The Reason Renewables Can't Power Modern Civilization Is Because They Were Never Meant To

[Sig]

If renewables can indeed, as you suggest, come in at an unsubsidized price point even marginally comparable to fossil fuels - then free markets will make the change with greater priority and efficiency than any Government program.

I think that anyone in the renewables field would be happy to end any and all subsidies for renewables at the point that they're equal to the value in today's dollars of all the subsidies that have gone into fossil fuels and nuclear. To be fair we'd include direct and indirect subsidies such as the cost of running NRC and the DOE labs, Coast Guard oil cleanup infrastructure, EPA, BOEM.....but I'm feeling generous so let's just go with direct subsidies including tax subsidies. Heck, maybe just end the billions in subsidies to fossil fuel and nuclear that we're still giving out to this day! And ignore the cost in dollars and lives of things like the wars in Iraq, Yemen, and South Sudan, as well as maintaining the defense budget to allow for that. Maybe throw in a bit of the $800B a year in health costs that would be saved if we stopped burning fossil fuels, nothing like unpaid externalities to make it easier to compete as a fossil fuel plant. Heck, maybe we can all just agree that it's complete and utter bullshit that to this day fossil fuel extraction gets the tax benefits of the MLP structure but renewables are specifically excluded?

Of course you know better than me that there is no "free market" in energy. It's one of the most highly regulated fields in the U.S., and small changes every aspect can have dramatic impacts on the economics of renewables versus fossil fuels. Just the small tweaks in the PJM capacity market that are going on right now will have dramatic impacts, as an example that comes to mind.

I am all for free markets, and the fact of the matter is if we truly had frictionless free markets with externalities priced in then we'd be predominantly operating on renewables. Unfortunately "Free markets" are a fiction in the energy business. There are markets that have spent trillions to drive down the cost curve of fossil fuels, provide fossil fuels continuing tax advantages and subsidies, externalities not priced into fossil fuels, and market design that was built around a fossil fuel reality from the past. Get rid of all that, and anyone is for "free markets"!

 

[Sig]

I will try to clarify my own views some, because I think they have been somewhat misunderstood. I am a scientist. And I have coauthored papers in photochemistry and diffusion, two fields aligned with knowledge necessary to understand the greenhouse effect, ice core studies, and the original Hansen Hypothesis, which I am convinced is wrong and should be rejected. We seem to be in a slight warming phase but CO2 plays only a minor role. There is no question whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it is, but a weak one present at very low concentrations in our atmosphere. Besides making a minor contribution to warming. it also plays a secondary cooling role via its participation in plant metabolism and in the outer atmosphere . Water, which works in all three of its physical phases to moderate the Earth's temperature, is the critically important greenhouse gas. I can't go into details here, as this is not an appropriate forum for a long dissertation, but Hansen is probably wrong about the greenhouse warming effects of CO2 being amplified by a positive feedback mechanism.

One thing about which there can be no question is that the Earth's overall feedback to temperature perturbations is negative; not positive. Were it overall positive, none of us would be here. Positive feedback systems are unstable and are driven to their limits. The most recent papers by Miskolczi lend support to the necessity of overall negative feedback. R. Spencer, who heads our satellite remote sensing operation has questioned why the most reliable land based temperature data was adjusted to conform to the least reliable, rather than the other way around in the most recent land-based temperature data set. That's enough to make me very concerned about the quality of much of the climate change science. Another thing that I find quite upsetting is how people I know to be top notch scientists have been made the subject of personal attacks because they pointed out defects in the original Hansen Hypothesis and raised serious questions about the inadequacy of current climate models. I think Nir Shaviv' assessment of the current situation is right on the money.

