There is a lot of warmie news this week that I just haven't had time to blog:
- Warmies have just seen a stake put in the heart of "Glaciergate," the wholly unsupported claim out of the IPCC that the world's glaciers were melting at incredible speed and, of course, threatening a global catastrophe. A recent study based on satellite data shows that the Himilayas have lost zero ice in the past ten years.
- From Dr. Judith Curry at her blog, responding to the meme that we should all accept the absolute truth of global warming becuase there is a scientific consensus:
The climate community worked for 20 years to establish a consensus. The impact of the consensus probably peaked in 2006-2007, at the time of publication of the AR4. Courtesy of the CRU emails, we now understand the sausage making that went into creating the consensus. Manufacturing a consensus in the context of the IPCC has acted to hyper-politicize the scientific and policy debate, to the detriment of both. Its time to abandon the concept of consensus; consensus matters far less than simply being right and the arguments themselves that ought to be the focus for discussion.
- "A paper published this week in the journal Climate of the Past analyzes an "unprecedentally large network of temperature...proxy records" [a total of 120] and concludes that warming of the 20th century was "within the range of natural variability over the last 12 centuries." Only two of the eight types of temperature proxies analyzed indicate 20th century warming exceeded that of the Medieval Warming Period."
- Despite a warm 2012 January in the U.S., overall January temperatures over the last 15 years have fallen off a cliff - falling at a minus seventeen degrees per century rate.
- Real Science goes climbing behind the numbers used by NASA's Jim Hansen to show global warming: "The bottom line is that his warming trend since 1880 is primarily based on non-existent temperature readings in the Arctic. Is Hansen the worst scientist in history?"
- It wasn't that long ago that San Francisco, with all its "low flow" toilets, began stinking like a ces pool because there wasn't enough water to pipe away the human waste. One would think the greenies would have learned from this, but obviously not:
Students at a high school in Boca Raton, Florida, must step over rivers of urine and endure the stench of rancid waste after a plan to bring 'green' waterless urinals into bathrooms backfired. School officials at Spanish River High School thought they had found an environmentally-friendly, cost-saving solution for their bathrooms when they installed Falcon Waterfree urinals in their boys bathrooms. But with no water moving through the school's copper pipes to flush the urine into the sewer system, the waste produced noxious gases that ate through the metal, leaving leaky pipes that allowed urine to drip into walls and flow onto floors.
- How to create a dutiful, unthinking warmie? Get them while they are young and fill their heads full of bile. And on that note, the USA Today tells us that a "Tree-hugging Dr. Seuss character will be marketeer"
The Lorax, perhaps the most famous anti-industrial crusader from children's literature, is about to become a big-time corporate spokesman.
With a host of commercial tie-ins — albeit for eco-friendly products —Universal Pictures will begin promoting "Dr. Seuss' The Lorax" this month. The animated movie, set for release March 2 in North America, is about a creature who "speaks for the trees" and fights rampant industrialism in a retelling of the Dr. Seuss children's book first published in 1971.
The studio's nearly 70 launch partners — including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Whole Foods Market — are seeking to latch onto the Lorax's nature-friendly message. . . .
Interestingly enough, if you read the rest of the article, you will see that the "partners" are going to use Lorax to push a lot of things that one does not normally associate with kiddies. Clearly the expectation is that children, once properly conditioned, will work on their parents to also act to save the planet from the evils of industrialization. It was Lenin who famously remarked, "education, education, education." He, like our modern left, knew the value of indoctrination.
- And lastly, if you haven't seen it, read Der Spiegel's exceptional interview with Germany's newest global warming heretic, former German Environment Minister Fritx Vahrenholt.
Let's go over some of the eye-opening facts about our gas and oil industry:
- Oil Prices: The major oil companies do not set the price of oil. That price is set independently by traders based on world supply and demand, the strength of the dollar, stability in oil producing regions, and weather events, among other factors.
- Oil Usage - Transportation: Per the DOE, oil accounts for 94% of the energy used in our transportation sector.
