Energy/Environment – Page 84 – artdiamondblog.com

Case for Wind Power is “Absolute Baloney”

I once heard a top MidAmerican Energy executive express considerable, articulate, scepticism about the economics of wind power. (Wind power is unreliable, so that electric companies still must stand ready to provide the electricity by other means.) If wind power made economic sense, you wouldn’t need subsidies to promote it—profit maximizing power companies would pursue it on their own. MidAmerican now invests in wind power, not because it has become an efficient energy source, but because wasteful government subsidies, make wind power profitable for MidAmerican.

Glen Schleede, a retired power company executive, has nothing to lose by speaking the truth:

(p. 1B) The turbines do bother some folks, including Glenn R. Schleede, a retired power company executive from Round Hill, Va., who said the wind power industry puts out "absolute baloney" to justify its existence.

"I’m tired of subsidizing Warren Buffett companies," Schleede said, referring to federal tax subsidies that go to MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., a division of Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. that is headed by Buffett. Those are MidAmerican’s turbines in the fields around Schaller.

Schleede’s criticisms, mostly in academic-style papers he writes, concentrate on the economics of wind power and what he called "false claims about how this is good for an energy system."

"In fact, these things, because they’re intermittent and volatile and unpredictable, they don’t really add a lot of capacity to an electric grid," he said. "When you see these things advertised, they talk about how many megawatts of capacity, the number of homes served and all that garbage.

"I would maintain that they don’t serve any homes."

For the full story, see:

Jordon, Steve. "Harvesting Wind;Farmers like payout, but critics of wind power point to costs." Omaha World-Herald (Sunday September 3, 2006): 1D-2D.

“If Ethanol Made Economic Sense, It Wouldn’t Need a Subsidy”

Source of graphics: online version of the World-Herald article cited below.

(p. 1D) LINCOLN – David Pimentel, a Cornell University researcher, has been criticized repeatedly since he questioned the energy value of ethanol in 1980.

In a government-funded report, he suggested that ethanol provides less energy than is used to produce it. Even though that report has been disputed and rejected by other analysts, Pimentel has not backed down.

He said last week that rural developers, farmers and investors will rue the day they put their money, hopes and dreams into the corn-based alternative fuel.

"It is too bad," he said in an interview, "because it would be a tremendous asset to agriculture if this were a true winner."

Pimentel is among the public critics who raise red flags as momentum gathers for dramatic increases in production, especially in the nation’s top two ethanol-producing states: Iowa and Nebraska.

While Pimentel is perhaps the expert most often quoted – in part because he presented his analysis more than 25 years ago – others also raise questions about the energy value of ethanol and its economic benefits and environmental effects.

Ethanol backers defend the fuel as a viable way to help stabilize the nation’s fuel supply. But they haven’t convinced Jerry Taylor, an energy policy specialist for the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.

"If ethanol made economic sense, it wouldn’t need a subsidy," Taylor said.

For the full story, see:

BILL HORD. "High-octane Clash." Omaha World-Herald (Sunday, August 6, 2006): 1D-2D.

Source of graphics: online version of the World-Herald article cited above.

“DDT Saves Lives, Environmentalists Take Lives”

Connecticut hedge-fund trader, and malaria-fighting activist and philanthropist. Source of image: online version of the WSJ article cited below.

Inside of a year, and working with George Ayittey of the Free Africa Foundation, Mr. Laifer’s efforts have spawned five "malaria-free zones" in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya. Expansion to Ivory Coast and Benin is in the works. He adds that he has the financing to roll out additional zones this year but — ever the searcher — first wants to assess what’s working and what isn’t. If all is going well, "next year I see us doing something like 100 villages."

Mr. Laifer says a future focus will also be DDT, the pesticide used by Americans and Europeans in the 1940s to win domestic fights against malarial mosquitoes. Indoor spraying of DDT is by far the cheapest and most effective way to control the disease. One South Africa province employing DDT saw malaria infections and deaths drop 96% over a three-year span.

