Coal Power and Pulling People Out of Poverty
February 22nd, 2009Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
Bil McKibben writes that he, Jim Hansen, and others are looking to get arrested next week at a demonstration against coal. I wonder if McKibben has given much thought to the following passage that he wrote (emphasis added):
Coal provides 50 percent of our electricity. That juice comes from hundreds of expensive, enormous plants, each one of them owned by rich and powerful companies. Shutting these plants down — or getting the companies to install expensive equipment that might be able to separate carbon from the exhaust stream and sequester it safely in some mine somewhere — will be incredibly hard. Investors are planning on running those plants another half-century to make back their money — the sunk costs involved are probably on the scale of those lousy mortgages now bankrupting our economy.
And if you think it’s tough for us, imagine the Chinese. They’ve been opening a coal-burning power plant a week. You want to tell them to start shutting them down when that coal-fired power represents the easiest way to pull people out of poverty across Asia?
The only hope of making the kind of change required is to really stick in people’s minds a simple idea: Coal is bad. It’s bad when you mine it, it’s bad for the city where you burn it, and it’s bad for the climate.
McKibben writes that getting arrested has a possible downside:
It could turn people off, make them think that global warming protesters are crazy hippies harkening back to the ’60s.
I think that a more serious downside is that people might come to realize that the willingness to trade off pulling billions of people out of poverty for shutting down coal plants. Does McKibben really think that “investors” are the only stakeholders in coal plants? Coal is both bad and good, which makes the issue really difficult and the politics very complicated. Thus, we need policies that achieve both decarbonization and pull people out of poverty at the same time.
February 22nd, 2009 at 1:39 pm
I noted in McKibben’s article:
“He’s appointed scientific advisers who actually believe in… science,..”
I wonder what it is to “believe in science?” Does that mean suspending disbelief where “science” is concerned? And isn’t the ultimate scientific principle that theories must be proven in the real world? So isn’t the need to “believe in science” a paradox?
I would prefer scientific advisors whose attitudes were founded in facts and not beliefs.. but perhaps that’s just me..:)
February 22nd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
LOL. I just hope they DO it! I’ll wager that it hurts their cause, big time. The more light that is shined on the AGW boogymen scaremongers, the more they will appear like their counterpart, the Wizard of Oz. If, on the other hand, they had some real science to support them, it might be different.
February 22nd, 2009 at 3:46 pm
“Thus, we need policies that achieve both decarbonization and pull people out of poverty at the same time.”
I agree. To his credit, Dr. Hansen advocates the rapid development of “green” nuclear (i.e. LFTR). LFTR is much greener than current nuclear and of course is low cost and clean. We can have our cake and eat it too.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20081229_Obama_revised.pdf
“The Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) is a thorium reactor concept that uses a chemically-stable fluoride salt for the medium in which nuclear reactions take place. This fuel form yields flexibility of operation and eliminates the need to fabricate fuel elements. This feature solves most concerns that have prevented thorium from being used in solid-fueled reactors. The fluid fuel in LFTR is also easy to process and to separate useful fission products, both stable and radioactive. LFTR also has the potential to destroy existing nuclear waste, albeit with less efficiency than in a fast reactor such as IFR.
Both IFR and LFTR operate at low pressure and high temperatures, unlike today’s LWR’s. Operation at low pressures alleviates much of the accident risk with LWR. Higher temperatures enable more of the reactor heat to be converted to electricity (40% in IFR, 50% in LFTR vs 35% in LWR). Both IFR and LFTR have the potential to be air-cooled and to use waste heat for desalinating water.
Both IFR and LFTR are 100-300 times more fuel efficient than LWRs. In addition to solving the nuclear waste problem, they can operate for several centuries using only uranium and thorium that has already been mined. Thus they eliminate the criticism that mining for nuclear fuel will use fossil fuels and add to the greenhouse effect.
The presently proposed Yucca Mountain “solution” for dealing with nuclear waste should be opposed, in my opinion. Creation of a large volume of waste with lifetime of the order of 100,000 years is not necessary. There is a far more effective way to use the $25 billion collected from utilities over the past 40 years to deal with waste disposal. This fund should be used to develop fast reactors that consume nuclear waste, and thorium reactors to prevent the creation of new long-lived nuclear waste. By law the federal government must take responsibility for existing spent nuclear fuel, so inaction is not an option. Accelerated development of fast and thorium reactors will allow the US to fulfill its obligations to dispose of the nuclear waste, and open up a source of carbon-free energy that can last centuries, even millennia.”
see
http://www.energyfromthorium.com/
http://rethinkingnuclearpower.googlepages.com/aimhigh
February 22nd, 2009 at 4:42 pm
“each one of them owned by rich and powerful companies. ”
As rich and powerful as GM, Ford, AIG or Citicorp? How about Wal-Mart? It’s so “powerful” that there are hundreds of communities all over the country where it can’t even get permission to build a store.
McKibben reveals a lot about his mindset and his prejudices with statements like that. Makes one wonder if he even understands that those utilities have their rates set by state regulators.
Beware the evil corporations! [and all our family, friends and neighbors who work for those companies or own stock therein through their 401(k)s.]
February 23rd, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Quoth McKibben: “It could turn people off, make them think that global warming protesters are crazy hippies harkening back to the ’60s”
I have been watching these people for some time. A lot of them actually do look, sound, and…smell like the crazy hippies hrkening back to the ’60s.