- Oil As Our Single Largest Source Of Energy: Per the DOE, oil is our single most important source of energy, accounting for 35.6% of all energy consumed in America. In comparison, solar and wind, added together account for less than 1% of all energy consumed in the U.S. There is a reason for that. Wind and solar energy are vastly more inefficient and costly than oil, gas and coal. They are not commecially viable without substantial subsidies.
- Profit Margin: While oil companies' profits may be vast, that is because their volume is vast. America uses over 20 million barrels of oil daily. The actual profit margin across the oil industry averages less than 6 cents on the dollar. By comparison, Obama's favorite crony capitalist, GE, has a profit margin nearly 33% higher.
- Oil Companies & Taxes: The oil and gas industry is a cash cow for government. Oil and gas companies pay, on average, more than 40% of their profits in taxes. To put a number to this, over the past three years, the oil and gas industry has paid over $242 billion in taxes. Obama's favored business, GE, paid no taxes last year.
- Oil Companies & Jobs: Domestic gas and oil companies play a huge role in our private sector, supporting "9.2 million U.S. jobs and 7.7 percent of the U.S. economy."
- Reinvesting Profits: Exploring and exploiting new sources of oil is a time consuming and very expensive process. For instance, Exxon, in the first quarter of 2011, made an after tax profit of $10.65 billion. Of that, Exxon invested "$7.8 billion into capital and exploration."
- Our Trade Deficit & Foreign Oil: We are, today, transferring vast amounts of our wealth outside of the U.S. to purchase foreign oil. Approximately 62% of our monthly trade deficit comes from the purchase of foreign oil.
[A]bout 1.5 percent of the shares of oil companies are held by the officers and board members of those companies. That is comparable to other industries. Similarly, if you look at who is holding the other 98.5 percent of the shares, more than 60 percent is being held by either mutual funds or the companies that manage large portfolios for pensions. There is another 9 percent that is held directly by pension plans and insurance companies and foundations. . . . . What do you say to people who are critical of oil and natural gas industry earnings? Aren't they really being critical of the benefits that are going to millions of American consumers and retirees?
Mr. Shapiro: Those earnings go to two places. They go to the dividends and the value of the stock that is held by pensions and people saving for their retirement. That comprises the overwhelming majority of the ownership of these companies. The other place where oil and natural gas company earnings go is into investment. The oil and natural gas industry has enormous investment needs. . . . That is the other place those earnings go. They go to the retirement plans of both average Americans and certainly the beneficiaries of the major pension plans in the country. They are public employees or auto workers and the earnings also go toward investments that generate returns in the future.
What all of these facts mean are that oil companies are huge industries that, in a myriad of ways, play a very critical role in supporting our economy. Moreover, nothing is going to replace our oil usage at any point in the forseeable future. Yet, with gas prices rising and the oil industry showing huge profits in the last quarter, the left wants to show they are doing something about gas prices - by punishing the oil industry. Specifically, Obama and Harry Reid propose removing "big oil's subsidies." And in reality, this is merely the latest in Obama and the left's much larger war on our domestic oil and gas industry.
George Will recently opined that the ideology and politics of the left are "untethered from the facts." Will, noting the left's substitution of wishful thinking for plans based in reality, chalks this up to deep historical ignorance. Will is half right. The other reason the left's politics and ideology are "untethered from the facts" is because the left are at least as intellectualy dishonest as they are historically ignorant. The actions of Obama, Reid and the left, to demonize and attack our oil and gas industry because gas prices are rising is merely the most recent proof.
The first deceit of the left is that the oil and gas industry receives no subsidies. Rather, what they receive, and that which Obama aspires to remove, are four tax write downs, three of which - domestic manufacturing tax deduction, percentage depletion allowance, and foreign tax credit - are available to every manufacturing entity in the U.S. The only way in which oil companies are treated partially different than other manufacturing entities in the the U.S. is as regards:
Intangible drilling costs -- According to CNN, "[a]ll industries get to write off the costs of doing business, but they must take it over the life of an investment. The oil industry gets to take the drilling credit in the first year."
