Big differences seen compared to EIA estimate.
Documents (link to PDF) obtained from the U.S. Treasury under the Freedom of Information Act by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute were released on Tuesday.
The U.S. Treasury Department admits that a “cap and trade” system for regulating greenhouse gas emissions could cost every household $1,761 a year. According to the CBS News story, “the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent”.
This comes in way over claims that the EIA says:
The Climate Bill Will Cost You Just 23¢ a Day, EIA Analysis Shows. This works out to $83.95 per year. Big difference.
CEI Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell on the accumulating evidence on the costs of cap and trade:
“The bill’s proponents talk about protecting consumers while intermittently acknowledging that cap-and-trade can only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by dramatically raising the price of energy derived from coal, oil and natural gas.
President Obama said during the campaign last year that ‘under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.’ Dr. Peter Orszag, now head of the White House Office and Management and Budget, testified last year when he was head of the Congressional Budget Office that ‘price increases would be essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program.’”
Praying for failure of this concept.
Liars
do it for the children /sarc
In an inflation economy figures must be adjusted to it, and to the result it should be added the increase in heating costs of the current solar minimum.
Having worked in government – the higher estimate is probably closer to the truth. Government bookkeeping can almost give any answer the government wants by moving money/expenses sideways.
Ron de Haan (11:28:21) :
Liars
We, as “gammas”, can not address our “alpha” masters in such a terminology.:-)
Drink your “soma” and do not worry.
Keep in mind that while Joe Wilson was out of line and violated protocol, he was essentially correct. Verify everything.
Every day that the focus is on the cost of cap and trade the other titles of the bill giving government control of much of the economy go unnoticed. Even if the cost of cap and trade goes to zero there are many reasons to reject the bill.
Beware staring at the waving hand while the other hand grabs your freedom.
When does the revolution start? I need to stock up on “Caps”.
It would seem that they meant 23 cents per hour and not per day as a final cost.
If prices are going to be increased that much, who benefits. Obviously not the consumer. Government? Is there some sneaky way these dollars will find their way back to the treasury? Energy companies? Might that explain their recent conversion to believers?
Somebody stands to gain.
So the Treasury Dept. hid this knowledge until forced to release it under the Freedom of Information Act? I guess they expected it to be buried long enough to rush the bill though congress. Scum!
The Daily Mail was brave enough to report on the 9-12 patriots expressing their views.
Your Representative and Senators are eager to hear your enthusiasm for this new carbon “tax”. One letter is often considered the express the interests of 10,000 silent citizens! Furthermore, President Obama is committed to creating the most open and accessible administration in American history.”
Is anyone really surprised?
Usual obfuscation where the end results always justifies the means.
Insane. I hope that Canada does not fall for this scam. I will continue to vote against any federal and provincial party thinking about introducing cap and trade. My taxes are high enough already.
Cap and Trade is one of the cornerstones of the administration’s plan to “change” the country. This not very subtle tax on everything and everyone is the perfect vehicle for sucking vast revenue into the federal till for subsequent redistribution along whatever lines the Washington loons decide is “best” for us while maintaining, with a straight face, that taxes will not be raised for anyone making less than $250,000. Global warming abatement is simply the “excuse”.
It is vital to the health of the population of the world that carbon traders not go broke. We must make a new class of “green” billionaires so that we may create a class of guilt-free “good” rich to replace the “bad” rich.
My question is, to what extent will the general population of Ethiopia be participating in the carbon trading market?
It was rather hard to accept “electricity rates would skyrocket” costing only 23 or 42 or whatever cents per day. Looking at previous government estimates of costs – Medicare costs about 10x predictions after inflation – I expect the $1761 is on the light side. With all the new things we are promised that won’t cost much, and my doubtful status as a bailout recipient, I’m a bit concerned about paying for all of it.
At least someone in D.C. admits it might cost more.
The real problem with this scheme is – who decides what the “cap” should be? Where does the number come from? Is this number derived, ultimately, from the AOGCMs and opinions of people like Jim Hansen? If that is the case, it is the most egregious tax scam our country has ever witnessed…
Oh well, I’m sure the AGW lobby and its friends in government will use our tax money to keep themselves well funded with worthless climate science “projects” and redundant climate “products”.
Can it really be that rational beings are a Senate vote away from the proposition that higher taxes lower an entire plantet’s tempurature?
Call me crazy but that sounds like a Monty Python skit.
Dead Parrot anyone?
Seems like chicken-feed compared to trillions in mandated health insurance premiums going to the insurance companies, the trillion dollar cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars, and a 12 trillion dollar bail out of the banks.
The Climate Bill Will Cost You Just 23¢ a Day
No one believes the 23¢ a day bs.
Many “fixes” attempted via government fail because the initial “good idea” runs into political reality and human nature. If cap and tax is going to work it will have to cost enough to make a difference. Companies will have to pass the costs along to customers and the customers will have to notice that they are paying more – enough more that they will turn out the lights or drive less or whatever. And government will have to restrict substitution. Thus, an import made in another country can’t be allowed to serve the purpose of a new higher priced widget made in America. Tariffs will follow cap and tax. There is the saying “that you can’t do just one thing.” It fits.
As currently designed this idea is designed to raise revenue for a larger government intrusion into our lives. There isn’t a chance it will affect Earth’s climate.
Estimating the cost of emissions reductions is no mean feat.
In general, the constant is the household budget constraint, not the cost of the energy. Therefore, if electricity prices rise, consumption tends to fall and the monthly bill tends to remain broadly constant. Best I can tell from visual inspection, power consumption falls in line with increased prices; thus, a 20% decrease in consumption results from a 20% increase in price (but no, I haven’t run any formal numbers).
By this rule, a 20% consumption reduction would cost about $250 / household / year. However, household income can be forecast to rise about 2% per year over the period, so the cost of the reduction might be twice that for a static exercise, that is, a 20% reduction would cost $500 / household, a 10% reduction $250. Maybe. And keep in mind that much of the adjustment will come from lower consumption, of which a portion will represent reduced welfare–something that is hard to measure.
For oil, we saw last year that a doubling of the oil price resulted in a 10% drop in oil consumption, that is, this can be achieved with a price increase of about $1.50/gallon, or about $1,500 per year for a household with two vehicles.
Allow about another $1,000 for heating oil / gas.
So, by 2020, a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions might therefore cost a typical household about $3,000, if we include the indirect costs of goods and services which depend on oil and power for manufacture or transportation. Based on current incomes, an estimate of $1700 might not be too bad, but it will be about twice that by 2020.
So what do we get for this? This would reduce US CO2 emissions by about 500 mt/year. The increase in China’s CO2 emissions in the next ten months will be about 500 mt / year.
So, if such a program were fully implemented today, a $1,700 annual cost to the typical household would reduce global CO2 emissions for about 10 months, after which emissions would be higher than they are today.
AGW should mean “Apportion Global Wealth.” I’ve read many UN and environmental documents that call for the rich nations to pay hundreds of billions of dollars per year to developing countries and LDCs so that these countries can build infrastructure and live a more modern lifestyle.
The equivalent to the cost of a postage stamp per day. Those were Obama’s exact words. Either he was lying, or there’s a big hike in postage costs in the pipeline!
Even radical warmist James Hansen believes this bill is a Turkey. Wrote and phoned my NH rep Carol Shea-Porter and Senator Jean Shaheen about this bill in August to no avail, total DNC puppets.
Since, from what I could tell, the $1761 per family only accounts for increased taxes and direct energy costs, the real cost will undoubtedly be very much higher. As we experienced last summer and also back in the 70s when energy costs are raised dramatically there is an inflationary ripple effect throughout the economy and the price of virtually everything goes up as well. If history is any kind of indicator, you can probably at least double the figure they’re admitting to, and there is a good chance even that number will be lower than the real value.
“ We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
I ask you: How does Cap and Trade align with the above?
It’s all about ‘carbon taxes’ it never was about anything else. Does anybody think that any of the bills do anything to actually reduce CO2 in the atmosphere, even if it needs reducing?
What if atmospheric trace gas CO2, the stuff of life on earth, is at levels which are now too low. Has anybody thought of that?
Harry Reid is getting cold feet, due to the fact that it looks like he’s going to lose his Senate race in 14 months.
Here’s a surprise for those overseas who may not watch the US political system too closely – I’m betting that the Senate never bothers to even put together a bill that they can vote on. Too contentious, too dangerous for too many Senator’s re-election chances.
And the best part is that if US efforts fall apart, (they will) then everyone else in the world who’s facing hard choices will take that as a cue and their efforts will fall apart too.
Copenhagen could easily turn out to be a sad joke – tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
The stated objective of Cap & Trade is to reduce CO2 emissions by replacing power stations fueled by coal, oil, or natural gas with “renewable energy” (nominally windmills or solar panels of one kind or another.) To emphasize this, during the past year Obama has said he would bankrupt coal companies, and J. Hansen told Congress the CEO’s of coal and oil companies should by indicted for crimes against humanity. Pretty strong language when half our electricity is from coal-fired power plants! So why aren’t answers to the following obvious questions being asked by the public:
Where will the needed power come from at night or when the wind stops, since there are no batteries yet available of the tremendous size needed to fill in during the outage hours?
What happens when an array of solar cells in the southwest dessert is struck by lightning in the summer or covered by snow in the winter?
How far is it practical to send AC power over transmission lines before “IR losses” become prohibitive? (Is it practical to send it from the southwest to the northeast?) What about the environmental impact to prairie dogs, jackrabbits, coyotes, and other denizens of the dessert when many square miles of land are covered with solar panels, DC to AC converters, and high voltage equipment; and to birds and bats when thousands of windmills are placed on mountains? And of course, the bottom line question: even if you are an AGW type, what good would it do to burden the US with such costs when India and China have already indicated they won’t? I smell money and extreme corruption behind all of this. Just as town meetings and tea parties have come on the scene in response to unanswered questions on health care, I expect similar revulsion of the public when the details are known about the impact of the Waxman-Markey bill.
Well look on the bright side. If people see their taxes or fuel costs going up then maybe they won’t vote for politicians who support cap and trade. In fact if they see their taxes go up $1761 per year maybe they’ll run their politicians out of town on a rail.
You are in troubles…seems you sought for them.
Snake oil salesman: Here’s your snake oil. That’ll be $1,761 please.
Average Joe: But I didn’t order any snake oil.
Salesman: Doesn’t matter. Your guvment, in its infinite wisdom ordered it, and now you have to pay for it, but don’t worry: we can do it on the installment plan. How does $4.82 a day sound?
Average Joe: Since I don’t want it, it sounds like highway robbery. Heads are gonna roll.
Salesman: Yes yes, but by then it’ll be too late. Hahaha. Pay up.
My personal feeling is that this number is still much too low. Remember Obama wants to use the revenue from cap ‘n’ trade to subsidize energy costs for the poor, invest in green technologies and fund his Health Care reform. $1761 is not near enough.
And, cap and trade is such a complicated beast that the government can tweak things to adjust revenue and the average Joe will not recognize it as a tax adjustment. Obama promised a transparent administration. This is about the least transparent means imaginable of funding government programs.
Waxman-Markey sets a cap at 2005 emissions levels and posits a reduction of ~2% per year from that cap through 2050.
The elephant in the room is not the direct taxes or fees, but rather the investment which would be required to actually reduce US carbon emissions by ~2% per year. I have estimated that investment at ~$700 billiion per year through the period. Assuming that the investors who provide the capital would expect a return of ~10% on that investment, the ROI alone would be ~$70 billion in year one and would grow by ~$70 billion each year, adjusted for depreciation of the relatively long lived assets. That suggests that energy costs, direct and indirect, would increase by ~$600 per household per year over the period. That piece of the puzzle gets us to $1761 per household within ~3 years, with no end in sight.
The above assumes that the requisite technology is actually commercially available at approximately the projected costs. That is a huge assumption.
U.S. Treasury: The Costs of Cap and Trade, $1761 per year per household.
And of course, $1,761/year is only for starters; it’s the base line from which C&T taxes will inexorably ratchet up year after year. All it takes is a simple majority vote.
So to paraphrase Joe Wilson: They lie!
‘price increases would be essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program’
This would be crazy in a time of recession.
Tomlama,
I donno. Sounds to me like it needs more cowbell…
Mike
Nogw (11:51:48) : Drink your “soma” and do not worry.
And don’t forget your hypnopedia! You can find it on ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, planet green, PBS, RealClimate, and in An Inconvenient Truth. 😉
simply an attempt to Cap our liberty and Trade our freedom
Can’t we all just get along? 😉
Europe has clashed with the US Obama administration over climate change… key differences have emerged between the US and Europe…The treaty will be negotiated in December at a UN meeting in Copenhagen and is widely billed as the last chance to save the planet…News of the split comes amid mounting concern that the Copenhagen talks will not make the necessary progress…Ban Ki-moon….said the leaders held in their hands “the future of this entire humanity”. …..yawn ;-)…..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/15/europe-us-copenhagen
wws (13:43:04) : Harry Reid is getting cold feet, due to the fact that it looks like he’s going to lose his Senate race in 14 months….I’m betting that the Senate never bothers to even put together a bill that they can vote on. Too contentious, too dangerous for too many Senator’s re-election chances
It could be too late for Harry Reid anyway. A recent poll showed that 46% of people think that you could put your finger randomly in a phone book and come up with 535 people that could do a better job than the ones in the House and Senate now.
It’s all about the redistribution of poverty because redistribution of wealth never succeeded. 🙂
Everybody will be green/yellow of hunger/cold. Got it take pictures of that event!
Nogw (13:56:18) : I don’t think that many of sought these troubles . Unfortunately , most of the people in the US have the victims of misinformation . If they “sought” troubles , it was through apathy and/or the idea that it wouldn’t really happen .
Michael J. Bentley (14:23:13) : Sounds to me like it needs more cowbell
QOTW! 😉
In Australia at the last election the then opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, was quoted on the media saying that cost to the public for his proposed ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) would ‘only be a dollar a day’. Subsequent costs from analysts have been suggesting closer to $3,000 per annum and of course now Prime Minister Rudd will not commit to any figures. Hopefully our legislation will fail again. An expensive solution to a problem that can’t be properly defined.
Tom_R (12:31:44) : wrote:
[So the Treasury Dept. hid this knowledge until forced to release it under the Freedom of Information Act? I guess they expected it to be buried long enough to rush the bill though congress. Scum!]
I have read through the pdf report FOIA. There is no smoking gun in there. It only mentions about a 200 billion cost.
The interesting part is what is not being talked about in the benefits of the climate bill.
The NYU study finds that finds that the benefits outweigh the costs by 9:1 .
Based on a middle-of-the road estimate, potential benefits add up to about $1.5 trillion over the next 40 years.
Conservative attacks on the high costs of a clean energy bill are off-base. Analyses of Waxman-Markey consistently show modest costs.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that on average, consumers will face the cost of about the same as a postage stamp per day.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates even lower average costs between $98 and $140 from 2010 through 2050.
The Energy Information Administration predicts families could spend up to $114 annually by 2020, or less than $10 per month per household.
Low-income consumers would receive $40 per year in 2020.
This $1761 doesn’t include the cost of loss of jobs from the hit to the GDP because of monies redirected out of the GDP to those “necessarily skyrocket”-ing energy costs.
If ‘pro’ and ‘con’ are opposites are ‘progress’ and ‘Congress’ opposites ?
Jeff Green (14:48:42) Based on a middle-of-the road estimate, potential benefits add up to about $1.5 trillion over the next 40 year
Al Gore has already benefited to the tune of $100 million. Truly, Al Gore came to do good, and he has done quite well. 😉
“If prices are going to be increased that much, who benefits. Obviously not the consumer. Government? ”
If you create a market where you can basically sell air, there will be some people speculating on it’s price. Most of them will be working for the banks. Of course we cannot blame them for using the opportunity, in my opinion it might be a great short-term investment occasion. In the long term though it (the whole green bubble) might create a bigger crisis than the one we just have witnessed and again people will blame capitalism. Encouraging or forcing people to use ineffective technologies might be a far worse idea than giving credits to people who cannot pay them back.
Jeff Green (14:55:13); (14:48:42),
Quoting EPA estimates is ridiculous. EPA employees from top to bottom will personally benefit financially from passage of C&T. Therefore their opinions can not be trusted.
Let’s listen to someone who doesn’t have a vested interest requiring them to lie about the costs:
Obviously, what is needed is to make marriage mandatory at age 21. Fewer households needing to pay.
Jeff Green wrote (14:55:13):
“The NYU study finds that finds that the benefits outweigh the costs by 9:1 .
Based on a middle-of-the road estimate, potential benefits add up to about $1.5 trillion over the next 40 years.”
OK, but you forgot to mention that the Moon really IS made of cheese.
Jeff Green, [snip] I will not even respond. It is a waste of time talking to you. I have seen your posts on other threads, and cannot stomach discussing anything with someone of your deluded viewpoint. Everyone has experienced the imbecilic nature of government, be they Dems or Repubs. What we are told and what it ends up being are so distant, it is hard for a normal person to fathom. Take the worst case scenario and double or triple it, and you may come close to what it is actually going to cost us. Cap and Trade on its own may be $1761 per year, but the cost transfered to the consumer by EVERY BUSINESS OUT THERE will result in the destruction of every family middle class and below. So much for doing it for the children. That should stymie population growth and go along way to reducing it dramatically. But that is the goal of people like Jeff Green, isn’t it Jeff? Benefits outweigh the costs 9:1 . [snip].
