Guest post by David Middleton
Note: The original version of this article included a significant error. The post has now been edited accordingly (DHM 3/21/2017).
On February 16, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center hosted a film screening of the “Rational Middle Energy Series.” The university promoted the event as “Finding Energy’s Rational Middle” and described the film’s motivation as “a need and desire for a balanced discussion about today’s energy issues.”
Who can argue with balance and rationality? And with Harvard’s stamp of approval, surely the information presented to students and the public would be credible and reliable. Right?
Wrong.
The event’s sponsor was Shell Oil Company. The producer of the film series was Shell. The film’s director is Vice President of a family-owned oil and gas company, and has taken approximately $300,000 from Shell. The host, Harvard Kennedy School, has received at least $3.75 million from Shell. And the event’s panel included a Shell Executive Vice President.
The film “The Great Transition” says natural gas is “clean” (in terms of carbon emissions, it is not) and that low-carbon, renewable energy is a “very long time off” (which is a political judgment, not a fact). Amy Myers Jaffe, identified in the film as the Executive Director of Energy and Sustainability at the University of California, Davis, says, “We need to be realistic that we’re gonna use fossil fuels now, because in the end, we are.” We are not told that she is a member of the US National Petroleum Council.
The film also features Richard Newell, who is identified as a Former Administrator at the US Energy Information Administration. “You can get 50% reductions in your emissions relative to coal through natural gas,” he says, ignoring the methane leaks that undermine such claims. The film neglects to mention that the Energy Initiative Newell founded and directed at Duke University was given $4 million by an Executive Vice President of a natural gas company.
[…]
Well… I guess this is not great news from the perspective of the Grauniad’s 97% Consensus Team and the two history department grad student who wrote this nonsensical article.
“You can get 50% reductions in your emissions relative to coal through natural gas,” he says, ignoring the methane leaks that undermine such claims.
Now, the reduction isn’t quite 50%; it’s more like 45-49%. However, there is no reason to account for the minuscule volume of methane that may or not be released in the production, transportation and consumption of natural gas.
In the chart below, I have plotted the following:
- Annual CO2 emissions from the burning of 100% of U.S. natural gas production.
- Annual ΔCO2 (coal minus natural gas) emissions assuming all of the natural gas was replacing coal consumption.
- Annual U.S. CH4 emissions from total U.S. energy production in metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
Even if I assume that all of the CH4 emissions from U.S. energy production came from natural gas (they don’t), it totals just 27% of the greenhouse gas emissions averted by switching from coal to natural gas. If all of the natural gas was offsetting coal, the averted emissions would be 1,235 MMT CO2/yr. According to the EPA, the natural gas component of methane emissions is 176 MMT CO2eq/yr. This doesn’t undermine the claim that “You can get 50% reductions in your emissions relative to coal through natural gas,” because coal operations also emit about 90 MMT CO2eq of methane per year. Accounting for the methane, so… “You can get 43% reductions in your emissions relative to coal through natural gas.”
Now, back to the idiotic article…
Fossil fuel interests – oil, gas, and coal companies, fossil-fueled utilities, and fossil fuel investors – have colonized nearly every nook and cranny of energy and climate policy research in American universities, and much of energy science too. And they have done so quietly, without the general public’s knowledge.
For comparison, imagine if public health research were funded predominantly by the tobacco industry. It doesn’t take a neurosurgeon to understand the folly of making policy or science research financially dependent on the very industry it may regulate or negatively affect. Harvard’s school of public health no longer takes funding from the tobacco industry for that very reason. Yet such conflicts of interest are not only rife in energy and climate research, they are the norm.
I don’t have to “imagine”…
The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) was entered in November 1998, originally between the four largest United Statestobacco companies (Philip Morris Inc., R. J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson and Lorillard – the “original participating manufacturers”, referred to as the “Majors”) and the attorneys general of 46 states. The states settled their Medicaid lawsuits against the tobacco industry for recovery of their tobacco-related health-care costs, and also exempted the companies from private tortliability regarding harm caused by tobacco use.[1]:25 In exchange, the companies agreed to curtail or cease certain tobacco marketing practices, as well as to pay, in perpetuity, various annual payments to the states to compensate them for some of the medical costs of caring for persons with smoking-related illnesses. The money also funds a new anti-smoking advocacy group, called the American Legacy Foundation, that is responsible for such campaigns as The Truth. The settlement also dissolved the tobacco industry groups Tobacco Institute, the Center for Indoor Air Research, and the Council for Tobacco Research. In the MSA, the original participating manufacturers (OPM) agreed to pay a minimum of $206 billion over the first 25 years of the agreement.
Setting aside the fact that this is a prime example of a false analogy fallacy and thoroughly moronic… The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) was used to fund at least a fair bit of public health research.
