Politics in the Zeros

Readers DJ and Dave Riley think I’ve jumped the tracks with my recent post about how nuclear power can prevent climate change and explain why.

The report came from The Breakthrough Institute, who I know a bit and have followed for several years. They’re definitely mavericks but have no ideological axe to grind that I can see and are genuinely convinced renewables can not generate enough power to replace fossil fuels, that only nuclear power can do that. If we don’t use nuclear, then the gap will be filled by fossil fuels with all its carbon emissions. This just happened in California with the permanent shutdown of the San Onofre nuclear plant.

The problems with nuclear are obvious. If something goes wrong it can be catastrophic. Plus, storage of spent fuel rods is expensive and also dangerous. It costs billions and years to build a new nuclear plant, and that’s not counting opposition to a new plant which can block it in court.

DJ makes artisan cheese on a small ranch in Utah and has some renewable power,

Our business currently uses a great deal of renewable energy in the form of solar electric, solar hot water, wind, wood, and geothermal. We don’t have the technology to calculate how much fossil fuel energy we are saving, but I’d guess the ballpark is more than 1MW per year. That’s for a small, 2-person cheese-making business. Yes, we still buy power from the grid. There’s wind energy available at about 2 cents per KWH more than coal, but right now we are hand-to-mouth and every penny counts, so the amount of wind we can buy is limited. We would also like to add manure-to-methane capability, but we don’t have the money and can’t find reliable technology for a small scale plant. They use them all over Central America, but not here.

After the disaster in Japan and the spread of radiation across the Pacific, no one can say “it can’t happen here” or “it won’t affect us” any longer. Nuclear disaster can happen anywhere, and can affect the entire hemisphere.

Saying we need such a dangerous source of power is irresponsible before we have (1) put solar hot water systems on every roof (they have a very rapid payback compared to other renewable systems and are readily available and can even be built from scratch, as ours has been), (2) expanded our capacity for geothermal heating and cooling (ours is used entirely for cooling), (3) maximized our trash-to-power and sewage/manure-to-power capacity, (4) and explored how we can save the 75% of our nation’s energy that goes to waste. Why is it, for example, that we use twice as much energy per person as the major European industrial economies? Do we really need that much more, or do we have structural inefficiencies that maximize energy usage for the benefit of our corporate (government-subsidized) energy providers?

Lastly, it would serve us to look at the state of our economy and contemplate the very real possibility that we will soon be living in an economy in which cheap, government-subsidized energy (fossil fuel, nuclear, or otherwise) is no longer available. When price goes up (and availability falters), usage comes down.

Dave Riley is a long-time left organizer in Australia and has solar panels on his roof.

I don’t agree with the cabal of pro-nuclear greenies that this is the scenario. They misrepresent the advances in renewable technology — as you have done here before — esp in regard to energy storage — to fit their shibboleth.

But that aside the complication with going nuclear is that reactors take so long to build and the number of engineers that would be required don’t exist out there to build them. So ‘going nuclear’ on the seeming scale required is a bit of a fantasy.

How many reactors world wide built in what tine scale by whom?

This grid thing is also a red herring primarily because renewables like wind and solar lend themselves to localisation when nuclear power — which requires not only massive quantities of water but acceptance in the communities of their location — does not. Intermittent supply, given current storage technologies, is not as you suggest.

Nor for that matter is cost.

As an example of feasibility the workup has been done for the whole of Australia based on renewables: Beyond Zero Emissions: a 10 year fast track to renewables [synopsis] and the full version is available here.

Also from Dave

We have been debating nuclear junkie, Geoff Russell — who the “Breakthrough” bods reference among their sources — here.. The issue of going nuclear is potent because of Australia’s uranium mining industry and opposition to it has been major mass movement for over 30 years.

