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Home > All Sources > Reason magazine | Global warming

Reason magazine / Global warming



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Are You Carbon Beta Rated?
07 10 2008 ...

Economy in the Balance
02 10 2008 In his first book, Earth in the Balance, Al Gore appealed to the world to think beyond the present and look to the future. In today’s financial crisis, we should take his advice. Acknowledging political realities, the former vice president turned eco-crusader said, “One reason many world leaders have difficulty responding to the environmental crisis is that the worst of the predicted effects seems decades away.” When it comes to global warming, the effects aren’t necessarily felt right now, but the things we do today have a significant impact on the world tomorrow. When it comes to the bailout, the effects won’t be felt right away, but it will have a significant impact on the world tomorrow. The most tangible future loss is financial. Congress will have to take out a $700 billion loan from China (or other nation) that will increase our foreign financial dependency and saddle future generations with even more interest payments. The total cost then is sure to pass $1 trillion and this added debt will have unknown negative effects on our economy. Another negative impact the bailout will have on our future is the message it sends to financial institutions. Economists call this concept “moral hazard” and in this case the notion can be summed up like this: What’s to stop financial institutions from taking big risks again in the future if they think they will just get bailed out if they fail? If this bailout was the first time the government had taken this kind of action the argument might be different, but take a look at recent history. The federal government bailed out Chrysler in 1979, and this year they came back to ask for more, along with Ford and GM. When many airlines were facing bankruptcy in 2001 they came to the Congress on the grounds that their survival was in the best interests of the nation. And Wall Street has made the same argument today. There is a pattern of government believing certain firms are “too big to fail” and this bailout only perpetuates that problem. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac took big risks because they believed the government would cover their losses. They were right. The bailout does not encourage responsible investing; rather it encourages excessive risk taking. That is a moral hazard. However, the largest impact the bailout will have on our future is the one that we cannot see. Bailing out Wall Street is not an investment in our future but a discouragement of innovation. The unseen losses are in the opportunities to create value that the bailout takes away. The bailout prevents new, innovative ideas in the financial industry from emerging. When carmakers threatened the horse drawn carriage industry, the makers of buggy whips switched to seat belts. When computers replaced typewriters and eliminated the jobs of typing staff in offices and newspapers nationwide, we didn’t panic. Instead, the information technology industry was formed, with more jobs and better pay than ever before. We can know that several more financial institutions would fail if no bailout passes. What we don’t know is what could rise from their ashes. Having a long-term perspective and acute understanding of the unseen effects of our actions are principles every environmentalist has adopted. Those same principles reveal the most destructive aspects of the bailout. They are principles that allow us to look past the surface of today and accept that we have a future to protect too. What Al Gore and green policy pundits have also accepted is the need for sacrifices to preserve our future. Firms need to invest in energy-saving technology and cut back on emissions—even if there is a cost today. Individual lifestyles need to be adjusted, whether or not there is a cost savings. Pollution, no matter how efficient it is to allow it today, will destroy us tomorrow. The bailout is pollution for our financial future. And most people know it. The frustrating part is that members of Congress are accepting the pollution on the grounds of efficiency. There will be no innovation to rise from Wall Street’s ashes because no one is willing to accept ashes. There is no willingness to sacrifice for the future. In 1979, President Carter, facing an energy crisis and stagflation, acknowledged that in the short-term there was simply no way to avoid sacrifice to save the nation. Carter, for all his faults and failures as a president, took the step of asking the American people to take ownership in their nation—and failed. Today’s leaders, John McCain and Barack Obama, are both way off this message, and unwilling to accept any sense of financial pain to promote a better future. Al Gore notes in Earth in the Balance that world leaders struggle with accepting pain for gain because it usually means death and suffering. In the case of the bailouts that is exactly the choice, some financial firm death and market suffering. Unfortunately, Congress would sooner drag our nation into debt, keeping alive firms that gambled away their futures, than go through even three to six months of negative GDP growth and a temporary freeze in the credit markets. No pain, no gain. Anthony Randazzo is a research associate at the Reason Foundation. He blogs at Out of Control, where an earlier version of this has appeared.

