An Inconvenient Truth: Gore is wrong

Quote from DrChaos:

The idea that only Democrats were responsible for the demise of nuclear power is not true.

The other fact was free-market capitalism.

For many years (until 2 or 3 years ago) natural gas was very cheap and gas powered plants much cheaper to operate, and get permitted.

Then, with the deregulation of power utilities, there was much more emphasis on earnings per share, and much less on strategic issues like diversity of supply.

Short term price signals and some emissions controls rules, which meant phasing out oil (price), moderating coal (emission regulation) and rapid expansion of natural gas.
Hence, little new power capacity other than natural gas.

Well unfortunately Peak North American Gas is coming. Gas wells deplete much more precipitously than do oil wells and it is alot harder to import from overseas. Yeah I favor LNG terminals (butch up environmentalists) too, but nukes would be alot better. We will need the high quality hydrocarbons (oil and gas) for transportation.

If I were emperor, I would socialize electric utilities as a strategic necessity and put lots of capital in wind and nuclear in preparation for the disaster of Peak Oil. That will effect many more people than global warming in an immediate $$$ sense. I worry that the reactions will be the wrong ones: drill in Alaska (not much oil there), and crank up the coal which is horrible climate crack.
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I was just rereading this thread and wanted to discuss this last post with you in a little more detail. I think your argument regarding free market capitalism being a factor in the demise of pursuing nuclear energy to be a little off base.

For one, with the naysayers opposing nuclear power, the problem we faced was overregulation of the industry. It is one thing to regulate an industry to make sure that everything is safe, and it is another to overstep what needs to be done for political gain. The cost of a nuclear program would be intimidating to the company pursuing it because the government would naturally overtax the industry to show the people that they are making sure everything is up to snuff. Red tape=mucho deniro.

A free market is what lets ideas like nuclear power thrive. Initially (and this goes for any business) the cost to start up outweighs the profits, but the long run is what the company has to look at. The price of natural gas at the time would not be a deterrent. The discussion of oil wells and natural gas resevoirs drying up is not new, so there would be reason to seek other alternatives.
 
I agree, of course all market participants have to deal with a mixed "free" and "regulated" area, but that is inevitable in something like electrical utilities.
The fact that nuclear licensing has been very time consuming and difficult does "add a thumb on the scale" to the market-return based computations. Regulation delays leads to longer time for getting a payback, and in the usual "implied rate of return" computations that adds a significant cost.

It still is empirically true that the significant utility company deregulation in mid 1990's lead to new generating capacity being almost all natural gas; there was very little discussion then of natural gas depletion as I remember. It was hailed as a very clean (except for CO2) low-cost technology, which it is, and modern gas turbines are efficient devices. And in the short run it was certainly the best choice economically---using the considerations and computations of the time.

I've read some heterodox economics which points out that this kind of 'rate of return' computation inevitably leads to short-term thinking which could be a bad idea for something as necesary and with such big physical constraints as utilities.

One can consider that an old-fashioned regulated utility, or even government owned, would likely be able to raise capital and hence have an 'internal rate of return' threshold which is significantly smaller, and thereby be more prompted to make long-term provisions, e.g. in maintenance and

The "creative destruction" of tooth and claw capitalism is not bad when dealing with internet commerce companies. It could be a mistake with necessary utilities, as the 'externalities' of a bad utility decision (or collapse) are immensely worse than pets.com's sockpuppet death.

To global economic progress and welfare, power is as necessary as police and a legal system, and those two are not privatized.
 
Quote from wilburbear:

I observe this for what it is - an issue largely pushed by the Democrats. But, that doesn't mean I won't examine the issue. So now, I'll dust off the ol' soapbox, and let you climb on up there. Let's assume you're right, global warming is here now. It's real, and serious. How has this new reality affected your life?
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You are missing the point. It doesn't matter whether the issue is being pushed by the Democrats or the Republicans. You cannot automatically oppose something simply because the Democrats are pushing it. The general scientific consensus is that global warming is real, and that its cause is likely human activities. Open any real scientific journal that publishes peer-reviewed research articles (as opposed to popular science articles), and you see their discussions are no longer on whether there is global warming - that debate has ended a long time ago, not based on political votes, but by overwhelming scientific evidence - but on the cause of the global warming and its effect.

