As We Squabble, a Great Tipping Point Begins

As climate skepticism rises and the old energy oligarchs throw millions upon millions battling clean energy legislation, one of the great predicted climate tipping points has apparently started: methane. Specifically, researchers have reported in Science that methane trapped under sub-arctic permafrost has started leech out, evidenced by significantly higher atmospheric concentrations of methane in these regions compared to the rest of the world. This is scary stuff. Methane even in limited amounts could begin to tip the scales significantly because, from a heat-trapping standpoint, it's 25 times more potent than CO2. The NYTimes has done a nice story summarizing the work.


But the realities of climate tipping points are fairly moot in this whole debate, which Grist has compared to the OJ Simpson trial. The climate skeptics will focus on attacking the process with which the climate science has been created over the past several decades rather than attacking the science itself. This may buy them enough time to screw us all over.

Gore Calls It As It Is

In a beautiful and eloquent op-ed in this Sunday's New York Times, Al Gore addresses the climate skeptics head-on and puts the politics of climate change in its historical context. The problem we now face is this:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

You could probably substitute this quote for just about any environmental or social woe now faced by this country. It is literally a fight between those who believe that government and publicly collected tax dollars can actually be used to improve people's lives and those who simply say no to every politically crafted solution to our nation's problems.

Nuclear: Climate Friendly, If Only It Weren't So Expensive

The State of Vermont now faces some very tough choices about how it's going to keep the lights on for its citizens due to a recent decision by the state's senate denying the Vermont Yankee nuclear generating station its right to operate after 2012. The plant accounts for an astounding three quarters of the state's generation. According to a recent article in Dartmouth Alumni Magazine by Scott Brown (CEO of New Energy Capital in Hanover, NH, and former member of the NREL advisory board) , "were Vermont to rely on coal-fired plants to generate the same amount of energy, its CO2 emissions would increase from zero to 4 million tons per year, almost three times the state's allocation under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative."

The state has rightly cited suspected radiation leaks and sloppy testimony by Entergy, the plant's owners, as the reason for their concern. I am not here to confirm or deny the facts surrounding this case, but I'm willing to stick my neck out and say that the basic philosophy motivating this decision goes deeper than simply the risk of tritium leaks and the lies of a few bumbling corporate representatives. This decision is, in microcosm, the basic struggle that we as a society face when it comes to nuclear energy. On the one hand, we have those who claim that nuclear is an inherently dangerous and expensive form of energy; on the other, there are those who hold out hope – as they have for decades – that nuclear will solve all of our energy woes by delivering cheap, near zero-emissions energy. It's a debate obviously all the more relevant in the face of globe-altering climate change.

I'm willing to bet that, when push comes to shove, the vast majority of Americans fall into the first camp, the NIMBY crowd. Nuclear is simply too emotional of a concept, even in our post-Cold War world. I basically have subscribed to this school too, but recently I've started questioning the stance mainly due to the added constraints of climate change. Now let me be clear, there are half a dozen strategies that society will need to pursue simultaneously to achieve carbon reduction goals. The top priorities should be on efficiency/conservation and renewables, clearly. But I have a difficult time believing that these strategies alone will suffice when the Department of Energy is anticipating load growth of about 25% by 2035. To me it seems that, if you're really serious about climate change, you need to at least be willing to consider nuclear as an option.

The interesting thing is that the anti-nuclear arguments I've found most compelling have nothing to do with tritium leaks or spent fuel rods. It goes back to dollars and cents (and sense).

Matter of fact, looking at the stats, I think you find pretty quickly that nuclear surpasses coal from an environmental standpoint. I think many people – enviros in particular – initially balk at this statement. After all, coal may release CO2 and SOx and NOx and particulates, but it isn't going to cause a Three Mile Island. Yes, you can't have a runaway thermal breakdown in a coal plant. But at the end of the day, coal still releases more radiation into the environment per year than all of our nuclear power plants. This is nothing new; we have known about this since the late 1970s. And although nuclear isn't truly carbon-free, it's as close to zero (< 1kg CO2 per kWh) as any renewable source out there. Even on safety, you simply can't make the case, based on nuclear's track record, that nuclear is more dangerous than most fossil fuel forms of energy. Only 30 people have died worldwide due to accidents at nuclear power stations over the past 50 years, and most of those at Chernobyl. Compare that to the scores of Chinese laborers that die in coal mines every year or those burnt or killed by natural gas explosions.

