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February Newsletter No. 125 |
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Written by SONE
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Sunday, 01 February 2009 |
The plan to make economic stimuli a green slush fund
Never in the history of economic mismanagement has so much money swished around to so little purpose. Or so it seems. The world is awash with taxpayers’ cash, propping up profligate banks, but it does not yet seem to be doing the people who have provided it much good. Worse still, it might well be misused.
Certainly, the Greens have scented money in Barak Obama’s pledge to lead the world in the battle against climate change. They are demanding gargantuan sums be spent on preventing or alleviating global warming. But with notable exceptions such as one of our patrons, Professor James Lovelock, they want to blow it on anything but nuclear power.
Take, for example, the World Economic Forum, meeting ironically while North America, Europe and the UK were under a blanket of snow. Its organisers said that globally at least $515bn should be spent annually on measures to limit carbon emissions – three times current annual spending.
But nuclear got no mention in the list of technologies they backed. Instead, they identified eight emerging sectors as playing a crucial role in the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy – onshore and offshore wind, solar voltaics, solar thermal electricity generation, municipal waste-to-energy, sugar-based ethanol, cellulosic and next generation biofuels and geothermal power. Anything, in fact, but the one safe, proven, reliable and economic reducer of carbon emissions: nuclear.
Then take Lord Stern, former UK Treasury economist and author of a somewhat derided report on global warming. As leader of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, he called for $400bn urgently to be invested in home insulation and renewable energy - or 20 per cent of the $trillion-plus expected to be laid out by governments in economic stimuli across the world.
But again not a mention could we find of nuclear power. The people who would spend our substance remain besotted with things that don’t work and micro-“solutions” requiring that most difficult thing of all to engineer: changes in human behaviour.
Finally, take Elliott Morley, former UK junior Environment Minister and president of Global International, a policymakers’ forum, who said the economic stimuli present “a unique opportunity” to create a low-carbon economy. Energy companies should be able to tap Government funds and loan guarantees to get clean energy projects off the ground. He was thinking of anything but nuclear power.
And so it goes on. This obsession with anything but a proven remedy – nuclear power - that brings far greater security of supply than anything they support is frightening. It shows that the irresponsibility which produced the credit crunch is still alive and kicking destructively.
Lomborg’s point
This was effectively the point made by Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish scientist who is by no means a global warming sceptic, in The Guardian at the end of last year.
“The problem with the green revolution argument”, he said, “is that it doesn’t trouble itself about efficiency. It is most often lauded for supplying new jobs. But billions of dollars in tax subsidies would create plenty of new jobs in almost any sector…many less capital-intensive sectors would create many more jobs for a given investment of taxpayers’ money… “Obama is now facing countless people who claim that subsidies for renewable energy and CO2 taxes are great ways to tackle global warming and forge a new green economy”, he said. “Unfortunately, this is almost entirely incorrect. Taxes and subsidies are always expensive and will likely impede growth. Moreover, if we really want to tackle global warming, we shouldn’t spend vast sums of money buying inefficient green technology, We should invest directly in R&D to make future green technology competitive.
“Obama should seize the initiative and make the [Kyoto-series summit] meeting in Copenhagen [at the end of this year] not about bloated subsidies for inefficient technologies but about lean investments in future breakthroughs. That is the way to tackle global warming and support a genuinely vibrant economy”.
May be. But you can’t build a vibrant economy on R&D without electricity. Why do these people spend their time running away from nuclear power?
The lovelock way
Professor Lovelock, one of our patrons, never makes that mistake. In a series of articles in the Sunday Times previewing his book The Vanishing Face of Gaia, published on February 26, he explains why we fail to welcome nuclear energy “as the one good and reliable power source”.
He says we have been “grievously misled by a concatenation of lies. Falsehood has built on falsehood and is mindlessly repeated by the media until belief in the essential evil of all things nuclear is part of an instinctive response”.
In particular, he dismisses the notion that nuclear waste is uniquely deadly and will persist for millions of years when, unlike lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium and thalium, it fades away. “More importantly”, he adds, “there is hardly any nuclear waste to worry about. The yearly output of waste from a 1,000MW power station would fit into a London taxi”.
Professor Lovelock also takes to task, as SONE has done, the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management for “propagating nuclear falsehood” with its claim that there is enough nuclear waste in Britain to fill the Royal Albert Hall. After 40 years of generating nuclear energy he says there is hardly enough to fill one RHA. There are, he adds, also almost as many untruths propagated about the favourable qualities of wind energy.
Against the background of his apocalyptic view of the future because of global warming, he says that to survive on these islands with probably a much larger population requires a constant and reliable source of electricity from indigenous fuel. “It would be madness to attempt it without nuclear energy,” he concludes. “It is sad that so many of the green movement and their intellectual followers still oppose nuclear on grounds as insubstantial as a fear of hellfire and Satan”.
What intellect?
Tony Benn once told us an engaging story at his own expense. In conversation with Antony Crossland, who was recognised as a Labour intellectual, he said he had become intellectually convinced of a certain course. Crossland, he laughed, languidly replied: “Tony, before you can come to an intellectual conclusion you have to have an intellect”.
