The pyramid of aluminum shown in the photograph figures greatly in our nation’s history. This once rare metal was so prized that it was placed into a national monument by a grateful nation. Can you guess where? Now, aluminum is so common, thanks to an electrical refining process and plentiful, cheap electricity, that we throw it away in soda cans.
Two seemingly unrelated events on opposite sides of the globe occurred this past week.
One was the closure of an aluminum plant in Montana, and the other is the president of a European metals association threatened to move production overseas citing environmental rules and energy costs escalating due to emissions trading schemes.
Both stories are presented below. At the end, is the story of our “Aluminum Pyramid”, now in a national monument.
Google Map of above is here
First, Montana.
How They Are Turning Off the Lights in America
On October 31, 2009, the once largest aluminum plant in the world will shut down. With it goes another American industry and more American jobs. The Columbia Falls Aluminum Company in Montana will shut down its aluminum production because it cannot purchase the necessary electrical power to continue its operations.
How did this happen in America? America was once the envy of the world in its industrial capability. America’s industrial capacity built America into the most productive nation the world had ever known. Its standard of living rose to levels never before accomplished. Its currency became valuable and powerful, allowing Americans to purchase imported goods at relatively cheap prices.
America grew because of innovation and hard work by the pioneers of the industrial revolution, and because America has vast natural resources. A great economy, as America once was, is founded on the ability to produce electrical energy at low cost. This ability has been extinguished. Why?
Columbia Falls Aluminum negotiated a contract with Bonneville Power Administration in 2006 for Bonneville to supply electrical power until September 30, 2011. But, responding to lawsuits, the 9th US Circuit Court ruled the contract was invalid because it was incompatible with the Northwest Power Act. Therefore, the combination of the Northwest Power Act and a US Circuit Court were the final villains that caused the shutdown of Columbia Falls Aluminum.
But the real reasons are much more complicated. Why was it not possible for Columbia Falls Aluminum to find sources of electricity other than Bonneville?
We need to look no further than the many environmental groups like the Sierra Club and to America’s elected officials who turned their backs on American citizens and in essence themselves, for they too are citizens of this country. These officials bought into the green agenda promoted by the heavily funded environmental groups. Caving to pressure, they passed laws and the environmental groups filed lawsuits that began turning off the lights in America. The dominos stated to fall.
They began stopping nuclear power plants in the 1970’s. They locked up much of our coal and oil resources with land laws. They passed tax credits, which forces taxpayers foot the bill for billionaire investors to save taxes by investing in less productive wind and solar energy projects.
In 1988, the Environmental Protection Agency called a meeting of atmospheric scientists and others with environmental interests. I remember well the meeting I attended in the San Francisco Bay Area. The meeting was in a theater-like lecture room with the seating curved to face the center stage and rising rapidly toward the back of the room. Attending were many atmospheric scientists whom I knew from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Stanford Research Institute and some local colleges.
The room became silent when a man walked up to the lectern. He told us that the next big national problem was global warming. He explained how human carbon dioxide emissions were trapping the earth’s radiation like a greenhouse and causing the atmosphere to heat beyond its normal temperature. He said this will lead to environmental disasters. He finished by saying the EPA will now concentrate its research funding toward quantifying the disasters that would be caused by our carbon dioxide.
The room was silent. I was the first to raise my hand to ask a question, “How can you defend your global warming hypothesis when you have omitted the effects of clouds which affect heat balance far more than carbon dioxide, and when your hypothesis contradicts the paper by Lee in the Journal of Applied Meteorology in 1972 that shows the atmosphere does not behave like a greenhouse?”
He answered me by saying, “You do not know what you are talking about. I know more about how the atmosphere works than you do.”
Not being one to drop out of a fight, I responded, “I know many of the atmospheric scientists in this room, and many others who are not present but I do not know you. What is your background and what makes you know so much more than me?”
He answered, “I know more than you because I am a lawyer and I work for the EPA.”
After the meeting, many of my atmospheric science friends who worked for public agencies thanked me for what I said, saying they would have liked to say the same thing but they feared for their jobs.
And that, my dear readers, is my recollection of that great day when a lawyer, acting as a scientist, working for the federal government, announced global warming.
