Greens want every possible intervention except one which “solves” their useful crisis
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
‘Drill Bit Dana’ has been at it again, trying to claim that we don’t “accept the science”, because we are ideologically opposed to their solution – massive government intervention.
There is just one problem with this argument – its an utter falsehood. The reason its a falsehood, is massive government intervention is not the only, or by any measure the best, route to reducing CO2 emissions. Most skeptics are supporters of power generation solutions which would, as a byproduct, significantly reduce CO2 emissions.
We have no reason to reject alarmist science, other than we think it is wrong.
Take the example of America. The USA has substantially reduced CO2 emissions over the last decade, because of fracking – the switch from coal to gas, even though energy use has gone up, has reduced the amount of carbon which is burned to produce that energy.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/02/us-co2-emissions-may-drop-to-1990-levels-this-year/
Of course, America’s coal producers are still mining as much coal as they ever did – and exporting it to Europe, whose disastrous policy failures have increased costs and CO2 emissions.
In the case of fracking, the reduction of CO2 emissions might have been incidental, but fracking has produced results. Surely when it comes to CO2, results are what count?
But the real elephant in the room, with regard to emissions reduction, is the nuclear option.
James Hansen likes nuclear power.
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/03/world/nuclear-energy-climate-change-scientists-letter/index.html
George Monbiot likes nuclear power. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima
Anthony Watts likes nuclear power.
James Delingpole likes nuclear power.
Jo Nova likes nuclear power.
The Heartland Institute likes nuclear power.
http://blog.heartland.org/2013/11/global-warmings-mt-rushmore-wisely-embraces-nuclear-power/
So why isn’t nuclear power the main focus of everyone’s attention? Why do far too many alarmists persist with antagonising us, by pushing their absurd carbon taxes and government intervention, when they could be working with us? Why do alarmists keep trying to force us to accept solutions which we find utterly unacceptable, when there are obvious solutions which we could all embrace?
Perhaps some alarmists are worried about the risk of nuclear accidents – but, if climate change is as serious as they say, how can the risk of a nuclear meltdown or ten possibly compare to what alarmists claim is an imminent risk to the survival of all humanity?
Why do alarmists persist with pushing falsehoods about the motivation of their opponents, when they could, right now, be taking positive, substantial steps to promote policies which actually would reduce CO2 emissions?
What was the motivation of Phil Jones, Director of the CRU, when he wrote the following Climategate email:-
http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=0837094033.txt
“Britain seems to have found it’s Pat Michaels/Fred Singer/Bob Balling/ Dick Lindzen. Our population is only 25 % of yours so we only get 1 for every 4 you have. His name in case you should come across him is Piers Corbyn. … He’s not all bad as he doesn’t have much confidence in nuclear-power safety.”
Does Phil Jones really think that nuclear safety is more of an issue than global warming?
The easy answer to this dilemma is that most alarmists are being dishonest – that they don’t really believe CO2 is an important issue, that its simply a convenient excuse to push their political agenda. But surely they can’t all be bent? Monbiot seems sincere about embracing nuclear power. Hansen, and the authors of the open letter, seem sincere about promoting nuclear power. Are they really the only honest participants on the alarmist side of the debate? Surely this can’t be the case.
What am I missing?
. Most skeptics are supporters of power generation solutions which would, as a byproduct, significantly reduce CO2 emissions.
===============
I don’t give a fig whether CO2 emissions are reduced or not. CO2 is only beneficial. Reduction of CO2 should not be a consideration when discussing power generation.
I’m with fenbeagle. Nuclear is expensive.
With regards to risks, whether you think they are large or small, nuclear involves taking particular risks which can be avoided for the foreseeable future. The ALARP risk principle (as low as reasonably practical) guides us to the conclusion there are better ways to produce useful power and heat today .They’re good for at least the next couple of centuries, and there is no reason to go nuclear right now.
Nuclear potentially has a valuable role to play in energy supply (absent better solutions), but it can do so in 200 years’ time. By then we will have developed much better technology with 200 more years’ progress along the learning curve. If the technology is better, the risks should be lower (ALARP) and we should be much better at making maximum use of limited nuclear resources.
Nuclear liabilities will always make their way back to the taxpayer. There is no better place for society to manage long term waste security and liabilities. And the taxpayer cannot escape the millstone of the default “insurer of last resort” if or when things do go badly.
It’s not necessary in my lifetime, and probably not for a couple of generations after me.
Back in the Seventies, I was a “public scientist” of sorts at a museum. Energy conservation and less use of fossil fuels was an issue even back then. After much reading, I realized nuclear power was better than most other power sources, save for one problem: too many people turned into frothing fanatics when they came anywhere near the idea. So I regretfully laid that option aside.
Today the balance is different. We have frothing fanatics on ALL facets of the energy equation – and Iran and North Korea prove that frothing fanatics are going to go for nuclear power whether it’s readily available or not. If fanatics are going nuclear anyway, why shouldn’t the rest of us? It WILL cut down on carbon emissions.
rcs says: Greens are fundamentally opposed to anything that works.