So Australia is the only continent not producing nuclear energy although our mines supply reactors worldwide.
As for grinding axes, the nucleartoids in my experience pass themselves off as imbued with absolute truth because the rest of us are supposedly ignorant and paranoid when they know so much better because their minds are embedded in ‘real’ ‘unbiased’ science.

But in effect they sign on with the nuclear industry and deploy the same arguments esp the ready scam of counterposing nuclear to fossil fuels while dismissing and denigrating any and all advances in renewables. They also repudiate the scale and depth of community opposition to nuclear reactors such as in places like India and Japan.

The other complication is that the pace of reactor construction is slowing world wide for very simple profit garnering reasons: cost vs return.

Their answer: renewables are a waste of time, money, reseach and effort. There is supposedly only one way into the energy g future and that is by going nuclear.

Thats’ what is called a shibboleth.

[Here over one million Australian homes are resourced by rooftop solar. In a total people population of 23 million, that's an extraordinary take up of renewables kin communities nationwide. At my home, over each financial year, we don't pay for the electricity we use as we end each year in credit. The complication is that if so many people rely on solar and are aware of its benefits, it is much harder to argue for fossil fuels or even to bang the nuclear drum. While there is a huge difference between domestic and commercial production of electricity, and Australia's switch to large scale renewables is tardy -- energy consumption is falling here. However the primary shift underway is from coal to CSG [Coal Seam Gas]. And therein rides the largest mass movement of opposition this country has seen in years.]

The Breakthrough Institute is all in favor of renewables. They just don’t think renewable energy will be able to do it all, hence their “no other option” support for nuclear power. Dave accurately mentions the difference between consumer and commercial use of electricity. I’m writing this and you’re reading it on the internet after it has passed through any number of ginormous servers farms that each use as much electricity as a small city. That’s just one example of the tremendous amounts of power that must be available 24/7, day or night, wind or no wind. Can renewable energy replace fossil fuels and deliver reliable amounts of grid-scale energy? Here in California alone, peak power usage on a hot summer day can reach 72 GW. Renewables are maybe 10% of that. “We got a long way to go and a short time to get there.”

Poverty in Colombia by Luis Perez, Credit:Wikipedia

Attention Third World nations: climate change means you can’t have what we developed nations have. Social justice will just have to take a hike. We’re sorry.

The environmental left too often advocates a back-to-nature, pastoralist approach to climate change which sandbags the developing world and bolsters the very corporatism they claim to oppose. So says The Breakthrough Institute in one of their provocative articles.

Social justice to be about supporting the right of the poor to get a better life, to have electricity and hot water. Yet environmentalists now, by wanting us to use less power and head back to nature are ignoring social justice for the Third World. We in the West have these wonderful things. But climate change means you can’t have them because it’s better for the planet that way. I’m sure they appreciate our concern.

If climate justice activists truly cared about poverty and climate change, Foreman notes, they would advocate things like better cook stoves and helping poor nations accelerate the transition from dirtier to cleaner fuels. Instead they make demands that range from the preposterous (eg, de-growth) to the picayune (eg, organic farming).

My wife had a cornea transplant last year. It changed her life. She’s about to have the other eye done. Rather than face a future of near blindness, her vision will be 20-40 in both eyes. To do this requires a world-class hospital supported by a stable electrical grid and clean water in abundance. Everyone on the planet should be able to have operations like this. Saying we must give it all up and head back to the farm is defeatism. Back in the 1960′s, Tim Leary said “turn on, tune in, drop out” while Ken Kesey of the Merry Pranksters said the opposite, take the glitter and the cities and create something better. Kesey was right. Pastoralism is just recycled dropout hippyisms. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now. To do it now because of climate change is a deliberate slap in the face against billions of poor people in developing nations.

Now, at the very moment modern energy arrives for global poor — something a prior generation of socialists would have celebrated and, indeed, demanded — today’s leading left-wing leaders advocate a return to energy penury. The loudest advocates of cheap energy for the poor are on the libertarian Right, while The Nation dresses up neo-Malthusianism as revolutionary socialism.

