Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Despite the poor initial reception, politicians and pundits are rallying around green socialism, they are still looking for a way to make the green new deal seem acceptable to the general public.
Fighting climate change may be easier than we think
By Geoffrey Heal
Updated 0253 GMT (1053 HKT) February 13, 2019…
The Green New Deal, spearheaded by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, has garnered attention for its ambitious goal of completely shifting to renewable and zero-emission energy over a decade.
…
Take the United States as an example. Wind and solar power are now on average the least expensive ways of generating electricity. In some locations, wind and solar energy prices are as little as one-third the cost of coal. Even without including the contribution of coal to global warming, it is simply no longer a cost-effective energy source. Wind and solar are now economically sounder investments.
The United States is working on that, too. Power from windy or sunny days can now be stored in batteries, which has been a tremendous contributing factor to the reduction in the price of renewable energy sources. In addition, there is hydropower, which is renewable, and nuclear energy, which is carbon-free. Both sources are not intermittent, meaning they can be relied upon for constant power, and can complement battery storage and provide backup to renewables. As the Green New Deal gains steam, there is also further hope for an even more concerted economic transition to clean energy jobs and infrastructure.
…
I estimate it would take a gross investment in renewable power plants, extra grid capacity, and storage capacity of about $3.3 trillion over the next 20-30 years (US GDP is about $20 trillion). But the cost is not really all chargeable to the transition to renewables. All our coal plants are old and will have to be replaced well before 2050. This is also true of many of our gas and nuclear plants, regardless of the movement to go carbon-free. That would offset the cost associated with transitioning by about $1 trillion.
…
Read more: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/12/opinions/climate-change-opinion-heal/index.html
3.3 Trillion dollars is a lot of money.
If you spent a million dollars every day since the birth of Christ until today, you would still be nowhere near to spending 3.3 Trillion dollars.
In the 1950s US scientists who developed the first atomic bomb calculated the cost of launching a manned starship mission at 3% of the speed of light to Alpha Centauri using known technology at 10% of US GDP, $2 trillion in today’s money.
The sheer waste, the money already spent, the money being demanded by climate action advocates – future historians will wonder how we could have been so stupid.
Also storage batteries have a sizable cost in capex and operating cost – electrical loses are substantial in moving electricity into and back out of storage. Anyone got real figures on this? Googling it gives the kumbayah economics. You must lose ~30% and I did read somewhere they are expecting batteries to “only” cos $200 a kW by 2030. What do they cost now?
If I’m not mistaken, what they’d be relying on is lithium batteries and lithium is mined primarily in an African country (I forget which one.) often by children working in horrid conditions.
Two thoughts.
1. That country may run out of children before there is enough lithium to achieve their “sustainable” pipe-dream.
2. Where are all the celebrities and activist that campaigned against clothing “sweat shops” a decade or two ago?
“(US GDP is about $20 trillion).”
Notice the assumption: All of that is “our” money. No, you brain-dead barbarian babies. The GDP has no bearing on anything. Your money is the money that you, personally, have earned. That $72 in your savings account is the budget for your utopian delusions. Go for it.
What will be hilarious is if they have a vote on the GND in the Senate as Mitch McConnell plans to. It puts the dems in a very awkward position.
Yeah, Mitch really got them in panic mode with that one. They were expecting to never have to actually cast a vote on it. Expect a lot of Dem’s to be voting “present” when it comes up for a vote.
Senator Menendez (D NJ) was threatening to call a cop on a reporter this morning who was trying to ask the Senator about the New Green Deal. The Senator was obviously very uncomfortable with the question. I bet he had a few choice thoughts in his mind for Rep. Ocasio and her wacky scheme putting him in the awkward position of trying to defend such lunacy.
I bet a lot of Democrats are feeling the same way about the GND: Harrassed by the facts and reality..
“Wind and solar power are now on average the least expensive ways of generating electricity”
Such utter crap. Surely no one buys this garbage?