Oh it’s nothing to do with whether it works or not, they oppose everything.
Propose a large tidal generator in the Severn estuary that could provide a large part of the power needed in Britain every day and they will be wailing about a “unique ecology” on some nearby salt marshes that will get dried / flooded / get more salty….
Ecology is now spelt N-O.
No, no. no ! What did you want to do again?
Many who are pushing CO2 alarmist science know they are grossly exaggerating. Schneider made that clear decades ago. They think they have to provide scare stories to get action on what they perceive as a possible long term danger.
Many of the woolly hatted grass-roots have probably swallowed it all hook, line and sinker.
I find that what I support most is the actual policy evolution that is taking place, slowly and surely. Let places like Germany and the UK tax and regulate their energy sources to death. All they will do, in the end, is to destroy their economic competitiveness and send all of their manufacturing jobs to areas with more competitive cost structures. At the same time, other areas (Texas! North Dakota! Oklahoma! Western Pennsylvania!) are allowing the development of large amounts of cheap and easily available energy, which translates into cheap electricity, which translates into a huge advantage for any heavy manufacturing which uses energy. (btw, don’t get pulled into the trap of trying to compare retail electric rates, because a large enough plant is always able to get long term contracts at a steep discount, or to just generate the power they need themselves from the available source)
So, the end game is that these areas with lots of cheap energy are going to draw all of the job growth that happens not just in the US, but in the world, and as such their wealth, power, and influence are going to grow, and those areas that stick to the Green Dream will continue to see their wealth, power, and influence decline. (Case in point: Great Britain, which in international affairs has now become the illegitimate offspring of an afterthought and a joke – how sad, really, to see the one-time seat of empire sink into total irrelevance and obscurity, as it has today)
To put it in its most simple terms – so you want to give us all of your money and become slaves to the people who think more clearly than you do? Okay, whatever. Your choice.
I am actually working in a non peer reviewed essay – not especially climate related – but definitely in the arena, on how vast numbers of people – let’s say 97% – can end up believing utterly in something that is completely wrong without there actually having to be an organised conspiracy of deception.
Unfortunately it paints humanity as creatures of innate and necessary prejudice, so greens will totally reject it, because they think through every issue from first principles and never ever let their ideas be guided by fashion, peer group pressure or selfish motives, and never ever act out of sheer denialism.
The great thing it discovers is that that people who reject prejudice overtly, can thereby excuse themselves of examining their own ideas for its existence.
I call that the art of convenient lying.
There are two main issues here.
The first is that many greens long ago bought into Maurice Strong’s agenda which is to de-industrialize the west while not-industrializing the rest of the world so that everybody (except certain special greens and their political cronies) will be living in a glorious green non-industrial world where poverty is the rule and life expectancy is half what it is today. Oh and populations die back so the planet is only carrying <1billion persons for a "sustainable" future. This is pure misanthropy but the greens don't think they'll ever be in the non-essential 6 billion who will have to go. I'mm mnot making this up you can find this policy promoted several places on the www by people whose names you know well.
The second is that greens never keep up with science and technology – mostly because they don't understand it and can't be bothered to learn. So their anti-nuclear stance is based on the fact that there are nuclear weapons (though they likely couldn't distinguish between an atomic weapon and a hydrogen weapon even though these are quite different technologies) which are BAD and nuclear power stations have had accidents. The fact that the accidents happened with poorly engineered first generation reactors built forty years ago while today's nuclear technology is quite different and can be engineered to be very safe and will solve their "CO2 problem" goes unnoticed. These guys are stuck somewhere back in history and will drag us all into some medieval "paradise" if we let them.
In a nutshell ideological hatred of modernity, wilful stupidity, wilful ignorance.
Dr Phil Jones is wrong about something else, too:
“Our population is only 25% of yours…” No it isn’t. The UK’s population is 20% of the USA’s.
The reason the Greens are opposed to “anything that works” type energy, is because they want the world’s population reduced by a factor of a thousand. Cheap, effective energy works against their plans. Their attitude that people are a cancer on the planet implies they would prefer no people at all, including themselves.
MikeH says: August 9, 2014 at 6:33 am
But choose a state like Nevada for a Thorium plant. No cooling water is needed.
Why would anyone think that a Nuclear plant would not require cooling water?
Is it a heat engine?
So now we are being told that nuclear power reactors are like TV sets and all we have to is buy a fine new reactor and it has all the up to date gizmos and no need to worry just sit back and enjoy. So what do you know, here they come, hawking their latest sets “This here is guaranteed never to melt down. That one there is the very latest in reactor technology- liquid fluoride, clean as a whistle it is. And so forth.
“What am I missing?”
The 800-lb watermelon in the room.
I wish someone would poll nuclear physicist who have been published in peer-reviewed journals on their opinion of the safety and desireability of nuclear power plants. Any doubt what the “consensus” would be?