Yet Rachel Carson-inspired environmentalists have convinced many public health agencies that the chemical is dangerous. African nations, fearful that lucrative European and U.S. markets might ban their agricultural exports, make do with less-effective DDT substitutes. Though DDT, like any chemical, can be harmful in high doses, there’s no evidence that using it in the amounts needed to combat malaria has any ill-effect whatsoever on humans.

Mr. Laifer’s been unable to spray DDT in any of his malaria-free zones. "It’s the best thing in our arsenal," he says. "We have a prodigious supply, it’s cheap and we know it works. Our world leaders need to legalize DDT, and people in America need to get mad about this. . . . We need to have people walking around with signs that say, ‘DDT saves lives, environmentalists take lives.’"

For the full commentary, see:

JASON L. RILEY. "Malaria’s Toll." Wall Street Journal (Mon., August 21, 2006): A11.

(Note: the ellipsis is in the original.)

Power to the People

Cooling towers at the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia. Source of photo: the online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

A long, and informative cover-story in the NYT, discusses the costs and benefits of nuclear power. My read is that, on balance, the considerations in the article favor nuclear energy. Here are a few passages from near the end of the article:

(p. 64) Gary Taylor, . . ., the C.E.O. of Entergy Nuclear, says he believes a doubling of the number of nuclear plants around the world is inevitable, both to satisfy energy demands and to counter global warming. As Taylor puts it: ”The reality is, what is scalable in the time frame that addresses the issues? If it isn’t this technology, I don’t know what it would be.” Diaz, the former head of the N.R.C., told me he sees a similarly bright future for nuclear. ”The world is going to go nuclear, because they do not have any other real alternatives,” he says. I met plenty of other engineers within the industry who went even further. Their feeling about nuclear power is close to evangelical, in that they seem to approach the technology with moral certitude while being loath to acknowledge any of its many negatives. Would that include the utility executives who will ultimately decide if — and what — to build? I’m not sure it would. To those I spoke with in the uppermost ranks, nuclear power isn’t a belief system. It’s a business. And to them, what might come out of, say, Vogtle Units 3 and 4 — the waste and the power and the profits — would be nearly identical to what comes out of Units 1 and 2.

At least that was my conclusion in Georgia, where Jeff Gasser, the Southern Company’s chief nuclear officer, took me through a long tour of the plant. He was smart, meticulous and intensely committed to the obscure safety protocols that go on at nuclear power facilities. Most of all he was forthright about the advantages and disadvantages of the nukes business. When we went to visit the spent-fuel pool in Vogtle, where the used fuel-rod assemblies are stored under 20 feet of protective water, Gasser let me know that we would die if we pulled one of the fuel assemblies out of the pool. ”We would receive, before we could get to the exit door a few feet away, a lethal radiation dose,” he said. I quickly had to check the radiation dosimeter I was wearing — another legal requirement of the N.R.C. — to see if I was already glowing. (It read zero.) ”The communications people hate it when I use words like ‘lethal’ and ‘irradiated,’ ” Gasser continued. ”But the fact is, there is no perfect way of generating electricity. There are byproducts for every type.” Like many others, he went through the positives and negatives of coal, gas, solar, wind and nuclear. In his opinion, he added, with Vogtle’s engineering, redundancy of safety systems and its trained operators, it was a safe, reliable and efficient way of making electricity. That was his sales pitch.

We had already passed through the containment buildings, where the reactors heat the pressurized water. So Gasser took me through the turbine building, an enormous room the size of a soccer field, where the steam turns the fan blades. Eventually, we went out a back door into the sunlight. The deafening sounds of turbines and machinery subsided to a dull thrum. We removed our earplugs and walked over to a small forest of electrical transformers, our backs to the plant. The electricity from the turbines inside comes out here, Gasser explained, its voltage is transformed, and it is then put into the grid.

Gasser made a pushing motion toward the green hills before us.

”Once the power is sent out of here, it can go everywhere,” he explained. And I could see that it did go everywhere. The high-tension wires stretched away from where we stood, in several directions, through deep cuts in the pinelands, as far as I could see.