Screw Obama: Crank Up the A.C.
30 07 2008 In today's excellent New York Times Findings column, John Tierney gives us 10 things not to worry about as we head off to the beach for vacation (if only...). Among them: Cell phone induced cancer, food miles, the Arctic's missing ice, and my favorite:

Your car’s planet-destroying A/C. No matter how guilty you feel about your carbon footprint, you don’t have to swelter on the highway to the beach. After doing tests at 65 miles per hour, the mileage experts at edmunds.com report that the aerodynamic drag from opening the windows cancels out any fuel savings from turning off the air-conditioner.

So don't listen to Obama when he says :

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK."

In the car, at least, enjoy the sweet, cool, conditioned air, guilt free. Opening the windows is a drag. More from my old boss Tierney on Martians and South Park in reason.

Al Gore's Curiously Cost-Free Plan to Re-Power America
29 07 2008 On July 17, Nobelist and Academy Award winner Al Gore issued a stirring challenge to our nation to produce 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and carbon-free sources within 10 years. Gore asserted, "The quickest, cheapest and best way to start using all this renewable energy is in the production of electricity. In fact, we can start right now using solar power, wind power and geothermal power to make electricity for our homes and businesses." This massive push for no-carbon electricity production would help prevent climate change and cut our dependence on foreign oil. Of course, great-souled visionaries such as Gore do not concern themselves with piddling and mundane issues such as who will pay for this marvelous no-carbon energy future and how much it will cost. Not being burdened with a great soul, I decided to don my green eyeshade and make a preliminary stab at figuring out how much Gore's scheme might cost us. According to the Energy Information Administration, the existing capacity of U.S. coal, gas, and oil generating plants totals around 850,000 megawatts. So how much would it cost to replace those facilities with solar electric power? Let's use the recent announcement of a 280-megawatt thermal solar power plant in Arizona for $1 billion as the starting point for an admittedly rough calculation. Combined with a molten salt heat storage systems, solar thermal might be able to provide base load power. Crunching the numbers (850,000 megawatts/280 megawatts x $1 billion) produces a total capital cost of just over $3 trillion over the next ten years. What about wind power? Oilman T. Boone Pickens is building the world's biggest wind energy project with an installed capacity of 4,000 megawatts at a cost of $10 billion, or about $2.5 billion per 1,000 megawatts. For purposes of illustration, this implies a total cost of around $2.1 trillion over the next ten years to replace current carbon-emitting electricity generation capacity with wind power. That's assuming that the wind projects generate electricity at their rated capacity at or near 100 percent of the time. Making the heroic assumption that in fact wind projects will generate power at about one-third of their rated capacity (due to wind variability), this would imply tripling the number of wind power generators. This boosts the total overall cost to more than $6 trillion over the next ten years. What's the potential for geothermal electricity generation? Geothermal power taps the heat of the Earth itself to make steam to drive turbines to generate electricity. For instance, superhot water erupting from the Geysers in northern California fuel power plants with a generation capacity of 725 megawatts. But such geothermal sites are relatively rare. However, an unconventional geothermal source—hot dry rocks—might supply us with no-carbon electricity. In lots of places, rocks several kilometers down are quite hot. To get at this heat, engineers drill at least two boreholes and inject cool water in one. The injected water flows around fractured hot rocks and rises through the other borehole as steam to drive a turbine to generate electricity. Some very preliminary figures suggest that it would cost around $3 billion for build a 1000 megawatt geothermal plant. Replacing 850 gigawatts of carbon-emitting power generation capacity with geothermal electricity would cost around $2.5 trillion over ten years. Curiously, nowhere does the "N-word"—nuclear—appear in Gore's speech. Currently, 104 nuclear power plants generate about 20 percent of America's electricity. Once a nuclear plant is up and running, it is essentially carbon-free. Westinghouse claims that it can build a third generation 1,000 megawatt nuclear power plant for around $1.4 billion. Assuming this estimate is right, all U.S. carbon-emitting electricity generation