Fast forward to today. The federal government is spending 1000 times more money to promote the global-warming charade than is available to those scientists who are arguing against it. Never before in history has it taken a massive publicity campaign to convince the public of a scientific truth. The only reason half the public thinks global warming may be true is the massive amount of money put into global-warming propaganda. The green eco-groups have their umbilical cords in the government’s tax funds. Aside from a few honest but duped scientists living on government money, the majority of the alarms about global warming – now called “climate change” because it’s no longer warming – come from those who have no professional training in atmospheric science. They are the environmentalists, the ecologists, the lawyers and the politicians. They are not the reliable atmospheric scientists whom I know.
Nevertheless, our politicians have passed laws stating that carbon dioxide is bad. See California’s AB32 which is based upon science fiction. (For readers who take issue with me, I will be happy to destroy your arguments in another place. In this paper, we focus on the damage to America that is being caused by those promoting the global-warming fraud.)
In the year 2000, America planned 150 new coal-electric power plants. These power plants would have been “clean” by real standards but the Greens managed to have carbon dioxide defined legally as “dirty” and this new definition makes all emitters of carbon dioxide, including you, a threat to the planet. Therefore, using legal illogic, the Sierra Club stopped 82 of these planned power plants under Bush II and they expect it will be a slam-dunk to stop the rest under Obama.
And now you know the real reason the Columbia Falls Aluminum Company had to shut down. America stopped building new power plants a long time ago. There is now no other source where the company can buy energy. Our energy-producing capability is in a decline and it is taking America with it.
I used to belong to the Sierra Club in the 1960’s. It used to be a nice hiking club. In the late 1960’s the Sierra Club began turning its attention toward stopping nuclear power. Then I quit the Sierra Club. It continues to prosper from the many subscribers who think they are supporting a good cause. What they are really supporting is the destruction of America brick by brick. The Sierra Club and similar organizations are like watermelons – green on the outside, red on the inside. They are telling us we have no right to our own natural resources, and in doing so they are sinking America.
Inherent in ecology are three assumptions: “natural” conditions are optimal, climate is fragile, and human influences are bad. Physics makes no such assumptions. By assuming climate is fragile, the global warming supporters have assumed their conclusion. In fact, the climate is not fragile. It is stable. The non-adherence to physical logic in the global-warming camp is what makes many physical scientists say that global warming is a religion.
So we have a new age religion promoted by environmentalists, incorporated into our laws and brainwashed into our people that is now destroying America from the inside.
Like a vast ship, America is taking a long time to sink but each day it sinks a little further. The fearsome day awaits, when America, if not quickly recovered by its real citizens, will tilt its nose into the water to begin a rapid and final descent into oblivion … her many resources saved for whom?
Edwin X Berry, PhD [send him mail] is an atmospheric physicist and certified consulting meteorologist with Climate Physics, LLC in Montana. Visit his website.
Now, Europe
From Heliogenic Climate Change:
Economic death march in Europe
“European non-ferrous metals producers may move to countries where environmental legislation is less strict unless the impact of forthcoming measures is reduced, an industry spokesman said on Thursday.
Javier Targhetta, president of Eurometaux, said the industry was concerned over high and unpredictable power costs [and] the added cost of a new emissions trading scheme (ETS) in 2013 …
Targhetta was particularly concerned over what he said was the reluctance of utilities to sell power for terms of three years or more following deregulation for heavy users in Spain last year.
“This increases long-term insecurity and leads to a halt in investment. If we carry on like this, the industry is destined to disappear,” he said.
Eurometaux estimates a new phase of the ETS could hike its power costs by an unsustainable 150-200 million euros ($221.1-294.8 million), and may prompt “carbon leakage,” or relocation to countries where emission costs are low or nil.
“Carbon will still be produced, it will still be producing the greenhouse effect, but a European plant will have been lost,” Targhetta said.”
…
Electricity accounts for an average of 35 percent of production costs for non-ferrous metals — 60 percent for aluminum — and producers say big differences in policy between European countries and lack of interconnection make power more expensive.