Left-wing politics was once about destabilizing power relations between the West and the Rest. Now, under the sign of climate justice, it’s about sustaining them.

By abandoning social justice for developing countries, environmentalists support the system they say they want to change.

I’m not saying those who want to go back to the farm shouldn’t. A friend left Los Angeles a few years ago and now happily makes cheese in rural Utah. However, I am saying that as a society we can not and should not go backwards.

The Earth did not warm as much as predicted in the past ten years. Volcanic eruptions could be a reason why, say researchers, while skeptics openly mock what they see as desperate attempts to justify a belief that global warming is happening.

Erupting volcanoes offset recent Earth warming, according to a team led by the University of Colorado at Boulder. Researchers arrived at this conclusion after searching for clues about why Earth did not warm as much as climatologists expected between 2000 and 2010.

As you might expect, climate change skeptics are having fun with this. And they do have a point. If global warming has increased little in the past ten years then extraordinary weather events can’t be blamed on it.

There would appear to be a logic problem here.

We are told:
=that the reason for ‘Super Storm Sandy” was ‘global warming’;
=that the reason for all the snow is extra moisture caused by ‘global warming’;
=that the reason for the heatwaves in Australia is ‘global warming’
=that the droughts in Texas and the mid-west is ‘global warming’
=that the reason for the continual rain on UK was ‘global warming’
=that the reason for the melt of the Arctic ice cap was ‘global warming’
=that the reason for the extra ice extent in the Antarctic is ‘global warming’

And now we are told that the reason there has been NO global warming for 15 years is because of volcanic aerosols?

So as it is now agreed that there has been no significant global warming for 15 years and we now have been given a solid reason for that being the case – the preceding claims of severe weather being caused by warming they now agree didn’t happen must be false.

Those crazed environmental extremists at the Department of Defense assume climate change is happening and are planning for it.

CCAR basically describes how DoD decision-making will pivot around climate science and related fields, by fully integrating “climate change considerations into its extant policies, planning, practices and programs.”

The Freeway Blogger tells me the “best entry so far has been ‘Worst. Ancestors. Ever.’”

Your message can be anything you like, but the issue I’m most concerned with is global warming, particularly what is happening in the Arctic. Messages should be short, smart, fit well into a rectangle and look good over traffic.

The Freeway Blogger has been busy putting up signs near freeways warning of climate change, over 1,000 so far this year. His signs get seen by thousands every day. His blog explains how to make them and, no, he’s never been arrested.

I just bought two hundred posters of the earth from space and will be putting them up on West Coast freeways for the next few months. Remember all those flags that went up after September 11th? This is like that, except instead of putting signs up after the tragedy, I’ll be putting them up before.

These are the three things that worry me most:
1) The amount of carbon we’re putting in the atmosphere.
2) The amount of carbon dioxide and methane seeping out of a now melting permafrost
3) The fact that an ice-free Arctic will start absorbing all the heat from the sunlight it used to reflect.

I think that for many conservatives, you are dealing with belief systems more like a religion than anything that would yield ground to rational analysis.

Take the following for example:

Forbes Magazine just published an article in which they named the 20 Dirtiest Cities in the US. A leader in many areas, California was also a leader in this, with 6 of the top 10 being in CA: Fresno #1, Bakersfield #2, Modesto #5, Riverside #6, San Jose #8, Stockton #9.

We know that this is bad, but what does it cost? In 2006, California State University Economists Jane V. Hall and Victory Brajer published a study that bad air quality cost the San Joaquin Valley (Fresno, Bakersfield, Modesto, Stockton) over $3 Billion / Yr.

In 2008, they published a similar study of Southern California in which they put the cost at $28 Billion. Conservative action? Attack the studies and rail against the EPA.