So when Obama says he wants to take away all of "big oil's subsidies," what he is really saying is that he wants to single out our oil and gas industry for unfavorable tax treatment as compared to all other manufacturing concerns in America. He wants to treat them as a pariah and steal more of their profits.
It is hard to imagine a plan more "untethered from reality" or more cynically designed to gain political advantage, irrespective of the expense to our nation. Basic economics dictate that this plan will negatively impact our economy.
Singling out our domestic oil and gas for special, unfavorable treatment will reduce domestic oil production, it will increase our trade imbalance, it will cost us private sector jobs, it will harm the pensions of millions of Americans, and it will result in rising gas and oil prices to the consumer. Charles Krauthammer does a great job of skewering Obama and the left for the intellectual dishonesty inherent this ostentatious push to punish our oil and gas industry:
Ultimately, this proposal by Obama and the left is going nowhere, simply because there are too many Republicans in Congress to allow them to get away with this insanity. Were this the only attack on our oil and gas industry from Obama and the left, perhaps it would be no big deal. But the reality is that Obama is waging war on our oil and gas industry very effectively by other means.
While Obama recently claimed credit for increased oil production in America under his watch, that was the height of hypocrisy. To the extent that there has been a slight uptick in production under his watch, that is because of expansions of oil drilling on private lands in North Dakota, South Texas and West Texas. Further, these figures have been bumped upward by the opening of BP's deepwater Thunder Horse well. That well was leased under Reagan, the exploratory well dug under Clinton, the well set under Bush, and production only now coming to full flow. In sum, Obama had as much to do with the increase in domestic oil production on his watch as he has had to do with the daily rising and setting of the sun.
To the contrary, as stated earlier, Obama is warring quite effectively on our domestic oil drilling. He is doing so, on one hand, by severely restricting the availability of public lands and coastal regions for exploration and drilling and, on the other hand, by limiting permits for such activities:
In 2008 there were 2,416 new oil and natural gas leases issued on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land spanning 2.6 million acres. In 2010, under the Obama Administration, the number of new leases issued dropped to 1,308 and acres leased dropped to 1.3 million. The total onshore acreage leased under the Obama Administration in 2009 and 2010 are the lowest in over two decades, stretching back to at least 1984.
There is also, of course, the permatorium on drilling in the Gulf, though at least a few drilling permits have recently been issued. The effects of Obama's war will be with us long after Obama himself is but a distant, very unpleasant memory in our national consciousness.
What makes this war on our domestic production, with all its attendant negatives for our economy, all the more mind boggling is that Obama has promised to significantly finance Brazil's development of their own oil industry. That is inexplicable - though of course it does bear noting that George Soros has a substantial investment, close to $1 billion, in Brazil's oil industry.
Fortunately for our nation, Obama's war on our domestic oil production is something that we can change at the ballot box. But there is also another front in the left's war on oil and gas - one that wholly bypasses Congress and the ballot box. I am referring to the radical environmentalists who have been given keys to the courthouse under our environmental laws. They are seeking new ways daily to bring our nation to its knees by hitting the off switch on oil, gas and economic growth.
One of their well honed methods is to request that a species be listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Once whatever little beastie is then declared endangered, any and all human activity that effects that beasties's habitat becomes enjoined. So for example, California's Central Valley, which but three years ago was a thriving bed of agriculture, has seen its irrigation water shut and is today "Zimbabwe West." The reason - a law suit brought under the ESA to protect a 3 inch fish with no commercial value, the Delta smelt.
And then there are the law suits charging that carbon dioxide is a pollutant for which emitters are liable. Their ultimate goal is to have the courts take over our nation's energy policy. Whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant and whether it is causing "global warming" are scientific questions very much at issue and that courts are unqualified to answer. Even assuming arguendo that CO2 is a pollutant causing global warming, what to do about it is a political question with massive ramifications for our economy. It is not a question to be decided by our Courts, but by our elected representatives.
