out. Ask ’em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask ’em when their engines stop. Ask ’em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask ’em. They’ll just want us to get it for ’em!
You know how a crack in a laminated windshield spreads after starting off from just a tiny chip, well ………….
Yeah, obviously they farmed moss !
barry:
Your post at October 29, 2013 at 6:42 pm displays a combination of economic illiteracy, ignorance of electricity grid supply systems, and lack of common sense.
It says
Industry would not need encouragement to invest in profitable enterprise.
The cost of an activity INCLUDES its infrastructure costs. Saying that it is profitable if you ignore costs of X, Y, … N is saying the activity is NOT profitable.
The major infrastructure of “coal” is its power stations. And they need replacement as and when they reach the end of their operating lives. So, if “wind is cheap as coal” it will replace coal as power stations reach the end of their operating lives unless coal has other benefits over wind.
And coal does have major benefit over wind: coal provides power when needed, but wind provides power when the weather allows. Therefore, thermal plant (e.g. coal) is needed to provide power when wind cannot. For this reason, wind has not displaced a thermal power station anywhere in the world and it cannot displace thermal power stations in the absence of a storage system for wind power.
So, wind is NOT as cheap as coal. And if wind were cheaper than coal then wind could not displace coal because coal provides back-up for when the wind fails to provide power. Wind only adds the cost of unnecessary and expensive additional infrastructure (i.e. wind power facilities) to the needed power supply from thermal (e.g. coal fired) power stations.
A more full explanation of this is at
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/courtney_2006_lecture.pdf
Richard
Barry:
My post addressed to you at October 30, 2013 at 3:28 am dealt with the existing situation and explained that wind cannot displace thermal power stations (e.g. coal).
I now write to add an historical point to aid your understanding.
Wind power was used for thousands of years. It was displaced by coal when the energy in coal became available as power by use of the steam engine.
The idea that wind power is as useful and economic as the use of coal is a claim that the steam engine is ‘future tech’.
Wind power now has useful small niches; e.g. to pump irrigation water at locations distant from a power supply. But the suggestion that wind is useful for large scale power supply is a denial that the industrial revolution required more energy and more reliable energy supply than wind can provide.
Richard
Richard,
Cost/benefit is time dependent. McKibben did not elucidate his commentary. What he did say (of which I am skeptical) is that wind power was as cheap – not cheaper – than coal.
If the outlay costs have been factored in McKibben’s comments (capital investment is 5 – 7 billion dollars to power 1 million homes in Australia), there is still no incentive to transition any faster than at the rate at which coal energy plants become inoperable or inefficient. You need incentive to transition faster. Like a carbon tax. Or government handouts taken from public taxes, which is the new policy Tony Abbott is lining up.
Who said coal should be completely phased out? Red herring. There are other energy sources (including existing fossil fuel sources) that can replace wind power if necessary. At present, wind power is displacing fossil fuels by a couple of percentage points in many countries, and by between 10 and 20% in a few.
Major fossil fuel companies (like Shell) already invest in wind farms. Clearly they think it is economically feasible. Incentive is designed to hasten an already existing trend. It’s not a black and white issue, despite much hype and propaganda. It’s important to read all sides.
@richardscourtney at 3:28 am
The major infrastructure of “coal” is its power stations.
Railroads is another major infrastructure. If the rails and rights of way didn’t exist, coal power would be prohibitively expensive. But they do exist. As a result, coal power is cheap and via reuse of capital assets, other long haul transporation in container cargo is keep inexpensive, too.
No single commodity is more important to America’s railroads than coal. Coal accounted for
41.0 percent of rail tonnage and 21.6 percent of rail gross revenue in 2012 — AAR: Railroads and Coal
Stephen Rasey:
At October 30, 2013 at 9:25 am you say
Indeed so, but I fail to see your point. Nobody is suggesting closure of the railroads. As you say, the use of the railroads for coal transportation maximises the utility of the railroads and the resulting improvement to their efficiency of use reduces other costs so provides a benefit.
Richard