Until today, I resisted the urge to comment on Wired provocative article on Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green. Lynn Miller‘s comment on Goeff Livingston‘s post about Wired piece, gave me the push I needed.
First, I agree with Lynn. Anything that can draw people into thinking about their carbon footprint, has my full endorsement. Second, I would also hope that the information that is being conveyed does not further confuse citizens. People need clarity, not controversies. Third, I agree with Goeff Livingston, that any respectable journalism medium, such as Wired magazine, ought to do its homework, and convey only accurate information, to the best of their knowledge.
About Wired‘s ‘10 Green Heresies‘, here is what I think:
- Live in cities: YES and NO; I have written before about supporting research for YES. At the same time, there is something about living closer to nature that supports greener behavioral changes. It may be that we have not found yet the way to optimize the way we live in non urban settings.
- A/C is OK: NO; The fact that A/C is less of a villain than heating, does not make it right.
- Organics are not the answer: YES and NO; I do not agree with the whole setup for their argument. The bigger issue is of conservation and proper use of natural resources. Their point about the role of transportation in carbon footprint is also highly debated. I do support their point about limiting read meat and pushing a vegetarian diet.
- Farm the Forests: YES and NO; I am aware that trees are a complex issue; on the whole however, more trees is better than less, and deforestation in the Amazon is never good.
- China is the solution: YES and NO; it is hard to ignore the polluting of the rivers, and of the air, and the exponential growth of coal plants.
- Accept genetic engineering: NO; I am no expert. Still that one does not feel right. I say, let us address the issue of growing population with family planning and education, and conservation strategies. Let us eliminate the food waste, let us eat less, and less processed food.
- Carbon trading doesn’t work: YES; Carbon trading is an easy way out, that does not solve the fundamental problems of needing to produce less greenhouse gases at each source.
- Embrace nuclear power: YES (reluctantly); I know I will get a lot of grief for that one, from some of my antinukes friends. The issue here is, if not nuclear energy, so what? Can we say with confidence that renewable energies, and conservation measures will be set in place soon enough to win the race against greenhouse gas emissions?
- Used cars – not hybrids: YES and MORE; as in retrofitting old cars, biking or walking instead of driving, carpooling, and hopefully soon electric cars that will be recharged with renewable energies. I do own a Prius, but I agree with them, a little old car with good gas mileage would be just as good.
- Prepare for the worst: YES.
Of course Wired loves to stir things up, but I agree with their overall theme – that unless we draw down our carbon emissions enough to prevent the contentration from settling at over 350 PPM (some still say 450 PPM) our other lifestyle choices won’t save us.
Of course, getting our national and international leaders to get on the same page with one another and force these kinds of changes requires a very informed and insistent citizenry. We don’t have that. Wired only reaches a small segment of the population. Most people are not making any significant changes in their lifestyle. That’s what most worries me.
My take:
– Green cities: Yes. They wouldn’t have to house millions though. I’m an advocate for apparment buildings for the ground-space they’re saving, and three-dimensional built makes things really close to each other.
– I hope that if we do everything else right, it will turn out we have enough green power to power A/C’s in warm places. I don’t live in a climate where an A/C is necessary, but I don’t want to judge others in a much hotter place.
– A few days ago, I glanced through a report by the UK government detailing environmental impact of conventional and organic farming methods. There is no general answer. There are always trade-offs. Not one label can suffice for this. I guess you understand this very well giving your engineering education.
– I didn’t know this about Canadian forests. I suppose the situation in the Amazon is much different.
– If China is the solution, America could be too. I mean it’s not like China has a headstart or something. It could be wise to let the Chinese make the hardware, and let Americans do the thinking as it were. You wouldn’t want to waste good brains.
– I don’t know enough about genetical engineering to understand its full implications. I don’t know if we’ve actually mastered nature, or only think we do.
– As for the carbon trading: You could always push for much lower caps. Problem is that this might bring the economy to a shreaking halt until there’s leadership how to do business under these new conditions.
– Nuclear: I’d say trade each coal plant for a nuke, but built solar, wind, etc at full speed. Nukes could give us some breathing room during the energy transition.
– Used-cars, not hybrids? I’d say NO cars, not hybrids. I think the car will not be an important mode of transportation in the future. It will be there, as taxis or rentals, but merely as a complement.
– Adaptation is only logical. I compare enviromentalist opposing adaptation because it might hamper prevention with environmentalist opposing CCS because it might keep destructive mining practices (and other negatives of coal) in place longer. These issues should be approached separately. Environmentalists (that is, the bad kind) should not be so “political” about this.
Marguerite, I have been reading your blog and been appreciating it for now two months. I find it great and it is becoming a vast data source for me.
And now, today, I really would like to thank you. Thank you for supporting nuclear. It is not a perfect solution, but there is none.