If we want to lower health care costs, clean up the air; if we want our industries to be more profitable, clean up the air; if we want better education results, clean up the air so that children don’t miss school due to asthma. The San Joaquin Valley is the center of Conservative Politics and almost all of their Congress Critters are Republican with a couple of Blue Dog Democrats. I really don’t see that any of this is truly Conservative in any traditional sense. I can’t imagine how far they will go to block any rational action to prevent climate change or even adapt to it after things get worse than they already are.

Nothing of substance has been accomplished at the Doha climate conference which of course was the predetermined agenda of the superpowers including the United States. Oh yes, our government makes a great show of pretending to care about climate change but when it gets down to concrete plans, blocks any substantive change.

“Developing countries have come here in good faith and have been forced to accept vague words and no numbers,” [Tim] Gore said. “It’s a betrayal.”

The developed countries have basically stonewalled any chance of real change despite the alarms being raised by many. But our worldwide political class appears to be mostly comatose and coopted.

The annual death toll worldwide from climate change is estimated to be at least 150,000.

The CIA says that climate change could lead to “geopolitical destabilisation””. The World Bank says a world where temperatures rise by 4 degrees Celsius “must be avoided”

In East Texas, members of the Tar Sands Blockade started their eleventh week of opposition to construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline with a new act of civil disobedience against the onrush of global warming, sealing themselves inside a mile-long segment of the pipeline itself.

In Doha, Qatar, other protestors at the U.N. World Climate Conference found themselves in just as dark and unyielding a metaphorical tunnel: the mindset of the globally powerful who appear unwilling to act to mitigate the human suffering they’re already perpetrating on millions of the less powerful people around the world.

In Texas and Qatar alike, the role of the United States government is to stand aside as if helpless, while covertly, and not so covertly, encouraging the forces driving the plant’s temperature to lethal levels.   At the climate conference, the U.S. was sharply criticized for failing to take the lead on planet protection, especially in light of its standing as the world’s worst polluter.

Among the top 20 developed countries, only one – Japan – spends more on fighting climate change than on subsidizing fossil fuels.  The country most out of balance is the United States.  The U.S. has pledged about $300,000 million – half of Japan’s amount – for mitigating climate change.  The U.S. spends about four times as much — $1.2 billion – subsidizing oil, coal, gas, and other fossil fuels.

Canada Was Once a Leader, Now It Has Shale Oil

Canada, home of the tar sands oil shale that scientists say may spell “game over” for the climate, also came in for condemnation in Doha.  Celine Charveriat, director of advocacy and campaigns for Oxfam International, called Canada a major villain for  blocking progress at the conference:

“Once again, rich industrialised nations are putting nothing on the table in terms of increased emissions cuts and financial support for poor nations. 

Governments found trillions of dollars to bail out the financial sector. This is a far greater crisis…. 

Canada has become rich and prosperous from its huge fossil fuel industry. And here they are offering absolutely nothing to pay for their pollution of the atmosphere…. 

What has gone wrong in Canada? They used to be a leader.

Now they are one of the worst laggards, down at the bottom with the U.S.” 

In June 2012, President Obama expedited permits for TransCanada to begin construction of the southern leg of Keystone XL pipeline through Texas, where Tar Sands Blockaders have been resisting since August.  In January, the President had put the whole pipeline on hold to allow for timely review, after Congress tried to rush the decision, which is now expected in early 2013.

Canada recently announced that it would break its commitment to controlling global warming and would not try to meet its commitment to lower greenhouse gasses, as it promised when it was one of 191 countries signing the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.

Canada ratified the protocol in 2002 and pulled out of it in 2011.  The United States signed the protocol in 1998, but stated it had no intention of ratifying it or being bound by it.

A Canadian company, TransCanada, is building the Keystone pipeline, which, when completed, will run from the Alberta tar sands to Texas ports on the gulf, where most of the unusually toxic oil will be shipped abroad, largely to China.  In November, Canada’s Natural Resources Minister predicted that President Obama would approve the Keystone XL pipeline “because it is clearly in the US national interest in terms of national security, jobs (and) economic growth.”