Source: Reuters, “Europe metals producers warn of relocation”
Read the Eurometaux press release here (PDF)
About the “Aluminum Pyramid”, here it is being set:
From Wikipedia:
The building of the monument proceeded quickly after Congress had provided sufficient funding. In four years, it was finally completed, with the 100 ounce (2.85 kg) aluminum tip/lightning-rod being put in place on December 6, 1884. It was the largest single piece of aluminum cast at the time. In 1884 aluminum was as expensive as silver, both $1 per ounce.
Over time, however, the price of the metal dropped; the invention of the Hall-Héroult electric refining process in 1886 caused the high price of aluminum to permanently collapse. The monument opened to the public on October 9, 1888.
Still confused? It is the Washington monument.
Read the history of the aluminum cap here:
The Point of a Monument: A History of the Aluminum Cap of the Washington Monument
Read Atlas Shrugged people, its all in there. Socialism comes in many guises, this version is green tinged.
Question: How do we stop all of this BS without another civil war?
The first victim will be our civil rights the next our freedom. I’ve planted my standard and will defend it to the end. If they call me a sceptic then so be it, I am proud to be one. Bring it on. This may get ugly.
Ian
Australia.
If I would be one of the 10% workless in the USA, I would start a riot and plunder Al Gore’s house.
This tricky liar Al Gore makes millions with his scams and innocent workers are workless because of this.
Kopenhagen in december will be the place for politicians to decide: Betray the working class and install eco-socialism or to stop that spook.
Amazing!
So no more aluminium smelters for the US.
But then again, I always maintained humans are basically stupid and superstitious.
(most of present company excluded)
I recently saw an enviromentalist in the street promoting a rally as a sign of support for copenhagen and to stop climate change.
He was having a nice day. Initially i laughed at him and roll my eyes when he invited me to attend. i walked off to the bank – see i work for a living.
I came back 5 minutes later and gave him a very big piece of my mind, and offered to go toe to toe on the science for the next 4-5 hours.
I also promptly told him that climate change was the biggest scam out, and left saying “you have a nice day”, as he stood their shocked, his jaw hanging down, surprised that anybody after all this attempted brain washing could be so vigorously against it.
The real story is here:
http://www.manufacturing.net/News-Montana-Aluminum-Plant-To-Shut-Down-102209.aspx
“The company had been able to buy discount electricity from the Bonneville Power Administration, a quasi-governmental outfit that for decades sold at-cost electricity to big industrial customers. But with an increase in population came an increase in demand for cheap hydropower, pitting industry against other users.
The amount of at-cost power available to industry was diminished and eventually was replaced entirely by a subsidy that helped the aluminum company and others buy down the cost of electricity.
Critics successfully argued that the subsidy was too large and came at the expense of other rate payers, and in December a court ordered the Bonneville Power Administration to end its subsidy to Columbia Falls Aluminum.”
You conservatives are really funny; you just don’t know what to argue. Usually it’s this:
Government subsidies to support industry are bad. Companies that aren’t competitive need to close and make way for companies which are – creative destruction. Manufacturing where it is cheaper is the basis of capitalism, a reflection of the free market and high wages in the USA. Artificially propping up these jobs would be protectionism which is contrary to the free market. etc, etc ……
But then you all go and turn everything you supposedly believe in because it’s convenient to blame the environmentalists for something that has absolutely nothing to do with them. Note that without environmentalists being on the case you might have been drinking aluminum byproducts in your water. Oh but I forgot you still are : water fluoridisation was a convenient way for the aluminum industry to get rid of a waste product by funding studies that claimed fluoride was ok to drink – as opposed to just putting it into toothpaste.
But let me get this straight; government subsidies are good when it’s an aluminium plant employing 88 people and taking electricity due to others and bad when it’s a wind or solar plant employing 88 people who produce electricity for others. Is that the wingnut position for today?
What is interesting with this story is that capitalism is coming to back to bite us in the ass.
With the emergence of investment funds, compose of millions of little owner, in the last 20-30 years the ugly face of the highest return at any cost lead to the search for the lowest salary, environmentally, cheapest operational cost possible.
As long as there is a market for development of job in tertiary sectors the situation is not to bad. But once this market is saturated, the negative commercial balance comes to bite back any country that let its manufacturing capacities go away.
The USA wouldn’t be the first SuperPower to throw away its economy. The spaniards in modern europe did the same thing, so did the roman Empire in the antiquity.