People do. People still believe the stuff they are told by the BBC and CNN and others. The Politburo in the USSR believed what it was told by the KGB – I read a very interesting book on the end of the Cold War that had a lot of stuff from Gorbachev. They were totally misinformed about just about everything, both inside and outside the USSR.
People believe.
“Wind and solar power are now on average the least expensive ways of generating electricity”
Utter crap? Actually, it’s great news. Now governments can drop all renewables subsidies and mandates. If renewables really are the cheapest electricity, people will sign up for them in droves (that’s how a free market works).
I have a suggestion for those who want the US to provide leadership in low CO2 energy. Bill Gates and TerraPower have had to put off building their prototype traveling wave reactor in China. How about providing research funding and streamlining regulations to build it here. There’s no reason this can’t be done. Wind turbines have been getting a free pass on killing endangered raptors and bats.
so to cnn the IMPOSSIBLE is a great idea to spend money on for 30 to 40 years
Aside from the horrendous political and economic aspects to the GND, I’m disturbed at the appaprent widespread assumption that going to 100% renewable energy is a laudable goal. I was/am so disturbed that I made my own video on the topic: https://youtu.be/B0n_53P81Mk
If any of you care to watch this, I would appreciate any comments you might have —thanks!
Push it off to the distant future, but keep bleating about it, liberals are crazy.
The GND as it stands violates rule 1 of Environmental Snake Oil Marketing, which is that the alleged problem must not be portrayed as being so severe and imminent that nobody is prepared to tolerate the medicine.
Hence we see the development of GNDv2.
I can’t help but notice how parts of the GND sounds like parts of the Super Great Leap Forward of the Khmer Rouge.
The “Green Screw Deal” is and will always be a colossally BAD idea.
Oh, and LMFAO about the ridiculous notion that wind and solar “power” is 1/3 the price of coal. Tell you what – I’ve got this great new fuel to run your car on. Only you can’t count on it starting when you want and you can’t count on it continuing to run as long as you need it to if you do get it started (and that lack of function may continue for entire days, nights or even a week or more at a time). But hey! It’s 1/3 the price of gasoline! Now how much would you like to buy??
To get that 1/3rd the price they have to:
1) Use post subsidy costs for both construction and purchase price for the electricity generated.
2) Then they have to assume that the wind mills/solar panels produce 100% of the rated power 24/7.
3) Assume the wind mills/solar panels last as long as claimed with zero loss in efficiency over time.
4) Assume there is no maintenance costs.
Liquid fuels are the lifeblood of commerce. All agriculture depends on fuels to plant and harvest crops (without mentioning fertilizer and other chemicals needed). All food is distributed by liquid fuels (mostly diesel fuel). Most people would be starving in weeks without fuel, and no one could get to work.
Alternatives to conventional diesel and gasoline fuels are scarce. Ethanol is not a viable biofuel as it competes with food. 40% of our corn goes to ethanol, with all the accompanying issue of Food for Fuel. One alternative is using non-food biomass. The DOE concluded that 1 billion tons of biomass are available per year to produce fuel. Sounds like a lot, but at normal conversion rates of oxygenated feeds to hydrocarbon fuels, this is only 3.8 million bbl/day of fuel. The US alone consumes nearly 20 million bbl/day of fuel products. Using the numbers the renewable industry prefers, this is 306.6 Billion gal per year. We produce 16 billion gal/yr of ethanol but this fuel has only 2/3rds the energy of hydrocarbon fuels so that is really only 10.6 Billion gal/yr of gasoline equivalent energy. Other biofuels are produced in much smaller quantities. Biodiesel which is not equivalent to conventional diesel is produced at 2 B gal/yr. And the much touted cellulosic ethanol production which Congress mandated in the 2007 RFS to be 16B gal/yr is only produced by pilot plants at the rate of a few hundred thousand gal/yr after 11 years of expensive research and many failed commercial efforts. Think Solyndra for the amount of money wasted on this technology. KIOR alone went through $2B in capital to produce fuels that were not compatible with conventional fuels for a few months before going bankrupt. And there are many other examples. GEVO with a market cap of $19MM (stock price $2.45/share) once had a value of $1.185B but wasted it chasing isobutanol production. There is also Solazyme, Range Fuels, Amyris, LanzaTech, and more that chased the dream of renewable fuels from biomass and have not produced any commercial quantities of fuels. So much for depending on renewable resources for our energy source.