Back to the Grauniad nonsense…
One way or another, the colonization of academia by the fossil fuel industry must be confronted. Because when our nation’s “independent” research to stop climate change is in fact dependent on an industry whose interests oppose that goal, neither the public nor the future is well served.
Dr. Benjamin Franta is a PhD student in the Department of History at Stanford University, an Associate at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and a former Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He has a PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University.
Dr. Geoffrey Supran is a Post Doctoral Associate in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Post Doctoral Fellow in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University. He has a PhD in Materials Science & Engineering from MIT.
Way back in the Pleistocene (late 1970’s), when I was getting my B.S. degree in Earth Science at Southern Connecticut State College (now University, “that fine oil school” in the words of the president of the first oil company I worked for), our department chairman and at least one other geology professor had oil industry experience. A lot of what they taught me is still relevant today.
The notion that academia should confront “the colonization of academia by the fossil fuel industry” is mindbogglingly stupid. The colonization which should be confronted and eradicated is that of “invasive species.” Energy education departments are usually dominated by people with little or no practical energy industry experience (AKA invasive species). And the “the colonization of academia by the fossil fuel industry” is nothing new. Who the hell do these morons think funds programs like this?
Allied Geophysical Laboratories (AGL)The mission of the Allied Geophysical Laboratories (AGL) is to create and apply new geophysical means of imaging and understanding the subsurface. AGL is particularly dedicated to conscientious resource discovery and recovery. Faculty members work with the energy industry, professional societies, and other institutions to develop advanced technologies and help in educating the next generation of geoscientists. AGL uses scaled laboratory measurements, field surveys, numerical modeling, and digital processing to develop novel methods of subsurface analysis.
The fossil-fracking-fuel industry funds it!!!
The fossil fuel industry and professional societies (which are also funded by the industry) fund relevant energy education programs because… geoscientists, engineers and other energy professionals don’t live forever.
Data Sources
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9050us2a.htm
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11
https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/inventoryexplorer/#iallsectors/methane/inventsect/current
Replace “Tobacco Industry” with Governments with an Agenda and what do you get, the sort of corruption we see today.
What else would you expect from Harvard
Annual U.S. CH4 emissions from total U.S. energy production in metric tons of CO2 equivalent.
Just exactly what does that mean? Equivalent How?
‘my’ B.S degree. Not ‘by B.S degree.
We must defend against opposing views and an open debate said the hero of our tale. Maybe this fellow hasn’t heard the bible story of the splinter and the log. As long as the funding is transparent it is not a problem in the real world. Engaging fanatics is futile. Shell should direct more funding to exposing them.
Let’s run a little thought experiment. I am going to provide all of the data and I can do it without consulting any big book of statistics, any news source, or any web site. Here is the experiment. Randomly pick an institution of higher learning. How about, uh, Harvard. Now answer this question. What percentage of the funding of this institution over its history was provided by economical activities that would now be anathema to the liberal elite in academia?
I am thinking of a number that is pretty close to 100%. For it is a fact that such institutions are, economically speaking, products of booming economies. In booming economies, some people get very rich. In fact, the better the economy, the more rich people there will be. These people have all of the money they need or want to support them in luxury, and so they donate what is left over to worthy causes, like universities. If you take away the booming economy, you also take away the donations, and you have no institutions of higher learning. And what makes booming economies possible? Cheap, abundant energy.
Sorry, libs. You cannot get away from it. Your renewables are not going to make that fact go away. And renewables aren’t going to change anything.
However, I would argue that if by some miracle humankind figures out a way to support booming economies with renewables, then the economic power would shift to those enterprises that provide the energy. Nothing changes. It’s not fossil fuel. Now it’s solar, which sucks up incredible amounts of land and kills birds by the millions. And/or it’s wind turbines that also require large areas of land, kill birds, and mar the landscape with big windmills and piles of junk.
These energy companies would become centers of political power, just like the fossil fuel industry. We are already seeing this. The wind industry is becoming politically powerful. In my state the governor and congress are tiptoeing around the issue of reducing subsidies for wind turbines, because the land-owners of the land on which the turbines are built are enjoying the lease money they are receiving that would go away when the subsidies go away. Same goes for that other scam, ethanol. The corn ethanol lobby is a growing political power. not so much in my state, but in the big corn-growing states.
Libs, you just cannot get away from the FACT that political power flows out of economic power. The good news for you is that you will always have these bad guys to fight, so you won’t ever have to suffer for want of something to do.
Not “economical activities”, “economic activities”.
These are energy companies…
Where do people think they buy bio-fuel from? algae fuel? etc
David Middleton:
Thanks for drawing attention to the daft Grauniad article. But the ethos promoted by the article is not new and is standard BBC practice.