The problem is that we Europeans and you Americans have been all too happy to export industrial production to China and other socalled developing countries and they have made the proliferation of cheap goods at a much bigger cost to the environment compared to a lower quantitative output at higher costs in our own countries. Just look at this UK Sunday Times article entitled Vanishing glaciers jolt smokestack China
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6907919.ece
I am sure you get the idea that soot deposited on the glaciers and absorbing heat is the main culprit.
jorgekafkazar (22:17:11) :
(Quote)
Ron: a search of the relevant document, which I believe is:
http://docs.house.gov/rules/health/111_ahcaa.pdf,
reveals that there is no “section 7203.” The number 7203 doesn’t even appear in the document. I suspect somebody has fallen victim to disinformation.
http://docs.house.gov/rules/health/111_ahcaa.pdf
The bill IS almost 2000 pages, so ………….. (unquote)
—————————————————–
I hope Ron does not mind me jumping in here, but you will find section 7203 is related to “THE INTERNAL REVENUE CODE OF 1986”, not Health Bill H.R. 3962.
Just Google to get the IRS web page and then search for “7203”. This gives you Bulletin No. 2006-15 April 10, 2006 a pdf in which you can find references to 7203.
Ta ta.
In the UK to some the care of livestock is important. There are many campaigns lead by people who see the welfare of the animal as important (They are not always Greens). However many people would find it difficult paying prices that well cared for stock demands. They opt for the £1.50/chicken and ignore the suffering intensive farming brings, or they import from countries where there is no control.
Who is correct?
Tesco Chain in UK Continues to Import Chicken from Charoen Pokphand Foods.
Publication: Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Date: Friday, February 6 2004
The EU/Uk also have dislike of possible dangers and controls are put in place to prevent contamination of the food chain by hormone injected meat, insufficiently tested GM crops, Food with additives. This stops the import of some seeds/foods
Is this correct? Is this a Green issue or a health issue?
US to sue EU at WTO over import ban on ‘chlorinated chicken’
by Richard Allison
Monday 16 June 2008 01:00
The US may sue the EU at the WTO over its continuing ban on imports of US “chlorinated chicken”, after EU vet experts voted overwhelmingly against a proposal to lift the ban.
This EU ban was put in place 10 years ago due to health concerns about antimicrobial agents used by American processors.
Some things are consumer price lead:
Computers
Car parts
AV equipment
Light Bulbs
etc
I have worked in the reseach department of a UK car subsytem manufacturer. They used to manufacture the parts in this country – too expensive says the consumer- Manufacture is now in 3 eastern countries. The research is done in this country, although a new research facility has been built in China. Jobs are safe they say!!! oh yeah!
are these green issues? or greed issues?
Did the Greens or the public opt for a reduction of 20% in vehicle costs?
Good used to be designed and manufactured in the west. But costs of looking after employees, costs of environmental controls, costs of environmentally safe waste disposal pushed up the costs. The “east” has none of theses concerns yet – life is cheap, the environment is no concern (yet) etc. The Great Western Consumer votes with its wallet and pays £300 for a TV instead of £400 and so Western jobs , manufacturing disappear to the East.
Is the environment important? Is this just Green agenda?
Are employees more than just disposable labour?
These are not green issues they are humanity issues. Would you want to live in the waste land created by some eastern companies?
Sustainability:
A major question should be are we living in a sustainable society. It would be very easy for us to say never mind the future, I want cheap energy so I can go fishing, live where it would be uncomfortably hot without AC, Drive a vehicle that consumes 2 times the fuel that it should just for a status symbol etc.
But we ARE consuming resources that ONE day will be exhausted, oil and gas are not being created.
Is it right that we should turn a blind eye to the future and let them sort out problems of our making?
Should we be pushing waste radioactives onto the UNKNOWN future?
Renewable energy is unlikely to provide base load requirements – there will be a need for fossil fuel power stations for a long time. But every watt of energy produced renewably means that most of the fossil fuel that would have been used is preserved for the future – a form of energy storage!