Harold Blue Tooth (14:55:30) :
This $1761 doesn’t include the cost of loss of jobs …
You beat me to it. As an economist, I have no doubt this number is too low. Way, too, low.
Jeff Green (14:55:13) :
http://climateprogres.org/2009/09/16/cbs%e2%80%99s-declan-mccullagh-promotes-another-false-cei-attack-on-clean-energy-reform/#more-11422
Conservative attacks on the high costs of a clean energy bill are off-base. Analyses of Waxman-Markey consistently show modest costs.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that on average, consumers will face the cost of about the same as a postage stamp per day. Then it has no hope of doing what it is supposed to do. So it should fail for that reason.
TANSTAAFL!
It is nothing short of surreal listening to hysterical pleadings of AGW cultists over how they must save planet Earth an illusory warming boogeyman for the sake of future generations, yet they have absolutely no problem condemning those future generations to toil under mountains of debt and massive government programs which they never would have had a chance to have their political voice heard on.
How can one group of people be so selfish yet so self-hating at the exact same time? THAT is a far greater mystery than the climate.
Harold Blue Tooth (14:22:30) :
‘price increases would be essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program’
“This would be crazy in a time of recession.”
Harold,
It is crazy at any time.
And so called GHGs will not decrease one iota. Most likely will increase.
davidgmills (13:08:39) :
Seems like chicken-feed compared to trillions in mandated health insurance premiums going to the insurance companies, the trillion dollar cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars, and a 12 trillion dollar bail out of the banks.
It starts as chickenfeed and it ends as the biggest balloon in the history of mankind.
Simply say No to the madness.
Kath, Canada has already fallen for this scheme or been pushed into it. I really can’t figure if politicians who know nothing of science believe this, believe the voters do or if they just can’t resist a good tax. The Liberals will put in a cabon tax and the Cons are looking at a cap and trade. Either way, I am out of here. This country is too cold to live in without heat.
This is the first year I have seen the hummingbirds leave on Sept 11th, normally the end of Sept and the geese leave on Sept 15th, normally Oct. Do they know something we do not?
In the words of a yoga classmate of mine “They keep talking about global warming but it keeps getting colder”
Ed Reid (14:18:40) :
Waxman-Markey sets a cap at 2005 emissions levels and posits a reduction of ~2% per year from that cap through 2050.
The elephant in the room is not the direct taxes or fees, but rather the investment which would be required to actually reduce US carbon emissions by ~2% per year. I have estimated that investment at ~$700 billiion per year through the period. Assuming that the investors who provide the capital would expect a return of ~10% on that investment, the ROI alone would be ~$70 billion in year one and would grow by ~$70 billion each year, adjusted for depreciation of the relatively long lived assets. That suggests that energy costs, direct and indirect, would increase by ~$600 per household per year over the period. That piece of the puzzle gets us to $1761 per household within ~3 years, with no end in sight.
The above assumes that the requisite technology is actually commercially available at approximately the projected costs. That is a huge assumption”.
Ed,
It’s nothing more but a big scam and it will destroy our economy, our middle class and send us back to the times where we used whale oil for lightning.
The third world will face mass famine and starvation.
That’s the scheme.
Jeff Green (14:48:42) :
I have read through the pdf report FOIA. There is no smoking gun in there. It only mentions about a 200 billion cost
Back when the nuns were trying to teach me arithmetic 200 billion divided by 300 million came out to about 667, which depending on what you use for average household size would seem to make even the $1761 figure an underestimate. On top of that we have the entire history of proposed government programs in which the benefits have always been overestimated and mostly illusory, while the cost estimates have nearly always been low by at least an order of magnitude and when the costs have eventuated they have always been very real.
Smokey (15:09:48) :
Jeff Green (14:55:13); (14:48:42),
[Quoting EPA estimates is ridiculous. EPA employees from top to bottom will personally benefit financially from passage of C&T. Therefore their opinions can not be trusted.
Let’s listen to someone who doesn’t have a vested interest requiring them to lie about the costs:
Whatever the costs, we will get almost nothing in exchange. According to climatologist Chip Knappenberger, Waxman-Markey would moderate temperatures by only hundredths of a degree in 2050 and no more than two-tenths of a degree at the end of the century. This doesn’t sound like a great deal for the next generation—millions of lost jobs, trillions of lost income, 50-90 percent higher energy prices, stunning increases in the national debt, and all for undetectable changes in world temperature. [source]]
The old can’t trust government routine. Business as usual will give us an increase of about 5 to 6 degrees average temp by 2100. At that temp its a disaster in the waiing. And the climatologist is correct on that matter. And that would be a big time win believe it or not. There is a long hauyl getting out of this.
One thing not being discussed on this forum is the benefits of the American Energy and Security act. The savings to the economy are 9 times the investment by 2050
Dave Wendt (15:40:11) :
[Jeff Green (14:48:42) :
I have read through the pdf report FOIA. There is no smoking gun in there. It only mentions about a 200 billion cost
Back when the nuns were trying to teach me arithmetic 200 billion divided by 300 million came out to about 667, which depending on what you use for average household size would seem to make even the $1761 figure an underestimate.]
Part of this money is for a middle class tax break.
http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=20447,00.html
Maurice Garoutte (11:59:40) : “Beware staring at the waving hand while the other hand grabs your freedom.”
Meanwhile, the Media keep us responsibly and accurately informed: Hey, everybody, did you hear Michael Jackson died? [waving hands]
Obama lied.
[Clarity2009 (15:23:12) :
It is nothing short of surreal listening to hysterical pleadings of AGW cultists over how they must save planet Earth an illusory warming boogeyman for the sake of future generations, yet they have absolutely no problem condemning those future generations to toil under mountains of debt and massive government programs which they never would have had a chance to have their political voice heard on.
How can one group of people be so selfish yet so self-hating at the exact same time? THAT is a far greater mystery than the climate]
Ahhh yes there is conspracy in the air. Not. Its investing in our country to save money down the road. We will be able to have a more stable energy economy. Reducing our dependence on foreign oil brings the several hundred billion dollars per year back home.
Jeff Green actually believes that if C&T is not passed, the planet will heat up by “5 to 6 degrees average temperature by 2100.” That’s in only nine decades. And he makes that preposterous claim as global temperatures are in decline.
In the novel 1984, Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, wonders if the State might declare that “two plus two equals five” as a fact; he ponders whether, if everybody believes it, does that make it true?
Apparently Green doesn’t even need “everybody” to believe his nonsense; he’s enough of a believer by himself.
Orwell also said: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.” Jeff is strong in that regard.
Jeff Green (15:45:42) :
Gosh. A middle class tax break. Where have we heard that promise before?
[David Ball (15:25:12) :
And so called GHGs will not decrease one iota. Most likely will increase]
James Hansen has done a model of the recovery time it would take for co2 to return to safer levels. There will not be imediate results. We will depend on the earth’s ability to reabsorb the co2 from the atmosphere.
How can one group of people be so selfish yet so self-hating at the exact same time? THAT is a far greater mystery than the climate
Easy: They received “funding” at the same time.
[Smokey (15:54:10) :
Jeff Green actually believes that if C&T is not passed, the planet will heat up by “5 to 6 degrees average temperature by 2100.” That’s in only nine decades. And he makes that preposterous claim as global temperatures are in decline.]
When you get a better understanding of the science you will get it. Co2 has not magically stopped its work because you say so. Its just physics.
[David Ball (15:20:40) :
Jeff Green, [snip] I will not even respond. It is a waste of time talking to you. I have seen your posts on other threads, and cannot stomach discussing anything with someone of your deluded viewpoint. Everyone has experienced the imbecilic nature of government, be they Dems or Repubs. What we are told and what it ends up being are so distant, it is hard for a normal person to fathom. Take the worst case scenario and double or triple it, and you may come close to what it is actually going to cost us. Cap and Trade on its own may be $1761 per year, but the cost transfered to the consumer by EVERY BUSINESS OUT THERE will result in the destruction of every family middle class and below. So much for doing it for the children. That should stymie population growth and go along way to reducing it dramatically. But that is the goal of people like Jeff Green, isn’t it Jeff? Benefits outweigh the costs 9:1 . [snip].]
As much as you don’t want to hear it, government is the only answer.
You did a really great rant. Have a nice day.
Too bad we can’t make the following deal:
We pay the 23 cents per day. And that’s it. Not one cent more. Ever. After all, that’s all he says we’ll need.
Problem solved.
Carbon cap-&-trade scheme is the greatest Potemkin village construction project that mankind has ever undertaken. All peasants, line up for your shovels!
NickB (15:15:42) :
OK, but you forgot to mention that the Moon really IS made of cheese
All we need is a second moon made of crackers.
Here’s an excerpt from a speech Michael Crichton gave in 2005. I believe that the logic behind it is relevant to the discussion of the costs of addressing AGW. Full speech and powerpoint is available here: http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-ourenvironmentalfuture.html
“Last, I want you to think about what it means to say that we are going to act now to address something 100 years from now. People say this with confidence; we hear that the people of the future will condemn us if we don’t act. But is that true?
We’re at the start of the 21st century, looking ahead. We’re just like someone in 1900, thinking about the year 2000. Could someone in 1900 have helped us?
Here is Teddy Roosevelt, a major environmental figure from 1900. These are some of the words that he does not know the meaning of:
airport
antibiotic
antibody
antenna
computer
continental drift
tectonic plates
zipper
nylon
radio
television
robot
video
virus
gene
proton
neutron
atomic structure
quark
atomic bomb
nuclear energy
ecosystem
jumpsuits
fingerprints
step aerobics
12-step
jet stream
shell shock
shock wave
radio wave
microwave
tidal wave
tsunami
IUD
DVD
MP3
MRI
HIV
SUV
VHS
VAT
whiplash
wind tunnel
carpal tunnel
fiber optics
direct dialing
dish antennas
gorilla
corneal transplant
liver transplant
heart transplant
liposuction
transduction
maser
taser
laser
acrylic
penicillin
Internet
interferon
nylon
rayon
leisure suit
leotard
lap dancing
laparoscopy
arthroscopy
gene therapy
bipolar
moonwalk
spot welding
heat-seeking
Prozac
sunscreen
urban legends
rollover minutes
Given all those changes, is there anything Teddy could have done in 1900 to help us? And aren’t we in his position right now, with regard to 2100?
Think how incredibly the world has changed in 100 years. It will change vastly more in the next century. A hundred years ago there were no airplanes and almost no cars. Do you really believe that 100 years from now we will still be burning fossil fuels and driving around in cars and airplanes?
The idea of spending trillions on the future is only sensible if you totally lack any historical sense, and any imagination about the future.
– – – – –
Finally, and most important—we can’t predict the future, but we can know the present. In the time we have been talking, 2,000 people have died in the third world. A child is orphaned by AIDS every 7 seconds. Fifty people die of waterborne disease every minute. This does not have to happen. We allow it.
What is wrong with us that we ignore this human misery and focus on events a hundred years from now? What must we do to awaken this phenomenally rich, spoiled and self-centered society to the issues of the wider world? The global crisis is not 100 years from now—it is right now. We should be addressing it. But we are not. Instead, we cling to the reactionary and antihuman doctrines of outdated environmentalism and turn our backs to the cries of the dying and the starving and the diseased of our shared world.”
[Nogw (14:44:55) :
It’s all about the redistribution of poverty because redistribution of wealth never succeeded. 🙂
Everybody will be green/yellow of hunger/cold. Got it take pictures of that event!]
I believe the wealth will redistribute from fossil fuels to clean energy. Its come at a time when its needed the most
Jeff Green,
You are hitting the nail on the head. We need to pass cap and trade without delay, and make an investment in our new green future.
You and I are on the same wavelength.
Sorry such a short post, but I have to go now. I’m late for my thorazine and electroshock therapy.
” government is the only answer.”
Your mindlessness is frightening.
Jeff Green,
You show amazing persistence , however, all of you claims rest on two large assumptions.
First, you assume that CO2 sensitivity is as large as Hansen and others claim. The problem with this assumption is there is no way to measure what the CO2 sensitivity is today because there is no way to conduct a controlled experiment that eliminates all other possible explanations. This means there is a significant non-zero probability that there is no problem that needs solving – a probability that is supported by the recent trends in temperature data.
Second, you assume that it is technically possible to use non-emitting energy sources while enjoying a standard of living comparable to what we have today. I have seen no credible evidence that this is the case which means it does not make a difference what the science says because we don’t have any economic alternatives.
Eventually politicians will realize that adaptation is the only option and the only question is how much damage will be done to the economy before politicians realize that mandating CO2 reductions is a futile exercise.
Ed Reid (14:18:40) :
[Waxman-Markey sets a cap at 2005 emissions levels and posits a reduction of ~2% per year from that cap through 2050.
The elephant in the room is not the direct taxes or fees, but rather the investment which would be required to actually reduce US carbon emissions by ~2% per year. I have estimated that investment at ~$700 billiion per year through the period. Assuming that the investors who provide the capital would expect a return of ~10% on that investment, the ROI alone would be ~$70 billion in year one and would grow by ~$70 billion each year, adjusted for depreciation of the relatively long lived assets. That suggests that energy costs, direct and indirect, would increase by ~$600 per household per year over the period. That piece of the puzzle gets us to $1761 per household within ~3 years, with no end in sight.
The above assumes that the requisite technology is actually commercially available at approximately the projected costs. That is a huge assumption.]
Solar thermal is viable today and has room to save money on construction through future R&D.
Plug-In cars are becoming viable. With manufacturing experience many of the costs will come down with time and experience.
There is enough of either solar or wind by themselves to completely sustain all our energy needs.
Smart Grid is being developed now. Again that is just a matter of time. It will be good to go from the dumb grid to the smart grid.
Smart Grid will help take care the intermittency of both solar and wind.
Utility scale energy storage is viable today. This is one of the keys to 80% clean energy by 2050.
[Clarity2009 (15:23:12) :
It is nothing short of surreal listening to hysterical pleadings of AGW cultists over how they must save planet Earth an illusory warming boogeyman for the sake of future generations, yet they have absolutely no problem condemning those future generations to toil under mountains of debt and massive government programs which they never would have had a chance to have their political voice heard on.
How can one group of people be so selfish yet so self-hating at the exact same time? THAT is a far greater mystery than the climate.]
Soooooo I’m just this cartoon and not a real person? Economists have added up the dollars and cents of acting now or acting later.
Acting now is about .1 to .5% of GDP
Acting later is about 20% of GDP
Jeff Green: If the middle class will get a tax break out of this, what incentive will that group have for cutting their energy consumption, and therefore emissions? There is also reportedly a provision in Waxman-Markey that allows the administration to change targets more or less at will. If that’s true (and I do not have the time to read 1,000 pages or more and still get work done, plus spend time with my family, which equals 1 wife and 2 children BTW) then the sky is the limit. Of course, even if they say there will be a tax break, that’s only promises which politicians seem to love to break.
“Government is the only answer…” Really! Try out Cuba or Venezuela for a few years and and report back then on how wonderful it is there. I’d like the US to remain a true democracy.
EPA’s own analysis presented to Congress illustrated no realistic effect. I also agree that the Treasury and EPA analyses will not consider what we can expect to be impacts on the production of all other goods and services. The Treasury analysis provides some lip service to this in their FOIA’d document under “Competitiveness.” How they plan to provide for protection of “energy intensives” sectors is, of course, missing.
If the real intend behind the concept of “spreading the wealth” is to lift the third world out of poverty, we would provide developing countries with a grid based on modern coal plants and offer them free trade agreements.
I believe that we only need about 8% of the current development budgets paid by the West to the UN and the Non Governmental Organizations, currently promoting medieval agriculture and health care without operating rooms in the third world, to make this happen.
Providing the Third World with a grid really would make a significant impact on their lives and the local environment and it would, without any doubt, lift them out of poverty.
They would have light to study, electricity to drive pumps for clean water and create an acceptable standard of living.
Our current schemes are aimed to deny the third world access to cheap energy for years to come, reduce their populations and steel their resources.
That’s why those countries are ruled by corrupt leaders and corrupt administrations.
Replacing our carbon fueled power generation by solar, wind and bio fuels is impossible and therefore unrealistic. Besides that, it is a terrible waste of capital because it took us decades to build the magnificent infrastructure.
The same goes for the option of battery propelled vehicles.
It’s nice on the Golf Yard but it’s not a realistic replacement of a gasoline or diesel propelled car. At least for now.
New technologies should compete with old technologies and the consumer should decide what to buy. Not a Governmental bunch of hooligans dictating us what to do.
Besides that, those countries that installed 20% of their energy needs with wind energy did not reduce their use of carbon fuels (Spain and Denmark and Germany)
This is because the wind technology simply does not deliver.
Germany today is building 23 new coal plants in order to remain compatible for the future. This is necessary because Germany depends largely on exports
This is a carbon driven world and we thank our prosperity to cheap carbon energy and that won’t change for a long time to come.
For those who believe we are out of coal, out of oil and out of gas soon, they are wrong.
Current inventories will last for the next 200 years and the application of new energy saving technologies could extend the period of time to 400 years, which leaves us with sufficient time to develop real alternatives.
For all those defending the Waxman Bill and the schemes behind it, I would like to say that they are defending a truly devious scheme that will seriously harm the USA,
our people and our interests without solving any problem.