The BBC obtains what it calls “balance” concerning fossil fuel usage by e.g.
(a) having a WWF spokesperson oppose usage of fossil fuels then
(b) ‘balancing’ that with a Greenpeace spokesperson claiming the WWF representative did not go far enough in opposing usage of fossil fuels.
Richard
I think we should end the colonization of academia by extreme leftists. We should do this by discharging their employees, dissolving the colleges, liquidating their assets, and applying the net amount to the Federal deficit.
For any person who has gone to college, graduated, worked in the real world, and then returned to college for a supplemental degree, their state is not surprising. The level of ignorance about how the real world works is the mind boggling part. That those in academia who seek to deny reality and live in their ivory towers, it is totally predictable.
But as the previous article pointed out – how many have forsaken their dependence on fossil fuels to support their jihad mentality concerning its effects? I bet both drive old clunkers and crank that AC (or heat) up when the weather is not conducive to their fragile existence.
Well there we have it: there is undoubtedly substantial fossil fuel industry funding going into the opposition to climate change.
That is undeniable.
So are they doing that out of an altruistic desire to see honest science, or to advance their own profits?
Because big oil and coal companies have a track record of honesty and not trying to reduce pollution etc controls to protect profits, right?
And this fossil money exceeds vastly any from green organisations.
I submit climate skepticism is the poison fruit of the poison tree…
So liberals (er, now called “progressives”) who are hell bent on seizing control of our government and society by following Antonio Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” are now complaining when others seek to deter their agenda of lies. What gall.
see:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/04/antonio_gramsci_take_over_the_institutions.html
Is there a single person in the climate blogging field that doesn’t take money from the government or alternate energy?
And then there is this: “…renewable energy is a “very long time off” (which is a political judgment, not a fact).” Sorry, but it’s actually a fact. No one has conceived of a way to make reliable 24-7 electricity, which our way of life absolutely requires, out of solar and/or wind power without fossil or nuclear energy. There has to be a way to fill in the windless, sunless periods. Batteries can’t do it, pumped storage can’t do it, flywheels can’t do it, and so on. Fossil can do it, but the resulting release of CO2 is greater than if fossil was doing it all in the first place. The only way known on earth at this time to make CO2 free electricity is nuclear energy and there are proven ways to use it to make electricity indefinitely. Just a few facts.
Good morning David Middleton
Did you happen to take look at the degree lists for these two? At a first glance they seem well educated, at universities anyway.
Dr. Benjamin Franta is a PhD student in the Department of History at Stanford University, an Associate at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and a former Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He has a PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University.
Dr. Geoffrey Supran is a Post Doctoral Associate in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Post Doctoral Fellow in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University. He has a PhD in Materials Science & Engineering from MIT.
Franta is an Associate at Harvard Engineering etc. But has he ever worked in the field? In any of his degrees? It appears that he does nothing but go from one College to another collecting them.
Zero experience. Same for Supran. Both are Professional Students.
Look, all of us who have worked in industries know there is a learning curve, no matter where you go.
You learn the most in the first two -three years. Then you either stagnate or move to new challenges. Different companies have their own set ways of doing things.
These two have never gone through that. In each field their learning stopped like a door slamming closed. No farther input, no cross fertilization.
Anyone who has ever been saddled with the “new” guy fresh out of school thinking he knows it all and a walking disaster to all around him. Yes all of us were once that person in our youth. These two have never moved beyond that. They may blather along about saving the world and all, but they have no experience in crunch mode, crises, or have someone look at you to keep a production line from stopping.
Nor has anyone ever trusted them with the authority to pick up a phone and say “shut everything down”
I have done this, as have many of you, and all of us know the feeling is crushing, not self satisfying.
Okay, off my soap box.
michael
“The fossil-fracking-fuel industry funds it!!!”
Whoop de do!
Big Oil funds the other side too.
I wrote about it in my blog.
https://thedemiseofchristchurch.com/2015/08/15/the-rockefellers-who-they-fund-from-their-web-site/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true
Try searching the Rockefeller Bros fund for Green Peace, Sierra Club or just about any other rabidly green organization you can think of.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
You’d think that these people would at least bother to learn something about the fossil fuels that they appear to have such an intensely emotional dislike of. The amount of methane leaks from oil/gas production is miniscule compared with the amount of methane that leaks out of coal as it’s being mined. It’s what makes underground coal mines dangerous, and it’s why they used to have canaries in coal mines Remember – canaries – coal mines? The little yellow tweeters would fall of their perches and die when they got a whiff of methane or carbon monoxide. Now, of course we have electronic canaries that are a lot more sensitive, but that’s no help against sudden explosive discharges of methane, which can ignite if they bang sandstone chunks against steel tools and make a spark, and then it’s bye-bye miners (usually in China, these days).
