The People’s Climate March celebrated recently in New York City was a joyous union of many disparate views on the environment and a need to do something. To do what is not clear nor the proper venue to effect change. For the movement to succeed it must coalesce around two propositions. One is that CO2 in the atmosphere is rising and two that any plan to reduce it meet a rigorous mathematical proof.
A video presentation on Reason TV by Matt Ridley showed a satellite photo of the Caribbean Island with two countries, Haiti and The Dominican Republic. From the sky one country appeared brown and barren and the other lush and green. One country is so poor that its only fuel is wood and the other country is rich enough to subsidize propane gas to be used as a fuel for cooking to save its forests. Many in the Climate March aspire to a life in a simple biofuel consuming economy, but unfortunately for them, Haiti is a good example of what you get from a backward system that is very little affected by petroleum, globalisation and corporate greed.
The contrast between Haiti and The Dominican Republic also indicates how ill suited the United Nations is as a forum for deciding issues on climate. Imagine a world wide solution to climate change mandating less use of coal and petroleum forcing more poor people to forage in the woods for fuel. Climate Marchers would feel slighted if the energy deprived of the world accused them of the royal quip “let them cook with dung.” In the quest for reducing CO2 in our atmosphere, first and foremost, keep the world’s poor countries out of the supposed solution. They are an insignificant part of the carbon problem yet a global response would affect them the most. Counterintuitively the world’s rich democracies with governments responsive to the will of its people for a clean and safe environment and with economies that can transform themselves with market messaging are cleaning up.
If reducing carbon in our atmosphere is the problem to be solved, then biofuels have to be discarded as a solution since a truly rigorous energy audit shows that its commercialisation increases CO2 in the air as well as use of petroleum assets. Unless, ostrichlike, you keep your head in the sand about the diesel fuel used to cultivate, process and transport the biomass turned to fuel. The other issue with biomass is that its cultivation competes for the farmland to feed the world. It’s grotesque to put an automobile in the same line as the poor at the local food pantry. Finally more farmland for cars means less rain forest in the world storing carbon and cleaning our air. All and all bio appears not to be an answer to CO2 reduction and should not be subsidized as ethanol is today in the U.S.
Sun and wind energy have strong support as renewable energy sources because they are early in their development and have an expectation of reduced costs as the technology gets better. Unfortunately these two sources of energy have low yield to acreage, in other words they both require a lot of area to generate little power. Secondly the intermittency character as described by Professor Paul Joskow of MIT of on and off production when the wind don’t blow and the sun don’t shine requires backup systems that counter the goal of CO2 reduction. Solar on roofs and windows is a positive source that uses the acreage of buildings already in place and it is a great supplement for peak air conditioning loads when the sun is out and is a worthy of the subsidy it currently has. A solar farm out in the desert is less compelling economically when considering intermittency and distance. Even less compelling are windmill farms. Recently Germany has been receiving good press regarding their full on effort to convert to solar and wind, but what is not talked about is that cheap coal powered utilities used to provide energy at night and when the wind is becalmed makes a well meaning green policy into a costly polluter with Germany slipping back on its goal of reducing CO2 in the atmosphere. So why the reliance on dirty coal to cover intermittency? A possible answer is the political solution of subsidizing green energy on the backs of utilities with a large asset base of traditional power sources. This unexpected cost has created real losses to utility share and bond holders but which are papered over by uninterested deniers of the numbers. Under such a loser circumstance those forced to provide the intermittent power choose to do so as cheaply possible and dam the pollution emitted. The answer for these losses requires a market based solution that correctly prices power according to supply and demand and would make wind farms uneconomic, which is okay because the world can only stand so much of this acreage hungry system before NIMBA (not in my backyard) syndrome stops its growth. Think of the resistance of locating wind farms off the coast of Cape Cod which was probably resisted by some who marched in New York.
Hydropower is also an acreage hungry source that reached its tipping point recently as ecologist reassess what damming rivers does to the ecosystem. Geothermal currently is too insignificant to consider so in the end we have to consider the hateful to climate marchers, nuclear energy. Unfortunately for them nuclear has the best power to acreage yield and emits no CO2. Curiously there was a Climate March in Paris as well. This in a country that embraced nuclear full on and is a leader in low carbon emissions. It is an elitist bet promoted by bureaucrat and engineering graduates of France’s famous Grande Ecoles whereby they went all in. The result is that France is clean and beautiful and with travel in their electric powered TGV fast trains a vision of a future with concentrated energy efficient cities surrounded by pristine farms, forests and mountains. Contrast France’s calculation with Germany which let its green movement chaotically create policies that increase CO2 emissions, energy costs and vulnerability to petroleum energy despots and whose political slogan appears to be: “Innumerates of the World, Unite.”
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