The entire concept of green clean renewable energy is a pipe dream and we currently do not have an alternative for coal, oil and gas.
Carbon fuels are not only essential for the production of electricity and to propel our distribution system, it’s also the basis for numerous products we need in our daily lives, from plastics to fibers and an endless list of chemicals we need to fertilize our crops and produce medicine, just to mention some of the applications.
Windmills and solar panels simply don’t deliver the energy we need to develop our societies to make the next jump an bring our civilization to a higher level.
Sending our society back to the level of the Medieval Ages is no solution and it is not necessary.
CO2 is not a climate driver and therefore there is no need to reduce emissions.
I am glad to live in the modern times and I cherish my freedom.
I would like to keep it that way.
There is noting wrong with our climate and only the fact that the greens promote the opposite opinion should make us very careful.
I regard the Green Doctrine as big threat to all we stand for.
Those who defend it should keep in mind that the consequences of the Green Schemes will be harmful them too.
If you don’t believe me, start reading:
http://green-agenda.com
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
Harold Blue Tooth (14:22:30) :
[‘price increases would be essential to the success of a cap-and-trade program’
This would be crazy in a time of recession]
Provided no stupid business people sink us again this doesn’t take place until 2012. We will be recovering resonably well by then.
Retired BChe (13:44:01) :
[The stated objective of Cap & Trade is to reduce CO2 emissions by replacing power stations fueled by coal, oil, or natural gas with “renewable energy” (nominally windmills or solar panels of one kind or another.) To emphasize this, during the past year Obama has said he would bankrupt coal companies, and J. Hansen told Congress the CEO’s of coal and oil companies should by indicted for crimes against humanity. Pretty strong language when half our electricity is from coal-fired power plants! So why aren’t answers to the following obvious questions being asked by the public:
Where will the needed power come from at night or when the wind stops, since there are no batteries yet available of the tremendous size needed to fill in during the outage hours?
What happens when an array of solar cells in the southwest dessert is struck by lightning in the summer or covered by snow in the winter?
How far is it practical to send AC power over transmission lines before “IR losses” become prohibitive? (Is it practical to send it from the southwest to the northeast?) What about the environmental impact to prairie dogs, jackrabbits, coyotes, and other denizens of the dessert when many square miles of land are covered with solar panels, DC to AC converters, and high voltage equipment; and to birds and bats when thousands of windmills are placed on mountains? And of course, the bottom line question: even if you are an AGW type, what good would it do to burden the US with such costs when India and China have already indicated they won’t? I smell money and extreme corruption behind all of this. Just as town meetings and tea parties have come on the scene in response to unanswered questions on health care, I expect similar revulsion of the public when the details are known about the impact of the Waxman-Markey bill.]
The plans are there and it will work. Denmark is at 20% now. Spain and Portugal are both very aggressive in bringing more wind and solar on now.
Smart grid will bring on an efficiency of about 16% helping to require less power generation. Iwth investment in energy efficiency in regular society another 20% can be saved. With plug in hybrids reach into the millions the smart grid can tap into their battery banks for utility storage.
Jeff Green (16:01:13) says:
“When you get a better understanding of the science you will get it.”
Ah. So that is how Green explains the details of Cap & Trade? No wonder the alarmist crowd can’t get anything right, whether it’s sea levels, drowning polar bears, computer models, global sea ice extent, the ozone hole, glaciers, ocean acidification, runaway global warming, hurricanes, etc., etc.
Every alarmist prediction has been wrong. Their CO2=AGW conjecture fails. Despite that list of uninterrupted failures, Green is now preposterously claiming that the government will come in well under its C&T budget!
We’ll see how that one works out.
And as soon as it is passed, they will suddenly say “It’s going to cost far more than we had predicted”. Please report to the burlap & sackcloth centers, where all your possessions will be confiscated. After that, you will receive a number, your ration card, and the work camp you will be assigned to.
astateofdenmark (12:31:23) : If prices are going to be increased that much, who benefits.
Companies that build infrastructure and produce electric generation equipment. GE stock was up 6 1/4% today. Think about it… If you shut down the coal plants you must build??? GE makes gas turbines, windmills, nuclear stuff, etc. etc. etc.
Government? Is there some sneaky way these dollars will find their way back to the treasury?
Well, start with the “campaign contributions” of corporations. Then proceed to the taxes paid, the “projects” approved in particular districts, Oh, and don’t forget the PERCENTAGE taxes on your utility bills…
Energy companies? Might that explain their recent conversion to believers?
The typical conversion happens right after they are told they will have to produce less with less expenditure of money on costs but must charge more for the product to discourage consumption … Can you say “Margin Expansion?”…
Dave Wendt (13:29:58) : Since, from what I could tell, the $1761 per family only accounts for increased taxes and direct energy costs, the real cost will undoubtedly be very much higher.
Oh Yeah. We have several $Trillions of dollars invested in existing infrastructure (such as coal power plants, coal mines, etc. along with things like Diesel trains, trucks, gas stations, etc.). ALL of it will need to be replaced with “something else” to have a “green” solution. $2k is barely the down payment on the increase in the taxes. Just wait till the capital build out begins… You are all, 100% ready to buy a brand new Government Motors Electric Car at about $30,000 to $40,000 each are you not? (That is about 1/2 the price of the present electric on the market – the Tesla.)
As we experienced last summer and also back in the 70s when energy costs are raised dramatically there is an inflationary ripple effect throughout the economy and the price of virtually everything goes up as well. If history is any kind of indicator, you can probably at least double the figure they’re admitting to, and there is a good chance even that number will be lower than the real value.
“That Number” is so way low that it is a joke. Look at California. We had a minor FUBAR with electric pricing and market structure and it darned near destroyed the state. Rolling blackouts. Industry abandoning the place. This gimmick will make Enron look like Boy Scouts. Picture the Grey Out of California, but add to it the demolition of the generation capacity and buying inferior replacements that cost more and doing it on the credit card funded by the Chinese. (And yes, the replacements will be economically inferior since they are not presently economically competitive, by definition.)
Retired BChe (13:44:01) : The stated objective of Cap & Trade is to reduce CO2 emissions by replacing power stations fueled by coal, oil, or natural gas with “renewable energy” (nominally windmills or solar panels of one kind or another.)
BINGO! And it that capital stock rollover that is being ignored. Putting it on the credit card (via Chinese funded treasury bonds) does not make it go away and does not make it free.
Nearly 100% of our transportation runs on oil products. To reduce that consumption means to replace that stock of capital goods. The entire ‘fleet’ of cars, trucks, train engines (and in many cases, track with electrification), ships, etc. One sticky little problem is airplanes. They don’t work so well on heavy electric motors…
Where will the needed power come from at night or when the wind stops, since there are no batteries yet available of the tremendous size needed to fill in during the outage hours?
Most likely, natural gas peaking plant using GE gas turbines. At least for the first decade or so.
How far is it practical to send AC power over transmission lines before “IR losses” become prohibitive? (Is it practical to send it from the southwest to the northeast?)
Quite far, actually, but at a price. See the pacific interchange that runs from Washington state to Los Angeles, for example. Very high volts DC. There are also superconducting power transmission lines now. Who wins? The companies that build those. To the tune of several hundreds of billions over time.
what good would it do to burden the US with such costs when India and China have already indicated they won’t?
Well, my India and Chinese holdings will go up 😉 And my Brazil too… If you can’t beat ’em, at least exploit ’em 8-}
I smell money
Me too! The risk is that the bill does not get passed and the trade collapses, but until that is the case, look to the OOTUS trade (Out Of The US) as the place to be. And “multinational” infrastructure companies.
Ed Reid (14:18:40) : Waxman-Markey sets a cap at 2005 emissions levels and posits a reduction of ~2% per year from that cap through 2050.
The elephant in the room is not the direct taxes or fees, but rather the investment which would be required to actually reduce US carbon emissions by ~2% per year. I have estimated that investment at ~$700 billiion per year through the period.
Spot on! Though I think you are low on the costs. Remember that you also must replace all the vehicle “fleet” and all the fueling infrastructure (gas stations, oil refineries, fuel barges, tank farms…)
That piece of the puzzle gets us to $1761 per household within ~3 years, with no end in sight.
Um, I think we need to START at $2k or so per household as the starting figure, then add your “per year” on top of that… plus the hidden costs and the costs of economic collapse as things move to India, China, and Brazil.
The above assumes that the requisite technology is actually commercially available at approximately the projected costs. That is a huge assumption.
There are lots of available uneconomic technologies just waiting for coal to be made twice as expensive. But that’s the problem, you must have about double the electric bill just to replace the coal fuel then you also need to add amortization of all the new facilities and decommissioning of all the old facilities (you didn’t expect a regulated industry to just eat the cost of that decommissioning did you? The “expected lifetime” is built into the rate structure. If that 50 year coal plant gets shut down in 30 years instead, then the other 20 years of ‘amortization’ will get ‘charged off’ onto your power bill…)
The true costs of Cap and Tirade are so horrific that it is absolutely doomed. The only real question is how much damage will be done to the structure of the U.S. economy before we chuck it and try to recover. If the coal plant is mothballed, it can be restarted. If it is demolished, so are we…
FWIW, I hold stock positions in China, Chinese land, a synthetic fuels company building facilities in China, Indian mutual funds and Indian vehicle makers. Oh, and a bunch in Brazilian energy companies and broad Brazil funds. I am positioning to make money off this absurdity, but would rather be doing something else instead… Maybe I can’t leave the country due to family and home, but my money can (and in large part, already has.)
I’m presently looking at international infrastructure companies, but it looks like I was a bit late for the GE pop. AMSC American Superconductor has been ripping upwards, but I didn’t have any of it, either. Worth watching, though.
Ron de Haan (16:58:24) wrote;
The entire concept of green clean renewable energy is a pipe dream and we currently do not have an alternative for coal, oil and gas.
I have read about plans proposed to replace coal with natural gas. This would cut the co2 emissions in half from those plants. It would be cheaper, quicker and we would meet our 2020 emission goals. Natural gas would be a transition fuel until we get our renewable infrastructure in place.
Someone could possibly pay an additional $1761 tax in a year – assuming that they still have a job…
In Germany, VW has developed a home generator that runs on natural gas and operates at an incredible efficiency of 92%, fueled by natural gas.
The generator provides heating and electricity.
Families can buy the Generator for 5000 Euro.
The generator is operated via a wireless connection and it kicks in if the grid is in need for additional power.
Like the solar panel schemes people are paid a fixed price per Kw for energy delivered to the grid.
The Government expects the system to be used to stabilize the net from fluctuations caused by wind energy.
VW is expected to build 100.000 generators short term.
What’s interesting about this concept is the fact that no power plants are needed.
This could be a very interesting option even for remote locations without or with an unreliable grid because the engine could also run on LPG, gasoline or replaced by a diesel with similar efficiency rates.
http://www.gizmag.com/vw-enters-the-home-power-market/12842/
Jeff Green
Does one of those stupid business people employ you? Cap and Tax will cripple business. The major offset will be to export jobs from U.S. business to off shore business. This will have a direct effect on your job as well as every other employer and every employee. If you are so lucky to have inherited wealth it will still have an effect on you. This effort by the government reminds me of Don Quixote but instead of windmills they are tilting with the sun! At least the good Don was not trying to control peoples lives or take their monies. Hopefully this effort will fail before it is enacted.
Jeff Green (15:45:42) :
Part of this money is for a middle class tax break.
http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=204447,00.html
They also plan to let the Bush tax cuts lapse at the end of the year, which will mean permanent tax increases larger than the temporary cut provided in the Stimulapalooza
Jeff Green (15:51:35) :
Its investing in our country to save money down the road. We will be able to have a more stable energy economy. Reducing our dependence on foreign oil brings the several hundred billion dollars per year back home.
Attempting to force the economy toward extremely inefficient, exorbitantly expensive, and highly ineffective alternative energy sources will accomplish nothing for our energy situation other than dramatically inflating the cost.
Jeff Green (15:57:08) :
James Hansen has done a model of the recovery time it would take for co2 to return to safer levels. There will not be imediate results. We will depend on the earth’s ability to reabsorb the co2 from the atmosphere
Citing Mr. Hansen as a scientific source is not a really effective type of argumentation.
Jeff Green (16:01:13) :
When you get a better understanding of the science you will get it. Co2 has not magically stopped its work because you say so. Its just physics.
Before arguing against some thing magically stopping you may want to suggest some evidence that it ever actually started. The behavior of CO2 in an isolated laboratory situation may be well understood, but it’s action in the complex environment of the climate is mostly the subject of lively speculation.
Jeff Green (16:09:53) :
As much as you don’t want to hear it, government is the only answer.
Yeah but, what was the question?
Smokey (17:11:18) :
Jeff Green (16:01:13) says:
[“When you get a better understanding of the science you will get it.”
Ah. So that is how Green explains the details of Cap & Trade? No wonder the alarmist crowd can’t get anything right, whether it’s sea levels, drowning polar bears, computer models, global sea ice extent, the ozone hole, glaciers, ocean acidification, runaway global warming, hurricanes, etc., etc.
Every alarmist prediction has been wrong. Their CO2=AGW conjecture fails. Despite that list of uninterrupted failures, Green is now preposterously claiming that the government will come in under its C&T budget!
We’ll see how that one works out]
There are people on this thread that understand what I am saying. Your world view gets in the way of even understanding the data. Right now the artic is experiencing warmer average temperatures more so than the rest of the world.
The process of polar amplification is in full force now.
James Hansen predicted that with a simpler computer model than they have today back in 1988. He is the winner of being right.
Jeff Green (17:10:13) could not sound any more clueless than in that post. And that’s saying something!
The U.S. produces well under 2% of its energy with non-traditional sources like wind power. Those alternate sources are hugely expensive. They would not exist if it were not for their heavy taxpayer subsidies; they are mostly sold as tax shelters.
And the always-hypocritical greens would have a conniption fit if hawks and eagles were being sliced and diced every day by normal power plants: click.
But since the eagles, bats and hawks are killed every day to serve the Leftist agenda of super expensive watermelon energy, it’s A-OK with the economically illiterate green simpletons to kill as many raptors as necessary to sell their failed schemes. After all, they’re just expendable birds.
Regarding Arctic sea ice: another epic FAIL by the greenies. Why? Because they’re deliberately ignoring the Southern Hemisphere: click. See, global sea ice is above average and increasing. But some folks insist on remaining clueless.
@John M (15:55:49) :
“Jeff Green (15:45:42) :
Part of this money is for a middle class tax break.
Gosh. A middle class tax break. Where have we heard that promise before?”
Yup. I’m middle class and if I get one more tax break, I’ll be broke.
I’m almost, almost with evanmjones except, like a postage stamp, it’ll be 23 cents, then 25 cents, then 32 cents…
I say no! Give them no quarter!
Jeff Green (14:55:13) : Conservative attacks on the high costs of a clean energy bill are off-base. Analyses of Waxman-Markey consistently show modest costs.
I don’t know what analysis you are reading, or what part you are highlighting of any analysis.
It has nothing to do with conservative politics. That is only the spin being put on it.
It is about findings of studies.
These are the results of an analysis of Waxman–Markey by the eia/ DOE (U.S. Department of Energy) that was requested by Waxman and Markey themselves.
From the “Executive Summary” :
ACESA (i.e., Waxman-Markey bill) increases the cost of using energy, which reduces real economic output, reduces purchasing power, and lowers aggregate demand for goods and services. … Total discounted GDP losses over the 2012 to 2030 time period are $566 billion… in the ACESA Basic Case…. from $432 billion… to $1,897 billion… across the main ACESA cases…
The hit to the GDP is estimated up to $1.9 trillion. This will equate to job loses and keeping the economy in a recession and likely pushing it into a depression.
Cap N Trade is a nightmare. Let’s not go in to that nightmare.
Link to the eia/ DOE report :
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/hr2454/index.html?featureclicked=2&
Link to page where quote is from, in the “Executive Summary” :
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/hr2454/execsummary.html
Harold Blue Tooth (14:44:32) : A recent poll showed that 46% of people think that you could put your finger randomly in a phone book and come up with 535 people that could do a better job than the ones in the House and Senate now.
Oddly enough, the ancient Greeks had a system like that. 500 random folks were rounded up to run the place and set the agenda for making the laws.. Worked pretty well, too.
http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/07/athenian_democracy.html
Jeff Green (17:10:13) :
….
The plans are there and it will work. Denmark is at 20% now. Spain and Portugal are both very aggressive in bringing more wind and solar on now.
You’re dreaming.
Denmark is selling it’s own prosperity to it’s neighbours in return for reliable Hydro, Nuclear and Coal Power. REF1: http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2009/09/14/something-rotten-obama-says-danes-receive-20-of-their-power-via-wind-new-study-tells-the-real-story/
Spain killed 2.2 real jobs for every 1 (lower paying, and transient) green job that it created, it now has severe unemployment. REF2: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a2PHwqAs7BS0
Current Spanish unemployment is above 17%.
It’s cheap energy that underpins prosperity, (+ Intellectual Capital, Property Rights, Individual Liberty and the Rule of Law… ).
Windmills slaughter birds. REF3: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574376543308399048.html
DDT was (wrongfully) banned for less – where are all the environmentalists screaming for windmills to be banned to save the birds, bats, and other wildlife from being slaughtered by these useless money sucking machines.
