Newsbytes: Durban & The New Wait-And-See Diplomacy

Wait and see and ‘how to we address’ Climate Change in an econimcally sensible manner are one and the same.
With coal prices in most countries above $80/ton(US and Australian are exceptions) spinning up nuclear build programs makes economic sense but will take time.

To any thinking man, the Wall Street Journal, 26 November 2011 piece would be like a knife to the heart of their ideology.
Unfortunately, people like Zero, Krugman and any number of progressive sycophants are not thinking members of the human race.

@ John
Yessiree, Bob! Come and meet the new and improved snake oil salesmen! 😉

Amazing how even the “facts” bandied about are misleading–production from the Bakken “oil shale” is actually from only the middle third of the formation, which happens to be a porous (but highly impermeable) limestone that contains crude; it isn’t shale at all. Admittedly, were this limestone not sandwiched between the two shale members of the formation, the oil probably wouldn’t still be there, but to ascribe it as “oil shale” is dubious at best. Fracking is needed to induce the necessary permeability in the limestone or there’d be no oil flow at all, while horizontal drilling keeps fracking within this production horizon for expansive extraction. (The Bakken formation doesn’t outcrop anywhere and is typically 2 miles deep.)

Gail Combs said November 26, 2011 at 8:27 am:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/26/newsbytes-durban-the-new-wait-and-see-diplomacy/#comment-809209
John, thanks for finding that e-mail. Makes it pretty clear it is all about “investments”

Gail, I love ya, you post interesting stuff, but I think all this shows is a marketer slipped one past the spam filters, that was loaded with right terms for FOIA’s content searching to pull it out of the pile. It’s a “Dear Colleague” email, which even I have gotten lots of over the years even without such colleagues, and that opening says to me it’s just generic spam suitable for sending to many, in this case likely using a small specialized mailing list. Note how Briffa is never referred to by name in the text.
You have many pieces of great material to work with and make your points, and this email certainly ain’t becoming one of them. Let it go.

ChE says:
November 26, 2011 at 7:52 am
Harry, you’re forgetting about gas.
Nuclear is ‘reasonably’ competitive against coal at about $4/MMbtu and natural gas at about $6/MMBtu.(Depending on interest rate) The US currently has some of the lowest natural gas prices in the world.
Even then the ‘delivered price’ of Natural Gas to electric utilities in Florida is running at $6/MMBtu. http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_dcu_SFL_m.htm
The US is not the world. The US and Russia account for about 1/3rd of global natural gas production and the Russian’s aren’t interested in giving away their gas for cheap. In order to export US gas it would have to be liquefied which adds a cost.

I have started on a little project and have decided to start at the start; email 0001.txt. What we see here is evidence of a possible “positive feedback loop”. In engineering such loops are generally unstable and dangerous and the feedback needs to be carefully managed.
What we see is Dr. Warren’s desire to carefully craft her CIAS product to the needs of the UK’s DEFRA which appears to get much of it’s guidance on “CC” (Climate Change) from the UNFCC which gets its guidance from IPCC which gets a lot of IT’S guidance from “The Cause”. So we go from CRU (et al) to the IPCC to the UNFCC to DEFRA and finally close the loop back to UEA with Tyndall Centre and CIAS. This email is a conversation with Mike Hulme.
So we have one group of UEA providing AGW propaganda to the UN who produces guidelines for national government and then another group at UEA (Tyndall Centre) positioned to profit from the resulting business that it creates at DEFRA. Very handy, and apparently all very vital.

Solar power does make sense in some applications but for the average home in the average neighborhood it is very inefficient. What is going on here is that people are being “sold” a bill of goods. You will never be able to get a major residential PV system to break even. You *might* be able to get one to break even if it heats water but the main demand time for hot water in most residential homes is when the sun is very low in the sky or at night (people generally take showers or wash clothes in the early morning or late at night, relatively few are at home in the middle of the day when solar energy is at its peak availability).
The reason you will never get a residential PV system to break even is that the failure rate of individual PV cells that make up a PV panel is pretty high. So you not only have to deal with the linear decrease in output from the cells as they age, you have to deal with the failure of entire cells at a rate of about 10% of cells / year. So if you have an array made of 1000 cells, you are, on average, going to lose about 100 of them in the first year and you won’t be able to tell which ones have failed. The ones remaining will have lost about 2% of their efficiency so overall you have lost 12% of your power output in the first year. The voltage will look good, but the maximum current that can be provided will drop. The second year you will lose 90 more cells, then 72 more the year after that (typical individual cell failure rate for the cells made in China). You will never actually get the rated power out of that panel after the first year of operation. It will likely be quite useless in 10 years time.
If you manage another stroke of bad luck (as a friend of mine did in Southern California) you will discover an end to the subsidies that made it attractive in the first place. These will likely end before your panels pay off and that inflated rate that the utility was required to pay you for your generated power suddenly drops.
Folks, this is a huge scam of international scale and there are people laughing all the way to the bank with your money.

Look, it isn’t really about the environment. I mean, it is if you live in Britain, but it isn’t if you live in China. It is about using the environment as a mechanism to get people to buy more Chinese magnets. It creates a cash flow from the UK to China. It is global “redistribution of wealth” using the fear of CO2 as the lever.

Australia as one of, if notthe world’s latgest coal exporters has a carbon tax which exempts coal exports as the emissions haven’t been emitted yet.
So international customers get cheaper electricity than domestic Australians inthe name of reducing emissions while the government plans to double the coal exports by 2050.
Beat that for stupidity.

Since the JAXA satellite revealed that the US and EU are major CO2 sinks, it’s vital that China burn as much coal as possible.