Yet our federal judiciary, from the Supreme Court on down - none of whom are scientists - has shown an avid willingness to hear and decide such cases. The EPA is regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant today under the Clean Air Act because five members of the Supreme Court felt qualified to pass judgment on this issue. Moreover, enterprising lawyers have brought suits against power companies under a nuisance theory because they are contributing to carbon dioxide in the air. These law suits are currently in the court system. If the lawyers succeed, the Courts then become the single most important arbiters of energy policy in America. On top of this, we have seen in the past week NASA's Jim Hansen, the "Bernie Madoff of climate science," file lawsuits with children as the plaintiffs seeking to have courts take complete control over our energy policy in the name of Global Warming.
While Obama's attempt to punish our domestic oil and gas industry for daring to make a profit is not going to go anywhere, his and the left's larger war on that industry is "untethered from the facts." We are all going to ultimately pay the price. I am praying that we are able to elect someone in 2012 who is both capable of articulating a coherent energy policy and who is able to take our courts and the radical left out of the business of deciding our nation's energy policy.
Andrew Bolt, writing at Australia's Herald Sun, has up a superb article on the global warming acolytes, having bought into the dogma that the polar regions are melting away under the intense heat of man made global warming, made expeditions to the poles to raise awareness - only to find that maybe they should have checked with Joe Bastardi instead of the IPCC . . .
TOM Smitheringale wanted to prove the world was warming. Now he's another alarmist with frostbite.
The 40-year-old from Perth planned to be the first Australian to trek unassisted to the North Pole, but announced he'd raise some consciousness along the way.
As he wrote on his website: "Part of the reason Tom's One Man Epic is taking place now is because of the effect that global warming is having on the polar ice caps."
Indeed, he wanted to see the North Pole while it was still there: "Some scientists have even estimated that the polar ice cap will have entirely melted away by 2014!"
Have your say at Andrew's blog
But Antarctica isn't melting away, and Arctic ice has slowly increased since its big low in 1997.
But no one seems to have told Tom, who soon found his extremities freezing. . . .
This is actually now the fourth year running that warming alarmists have had to be rescued from expeditions to prove the Arctic is warmer than it actually is. It's a metaphor.
Last year it was British eco-explorer Pen Hadow and his two-person team who had to be flown out mid-stunt, after battling brutal sub-zero weather conditions that gave the team's photographer frostbite.
The year before, eco-adventurer Lewis Gordon Pugh was similarly thwarted.
He'd planned to kayak 1200km to the North Pole to raise awareness of how global warming had allegedly melted the ice sheet so badly that scientists warned the North Pole that summer could be ice-free.
No such luck. Pugh had to pull out, still 1000km from the finish, when a great barrier of sea ice blocked his route.
The year before gave even more farcical entertainment.
"Explorers and educators" Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen said they were off on what reporters described as "a historic 75-day expedition to the North Pole and beyond to raise awareness of global warming's impact on the fragile Arctic".
It turned out that what was fragile was not the Arctic but the alarmists, who had to call off their big trip not long after it started, when Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold drained their batteries.
Explained a spokesman: "They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming."
Like the globe, really.
The fact is that when Arctic rescuers must save more people from global warming stunts than from global warming itself, it's time to heed again the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
"We have nothing to fear but fear itself." So if alarmists settled down, they might just live longer, and keep their toes.
And the rest of us might not be put to so much needless expense. Like rescues, for instance.
There certainly is a measure of justice to all of this. Now if we could just ship all the greens to the poles for a reality check . . . Indeed, hopefully they might even be able to give us first hand information as to whether the polar bear population is really shrinking - assuming they can run fast enough.
Two years ago I pointed out at this blog that all of the non-nuclear green energy Obama and the left were pushing as substitutes for coal and oil were not merely economically uncompetitive, but that they were untested at scale. Shannon Love, in a brilliant essay at Chicago Boyz not long ago expounded on why alternative forms of energy could not be relied upon to substitute for coal and oil at scale.