Jeff Green (17:28:35) : James Hansen predicted that with a simpler computer model than they have today back in 1988.
When you talk like this Jeff you show everyone that you chose to ignore what is happening in the real world.
James Hansen’s predictions from 1988 are wrong.
Also, have you checked what is happening with Arctic ice?
Sit down first before opening the link :
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover.uk.php
Jeff Green-
While you obviously hold your ideas firmly, you are showing manifold signs of extreme naivete. Just out of curiosity, do you have any post-secondary education in any of the sciences?
IanM
Has anyone done an in-depth anaylsis of how we got to this stage? From climate change policy (I believe) as far back as Maggie Thatcher’s era and perhaps before? About the indoctrination of the youth with “Inconvenient Truth” videos and the like in more recent years?
I think it would make a fascinating documentary to track the “science”. It takes a lot of cumulative mis-education to get to this stage. It must have been a generational concerted effort. Or was it something that got triggered by a confluence of more recent events? I imagine the former… these things, like claims in some shampoo ads, don’t happen overnight.
As for my neck of the woods (Australia) where they are trying to push through an ETS, I am sure these US Treasury estimates may make good ammunition for the opposition, if they have the huevos to run with it. Problem is that the leader of the conservative party (Liberal compared to US politics) is also soft on climate change.
“crosspatch (12:54:03) :
My question is, to what extent will the general population of Ethiopia be participating in the carbon trading market?”
Their gummint has already made food more expensive, as well as everything else, has banned the use of charcoal (That’s like banning teff FFS), so yeah, they are participating.
And we will soon find out that the real costs are even higher than Treasury bureaucrats estimated (they DO tend to be conservative you know).
Jeff Green (15:51:35) : Its investing in our country to save money down the road. We will be able to have a more stable energy economy. Reducing our dependence on foreign oil brings the several hundred billion dollars per year back home.
FANTASY, sheer self delusion. Vehicles run on oil, electricity is made from coal. We are the “Saudi Arabia” of coal. NOT using our major domestic energy source can not in any way reduce imports. Eliminate 100% of coal usage and it will do NOTHING to oil usage. They go into different machinery.
OIL will only be reduced by replacing the vehicle fleet (since that is where the oil is used). That task will take at a minimum a decade and more likely two and cost $ Trillions. Just take the cost of the fleet (no, ALL of it, including train engines and garbage trucks and ships at sea…) and divide by the population of the country (yes, people pay for things, directly or indirectly, it all comes from a person in the end). THAT is the cost of replacing oil. Well, not quite all of it. You also have to amortize the remaining life of all the oil infrastructure that gets removed before it’s time (think pipelines, oil refineries, fuel trucks, gas stations) and ADD all the costs for whatever new infrastructure is needed. (No, there is not enough infrastructure in the grid “as is” to charge all our cars, even if we had electric cars. It is sized for what we do now.)
The best way to “replace oil” is with coal to oil conversion. It works today. It can use the existing oil infrastructure and the present vehicle fleet. It is cost effective with oil at $70+ as it is today. It does not require ‘fleet replacement’ and it uses a domestic energy supply that we have in abundance. CTL Coal To Liquids and GTL Gas To Liquids can give us energy independence in about 5 years of construction time and at reasonable costs.
It is forbidden by the “Coal Is Evil” mantra. You can speculate as to why…
(Hint: How much does Saudi Arabia contribute to various political campaigns via it’s holding companies?… What would it be worth to guarantee a decade or two of continued OPEC oil demand? )
Smokey (17:11:18) :
Jeff Green (16:01:13) says:
[“When you get a better understanding of the science you will get it.”
Ah. So that is how Green explains the details of Cap & Trade? No wonder the alarmist crowd can’t get anything right, whether it’s sea levels, drowning polar bears, computer models, global sea ice extent, the ozone hole, glaciers, ocean acidification, runaway global warming, hurricanes, etc., etc.
Every alarmist prediction has been wrong. Their CO2=AGW conjecture fails. Despite that list of uninterrupted failures, Green is now preposterously claiming that the government will come in under its C&T budget!
We’ll see how that one works out]
http://www.noanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090916_globalstats.html
NOAA has declared warmest sea temps warmest ever for summer and august.
Water has a higher thermal mass than land. This will bring temperatures higher and the global cooling argument will cool off. The future data will just not bear out your distorted argument until the next La Nina
There are people on this thread that understand what I am saying. Your world view gets in the way of even understanding the data. Right now the artic is experiencing warmer average temperatures more so than the rest of the world.
The process of polar amplification is in full force now.
James Hansen predicted that with a simpler computer model than they have today back in 1988. He is the winner of being right.
peer (15:05:25) : “If prices are going to be increased that much, who benefits. Obviously not the consumer. Government? ” If you create a market where you can basically sell air, there will be some people speculating on it’s price
This is a nice video showing what happens in a commodity market gone wild. This is what could happen in a carbon credit commodity market, and likely what those behind the scenes are hoping for :
Rolling Stone: The Great American Bubble Machine (in 5 parts)
Folks, we should not pick on Jeff Green.
Yes, I disagree with him on just about everything (particularly on his cost analysis a la the Stern Review), but nonetheless he deserves common courtesy.
Who knows, maybe he will pick up a few pieces of data that will make him think twice. We mustn’t jump all over new arrivals who do not agree with the skeptical majority here. Yeah, it’s tempting, on account of how we skeptics get jumped all over elsewhere, but we need to transcend all that.
We want to argue the facts of the matter to the best of our knowledge and ability. And do not forget that with the science so poorly understood, all sorts of climate surprises could well be just around the corner. Any scientific pov must be theoretically falsifiable, and that applies to both sides.
Jeff Green (16:09:53) : As much as you don’t want to hear it, government is the only answer.
I agree. But you must bear in mind that the question was: “How can you really screw up a functioning economy?”
Jeff Green (17:10:13) :
James Hansen is an irrelevant person Jeff. Why do you keep talking about him?
IanM (17:42:04) :
Jeff Green-
[While you obviously hold your ideas firmly, you are showing manifold signs of extreme naivete. Just out of curiosity, do you have any post-secondary education in any of the sciences?]
IanM
I have a BSEET. I have been studying climate for about 2 years now.
@ Jeff Green: From up thread you said: “As much as you don’t want to hear it, government is the only answer.”
Question: What form of government are you referring to? Be specific, please.
Jeff Green (17:28:35) :
The process of polar amplification is in full force now.
Near as I can tell the last decade, which has been marked by the largest increases in open water in the summer Arctic, has also been characterized by flat to declining global temps. I’ve got to get me some of those polar amplifiers to hand out to the bozos who are always driving thru my neighborhood at 2 AM with their hip hop blasting.
You really need to pick up the level of your game, otherwise the only ones who’ll appreciate your appearances here will be Flanagan and his broheims, since you’ll make even their lame efforts look positively brilliant.
Gene Nemetz (18:14:19) :
Jeff Green (17:10:13) :
[James Hansen is an irrelevant person Jeff. Why do you keep talking about him?]
James Hansen won the prize. Observations of the climate were very close to what his paper was back in 1988. There are 1000s of scientists studying the climate in the world. Of the people studying climate very few doubt AGW foundation. Even Richard Lindzen’s negative feedback postions are going down the tubes. That’s why its called an unfortunate truth. LOL
Jeff Green (17:10:13) :
There is enough oil in Alaska to bring gas down to $1.00 dollar a gallon in the US. This is what needs to take place.
China is building a new coal powered electricity plant at the pace of 1 every 2 weeks. The US needs to match and exceed that kind of aggression .
These are the only solutions that make sense Jeff. It would be a terrible shame to waste our resources–both natural and human!
Come back to the real world.
America must once again become the greatest Nation in the world. We are well capable of it—and it would be fun to do it again!!!
Gene Nemetz (18:09:52), interesting post, thanx for sharing.
Jeff Green (18:23:25):
“James Hansen won the prize.”
Which prize? Specifically.
All this for no measurable effect on climate…
Take a look at the Obama ‘proposed budget’ overview at:
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy10/browse.html
Indicates a proposed increase of the deficit by about $6.9 Trillion between 2010 and 2019. Also shows a revenue stream from ‘climate revenues’ of about $646 Billion. That starts in 2012, so not sure how it relates to Waxman-Markey, unless that is when the actual taxing begins… Anyway, at least $79 Billion a year starting in 2012, wonder who is actually going to pay that? If you divide that by the tax paying population of the US, about 138 Million (from wiki answers, so…), you can see that the Obama administration expects to garner about $572 per tax payer from ‘climate income’ per year.
Over at CP Jeff Green says:
September 16, 2009 at 6:53 pm
I have been on the WUWT website talking to deniers. Its a hoot. All they have is their own stories and no data.
Over here Jeff Green (14:48:42) says: The NYU study finds that finds that the benefits outweigh the costs by 9:1 .
Yet he gives no data or link backing his claim. How he measures the benefits and what the benefits are is not known.
And his claim of a six degree rise in global temperatures by 2100 should be filed away with this years hurricane forecast. Even with the warmest ocean temperatures ever recorded in the history of mankind, the hurricanes aren’t buying it.
Jeff Green (16:31:36) :
Its come at a time when its needed the most
It didn´t and it is not needed at all..unless you want to kill birds with windmills or spreading snow or bs with the same!
It´s really so funny!..so you are one of those who were really absolutely cheated and didn´t realize it yet.
Do you know tham I am a third world foreigner who has nothing to gain or lose in this issue, but who is watching how the first country of the world is becoming the last one. Do you know that the USA has lost its 1st.place as the most competitive economy?,etc,etc.
I have witnessed in my life the fall of the soviet union and now….come on, wake up!, you are becoming a banana republic!
Dave Wendt (18:18:22) :
Jeff Green (17:28:35) :
The process of polar amplification is in full force now.
[Near as I can tell the last decade, which has been marked by the largest increases in open water in the summer Arctic, has also been characterized by flat to declining global temps. ]
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090916_globalstats.html
This is a weak to moderate El Nino and yet we have the warmest average ocean temps ever. This is a strong sign of things to come.
We all come from different places and I enjoy a good talk with people who have a different point of view than I do.
Within the natural variation there is the AGW signal. The 10 warmest years have been since 1998.
Jeff Green (16:40:59) : Solar thermal is viable today and has room to save money on construction through future R&D.
Jeff, I agree that there are lots and lots of viable alternatives if the price is high enough and the time to convert long enough:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
What your posting shows is that you do not see those two dimensions of the problem. Time and money.
IF the AGW thesis plays out as you say, we don’t have time for “future R&D” to lower costs. If it does not play out as you say, then we don’t need to trash our economy in order to save it…
Plug-In cars are becoming viable. With manufacturing experience many of the costs will come down with time and experience.
Yes, and this is EXACTLY why your solution will not work. The lead time to convert the fleet is over a decade and near 20 years. That is outside the time you allow. The costs are presently astounding. Do the math…
We can not produce enough Copper each year to build all the electric cars in less than 20 years. Trying to do so will increase the cost of copper so much that your price will rocket, not drop. Ditto windmills and powerlines. Oh, and did you know there are TWO places that mine lithium for batteries? And it is hard pressed to keep up with laptop demand?
Smart Grid is being developed now. Again that is just a matter of time. It will be good to go from the dumb grid to the smart grid.
And just how does a “smart grid” make all the electricity? Re-arranging the deck chairs does not keep the ship afloat. Take the coal out, the “smart grid” will have nothing to redistribute. Oh, and you do realize that it will take a decade or two to ‘replace the grid’?
Smart Grid will help take care the intermittency of both solar and wind.
Only if it has some OTHER source of power to redistribute. Will that be coal? Natural Gas? Nuclear? If so, when will you be building that added capacity?
Utility scale energy storage is viable today. This is one of the keys to 80% clean energy by 2050.
Not that I’ve seen, other than a couple of small scale pumped water storage systems. And there are not very many convenient lake sized mountain tops in the country…
Oh, and you have allowed for the 20% or more energy loss in storage have you not? You will need to have a lot more generating capacity to allow for the losses in storage. Electricity is not efficiently stored and recovered…
I suspect that you have very limited technical skills. Ask a power engineer about these things before you believe you know about them.
(FWIW I have managed multi-million dollar construction projects and done long lead time build outs. One included a 750 kVA power feed. The normal lead time for the single transformer alone is 2 years. Now multiply that by millions of them suddenly desired…)
What?? It’s warmer on average in the Arctic (you forgot a “c”), than the rest of the world?? What you’re saying is if the average temperature in, say, Seattle is 66f, then it’s higher than 66f all throughout the Arctic? Surely you jest.
gtrip (18:28:39),
Thanx for pointing out that Jeff Green is boosting the hits at WUWT. Twenty million hits, comin’ up!
Now that ‘Jeff Green’ is a self-admitted Troll, it’s best to not respond to his deliberate scientific illiteracy — as tempting as that is [and I should know].
[And a message to the odious “tamino”, who desperately reads each and every WUWT post: how does it feel to be a loser, loserboi? You’re behind this, ain’tcha? heh]
Jeff Green, man up, and admit your diaphanous theory is wrong. Hate to take all the meaning out of your life, but Co2 does not drive climate change. I have lived off the grid and can build a sod hut. What are you gonna do? Let’s both go camping for a year, and we’ll see how you make out. My guess is that it wouldn’t turn out so good for you (and most “greenies). Be careful what you wish upon humanity. As soon as “crap and enslave” starts hitting “Joe Average” in the pocketbook hard, you and the hockey team ( and any who pushed for it) should have to answer to all of us.
Jeff Green (16:48:40) : Economists have added up the dollars and cents of acting now or acting later.
Acting now is about .1 to .5% of GDP
Acting later is about 20% of GDP
I’m an Economist (degree from U.California) and I say your numbers are a load of cow pies. This is a case of “What number do you want me to make up?”, not reality.
There is no cost of “acting later” since there is no action needed. Someone made up a number and you believe it.
You also have no time interval on your numbers. 20% over how many years? Starting and ending when? Your dimensionless numbers are meaningless and useless.
Message to Obama: “You Lie!”
Whoops, there I went and done it, now I will get spankings by Pelosi in front of Congress. Yikes!
Folks, NOTHING IN, NOTHING OUT … UNTIL WE RID OUR COUNTRY OF THIS CORRUPTION!!!
We are making a mistake using trillions to describe items like the GNP, federal deficit, and cost of cap and trade. The better way to express one trillion is one thousand million, or even better one hundred thousand million. Most people have no concept of the enormity of one trillion. Its continued use for fiscal and economic matters quickly immunizes the public in the same way continued repetition of the big lie will lead to it becoming the truth.
To put C&T (Emissions Trading Scheme) in perspective, consider it to be an excise tax of 15% to 20% upon every level of commerce starting with extraction of crude oil, natural gas, coal, and minerals, the cost refining or processing into fuels and elements, the cost to build facilities for and to produce energy, the costs of manufacturing and distribution of all products including transportation through all stages to the ultimate consumer, the costs of transportation by carriers of goods and persons including all personal uses, all service business revenues, the value of all retail transactions, and the value of all goods and services that are purchased or consumed by individuals. The taxes imposed at every level of extraction, manufacture, transportation, distribution, and retailing will be passed on to consumers.
The various government and liberal leaning organizations’ estimates of C&T costs and impacts vary from wishful thinking to spin to outright false misrepresentations. They are entitled to the about same credibility as GISS and NOAA weather and climate data and model projections.
C&T will bankrupt the US regardless of what if anything is done to reform health care. Taxing our energy will destroy our economy and export millions of jobs to China, India and Brazil where they will continue to use low cost fossil fuels to produce cheap energy until future technological advances provide cheaper sources regardless of the consequences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansen,_James
Notable awards
United States National Academy of Sciences,
Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal
Smokey (18:26:42) :
Jeff Green (18:23:25):
“James Hansen won the prize.”
Which prize? Specifically
Stern is the one with the 20% number. But his projections for future consumption growth are ‘way, ‘way too low.
He proposes spending 1% of GWP (1.8% by the developed countries) per year. That’d be around half of world growth in a good year. (And this ain’t no good year.) Compound that loss and it’ll cost us one heck of a lot more than 20% of GWP per year by 2100!
Lomborg, OTOH, suggests spending 0.05% on research and mitigation, which makes a lot more sense and is far more affordable, though not what one would call “cheap”. (L. also ran the cost-benefit analysis for other ways to spend the money proposed for AGW. Bottom line, you could spend that dough and save many, many millions of lives HERE AND NOW.)
Relax everybody! The world of the future has all the answers: clicky.
Smokey (18:39:25) :
Actually Smokey, I am sure that Jeff Green loves it here. At least he gets some responses that the moderators allow. Over at CP they get about 6 comments per article, unless of course they mention Palin, Fox News, or Big Bad Oil, etc. I find it amusing that Joe Romm spends so much time writing his blog and all he gets is the same 5 or 6 poster’s that have comments ALLOWED on his site. And I am sure that he thinks that that is a dialog! Romm doesn’t even discuss climate change over there anyway, he just discusses what government needs to do about it. But what would you expect from a wonk hoping to impress his funding body; The Center for American Progress Fund…a big time Liberal Progressive PAC.
gtrip (18:28:39) :
[And his claim of a six degree rise in global temperatures by 2100 should be filed away with this years hurricane forecast. Even with the warmest ocean temperatures ever recorded in the history of mankind, the hurricanes aren’t buying it]
You only want the science that fits your world view.
