Tweet I will be presenting Beyond Fuel: From Consuming Natural Resources to Harnessing Natural Processes at the Space Coast Green Living Festival, Cocoa Beach, Florida, Sept 17, 2011.  The festival  is sponsored by the Cocoa Beach Surfrider Foundation and the Sierra Club Turtle Coast Group. It will be at the Cocoa Beach Courtyard by Marriott. Haley Sales, (Website / Facebook / Youtube),a local singer / songwriter, will perform.

Our current energy paradigm today is to fuel based. We burn oceans of oil and methane mountains of coal. And there are consequences.  We suffer oil spills, polluted water, mercury, coal mine disasters, nuclear power plant melt-downs, we fight wars …

According to the DoE, in 2010 we burned 1,085,281 thousand short tons of coal and 15,022 thousand short tons of coke (here).

Wind and solar don’t burn fuel. The winds blow, the sun shines, you put a widget in the path of those moving particles in the air or those photons of light and you get electricity – without greenhouse gases, radioactive wastes, toxic wastes, and it costs less. So the question is not ‘Can we meet our energy needs with clean, sustainable renewable energy technologies?” The real question are How? How Much? And How quickly?

And we could do it within 25 Years if we wanted to.

Amory Lovins, of the Rocky Mountain Institute, coined the term “Negawatt” to mean energy you don’t need to buy, as in “The cheapest unit of energy is the one you don’t have to buy.” The next cheapest, the “nega-fuel-watt” is the unit of energy that doesn’t require fuel.

Courtesy of AP, NY Times, Fellowship of the Minds

  Tweet Omaha, Nebraska. Flooding on the Missouri River at The Cooper and Fort Calhoun nuclear power stations. I suppose the good news is that given the flooding, one or both of these two Nebraska plants will be decommissioned after the floodwates recede, so there will soon be one or two fewer nuclear plants operating in the United States. And terrorists will have a difficult time attacking these plants now that they are surrounded by a moat. The real good news, if you can call it that, is that these floods are the result of heavy rains, not a tsunami triggered by an earthquake. The pressures are different. It is a steady buildup and which will be followed by steady decrease. It is not the surge / vacuum of a tsunami. And there was no earthquake and series of aftershocks.

These plants were built in the mid-1970′s. They are both about 35 years old. Were they built to withstand weeks of flooding like this? How do we get maintenance workers to the plants? Boat? Chopper? And how do we get them out? Hearse?

Via the NY Times (here, here, and here), the Wall Street Journal (here) ,  Fellowship of the Minds (here) and IntelHub, (here) which reprinted Patrick Henningsen’s piece, excerpted below:

21st Century Wire,  Media Blackout: Was There a Nuclear Incident At Fort Calhoun In Nebraska?

Flooding began on June 6th at the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Facility near Omaha, Nebraska. . . .  Evidence strongly suggests that something very serious has in fact happened there.

On June 7th, …  a fire reported at Fort Calhoun.

The official story is that the fire was in an electrical switchgear room at the plant. The apparently facility lost power to a pump that cools the spent fuel rod pool, allegedly for a duration of approximately 90 minutes.

FORT CALHOUN NUKE SITE: does it pose a public risk?

The following sequence of events is documented on the Omaha Public Power District’s own website, stating other things, that here was no such imminent danger with the Fort Calhoun Station spent-fuel pool, and that due to a fire in an electrical switchgear room at FCS on the morning of June 7, the plant temporarily lost power to a pump that cools the spent-fuel pool.

In addition to the flooding that has occurred on the banks of the Missouri River at Fort Calhoun, the Cooper Nuclear Facility in Brownville, Nebraska may also be threatened by the rising flood waters.

As was declared at Fort Calhoun on June 7th, another “Notification of Unusual Event” was declared at Cooper Nuclear Station on June 20th.

This notification was issued because the Missouri River’s water level reached an alarming 42.5 feet. Apparently, Cooper Station is advising that it is unable to discharge sludge into the Missouri River due to flooding, and therefore “overtopped” its sludge pond.

Not surprisingly, and completely ignored by the Mainstream Media, these two nuclear power facilities in Nebraska were designated temporary restricted NO FLY ZONES by the FAA in early June.

The FAA restrictions were reportedly down to “hazards” and were ‘effectively immediately’, and ‘until further notice’. Yet, according to the NRC, there’s no cause for the public to panic.

via Why Is There A Media Blackout On Nuclear Incident At Fort Calhoun In Nebraska? :.

Thanks to Intelhub and 21st Century Wire

Tweet On Ayn Rand, Objectivism, and Climate Change

Ayn  Rand would not “believe” in climate change.  She would try to objectively determine whether the theory correctly modeled the data. While it is legitimate to question both the conclusions of scientists and the methodologies by which data are gathered, denying objective validity of the data, which people who call themselves “Objectivists” are doing with respect to climate science, is well, in a word, anti-Objectivist, at least as described  by Ayn Rand in 1962.

“The essence of my philosophy” she said, is:

1. Metaphysics Objective Reality
2. Epistemology Reason
3. Ethics Self-interest
4. Politics Capitalism

“Translated into simple language, ” she continued, “it would read:

1. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” or “Wishing won’t make it so.”
2. “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.”
3. “Man is an end in himself.”
4. “Give me liberty or give me death.”

