WTF are the Echo Terrorists and Global Warming
Idiots doing to destroy the USA while lining their own pockets those
of their elected protectors...
Like
medieval priests, today’s carbon brokers will sell you an indulgence
that forgives your carbon sins. It will run you about $500 for 5
tons of forgiveness—about how much the typical American needs every
year. Or about $2,000 a year for a typical four-person household.
Your broker will spend the money on such things as reducing methane
emissions from hog farms in Brazil.
But if you really want to make a
difference, you must send a check large enough to forgive the carbon
emitted by four poor Brazilian households, too—because they’re not
going to do it themselves. To cover all five households, then, send
$4,000. And you probably forgot to send in a check last year, and
you might forget again in the future, so you’d best make it an even
$40,000, to take care of a decade right now. If you decline to write
your own check while insisting that to save the world we must ditch
the carbon, you are just burdening your already sooty soul with
another ton of self-righteous hypocrisy. And you can’t possibly
afford what it will cost to forgive that.
If making carbon this personal seems
rude, then think globally instead. During the presidential race,
Barack Obama was heard to remark that he would bankrupt the coal
industry. No one can doubt Washington’s power to bankrupt almost
anything—in the United States. But China is adding 100 gigawatts of
coal-fired electrical capacity a year. That’s another whole United
States’ worth of coal consumption added every three years, with no
stopping point in sight. Much of the rest of the developing world is
on a similar path.
Cut to the chase. We rich people
can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple
of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach.
We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions—because
emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because
the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and
because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we
can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs
and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and
their carbon emissions faster still.
We
don’t control the global supply of carbon.
Ten countries ruled by nasty people
control 80 percent of the planet’s oil reserves—about 1 trillion
barrels, currently worth about $40 trillion. If $40 trillion worth
of gold were located where most of the oil is, one could only scoff
at any suggestion that we might somehow persuade the nasty people to
leave the wealth buried. They can lift most of their oil at a cost
well under $10 a barrel. They will drill. They will pump. And they
will find buyers. Oil is all they’ve got.
Poor countries all around the planet
are sitting on a second, even bigger source of carbon—almost a
trillion tons of cheap, easily accessible coal. They also control
most of the planet’s third great carbon reservoir—the rain forests
and soil. They will keep squeezing the carbon out of cheap coal, and
cheap forest, and cheap soil, because that’s all they’ve got. Unless
they can find something even cheaper. But they won’t—not any time in
the foreseeable future.
We no longer control the demand for
carbon, either. The 5 billion poor—the other 80 percent—are already
the main problem, not us. Collectively, they emit 20 percent more
greenhouse gas than we do. We burn a lot more carbon individually,
but they have a lot more children. Their fecundity has eclipsed our
gluttony, and the gap is now widening fast. China, not the United
States, is now the planet’s largest emitter. Brazil, India,
Indonesia, South Africa, and others are in hot pursuit. And these
countries have all made it clear that they aren’t interested in
spending what money they have on low-carb diets. It is idle to
argue, as some have done, that global warming can be solved—decades
hence—at a cost of 1 to 2 percent of the global economy. Eighty
percent of the global population hasn’t signed on to pay more than 0
percent.
Accepting this last, self-evident
fact, the Kyoto Protocol divides the world into two groups. The
roughly 1.2 billion citizens of industrialized countries are
expected to reduce their emissions. The other 5 billion—including
both China and India, each of which is about as populous as the
entire Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development—aren’t. These numbers alone guarantee that humanity
isn’t going to reduce global emissions at any point in the
foreseeable future—unless it does it the old-fashioned way, by
getting poorer. But the current recession won’t last forever, and
the long-term trend is clear. Their populations and per-capita
emissions are rising far faster than ours could fall under any
remotely plausible carbon-reduction scheme.
Might
we simply buy their cooperation? Various plans have circulated for
having the rich pay the poor to stop burning down rain forests and
to lower greenhouse-gas emissions from primitive agricultural
practices. But taking control of what belongs to someone else
ultimately means buying it. Over the long term, we would in effect
have to buy up a large fraction of all the world’s forests, soil,
coal, and oil—and then post guards to make sure that poor people
didn’t sneak in and grab all the carbon anyway. Buying off people
just doesn’t fly when they outnumber you four to one.
Might we instead manage to give the
world something cheaper than carbon? The moon-shot law of economics
says yes, of course we can. If we just put our minds to it, it will
happen. Atom bomb, moon landing, ultra-cheap energy—all it takes is
a triumph of political will.