Below is a MIT study saying they have come to 10 degrees Fahrenheit or 6 degrees centigrade.
http://climateprogres.org/2009/05/20/mit-doubles-global-warming-projections-2/
evanmjones (18:54:27) :
Stern is the one with the 20% number. But his projections for future consumption growth are ‘way, ‘way too low.
He proposes spending 1% of GWP (1.8% by the developed countries) per year. That’d be around half of world growth in a good year. (And this ain’t no good year.) Compound that loss and it’ll cost us one heck of a lot more than 20% of GWP per year by 2100!
Lomborg, OTOH, suggests spending 0.05% on research and mitigation, which makes a lot more sense and is far more affordable, though not what one would call “cheap”. (L. also ran the cost-benefit analysis for other ways to spend the money proposed for AGW. Bottom line, you could spend that dough and save many, many millions of lives HERE AND NOW.)
I agree – I wish I had something constructive to say – the collosal diversion of resources away from actually doing something useful, helpful and empowering for the under-developed world by the AGW Myth and it’s promoters – just leaves me gobsmacked.
David Ball (18:39:33) :
[Jeff Green, man up, and admit your diaphanous theory is wrong. Hate to take all the meaning out of your life, but Co2 does not drive climate change. I have lived off the grid and can build a sod hut. What are you gonna do? Let’s both go camping for a year, and we’ll see how you make out. My guess is that it wouldn’t turn out so good for you (and most “greenies). Be careful what you wish upon humanity. As soon as “crap and enslave” starts hitting “Joe Average” in the pocketbook hard, you and the hockey team ( and any who pushed for it) should have to answer to all of us.]
Off grid is totally cool. Solar? wind? Did you self install? Microhydro?
Below is a MIT study saying they have come to 10 degrees Fahrenheit or 6 degrees centigrade.
But that’s assuming the most aggressive scenario from positive feedbacks. Yet that is what has not been panning out. In fact, feedbacks appear to be negative.
If that’s so, only the direct CO2 warming will be left (if that) and that is well under 2C for doubling down.
And that assumes continual increase of CO2 output and no tech breakthrough, which is not likely, considering the recent historical record. (In fact, that would be making much the same mistake Malthus made. At least M., to his credit, had the good grace to recant in later years.)
Monckton asserts that all four parts of the forcing equation are exaggerated by about a factor of 2. If true, that would render the overall warming effect under 10% of that which is proposed by the IPCC.
There’s also a LOT of dispute over CO2 persistence.
Curiousgeorge (18:18:13) :
[@ Jeff Green: From up thread you said: “As much as you don’t want to hear it, government is the only answer.”
Question: What form of government are you referring to? Be specific, please]
Voluntary standards failed under the Bush administration.
Democracy.
Thank goodness.
“NOAA has declared warmest sea temps warmest ever for summer and august. Water has a higher thermal mass than land.”
NOAA is measuring the sea surface temperature (the second “S” in “SST”), not the temperature of the mass beneath it. The buoys that measure the temperature beneath it show no increase, and maybe even a decrease.
Jeff Green (19:09:15) :
…
You only want the science that fits your world view.
Below is a MIT study saying they have come to 10 degrees Fahrenheit or 6 degrees centigrade.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/05/20/mit-doubles-global-warming-projections-2/
Jeff – And the MIT Computer model is an accurate representation of reality based on what…
(BTW: I’m a professional software engineer).
I would suggest that the models can only tell you what they are programmed to tell you.
How many model runs before 1998 predicted static temperatures for the decade from 1998 to 2008? REF: http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_Aug_091.jpg
And before you claim the GISS is the reliable dataset vs Satellites. Are you aware that 91% of the ground stations in the US have error bars of at least 1 degree Celcius and 69% of at least 2 degrees Celcius. REF: http://www.surfacestations.org/
The UN IPCC Claim a warming signal in the 20th century of 0.7 degrees celcius. How is that justified when the ‘best” network in the world is so inaccurate?
You don’t have the instrumentation/data to justify your claims of warming, so you resort to model runs and predictions 90 years from now that can’t be validated.
When you turn up with some real measurable science that is based on empirical data that can be independently verified, then I’ll be impressed.
I agree – I wish I had something constructive to say – the collosal diversion of resources away from actually doing something useful, helpful and empowering for the under-developed world by the AGW Myth and it’s promoters – just leaves me gobsmacked.
Another way of thinking about it is that for every billion dollars of wealth wasted (or, worse yet, never created), babies starve. We are at a very real tipping point. An economic tipping point. With a potential for “runaway growth” that will result in huge, ubiquitous affluence and god-like technological advance.
We must not blow that.
In fact if we do flush all that away, we will be far less able to solve AGW (if it even requires solving, which I doubt) or any similar problem that comes down the pike.
I did it the way it would have been done in the past . I know first hand why life spans were very short. Do you have this delusion that living off grid was easy? You can not bait me. Our discussion will go in the direction I want it to. Reason being; that I am not allowed to post on the sites you frequent (Open Mind) my (snip). I will admit that I may be wrong, but before we can discuss it, you will have to acknowledge that you may also be wrong. Or go away.
Jeff Green (19:09:15) :
Why link to Joe Romm’s babbling here? If you want to link to the M.I.T. study, do so in the first place.
You say: ” You only want the science that fits your world view.”
I say; how do you even know what my world view is (hell, I don’t even know what my world view is)?
If I link you to a study that shows that pigs can fly, would you believe it just because it was a study? That is what we see with these “study’s” that you throw at us. This is also a reflection of our educational system. Our belief that every child should get a college education and our policies that make it happen is the reason for some of these “study’s”. Your NYU study you mentioned earlier was done by a bunch of lawyers using data from a slanted AGW data base. So why should that be believable?
I don’t think that really care much about climate change; I think that you are just all about climate change legislation and what it can mean to the advancement of your religion; and that is faith in government to take care you from cradle to grave.
Sorry, last post should be directed Jeff Green,….
Jeff Green. Well, at least you tried to answer one of my questions: where are the batteries? You think we will all have our car batteries accepting power from the grid. Did you ever think that most people would prefer to keep their batteries charged by the alternator in the car, so it will be ready to start the next morning, rather than drained to heat last night’s dinner? The average house uses about 700 kilowatt hours per month, or 24 per day. Assume that the battery only has to supply the electricity for 16 hours, and that the battery has a capacity of 100 ampere-hours at 12 volts. This is equivalent to 1.2 kwh, vs. 16 kwh needed. And, you would have to have a converter to upgrade the battery’s 12 volt DC to 120 volts AC for use in the house, as well as a converter to bring the 120 volt AC line voltage down to the battery requirements of 12-volt DC. The losses in a transmission line are proportional to the square of the current times the resistance, but the power transported is proportional only to the current times the voltage. So by going to very high voltage, using a transformer, you can tranport the same power at a lower current, and thus less loss. I don’t hear you or the other proponents talking about details like these, only grandiose wishful thinking. Look in a high school physics book for the fundamental relationships!
Jeff Green,
Remember, I’m on your side. A lot of the folks on this site are a bunch of science / mathematics geeky types and they don’t understand that the future belongs to those who have vision – and that imagining a future the way we want it to be is all that is required to make it happen. Facts are just details that get in the way of Vision.
If you really want to beat them at their own game, explain how the smart grid will take care of the intermittency of both solar and wind power. Will the smart grid cause the wind to blow at all times or does it just make the sun shine at night? I’m not too clear on that, you see, our local electrical cooperative has already installed smart grid technology and it pretty much just allows them to turn off our water heater when electric rates peak (they can also read my meter realtime from the office). I’m not really sure if load shedding is quite the same as “taking care of intermittency”, but when my wife gets pissed (frequently) about running out of hot water while she’s shaving her legs, well it’s just the stupid smart grid again.
Hey Jeff Green: My post didn’t get through over at CP. And you wonder why people throw around the socialist, fascist phrase when discussing your side!
Jeff Green (16:09:53) : As much as you don’t want to hear it, government is the only answer.
What you say here is un-Constitutional and un-American.
Government getting out of the way is the answer. America was much healthier when government was small and not felt in “we the people’s” lives—i.e., when it followed the Constitution. I am better equipped to know how to use my own money, raise my own children, and give to charities of my own choosing.
The government is only for defending me and all the others in this Nation.
But now the government has become a ‘domestic’ enemy of “we the people”.
The idea that government is the answer belongs to Communism, Fascism, etc. Surely someone with a college degree knows this. I think you do know it, but you haven’t taken the time to sit back and process it.
A lot of the folks on this site are a bunch of science / mathematics geeky types and they don’t understand that the future belongs to those who have vision – and that imagining a future the way we want it to be is all that is required to make it happen.
And some of us are history types and have our own (very) grand vision. It is, however, at variance with that which you propose: Imagination is all very well, but as Edison (not known for his lack of imagination) observed, it comes down to 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. In the meantime it will not do to criminalize elbow grease.
Jeff Green (17:10:13) : The plans are there and it will work. Denmark is at 20% now. Spain and Portugal are both very aggressive in bringing more wind and solar on now.
Plans are fine. They are worth about the paper they are printed on. I’ve done a lot of planning for many projects. They are largely used to measure where you were wrong and how far off the price was.
Wind can deliver intermittent power. Same problem for solar. Now demand is not so intermittent. Exactly how will you keep English homes warm on a cold night when the wind has stopped? That happens with astounding regularity due to the nature of the weather there.
Here in California (and in places like Spain) the solar power arrives along with peak AC demand, so you can peak clip the AC demand. But that does nothing for cold and darker parts of the world (which is where a lot of the present population live) and does nothing for night time AC nor car charging ‘off peak’ which is also in the dark.
Storage will not get you out of that box. Only generation will.
Why? Efficiency. Charge / discharge on a battery wastes energy. About 10% for the very best. About 30% for the more economical ones. Then there are losses in the charger and the inverter too. That can be another 10% (5% each, assuming they are of stellar design). So before you begin you have lost about 20% to 40% of your ‘capacity’. Now since anything over about 20% wind destabilizes grids to the point of failure, you have bit of a problem here…
The more wind and solar you add, with storage to make up for their down intervals, the less efficient you become.
Do you know what the worlds most efficient engine is? The very best in the whole world? No, not the GE gas turbine (though it is close at about 52%).
It is a Diesel. 54% IIRC.
No mater what you do, you will be less efficient than that.
Now your prime mover can be gasoline, gas turbine, whatever. Unless it is that Diesel, you have already got a lower efficiency. Now you take some loses in the generator, the transformer, the transmission lines, the transformer at the other end, then the electric motor has some losses. At the end of the line, you have far less than the initial efficiency. Add a battery charger, battery, inverter and it is even lower. You are rapidly headed to 30% or even 25% efficiency. For the car, you get even lower efficiency since you get rolling losses and drive line losses and…
Please note: It does not matter if you put that battery, charger, inverter into an electric car or a storage system. It still will waste energy and reduce efficiency. You can not cheat the laws of thermodynamics.
So at the end of the day, you have a simple choice: Burn one gallon of Diesel fuel in a Diesel engine vehicle, or burn 2 to 3 gallons of Diesel equivalent in an electric generator of some sort and take the electric system losses. You may be happy with that, I’m not.
Smart grid will bring on an efficiency of about 16%
Which will not quite make up for the charge / discharge losses of your power storage system. It’s a negative sum game you are playing.
Iwth investment in energy efficiency in regular society another 20% can be saved.
Flat out dreaming.
With plug in hybrids reach into the millions the smart grid can tap into their battery banks for utility storage.
And you have allowed 20% minimum losses for the charger, battery charge discharge cycle, inverter? And 1% / day for whatever capacity is in the charged state? (typical good battery standby losses). And you have allowed for the capital costs to replace those batter packs after 3 years or 1000 cycles of charge discharge (common specs)? Oh, and you have allowed for the fact that a 90% efficient charge cycle battery drops considerably as it ages so that 10% charge / discharge loss will only be on the first day you plug in. It will drop consistently from that day forward…
Please, go find a power engineer and a battery engineer and after they are done with you, spend some time working out the logistics of building out even a single building of infrastructure. Your rampant speculations are full of great imaginings and no practical experience nor technical understandings.
Try this, call your local utility. Ask them the lead time to get a 750 kVA transformer installed. Then ask them how long for 2. Then 10. They will likely hang up when you ask for 10, so be sure to start with 1.
When we did this for our project, it was 2 years to get one. If we wanted a second one, they could start to build it after that construction work station was done building the first one … If you are going to charge a bunch of 45 kVA cars, you will need one of these for about every 10 to 20 such cars. (You don’t know when they will all be plugged in at the same time, but I would bet it will be just after “commute home” at peak power demand mid afternoon…)
These power equpment things are not just kept sitting around. The first one they installed for us was a dud. They gave us the ONE SPARE they had for the western region… and everybody prayed it would work. If it didn’t, we would have been looking at the East Coast and folks would have been asking who was going to be down for 2 years if another one died…
David Ball (19:40:13) :
[I did it the way it would have been done in the past . I know first hand why life spans were very short. Do you have this delusion that living off grid was easy? You can not bait me. Our discussion will go in the direction I want it to. Reason being; that I am not allowed to post on the sites you frequent (Open Mind) my (snip). I will admit that I may be wrong, but before we can discuss it, you will have to acknowledge that you may also be wrong. Or go away]
WHy not let down your defenses a little bit. THis really isn’t a war. You will definitely be allowed on the site, but with a discussion of science as the basis. If all you have is just a political rant, then its just a waste of our time. Most of my conversation is based in science.
The reason I asked you about your living off grid is that I have solar electric energy on my home. I actually enjoy the idea of off grid living and respect it a great deal. I understand it to be a harder working life. And you are right I probably couldn’t handle the lifestyle you have chosen.
I have been teaching renewable energy for 10 years now. THe interest is real.
Jeff Green (19:19:00) : “Voluntary standards failed under the Bush administration.”
I can see you are a political animal. Clanging the ‘Bush administration’ bell is a dead give-away. I can only expect talk of Dick Cheney now somewhere down the line.
I think I was assuming you had a broader viewpoint than that. That was why I replied to you. So it is a let down to see you revolving around the usual, hackneyed party line.
This is my last reply to you.
where are the batteries?
Well, if they ever do come up with the superbattery (and they may) and are therefore able to save/store all that unused power from the grid, all bets are off.
evanmjones (20:06:10) : …as Edison (not known for his lack of imagination) observed, it comes down to 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration…
Edison’s imagination, inspiration, and perspiration or his warehouse full of worker’s imagination, inspiration, and perspiration? 😉
HEY!!!
Stop making this a Jeff Green blog post! You’re all looking like fools. Enough already. Just ignore the troll. Sheesh.
DGallagher (19:49:10) :
Jeff Green,
[Remember, I’m on your side. A lot of the folks on this site are a bunch of science / mathematics geeky types and they don’t understand that the future belongs to those who have vision – and that imagining a future the way we want it to be is all that is required to make it happen. Facts are just details that get in the way of Vision.
If you really want to beat them at their own game, explain how the smart grid will take care of the intermittency of both solar and wind power. Will the smart grid cause the wind to blow at all times or does it just make the sun shine at night? I’m not too clear on that, you see, our local electrical cooperative has already installed smart grid technology and it pretty much just allows them to turn off our water heater when electric rates peak (they can also read my meter realtime from the office). I’m not really sure if load shedding is quite the same as “taking care of intermittency”, but when my wife gets pissed (frequently) about running out of hot water while she’s shaving her legs, well it’s just the stupid smart grid again]
For smart grid to work it needs to connect most or all of the grids across the United States. This will allow the renewable energies that are producing to be routed to where they are needed. This would also be a form of peak shaving avoiding co2 emissions and using less energy to get the same job done.
For your wife’s sake, possibly go to gas instead of electricity.
Edison’s imagination, inspiration, and perspiration or his warehouse full of worker’s imagination, inspiration, and perspiration? 😉
Yes.
Gene Nemetz (20:10:52) :
[Jeff Green (19:19:00) : “Voluntary standards failed under the Bush administration.”
I can see you are a political animal. Clanging the ‘Bush administration’ bell is a dead give-away. I can only expect talk of Dick Cheney now somewhere down the line.
I think I was assuming you had a broader viewpoint than that. That was why I replied to you. So it is a let down to see you revolving around the usual, hackneyed party line.
This is my last reply to you]
You guys are tough cranky bunch. LOL
Lets go a little deeper than that. Businesses are a race to the cheapest price. which is fine. What businesses also want is an even playing field. And that is fair too. With cap and trade we can make even rules across the United States. And the next field to even out is across the world. We will see what comes about.
One worker in particular by the name of Tesla
Jeff Green (14:55:13) : Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. The reason the CBO doesn’t estimate Waxman Markey to cost so much is largely because it doesn’t do anything but transfer money in circles. Many of the really INSANE elements of the bill had to be stripped out, and backdoor deals cut all around to get that pile of crap passed. This is one reason why Hansen doesn’t like it. It doesn’t do much of anything but waste money. But what Waxman Markey provides in spades is a Trojan Horse for truly destructive legislation that would follow. Any estimate of cost today is meaningless because we don’t know what we will get until the Senate responds with their bill, and all those that would follow. There is no way to destroy this country’s energy infrastucture (particularly with no feasible shovel ready plan to replace it) and accomplish anything but failure.