plants could be replaced with nuclear power at a cost of about $1.2 trillion by 2018. One other issue: Just how does using renewable sources of energy to generate electricity free us from dependence on foreign oil when only a tiny bit of crude is burned to produce electricity? The vast majority of petroleum is turned into transportation fuels, while home heating accounts for around two percent of total U.S. petroleum consumption. The answer, evidently, is a vehicle fleet powered by electricity. Although Gore doesn't dwell on it, he does mention that we should help "our struggling auto giants switch to the manufacture of plug-in electric cars." In 2006, a U.S. Department of Energy study concluded that if 84 percent of all cars and light trucks were plug in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), fueling them would not require any additional electric generation capacity. The study assumes that the PHEVs would travel an average of 33 miles per day solely on electric power and could be charged using off-peak power at night. PHEVs would cost between $6,000 and $10,000 more than conventional cars. Such a PHEV fleet could reduce oil consumption by 6.5 million barrels per day, or approximately 52 percent of our oil imports. While the capital costs for current versions of renewable no-carbon electricity generation are high, one big advantage is that their fuel costs are low to non-existent. Gore is also probably right that the prices for renewable energy production technologies will fall in the future. However, his proposed crash program would put an immediate steep upward price pressure on the commodities—steel, concrete, silicon, copper—that go into building energy infrastructure. All of the rough calculations above are for generating capacity alone and do not include the costs of a $1 trillion smart grid upgrade for our creaky electric power distribution system. And does Gore plan to compensate the shareholders of conventional power generation companies when their assets are forcibly scrapped? As a very rough low estimate, Gore's 10-year no-carbon energy plan would cost about $300 billion per year for the next ten years. According to the Brattle Group consultancy, "new and replacement generating plants will cost about $560 billon through 2030, absent a significant expansion of energy efficiency programs or new climate initiatives." That comes to an average of about $25 billion per year over the next 22 years. Gore's proposal is a "new climate initiative" that aims to spend twelve times more than the utility industry would otherwise annually invest in new and replacement generating capacity. Gore explicitly likens his scheme to NASA's Apollo program, but reaching the moon cost only $150 billion (in current dollars) spent over eight years. In other words, getting to the moon cost half of what Gore wants to spend annually to realize his no-carbon energy vision. "Of course there are those who will tell us this can't be done," warned Gore. I am not one of those people. I am sure it can be done. But before embarking on his "generational challenge to re-power America," I would like the former vice-president to sketch out a few more details on how it's going to be paid for and who's going to be stuck with the bill. Without those answers, Gore's bold challenge amounts to little more than hot air. Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Schwarzenegger for Cabinet (and President?)
15 07 2008

Amid murmurs that he might consider a position as energy czar—from McCain or Obama—Schwarzenegger puts in a good word for the virtues of the flip flop:

"Flip-flopping is getting a bad rap, because I think it is great," Schwarzenegger told ABC's "This Week" in an interview broadcast Sunday. "Someone has made a mistake. I mean, someone has, for 20 or 30 years, been in the wrong place with his idea and with his ideology and says, 'You know something? I changed my mind. I am now for this.' As long as he's honest or she's honest, I think that is a wonderful thing. You can change your mind," he said. "I have changed my mind on things and there is nothing wrong with it."

This is why I love Arnold. This is why America loves Arnold. This is why Arnold is a mere constitutional amendment away from the presidency. Take a peek back at my coverage of the Arnold-dominated 2008 Governors' Declaration on Climate Change, where everyone agreed that no matter who won the election, he'd be "better on global warming" than Bush. Maybe that's because no matter who wins we're going to wind up with Schwarzenegger in the cabinet. Query for constitutional scholars: What happens if Arnold is the only cabinet member to survive some kind of horrible attack. Does he finally get to be president, lack of native-born status notwithstanding?

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