Tag Archives: Carbon

Keynes, Reluctance to hire, & 21ST Century Energy

John Maynard Keynes, in black and white, because some ideas are.

in black and white, because some ideas are.

Tweet Follow LJF97 on Twitter   During the Great Depression the Classical Economists said “Unemployment is voluntary. Business owners will not voluntarily keep the means of production idle.”  While he had been a student of classical economics, John Maynard Keynes observed that the data didn’t fit the theory. And, he reasoned, if the observable data don’t fit the theory, the theory must be flawed.   “Business owners are risk averse,” he saw. “A employee needs to be productive, needs to make widgets. But if no one is buying widgets, then contrary to classical theory, factory owners will fire workers and keep capital idle rather than hire workers to create excess inventory. That’s just common sense.”

We see this today.

When unemployment was low, for example in the United States during the tech boom of the 1990’s, people acted on the premise that “There is so much work that we could hire and good people and train them.”  Today hiring managers seem to be acting on the premise that “There are so many people looking for work that they can wait for the perfect candidate.” Perfection being unattainable, jobs go unfilled. This is ok, in this context, because

  • “Budgets are tight.”
  • “The future is uncertain.”
  • “Money not spent on a new hire can be saved or used to pay down debt.”

Keynes also observed that the government is an employer that does not need to worry about going out of business. Building infrastructure is government employment that is investment for the future. These observations are as valid today as they were 80 years ago.

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Coal Is Really Dirty

Burn Coal – release arsenic, mercury, radioactive particles, and carbon – lots of carbon.  Here’s how the National Resources Defense Council, NRDC, describes it:  Coal is Dirty and Dangerous

Coal is America’s dirtiest energy source — and the country’s leading source of global warming pollution.

Coal mining destroys land, pollutes thousands of miles of streams and brings massive environmental damage to mountain communities.

… produces dirty air, acid rain and contaminated land and water … childhood asthma, birth defects and respiratory diseases that take nearly 25,000 lives each year.

“Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet.” – James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientistThere are far cleaner and cheaper ways to meet America’s energy needs. Yet industry apologists are spending millions of dollars to block clean energy solutions and persuade Americans that they can keep using coal without the consequences.

…

Green technologies and renewable fuels will create millions of good-paying jobs, … reduce dangerous pollution and help fight global warming.

Nuclear Fusion in 10 or 20 Years

Thomas Friedman is right in “The Next Really Cool Thing” in The New York Times, March 15, 2009, when he concludes:

At the pace we’re going with the technologies we have, without some game-changers, climate change is going to have its way with us. Yes, we’ll still need coal for some time. But let’s make sure that we aren’t just chasing the fantasy that we can “clean up” coal, when our real future depends on birthing new technologies that can replace it.

Note that he pointed out ‘the fantasy that we can “clean up” coal.

Friedman also said:

“I don’t know if they can pull this off; some scientists are skeptical. Laboratory-scale nuclear fusion and energy gain is really hard…. we need to keep working on all forms of solar, geothermal and wind power. They work. And the more they get deployed, the more their costs will go down.”

Fusion may be the game changer. “Energy Gain” means we get more energy out than we put in. The prototype will cost $10 Billion – enough for 5 GW of wind capacity, and 1.53 GW of PV Solar. And fusion is at least 10 years away, maybe 20, maybe 50. We know how to build wind and solar. (On the other hand it takes 10 years to build a nuclear fission reactor.)

But pushing carbon below 350 ppm is a problem that can’t wait 10 years.  According to the World Watch Institute’s Vital Signs, 2007-2008, the 6.5 billion humans on the earth are using the natural resources of 1.25 earths.  This can’t go on.

Coal – Going the Way of Nuclear Power

What killed nuclear power was not Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, or the demonstrations of public opposition such as at Seabrook, NH in the late 1970’s or the Musicians United for Safe Energy concerts in New York, Sept. 19-23, 1979, (both of which I attended).

What killed nuclear power was the realization by the bankers on Wall St. that after an event like Three Mile Island their multi-billion investment very quickly became a multi-billion pile of junk with virtually zero salvage value and a tremendously negative return on investment.

And coal today?

According to the National Energy Technology Laboratory “Historically, actual capacity has been seen to be significantly less than proposed capacity. For example, the 2002 report /of the National Energy Technology Lab, NETL, of the Department of Energy, DOE/ listed 36,161 MW of proposed /coal/ capacity by the year 2007 when actually only 4,478 MW (12%) were constructed.” Tracking New Coal-Fired Power Plants, NETL, Office of Systems Analyses and Planning, by Erik Shuster, Feb. 18, 2008, pg, 4, 5.

Housley Carr, writing in McGraw Hill’s Engineering News-Record, reported on the impending demise of  “King Coal” Uncertainty Over Carbon has Coal Plants Stymied

with public, regulatory and lender concern growing, many proposed plants are being cancelled. Permits issued for others require offsets for their carbon emissions, while the ones that remain in permitting are being intensely challenged. The U. S. Envrionmental Protection Agency must regulate carbon-dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act, the Supreme Court ruled last year, but Congress has failed to give EPA guidelines for a national policy. Three investment banks last month announced guidelines they would use to assess the risks of investment in coal-fired generation in the absense of a national policy. Further, the largest electric utility in Kansas, citing “seismic shifts in the assumptions shaping our industry,” issued a strategic plan that knocks the crown from King Coal’s head.”