You might be able to make a strong policy case that nuclear is the best climate mitigation option following energy efficiency/conservation and renewable sources of energy. This is simplifying the issue, ignoring the very real environmental hazards posed by uranium mining, water use, and storage of spent fuel, not to mention the security risks associated with terrorism and proliferation. But even so, you could make nuclear look a hell of a lot more compelling than coal.

You might, that is, if it weren't for money. We would not have nuclear power today if it weren't for multi-billion dollar subsidies from the federal government to absorb some of the massive capital costs of these facilities. Amory Lovins and Imran Sheikh published an incredibly dense (I believe half of the space is taken up with footnotes), exhaustive white paper on the subject of nuclear's financial viability, "The Nuclear Illusion." Their charts tell the story of nuclear's competitive disadvantage, particularly in comparison to emerging energy resources, which include distributed generation, renewables, and efficiency/conservation (or as Amory loves to call it, negawatts). Even looking at some of the best cost estimates for new nuclear technologies like pebble bed reactors, you're still looking at prices in excess of 11 cents per delivered kWh, seen in the chart below.

Source: Lovins and Sheikh, 2008.

So interestingly, what has finally convinced this enviro that nuclear should be last on the list of climate mitigation strategies is a simple cost-benefit analysis (and some extremely persuasive prose on the part of Lovins). In the end, we can simply get so much more accomplished (and sooner) by investing in other technologies today rather than waiting for the next fissile behemoth to come online.

The Obama administration seems to be continuing nuclear-friendly policies of the Bush White House by providing massive loan guarantees to new plants (although, to be fair, they are also extending benefits to renewable plants as well). This is a plan distasteful to environmentalists and free-marketeers alike, receiving equal condemnation from the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Cato Institute. The one thing that these groups and, I think, taxpayers can agree on is that nuclear is simply too expensive to be a serious part of our climate change mitigation strategy. It's criminal when the billions of loan guarantees could instead be invested in efficiency or even renewables that might provide over double the amount of energy per dollar invested. Although we may have the cash, we don't have time to wait for radical new technologies like TerraPower's "traveling wave nuclear reactor" to reach maturity. We need to get started now and to make every dollar count.

Epilogue
My earlier post may have sounded like I was in favor of continued operation at Vermont Yankee. This is not the case, especially given the increasingly damning evidence that keeps coming out about the plants mismanagement. Plus the populace of the entire state seems to be against continuing operation. The main point here is that to produce the same amount of base load power today in Vermont would probably require half a dozen dirty coal-fired plants and a lot of CO2.

The Military Gets It, Why Don't Our Politicians

I was just having lunch with a friend the other day who does a lot of energy efficiency related consulting work with the military. Rubs shoulders with generals and whatnot at West Point. He has been amazed in the past years at just how much the military gets it when it comes to energy issues. "These are the guys who are going to have to put their lives on the line the next time we go chasing oil," he said, "so it totally makes sense that they get it." How funny, we commented, that the American right would probably take any and all advice from the military brass when it comes to issues like weapons development, terrorism, etc., but they turn a deaf ear when it comes to clean energy (well that and repealing the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy, which military brass now support as well).

But the military is getting more and more vocal about clean energy issues. This story on Grist describes the efforts of veterans to advocate for clean energy legislation through an organization called Operation Free. The group plays to the very natural security consequences of the current energy system, but interestingly doesn't stray from wading into issues such as the so-called "controversy" over climate science. On a recent visit to the Operation Free homepage, I was greeted by this blog post regarding EPA's firm rebuttal of climate skeptics.

Of course we had the Department of Defense's Quadrennial Defense Review, released just this February, which has cited climate change as a national security threat for the first time ever. And there's the military's ongoing investment in the greening of its own operations. Outside of the EPA, you might be able to make the case that the Department of Defense is becoming the greenest branch of the federal government.