So many environmentalists are against, just thinking about Chernobyl and Three Miles Island incidents.
But as I did some research on nuclear for my Master’s thesis, I discovered it has a lot of advantages : ultra low emissions, ability to provide huge amounts of energy and increased yield and safety with regards with older plants.
Make no mistake, I am a real supporter of renewables and energy efficiency, but you are right, they won’t be enough… (got an article to publish on that…)
Why do you think the UK, Italy and other European countries are willing to build new plants ?
Because it is cheaper yet than renewables, (for the same amount of GWh) and it uses much less space. And compared to coal, it is much cleaner.
The French magazine Science et Vie published last year a very interesting article on coal versus nuclear, the two only solutions that are able to provide us with much of the energy we need.
“if not nuclear energy, so what? Can we say with confidence that renewable energies, and conservation measures will be set in place soon enough to win the race against greenhouse gas emissions?”
As much as we can say with confidence that nuclear would be, yes.
It takes years to get power plants built, whatever they’re fuelled by. The ones that take longest are large hydroelectric and nuclear. Large hydro takes ages because it uses vast quantities of concrete, lots of digging of rock, and so on. Nuclear takes ages because it also takes lots of concrete and steel, and is technically the most complex of all power sources we have.
I mean, with nuclear – even the United Kingdom has to get the French help them build the things. If a First World country with hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians needs the assistance of another country to do it, how the hell is Ghana or Surinam or Mexico going to manage it?
Whereas a wind turbine has been built by a 14 year old boy in Africa.
Then here in the West we get legal delays, too. Good old NIMBYism – is that likely to be stronger with a proposed nuclear power station, or a renewable one?
So all in all, we can say that nuclear is likely to be rather slow to build compared to virtually any renewable energy.
And even if all were equal, what we’re talking about is simply choice, which do we choose to build.
Wired is of course talking bollocks, and they know it – if they thought their advice was good, then they wouldn’t have to finish with “prepare for the worst!”
Cliff, Meryn, thanks for your added wisdom.
Cliff, your worries are well founded of course. This is why I am so interested in latest social network research I blogged about a few days ago. Knowing that we make changes in clusters is one piece of the puzzle. Next question is how do you move a cluster, and which types, besides generic ‘group of friends or coworkers’ are most applicable for this type of problem. I will be writing more on this subject very soon.
Meryn, agree with you on your environmental politics point. I only have one politic, whatever works for the problem at hand.
“nuclear is likely to be rather slow to build compared to virtually any renewable energy. ”
Yes, but I don’t think we can be on 100% solar and wind in the time those nukes would come online. At that time, those nukes will allow more coal plants to go offline.
“If a First World country with hundreds of thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians needs the assistance of another country to do it, how the hell is Ghana or Surinam or Mexico going to manage it?”
This is a very important point, and only shows that nukes are not THE answer, but part of the answer. We might say: The more nukes the better, because with all the will in the world we couldn’t build them fast enough to replace coal.
If the expertise constraints aren’t as big as we both think, we might need to temper the nuke-building somewhat. 🙂
BTW: If I were in charge I think I would only allow building of fourth generation nukes. They use much more of the fuel, which not only reduces in less need for mining, but also much less radioactive waste.
Edouard, both you and I grew up in France, a very pro-nuclear country with lots of expertise in the field – some of my ex-classmates from engineering school are the heads of nuclear plants – Let us not minimize the cultural influence here . . .
Kyle, I expected your response 🙂 I do not necessarily disagree with you, with two caveats. First, the nuclear option is already part of the mainstream mindset, and of our energy production infrastructure. Hence, it is easier to adopt. Renewable energies on the other hand are not there yet, and require some new policies and infrastructures. In the U.S. for instance, one big question is whether or not the Energy Bill that will extend critical tax credits for the installation of renewable energy installations, past the end of 2008, is in question. Second, I also do not have the numbers, in terms of the amount of energy that can be produced with either option, within the time frame at hand. Would you happen to know those numbers?
I thought it was trashy WIRED being WIRED. Given the topic, not a very responsible piece of journalism. Great blog. I am adding you to my reader.
I haven’t read the Wired article, but I’ll just comment on Item 7, above, having to do with carbon trading.
Let me start first with a necessity, in my view: We will need a carbon cap-and-auction, and “trading”, system. Such a system isn’t the whole answer, of course, but it should be a key part of the answer (and it should be designed effectively). Along with increased R&D and etc. etc. etc.
Having not read the Wired article, I’m not sure exactly what they said. There are many ways to do a trading system incorrectly, of course, and there are ways to turn one into not much more than a boondoggle. But, I do hope that Wired isn’t suggesting, or implying, that we can solve the global warming matter without a robust cap-and-auction system. If that’s what they’re suggesting, they are, unfortunately, incorrect.
