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Sunday, August 7, 2005 |
[SF Chronicle]: Nuclear Energy Can't Solve Global Warming
Mark Hertsgaard offers the cogent response I've been looking for to the small but growing chrous of 'enviros' (James Lovelock, Patrick Moore, Hugh Montefiore, Stewart Brand, and now Jared Diamond) who see nuclear power as an attractive response to concerns over global warming.
'Environmentalists center their critique on safety concerns', he observes. '[But] in an atmosphere of desperation over how to keep our TVs, computers and refrigerators humming in a glboally warmed world, economic considerations will dominate. This is especially so when dissident greens like Diamond and Brand say nuclear safety is a solvable problem.'
Hertsgaard steps out of the all too common trap of binary thinking (which characterizes so much of the public debate - about so many things) to hammer the economic argument:
The upshot is that nuclear power is seven times less effective is displacing carbon than the cheapest, fastest alternative -- energy efficiency, according to studies by the Rocky Mountain Institute.
And a dubious investment:
As Amory Lovins points out, 'Nowhere [in the world] domarket-driven utiities buy, or private investors finance, new nuclear power plants. Only large government intervention keeps the nuclear option alive.
Large government intervention, I might add, by committed advocates of 'small government.'
The challenge: How to turn 'efficiency' into the sort of consolidated economic/political block that can take on the political muscle of the nuclear industry and its allies. Until that happens, rational arguments alone -- even economic ones -- won't be enough to win the day.
11:38:03 AM 
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[Global Public Media]: Richard Heinberg asks 'Where is the Hirsch Report?'
Evidently the US Department of Energy is interested enough in the Peak-Oil debate to commission a report on the subject. Released in February this year by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and titled 'Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management,' the report examines the likely consequences of the impending global peak. It was authored principally by Robert L. Hirsch (bio: www.d-n-i.net/fcs/hirsch_bio.htm), and is as remarkable for its subsequent reception as for its content.
The report's Executive Summary begins with the following paragraph:
The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides, but to have substantial impact, they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking. ...
Here, then, is a significant report produced by an independent research company for the US Department of Energy, warning of a global problem of 'unprecedented' proportions with economic, social, and political impacts that are likely to be extremely severe. The authors forecast 'protracted economic hardship' for the United States and the rest of the world. It is a problem that deserves 'immediate, serious attention.'
Yet, half a year after its release, the Hirsch report is nowhere to be found. For several months it was archived, in PDF format, on a high school web site (www.hilltoplancers.org, Hilltop High School in Chula Vista, Calif.). On July 7 the report disappeared from that site. The Atlantic Council (www.acus.org) is considering publishing the Hirsch report; however there is no projected date of release. When contacted, Dr. Hirsch replied that the document is 'a public report, paid for and released by DOE NETL, and that it therefore could be reposted at will.'
Project Censored is therefore posting the report in full at: http://www.projectcensored.org/newsflash/The_Hirsch_Report_Proj_Cens.pdf
Offered without comment, just concern. Read and discuss.
11:12:53 AM
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'Simulation shows US held over a barrel,' reports the Financial Times (a consistently more useful paper than most of what passes for news media in the US).
Their lead:
Terrorists yesterday struck oil facilities in the US and Saudi Arabia, pushing oil prices to a record $120 a barrel and doubling to $5,214 the expected annual petrol bill for the average US household. Economists warned of the imminent collapse of the US's economic recovery and a loss of more than 2m jobs, the largest drop since 1945.
And they continue:
'With only 2.2m barrels a day of spare capacity, which is enough capacity to meet a little more than one year of demand growth, the oil markets are at the mercy of political stability in Venezuela, Nigeria and Iraq, as well as potential terrorist acts,' said John Dowd, analyst at Sanford Bernstein, which prepared the simulation[base ']s price reactions....
For the scenario, which included the evacuation of foreign workers from Saudi Arabia and unrest in Nigeria, analysts at Sanford Bernstein calculated that a 4 per cent reduction in world oil supply would increase prices by more than 170 per cent....
Oil facilities were too large to guard, the mock cabinet found, and diplomatic solutions were marred by unreasonable (in the eyes of the US) demands by countries such as Saudi Arabia, which among other things had demanded that the US stop putting it under pressure over democratisation.
You've just got to follow John Robb's Global Guerillas site to get a feel for how fragile the whole global house of energy cards could be to assymetrical warfare and what Robb characterizes as the open source emerging bazaar of violence...of the first epochal war of the 21st Century.
So, what's to be done?
[Robert Gates, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency] concluded that Americans could probably be persuaded to adjust their behaviours to reduce their oil consumption for about a year if they saw the shortage of oil as an issue of national security.
'The real problem is year two to five. How do you impose that kind of daily pain on Americans for a three- to four-year period before alternatives can be felt?' he said.
Mr Sperling said after the simulation: 'What I learned was that when you face an energy crisis, you better have a pound of prevention, because if not, you are left with only an ounce of cure....'
The question now is whether lawmakers in Washington will take the issue as seriously as their retired counterparts who took part the simulation.
Put this together with Joel Makower's recent piece examining
why Americans aren't buying clean energy (short and disturbing answer: They just don't think clean energy works.!), and you've got a growing sense of the dimensions of the challenges we face.
11:01:32 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Gil Friend.
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