For the full article, see:

JON GERTNER. "Atomic Balm? ‘ The New York Times Magazine, Section 6 (Sunday, July 16, 2006), 36-47, 56, 62 & 64.

“Al Gore’s Penguin Army”

Source of screen capture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZSqXUSwHRI

"Al Gore’s Penguin Army," a funny satire of Al Gore’s movie "An Inconvenient Truth," has been posted to the popular YouTube web site. A bee’s nest of folk are agitated that this satire may have been created by someone with some tie to an oil company. My response: who cares? (Don’t those who produce oil for us, have the same right to free speech that the rest of us have?)

View the video at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZSqXUSwHRI

25% Increase in Oil by 2015

Source of graphic: online version of the WSJ article cited below.

Despite fears of "running out" of oil, Cambridge Energy Research Associates’ new analysis of oil-industry activity points to a considerable growth in the capacity to produce oil in the years ahead. Based upon our field-by-field examination of current activity and of 360 new projects that are either underway or very likely, we see capacity growing from its current 89 mbd to 110 mbd by 2015, a 25% increase. A substantial part of this growth reflects the advance of technology, i.e., the rapid growth in "non-traditional" hydrocarbons, such as from very deep offshore waters, Canadian oil sands, and liquids made from natural gas. (We are not counting in this increase the additional supplement that will come from ethanol and other fuels made from plants.)

There are important qualifications, however. First, this is physical capacity to produce, not actual flows, which, as we have seen over the last year, can be disrupted by everything from natural disasters to government decision, to conflict and geopolitical discord. Second, while prices are going up rapidly, so are costs; and shortages of equipment and people can slow things down. Third, greater scale and technical complexity can generate delays. Still, a 25% increase in physical capacity by 2015 is a reasonable expectation, based upon today’s evidence, and that would go a long way to meeting the growing demand from China, India and other motorizing countries.

Admittedly, it may be hard to conceive of this kind of increase when oil prices are climbing the wall of worry, when each new disruption reverberates around the world, when Iranian politicians threaten $100 or $250 oil in the event of sanctions, and when so many geopolitical trends seem so adverse. All this underlines the fact that while the challenges below ground are extensive, the looming uncertainties — and risks — remain above ground.

For the full commentary, see:

Daniel Yergin. "Crisis in the Pipeline." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., August 9, 2006): A10.

Environmentalists Hurt Poor Quatemalans

Residents of El Estor, a small Q’eqchi community of 40,000 people located in northeast Guatemala, cheered when they heard that Vancouver-based Skye Resources was interested in reopening a local abandoned nickel mine. According to local press, the town’s mayor and several community leaders led a rally last September in favor of the mine with a banner that read, "El Estor says yes to responsible mining."

It’s easy to see why there was such excitement. Skye Resources estimates that it will employ 1,000 people and create four indirect jobs in the community for every new mining job. That plus an overall investment of at least $539 million is not irrelevant for an impoverished town with one of the highest illiteracy rates in the country — over 40% for indigenous men and 35% for indigenous women.

The festive mood didn’t last long. Within months, opposition to the project began to swell. Well-organized protesters were soon demanding that the Guatemalan government withdraw the mining license it had issued, alleging environmental risks and inadequate consultation with the community.

. . .

In a country with such dire needs for capital and technology to lessen the want of the poor, it is worth exploring whether such anti-mine activism truly expresses the will of the people. Looking behind the scenes, the funding and instigation of the activism appears heavily driven by international nongovernmental organizations that end up discouraging development while trying to fulfill their own mission.

Boston-based Oxfam America and Toronto’s Rights Action are two anti-development NGOs active in Guatemala. Oxfam has partnered with MadreSelva (Mother Jungle), a Guatemala City environmental group headed by affluent urbanites, to block mining projects.

For the full commentary, see:

ANDREA TUNAROSA. "AMERICAS; What Do NGOs Have Against Poor Guatemalans?" The Wall Street Journal (Fri., July 21, 2006): A15.