There is a great, easy-reading, to-the-point, short, and wise (in my view) book on the subject titled “Climate Solutions: A Citizen’s Guide” by Peter Barnes, with a foreword by Bill McKibben. It’s a must read for anyone serious about the various aspects, flavors, dynamics and optimizations of cap-and-auction and trading solutions. I hope that the author of the Wired article read Barnes’s book before writing that part of his/her article.
I’ll end this time with one of my favorite quotes that I saw recently:
Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope; only, doth backward pull
Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull.
– Shakespeare, “All’s Well That Ends Well”
Thanks, as usual, for the great post and thoughts Marguerite!
Cheers.
I think perhaps you’re misunderstanding “the mainstream mindset”. We have to look at the evidence: what is actually being built today? In the US more renewables have been built than nuclear in the last decade. T Boone Pickens, lifelong oil man, is investing a couple of billion in wind turbines in Texas. So looking at that, we see that the US public is quite friendly towards renewable energy, and unfriendly towards nuclear.
If you want to talk about how much energy can be produced, well it has the following limits in descending order of importance,
– political
– economic
– technical (skilled workers, and the tools to make the tools)
– resource
From a decade on out, the resource limits will become more important. But for today the political and economic limits are strongest. This applies whichever power source you’re talking about.
The economic limits are easier to surmount than the political, since we waste oodles of cash already; really these supposed economic limits are political limits, it’s a matter of whether we the public think the spending is worth it. Apparently we think a $1 billion “stealth” fighter which can be shot down by a 1970s-era Serbian surface to air missile is worth it, but $1 billion of (say) train tracks is not. This can change.
If we decide to do some massive build-out of nuclear, then we’ve overcome the political and economic limits. If we can overcome the political and economic limits, then they’re overcome – and we can do it for renewables, too.
I’d argue that the political and economic barriers for renewables are not as great as for nuclear. People will more readily consent to a wind turbine in their “backyard” than a nuclear power plant. Whether one costs $1.1 billion and the other $1.2 billion or vice versa is to most people entirely abstract.
The technical limits are not as significant for renewables as for nuclear, for reasons I’ve noted. The resources required for renewables are less than for nuclear.
You have things like the central containment vessel – there’s only one place in the world that makes these, in Japan, where they can make 4-8 a year – the thing has to be a big single piece of metal with no seams, and the Japanese joint’s the only place that can make it. Other countries could build such a facility to add to Japan’s capacity, but we’d be looking at about 10 years from design to first unit out. With about 450 power reactors in the world providing about a sixth of the world’s electricity you can see that we can’t do a massive buildout in the near future with that.
There are other reactor designs, but only a dozen or so power reactors in the world that don’t require the single-forged containment vessels. Still other designs, such as the “generation IV” ones Meryn mentioned, they’ve never actually been built yet, so we don’t know how well they’d work and I don’t think we can really place all our hopes in them. In principle they’re great, but we all know how things which look lovely on paper are not so wonderful in practice. Certainly we should experiment and test and so on – but not hold our breaths.
Whereas geothermal is 1950s technology, hydro 1930s, wind 1930s, PV 1960s, concentrated solar was first done in the 1860s, and so on. So we can go for stuff that’s worked fine for half a century or more, or stuff that’s never been built so we don’t know how it’ll work.
So it’s as I said: the main obstacles to anything are political-economic. And politics is really just the public will. If you can persuade the public to have a single nuclear reactor in their neighbourhood then you should be able to persuade them to have about a thousand wind turbines.
But that aside, technically the renewables are just heaps easier to build and make work safely. There are other kinds of safety, too, like national security – if Iran were building a bunch of wind turbines then the US Sixth Fleet wouldn’t be buzzing its coastline.
A massive buildout of nukes for the West leaves the Third World wondering what to do.
– do they get nothing? I strongly suspect they won’t stand for that, and will choose one of the following:
– nukes for the Third World, too? Great, more Iran-style headaches
– continue with fossil fuels? Why would we bother, then?
– renewables? If they can do it, why can’t we?
And then of course we come to resources. It’ll be no sweat in the next decade or so, but after that we start running our uranium reserves down, the price goes right up, the supply is contested in world markets and perhaps by force.
It’d be a bit stupid to change from one depleting resource to another. It’s like some guy with no job who spends out to the max on one credit card and then when that runs out he hits up another credit card – eventually the guy has to get an income if he wants to keep spending. It’d be much easier for him if he just tried to get an income straight away.
Realistically whatever we do we’re going to face an energy crunch about 2015-25. We’re very unlikely to have enough fossil fuels to keep consuming them at the current rate, and also unlikely to have any replacements – renewable or nuclear – up and running enough.
So the question really is how we come through that crunch period. There’s no question that our current wasteful industrial society just can’t survive. It’s an open question whether we’ll crunch down to a mixed-industrial society (like the Eastern Bloc after the Soviet collapse, horses replacing tractors, but still lots of factories working, etc) or go on to some kind of ecotechnic society.
