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On Renewable Energy Grid Parity Reality Check
AV, your comment seems to imply an assumption that ill-conceived, imprudent choices cannot be popular; hence the popularity of a choice is evidence that is not ill-conceived or imprudent.
The global financial debacles of 2008 provide contrary evidence.
On Renewable Energy Grid Parity Reality Check
I just came across this Economist article which is pertinent to the arguments here about wind subsidies:
Along the line of my point that valuing carbon is not essential to promoting renewable energy options was this in particular:
Some of the most enthusiastic Republican supporters of the PTC do not even acknowledge that climate change is happening. Karl Rove, a former adviser to George W. Bush, and Charles Grassley and Steve King, respectively Iowa’s senior senator and fourth-district congressman, have all campaigned for the wind-energy credit but have expressed opinions about climate change ranging from ambivalence (“The science is confusing”) to downright hostility (“Climate is gone”). A number of other groups, such as the US Chamber of Commerce, support the credit but lobby against climate-change legislation.
On Renewable Energy Grid Parity Reality Check
Brian, technically you raise a fair point about the nature of current wind subsidies. But correcting it leads to further complications. If you prefer to compare total cost of ownership or lifecycle costs, you have to do it equivalently for all alternatives. For one, nuclear power's costs also tend to be front-loaded: construction is expensive but fuel and operating costs tend to be modest. The Breakthrough Institute has published a number of articles recently arguing that nuclear power is significantly more cost-effective than solar or wind. And it effectively is carbon-free too, so that argument does not apply.
Beyond that, comparing net present value of energy options requires making assumptions about future financial, policy, and other factors that are fraught with uncertainty. Subsidies are created by policies that can and do change -- or fail to -- in ways that differ from official rhetoric. Financial crisis led to subsides for renewables being cut back in some places sooner than expected. Other subsideies, e.g., for biofuels, persist despite broad political support for eliminating them. Negative public attitudes sparked by the Fukushima disaster caused some countries to freeze or undo nuclear power development. And so on. The existence of such uncertainties itself imposes a risk penalty on current investment decisions.
So your assumption that wind subsidies, for instance, will remain targeted on 'capacity building' may not be reliable. 'Mission creep' and inertia are not unknown in public policy. Once a constituency dependent on government subsidies acquires sufficent mass, it is likely to lobby to maintain or add subsidies for whatever rationale will work.
Consider the Price-Anderson Act, designed to indemnify utilities that bought nuclear power plants, which was passed in 1957. Wikipedia notes: "The act was intended to be temporary, and to expire in August 1967 as it was assumed that once the companies had demonstrated a record of safe operation they would be able to obtain insurance in the private market." You may have noticed that 56 years later, the subsidy is still around, despite a great deal of nuclear power capacity having been built in the interim.
In Virginia, where I live, politicians have been arguing lately -- next year there's an election here -- that it's time to repeal a much-disliked gross receipts tax on businesses. The tax was originally imposed to help pay off debt from the war........the War of 1812.
Schalk's essential argument remains valid: A notion of 'grid parity' which compares costs of solar/wind power under ideal conditions to the costs of conventional power under real conditions is fundamentally erroneous and misleading. The intermittent, unreliable nature of solar and wind and some other 'renewable' power options imposes a negative risk premium that utilities must and do factor into real decisions. Even subsidies cannot remove the tangible costs of backup or storage.
Hence, you conclude that "the entire argument for renewables is silly if you don't value carbon." But that is overly simplified, and not really true. If you do value carbon, nuclear power looks like a more cost-effective option. So too does traditional hydropower -- which effectively is as 'renewable' as anything else, but which many environmental activists insist is not.
Alternately, there are other reasons -- social, political, economic, environmental, strategic -- to make a case for renewable energy sources, even if carbon is not considered at all. In the US, the Solar Energy Research Institute was established by Congress in 1977 during the Carter Administration. (I was one of its first employees.) At the time, there was little interest in global warming -- if anything, many scientists were warning of the threat of global cooling. The main reasons for the policy goal of the Carter administration to expand use of renewable energy focused on oil dependency and the lingering threat of another OPEC embargo. That, and a popular view within an increasing influential environmental movement -- stoked by Amory Lovins among others -- that nuclear power was dirty and dangerous. Those concerns were further inflamed in 1979 by another oil embargo and the Three Mile Island accident.
Those issues persist today, along with concerns about air and water pollution, acid rain, oil spills, mining accidents and many other interests that affect energy policy, completely unrelated to global warming or carbon emissions.