In the UK some industries obtain cheaper energy by accepting disconnection at peak times. In the UK they are known as (wiki) “NG Frequency Service, National Grid Reserve Service or reserve service participants. These are large power users such as steel works, cold stores, etc. who are happy to enter into a contract to be paid to be automatically disconnected from power supplies whenever grid frequency starts to fall. An example of such a participant would be a large steel melting furnace”
cannot Al smelters use renewables in such a way?
Well, I got this published in the letters page of physics world. I have some hope that people are starting to think, even if very slowly.
I was dismayed by the number of pages in October’s Physics World dedicated to the propaganda of climate alarmism. This is purely a political issue, not science. Cleaner energy, practicalities of sustainability, yes, but please stop trying to force us to accept that it is proven that today’s planetary energy balance is leaving the world warmer than it has been for thousands of years. It seems that we simply don’t know how much warmer it was 1000 years ago – all we can say with any certainty is “not much”. Too much weight is being placed on the belief that we are responsible for what we currently think we observe – and that we can change what we guess is happening.
In British Columbia we have an additional layer of protest to cut through and that is the Native Indian population who have seized on the environmental message to put weight behind their positions.
BC Hydro is trying to complete a deal with Alcan (Rio Tinto) in Kitimat to expand and secure an electrical supply for the Northern part of the province. You see here in Canada we allowed the aluminum smelter to build its own hydro power station as so to not impact supply for the province. Alcan constructed a Hydro facility and will expand it to help with the growing power needs in BC.
Except that the river flows through native lands. It is a 2 Billion dollar project on hold.
Here is a two point Electrical Energy Plan for North America because Canada is a net exporter of Electricity to the US.
1) Reduce the cost of energy by 20% over 10 years to make manufacturing more competitive. Energy = Production.
2) Simply create a Standard that any NEW power generation be 25% cleaner based on intensity (800Mw facility being replaced by a 1Gw Facility would have the same emissions level) than what it is replacing perpetually, in return remove current obstacles to deployment of these projects to reduce cost of development which will spur new projects and create JOBS.
A quick google brought this up:
http://www.missoulian.com/news/local/article_5d5dad54-be72-11de-b9f2-001cc4c03286.html
“The prices (of electricity) have gone way up, way beyond what you can make aluminum at,” said company spokesman Haley Beaudry.
Traditionally, big power users such as CFAC (at its height the plant consumed about 25 percent of all electricity used in Montana) received cut-rate prices from Bonneville Power Administration.
A quasi-governmental outfit, Bonneville markets power produced at the region’s federal hydroelectric dams, and for decades sold at-cost electricity to big industrial customers. It was considered a sort of economic development, as the smelters provided hundreds of jobs in a region short on diversified employment.
But as population boomed and economies modernized, general demand for the cheap hydropower skyrocketed, pitting industry against other users. The amount of at-cost power available to industry was whittled away, and eventually was replaced entirely by a small subsidy that helped CFAC and others buy down the cost of electricity.
General consumer advocates, however, still cried foul, arguing that the subsidy was too large and came at the expense of other ratepayers. The court agreed, and in December 2008 ordered BPA to end its subsidy to CFAC.
Bonneville and the aluminum producer quickly cobbled together a “bridge agreement,” Beaudry said, which carried the company through Sept. 30, 2009. CFAC has been operating at 10 percent capacity since that agreement.
The litigants again sued, however, successfully challenging the bridge agreement.
So who forced the closure?
Not the greens
Not lack of power stations
Just the great american public requesting lower cost electricity!
There should be a name for the anti industry anti-intellectual liberal faction that rules western Europe: the Khmer Vert.
Well off topic I’m afraid, but is anyone else having trouble with Firefox? I’ve been trying to load this page (and Booker’s Telegraph articles) for over 10 minutes and I’ve had to switch to IE8.