We have more crude resources now than every before despite our current consumption rate, and more are being found as only a small fraction of the earth has been thoroughly explored yet.
The greatest threat of the GND is in generating a recession followed by slowing long-term growth and loss of confidence for new investment and risk taking. That has cancerous effects on the Federal budget from stress in making debt service payments on accumulated debt in addition to cutting tax revenue potential from the weakened tax base. Trying to raise tax rates in that environment means you slide further in investor confidence and guarantee the long term slowdown. It also means you fall into the less developed nation status with shell games in financial markets.
Some examples:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-oil-pemex/mexican-president-says-pemex-will-pay-debt-vows-to-boost-finances-idUSKCN1Q3254?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FbusinessNews+%28Business+News%29
https://www.reuters.com/article/safrica-politics/south-africa-to-split-eskom-in-rescue-plan-ramaphosa-idUSJ8N1RJ00E
https://www.reuters.com/article/safrica-eskom-outages/south-africas-eskom-aims-to-end-power-cuts-by-end-of-this-week-idUSL5N2072PT
Scott Adams pointed out today that the simple addition of the word “aspirational” gives them an out.
This is not actually what we are proposing, it is a goal we must work towards.
Thus they wiggle out of McConnel’s trap of making them vote for it.
Oh ya, that’ll fly like a lead balloon.
I was taking a tour through the YouTube yesterday and came across a post of a young fellow wandering around a college campus asking the students if they thought the GND was a good thing, they all said yes until he told them what was in it then without fail each of them said “Oh No” not a great idea. What really made me laugh was their reaction to being told that under the GND you could get paid even if you were unwilling to work. “No Way”.
It proved to me that many of today’s students follow the herd and don’t read or research issues.
On another note a great quote from Rex Murphy ( maybe a bit garbled but the essence is there), the practice of good journalism and good science requires skepticism, if you aren’t skeptical you are practicing niether.
The Green New Deal is all about keeping the peasants down on the farm.
It’s also about making sure that 90% of the population buys the farm.
I agree. This plan could kill more people than Communism did in the 20th Century and that’s around 100 million or so.
CNN : “Power from windy or sunny days can now be stored in batteries”
Is there any (peer-reviewed 🙂 ) published paper about batteries that can meet the needs in real time of a country (industry, infrastructures, transport, domestic consumption, hospitals, etc.) for at least a 1 hour ?
Seriously, do those guys live in Wonderland ?
Pee-er review is irrelevant. Are there any data that show batteries “can meet the needs in real time of a country (industry, infrastructures, transport, domestic consumption, hospitals, etc.) for at least a 1 hour “? The current state of pee-er review is nothing more than the fox guarding the hen house.
btw, I did see your smiley face, so my comment was simply leveraging yours, not finding fault with it.
I like how the author used “now,” as if this were new technology.
There are many lies, but the biggest lie is “Wind and solar power are now on average the least expensive ways of generating electricity. ” Absolute nonsense. They are the most expensive because they rely on back up power from other sources all the time. And the power that is generated from them (when it happens) is given priority over other forms of generation. It’s just an outright lie.
“The Green New Deal is a Good Idea, but We Need 20-30 Years Instead of 10 Years”
More accurately, what we need is the technology to replace hydrocarbon-based energy (regardless of how much time that takes to develop). Currently, no such technology exists. Yeah, we can produce energy with this-and-that r̶e̶n̶e̶w̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ unreliable technology, but realistically, the technology doesn’t exist to feasibly, safely and justly transition modern society to non-hydrocarbon energy sources. Anyone who says, or implies, otherwise is just a liar.
A. F. Branco cartoon on GND: ‘Chasing A Dream’ Perfect!
https://www.conservativedailynews.com/2019/02/chasing-a-dream-a-f-branco-cartoon/
People want good news. Good news is fun.