P.S. I have decided to add a little personal note to Sig, someone whose posts are worth reading. Sig, I can trace my training back to I.M. Kolthoff, as I was trained by someone who was trained by Kolthoff. (you can google him) That kind of training of course involves acquiring a certain expertise in pH measurement and electrochemistry. I want to caution you regarding the ocean pH measurements. Getting reliable pH measurements in ocean water outside of a laboratory setting, i.e., directly in the ocean, or aboard ship in a makeshift laboratory, is difficult. The state of past measurements is in chaos but it does seem to indicate a cyclical pattern, not well correlated with 20th century CO2, by the way, except for a recent period. If you see a pH measurement to two significant figures it may be somewhat reliable to +- 0.1 unit. If you see a value to three significant figures, except in very rare circumstances, reject the 3 digit entirely and assume the error is in the second. I can't emphasize enough what an unreliable state the current knowledge of ocean pH over time is. The most reliable, i.e., most precise, measurements may be photometric rather than with a glass electrode, but they are more inconvenient, and only available for recently acquired ocean pH data. Going forward I think it will be possible to get reliable data so long as we are willing to spend enough to get it, but I don't put much faith in the past data if the purpose is to see what is happening to pH over time. Then once you get reliable data you've got the job of figuring out what the cause for a change is. Ocean pH varies widely with location.

Let's start with something we probably both agree on, that atmospheric CO2 levels are close to double what they were at the beginning of the industrial revolution and higher than they've been in 400,000 years. Agreed? From there, it's a simple equation...CO2 + H2O -> (H+) + (HCO3-) Double the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere and it's a basic chemistry equation that you decrease pH. I'm not sure if you were attempting to argue that we haven't observed lower ocean pH levels with the discussion about the difficulty in measuring pH, but that's really a red herring (see a discussion on the subject here https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Quality+of+pH+Measurements+in+the+NODC+Data+Archives) that sadly attempts to subvert the scientific process in the same way I described earlier with the "see, they made a mistake or have a difficult data set, everything they've ever done should be disregarded". Again we're performing a massive experiment and one of the impacts, that of dissolved CO2, is something so easily replicable in a lab that it's being intellectually dishonest to claim that it's unlikely it occurred or is occuring. Are there factors like ocean currents and strata distributions that could impact this, absolutely. However for those to negate a basic chemistry process is to have an almost childlike belief in stable systems as some kind of universal law....the headwind is definitely against this being the case.
As for Hansen's Hypothesis, it's funny that in the 80's when he first proposed it up until about 7-8 years ago when the facts made it unavoidable those of you who dismissed him claimed that warming was not occuring...full stop. All kinds of claims about how is wasn't possible to make measurements that accurately (sound familiar) and the like. At the point that sea ice and glacier melt became impossible for all but the most willfully ignorant to ignore, we switched to "well, sunspots" and "the models are probably not right". The models probably aren't right, we all agree. However you can't deny that we're performing a massive experiment on a global scale, and the climate change deniers have pretty much zilch in the way of evidence that provides confidence that it won't have a negative impact. Your post is a great example, it consisted mostly of why the current consensus on climate change is wrong, and no evidence or studies beyond the hopefully belief in negative feedback loops that doubling CO2 levels will have no impact. If you want to be taken seriously, you can't spend your time proving the current consensus wrong, you need to spend your time proving that this huge experiment we're doing will not cause harm. The science on that is abysmal. And one wonders, why would anyone be so against clean air and removing the detrimental impacts of oil on geopolitics at the cost of less than one Iraq war, even if you are convinced that carbon itself is harmless?

 

[Sig]

It is awfully sad to see how socialized american academia has become. Many concerns such as paleoclimatology and anthropology that are absolutely essential to understanding our origins and our world also can produce results that disrupt the comfort of over-politicized, over-sensitive, over-tenured faculties completely adverse to adjusting the status quo. I recall the great James Watson, Nobel Prize winner and discoverer of DNA, a man foundational to several independent branches of biology. He was completely cast aside and stigmatized because of some mildly unpleasant but scientifically irrefutable comments he made in an anthropological vein. Often our intellectuals operate like tabloid journalists.
That said, great discussion between you and sig.