If the warmests refuse to accept data, we could bury them under their own BS.
Maybe it is time for another LENR update. GK
The post WWII technology of plutonium generators that we are still using today are expensive and risky. Note the way the UK government in the new deal with EDF recently, had to DOUBLE the strike price of nuclear power AND take on the responsibility of cleaning up the mess if there was ever an accident.
Not much sign of the “cheap and safe” claims there.
The irony is that in opposing “dirty coal” even when it’s a clean modern power plant, what the greens are doing is locking us into risky technology and preventing the time for R&D into more stable and less polluting forms of nuclear power generation.
The roughly 80 BILLION GBP ( add another 40 for cost over-runs ) that has just been committed to build two plants in Britain is 80 bn that will not go into developing better nuclear technologies.
That’s what happens when you lie about what the problem is, you force solutions that are expensive, harmful and do not address the problem.
If the greens want to reign in rampant consumerism ( which I suspect is what is behind a lot of it ) then they need to come out and say so and see how it could be done.
I’m sure a lot of people are tired of spending their lives working long hours to buy crap that breaks in 12 months + 1 week and they then need to work again to buy another one.
We are all chasing our own tails, running round in circles trying to out consume each other. Like hamsters in a wheel no one knows how to slow down.
I don’t see anyone around here getting richer, but the hours are getting longer.
While everybody debates their favourite nuclear position, it might be instrumental to remember that the problem to be solved here is not CO2 emissions, climate change or global warming, it’s Dana Nuccitelli…
Byes-a bye, when did the stupid “like” buttons get turned back on again? Didn’t think WUWT was about “building consensus”. 🙁
Chris Moffat @ur momisugly 8>27 pretty much nails it.
I have no reason to reject alarmist science.
I just wish they would produce some, you know good old fashioned testable ideas.
At the moment their efforts are Opinion.
Their conjectures of Global Doom brought on by the rising production of that magic gas, CO2, are not science.
They are soothsaying.
I for one would love to see some Alarmist Science.
How about they do this;
Define their terms.
Definite and document their data.
Test their ideas.
Acknowledge history.
Refrain from hysterical pouting.
There is very little Alarmist Science, this has always been the cause of scepticism.
Dressing up in white lab coats and cloaking oneself in the authority of the institution does not make ones utterances science.
Unsupported opinion remains the only “proof” of the magic gas theorem.
…Anthony Watts likes nuclear power.
James Delingpole likes nuclear power.
Jo Nova likes nuclear power.
The Heartland Institute likes nuclear power.
So why isn’t nuclear power the main focus of everyone’s attention?
Because:
Anthony Watts likes nuclear power.
James Delingpole likes nuclear power.
Jo Nova likes nuclear power.
The Heartland Institute likes nuclear power….
Paul, they are annoying and childish….
@ur momisugly kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
August 9, 2014 at 7:34 am
Further to your post, this is a similar situation with regard to Argon and the other noble gases with the exception of helium.
For a while I was involved in the atmospheric and specialty gases industry. It was there I was told that no one would ever build a plant specifically for the extraction of Argon, etc. It would be far too expensive. Those gases are available because LOTS of people have a need for cryogenic nitrogen and oxygen; they are “byproducts” of the process to liquify O2 and N2.
Paul Coppin says:
August 9, 2014 at 8:47 am
Byes-a bye, when did the stupid “like” buttons get turned back on again? Didn’t think WUWT was about “building consensus”. 🙁
__________________
No lie.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/09/dont-mention-the-nuclear-option-to-greens/#comment-1705541
“Roger Sowell, I have a question regarding your post: What is your position?”
Mr. Sowell is a lawyer who works for oil companies. His position is whatever the person writing his paycheck says it is.
His arguments are so stupid that I think that his employers are being ripped off.
The Westinghouse AP1000 is a so called gen 3 design. All nuclear accidents including Fukishima were in various gen 1 designs. An important policy question is whether and to what degree to go with gen 3 now, or continue to build USC coal and CCGT (depending on where in the world and what resource is available) while further developing the various gen 4 ideas, of which LFTR is only 1. There are several others, including but not limited toBill Gates TerraPower traveling wave reactor, MIT’s Transaromic (both solving the rad waste problem), General Atomics modular fission SMR EM2, and the Lockheed Skunkworks moonshot for high beta modular fusion (one TED talk does not make a working demonstration).
China is doing all three: one USC unit about every two week through 2016, 28 of their version of AP1000 also under construction, a pilot LFTR under construction, and negotiation with TerraPower about a first demonstration unit.
In the US, thanks to shale gas, the obvious path is CCGT plus aggressive development of gen 4 ideas. The former is happening thanks to simple economics. CCGT takes three year to construct rather than USC 4 years, costs at most 1300/kWe versus about $4000/kWe for USC, and runs at about 60 rather than 42-45% net thermal fuel efficiency. The latter is not happening due to Green/liberal/OBummer obtuseness. As Mr. Worrall deftly points out.