This is why I talk about conservation. Firstly, it’s so that when less energy’s available it won’t hurt so much, same as the way if you’re frugal and lose your job it hurts less than if you’re wasteful and lose your job, and secondly so that it puts off the crunch time and makes it relatively less severe, gives us some space to build in.
Whatever we do we’re in for some hard times. The only question is how hard. Relying on techno-fixes that have never been built before, and dreams of global co-operation on a level of organisation and harmony that’s never been seen before in history is just delaying action. Essentially we can look at ourselves, or look at abstract forces – we can talk, or we can change.
Goeff, I am glad you visited. What I found dangerous with the Wired article, is how they mixed in some truths, with half-truths, and just plain wrong information.
Jeff, thanks for the reference. I will be curious to hear your thoughts if and after you read the article. It is a quick read.
Kyle, thanks for the brilliant expose. I knew I could count on you for some hard facts. The problem of the citizens derived, economic-political will has its roots in individual and group psychology. I am convinced the key is to be found in an amalgam of cognitive, swarm, behavioral, psychodynamic, social, evolutionary, narrative, and Jungian theories, to name just a few. Because in the end, whether we are dealing with heads of states at a summit, or folks in their homes, we are trying to get people to change their behaviors.
Carbon trading doesn’t work (further to Jeff Huggins):
There is a critical distinction between cap-and-trade and baseline-and-credit. Cap-and-trade schemes (the EU’s Emission Trading Scheme is 80% – 90% cap-and-trade) are an efficient way to reduce industrial carbon emissions. In Europe, cap-and-trade has produced a robust carbon price and the majority of companies covered by the scheme report already investing in efficiency as a result.
Baseline-and-credit schemes, primarily the CDM, are a different story. The CDM is designed to reduce the burden of the Kyoto Protocol on developed countries by supplying cheap reduction credits. As many reports show (including the front page of yesterday’s Guardian) the CDM is not delivering the same kind of reductions that a cap-and-trade programme can.
> Marguerite : yes indeed, we both come from a seriously pro nuclear country. It is quite important to understand our mindsets.
Me too I know somebody who worked for the nuclear industry. Fascinating industry I would say… and fantastic people.
> Meryn, you are right, the new generation of nuclear plants have serious improvements over the ones we have nowadays. The European Pressurized Reactor will have increased yield (+36%) and security and decreased waste (-30%).
For more data on EPR :
http://www.elrst.com/2007/12/05/epr-reactor-is-being-built-in-france/
Dan,
Thanks for the message. That said, I’m not sure of some of the terminology that you’re using. If you are in Europe, it may be that some of the terms used to describe some things are a bit different there.
From what I’ve heard and read and seen presented, the original “cap-and-trade” scheme that was used in Europe did not work very well, in some respects. (For example, many participants made windfall profits, and many prices still rose, even though permits were given away for free.) Much has to do with whether permits are given away or whether they are auctioned. And, another factor is whether “credits” count from outside the system. And so forth.
The book I mentioned earlier addresses all these things and builds on the European (and other) experiences. The result is a system involving a decreasing cap on all carbon emissions. The system is managed at the point that large sources of carbon enter the economy, e.g., crude oil coming in, or coal being mined, etc. All permits are auctioned, not given to companies for free. No credits are allowed (from outside the system) to serve as permits. There are no “safety valves” in which the government can just issue more permits if it thinks prices get uncomfortable. And, a key thing, is that the revenues from the auctions are returned to the populace on a per capita basis. (This has huge benefits and makes the whole system politically and economically sustainable, yet it doesn’t alter the effectiveness of the carbon dioxide emissions reductions.)
I don’t understand some of the terminology you’re using, so it would probably take a long time here to sort through whether, and how, your suggested system would be similar to this. But, the book I mentioned covers (and explains) all of these aspects of a good cap-and-auction (which also includes trading) system. And, it’s only about 80 or 90 pages.
Thanks again for the comment. Cheers.
I don’t see how any trading system for carbon will reduce emissions. When we wanted to abolish slavery we didn’t begin by setting up a slave market.
Hi Kiashu. Regarding your point #17: In a carbon cap-and-auction system (which includes trading), it’s the “cap” on carbon (a declining cap) that forces a reduction of emissions. The “trading” part just allows the market to work (within those bounds) to make it all happen. Otherwise, the government would need to set specific limits on all sorts of individual industries and on individual companies within those industries. You’re right that the “trading” part alone, without a declining cap, wouldn’t do anything. Also, this is only part of the solution. Some industries do require (in my view) at least some specific regulations, such as standards for auto fuel efficiency and etc. Also, of course, other things are necessary, such as greatly increased R&D.
Cheers.