Then she elaborated

“Objectivism, holds that

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.
2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.
3. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.
4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”

Statements 1 and 2,  “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed…. Wishing won’t make it so…. Facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears…. Reason is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival” suggest that the objectivists should be taking note of several observable facts:

As shown in the graph at left, from Vincent Gray, Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, here, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 280 parts per million to 390 ppm since 1800. The mass of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from about 2.63 trillion tons to about 3.67 trillion tons, an increase of about 1.034 trillion tons.  This also corresponds to a decrease of about 282 billion tons in the mass of the earth below the surface, since the carbon in the carbon dioxide was taken from carbon sequestered below the surface in coal mines, oil wells, and gas wells.

While 211 years is one year longer than three times the Biblically defined human lifespan of three score and ten, it is a small fraction of the 5,600 years of recorded history, and the 4.5 billion years the U. S. Geological Survey tells us the earth has been in existence (here).

The non-magic number is 350 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Above that we will see dramatic changes in climate; below that, the climate in which humans and other contemporaneous species evolved (click here).

The objectivists ought look at this increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and shift from solid, liquid, and gaseous carbon below the surface into atmospheric carbon dioxide in the 211 years, and ask what it means for the earth and the ecologic systems. Will earth become warmer or cooler, or neither? Will there be more storms or fewer? Will the carbon dioxide hold more heat and allow the atmosphere to hold more water vapor?  Will this result in more storms?  Will any storms be stronger or weaker?  Will rivers like the Missouri and the Mississippi flood? Will there be heavier snowfalls? What are the effects of shifting 282 billion tons of mass from below the surface into the atmosphere? And what are the effects of combining 753 billion tons of atmospheric oxygen with 282 billion tons of subsurface carbon in order to create this 941 billion tons of carbon dioxide?

Dramatically increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide, as we have done, from 280 ppm to 390 ppm, may have no effect. But believing they have zero effects, and scientifically proving they have zero effects are two different things. Rand would say “We Must KNOW! We may not simply believe!”

in black and white, because some ideas are.

Tweet    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.

Back to the problem of today’s unemployment, we also see hiring managers faced with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of qualified applicants, including many who are out of work, and many who are “over-qualified.”  Suppose a hiring manager has 100 resumes. Each has two pages and a one-page cover letter.  At one minute per page, it would take 300 minutes – 5 hours – to read the resumes and cover letters.  Assuming half are qualified applicants, and the hiring managers throws darts, he or she has a 50/50 chance of finding someone good. While no one with integrity would do that; HR must read resumes and talk to people on the phone trying to send the hiring managers a reasonable number of the best resumes. The level of specialization in today’s world makes the job harder. If someone talks slowly in a phone interview are they thoughtful, looking up the answer on the Internet, or stupid? Again, with 20 or 50 new resumes each day, why not wait?  HR and hiring managers may say “these applicants seem to be really good, but are they? let’s see who else is out there.”

The decision to hire the employer closes the door to all other candidates. If the new employee doesn’t work out, which may not be evident for 3 to 6 months, the employer has to fire the employee – which costs time and money, and and then go thru another round of search, weed out, and ultimately hire.  From the employer’s perspective the biggest risks are that the prospective employee is either incapable of doing the job, as advertised on the resume, or unwilling to do the job, and as promised in the sales call that is the interview.

But let’s take a step back. Let’s look at the economy from 30,000 feet, or 10,000 meters, and look thru the lens of “sustainability.”  Consider what our competitors in other countries are doing. Every developed country except the United States has a single payer health care system which covers every citizen and even tourists. A high speed rail system links people in Europe from Madrid to Rome, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Amsterdam, and London. Germany is replacing their nuclear plants – which 10 years ago provided 29% of their electricity and today provide 20% – with clean, renewable, sustainable energy from wind, solar, and combined cycle hydro and biofuel systems.  What about a domestic high speed rail infrastructure efficiently linking cities from Boston to Miami, New York to San Francisco, LA to Seattle (and Vancouver) and Chicago to Denver to Dallas, Houston, Austin, Reno, LA, and Mexico?

Can we do this? How long would it take? How much would it cost? What is the multiplier? How many jobs would be created? We have 14 or 15 million unemployed people, millions others who have been out of work so long that they are not counted, and countless more who are underemployed! How many jobs would we create building a sustainable energy infrastructure and a high speed rail infrastructure?  With wind turbines offshore of the East Coast in up and down the Great Plains and solar modules on the roof of our homes, schools, office buildings, stores and factories? And with insulation and cogeneration basically doubling building energy efficiency?  Can we retrain unemployed coal miners in manufacture of solar modules, mounting systems and wind turbines?  The answer is of course. The questions that matter are “How much would it cost?” and “Can we afford not to?”