Really? For the very poorest,
this would mean beating the price of the free rain forest that they
burn down to clear land to plant a subsistence crop. For the
slightly less poor, it would mean beating the price of coal used to
generate electricity at under 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. And with
one important exception, which we will return to shortly, no
carbon-free fuel or technology comes remotely close to being able to
do that. Fossil fuels are extremely cheap because geological forces
happen to have created large deposits of these dense forms of energy
in accessible places. Find a mountain of coal, and you can just
shovel gargantuan amounts of energy into the boxcars.
Shoveling wind and sun is much, much
harder. Windmills are now 50-story skyscrapers. Yet one windmill
generates a piddling 2 to 3 megawatts. A jumbo jet needs 100
megawatts to get off the ground; Google is building 100-megawatt
server farms. Meeting New York City’s total energy demand would
require 13,000 of those skyscrapers spinning at top speed, which
would require scattering about 50,000 of them across the state, to
make sure that you always hit enough windy spots. To answer the
howls of green protest that inevitably greet realistic engineering
estimates like these, note that real-world systems must be able to
meet peak, not average, demand; that reserve margins are essential;
and that converting electric power into liquid or gaseous fuels to
power the existing transportation and heating systems would entail
substantial losses. What was Mayor Bloomberg thinking when he
suggested that he might just tuck windmills into Manhattan? Such
thoughts betray a deep ignorance about how difficult it is to get a
lot of energy out of sources as thin and dilute as wind and sun.
It’s often suggested that technology
improvements and mass production will sharply lower the cost of wind
and solar. But engineers have pursued these technologies for
decades, and while costs of some components have fallen, there is no
serious prospect of costs plummeting and performance soaring as they
have in our laptops and cell phones. When you replace conventional
with renewable energy, everything gets bigger, not smaller—and
bigger costs more, not less. Even if solar cells themselves were
free, solar power would remain very expensive because of the huge
structures and support systems required to extract large amounts of
electricity from a source so weak that it takes hours to deliver a
tan.
This is why the (few) greens ready to
accept engineering and economic reality have suddenly emerged as
avid proponents of nuclear power. In the aftermath of the Three Mile
Island accident—which didn’t harm anyone, and wouldn’t even have
damaged the reactor core if the operators had simply kept their
hands off the switches and let the automatic safety systems do their
job—ostensibly green antinuclear activists unwittingly boosted U.S.
coal consumption by about 400 million tons per year. The United
States would be in compliance with the Kyoto Protocol today if we
could simply undo their handiwork and conjure back into existence
the nuclear plants that were in the pipeline in nuclear power’s
heyday. Nuclear power is fantastically compact, and—as America’s
nuclear navy, several commercial U.S. operators, France, Japan, and
a handful of other countries have convincingly established—it’s both
safe and cheap wherever engineers are allowed to get on with it.
But getting on with it briskly is
essential, because costs hinge on the huge, up-front capital
investment in the power plant. Years of delay between the capital
investment and when it starts earning a return are ruinous. Most of
the developed world has made nuclear power unaffordable by
surrounding it with a regulatory process so sluggish and
unpredictable that no one will pour a couple of billion dollars into
a new plant, for the good reason that no one knows when (or even if)
the investment will be allowed to start making money.
And countries that don’t trust
nuclear power on their own soil must hesitate to share the
technology with countries where you never know who will be in charge
next year, or what he might decide to do with his nuclear toys. So
much for the possibility that cheap nuclear power might replace
carbon-spewing sources of energy in the developing world. Moreover,
even India and China, which have mastered nuclear technologies, are
deploying far more new coal capacity.
Remember, finally, that most of the
cost of carbon-based energy resides not in the fuels but in the
gigantic infrastructure of furnaces, turbines, and engines. Those
costs are sunk, which means that carbon-free alternatives—with their
own huge, attendant, front-end capital costs—must be cheap enough to
beat carbon fuels that already have their infrastructure in place.
That won’t happen in our lifetimes.
Another
argument commonly advanced is that getting over carbon will,
nevertheless, be comparatively cheap, because it will get us over
oil, too—which will impoverish our enemies and save us a bundle at
the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. But uranium
aside, the most economical substitute for oil is, in fact,
electricity generated with coal. Cheap coal-fired electricity has
been, is, and will continue to be a substitute for oil, or a
substitute for natural gas, which can in turn substitute for oil. By
sharply boosting the cost of coal electricity, the war on carbon
will make us more dependent on oil, not less.