Jeff Green,Did you even read my post? My post was political and non-scientific and yours wasn’t ? As with most greenies, they don’t go outside. You haven’t admitted you might be wrong. Endy story
DGallagher, stop and re-read your own post. Do you not even see the slippery slope you are on? Nice cheerleading by the way. Are you guys meeting for Lattes later on?
E.M.Smith (20:06:38)
I am definitely an optimist when it comes to Renewable energy. With proper listening to the skeptics, it helps to cover all the bases where things might go wrong. I agree with quite a few of your presentations of inefficiencies.
Advanced coal burning is at best about 40% efficient and then you have the inefficiencies of the transmission system after that. I’ve always been annoyed with all the waste heat that just goes into the air. If we are giong to keep on using coal for awhile it is actually possible to capture 60 to 80% of coal energy.
One of my favorite energy storage schemes for utility is CAES. Compressed air energy storage. In Iowa they are building one with an attached wind field. There the wind comes more at night when electric buying rates are low and the demand isn’t for crap. By storing it at night, they can sell the energy during the day when the rates are higher. It also provides energy when the demand is highest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage
This is bogus. The CEI spin on the Treasury analysis (which isn’t really an analysis) has been totally debunked.
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dhawkins/climate_bill_slanders.html
Jeff Green, you stated, “Business as usual will give us an increase of about 5 to 6 degrees average temp by 2100.”
This would imply global temperature increases of about 0.6 to 0.7 degrees C per decade for the next nine decades. Given that temperatures for the past 30 years have increased at an average of about 0.13 degrees C per decade, at what point in time do you expect global temperatures to start increasing five times faster than they have been for the past three decades?
The cost of cap and trade will indeed place an economic stranglehold on what is left of the industrial world. Once in a while the beleaguered skeptics of AGW need to take the offense, and point out the benefit of CO2, both to life on earch as well as the economic benefit to society. I copy below a short previous post on a less used blog
It is cogent to point out the the increased bio-mass of the earth appears to be the result of a lineal symbiotic relationship with increasing CO2, while the negative effect of any warming from increasing CO2, decreases exponentially. The benefit is, for a time at least, nearly lineal, the negative decreases exponentially. About 75% of the warming expected to happen from a doubling of CO2 should have already occurred. Therefore the benefits of the finale doubling should far outweigh the negative of a litttle additional warming.
Due to the benefit of increased CO2 we (the earth) currently produce a crop yeild that formerly would have required at least 10% more water. What is the economic value of this benefit. I would love to have, say a Ross Mckitrick do a study on this. Do anyone have access to Mr Mckitrick?
I’m afraid $1,761 is just the tip of the iceberg, as they are not taking full account of job losses and GDP shrinkage, among other related things. However, we must look on the bright side: If you thought cap-and-trade was dead in the Senate, now it’s really dead. There are just too many Democratic senators who are already in electoral trouble, or would put themselves in trouble by voting for it, and not enough Republicans (if any) who are receptive.
Off of Topic, but important.
Who needs frogs? Hundreds of frogs singing at once in the fields near BioCab’s offices.
Extinct or endangered species? Hah! You have to hear them spreading their croaks, looking for couples under the thunderstorm. It is Frog’s Valentine’s Day.
They only had said “tomorrow”… Today is “tomorrow”.
Actually one trillion would be 1000 billion. But really this is splitting hairs. If someone cannot comprehend 1 trillion then they’re not going to comprehend 1000 billion. To me that kind of notation is more confusing.
Um, sorry. “Fools” might have been excessive.
E.M.Smith (20:06:38) :
Excellent post, Mr. Smith, as per usual.
Gene Nemetz (20:00:47) :
Jeff Green (16:09:53) : As much as you don’t want to hear it, government is the only answer.
[What you say here is un-Constitutional and un-American.
Government getting out of the way is the answer. America was much healthier when government was small and not felt in “we the people’s” lives—i.e., when it followed the Constitution. I am better equipped to know how to use my own money, raise my own children, and give to charities of my own choosing.
The government is only for defending me and all the others in this Nation.
But now the government has become a ‘domestic’ enemy of “we the people”.
The idea that government is the answer belongs to Communism, Fascism, etc. Surely someone with a college degree knows this. I think you do know it, but you haven’t taken the time to sit back and process it]
We come from 2 different places and that’s what makes it interesting. I have no interest in some other form of government. What pulled us out of the recession faster was the government. Had it not been for gov intervention we would be in depression right now. Probably one close to the great depression back in the 30’s.
The Fed did the best they could to get other banks to buy up the bad banks. After awhile there’s just no other choice or we will suffer extreme consequences.
From my point of view which is different from the purpose of this site, co2 is going to do us a whole lot of harm. From that point of view the only entity that can even handle the problem is the government.
From another platform Carbon Cap and Trade engages the private sector to find the cheapest most economical way to reduce emissions. It is a market stimulation to solve a very serious problem.
Someone must have come up with a way to drop the cost of renewable energy by an order of magnitude or two, because it wasn’t remotely competitive with fossil fuels last time I checked (speaking of solar, wind, wave etc… not the sensible ones like hydro).
As for “super batteries” I keep waiting to hear more about eeStor, but they still seem to be very secretive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEStor
I do not see a super battery, or rather accumulator as being likely.
The Economist reently had a briefing on electric cars in which it suggested batteries might improve by as much as 8% a year and that to be truly viable they had to be 3 times better in power to weight ratio than now.
I doubt that can be.
Great strides have been made in the mechanical construction of cells allowing much larger surface areas, and hence high charge/discharge rates. This has also reduced weight because mechanically the battery has to withstand the physical loads on the electrodes produced by charging and discharging as well as outside influences: such as vibration in a motor car.
Likewise chemical degradation of the cell with use can be improved giving a longer life. Also desirable.
But however successful that might be, and has been, for instance with the lead accumulator used in your motor car which today lasts for years but fifty years ago failed within a year or two and needed topping up with distilled water regularly, it only goes so far.
It is the electrochemical reation which determines the theoretical efficiency of the accumulator in terms of both its energy density and its weight, and thus cost.
And compared to the combustion of fossil fuels, weight for weight, volume for volume, cost for cost, the easily reversible electrochemical reactions of accumulators are at best ten times worse: but usually annot get anywhere near that.
It is a pipe dream.
Kindest Regards.
By the way Jeff Green, it is a year camping in Canada. Up for it? Any of your “systems ” up for it? Bring the kids? Whadaya say? Should we all move to warmer climes? Is it tough to power an MRI in the woods? You really haven’t thought this through have you.
Graeme Rodaughan (19:28:59) :
Hey, what about that M.I.T. dart board?
Jeff Green (20:07:46) :
WHy not let down your defenses a little bit. THis really isn’t a war. You will definitely be allowed on the site, but with a discussion of science as the basis. If all you have is just a political rant, then its just a waste of our time. Most of my conversation is based in science.
You Lie Jeff Green. Most of your sites deny an IP address if they find on “offensive” comment to their view. Stop feeding us garbage And a political rant? That is all your hero Romm does on his site. He headlines “study’s” and “model’s” as if they are fact. You live in a world created by yourself and revel in that fact. I can spot one of your kind in an instance just on the rhetoric you use. And I am amused at the monthly talking words you all use, it is so funny to see them used here, at Huffpo, DailyKos, CP, etc.. I know that you are expecting the minorities and immigrants to take your side and give you full power….but it has never worked before and it won’t work this time!!!
DGallagher (19:49:10) :
Jeff Green,
Remember, I’m on your side. A lot of the folks on this site are a bunch of science / mathematics geeky types and they don’t understand that the future belongs to those who have vision…
Aren’t you, Daniel?
Jeff Green (17:21:19) : I have read about plans proposed to replace coal with natural gas. This would cut the co2 emissions in half from those plants. It would be cheaper, quicker and we would meet our 2020 emission goals. Natural gas would be a transition fuel until we get our renewable infrastructure in place.
Jeff, please use numbers. It will be worth the effort. Until then, take a look at this graph:
It is from the government, so you ought to like it 😉
Notice that natural gas is a little smaller than coal? It is 19.6 while coal is 22.6 so that is a shortfall of 3 if we used every bit of present natural gas just to replace coal. Now think maybe all that natural gas might already have a use and might not be available to replace the coal? You know, things like:
1) Home heating
2) Food drying (for example, the giant rice driers that are used near where Anthony lives to dry all the harvested rice so it doesn’t rot).
3) Producing “petro” chemicals – natural gas is the dominant feedstock for many kinds of “petro” chemicals, not oil.
4) Present electric generation in gas turbines (that 5.7 that goes to electric generation up toward the top)
etc.
Do you see the problem? From where will you get that added 22.6 quads worth of natural gas? That is more than doubling the present supply for the nation.
Now look at the green bar at the bottom. That’s oil. Notice that almost all of it goes into transportation. Of that which doesn’t the largest bit is “non-fuel” at 5.2 and a lot of that is lubricants for, you guessed it, transportation.
Now what is the size for oil? 14.9 from the USA, 24.3 imported, total of 39.2 quads. So now you need roughly twice as much as all the natural gas we have just to replace oil.
Add that to coal, and you have more than 3 times as much coal and oil as you have natural gas. Last time I looked, 3 was a lot larger than 1 and you can not use 1 to replace 3. This is not negotiable and not a matter of opinion. The numbers are what they are and you can not wish them away.
The “natural gas will bridge” is a fantasy based on not looking at the size and ignoring the numbers. It is a “bridge too far” and “a bridge to nowhere”.
Now see that “Biomass other” at 3.2 just below nuclear? That is what you want to expand to replace all that coal and oil. Most of that is wood waste and farm waste along with some trash burning. Not things that can be readily expanded in a hurry. So the bottom line is that you want to take something that is at most a “1.4” (it is less than that, but I’ll be generous) and use it to cover 39.2+ +22.6 = 61.8 Quadrillion BTUs of energy. If you don’t appreciate just how impossible that is, and how much time and money it would take to build 60 Quads of solar and wind, please find an Electrical Engineering major and ask them.
Finally, just for fun, take a look at the “losses” bar. Now you think that can be magically shrunk some how, but it can’t. We spend $Billions to assure that electrical generation is astoundingly efficient. That GE gas turbine at 52% is an amazing accomplishment and widely used. You can not buy more efficient gas turbines. Notice that 26.3 of it comes from “electric generation” – by far the largest part. The next largest is vehicles at 21.2. Of those vehicle losses, the part from Diesels can not be made smaller. They are already at the top end of efficiency. The only way to change the rest is to replace the vehicle fleet. With Diesels. That’s one new car for every car on the road today… If you don’t use Diesels, the efficiency will go down, not up.
So you want to run ever more of our energy supplies through the part that accounts for most of the losses, THEN you want to layer on top transmission loses, charger losses, battery charge losses, standby losses, battery discharge losses, inverter losses, more transformer losses, more conversion losses in whatever the end equipment is: All so you can use wind and solar to replace very high efficiency coal?
Do you see the problems with this?
Do you see that the numbers don’t work?
Do you see that coal is not oil and does not go to the same places?
Do you see that using oil directly is the most efficient path to transport? (And that is why substantially 100% of the world does it… Mostly with Diesel engines.)
Do you see that the rest of the world and all the folks who built and bought all this equipment are not idiots and made fairly intelligent decisions?
Do you see what that implies about your decisions?
Think about it. With numbers, please.
evanmjones (20:21:18) : Edison’s… or his worker’s …Yes.
Very funny.
Ron de Haan (17:25:53) :
In Germany, VW has developed a home generator that runs on natural gas and operates at an incredible efficiency of 92%, fueled by natural gas.
There is a Japanese variation that uses a fuel cell and is less noisy and with less smog than an internal combustion engine. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have one of the VW gadgets, but for most folks the fuel cell solution will be better (think of an apartment building with 500 lawn mower engines droning away…)
The 92% efficiency of this comes largely from capture of “waste heat” for domestic heating needs. Works well in cold places. Not so well in places like California and Arizona where you need AC not heating… In those places the heat is still waste heat and you are back at the 25-30% range of the ICE generator. Less if you must meet smog requirements… (Ask CARB about running one on “spare the air” days…)
So I think they are a great idea for Alaska and Canada. Florida, not so much…
Jeff Green (20:54:41) :Lies again:
We come from 2 different places and that’s what makes it interesting. I have no interest in some other form of government. What pulled us out of the recession faster was the government. Had it not been for gov intervention we would be in depression right now. Probably one close to the great depression back in the 30’s.
We are not out of recession….saying so doesn’t make it so unless it is in your world of make believe.
The Jeff Greens of the world believe that if someone writes what they believe to be true then it must be true….Yet they deny the same belief in the religious world. Strange isn’t it?
I repent for expecting too much from what turns out to be a troll.
BTW, DGallagher: I do note your irony thread.
Sandy (16:36:47) :
” government is the only answer.”
Your mindlessness is frightening.
I understand what you mean.
But in the end the one who will be hurt the most by his mindlessness is himself.
Americans are rising to stop the mindlessness that has been transpiring here. They finally see how they have been getting hurt by that mindlessness for years now.
Gene Nemetz (21:05:24) :
Graeme Rodaughan (19:28:59) :
Hey, what about that M.I.T. dart board?
I remember it well – completely indicative of the intellectual bankruptcy of the MIT effort.
DGallagher (19:49:10) :
Jeff Green,
Remember, I’m on your side. A lot of the folks on this site are a bunch of science / mathematics geeky types and they don’t understand that the future belongs to those who have vision…
Vision? – so did Jim Jones – he’s vision is not still around.
How about a few others, Napoleon, Hirohito, Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse tung… All failed visionaries. France does not rule Europe. No Japanese Empire. Italy and Germany are not Fascist states, No thousand year Reich, the Soviet Union is on the trash heap of History, China is embracing Capitalism.
History is littered with the failed visions of mad men that have crashed on the cold shore of hard fact. It seems to me that the practical men who focus on the practical realities of life are the ones who win in the end.
Apologies to DGallagher. I guess I’m having difficulty recognizing sarcasm lately. Re- reading your post showed me it was a brilliant one. I shall try to be more diligent in my reading of all posts, it is just that it there is so much to read (time constraints) and so much of it is so good. Sorry Mate, ..
Jeff Green. Empty pitchers make the most noise.
Good article by Garth Paltridge,who has a theory as to how science has sold itself down the river .It is a question I asked-Why didn’t the sceptics speak out at the start?)It seems to me that the sceptics are still not doing enough to defend science.An obvious choice would be a television campaign,full newspaper ads,your mob led us into this,pity you are not prepared to spend money to get us out of it.
Anyway,here is the link,and my favourite quote from the article
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26056202-7583,00.html
More generally, there are those who, like the politically correct everywhere, are driven by a need for public expression of their own virtue.”
Graeme Rodaughan (21:53:38) : Your comment is awaiting moderation
DGallagher (19:49:10) :
Jeff Green,
Remember, I’m on your side. A lot of the folks on this site are a bunch of science / mathematics geeky types and they don’t understand that the future belongs to those who have vision…
Vision? – so did Jim Jones – he’s vision is not still around.
How about a few others, Napoleon, Hirohito, Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse tung… All failed visionaries. France does not rule Europe. No Japanese Empire. Italy and Germany are not Fascist states, No thousand year Reich, the Soviet Union is on the trash heap of History, China is embracing Capitalism.
History is littered with the failed visions of mad men that have crashed on the cold shore of hard fact. It seems to me that the practical men who focus on the practical realities of life are the ones who win in the end.
BTW: The death toll of all those visionaries is in the many tens of millions…
@Jeff Green.
How do you explain how the Medieval Warm Period was world wide and warmer than now?
REF: http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l3_nzeastnorth.php
Jeff Green (20:42:40) : I am definitely an optimist when it comes to Renewable energy.
As am I. I’ve been an advocate for it since the ’70s or so. I’ve played with running vehicles on all sorts of stuff (even ran my truck on Crisco once, just to prove a point…) and mostly run my car on BioDiesel when I can get it.
I have backup generators at home and a 1 kW inverter that can be attached to the car battery in the Diesel if needed. (Part of a ‘kit’ I was putting together to make a UPS for the house under the Grey Out Davis years here in California… then he left office and the electric system stabilized, so the kit got set aside. Still have the battery box and other hard goods, should the need arise. No batteries in it, though. Didn’t reach that step.)
From time to time I’ve owned several thousand dollars of investments in alternatives companies (often to my loss, but I like them conceptually, so I accept that cost to my portfolio… Right now my “toys” include a wave power company OPTT, an algae oil company PSUD, a ‘trash to motor fuels’ company RTK, and a Thorium alternative to Uranium company THPW) As charts say to ‘be in them’ I trade into and out of FAN (wind), GEX (global alternative energy fund), PBW (clean energy fund) and several others. Oh, and I’ve got some QTWW (an electric car drive train company that also holds some of Tesla stock IIRC). I’m addicted to the field, even if I’d make more money in other areas. Oh, and I own some biofuel stock in Brazil – CZZ.
Advanced coal burning is at best about 40% efficient
See:
http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/gasification/index.html
which claims 50% is possible with combined cycle steam in the exhaust and asserts that there is 70% to 80% possible with combined heat and power with the final stage warm steam for heating uses.
One of my favorite energy storage schemes for utility is CAES. Compressed air energy storage. In Iowa they are building one with an attached wind field.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage
Did you read your link?