See this link for an education
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change
 
The scientific questions on global warming have now generally moved on even from the key question about cause itself, namely the role of human change to atmospheric chemistry and consequent change in greenhouse effect (this is observed fact, not theory any more).

It is now undoubtable that the human influence is a significant to the dominant influence in the currently observed climate change, as it is impossible to explain scientifically the observed climate otherwise.

The big questions now are on the magnitude of the futher course of the climate change, and trying to understand what the localized impacts may be as opposed to broad global phenomena.

Even more difficult---because biology isn't governed by hard laws of physics like oceans and atmospheres---but of immense concern to humans, is the impact on the biological and ecological networks. This has immediate economic impact.
 
Published online 27 October 2004 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news041025-15

News

Sunspot record reveals Sun's past
Solar history may have links with Earth's climate.

Mark Peplow

sunspot.jpg
Sunspots eject plumes of gas hotter than a million degrees Celsius.© NASA
The past 70 years has seen the longest and most intense period of sunspot activity for 8,000 years, according to scientists who have reconstructed a record of the Sun's last 11,000 years.

Solar physicist Sami Solanki from the Max Planck Institute in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, and his colleagues found in November 2003 that the Sun is more active now than at any time in the past 1,000 years1. This, along with several record-breaking solar storms that occurred at around the same time, has triggered intense debate about why the Sun is now so active.

However, Solanki's latest data reveals that before 8,000 years ago, the Sun went through several short periods where it was just as active as it is today. This suggests that the current high is part of the Sun's normal activity and that it will probably calm down again, returning to normal levels within the next few decades, he says.

Sunspots are temporary dark patches on the Sun, caused when its magnetic field 'pinches' at the surface. The magnetic field is generated by hot, ionised gas that swirls around inside the star, acting like a dynamo.

"But we don't really know how the Sun's dynamo works," Solanki says. The new record will help solar physicists to model how that dynamo changes over thousands of years.

Scientists already have a good observational record of sunspots that dates back to the early seventeenth century. This shows that the Sun's activity varies on cycles that last roughly 11 and 88 years, although scientists are not yet sure why these cycles exist.

David Hathaway, a solar physicist from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, recently predicted that the Sun's current spotty outbreak was on the wane and should reach a minimum by 2006, although this will still be significantly more active that in previous centuries.

Ringing in the changes


sunspot2.jpg
Sunspots are slightly cooler and less luminous than the rest of the Sun.© NASA
Solanki's team reconstructed their record by following an intricate scientific breadcrumb trail. Sunspots have extremely turbulent magnetic fields, which send extra bursts of charged particles hurtling towards Earth, and can potentially disrupt radio communications and damage satellites.

This boost to the solar wind also deflects more of the cosmic rays that normally bombard the Earth's atmosphere, so there are fewer cosmic rays to trigger nuclear reactions in the upper atmosphere that produce a heavy form of carbon called carbon-14.

When trees absorb this as carbon dioxide, they indirectly carry a historical record of the Sun's surface that can be dated by measuring the variation of carbon-14 in their rings. More sunspots means less carbon-14 in the tree's ring for that year.

"The models reproduce the observed record of sunspots extremely well, from almost no sunspots during the seventeenth century to the current high levels," comments Paula Reimer, a palaeoecologist from Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland.

Cold snap
The period between about 1650 and 1700, when astronomers saw virtually no sunspots, is known as the Maunder Minimum. It coincided with the coldest part of a chilly period on Earth called the Little Ice Age, and some scientists have speculated that this provides evidence that the Sun's activity significantly affects our climate.

"There's a really interesting debate about this at the moment," says Mike Hapgood, a space scientist from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, UK. The sunspot record, published this week in Nature2, could help to settle the issue, he says.

Solanki stresses that without fully understanding the chain of cause and effect, we cannot be sure exactly how the changing Sun impacts on our climate. Greenhouse gases, generated by burning fossil fuels and volcanic eruptions, are probably far more important in controlling the Earth's temperature, he says.

 
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