Global Warming Turns Greenland Green

A potato farm in Greenland has been able to expand as more land is arable due to higher temperatures. Source of image: the online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) QAQORTOQ, Greenland — Stefan Magnusson lives at the foot of a giant, melting glacier. Some think he’s living on the brink of a cataclysm. He believes he’s on the cusp of creation.

The 49-year-old reindeer rancher says a warming trend in Greenland over the past decade has caused the glacier on his farm to retreat 300 feet, revealing land that hasn’t seen the light of day for hundreds of years, if not more. Where ice once gripped the earth, he says, his reindeer now graze on wild thyme amid the purple blooms of Niviarsiaq flowers.

The melting glacier near Mr. Magnusson’s home is pouring more water into the river, which he hopes soon to harness for hydroelectricity.

"We are seeing genesis by the edge of the glacier," he says.

Average temperatures in Greenland have risen by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 30 years — more than double the global average, according to the Danish Meteorological Institute. By the end of the century, the institute projects, temperatures could rise another 14 degrees.

The milder weather is promoting new life on the fringes of this barren, arctic land. Swans have been spotted recently for the first time, ducks aren’t flying south for the winter anymore and poplar trees have suddenly begun flowering.

. . .

(p. A12) For Greenlanders, adapting to the effects of climate change is nothing new. Oxygen isotope samples taken from Greenland’s ice core reveal that temperatures around 1100, during the height of the Norse farming colonies, were similar to those prevailing today. The higher temperatures were part of a warming trend that lasted until the 14th century.

Near the end of the 14th century, the Norse vanished from Greenland. While researchers don’t know for sure, many believe an increasingly cold climate made eking out a living here all but impossible as grasses and trees declined. Farming faded away from the 17th century to the 19th century, a period known as the Little Ice Age. Farming didn’t return to Greenland in force until the early 1900s, when Inuit farmers began re-learning Norse techniques and applying them to modern conditions. A sharp cooling trend from around 1950 to 1975 stalled the agricultural expansion.

Since then, temperatures have mainly been on the upswing. Ole Egede is taking advantage of the warmer climate. He and his brother live on Greenland’s southwest coast on an isolated farm at the head of an inlet that can be reached only by helicopter or by a boat that can navigate around the icebergs that often choke the blue fiord. Mr. Egede started Greenland’s first commercial potato farm in 1999 and it remains the largest potato farm in Greenland.

Improved farming technology and methods, such as new cold-resistant seed varieties and cultivation techniques — are responsible for some of Greenland’s expanding agriculture. But experts credit the more-favorable climate with much of the new growth. "There’s no doubt he’s now growing potatoes because of better conditions," Mr. Hoegh, the farming consultant, says of Mr. Egede.

For the full story, see:

LAUREN ETTER. "Feeling the Heat For Icy Greenland, Global Warming Has a Bright Side As Temperatures Inch Up, Melting Glaciers Bring New Life to a Frozen Land But Could Polar Bears Vanish?" The Wall Street Journal (Tues., July 18, 2006): A1 & A12.

Source of map: the online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

“a jobs program for people who couldn’t make it in the private sector”

Source of book image: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400065526/sr=8-1/qid=1153368329/ref=sr_1_1/104-2835260-2878345?ie=UTF8

The levees are built by the Army Corps of Engineers, with the Orleans Levee District enjoying local control. It is instructive to learn that the former president of the levee district bought himself an inflatable rubber craft a decade ago. As Mr. Horne writes, some levees gave way "even before water reached the heights the walls were meant to contain and, in some cases, after it had begun to ebb."

Beset by outsourcing, brain drains and budget cuts, the Army Corps has been skimping for years. This spring, its commanding officer conceded that there had been problems with flood-wall engineering. But the government hardly has a monopoly on blame. As Mr. Horne notes, the corps had intended to build a flood barrier at the mouth of Lake Pontchartrain on the city’s northern border ("an idea that would, after Katrina, suddenly seem like the highest sort of wisdom"), but the plan was scrapped when environmentalists sued.