On Renewable Energy Grid Parity Reality Check
Excellent analysis, Schalk. Your rebuttals too. Overall, a valuable reality check.
On Climate Change and the Peak Oil Flip-Flop
For simply moving people from place to place, a motorcycle has long been an effective option. Its fuel economy is much greater than that of most automobiles. But the casualty rate is much higher too. And many people either can't or don't want to be fully exposed to the elements while traveling.
The mass of automobiles serves to protect the passengers from weather and harm. So it is not irrelevant to the purpose of safe transportation.
Motor vehicles also need to able to haul cargo in addition to just people. That in turn requires more power and sturdier construction that what might be required to move people only. Those necessary functions also add weight. More weight might be saved by eliminating seats and having passenges kneel or sit on the floor. But at some point austerity becomes onerous.
However, some of Amory's ideas about how to make automobiles lighter, without compromising safety and utility, are starting to become feasible to implement in manufacturing.
On Tesla Makes a Profit, But Not from Selling Cars
Good reality check from the whole collection of comments here.
On The Irrelevance of Climate Change Skeptics
Re the Foreign Policy piece you pointed to, it includes this note:
Pielke has informed the editors of FP that he strongly objects to being included on a list titled "Climate Skeptics." The aim of the list was, as the introduction states, to separate "the noise from the serious concerns" with regards to those offering critiques of either climate science or institutions charged with presenting climate science to the public or policy-makers; the article was explicitly not intended to equate the viewpoints of all people contained on the list.
The Laidley piece is evidently based on interviews of 40 people in the Boston area -- it is hard to imagine what this sample is supposed to represent.
I scanned Norgaard's chapter but I could find no consistent definition of what the author considered 'denial' or 'skepticism' -- making the bulk of the discussion of dubious value.
She suggests that wealthy communities/countries, and capitalism generally, find denial of environmental hazards comforting because acceptance of their reality would be emotionally distressing. There are at least two problems with that notion. One is that historically the extent of environmental ruin has been no less and often greater greater in socialist economies -- e.g., the Soviet Union -- than in capitalist ones.
Another is that her view fails to account for the popular emotional attraction of millennialist visions. The introduction to a special issue of Scientific American on "The End" notes:
We all believe we live in an exceptional time, perhaps even a critical moment in the history of the species. Technology appears to have given us power over the atom, our genomes, the planet—with potentially dire consequences. This attitude may stem from nothing more than our desire to place ourselves at the center of the universe. “It’s part of the fundamental limited perspective of our species to believe that this moment is the critical one and critical in every way—for good, for bad, for the final end of humanity,” says Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego. Imagining the end of the world is nigh makes us feel special. (http://j.mp/149cBDl)
On What Would it Take to Get to a Steady State Economy?
I share Gail's skepticism about the feasibility or desirability of a 'steady state' economy. See:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/61318837/Speculations-on-the-Transition-to-Sustainable-Energy-1980
But her suggestion that populations are bound to overshoot and collapse seems a bit too Malthusian and overlooks examples where species regulate and maintain populations for an extended period if not permanently. Some animals reduce their fertility when food is scarce. Indigenous human tribal cultures have a variety of mechanisms by which they regulate the size of their populations.
It is well known among demographers that economic prosperity leads to a demographic transition where fertility rates fall sharply, often to below replacement level. This has already happened in most of the industrialized countries and is increasingly happening elsewhere. The human population is likely to peak by the end of this century and then gradually decline.
It's worth noting that nuclear power is not generally considered 'fossil' energy, and has the potential to be substantially expanded. Development of feasible fusion power would expand that potential greatly. The problem with expanding supplies of nuclear or other non-fossil energy supplies is primarily one of cost. There is no evident reason to presume that further innovations could not eventually reduce the cost of alternatives to a level on a par with fossil fuels.
Also, the declining energy intensity of economic output means that economic growth can be continued, for some time at least, without proportional need for more energy inputs. Greater efficiencies in other material resource use, combined with the shift toward more 'intangible' forms of economic utility, can further alleviate some of the constraints Gail assumes. Overall, the picture is less gloomy than she suggests.
However, the exchange between Gail and Schalk raises an important issue that is generally not getting much/enough attention in policy circles. That is, the modern economy is on track toward a major technological inflection point that some call The Singularity: when automatons become capable of performing nearly all forms of labor cheaper and often better than humans can. That trend is already visible and may reach its consummation by mid-century. Yet no existing economic theory offers a model for distributing wealth and income other than mainly through human labor, and secondarily via capital investment. At least not at a global scale. Rent-based economies, such as those of major oil-producing states, often suffer from various sorts of social morbidity from the decoupling of income from labor. Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 novel, "Player Piano," offers a troubling scenario of how degrading a prosperous but labor-free economy could be.