Thus if 1.0 m3 of ambient air is very slowly compressed into a 5-liter bottle at 200 bars (20 MPa), the potential energy stored is 530 kJ (or 0.15 kW·h). A highly efficient air motor could transfer this into kinetic energy if it runs very slowly and manages to expand the air from its initial 200-bar (20 MPa) pressure completely down to 1 bar (0.10 MPa) (bottle completely “empty” at ambient pressure). Achieving high efficiency is a technical challenge both due to nonlinear energy storage and the thermodynamic considerations. If the bottle above is emptied down to 10 bars (1.0 MPa), the energy extractable is about 300 kJ at the motor shaft. The efficiency of isothermal compressed gas storage is theoretically 100% but in practice the process is not isothermal and the two engines (compressor and motor) have additional types of losses.
300 / 530 = 57% and that is done carefully in a lab… You will be lucky to ever see 1/2 of your energy ever again. Not my idea of efficient storage.
Avoiding storage with micro scale combined heat and power is the best approach (uses fossil fuels…). Right behind it is IGCC integrated gasification combined cycle (uses coal and some biomass). Next in line is CTL and using that fuel in a Diesel (best for transportation, can use biomass). Way down the list is wind and solar (though solar is advancing very fast – solar thermal also lets you get some leverage on the sundown problem with thermal mass heat storage…)
The problem with the all of this is that putting fossil fuels off limits puts us way down the list of options into the “not quite ready for scale” ones…
The simple truth is that THE best capital allocator is the market, not the government. Governments allocate capital based on political needs, and that is always worse than the economic allocation of markets. This is not speculation. The “experiment” has been run many many times. Every time command economies fail and market economies (even with their problems) come out much better.
So as much as I would like to have alternative energy power plants, the fact is that it would be a bad economic idea and waste resources that could be better used elsewhere (such as in building water supplies in 3rd world countries or providing “rocket stoves” to the same people to save the forests).
See the Corn Ethanol mandate as a stellar example…
Speaking of how America better get it in gear…
President Hugo Chavez said on Wednesday Venezuela signed a $16 billion investment deal with China over three years to raise oil output by several hundred thousand barrels per day….Last week, Venezuela and Russia formed a joint venture to develop the Junin 6 field with a $20 billion investment.
http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Oil/idUSTRE58F5MS20090916
Good thing is is that America doesn’t have to sign a deal with Venezuela. We’ve got plenty of oil in Alaska!
Over on Climate Progress, this is what Jeff Green thinks about it all:
From what I’ve seen above, it seems clear that Jeff is the one who is bereft of data.
For starters, on your “5-6 degree business as usual temperature rise” claim, have a look at this graph showing the logarithmic response of CO2 in the atmosphere.
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/co2_temperature_curve_saturation.png
Graeme Rodaughan (22:24:56) : @Jeff Green. How do you explain…
Graeme,
You’re asking him to think outside the party-line box. You’re just going to get some semblance of a quasi scientific answer. Like, he’ll bring up the Hockey Stick.
We all know the Hockey Stick, as in, “I visited ClimateAudit and all I got was this cruddy, broken Hockey Stick”. 😉
wattsupwiththat (23:28:46) : Over on Climate Progress….
I wouldn’t expect to see Climate Progress winning Science Blog of the Year.
Jeff Green (20:54:41) : What pulled us out of the recession faster was the government. Had it not been for gov intervention we would be in depression right now. Probably one close to the great depression back in the 30’s.
As someone else has already pointed out: The recession is not over yet. We have not had 2 quarters of economic expansion (we are still dropping, so you have at minimum 1/2 year to go.)
It is beyond the scope of this blog, and way off topic, so I will only mention that what got us INTO the mess in the first place was government. Largely the democrats but with a little republican help. Freddy Mac was a creation of the government. The source of the evil was the “homes for everyone” mantra (see Barney Frank and Chucky Shumer) and the no-redlining law (forget the TLA right now..) that REQUIRED banks to write bad loans (palmed off to Fanny and Freddie). The republicans added a bit by requiring the repeal of Glass-Steagall in exchange for signing onto the expansion of bad home loans for everyone (signed by Pres. Clinton). The rest was just the banking industry trying desperately to find a way to get the junk off their books any way they could in the hope of surviving.
The Fed did the best they could to get other banks to buy up the bad banks. After awhile there’s just no other choice or we will suffer extreme consequences.
Not quite… The repeal of Glass-Steagall left some banks more equal than others. “Investment Banks” could not go to the Fed as lender of last resort, but “regular banks” could. So when Lehman and Bear Stearns had “issues” the Fed could do nothing for them. And guess what: Now there are no longer any “Investment Banks”. They either went bankrupt or committed merger or, in the case of Goldman Sachs, refiled as a federal bank.
I’m glossing over a bit here, as it is rather complex, but the bottom line is that the bank failures and the home mortgage crisis is 100% the creation of the government. Mostly lead by the democrats desire to bugger the banks to buy constituents votes with easy money home loans; abetted by the republicans wanting the repeal of Glass-Steagall. (And seasoned a tiny bit by the accounting rule change requiring “mark to market” that ignored the trader wisdom that “markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”…)
But we never learn. It is not significantly different from 2000 years ago. This reads like “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”, but it is real:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/business-panic-of-33ad-things-never-change/
From my point of view which is different from the purpose of this site, co2 is going to do us a whole lot of harm. From that point of view the only entity that can even handle the problem is the government.
The purpose of this site is to explore truth and observe interesting things. I would agree that is different from your point of view. CO2 will cause no harm at all. None. Most of the heating in the temperature record is an artifact of bad thermometers:
http://www.surfacestations.org/
and lousy code:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/category/agw-and-gistemp-issues/
From another platform Carbon Cap and Trade engages the private sector to find the cheapest most economical way to reduce emissions. It is a market stimulation to solve a very serious problem.
There is no problem, serious or otherwise, to solve. The result of reduction of CO2 emissions will be increased poverty, more environmental damage (a rich people can set aside land for parks; a poor people burns them down to cook the endangered species…), and a reduction of the planet to ruin.
The good news is that Cap and Tirade will not achieve that. It is, as written, a political boondoggle that will damage western democracies industry, enrich a few US “leaders” at the expense of the many, but enrich India, China, Brazil and a couple of other minor players the most. All it will do is transfer power to them. Oh, and Russia will stop playing as soon as the EU stops paying them to play. That happens when the money runs out, which is Real Soon Now.
So the world and capitalism are safe. Even if they will be held in Brazil, and the strange vessels of Russia and “Communist” China…
And since they are not buying into this farce, the end game is self limiting.
FWIW, I decided to learn Brazilian Portuguese rather than Chinese. It’s easier (given that I have a couple of Romance languages already) and I’m more likely to end up retired in Brazil than China anyway. Neighbors are headed out next year to South America. I’m going to visit them “sometime” for “a while”… Mostly just need to pick a country… I already have some Spanish and French, and Belize speaks English; so with Portuguese the whole place kind of opens up. Wife has a friend in Chile… who knows… Need to find where the property rights laws are decent and that’s about it. Then again, the wife has an EU passport so we do have the option of the EU related islands. There is a certain charm in the Caribbean…
But retire here, to a cold economy with tax to death and mandated expenditures? No, not an option.
Gene Nemetz (23:35:14) :
It’s a slow day….
E.M.Smith (23:42:53) :
E. I read your material both here and on chiefio – you write lucidly.
WRT the US, I suspect that you are right. It has a certain inevitability about it. Like a slow motion trainwreck. However, hope is not lost, and nations can be rebuilt.
E.M.Smith (23:42:53) : end up retired in Brazil
You might like how the girls there treat you, even if you retire and move there at 65. It will be better than you can imagine now.
How would everyone feel about a case of beer going up a $1 upon the introduction of C&T? The making and transportation of aluminium cans and glass bottles are energy intensive. Speaking of beer it is evil. The bubbles are CO2.
E.M.Smith (20:06:38) : Do you know what the worlds most efficient engine is? The very best in the whole world? No, not the GE gas turbine (though it is close at about 52%).
It is a Diesel. 54% IIRC.
Looks like I remembered well. From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine#Power_and_fuel_economy
The MAN S80ME-C7 low speed diesel engines use 155 gram fuel per kWh for an overall energy conversion efficiency of 54.4%, which is the highest conversion of fuel into power by any internal or external combustion engine.[1] Diesel engines are more efficient than gasoline (petrol) engines of the same power, resulting in lower fuel consumption. A common margin is 40% more miles per gallon for an efficient turbodiesel.
Might have trouble fitting it into the car, though. Looks like it is about 14 meters long 😉
http://www.manbw.com/engines/TwoStrokeLowSpeedPropMEEngines.asp?model=S80ME-C7
So if you want to reduce oil consumption, just use Diesel engines. It is the best thing you can do to “save the planet” from excess fuel consumption. Want to reduce oil consumption in cars in the USA? Use Diesels and you will reduce car fuel use by about 40%. (Europe is already selling 1/2 Diesels, so they know this already… as do all the trucking companies, and the trains, and the ships, and the military, and even some airplanes use Diesels)
http://www.dieselair.com/
So, forget the hybrid electric and dump the carbon cap: Buy a Diesel truck and go camping 😎
Do it for the planet…
Graeme Rodaughan (00:10:42) :
E.M.Smith (23:42:53) :
E. I read your material both here and on chiefio – you write lucidly.
Thank you! I owe it all to an English Mother who taught me language and an Irish / Amish mix Dad who loved words.
WRT the US, I suspect that you are right. It has a certain inevitability about it. Like a slow motion trainwreck. However, hope is not lost, and nations can be rebuilt.
Yes, but the process will outlast me, I fear. So I’ll need to abandon the field to someone else. My son is looking at overseas as well (though he has his eye on Italy… something about villas and the sea… and …)
Gene Nemetz (00:29:47) :
E.M.Smith (23:42:53) : end up retired in Brazil
You might like how the girls there treat you, even if you retire and move there at 65. It will be better than you can imagine now.
I donno… I’ve got a pretty good imagination 😉
My mechanic is married to a lady from Brazil. They are talking of moving back. (He is Swiss / German mix) He talks fondly of the beaches and 2 lb steaks for a couple of bucks (that is cooked and delivered to your table…)
back to the future (00:45:35) : How would everyone feel about a case of beer going up a $1 upon the introduction of C&T? The making and transportation of aluminium cans and glass bottles are energy intensive. Speaking of beer it is evil. The bubbles are CO2.
It is not a large step from bread riots to beer riots…
BTW, I do my part to keep the planet green. I sequester as much beer derived CO2 as I can. Never let a beer go flat. You are doing it for the planet… and the children… and it helps the polish sausage digest better…
Using the famous words spoken by Darryl Kerrigan from the movie called The Castle…
“Tell ‘im (Mr. Green) ‘es dreamin!”
It seems to me that the US government needs to raise money from Cap and Trade – or from some other source – to get back the money they used to bail out the banks.
OMG, it’s worse than we thought!
(Sorry, couldn’t resist)
Clarity2009: “How can one group of people be so selfish yet so self-hating at the exact same time? THAT is a far greater mystery that the climate.”
This mystery has also for long plagued me. As a warmist, I have always been acutely aware of my selfishness, and yet have been puzzled that this trait – so essential to survival in the modern world – has failed to bring me happiness. Until now, I have put this failure down to ‘just one of those things’ and gone about my usual warmist business of destroying civilisation as we know it.
But your question awakened me from my intellectual and moral slumbers, and I decided to investigate the matter, using the power of introspection. Despite some serious avoidance issues and temptations towards rationalisation, I managed to break through the barriers of my mind’s resistance.
The results of my investigations were startling and liberating, if somewhat obvious in retrospect, but such is the way with paradigm-breaking discoveries.
I am, of course, self-hating because I am selfish. Thus, I have identified the causal empirical factor for my ethical shortcomings. This strikes me as an intellectually pleasing and elegant explanation for my lack of fulfillment, and further, demonstrates that sceptics and warmists can work together to craft solutions to the problems of our time.
But what to do about my selfishness? Serendipitously, your President recently gave a speech suggesting practical ways we can help our fellow human beings. I plan to obtain a transcript of his speech for close study, and hope that through diligent application I can change for the better.
“E.M.Smith (23:42:53) :
It is beyond the scope of this blog, and way off topic, so I will only mention that what got us INTO the mess in the first place was government. Largely the democrats but with a little republican help. Freddy Mac was a creation of the government.”
Yes! It started in the 1930’s, and we seem not to learn from the “mistakes”.
“For starters, on your “5-6 degree business as usual temperature rise” claim, have a look at this graph showing the logarithmic response of CO2 in the atmosphere.”
I look at that graph and realize that your grasp of climate science is even worse than your graph of economics. 1) The logarithmic response of CO2 only holds “near” to the current concentration, so plotting the graph down to zero ppm is ridiculous. 2) Your graph implies that the climate system has near-instantaneous equilibration to CO2 changes, which is clearly not true. 3) Your graph implies that there are no other forcing substances in the atmosphere (like aerosols), also clearly not true.
On the economics: “This comes in way over claims that the EIA says” : dividing “tax raised” by “households” is, of course, going to get you a different number than the EIA analysis, which actually looks at the consumption reduction per household – yes, the EIA analysis probably requires some assumptions about how the tax money is used, but it is still going to be a heck of a lot closer to the best estimate of “truth” than your number. Also, historically, U.S. environmental regulations have always come in way under expected costs (see catalytic converters, SO2 cap and trade, etc.)
CALLING E.M. SMITH
I hear you are an economist and I would greatly appreciate your imput on this question.
It is cogent to point out the the increased bio-mass of the earth appears to be the result of a lineal symbiotic relationship with increasing CO2, while the negative effect of any warming from increasing CO2, decreases exponentially. The benefit is, for a time at least, nearly lineal, the negative decreases exponentially. About 75% of the warming expected to happen from a doubling of CO2 should have already occurred. Therefore the benefits of the finale doubling should far outweigh the negative of a litttle additional warming.
Due to the benefit of increased CO2 we (the earth) currently produce a crop yeild that formerly would have required at least 10% more water. What is the economic value of this benefit.? I would love to have, say a Ross Mckitrick (or an E.M. Smith) do a study on this. (-:
Cheers
Some might be interested in the graph found on page twenty of this document.
It is Thursday. Isn’t that the day the evironmentalists flush their toilet? I am sure if the moderates and right wing women stopped shaving legs and other, we could get this cunsumption down. I am not so sure about more people doing less bathing.
On a serious note. The estimate of 1700 per month is low. It looks like socialized energy. The poor people that will have their energy bills paid for, will have no incentive to conserve energy. I watched a woman at the market yesterday buy most of her groceries on food stamps. That means I was buying her groceries and mine. 35 million on food stamps and they represent most of the obesity. They also are great consumers of top branded products.
I love to see Irish traditions held in good staid here at WUWT. Another successful “spanking of the green”. Too bad it is wasted on the “spankee”. No alarm clock could wake that guy up from what is (from a human perspective) a nightmare.
To me, there should be no right and left. The focus should be right or wrong.
Jeff Green,
“For smart grid to work it needs to connect most or all of the grids across the United States. This will allow the renewable energies that are producing to be routed to where they are needed. This would also be a form of peak shaving avoiding co2 emissions and using less energy to get the same job done.”
Jeff, this is what the existing grid does – you really haven’t addressed how a smart grid is going to “take care of the intermittency”. I am very disappointed with your ability to promote our shared vision of the future. The folks on this site may be geeky, but they are not stupid.
“For your wife’s sake, possibly go to gas instead of electricity.”
If I do that then I won’t be able to get hot water from the wind. Oh sure it will address the reliability problem and will no doubt be cheaper, but the future we both crave isn’t about cheap, reliable power. I could get crappy advice like that from any of the brainiacs who frequent this site.
I was wondering if you could help me out with a few gaps in my knowledge concerning the Cap and Trade bill before Congress. When they originally drafted the bill, they were going to raise revenue by auctioning off the carbon permits. Unfortunately, that ran into difficulty because it would cause the pain to occur immediately and in a way that would be readily traceable to Congress, so they decided to give the permits away to get the carbon markets started. Brilliant! That solves the problem, but if they do that, where is the money for the tax cuts (to offset the price increases) or the funding to jump start the green economy coming from. I’m not very smart about high finances, please explain it so that even I can understand.
I implore everyone to read over Jeff Green’s comments. It is clear that Co2 is a problem when you intend to line your own pockets because of it. He stands to gain a great deal if you believe the basis of his argument. I gain nothing (as does anyone who argued against Co2=CAGW). You tell me who is telling the truth. Big hello to Joe Romm and friends from all of us here!! Keep em coming, cause you are doing yourselves a disservice.
A correction. Earlier I’d said:
E.M.Smith (22:45:44) : I’ve got some QTWW (an electric car drive train company that also holds some of Tesla stock IIRC).
It’s a bit more complicated than that. QTWW is part owner of Fiskar Automotive who make an electric car. Fiskar Coachworks did some of the design work on the Tesla… (And when Tesla found out Fiskar was making their own car, the Karma, sued, but has lost the suit…)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisker_Karma#Tesla_lawsuit
QTWW also makes other stuff, like a hybrid Hummer for the army and hydrogen fueling stations sold to places like Norway.
http://www.qtww.com/
Fun company, no idea if it will live or die, but Fiskar has funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (where AlGore is a partner) and QTWW owns a large chunk of Fiskar so in a round about way one could say that Al Gore and I both stand to make money from suppressing gasoline consumption and pushing electric cars and hydrogen vehicles.