The ‘Right’ side (side of logic and engineering facts) needs a new nuclear option. Something that really is fundamentally better in every way than the old nuclear and wind/sun gathering. We have that.
The Republicans need to change the conversation by introducing something that really is a civilization changing breakthrough.
By forcing the Left to discuss the new nuclear, we can also force them to discuss the fact that wind and sun gathering will never work regardless of how much we spend. Logic and reason are on the side of the ‘Right’, all we need to do is start the process.
There is a reactor design, that is currently under regulatory review, that is as cheap as coal all costs in, that has no catastrophic safety issues, that was developed and tested 50 years ago.
The current pressurized fuel rod reactors are naturally dangerous, inefficient, and expensive to construct because of their basic fundamental safety issues.
The molten salt reactor is six times more fuel efficient than a pressure water reactor (PWR), requires 1/3 the amount of fuel for the same power output, is roughly 1/9th the cost of a PWR, operates at near atmospheric pressure, that has no chemical or phase changes to cause explosions, that cannot have a fuel meltdown or fuel over concentration, that is sealed, that is walk away safe, that can be constructed in 4 years rather than 12 years (PWR), and that can be mass produced.
And where, pray tell, can we see one of these reactors in full operation to we can evaluate how well they live up to the hype? Just one fully operation reactor will do. Bueller? Bueller?
John,
We built and tested this design, 50 years ago, and then did not document the test results, as obviously there would have been no pressurized reactors constructed. This design is too good, to cheap. We do not have a nuclear industry, we have a fuel rod industry.
The no fuel rod, no water reactor is 1/9th the cost, six times more fuel efficient, and is walk away safe, no catastrophic failure modes.
What is your issue? Are you for or against nuclear? Are you for reactors that can and have blown up?
Are you for or against spending trillions of dollars on green scams that do not work?
The Left talked about an Apollo program to build something that will not work.
Rather than spend trillions on green scams which do not work and will never work, if work is defined to significantly reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions.
We can logically accelerate the No Fuel rod, no water fission reactor.
This is a zero CO2 fission device, that is safe and cheap.
We built and tested this design, 50 years ago
a lab prototype and a real world commercial operation are two different things. If this design is so well tested where are the commercial operations? Get back to me when you have just a real world working commercial reactor. just one. so that we can all see how wonderful they are. Until then you are hyping vaporware.
What is your issue?
My issue is hype gets you no where. Real world results are what count.
Are you for or against nuclear?
I’m for nuclear and I’d love to see molten salt reactors live up to the hype. I’ve been hearing the hype for years, yet there is *NOTHING* to show for it. Get back to me when you have something REAL that can be evaluated, not more hype.
John,
It is a fact that the no fuel rod, no water, reactor that is six times more fuel efficient, that has not catastrophic failure modes, 1/9th the costs of pressure water reactor, that requires 1/3 the fuel for same output, that produces heat at 600C as opposed to 315C for a PWR which opens up all industrial heat applications (twice electrical grid in size), …
development has stopped in the US by a one page not in our regulations that does not mention the past test, but does purposely stop a test in the US.
… The Canadians started the ball rolling and are at phase 2 of their process. The US has followed and there is notice of a big grant for testing.
We could of course accelerate testing and inform the world that there is now fission reactor design that is super better it that cannot blow up, cannot melt down, is 1/9th the cost, six times more fuel efficient, that can be mass produced, and so on.
Weird that a cheap as coal power fission source, that has no catastrophic failure modes, that has zero CO2 emissions, is the win-win answer to CAGW.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609194/advanced-nuclear-finds-a-more-welcome-home-in-canada/
It is a fact that the no fuel rod, no water, reactor that is six times more fuel efficient, that has not catastrophic failure modes, 1/9th the costs of pressure water reactor, that requires 1/3 the fuel for same output, that produces heat at 600C as opposed to 315C for a PWR which opens up all industrial heat applications (twice electrical grid in size), …
Great, William, then show me this reactor in commercial operation (Just one such reactor will do) so your claims of fact can be verified as actually being factual. Because if you can not do that (and you can not) than it is *NOT* a fact, it is mere *HYPE*
Or as Inigo Montoya would say “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means”
I see William still doesn’t understand how nuclear reactors create electricity.