In the last 210 years we – humanity – have increased atmospheric carbon dioxide from 290 parts per million and about 2.8 trillion tons to 390 ppm and 3.6 trillion tons.  Looking at the data Arrhenius concluded that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would make summers warmer in Scandinavia. He was right.  However, we now know that burning fossil fuels contributes to storms, floods, the death of coral reefs and the challenged food supply of climate change. We also know that domestic oil production peaked in 1971 and international production is peaking now.  Do we want to blow up every last mountain in Appalachia for coal?  Do we want to destroy water supplies for methane?  Don’t we realize that sooner or later we, or our children, will have to shift the energy paradigm to one that is sustainable?  And beyond that, fuel free energy systems cost less. While this actually hurts GDP – GDP measures spends not value – repair of the damages caused by the earthquake – tsunami – nuclear disaster at Fukushima (IAEC Log) and the Deepwater Horizon will contribute to GDP – but these decrease Genuine Progress Index (wiki). These are ‘Uneconomic Growth.” Fuel free energy systems contribute to the Genuine Progress Index and other indices that measure wealth and happiness.

John F. Kennedy

President Kennedy once said “Politics is the only game that matters.” It’s winner take all, and the winner decides how your money is spent. President Clinton used to say “It’s the economy, stupid.” This still applies. Neither the President nor the Congress was focused on putting Americans back to work. They need to re-read Keynes, and also study Ecological Economics. (And Mr. President it’s not the economy according to the economists, it’s the economy according to voters who are up to their eyeballs in debt, unemployed, or facing foreclosure, and their kids, with health care, courtesy of your law, but fresh out of college, with huge college loans, and no jobs.)

Gov. Elect Cuomo

Andrew Cuomo’s win of the NY Governor’s race was not a surprise. Altho the margin – 1,135,214 votes (2,565,869 votes, 61%, to 1,430,655, 34%, Washington Post) is staggering . Some of my conservative Republican friends voted for Cuomo. Others abstained. How could they vote for Carl Paladino, with such an obvious inability to govern, a guy who is uncomfortable with gay people but who owns 2 gay bars?

Congratulations to Governor-Elect Cuomo, and the State of New York. Popular Logistics would like to see Gov. Cuomo run for President in 2016.

Lucy Liu, Actor

Jennifer Lopez, Singer & Actor

Senator Harry Reid won reelection, thanks to Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans, by a margin of 5%. Hispanic citizens were 10% of the vote, with 66.7% voting for Reid.  According to the AP, on NPR, “Reid won two-thirds of the Hispanic vote” 80% of African-Americans and 75% of Asians.

(Note to Sharron Angle – like Asians and Hispanics generally, both Lucy Liu, on the left in blue, and Jennifer Lopez on the right in beige, have black hair and brown eyes. Even if I didn’t know who they were, I’d know the woman in blue is Asian and the woman in beige is Hispanic, or white-with-a-tan.)

Senator Harry Reid

The coal and oil industry poured money into the campaigns of Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and Proposition 23, the anti-clean energy initiative in California. They lost. Lance Williams, writing in the California Journal,  wrote that Fiorina’s campaign was given $292,800 from fossil fuel companies and Republican outside California. The breakdown is $122,800 from fossil fuel companies outside California and $170,000 from Republican Party officials ouside California. According to Reuters, “Fiorina, the former chief executive officer of computer giant Hewlett-Packard, bolstered her own campaign treasury with loans of $1.25 million in personal funds.” Fiorina and Paladino loaned their campaigns $Millions. Since the campaign will pay them back, they didn’t really risk their own money.

The Republican-Tea Party lost in Alaska, as Lisa Murkowski beat Sarah Palin’s boy Joe Miller, the guy who’s security people handcuffed a reporter (NPR or Salon) who persistently asked questions about the candidate’s alleged improprieties. Popular Logistics would have preferred Scott McAdams – he understands the science on climate change and supports renewable energy (Mackerel Sky or the Alaska Journal).

Senator Elect Coons

Should the the citizens of Delaware elect to the Senate someone who, in her own words no longer “dabbles in witchcraft”?  Should the citizens of Nevada elect someone who suggests that there would be “Second Amendment remedies” if she loses?

Contrast New York’s Governor-Elect with NY District 13′s non-relected Congressman, Michael McMahon. McMahon won in ’08 because his predecessor was disgraced by calling his girlfriend, not his wife, after an incident involving driving under the influence of alcohol.  McMahon served by running away from his base. If you’re going to be defeated, you might as well be go down fighting like Alan Grayson, Russ Feingold, or John Adler. Democrats need to understand what the Republicans understand – what Cuomo, Reid understand, and Obama understood in ’08 – fire up your base and get out the vote.

The Republican-Tea Party beat Alan Grayson, Russ Feingold, John Adler.  Without Citizens United (see Adam Liptak, the New York Times, 1/21/10, “Justices, 5-4, Reject Corporate Spending Limit“, they wouldn’t have been able to pour money into those or other races.

The worst idea, from a democratic and libertarian standpoint, is this notion, ratified by the Supreme Court, that “a corporation is a legal person,” and therefore that First Amendment rights, such as Freedom of Speech, apply to corporations.  This is not in the long term interests of the United States.

The losers will be ourselves and our children. According to Kenneth Chang, writing “Money for Scientific Research May Be Scarce With a Republican-Led House” published Wednesday, 11/3/10,  in the New York Times, “Federal financing of science research, which has risen quickly since the Obama administration came to power, could fall back to pre-Obama levels if the incoming Republican leadership in the House of Representatives follows through on its list of campaign promises.”