In juxtaposition to the gentleman who linked to the Anglesey smelter closure and the other gentleman who argued about cheap nuclear power, the history of the Invergordon smelter is pertinent:
“When the British Aluminium Company decided in 1968 to build an aluminium smelter at Invergordon on the Cromarty Firth, it was on the understanding that nuclear power could be purchased at a price which would allow it to compete with producers overseas. The company therefore signed a contract with the Hydro-Electric Board, its suppliers, whereby in return for contributing towards the construction cost of the South of Scotland Electricity Board’s Hunterston ‘B’ nuclear power station, it would receive a tranche of nuclear electricity up to the year 2000 at a price of 0.263 pence per kilowatt-hour plus escalation. Experts assured the company that the latter would never be more than general inflation. In fact by 1981, at a time when the world price of aluminium was falling, the price of Hunterston ‘B’s electricity had soared to 1.354 pence per kilowatt-hour, well over twice the rate of inflation. British Aluminium was now making a loss of [pounds]2 million a month, …”
Lessons to learn; a) never trust nuclear industry projections. b) If you want cheap electricity for aluminium smelting it’s best to sort out your own hydro-power or geothermal station (eg in Iceland).
Nuclear environmentalist protests/delays were non-existent in Scotland and in most UK nuclear construction. The only exception was against the use of the more “unsafe” US-designed PWR at Sizewell B. Nuclear power of course collapsed in the UK entirely due to the ever-rising costs and nothing whatsoever to do with environmentalists. On coal in the USA I wouldn’t comment but coal-plant construction in the UK was stopped because natural gas power was far cheaper and simpler. ie for better or worse it was the free market, not environmentalists.
JamesG (05:20:21),
When the government is a business partner, it is no longer a free market.
Both Socialism and Fascism employ government control of business. They are both anti-ethical to the free market.
JamesG (05:20:21) :
Lessons to learn; … b) If you want cheap electricity for aluminium smelting it’s best to sort out your own hydro-power or geothermal station (eg in Iceland).
Thanks, I’ll pass on you simple solution.
I reply to JamesG + others.
If you are buying any products in bulk it is reasonable to expect that you will get discount. Electricity is no different.
While this plant was no doubt marginal at best it should serve as a warning that the US + Europe are already losing large chunks of industry to other countries because of high energy costs, taxes and regulation. As energy costs go even higher and cap + trade comes in we will lose a hell of a lot more.
The loss of this capacity will do absolutely nothing to reduce CO2 as the Chinese, Indians + other emerging countries will have no desire to castrate their industries with CO2 restrictions.
bill (04:38:27) : Sustainability:
A major question should be are we living in a sustainable society.
By definition, yes. Until “stuff” is sent into outer space via rocket, it does not leave the planet and so it is still here for use. “Stuff” never goes away. And we have an effectively infinite supply of energy (though, it would seem, a shortage of intelligence.)
But we ARE consuming resources that ONE day will be exhausted, oil and gas are not being created.
Well, even ignoring for the moment the evidence that there is some reasonable evidence that oil and gas are created where carbonate rock is subducted and nature does a natural FT process on it; ignoring that, we can make all the oil we want at about $80 $100 bbl.
Look, this whole “consumption” and “running out” meme is just broken.
Stuff never leaves the planet. Every ounce of copper ever mined (modulo the few tons in satellites, but even then most of them will reenter and burn up at some point…) is still here and natural processes of concentration are still working. We don’t run out. There is no shortage. Ever. Period.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
And back at the “oil from rock subduction” (links in the link given), look at where there is lots of subduction and you find oil. California. Saudi Arabia. Indonesia. The Russians are finding lots of oil using this methodology. It is a novel thesis, but has reasonable lines of reasoning backing it. There are also some ‘depleted oil fields’ that seem to refill (and the newer oil has a different isotopic signature that seems to indicate deep sources.
But even if none of that were true, we have about 400 years of coal and oil proven and an effectively infinite reserve of Uranium.
Is it right that we should turn a blind eye to the future and let them sort out problems of our making?
“Mu”. We are making solutions, not problems. Every year we have more resources, not less, because we used what we had to figure out how to make more, cheaper.
Should we be pushing waste radioactives onto the UNKNOWN future?
At one point in my life I was adamantly against nuclear power due to the “store waste for 25,000 years” issue. Later I found out that was time to decay to ‘normal background’, or basically zero. If you set your standard to “Decay to the level of the original ore body, you need to store the waste for 250 years or less. So it isn’t an “unknown” future, it’s my grandkids future. And they will quite able to not go dig up the one little mountain where the stuff out to get buried.
But every watt of energy produced renewably means that most of the fossil fuel that would have been used is preserved for the future – a form of energy storage!