The first place where coal displaces
oil is in the electric power plant itself. When oil prices spiked in
the early 1980s, U.S. utilities quickly switched to other fuels,
with coal leading the pack; the coal-fired plants now being built in
China, India, and other developing countries are displacing diesel
generators. More power plants burning coal to produce cheap
electricity can also mean less natural gas used to generate
electricity. And less used for industrial, commercial, and
residential heating, welding, and chemical processing, as these
users switch to electrically powered alternatives. The gas that’s
freed up this way can then substitute for diesel fuel in heavy
trucks, delivery vehicles, and buses. And coal-fired electricity
will eventually begin displacing gasoline, too, as soon as plug-in
hybrid cars start recharging their batteries directly from the grid.
To top it all, using electricity
generated in large part by coal to power our passenger cars would
lower carbon emissions—even in Indiana, which generates 75 percent
of its electricity with coal. Big power plants are so much more
efficient than the gasoline engines in our cars that a plug-in
hybrid car running on electricity supplied by Indiana’s current grid
still ends up more carbon-frugal than comparable cars burning
gasoline in a conventional engine under the hood. Old-guard energy
types have been saying this for decades. In a major report released
last March, the World Wildlife Fund finally concluded that they were
right all along.
But true carbon zealots won’t
settle for modest reductions in carbon emissions when fat targets
beckon. They see coal-fired electricity as the dragon to slay first.
Huge, stationary sources can’t run or hide, and the cost of doing
without them doesn’t get rung up in plain view at the gas pump.
California, Pennsylvania, and other greener-than-thou states have
made flatlining electricity consumption the linchpin of their war on
carbon. That is the one certain way to halt the displacement of
foreign oil by cheap, domestic electricity.
The oil-coal economics come down to
this. Per unit of energy delivered, coal costs about one-fifth as
much as oil—but contains one-third more carbon. High carbon taxes
(or tradable permits, or any other economic equivalent) sharply
narrow the price gap between oil and the one fuel that can displace
it worldwide, here and now. The Muzzie and Commie oil nasties will
celebrate the green war on carbon as enthusiastically as the coal
industry celebrated the green war on uranium 30 years ago.
The
other 5 billion are too poor to deny these economic realities. For
them, the price to beat is 3-cent coal-fired electricity. China and
India won’t trade 3-cent coal for 15-cent wind or 30-cent solar. As
for us, if we embrace those economically frivolous alternatives on
our own, we will certainly end up doing more harm than good.
By pouring money into
anything-but-carbon fuels, we will lower demand for carbon, making
it even cheaper for the rest of the world to buy and burn. The rest
will use cheaper energy to accelerate their own economic growth.
Jobs will go where energy is cheap, just as they go where labor is
cheap. Manufacturing and heavy industry require a great deal of
energy, and in a global economy, no competitor can survive while
paying substantially more for an essential input. The carbon police
acknowledge the problem and talk vaguely of using tariffs and such
to address it. But carbon is far too deeply embedded in the global
economy, and materials, goods, and services move and intermingle far
too freely, for the customs agents to track.
Consider your next Google search. As
noted in a recent article in Harper’s, “Google . . . and its
rivals now head abroad for cheaper, often dirtier power.” Google
itself (the “don’t be evil” company) is looking to set up one of its
electrically voracious server farms at a site in Lithuania,
“disingenuously described as being near a hydroelectric dam.” But
Lithuania’s grid is 0.5 percent hydroelectric and 78 percent
nuclear. Perhaps the company’s next huge farm will be “near” the
Three Gorges Dam in China, built to generate over three times as
much power as our own Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State. China
will be happy to play along, while it quietly plugs another coal
plant into its grid a few pylons down the line. All the while, of
course, Google will maintain its low-energy headquarters in
California, a state that often boasts of the wise regulatory
policies—centered, one is told, on efficiency and conservation—that
have made it such a frugal energy user. But in fact, sky-high prices
have played the key role, curbing internal demand and propelling the
flight from California of power plants, heavy industries, chip fabs,
server farms, and much else (see “California’s
Potemkin Environmentalism,” Spring 2008).
So the suggestion that we can lift
ourselves out of the economic doldrums by spending lavishly on
exceptionally expensive new sources of energy is absurd. “Green
jobs” means Americans paying other Americans to chase carbon while
the rest of the world builds new power plants and factories. And the
environmental consequences of outsourcing jobs, industries, and
carbon to developing countries are beyond dispute. They use energy
far less efficiently than we do, and they remain almost completely
oblivious to environmental impacts, just as we were in our own first
century of industrialization. A massive transfer of carbon,
industry, and jobs from us to them will raise carbon emissions, not
lower them.