By the mid-1970s, "the completion date for the upgraded flood defense that Congress had mandated for New Orleans had already been pushed back thirteen years," Mr. Horne writes, and one section was still unfinished as Katrina hit. Apathy and indifference "turned government work into a jobs program for people who couldn’t make it in the private sector or who couldn’t be bothered to try."

Government handouts of a different sort followed the hurricane: After a slow start with its relief effort, FEMA helped countless hurricane victims who were truly in need, but the agency also began cutting checks for almost anyone who asked. "An initial $2000 would turn up in the mail within a few days of registering online or placing a call," Mr. Horne writes. In fact, the agency "rolled over for millions in fraudulent or duplicate claims without checking to see that the applicant had offered a vacant lot or a nonexistent address as his or her residence." Perhaps that was easier than risking further accusations of bias.

For the full review, see:

TOM BETHELL. "Books; Levying the Blame; Nearly a year after a hurricane ravaged a city and the finger-pointing began, two books dissect the destruction and the government’s response." The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 15, 2006): P8.

The citation for the Horne book is:

Horne, Jed. Breach of Faith. Random House, 2006. (412 pages, $25.95)

Environmental Bureaucrats Ignore Local Knowledge

Source of book image: http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300106211

From a useful review of a book on environmental policy:

(p. D8) The striking aspect of his new book is the story he tells of his own journey from supporter to critic of the Spaceship Earth theory of environmental law. His first step toward disenchantment was seeing, as an NRDC lawyer, the EPA’s personnel up close. "The EPA had not come from Starfleet Academy," he notes, "but rather was an amalgam of the federal government’s preexisting environmental programs," then part of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. In short, the bureaucrats were real people with real incentives, just like politicians and voters—but unanswerable to the public.

The next educational step, for him, was the decision to buy a farm in upstate New York. Mr. Schoenbrod was surprised by the wisdom of his rural neighbors. He movingly describes how a local logger changed his mind about forestry practices by showing him, among much else, that sometimes cutting down particular trees can benefit the forest. (It sounds like a simple observation, but it is the kind of thing that bureaucrats, with their sweeping mandates, often don’t allow for.) Mr. Schoenbrod also looks at the local reaction to a number of environmental decisions, such as the EPA’s ordered dredging of the Hudson River because of the small risk of PCBs. The intent was to protect the health of local communities, but upstate landowners opposed the dredging by a ratio of more than 2 to 1.

For the full review, see:

John Berlau. "Bookshelf; A Law Unto Themselves." The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., August 18, 2005): D8.

The full reference to the Schoenbrod book:

Schoenbrod, David. Saving Our Environment from Washington: How Congress Grabs Power, Shirks Responsibility, and Shortchanges the People. Yale University Press, 2005.

Indians Hunted Several Species to Local Extinction

Researchers at work at the Emeryville Shellmound. Source of photo: online version of The Washington Post article cited below.

Like the Europeans who came later, the first Americans apparently had a propensity for killing and eating any animal they could lay their hands on without giving a lot of thought to the future, judging by the bones they left behind at one notable site.

"The general public probably buys into the ‘Pocahontas version’ that Native Americans were inherently different and more in tune with nature," said University of Utah archaeologist Jack Broughton. "The evidence says otherwise."

After studying thousands of animal bones found in a garbage heap on the shores of San Francisco Bay, Broughton concluded that Native Americans living in an area where Emeryville is now located hunted several species to local extinction from 600 B.C. to A.D. 1300.

For the full story, see:

Guy Gugliotta. "SCIENCE Notebook; Indians Depleted Wildlife, Too." The Washington Post (Monday, February 20, 2006): A09.

A more detailed summary of the research can be found in a University of Utah press release:

"Early California: A Killing Field; Research Shatters Utopian Myth, Finds Indians Decimated Birds."

The full, academic version of the research can be found in:

Broughton, Jack M. Prehistoric Human Impacts on California Birds: Evidence from the Emeryville Shellmound Avifauna, Ornithological Monographs, 2004.