And just why would we want to store it? In “depleted” oil wells, roughly 1/2 the total oil is still in the ground. In 200 years, we we are close to “running out” do you not thing recovery technologies will improve? This has happened a couple fo times already. Closed fields reopened with newer technology.
In the UK some industries obtain cheaper energy by accepting disconnection at peak times. … cannot Al smelters use renewables in such a way?
In fact, that was the original rational for what some have called a subsidy. The aluminum company could consume lots of power “off peak” when the hydro guys needed to keep rivers flowing, but everyone was in bead with the lights, stove, and TV off. So the Alu guys would suck it up, but cheap. That the total electric demand is so close to capacity that even hydro at midnight is being bid up is a worrisome point!
The Alu guys could also shut down fairly quickly or on an odd as needed (Salmon Run, stop work!). They got cheaper rates for taking the disruption.
While I agree mostly with Berry’s sentiments, his rant reads like a typical physiscist/engineer’s diatribe, (with apologies to the more astute physicists and engineers here), being long on noise and light on substance. To wit: “Inherent in ecology are three assumptions: “natural” conditions are optimal, climate is fragile, and human influences are bad.” Balderdash. No ecologist worthy of the title thinks like this. Self-absorbed environmentalists might, just as self-absorbed physicists (and their newly minted “climate scientist” kin) have their dilettantes too.
This ignorance is the curse of the working biologist. If the physicists et al would actually take the time to learn some biology, they would find that the fundamental tenet of life is its robustness. The wails of the climate scientists and the handwringing of the “environmentalists” (who are not, and never will be, biologists) about fragility are laughable to most biologists. Evolution has imbued tremendous capacity for adaptability in biological systems. To be sure, some systems are fragile, but then so is the engineered crystal glassware on my dinner table. Doesn’t mean the whole dinner is going to hell in a handbasket.
My only comment is to suggest that people read “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. It is entirely related to all of this.
Falstaff and some of the others.
I see your point that a large part of this can be connected to a fall in the price of aluminum. But what about going back several steps further? to the law of supply and demand. What would be the generating capacity of this area of Montana and what would be the price of electricity had the market been able to develop without unnecessary environmental interference? Maybe the price of electricity would be at a point where the company would be competitive. Mr. Berry says the court was the “final” villain
We stopped building nuclear plants in about 1980. How many should we have by now? If we want to have a stimulus plan how about cheap energy?
I thought one of the more interesting lines in the first piece was: “How can you defend your global warming hypothesis when you have omitted the effects of clouds which affect heat balance far more than carbon dioxide, and when your hypothesis contradicts the paper by Lee in the Journal of Applied Meteorology in 1972 that shows the atmosphere does not behave like a greenhouse?”
When I get into a discussion about “global warming,” I always ask the person, “What makes you think the atmosphere behaves like a greenhouse?” That is usually the end of the discussion, because I badger them about, ” Where is the roof, where are the vents. What controls them. Where is the door? ”
Anyway, I could not find the actual article from “The Journal of Applied Meteorology,” but there are many references to it. Here is one of the better ones –
Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics
http://www.tech-know.eu/uploads/Falsification_of_the_Atmospheric_CO2_Greenhouse_Effects.pdf
Excerpt:
“The authors express their hope that in schools around the world the fundamentals of physics will
be taught correctly, not by using shock-tactic ‘Al Gore’ movies and not misinforming physics
students by confusing absorption/emission with reflection, by confusing the tropopause with the
ionosphere and by confusing microwaves with shortwaves.”
Abstract
The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea the authors trace back to the traditional works of
Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861 and Arrhenius 1896, but which is still supported in global climatology,
essentially describes a fictitious mechanism by which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump
driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the
atmospheric system.
According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist.
—————
Gerlich and Tscheuschner reference Lee’s paper as being published in 1973
I am not a scientist, but I play one when arguing with idiots.
R Dunn
(I wish there was a preview function here)
If one believes in free markets then yes this plant should close. Its cheap electricity was essentially being subsidized by other users whose costs will now go down as a result. And yes aluminum production should go elsewhere if someone else can produce electricity more cheaply or is located more closely to raw materials.
If the plant was closed by environmentalists, that is wrong. But if the plant closed because it could not compete on a level playing field. It is so.