Looking closely at the California Journal on contributions to Fiorina’s campaign … $292,800 from fossil fuel companies and Republicans outside California. Here’s a breakdown:

$170,000 from Republican Party officials, most outside California.
$2,500, from Palin’s PAC
$2,400 McCain’s 2008 Presidential campaign
$5,000 Susan Collins, Maine,
$1,000 Olympia Snowe, Maine,
$5,000 Lindsey Graham, S. Carolina,
$5,000 Thad Cochran, Mississippi
$5,000 Bob Corker, Oklahoma,
$5,000 Kay Hutchison, Texas,
$5,000 Saxby Chambliss, Georgia,
$2,500 John Barrasso, Wyoming
$2,000 Orrin Hatch, Utah
$1,000 Trent Lott, Mississippi, retired
$5,000 Haley Barbour, Mississippi Gov, retired
$3,000 Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota Gov.
$1,000 George Allen, Virginia Gov., retired.

$122,800 from Fossil Fuel / Global Warming companies
$63,000 from Midwestern coal mining interests.
$47,500 from various other energy companies.
$5,000 from Tesoro Petroleum
$4,800 an executive with Oklahoma’s Alliance Coal
$2,500 from Valero PAC

How much free advertising did Fiorina and other Republican-Tea Party Candidates get from Murdoch and bin Talel via “Faux News”? How much support came from Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries – directly via the Tea Party and indirectly via PACs?

Unlike Warren Buffett, Jeremy Grantham, chairman of Grantham Mayo van Otterloo, GMO.com, is not a “celebrity investor.” And also unlike Buffett, Grantham is an environmentalist. Jeremy and his wife, Hannelore, established the Grantham Foundation for the protection of the environment, and The Grantham Research on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. Like Buffett, Mr. Grantham talks to investors who hire him, and via his investments, charities, and other work, he talks to the world.  Mr. Grantham recently wrote “Everything you want to know about Global Warming in 5 minutes“,

Two ideas stand out:

Climate warming involves hard science. The two most prestigious bastions of hard science are the National Academy in the U.S. and the Royal Society in the U.K., to which Isaac Newton and the rest of that huge 18th century cohort of brilliant scientists belonged.  The presidents of both societies wrote a note recently, emphasizing the seriousness of the climate problem and that it was man-made. …  Both societies have also made full reports on behalf of their membership stating the same.  Do we believe the whole elite of science is in a conspiracy?  At some point in the development of a scientific truth, contrarians risk becoming flat earthers.

Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for … what?  Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs, and by right-wing politicians and think tanks?

The full text is below:

1) The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, after at least several hundred thousand years of remaining within a constant range, started to rise with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.  It has increased by almost 40% and is rising each year.  This is certain and straightforward.

2) One of the properties of CO2 is that it creates a greenhouse effect and, all other things being equal, an increase in its concentration in the atmosphere causes the Earth’s temperature to rise.  This is just physics.  (The amount of other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as methane, has also risen steeply since industrialization, which has added to the impact of higher CO2 levels.)

3) Several other factors, like changes in solar output, have major influences on climate over millennia, but these effects have been observed and measured.  They alone cannot explain the rise in the global temperature over the past 50 years.

4) The uncertainties arise when it comes to the interaction between greenhouse gases and other factors in the complicated climate system.  It is impossible to be sure exactly how quickly or how much the temperature will rise.  But, the past can be measured.  The temperature has indeed steadily risen over the past century while greenhouse gas levels have increased.  But the forecasts still range very widely for what will happen in the future, ranging from a small but still potentially harmful rise of 1 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit to a potentially disastrous level of +6 to +10 degrees Fahrenheit within this century.  A warmer atmosphere melts glaciers and ice sheets, and causes global sea levels to rise. A warmer atmosphere also contains more energy and holds more water, changing the global occurrences of storms, floods, and other extreme weather events.

5) Skeptics argue that this wide range of uncertainty about future temperature changes lowers the need to act: “Why spend money when you’re not certain?”  But since the penalties can rise at an accelerating rate at the tail, a wider range implies a greater risk (and a greater expected value of the costs.)  This is logically and mathematically rigorous and yet is still argued.

6) Pascal asks the question: What is the expected value of a very small chance of an inf nite loss?  And, he answers, “Infinite.”  In this example, what is the cost of lowering CO2 output and having the long-term effect of increasing CO2 turn out to be nominal?  The cost appears to be equal to foregoing, once in your life, six months’ to one year’s global growth – 2% to 4% or less.  The benefits, even with no warming, include: energy independence from the Middle East; more jobs, since wind and solar power and increased efficiency are more labor-intensive than another coal-fired power plant; less pollution of streams and air; and an early leadership role for the U.S. in industries that will inevitably become important.  Conversely, what are the costs of not acting on prevention when the results turn out to be serious:  costs that may dwarf those for prevention; and probable political destabilization from droughts, famine, mass migrations, and even war.  And, to Pascal’s real point, what might be the cost at the very extreme end of the distribution: Definitely life changing, possibly life threatening.?

7) The biggest cost of all from global warming is likely to be the accumulated loss of biodiversity.  This features nowhere in economic cost-benefit analysis because, not surprisingly, it is hard to put a price on that which is priceless.
A special word on the right-leaning think tanks:  As libertarians, they abhor the need for government spending or even governmental leadership, which in their opinion is best left to private enterprise.  In general, this may be an excellent idea. But global warming is a classic tragedy of the commons – seeking your own individual advantage, for once, does not lead to the common good, and the problem desperately needs government leadership and regulation.  Sensing this, these think tanks have allowed their drive for desirable policy to trump science.  Not a good idea.