The
grand theory for how the developed world can unilaterally save the
planet seems to run like this. We buy time for the planet by rapidly
slashing our own emissions. We do so by developing carbon-free
alternatives even cheaper than carbon. The rest of the world will
then quickly adopt these alternatives, leaving most of its trillion
barrels of oil and trillion tons of coal safely buried, most of the
rain forests standing, and most of the planet’s carbon-rich soil
undisturbed. From end to end, however, this vision strains
credulity.
Perhaps it’s the recognition of that
inconvenient truth that has made the anti-carbon rhetoric
increasingly apocalyptic. Coal trains have been analogized to
boxcars headed for Auschwitz. There is talk of the extinction of all
humanity. But then, we have heard such things before. It is indeed
quite routine, in environmental discourse, to frame choices as
involving potentially infinite costs on the green side of the
ledger. If they really are infinite, no reasonable person can
quibble about spending mere billions, or even trillions, on the
dollar side, to dodge the apocalyptic bullet.
Thirty years ago, the case against
nuclear power was framed as the “Zero-Infinity Dilemma.” The risks
of a meltdown might be vanishingly small, but if it happened, the
costs would be infinitely large, so we should forget about uranium.
Computer models demonstrated that meltdowns were highly unlikely and
that the costs of a meltdown, should one occur, would be
manageable—but greens scoffed: huge computer models couldn’t be
trusted. So we ended up burning much more coal. The software shoe is
on the other foot now; the machines that said nukes wouldn’t melt
now say that the ice caps will. Warming skeptics scoff in turn, and
can quite plausibly argue that a planet is harder to model than a
nuclear reactor. But that’s a detail. From a rhetorical perspective,
any claim that the infinite, the apocalypse, or the Almighty
supports your side of the argument shuts down all further
discussion.
To judge by actions rather than
words, however, few people and almost no national governments
actually believe in the infinite rewards of exorcising carbon from
economic life. Kyoto has hurt the anti-carbon mission far more than
carbon zealots seem to grasp. It has proved only that with carbon,
governments will say and sign anything—and then do less than
nothing. The United States should steer well clear of such treaties
because they are unenforceable, routinely ignored, and therefore
worthless.
If
we’re truly worried about carbon, we must instead approach it as if
the emissions originated in an annual eruption of Mount Krakatoa.
Don’t try to persuade the volcano to sign a treaty promising to
stop. Focus instead on what might be done to protect and promote
the planet’s carbon sinks—the systems that suck carbon back out of
the air and bury it. Green plants currently pump 15 to 20 times as
much carbon out of the atmosphere as humanity releases into
it—that’s the pump that put all that carbon underground in the first
place, millions of years ago. At present, almost all of that
plant-captured carbon is released back into the atmosphere within a
year or so by animal consumers. North America, however, is currently
sinking almost two-thirds of its carbon emissions back into prairies
and forests that were originally leveled in the 1800s but are now
recovering. For the next 50 years or so, we should focus on
promoting better land use and reforestation worldwide. Beyond that,
weather and the oceans naturally sink about one-fifth of total
fossil-fuel emissions. We should also investigate large-scale
options for accelerating the process of ocean sequestration.
Carbon zealots despise
carbon-sinking or natures carbon neutralizing schemes because, they
insist, nobody can be sure that the sunk carbon will stay sunk.
Yet everything they propose hinges on the assumption that carbon
already sunk by nature in what are now hugely valuable deposits of
oil and coal can be kept sunk by treaty and imaginary
cheaper-than-carbon alternatives. This, yet again, gets things
backward. We certainly know how to improve agriculture to protect
soil, and how to grow new trees, and how to maintain existing
forests, and we can almost certainly learn how to mummify carbon and
bury it back in the earth or the depths of the oceans, in ways that
neither man nor nature will disturb. It’s keeping nature’s black
gold sequestered from humanity that’s impossible.
If we do need to do something serious
about carbon, the sequestration of carbon after it’s burned is the
one approach that accepts the growth of carbon emissions as an
inescapable fact of the twenty-first century. And it’s the one
approach that the rest of the world can embrace, too, here and now,
because it begins with improving land use, which can lead directly
and quickly to greater prosperity. If, on the other hand, we persist
in building green bridges to nowhere, we will make things worse, not
better. Good intentions aren’t enough. Turned into ineffectual
action, they can cost the earth and accelerate its ruin at the same
time.
So I say Al Gore, MIchael Moore and
anyone waving a "Save the Earth" sign at some Global Warming summit,
figure out how to eliminate the carbon polluters in India, China,
Indonesia from the human race. LOL ... nuking them is not the
Politically Correct green thing to do!
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