On The Irrelevance of Climate Change Skeptics
Some of the comments here illustrate the very sort of self-defeating behavior Pielke's critique describes.
It may have been helpful to distinguish between "skeptic" and "denier." Pielke is right that climate protection zealots often do (as here) try to stick the "denier" label on those who express an appropriately skeptical view of some of the activists' claims. In one of his Scientific American columns, Michael Shermer emphasizes that skepticism is central to the scientific method:
http://www.michaelshermer.com/2009/07/i-want-to-believe/
As I frequently find it necessary to point out in climate policy discussions:
Denial of certainty is not equivalent to certainty of denial.
In studying this subject over a span of decades, I cannot recall encountering any scientist or other moderately informed analyst who has denied that "climate change is real." Not merely the consensus but virtually unanimous view of geophysical science is that the earth's climate has been naturally and continually changing for about 4 billion years, and that it will inevitably continue to do so for hundreds of millions of years to come.
To alleviate confusion, it is important to distinguish also between the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming and the essentially established fact of geophysical climate change. As Elliott notes here, there is significant skepticism, discussion, and debate among scientists and other analysts about the extent to which observed recent increases in temperature, and other meteorological variations, can be attributed to human GHG emissions versus other possible causes. To the extent there is a consensus judgment (and to the extent that 'consensus' matters), it seems to be that AGW probably has made a significant contribution to observed meteorological changes over the past century or so; and that further human GHG emissions are likely to have a more pronounced impact in the future, possibly over a span of several centuries. These are important insights that deserve serious attention.
As to the policy questions of what should or can be done about that -- a subject more of political science than of geophysical science -- there clearly is far less agreement.
As Pielke has pointed out elsewhere, political confusion has been compounded by the UN's climate apparat officially defining "climate change" as equivalent to, and only equivalent to AGW. That political definition contradicts the body of scientific knowledge as well as the view of the IPCC and other scientific groups and individual scientists.
The rhetoric of climate zealots also tends to muddle the necessary distinction between what geophysical science knows about the recent and distant past and what science is capable of forecasting about future climate trends. The fact is that the level of uncertainty about the future is significantly and inherently greater than whatever scientists have been able to induce about geophysical history.
The inherent uncertainty in what scientists who study climate can say about the future has at least two methodological roots: (1) As the IPCC acknowledged in its early reports, the terrestrial climate is a 'chaotic' system -- the mathematics of chaos makes the future states of such systems intrinsically unpredictable. (2) The scientific method requires that hypotheses be tested by replicable, empirical observations -- but there is no way to so test the future until it becomes the present or past.
As Pielke suggests, acknowledgement of uncertainty need not be a barrier to devising practical policies to address climate trends and potential hazards (also opportunities). Decision scientists and policy analysts have extensively studied and developed methodologies for both risk management (where probabilities can be judged from actuarial data) and decision making under uncertainty (when facing possible contingencies that are hard or impossible to predict).
In an essay published in 2002, the late climate scientist Stephen Schneider and Kristin Kuntz-Duriseti presented a defensible climate policy strategy predicated on the acceptance of uncertainty in what science knows and can predict:
http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Ch02ClimatePolicy.pdf
Military strategic planning, investment strategy, and other practices routinely have to plan actions in the face of uncertainties about causes and effects and future developments. Attempts to assuage decision makers with false illusions of certainty -- such as George Tenet's ill-starred "slam dunk" assessment of Saddam Hussein's WMD inventory -- only serve to subvert effective action and to increase the chance of unintended, often countrerproductive consequences.
On Third California Cap And Trade Auction Sells Out, At Record Price
Good reality check, John.
On Carbon Bubble a Turning Point for Climate Change Action?
Clearly, giant space rocks continue to be a potential threat. The fact is that the ability to identify and track asteroids that could hit the earth is currently very limited and inadequate. No technology exists that can effectively prevent a collision. The money estimated to be needed to develop the necessary defensive capabilities seems to be no more than a few percent of the c. $365 billion currently being spent on climate change 'mitigation' activities. Yet the necessary investment is not being made. http://j.mp/10EU11R
On Renewable Energy Grid Parity Reality Check
AV, those sources seem to include hydropower as "renewable." The latter does not have the intermittency problems that solar and wind power do. And many "greens" do not consider hydropower to be 'renewable.' Indeed, in many places they oppose hydropower development and even seek to dismantle existing dams.
You keep skirting the backup/storage needs of solar and wind.