So Watson is pretty much an asshole. From his demeaning comments about Rosalind Franklin, to the comment about aborting fetus' with "the gay gene" to the belief that thin people work harder than fat people and he'd never hire a fat person to saying that our social policies in Africa are doomed because of our incorrect assumption that people there are equally intelligent as elsewhere to saying "while people might wish all humans were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
Now if he had done research into any one of these things and his research was being attacked your statement would have merit. But he didn't, he's just a bigoted asshole and being part of a team that made a major scientific discovery doesn't turn asshole behavior into not asshole behavior or excuse bigotry. It's not over-politicized, over-sensitive or over-tenured to call an asshole and asshole. In fact I would argue it's all of those things to ignore that type of behavior and give someone a pass because they accomplished something great. Read up on the guy and you may regret the "mildly unpleasant but scientifically irrefutable" label, I'd sure like the see the "scientifically irrefutable" part of "while people might wish all humans were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”?

 

[Sig]

You're looking at it from a household perspective, but I think the primary opposition to any wide-ranging policy changes on energy production and consumption is going to be huge organizations- corporations, governments, trade committees, etc. They are way harder to sway than a family of five. Oil source and pricing is the central focus of America's geopolitical posturing.

I don't disagree with your last sentence. However on the whole corporations are way ahead of government in the U.S. when it comes to clean energy, everyone from Walmart to Amazon to pretty much any tech firm is already procuring or on their way to procuring 100% renewable energy. This is one area where post citizens united combined with inertia gives results that are out of synch with nearly every interest in the country.

 

[Overnight]

...everyone from Walmart to Amazon to pretty much any tech firm is already procuring or on their way to procuring 100% renewable energy...

This will never happen unless their customers stop consuming plastic, which Walmart, Amazon et al sell in abundance.

 

[Sig]

This will never happen unless their customers stop consuming plastic, which Walmart, Amazon et al sell in abundance.

You may be surprised. One of my b-school classmates moved to Bentonville and spent several years basically focusing entirely on reducing the plastic content of their packing. He had good things to say about the experience.

 

[Overnight]

You may be surprised. One of my b-school classmates moved to Bentonville and spent several years basically focusing entirely on reducing the plastic content of their packing. He had good things to say about the experience.

How did he commuinicate to you about the experience?

 

[matthewyoung]

So Watson is pretty much an asshole. From his demeaning comments about Rosalind Franklin, to the comment about aborting fetus' with "the gay gene" to the belief that thin people work harder than fat people and he'd never hire a fat person to saying that our social policies in Africa are doomed because of our incorrect assumption that people there are equally intelligent as elsewhere to saying "while people might wish all humans were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
Now if he had done research into any one of these things and his research was being attacked your statement would have merit. But he didn't, he's just a bigoted asshole and being part of a team that made a major scientific discovery doesn't turn asshole behavior into not asshole behavior or excuse bigotry. It's not over-politicized, over-sensitive or over-tenured to call an asshole and asshole. In fact I would argue it's all of those things to ignore that type of behavior and give someone a pass because they accomplished something great. Read up on the guy and you may regret the "mildly unpleasant but scientifically irrefutable" label, I'd sure like the see the "scientifically irrefutable" part of "while people might wish all humans were equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”?

It was my understanding Watson was blacklisted for tying genetics to intelligence,which is scientifically irrefutable. Reading a little more about him reveals he may have also been generally unlikeable, a legend but not going into the hall of fame akin to barry bonds.

 

[matthewyoung]

I don't disagree with your last sentence. However on the whole corporations are way ahead of government in the U.S. when it comes to clean energy, everyone from Walmart to Amazon to pretty much any tech firm is already procuring or on their way to procuring 100% renewable energy. This is one area where post citizens united combined with inertia gives results that are out of synch with nearly every interest in the country.

How do you see the balancing of environmental concerns with native corporate interest in competing with firms in countries with less stringent environmental regulations corresponding to lower costs of production?

 

[bone]

NextEra, the largest wind power Company in the US, is also the most heavily subsidized Company in the Fortune 500. I recall reading an article in the Journal last year that they became the global king of wind power on the backs of outright grants in the form of local, state, and federal subsidies - many billions of dollars. And very low or even interest free loans to service their massive building program and their operating expenses. And then they sell their wind generation to ISO's even during periods when the ISO can't use or distribute the power. [so it gets 'wasted' as excessive spin]

What a racket. So yes, I am all for letting markets pick winners.