None of that has mattered thus far to the radical greens. Obama is deconstructing our energy infrastructure and warring on both coal and oil. Obama and the far left have legislated that increasing amounts of highly subsidized green energy must be used in our energy production. All well and good - until reality strikes. This from Alex Salkever writing at Daily Finance:
Boy, that was fast. Only five years into the world's renewable energy push, many utility companies are so concerned about grid instability that they're saying they can't accept any more electricity from intermittent sources of power. Translation: Solar power only runs in the day time and can't re relied on for so called "baseload" capacity. Wind power primarily produces current at night and, likewise, can't be relied upon for baseload capacity. Geothermal, meanwhile, is perfect for providing baseload. But geothermal projects take an excruciatingly long time to build out. And then there have been the recent spate of earthquake scares around geothermal sites. The upshot: Utilities such as Hawaiian Electric in President Obama's home state are voicing concerns about plans to integrate more solar and wind power into the grid until they develop methods to more effectively absorb intermittent sources of power without destabilizing the whole shebang. In Europe, Czech utility companies are concerned that "feed-in tariffs," which require power companies to repurchase all home- and business-generated renewable power at elevated rates, might wreak havoc on the Central European grid.
This growing push-back from utilities could prove to be shock to energy project developers, lawmakers and homeowners. In the U.S., project developers and state lawmakers have assumed that the ambitious laws mandating as much as 40% of some states' power come from renewable sources within the next few decades would ensure huge demand for green power as utilities scaled up their use of such resources from low single-digit levels. Likewise, homeowners have tended to assume that if they could put a panel on their roof (or a windmill on their property), they would be guaranteed a market for the extra power produced. . . .
This is only a shock if you haven't been paying any attention to the issue beyond listening to the green propaganda machine. But expect the left to do absolutely nothing about this while our existing coal and fossil fuel infrastructure declines, leading to much higher energy prices in the medium term.
So now lets pivot to something else in the news - the revolution in Kyrgyzstan that occurred the other day. Kyrgyzstan is a landlocked Islamic majority nation that sits on the border of China and to the north of Afghanistan. It was annexed by the Soviet Union around 1920, then gained its independence in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell. It became a democracy, but the government has been unable to stem rampant corruption. Given that short history and its location, one could well imagine a host of reasons for the violent coup that occurred the other day, from Islamic radicalism to Russian or Chinese involvement. Nope, none of that. The reason for the violent overthrow of the government - rising energy prices attibutable to government intervention. This from Dr. North at EU Referendum:
Covered widely by the media, the reports of the rioting in Kyrgyzstan yesterday vary widely in tone and content. But, even if you have to drill down into the piece, not even The Guardian can conceal the reason for the unrest, which has seen protestors beat a Cabinet minister to death.
"The violent rolling protests appeared to be largely spontaneous rather than a premeditated coup," it says, eventually telling us that a "leading expert" has said the government had triggered the protests by imposing punitive increases on tariffs for water and gas. . . .
There is much more to it than that, as The Daily Mail indicates, but even on 23 February the Institute for War & Peace Reporting had Timur Toktonaliev in Bishkek writing: "Soaring energy costs anger Kyrgyz", with prices for electricity having risen 100 percent and the cost of central heating shooting up by 500 percent. Clearly, energy prices have been the primary trigger of current events.
And therein is a lesson. For a country with a violent past, not too much can be read into it, but every society has its limits of tolerance and, where we have our own government determined to drive up energy costs, this could become a factor in triggering open dissent in this country as well.
Here, the crucial issue in Kyrgyzstan was that the prices were driven up by government fiat, albeit following a decision to remove subsidies which had enabled energy to be sold at less than the cost of production. It can be assumed, from this, that where government action is directly responsible for price hikes, governments will take the flak.
It is far too extreme to suppose that we will any time soon see a Cabinet minister beaten to death on the streets of London, although there are not a few who would leap at such an opportunity if it was presented. But it is not a happy or a stable government which relies only on constant police protection to keep its members alive and safe.
Ministers, therefore, would do well to note the events in Kyrgyzstan. Even remote possibilities are still possibilities and, the way our politicians are behaving, they could yet become probabilities and then certainties.