Could the message from the military – ostensibly one of the bastions of conservative thinking in the government – be any more clear? More importantly, what will it take for Tea Party America to hear the message?

Update
So Sen. Inhofe had some very helpful clarifying words on the above topic in terms of why the Pentagon would "play along" with a climate hoax. The man is truly delusional.

Keep in mind that the Quadrennial Review and all that comes out of the White House. That’s part of the administration. In the Pentagon, they’re good soldiers—they’ll do pretty much what will ingratiate the commander in chief. That’s what they’re supposed to do.

Monumental Work

I cannot imagine what it takes to compile and monetize the environmental impacts of hundreds of companies and their supply chains. Having worked in environmental consulting before, I know the degree of hand-waving necessary, but I also recognize how such broad-sweeping analyses can be spot-on from an order of magnitude perspective. $2.2 trillion in environmental damage caused by the world's top countries each year. Unreal.

Get a sneak peak of this report from Trucost at Green Inc.

The Climategate Legal Backlash Begins

You should be able to hear your eyes rolling as you read this: the Climategate backlash has begun. Yes, based on allegations of an undetermined amount of sloppy science in the past three months, climate skeptics and political hacks are questioning EPA GHG rulings based on IPCC climate science that has taken decades to develop. The Washington Post reports on Virginia's latest attempts. Texas has challenged as well. It's going to get uglier out there.

Bill Gates Joins the Push for Climate Solutions

Not the first time that Gates has called attention to the problem, but I think his most recent speech at TED 2010 was perhaps his most noticeable push for real climate solutions. Gates plugged TerraPower, a startup developing a form of nuclear power that takes advantage of the spent fuel from traditional fission reactors. The concept sounds wonderful. Solve the low-carbon power problem and the nuclear waste problem by simply "burning" the fuel in other reactors.

I have to wonder at this approach. Solutions like the one TerraPower is looking to develop are certainly needed. Hell, we need all of the potential good ideas we can muster. Throw 'em all at the wall and see what sticks. My problem is that, like other climate luminaries, Gates has plugged this spent nuclear fuel approach as a panacea. First off, it is going to take hundreds of millions, perhaps billions in R&D and pilot studies to get this technology to scale, while renewables are fairly established by comparison.

My second and biggest gripe with this is not that it bears the stigma of nuclear but that TerraPower simply isn't an option for everyone. When it comes to clean power solutions, energy sources are incredibly geographic/geopolitical in nature. I don't need to explain that developing nations just aren't going to be able to take advantage of something like this.

And finally, clean power is just one piece of the puzzle. We'll never get there without efficiency, which could/should account for 50% of our carbon reductions.

====UPDATE====
Okay, so others are having their say about this Gates thing as well. Here's a different take from David Roberts of Grist.

Saving Energy by Cheating Consumers

That is, at least, what it appears lighting manufacturers are doing to meet new California Title 20 mandatory efficiency standards for incandescent lamps, according to Green Inc. This is something that the efficiency community had long feared. There is a clear lesson here, and that is that under global competitive pressure, companies will do whatever they can -- even degrade the performance of their products -- to meet environmental standards. You'd have to regretfully conclude that all environmental regulations, then, have to be crafted with all of the worst intentions in mind.

Beyond Vampires

It was a small idea that has turned into a huge energy saver. Improving the active mode efficiency of power supplies -- the devices that convert ac electricity from the grid into low voltage dc electricity that our gadgets can use -- is going to save $2 billion of electricity per year. The Economist reports. The initiatives, pioneered by Natural Resources Defense Council and Ecos Consulting (now Ecos IQ), have transformed the power electronics industry and refocused attention on efficiency.
Gandhi's famous saying was correct in this instance. First they ignored us, then they laughed at us, then they fought us, but eventually, we won.

The United States of Climate Change

This might be one of the most brilliant -- and alarming -- visualizations of US climate impact that I have ever seen. When someone tells you that the US emits a quarter of the world's CO2, you know it's a large number, but you really have no idea what it means until you see it in this way.

Kudos to Sightline for their amazing visuals on this topic.