9) Also, I should make a brief note to my own group – die hard contrarians.  Dear fellow contrarians, I know the majority is usually wrong in the behavioral jungle of the stock market.  And Heaven knows I have seen the soft scientists who lead ?nance theory attempt to bully their way to a uniform acceptance of the bankrupt theory of rational expectations and market efficiency. But climate warming involves hard science. The two most prestigious bastions of hard science are the National Academy in the U.S. and the Royal Society in the U.K., to which Isaac Newton and the rest of that huge 18th century cohort of brilliant scientists belonged.  The presidents of both societies wrote a note recently, emphasizing the seriousness of the climate problem and that it was man-made.  (See the attachment to last quarter’s Letter.)  Both societies have also made full reports on behalf of their membership stating the same.  Do we believe the whole elite of science is in a conspiracy?  At some point in the development of a scientific truth, contrarians risk becoming flat earthers.

10) Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for … what?  Being needled by nonscienti?c newspaper reports, by blogs, and by right-wing politicians and think tanks?  Most hard scientists hate themselves or their colleagues for being in the news.  Being a climate scientist spokesman has already become a hindrance to an academic career, including tenure.  I have a much simpler but plausible “conspiracy theory”: that fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profi ts, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results.

11) Why are we arguing the issue?  Challenging vested interests as powerful as the oil and coal lobbies was never going to be easy.  Scientists are not naturally aggressive defenders of arguments.  In short, they are conservatives by training:  never, ever risk overstating your ideas.  The skeptics are far, far more determined and expert propagandists to boot.  They are also well funded.  That smoking caused cancer was obfuscated deliberately and effectively for 20 years at a cost of hundreds of thousands of extra deaths.

We know that for certain now, yet those who caused this fatal delay have never been held accountable.  The pro? ts of the oil and coal industry make tobacco’s resources look like a rounding error.  In some notable cases, the obfuscators of global warming actually use the same “experts” as the tobacco industry did!  The obfuscators’ simple and direct motivation –  making money in the near term, which anyone can relate to – combined with their resources and, as it turns out, propaganda talents, have meant that we are arguing the science long after it has been nailed down.  I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?”

12) Almost no one wants to change.  The long-established status quo is very comfortable, and we are used to its de?ciencies.  But for this problem we must change.  This is never easy.

13) Almost everyone wants to hear good news.  They want to believe that dangerous global warming is a hoax.  They, therefore, desperately want to believe the skeptics.  This is a problem for all of us.

Postscript
Global warming will be the most important investment issue for the foreseeable future.  But how to make money around this issue in the next few years is not yet clear to me.  In a fast-moving field rife with treacherous politics, there will be many failures.  Marketing a “climate” fund would be much easier than outperforming with it.

At Deutsch Bank, one of the world’s largest banks, there are some very bright people who understand that climate change is problem. An Internet search on “Deutsche Bank Climate Change” brings up links to Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors, which features a carbon counter,  showing the tons of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, 3.6659 trillion metric tons.  Before the start of the “Industrial Revolution” there were approximately 2.5 trillion metric tons.  The question for the scientists is “What are the effects of shifting all this carbon from under the ground into the atmosphere?” For the citizens and policy makers, “Is this good or bad, and if bad, what should we do?”

What should Obama do? What is Celebrity Investor and Adviser to Presidents Warren Buffett doing?

The headline under the counter, is “Greenhouse Gases Cause Climate Change.”

Our climate is changing. The scientific evidence is clear: our planet is getting warmer.  Greenhouse gases (GHGs) – including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and chlorofluorocarbons – are increasing rapidly in our atmosphere. Human activity such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation is a major source of these gases.  But since we can’t see them, it’s easy to forget they are there. Out of sight, out of mind. And if we aren’t aware of these “carbon” gases, it’s easy to ignore the urgent need to reduce their emission. The Carbon Counter displays the running total amount of long-lived greenhouse gasses in the earth’s atmosphere, measured in metric tons.

Thru Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett recently purchased the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, the nation’s top hauler of coal. In the middle of 20’09 he purchased $1.28 million shares of Exxon Mobil, altho he sold 70% of this a few months later. Buffett, according to Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone, is one of America’s top “Climate Killers.”

They include Rupert Murdoch, the man behind Fox News and now the Wall St. Journal, Marc Morano, Conservative Columnist George Will, Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, Lobbyist-former-Congressman  Dick Gephardt, and Senators McCain, Inhofe, and Landrieu. Unlike his colleagues Buffett appears to be above politics. However, as an advisor to President Obama, Buffett makes policy. He’s an exception to the rule, described by Deborah Stone, as the Policy Paradox, (ISBN-10:  0393976254) to whit, “In order to make policy, you have to be good at Politics. ” Stone teaches political science at Dartmouth.

What will Buffett, with his investments in fossil fuel and nuclear power, tell President Obama? Will he tell the President to a shift from a fossil fuel economy to a sustainable energy economy? Will he say “We really don’t have carbon sequestration technology, but we know it will be expensive, and it won’t solve all the other problems of mountaintop removal?