The coal-bed methane industry actually started as a safety measure, to draw as much gas as possible from a coal seam before it was mined. In those days, the gas was just let into the atmosphere, or flared off. Now of course it’s captured and sold. But, the thing is, capturing methane from a single wellbore is way more efficient than trying to capture methane from a large coal deposit, so there’s no doubt that far more CH4 leaks from coal deposits (including many that have had no mine development), than from oil or gas wells.
That’s an undocumented (and probably undocumentable beyond educated guesses) part of “carbon” emission reduction that comes from the switch from coal to gas.
This is one small area that I happen to have knowledge of, and the author(s) could not be more wrong. No doubt there are other errors of fact, but I stick to what I know. That’s because I’m a scientist (doing applied science in the private sector). Those people doing their advocacy and activism are “climate scientists”, which is a different thing altogether. In climate science, the conclusions come first, and name-calling replaces informed discussion.
It’s always amusing when the Climate Godzillas cry “elephant!”
There must be a dissolution of the universities.
‘ the colonization of academia by the fossil fuel industry must be confronted’ – sounds like an admission that the 97% consensus is a bit of a fraud….
I qupte: “The film “The Great Transition” says natural gas is “clean” (in terms of carbon emissions, it is not) and that low-carbon, renewable energy is a “very long time off” (which is a political judgment, not a fact). ”
First, natural gas or any otherfissil fuel will produce carbon dioxide which is the ultimate polluter to warmists. It so happens that the reason ity is supposed to pollute – warming up the aur with its greenhousde effect – does not even exist. Check any geological time chart and you will discover these facts:
First, in the Cambrian, 500 million years ago. the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 7000 ppm. Abd global te,perature? it was 22 degrees Celsius. Bear in mind that 7000 p[pm is is 175 times 400, our presend carbon dioxide level,
Now, move from Cambrian to Cretatopus, 400 mi;;ion years closer to us. Carbon dioxide by now is down to 1000 ppm and still dropping. That amount is actually 25 times of our present anount of 400 ppm. And the corresponding global temperature? Still 22 degrees Celsius. Do you notice that global temperature on geological time scale absolutely brefuses to take notice what carbon dioxide is doing? If carbon dioxide is doing its greenhousewarming stuff, global temperature simply does nod care. It may not veven exist, which is whawt I think this means.
Now let’s get closer to today. Carbon dioxide in the Holocene is dowen to 280 ppm, our pre-industrial value. And global temperature is down a bit, meaning 12degrees Celsius. But woould’nt bit be intereswting to figure out what is ahead, likre all those models do?
If uou assume thatthe carbon dioxide drop those few samples represent will continue in the future you come op with a cprediction of 250 ppm two million years from now. This just happens to be the photosynthersts limit for this planet and lifewill cease to exist.
Like the warmists say, all those expensive projects they run are for the good of vour childrens’ children. If you are for that, you don’t want the life on this planet to cease. Obviously, what you must do is to prevent the amount of carbon dioxide from getting down to that photosynthesis limit 250 ppm that is coming up. Not for you, of course, but for the sake oif your childrens’, childrens’ children’ childrens’…..sake
Remember: increasing carbon dioxide good, decreasing carbon dioxide bad!!!
Gas has the CO2 stripped out during the refining process which is then released into the air. This is why so little, if any, is produced when gas is burned.
“On February 16, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center hosted a film screening of the “Rational Middle Energy Series.” The university promoted the event as “Finding Energy’s Rational Middle” and described the film’s motivation as “a need and desire for a balanced discussion about today’s energy issues.”
Who can argue with balance and rationality? And with Harvard’s stamp of approval, surely the information presented to students and the public would be credible and reliable. Right?
___________________________________________
Right – at least one side of the arguments should be reasonable.
And the tone of an eventually following discussion should be directed right.
You’re numbers are all wrong. In 2014, the net CO2 emissions from combustion of natural gas is 1427 MMT. You have it at around a thousandth of that. Meanwhile, CH4 emissions from this time due to natural gas systems is 176 MMT (CO2 equivalent). That would be adding 12% to the greenhouse effects (looking at the natural gas sector as a whole). Those figures are from the EPA (https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-04/documents/us-ghg-inventory-2016-chapter-3-energy.pdf).
This study (http://www.pnas.org/content/112/51/15597.full.pdf) on Barnett Shale from the Environmental Defense Fund have put this percentage as high as 50%:
“Measured oil and gas methane emissions are 90% larger than estimates based on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory and correspond to 1.5% of natural gas production. This rate of methane loss increases the 20-y climate impacts of natural gas consumed in the region by roughly 50%.”