As I pointed out here, we are not quite a decade behind Britain in the mad push into alternative energy. Britain has already seen vast spikes in energy prices and is expecting much more. We are set on the same path now with Obama's war on our fossil fuel powered energy infrastructure and our own mad push towards alternative energy to replace them. For us, the real economic effects of this madness are several years out, when our own costs spike. And while I don't expect blood in the streets over it at this point, I do expect very substantial unrest indeed.
From across the pond, here is Dr. North at EU Referendum, passing on the UK's new green "feed-in" tarrif program. It is a program where you can install green energy producing "enhancements," such as solar panels, on your property and the UK government will require that all energy you produce will be bought by the energy company at a premium - regardless whether you use all the energy yourself:
. . . So it starts ... the pigs rush to the trough, scooping up the cash by the handfuls. They would be mad not to do so. The government has devised an utterly mad system designed to put £8.6 billon a year into the kitty, available for anyone able to afford the initial investment. AND THE REST OF US PAY.
This one, like so many, has crept in under the radar, a perverted, distorted reverse Robin Hood scheme where the poor are robbed to give to the rich. And even with today's debauched currency, £8 billion plus A YEAR is a lot of money – you could build four aircraft carriers a year with that, every year.
This is money which is going to be siphoned out of our pockets, all to produce electricity in one of the least efficient and most expensive ways known to man. On our backs, will arise a vast, bloated "green" industry, milking the poor and the less-well-off, just to pay homage to a mad obsession. In Zimbabwe, runaway inflation produced scenes such as the one shown. If you see something similar in Britain, you are looking at a solar energy developer.
Keep a close eye on what happens across the pond. It is a laboratory for socialim and green insanity. And it is a laboratory whose results Obama seems to wish to emulate.
Over a year ago, I posted here on the insane push to scrap our existing energy infrastructure and replace it with a variety of "alternative energy" sources that, other than nuclear power, are deeply cost ineffective and not proven to scale. Two recent articles highlight those realities.
The first from Shannon Love is an exceptionally articulate primer on why replacing our reliance on coal and other fossil fuels with non-nuclear alternative energy is pure fantasy:
Here’s a fact you won’t see mentioned in the public policy debate over “alternative” energy:
There exists no alternative energy source, no combination of alternative energy sources, and no system of combinations of alternative energy sources that can fully replace a single, coal fired electric plant built with 1930s era technology.
Nada. Zero. Zilch.
Yet many want to make this group of functionally useless technologies the primary energy sources for our entire civilization.
Most discussions of alternative energy talk only about the cost and reliability of the electricity when it leaves the grounds of the alternative-energy installation. This is called the Point of Generation (POG). However, energy is useless unless you have it where you need it, when you need it. It does no good to have plenty of power in Arizona when your work and home are in Michigan. It does no good to have a roaring fire in July when you’re freezing in January. Therefore, the only real factors that count are the cost and reliability at the Point of Consumption (POC).
All current and forecast alternative energy sources fail miserably at POC. When you look at all the hurdles, redundancies and hypothetical/theoretical technologies you have to invoke to make alternative energy reliable at POC, you see they can’t even come close to matching the 80-year-old coal plant.
An obsolete coal plant using 80-year-old technology can provide power where and when you need it. It can be positioned almost anywhere from the equator to the tundra. . . . It can be positioned immediately adjacent to the point of consumption. It works around the clock and in all types of weather. It can easily store weeks or months of coal reserves in a big pile outside. 99% of its offline time is scheduled and it is trivial to build in redundancy to compensate for both scheduled and unscheduled offline time. For the last 80 years, this type of technology has chugged out the electricity all over the world without pause.
“Alternative” energy sources have none of these attributes. They can only be built in specific locations, and those locations are wholly unrelated to the points of consumption. They can only operate under specific weather/environmental conditions, so they cannot fulfill the when of the point of consumption need.