He’s still trying to claim that they need no water, even on the turbine side.
The no fuel rod, no water reactor is 1/9th the cost, six times more fuel efficient, and is walk away safe, no catastrophic failure modes
Sorry, but it isn’t because *IT DOES NOT CURRENTLY EXIST* beyond the hype. Get one built and into operations (just 1, is that too much to ask?) *AND THEN* (AND ONLY THEN) can you compare the real cost, the real efficiency and the real safety. Hype isn’t real.
In general, it is a fools errand to compare the cost of an actual, real world product against back of the sheet calculations based on a lab prototype.
The real world product has gone through the multiple engineering analysis as problems that you didn’t need to worry about in a prototype have to be solved for a full size version to operate.
The real world version has had to survive multiple licensing processes against those who don’t want anything nuclear to be successful.
Exactly MarkW. Spot on.
Are you for or against spending trillions of dollars on green scams that do not work?
If you’ve been reading these threads about AOC’s GND and my posts in them, you should be easily able to tell I am very much against green scams. But being against green scams does not make me for endless hype with nothing real to show for it.
If you didn’t document the test results, then as far as the rest of the world is concerned. It didn’t happen.
Regardless, getting a result in a lab is orders of magnitude different from getting a full sized production unit up and running.
When you do that, then you can brag about how your technology is going to take over the world. Until then, you sound an awful like the guys who are bragging how electric cars are “this” close to taking over the transportation world.
The test results where found, 30 years later, by a NASA engineer who was looking for a reactor design to use on the moon.
The NASA engineer found the test results by meeting with retired engineers and scientists that did the test and wrote the test documentation.
The Chinese sent roughly 1000 people to have visited the test laboratory to look at the test data.
We built and tested this design, 50 years ago
The test results where found, 30 years later
Great, so that means it’s been 20 years. Where’s the fully functional and operational version that we can examine to verify all your claims of “fact”? Hmmm. What’s that? there isn’t one? then your “facts” are no such thing, they’re hype and worth nothing.
From this comment, I can assume that the NASA scientist concluded that the design did not fit his needs.
Once again, undocumented claims.
Once again, an unfailing belief that something that worked in a very small scale lab experiment (allegedly) will automatically work full scale and that no additional work will be needed to go from small scale to large scale.
“Here’s Toyko, 27 million people, you have three days of a cyclone every year. It’s 23GW of electricity for three days. Tell me what battery solution is going sit there and provide that power.”
Not to mention the six months required to rebuild all those wind and solar installations after such a storm.
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/02/gates-on-renewables-how-would-tokyo-survive-a-3-day-typhoon-with-unreliable-energy/#comment-2105319
To AO-C and CNN:
To prove to non-believers that wind turbines, solar panels and batteries are all that would be needed to supply electricity needs, I suggest a demonstration project. There would need to be windy hills nearby for all of the wind turbines, plus lots of sun during most days, at least, so perhaps a small-ish city in California could be selected. The city would have to be big enough for the demonstration to be “realistic” – perhaps a population of 50-100 thousand.
The key concept would be that no electricity from fossil-fueled or nuclear generating stations would be allowed, so after it’s all ready to go, all transmission tie-lines to the California grid would be opened. It would be critical to keep track of all of the costs, of course.
If something like this could be done for the entire USA in even 30 years, then surely it should be possible to find a suitable small city in which to build and install enough wind turbines, solar panels and batteries within, say, 5 years. Then open all tie-lines to the grid, and SHOW the world how it will work. Or Not.
They could also pick a smallish town in Texas.
Near Austin perhaps?
But really, if it’s going to take 20 – 30 years to achieve those goals, we might as well abandon all hope and party on. After all, the world’s going to end in 12 years.