Abstract. By burning fossil fuels we have put 3.6 trillion tons of Carbon Dioxide, CO₂ in the atmosphere¹ in the last 200 years – most in the last 60. This has changed the concentration of atmospheric CO₂ from 270 parts per Million, ppm, to 390 ppm, an increase of approximately 31%. This increase of atmospheric CO₂ is resulting in changing precipitation and rising temperatures, from the equator to the poles.

The typical modern reductionist approach is to simplify the problem to develop a solution:

“Burning coal, oil, and natural gas puts CO₂ into the atmosphere. All we need to do to solve the problem is modify the machines so they burn fossil fuel without releasing CO₂ into the atmosphere. How do we do that? We should capture the carbon dioxide, and the arsenic, mercury, other heavy metals, radionucleotides, etc, and store it somewhere.”

But we need to remember that we are burning coal, oil, and natural gas for a reason: to generate heat, hot water, electricity and transportation. There are alternative energy technologies, including nuclear, solar, and wind.

Coal with Carbon Sequestration is estimated to cost $10 to $15 Billion per gigawatt, without considering the costs of mining, processing and transporting the coal, cleaning up after mining, and isolating the arsenicals, mercury, and radionucleotides released from burning coal.  Solar is estimated to cost $6.5 Billion per gigawatt – with no fuel and no wastes. Wind $2 to $3 Billion per gigawatt – with no fuel and no wastes.

We at Popular Logistics think, feel and believe that we need to replace coal with solar and wind immediately.

Body.  The Brundtland Commission defined “sustainability” as “meeting the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” I see sustainability as arising from systems that harness one or more natural processes. Unsustainable systems are built around consuming nonrenewable resources. So whether or not carbon sequestration works, there are questions of sustainability that should be raised in conjunction with the use of carbon based fuel systems.

The sun shines. The winds blow. Plant an apple, a maple, or an olive tree, you get apples, maple syrup, or olives. Put a polar panel in the sun, you get power or hot water, depending on the panel. Put a wind turbine in the path of the wind; you convert the kinetic energy in the particles of air into electricity.

Is Carbon Sequestration Sustainable or Less Unsustainable? The Toyota Prius, and the Honda Insight, which get 40 to 50 miles per gallon, and the 100 mpg Bright Automotive Idea are less unsustainable than the 8 – 20 mpg SUV. But a 20 mpg biodiesel vehicle is sustainable, when it comes to fuel.

Carbon Capture and Sequestration

Our reliance of fossil fuels for energy has put 3.6 trillion tons of Carbon Dioxide, CO₂ in the atmosphere¹ in the last 200 years – most in the last 60. This changed the concentration of atmospheric CO₂ from 270 parts per Million, ppm, to 390 ppm, an increase of approximately 31%. This increase of atmospheric CO₂ is resulting in changing precipitation and rising temperatures, from the equator to the poles.

The typical modern reductionist approach is to simplify the problem to develop a solution:

“Burning coal, oil, and natural gas puts CO₂ into the atmosphere. All we need to do to solve the problem is modify the machines so they burn fossil fuel without releasing CO₂ into the atmosphere. How do we do that? We should capture the carbon dioxide, and the arsenic, mercury, other heavy metals, radionucleotides, etc, and store it somewhere.”

But we need to remember that we are burning coal, oil, and natural gas for a reason: to generate heat, hot water, electricity and transportation. There are alternative energy technologies, including nuclear, solar, and wind.

If capturing, storing, and cleaning up the carbon dioxide and other toxic products of burning fossil fuels is less expensive then other energy technologies, then clearly we should burn fossil fuels. But if, after looking at the system as a whole and factoring in the costs of coal mining, oil and gas drilling, processing, and transport, and the costs of isolating pollutants such as carbon dioxide, arsenic, mercury, other heavy metals, and radionucleotides is higher, we need to choose the least expensive alternatives.

This discussion focuses on techniques for capturing and storage of carbon when it is released by burning coal, and asks a few questions about carbon capture and sequestration. A comparison is made between coal, solar and wind. Nuclear power is not considered because it is understood to be the most expensive energy alternative available today.

Some Questions about Carbon Sequestration:

1. How much will it cost, in terms of money and energy?

2. What can go wrong? What happens then? What will natural and man-made disasters do to the ecology, biochemistry and chemistry of the ecosystems in the vicinity of carbon sinks? What is the effect of a spill of Millions of gallons of liquid carbon dioxide at the bottom of the ocean?

3. What happens if nothing goes wrong? The side-effects of strip mining are devastated local ecosystems in the vicinity of the mines. The side-effects of burning coal include mercury in fish and in the biosphere. What are the side-effects of CCS?

4. The idea is to pull or rip carbon out of the ground, process it somehow, transport it to where it needs to be burned, process it some more, then burn it, which converts some of the chemical energy into electricity, and push the carbon dioxide back into the ground. Does this really make sense?

Burial At Sea

The NY Times² reported that SCS Energy, of Concord, Mass., has a plan to build the “Purgen” plant, a new CCS equipped coal plant in Linden, NJ. 90% of the carbon dioxide released by burning coal at this plant will be captured, compressed, pushed into a 24 inch diameter pipe, pumped approximately 70 miles south-east, and a half-mile down along the ocean floor, past Staten Island, New York, and Middlesex, Monmouth, and Ocean Counties in New Jersey, to a point 25 or 30 miles east of Atlantic City, New Jersey,and injected into a well drilled a mile beneath the sandstone floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

The pipe will have to be monitored for leaks along its 70 mile length. Leaks will have to be repaired. Maintanence and repair costs could be significant.