They operate on nature’s schedule not ours. If we could easily operate on mother nature’s schedule, we wouldn’t need the energy in the first place, because we primarily use the energy to alter natural environmental conditions to keep ourselves alive. . . .
The UK is much further along in the green madness than we - though Obama seems determined to catch us up, whatever the economic cost. As I posted here and as discussed by Dr. North of EU Referendum, Brits have seen their energy prices double in the past five years and are staring at exponential rises in energy costs in the future. As discussed in those posts, the things driving up their energy costs are a variety of charges aimed at reducing carbon dioxide. And today there is yet another charge added - "feed in" tariffs to encourage Brits to start generating their own alternative energy through installation of such things as solar panels. This from George Monbiot on just how insane and costly this idea is for the Brits:
Those who hate environmentalism have spent years looking for the definitive example of a great green rip-off. Finally it arrives, and nobody notices. The government is about to shift £8.6bn from the poor to the middle classes. It expects a loss on this scheme of £8.2bn, or 95%. . . .
On 1 April the government introduces its feed-in tariffs. These oblige electricity companies to pay people for the power they produce at home. The money will come from their customers in the form of higher bills. It would make sense, if we didn't know that the technologies the scheme will reward are comically inefficient.
The people who sell solar photovoltaic (PV) panels and micro wind turbines in the UK insist they represent a good investment. . . . The government wants everyone to get the same rate of return. So while the electricity you might generate from large wind turbines and hydro plants will earn you 4.5p per kilowatt hour, mini wind turbines get 34p, and solar panels 41p. In other words, the government acknowledges that micro wind and solar PV in the UK are between seven and nine times less cost-effective than the alternatives.
It expects this scheme to save 7m tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2020. Assuming – generously – that the rate of installation keeps accelerating, this suggests a saving of about 20m tonnes of CO2 by 2030. The estimated price by then is £8.6bn. This means it will cost about £430 to save one tonne of CO2.
Last year the consultancy company McKinsey published a table of cost comparisons. It found that you could save a tonne of CO2 for £3 by investing in geothermal energy, or for £8 by building a nuclear power plant. Insulating commercial buildings costs nothing; in fact it saves £60 for every tonne of CO2 you reduce; replacing incandescent lightbulbs with LEDs saves £80 per tonne. The government predicts that the tradeable value of the carbon saved by its £8.6bn scheme will be £420m. That's some return on investment. . . .
Solar PV is a great technology – if you live in southern California. But the further from the equator you travel, the less sense it makes. It's not just that the amount of power PV panels produce at this latitude is risible, they also produce it at the wrong time. In hot countries, where air conditioning guzzles electricity, peak demand coincides with peak solar radiation. In the UK, peak demand takes place between 5pm and 7pm on winter evenings. Do I need to spell out the implications? . . .
We don't need to guess the results: the German government made the same mistake 10 years ago. By 2006 its generous feed-in tariffs had stimulated 230,000 solar roofs, at a cost of €1.2bn. Their total contribution to the country's electricity supply was 0.4%. Their total contribution to carbon savings, as a paper in the journal Energy Policy points out, is zero. This is because Germany, like the UK, belongs to the European emissions trading scheme. Any savings made by feed-in tariffs permit other industries to raise their emissions. Either the trading scheme works, in which case the tariffs are pointless, or it doesn't, in which case it needs to be overhauled. The government can't have it both ways. . . .
There are significant opportunity costs for engaging in this alternative energy madness. While there are current costs to each person for having to subsidize this push to alternatives, we are also neglecting both our existing infrastructure and our future supplies of coal and oil. Obama's war on coal today may only be making the back pages of the newspaper, but its real effect will be in a decade or so out, when we are paying skyrocketing costs for energy that may well not be be there when we want to flip the switch.
No Oil For Pacifists has found the "headline of the year" in an AFP article published by our frozen neighbors to the north:
Green vibrators promise truly sustainable pleasure
Heh. Apparently you have to do something to keep warm up there. You will find the article here. I've written three different versions of comments on this, throwing each out as inappropriate for this blog. Just read the article.
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