TransCanada Treats Blockaders with Dispatch

TransCanada’s approach to the Tar Sands Blockade has been uncompromising, relentless, and sometimes violent, although the company says it was not responsible for sheriff’s deputies using pepper gas, choke-holds, and other torture tactics on non-resisting activists.

In Tyler, Texas, on December 3, according to Ecowatch.org:

“The police threatened a variety of dangerous and violent responses including tear gas, canine units, cutting into the pipe or lifting it up to dump out the blockaders. Eventually, they were able to forcibly remove the blockaders and the barrels they were locked into.

Both blockaders, Glen Collins and Matt Almonte, were extracted and arrested. Isabel Indigo Brooks, who had been inside the pipe to provide support for Matt and Glen, was also arrested.  All three have been charged with three misdemeanors: criminal trespassing, resisting arrest and illegal dumping of more than 500-1000 pounds.

We haven’t yet learned whether the police used mace or other means of pain  compliance or if any of the blockaders were injured by the police. 

Although the Smith County District Attorney has piled on the charges and bail on the three pipe-sitters was set at $65,000 each, the Smith County Sheriff’s Department felt called upon to announce that they had not used pepper spray.

Responding to the removal of the protestors sealed in their pipe, TransCanada responded with this  statement by David Dodson: “It is unfortunate these protestors are trying to keep thousands of Americans from the jobs they depend on to provide for their families. This project is important, not only to thousands of workers, but also to Americans in general.”

TransCanada Continues to Lie About Jobs

The TransCanada jobs claim has long since been shown to be false in many ways.

The jobs will go mostly to non-Americans.  The jobs will be mostly temporary.  The jobs may number in the hundreds rather than thousands.  And even a TransCanada vice president has admitted that the number of permanent jobs will number in the hundreds.

While most of the American media have given little or no coverage to the Doha climate conference, Amy Goodman and DemocracyNOW! Has been covering it from Doha all week.    U.S. climate negotiator Jonathan Pershing refused to answer a question from Amy Goodman as to whether the position he was taking was consistent with what President Obama had said in his first speech after he was elected (that “he didn’t want his—he didn’t want our children to live in an America that isn’t (sic) threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet”). On December 4,  Pershing described his country’s passive role this way:

“I think the United States’s role is very much one of engaging actively and constructively in the discussion. We are one of the significant contributors to the intellectual thinking in the process. We have been. We will continue to try to do that. It doesn’t mean that we will agree with everyone on everything. This is, after all, a negotiation. We’re looking to participate in an outcome that will lead to a reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions. We’re looking at an outcome that will be acceptable to all parties. We’re looking at an outcome that will be effective in the time frame that we’ve set for ourselves to move forward.” [emphasis added]

World Bank Reports: Situation Is Desperate

Weeks before Pershing made those comments, the World Bank released a report that warned that global warming was more advanced than anyone had thought and that the world was facing a “carbon tsunami” with devastating potential effects.  As Amy Goodman reported:

“A shocking new report commissioned by the World Bank is warning temperatures could rise by 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, causing devastating food shortages, rising sea levels, cyclones and drought — even if countries meet their current pledges to reduce emissions. If these promises are not met, the increase could happen even sooner. Meanwhile, scientists say it is still not too late to minimize the devastating impact of climate change. A separate report by the Climate Action Tracker says global warming could be kept below 2 degrees. “

The decision to approve construction of the Keystone pipeline coming from Canada into the United States technically belongs to the State Department, although there is little doubt that the President will make the final decision.  By the time he decides, he may well have a new Secretary if State, and that Secretary of State could be the current ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice.  As Secretary of State, Rice would be expected to advise the president on Keystone, unless she recuses herself for a conflict if interest, since she owns at least $1.2 million worth of stock in more than a dozen Canadian banks and oil companies, including TransCanada (over $300,000), Enbridge, and at least seven others.