CCS is energy intensive. It is projected to use 25% or more to the plant’s energy to compress, cool, and pump the CO₂ into the sub-sea well in which it will be sequestered.

According to the NY Times, the plant will cost $5 billion if completed on time and on budget. It will also need $100 Million a year in Federal Government subsidies, which amounts to another $3 Billion to $4 Billion of taxpayer money, over the plant’s 30 to 40 year operating life span. Plus fuel costs and normal operating and maintenance costs. The total: $8 or $9 Billion. The article left out a crucial detail: the size of the plant. If it’s a 500 MW plant, then the cost is $16 or $18 Million per megawatt ($M/mw). If it’s a 2.0 gigawatt plant, the cost is $4.0 to $4.5 M/mw. According to the Highland Park Mirror³, and the Green Party of Essex County, NJ⁴, this would be a 750 MW plant, so the capital costs are $6.67M/mw up front and $10.67 M/mw to $12.0 M/mw over the life of the plant.

CCS Prototype on Land

Industry Week reported another CCS prototype at American Electric’s Mountaineer facility in New Haven, W. Virginia.⁵ He states: “the pilot facility captures and stores around 20 megawatts of carbon dioxide…. The unit can handle only a fraction of Mountaineer’s 1,300 megawatt capacity.” According to the New York Times⁶ the 20 MW carbon sequestration subsystem at the Mountaineer Plant will cost approximately $146 Million, $7.3 Million per megawatt of capacity.

In comparison, utility scale photovoltaic solar costs approximately $6.5 Million per megawatt. Wind power is approximately $2 Million per megawatt; offshore wind is estimated at $3 Million per megawatt. Wind and solar energy systems do not require mining, drilling, processing or transportation of fuel, or clean-up of by-products. These data are summarized in Tables 1 and 2 below.

Beauty, Elegance, and Simplicity

Destroying mountains, shipping rocks 1,000 miles, or 2,000 miles, from Kentucky, Pennsylvania, West Virginia or Montana to California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, etc., is not simple. Capturing the waste, compressing it, and burying it under the coal plant, or piping it another 50 or 100 miles under tremendous pressure and burying it a mile under the ocean floor is not beautiful, elegant, or simple.

A battery of wind turbines planted on and bolted to the sea floor and rising 300 feet into the air is not simple either. One 3.5 megawatt turbine can meet the electric power requirements for about 4,000 people, so we would be looking at 2,000 turbines to meet the electricity requirements for the 8,000,000 residents of state of New Jersey, and another 5,000 for the 20,000,000 New Yorkers. Once the system is installed, however, there is no fuel to mine or pump out of the ground and transport 1000 miles or 2000 miles, there are no wastes to “manage” discard.

Conclusion

Cutting the carbon footprint of coal would make it less unsustainable. But we still have to mine, ship, and burn the coal, then manage the waste, which is where sequestration comes in.

The Carbon Capture and Sequestration, CCS, technology that exists is expensive and still being developed. CCS therefore shouldn’t be considered “proven” or “state of the art” but should be considered prototypes. Furthormore, since solar and wind power technologies are clearly cleaner and less expensive, the use of fossil fuels, including coal, oil, and natural gas should be phased out as soon as possible.

Notes:

1DB Climate Change Advisors, Deutsche Bank Group, “Greenhouse Gases Cause Climate Change”, http://www.dbcca.com

2Gailbraith, Kate, “A Plan for US Emissions to be buried at Sea,” New York Times, May 18, 2009,

www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/business/energy-environment/18clean.htm?_r=1

3Davis, Leigh, Oceanic carbon interment plan draws local objections

, Highland Park Mirror, Oct. 15, 2009, http://www.highlandparkmirror.com/pp/story/oceanic-carbon-interment-plan-draws-local-objections

4Green Party of Essex County, NJ, http://www.essexcountygreens.org/, Facts about the Proposed Coal Plant in Linden, http://www.essexcountygreens.org/PurGenFactSheet.html

5Beatty, Andrew, Alstom Pushes Carbon Capture Solution at U. S. Coal Plant, Industry Week, Nov. 1, 2009, http://www.industryweek.com/articles/alstom_pushes_carbon_capture_solution_at_u-s-_coal_plant_20303.aspx?Page=1

6This $7.3 Million per mw is based on the statement that American Electric is spending “$73 Million on the capture and storage effort, which includes half the cost of the factory.” Riddell, Kevin, Retrofitted to Bury Emissions, Plant Draws Attention, New York Times, Sept. 22, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/science/earth/22coal.html

7http://www.scribacrc.org/uploads/24__45.3_Billion_in_Coal_Plants_Canceled_in_07.pdf

8The subsidies that appear to be needed for solar would not be needed if there were no subsidies for coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power. That hypothesis, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.

Columbia University

NY. Jan. 25. Mark Fulton, “Climate Change Strategist” Deutsche BankAsset Management, spoke at Cary Krosinsky’s class in Sustainable Investing at the CERC, the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, Earth Institute, Columbia University.