So AlGore is my partner in business deals… Who knew?
Does that make me a biased warmer ? 😎
Todays news from Canada is Harper meeting with Pelosi and Reid at the White House trying to get the “Buy American” law repealed, at least for Canada. I thought Obama didn’t believe in protectionism? So far, Harper has agreed to present a common front with the US on the environment at the meetings in Copenhagen. This is how Canada gets pushed into this stupidity. Our government is trying to keep us alive but they have to agree to freeze their citizens to do it.
Don’t pick on jeff Green. he doesn’t know any better. I posted the paragraph of $1,761 annual incerease on Joe Romms site yesterday. It was deleted and then Joe (the sock puppet for soros) started a thread a few hours later laughing at Obama’s internal and secret findings. Climate Progress doesn’t allow posts that even have a tone of not supporting punative taxation and redistribution of guilt, wealth, poverty and misery.
Tax breaks for the poor/middle class:
Whenever you hear this associated with *any* bill which is an across-the-board change, it’s simply an attempt at transfer of wealth. Period.
Fundamentally, it is non-productive and creates a greater divide between the classes: the ‘poor’ are allowed to continue to act as they always act – maintaining their current lifestyle, while the rich *have* to get richer. These ‘riches’ are simply used to employ rich lawyers and attorneys who are very good at finding ways for their clients to avoid paying said taxes.
Most people have pointed out that Jeff Green is simply making appeals to authority as an argument, but I will comment that the reason a lot of people ‘believe’ in these alternate energies is that they are clueless about the quantity of energy used by a country such as the US, and have no idea about their own energy consumption.
In addition:
The implication is that ‘taxing’ energy will result in a reduction in individual consumption: How so? We will start turning off our porch lights?
Does such a bill enforce the desires of a majority? (If not, are we imposing a ‘law’ that goes against the majorities desires and needs?)
If It is a majority, why are they waiting to be taxed to start turning off their porch light at night? Rhetorically, are they stupid?
E.M.Smith said: “If you don’t appreciate just how impossible that is, and how much time and money it would take to build 60 Quads of solar and wind, please find an Electrical Engineering major and ask them.”
As an Electrical and Electronic Engineer, I did some napkin math some time ago when ‘everyone’ was bemoaning why Big Oil is conspiratorially blocking the development of solar power: the number of solar panels required is, well, a crap load…in addition, the ‘cost’ will obviously drop on mass production, but then the cost rises as the resources to actually make the quantity of panels dwindles and is much, much harder to extract (along with the associated increase in energy cost).
In addition to that, you how have a lot of solar energy being absorbed by said panels, and not the ground. Now, I’m no expert on that sort of thing, but I can pretty much guarantee it’s going to have *some* kind of environmental impact (just like the fact that extensive geo-thermal energy can cause subsidence and sink holes…)
http://climateprogress.org/2009/09/17/%E2%80%9Cinvented-here-sold-there-%E2%80%9D-solar-power-industry/
The Ironing!
Somehow, someway, US polices ‘forced’ this multibillion company to build factories “Not Here”. Yet, no where does it indicate ‘why’ a Solar Panel company built in other countries than the US. Well, why did they?
Did evil conservatives say they didn’t want their business?
Is there a regulation that prevents solar panel companies in the US?
To quote:
“We are seeing the industrialization of the solar business,” he added. “In the last 12 months, it has brought us $1.3 billion in revenues. It is hard to build a billion-dollar business.”
Hmm. Where did 1.3 billion dollars come from? Could they not make 1.3 billion in the US? Well, no. Applied technology makes *factories* that make solar panels (yours for only 200 million dollars). The market for solar panels isn’t as significant here as in other countries, so making a factory here doesn’t make…wait for it…Economic Sense.
Why does BMW (a German company) have factories in the US? Because it makes economic sense. There’s a demand for BMWs, so you build where the demand is.
But wait. Why isn’t there a demand for solar panels in the US and yet there is in other countries? Are panels somehow cheaper in foreign countries (Is the price of gasoline cheaper or more expensive in other countries)? No, they are fundamentally exactly the same price. So, why is it profitable to sell panels in Europe (Germany for example) and not in the US?
The article implication is that somehow the US is backward-thinking because Applied Materials discovered that the governments of other countries gives away tax dollars for certain products. I’m sure they’d make Green Plastic Poos if governments would give them money for it.
E.M.Smith (08:54:58) :
So AlGore is my partner in business deals… Who knew?
So you are a “el Gordo Al” pal?…well, businesses are businesses,
anyway you will have to invest also in lithium (lithium “self igniting” batteries), where you’ll find your pal too. The trouble is, in this case, that lithium is found as carbonate and to make it useful for batts it has to be calcined to lithium oxide before turning it to LiOH (lithium hydroxide), so increasing atmosphere’s CO2….the windmills of life.
OceanTwo (11:26:40) : Somehow, someway, US polices ‘forced’ this multibillion company to build factories “Not Here”. Yet, no where does it indicate ‘why’ a Solar Panel company built in other countries than the US. Well, why did they?
Once upon a time I was a production planner for a semiconductor company. Most of our “fab” moved offshore. Eventually, all of it (other than a small mil-spec and development fab). So I think I can speak to this a little bit.
1) Labor cost.
2) Taxes.
3) Land costs.
4) Regulations.
5) Tax incentives.
6) Shipping costs.
7) Smart venture capital firms.
A 3rd world employee costs cents/day or maybe cents/hour now. That same employee in the USA was $$$/hour. (We had plant in the Philippines with Philippinas working in it and we had Philippinas working in our California facility before it was closed – literally the same labor source and same quality. Far different wage costs.)
Taxes in The Peoples Republic of California are a killer. Places that know the value of added jobs will often grant tax “holidays” and/or have very low taxes anyway. We would load up $Millions of semiconductors into a fleet of trucks and park them in Nevada every Christmas. Why? California mandated an “inventory tax” that was assessed on inventory in stock each end of year… If it was ‘in transit in Nevada’, no tax. Then add the 11% income tax, the 8+% sales tax, the property tax, FICA, SSI, the…
Land in the Rest Of World is much cheaper than in Silicon Valley.
Say you want to put in a phosgene and an arsine tank farm. Look up the MSDS on those. Now ask yourself what the regulatory hurdles are likely to be in California. Heck, you can’t even buy degreaser spray that works due to CARB. 3rd World, no problem. Don’t even think about the problems with lead vapor from soldering. Anyone using lead is bailing from the state. (I know a bullet maker who moved to Nevada just because the lead regulations were so horrid and an indoor gun range that shut down after their 3rd signed off an approved lead mitigation construction round.) So if I have a business plan that said “Make anything” I would not think “California sounds good”.
For semiconductors the cost to ship was not particularly relevant, but for solar panels, they are large, bulky, heavy, and sometimes a bit fragile. You will benefit from building near the demand centers.
Finally, about 10 years ago the Venture Cap firms figured all this out. If you took a ‘pitch’ in to them, you were guaranteed to be asked “What is your China strategy for production?”. Any answer of the form “We will build in the U.S.A.” was met with “No Funding. Come back when you have a China strategy. Maybe. NEXT!” It didn’t take long for everyone here who works with Venture Cap folks to get the message…
And that is why when you drive down “semiconductor row” as I have done for the last 30 years, you see row after row of what used to be semiconductor companies and little venture cap startups that are now large empty buildings with “For Rent – Make Offer” signs on them. (In Santa Clara, California, take Central Expressway to Arques, about where Scott heads south. Take Arques north. About Wolf, get back on Central and drive south. That was, roughly, the core of it all. You can wander out about 1 mile on both sides of that too, if you like. The number of empty buildings is scary. And has been for about a decade… See the present California budget shortfall of $40B at last news).
For a long time in the ’80s the notion was that the “scut work” would go overseas but the “intellectual work” would stay here, so high costs and taxes would be Just Fine. This was followed by the spectacular growth of Ph.Ds and the M.E.E. and general M.S. flood from India and China. You can get two decent Ph.D’s in Bangalore for the cost of one plumber in Silicon Valley… In the late ’90s the question shifted from “How will you get H1B visa researchers to drive down your labor costs?” to “Which of your R&D facilities will be in India or China? What are you keeping in the USA and why?” (The preferred answer was “R&D to {foo}, USA to have Head office, to be near you, and Marketing / Sales office for the USA.”)
Hope that clarifies things for you…
But the good news it that there is no traffic jam at “rush hour” anymore. Just a few months ago I did 65mph+ down I-85 between 280 and 101 at 8am. Before it was dead halt and creep 20 feet. Halt. Creep. No workers, no problem…
Nogw (12:01:05) : you will have to invest also in lithium (lithium “self igniting” batteries), where you’ll find your pal too.
From time to time I hold one of the two major Lithium miners in the world. FMC is one, but SQM is the more important. I presently hold some indirectly as a part of the Chili Fund CH (I’m doing more ‘broad baskets’ now and less individual stocks. It’s easier and the charts are more predictable.) Both FMC and SQM are presently having up runs, but the RSI indicator is approaching 80 so it is not a particularly good time to “enter” a trade. Check it in about 2 weeks.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/choosing-a-stock-entry-point/
As you pointed out, the lithium comes from carbonates, almost exclusively from the high desert dry lake beds behind the mountains of the Pacific west coast of N and S America. There are not a lot of dry lake beds and not much lithium…
And that is one of the major problems with the whole windmills, solar cells, stored energy, electric cars green model. Do the math on the quantity of copper (PCU and FCX of which I’m holding PCU at present), lithium, and other battery metals needed. It just doesn’t work for the size they want (and they are against mining too… go figure…)
Heck, just the added demand for lead for batteries on cheap Chinese electric bikes drove a spike in lead prices (ticker LD) that is still climbing. Even in the face of dead car sales. Think about it…
So yeah, this cap and trade / eCar fantasy will likely be a big FUBAR for the US economy. But it will do wonders for copper, lead, lithium and related stocks.
I don’t need to like someone to know when they have the clout to be a market maker and invest along side them… And I can know they are wrong and still recognize that important people believe them. (The phrase “useful idiots” springs unbidden to mind…)
E.M. Smith please see my comment to you today at 6:18:40
David (06:18:40) :
CALLING E.M. SMITH
I hear you are an economist and I would greatly appreciate your imput on this question.
Economist by education. Computer guy as a historical profession. Stock trader by choice. Polymath by genetic accident.
It is cogent to point out the the increased bio-mass of the earth appears to be the result of a lineal symbiotic relationship with increasing CO2,
It isn’t quite linear. There is a dramatic initial rise in growth rates, then it levels off at about 2000 ppm CO2. Roughly parabolic asymptotic to about 2500ppm with zero at about 100 ppm (plants can not suck in CO2 at under 100 ppm and stop growth, by and large).
while the negative effect of any warming from increasing CO2, decreases exponentially. The benefit is, for a time at least, nearly lineal, the negative decreases exponentially.
The initial benefit is non-linear upward.
About 75% of the warming expected to happen from a doubling of CO2 should have already occurred. Therefore the benefits of the finale doubling should far outweigh the negative of a litttle additional warming.
BINGO! I would estimate the “ideal level” at about 500 to 1000 ppm.
Due to the benefit of increased CO2 we (the earth) currently produce a crop yeild that formerly would have required at least 10% more water.
Um, I think it is closer to 20% than 10% yield increase.
What is the economic value of this benefit.? I would love to have, say a Ross Mckitrick (or an E.M. Smith) do a study on this. (-:
Unfortunately, I’m not one of those folks who like to make things up. To do such an analysis you must ask what is the economic worth of the millions of lives not lost to starvation? The wars avoided due to enough food? The added IQ among the billions who got good nutrition rather than having brain stunting from malnutrition. I am unwilling to put prices on those things.
If you do, you will end up with many trillions of dollars for any reasonable guess, and IMHO, $Trillions are not enough.
For simply the economic value of the increased production, take world food and fiber production and ask “What is 10 to 20% of that value?”
For example, wheat:
http://nue.okstate.edu/crop_information/world_wheat_production.htm
gives world wheat at 549,433,727 metric tons. So about 54,943,372 (to double that) would be due to CO2 enrichment. Wheat runs about 36 to 37 bu / ton (varies with variety and moisture) and is selling for about $4.30 / bu. Now do the math and multiply those three things.
I get: $8,623,362,235.4 so call it about $8.6 Billion for wheat alone.
Repeat that exercise for all the various grains, legumes, vegetable crops, trees, … (rice and corn are in the link provided. Rice is about the same as wheat, corn is 637 MMt but sells for less. I’d roughly guess they are about the same as wheat. Call it about $24 Billion all told for the three.)
It would take a fair amount of work to run through all the various crops and make a final number, but that gives you an idea.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/x1607e/X1607E09.htm#P3551_50969
puts world consumption of ’roundwood’ at about 1.8 Million Thousand cubic meters; but it would take some assumptions to put an average price per cubic meter on that. Eyeballing this chart:
http://www.globalwood.org/market/timber_prices_2009/aaw20090901.htm
it looks like about 300 to 400 Euro per cu-m. so 0.18 million thousand x 350 = 63000000000 or about 63 Billion Euro of added round wood values.
I’ll leave the rest of the products as an exercise for the students… unless someone wants to pay me to do the work. (i.e. I have other things to do unless folks really want a full report and are willing to provide enough beer and red wine to make it worth my while. Preferably in a beach cabana on a South American shore 😉
Suffice it to say that the total will be large and measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars place. Though it could be double that.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/of-trees-volcanos-and-pond-scum/
http://www.oism.org/pproject/Slides/img23.html
http://www.oism.org/pproject/Slides/img24.html
David (13:39:01) :
E.M. Smith please see my comment to you today at 6:18:40
I did reply, but had “too many links” and that tosses it into the SPAM queue. The moderators need a little more time to find postings there and pull them back. I think “6” is the magic number here (it is a tunable parameter to wordpress).
I see it is “up” now.
E.M.Smith
Dear Mr. Smith, thank you for your detailed response. I knew I could count on you to provide greater insight. I purposely understated the numbers in regard to increased biomass growth because when I guesstimate I like to understate.
To the basic assumptions you stated we would have to assume that without the benefit of the increase in CO2 the cost of every food would be greater then it is currently due to the law of supply and demand. This would, I think, add significantly to your numbers and would increase the price of every commodity in every part of the economy that uses resources that are also used in farming. Your point that this increased production very likely has prevented more then one war is of course extremely valid.
Of course we have to (if we are pro carbon tax) add the value of millions of tons of carbon that are absorbed by this increased biomass. (A negative feedback rarely calculated) We would have to include the carbon storage of the increased biomass in the oceans also. As mentioned the benefit will continue to increase while the warming decrease.
Yes indeed, you should be well paid to provide a detailed report on this. Unfortunately I (ex-wife, four children) could afford no more then a domestic beer. (-: Hum? Perhaps Mr Mckitrick could encourage a graduate student to do a thesis on this. Do you have his number?
Seriously such a study would generate a lot of publicity. Money still talks in the US of A.
Jeff Alberts (20:47:35) :
It gets even more confusing. IIRC, in the UK a billion is a U.S. trillion. A UK trillion is a million X a million X a million. Here, it’s a million X a million. A U.S. trillion is a million times smaller.
Now, can someone please explain shillings, crowns, bobs, farthings, sovereigns, quids, guineas, florins, etc.? That’s something I can not comprehend.
Actually no. For matters of finance at least we moved to a billion being one thousand million over thirty years ago.
As for that wonderful money we used to have there were 12 pennies to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound. In coins a farthing was a quarter of a penny, a happn’y half a penny, three pennies thrupenny, a groat four pennies but long since gone even then, sixpence was a tanner, a bob one shilling, a florin two shillings, a half crown two shillings and sixpence [aka half a dollar or two and a kick], a crown, seldom used but extant, five shillings: and a guinea one pound and one shilling: but also long gone.
A sovereign was a gold coin worth one pound, until the abolition of the gold standard, and also known by many names from a sov to a jimmy o’ goblin. They are still minted today: but it will cost you a lot more than a pound to buy one.
A pound was and still is often called a quid.
Hope this helps.
Kindest Regards
Thank you, a jones.
I also found a really comprehensive page that tells me more than I ever wanted to know about the strange [to US readers] and wonderful British money system prior to decimalization: click
Tanners, groats, foonts, it’s all there and more.
Smokey (18:04:10) :
Jeff Alberts (20:47:35) :
Actually one trillion would be 1000 billion. But really this is splitting hairs. If someone cannot comprehend 1 trillion then they’re not going to comprehend 1000 billion. To me that kind of notation is more confusing.
It gets even more confusing. IIRC, in the UK a billion is a U.S. trillion. A UK trillion is a million X a million X a million. Here, it’s a million X a million. A U.S. trillion is a million times smaller.
Try here:
http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutwords/billion?view=uk
Where they make the interesting observation that both systems were actually invented by the French! Ever wonder what a milliard would be? How about a billiard? (No, not the table game…)
E.M. Smith,
Thanks for that interesting link:
The fact that the French invented the system explains a lot. Possibly everything.
As Churchill pointed out, we [US/UK] are
joinedseparated by a common language.[Also, I always enjoy E.M. Smith’s interesting posts.]