Krosinsky, Vice President of Trucost, recently co-edited and wrote the book Sustainable Investing: The Art of Long Term Performance with Nick Robins of HSBC. He is an Advisory Board member of the Association of Climate Change Officers (ACCO) and founder director of InvestorWatch. Trucost has built and maintains the world’s largest database of carbon emissions and other environmental impacts as generated by the world’s largest public and private companies. Their data and expertise is used by leading global fund managers and asset owners to manage carbon risk.

Krosinsky described Climate Change and Global Warming in terms of Pascal’s Wager. “We can neither prove nor disprove that God exists. However, if we act as if God exists we will be better off.” So it is with climate change. The science is complex. But we will be better off if we redesign our energy and industrial infrastructures, reduce the level of greenhouse gases, and build a sustainable infrastructure.

Rather than subsidizing coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power, we need to tax carbon. And use the money to build solar arrays, wind turbines, and other new things.

“When you listen to the State of the Union,” Fulton said, “don’t expect anything on cap and trade, but expect to hear about green jobs.”

John Maynard Keynes

“Every time there’s a crisis,” he added, “we rediscover John Maynard Keynes and the government stimulates the economy.”

“Peak Oil,” Fulton said, the idea that extraction of oil has peaked, “appears to be borne out by the market. When oil prices were high ($140 per barrel) OPEC wasn’t producing more oil – they couldn’t.”

But in my opinion, this isn’t a bad thing. As oil and other fossil fuels get more expensive we will shift to other, sustainable technologies. I’ve been thinking about the science. We’re 25 to 30 years away from Fusion. (Click here for the MIT Press Release summarizing work at the MIT and Columbia on the Levitated Dipole Experiment, LDX).

The science on climate change can be summarized:

We’ve put 3.6 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the last 200 years – mostly in the last 50. We’ve changed the concentration of Carbon Dioxide from 250 ppm to 390 ppm – an increase of 56%. Carbon dioxide is not meteorologicaly active. This is changing the thermodynamic behavior of the atmosphere, the oceans, and the land surfaces – it’s changing the climate and the weather.For a concise description, see this article in Scientific American and my summary on Popular Logistics. For the details see William James Burroughs, Climate Change, A Multidisciplinary Approach. 2nd Edition, Cambridge, 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-87015-3 or 978-0-521-69033-1. As to why it took so long to figure it out, when Burroughs titled his book “A Multidisciplinary Approach” he wasn’t exagerating. You need to understand physics, including fluid dynamics and mechanics, chemistry, geology, ecology, evolutionary biology, paleontology, etc. You don’t need a PhD, but you need to be able to think.

Rather than framing the debate in terms of parts per million of carbon dioxide, like they do at 350.org, We Can Solve It, and elsewhere,  Fulton uses Tons of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere – 3,651,546,689,564 – 3.6 trillion tons, increasing by 800 Metric Tons per second. One instance of the counter is on the Internet, here. Another is outside Madison Square Garden. And you can install a widget on your desktop by clicking here.

The people on Wall Street are interested in things they can quantify and hedge. They are more interested in natural gas, solar, and wind than coal. We know how to do wind, solar, and gas. Coal is dependent on Carbon Capture & Sequestration, CCS, which we don’t know how to do. We won’t know if we know how to do CCS for 20 or 30 years. Investors on Wall St. don’t want to get caught holding the bag. (This is also the problem with nuclear power. The plants can be operated more or less safely. But an accident like 3 Mile Island will turn a billion dollar investment into a 10 billion dollar pile of radioactive waste – in milliseconds.)

View of what had been the James home in the middle of 1.1 billion gallons of sludge, Copyright (c) 2008, Knoxville Biz . com

After the formal lecture, I asked Fulton about coal …

If you use the term “Clean Coal” you’ve never been to West Virginia. Michael Hendryx’ research that suggests that for every $1 in revenue from coal mining there is $5.25 in costs and premature deaths. Click here for an interview, here for an abstract of the research paper or here for my post on Popular Logistics.

On Dec. 22, 2008 1.1 billion gallons of coal ash flooded 300 acres and the Clinch and Tennessee Rivers, near Kingston, Tennessee. Click here for satellite photos and analysis from NASA, here for my post,  “Clean Coal, My Ash”, or here for an account on Knoxville Biz.com.

Fulton, sounding like Herman Daly, Joshua Farley and other Ecological Economists said “in the future externalities will be internalized.”

And the good news for investors :

The Europeans have done a great job with PVSolar. The next big thing will be Concentrated Solar Thermal (CST).

Fulton and Krosinsky also noted that when socially responsible investing (SRI) started people expected to pay – to sacrifice a few dollars in return on investment for sleeping better at night. But they found that they did well by doing good. They stopped investing in tobacco companies, and they were not holding the bag when tobacco companies were sued. Out of a universe of 4000 equities, Fulton and his people identified about 100 in several sub-sectors: Global Clean Energy, Global Energy Efficiency, Clean Technology. These significantly outperformed the S&P since the recent bottom – March, ’09, in the last year, and in the last 3 years. Energy Efficiency was the best segment – it’s easier and cheaper to install insulation than solar arrays. There’s money to be made doing well by doing good.