We have much the same views about so-called environmental intellectuals mentioned by Professor Lovelock. You cannot pretend to possess an intellect when, in spite of the evidence, you advocate a whole range of “remedies” for global warming that either manifestly don’t work, are unreliable, don’t exist in practical, industrial form, are mere theoretical possibilities or just a gleam in the eye. That covers virtually every “remedy” they currently put forward before we even come to whether they could be applied in a modern, viable economy.
This is not to decry the need, as Bjorn Lomborg advocates, for R&D, notably into carbon capture and sequestration. But anyone with an intellect would recognise that meanwhile life has to continue and that in a democracy you ignore the people’s comfort, convenience and wellbeing at your peril. Intellectuals without responsibility for the consequences of their intellects need careful watching.
This generously brings us to Sir Jonathon Porritt, the Government’s sustainability adviser, who, as we have repeatedly seen, is not of this world. He now says families should limit themselves to two children because the Earth cannot sustain any more. He may be right that there are too many people in this world but to go for a generous version of the old Chinese solution demonstrates just how dictatorial these Greens would be given half a chance. Where are our civil libertarians when they are needed? Or are they more green than libertarian?
Irresponsibility personified
Given the endless prevarication over nuclear power, the Government is going to have to sanction new coal-fired power stations sooner or later unless it is determined to put the lights out. You can tell things are coming to a head because the Greens have just wheeled out their ultimate deterrent – James Hansen, of NASA, described as “one of the world’s foremost climate experts” – to savage coal.
In the Observer of February 15 Hansen revealed he had written to Gordon Brown, Barak Obama, Angela Merkel, Kevin Rudd (Australia), Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, asking for a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants because the planet is in dire peril.
“The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains”, he wrote chillingly. “Coal-fired power plants are factories of death. When I testified against the proposed Kingsnorth [Kent] power plant, I estimated that in its lifetime it would be responsible for the extermination of 400 species”.
To try to make life as difficult as possible for the government he wrote the “dirtiest trick governments play on their citizens is the pretence that they are working on ‘clean coal’ or that they will build power plants that are ‘capture-ready’ in case technology is ever developed to capture all pollutants”.
He added that young people were beginning to understand the situation. If they are, they will recognise irresponsibility when they see it. Unlike the young, Hansen will not have to live in the UK with the consequences of his advice.
Incidentally, Hansen’s former supervisor at NASA, Dr John S Theon, says Hansen violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting – “we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it”- and “embarrassed” NASA with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress.
Renewables in trouble…
While all this manoeuvring was going on, there was one insistent message in the press: renewables are in trouble. “Scepticism grows over the viability of green projects”, said The Times. “Offshore wind farms fall victim to financial crisis” - Der Spiegel. Under a heading “Blown away” the Sunday Times reported BT and Tesco threats to abandon wind developments because the Government is ruling out what it describes as “double counting” of renewable obligation credits.
The Financial Times reported Lord Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency, saying that the UK is losing its attraction for renewable energy generators and the Government needed to look at the subsidy system. And the New York Times said the credit crisis was starving solar as well as wind of capital and the development of biomass and geothermal systems had slowed.
Not surprisingly The Guardian weighed in with “Britain’s energy industry is nosediving into a dark uncertain future”. In a joint article John Constable, Renewable Energy Foundation, and Hugh Sharman, an energy consultant, said the Government had underestimated the impact of EU regulations on coal-fired power stations, been unduly optimistic about the construction of new gas-fired plants and reckless in committing the UK to extreme dependence on imported gas, and had failed to understand that the contribution of renewables to security of supply would, even if built, be modest.
Altogether a bit of a mess that James Hansen would make worse. You have, of course, been reading about all this in this Newsletter for years. We would feel more encouraged if anybody else was now demanding real urgency over nuclear power.
…And mucky with it
What you have not been reading in this journal is that renewables are dirty as well as pretty useless as things stand. Der Spiegel actually claimed this month that the now stalled European boom in solar and wind energy had not reduced CO2 emissions by a single gram.
The same was true of Germany’s solar, wind and biomass facilities. Nearly 250,000 jobs had been created and the business was worth Euros35bn a year but the climate was not benefiting. This was because no matter how many wind turbines were erected the total amount of CO2 that power companies and industries could emit under the European Emissions Trading System did not change. Everybody was keeping mum about it because governments are embarrassed and energy companies want things to stay as they are.
One person who has not maintained silence is Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive of EdF, owners of British Energy. He has warned that speculators risk turning carbon into a new category of sub-prime investment. Governments, he said, needed to revisit the way the ETS was working and its results.
The other piece of dirty news came from the Canada Free Press. It said the vast cloud of brown pollution hanging over Asia actually comes from renewables. A Swedish bio-geochemist had found that two thirds of its particles came from wood, straw and cow dung. Worse still, these renewables were causing lung diseases from indoor smoke “equivalent to a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit”.
Nuclear medicine
Perhaps we are naïve, but we remain amazed that the Green movement seems to utter not a word against nuclear medicine, bearing in mind it puts 140 times more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power. It may think it is on to a loser if it did. But why then does it apparently consider nuclear power damned when it keeps Britain lit, warm, healthy and productive? Perhaps they have just got their knickers in a twist and are privately relieved to learn that the nuclear authorities are tackling the shortage of Technetium-99m used in medical diagnostics. There are more than 30m diagnostic procedures using Tc-99m a year and 95 per cent of the world’s needs are supplied by only five reactors, all of them more than 40 years old. A Nuclear Energy Agency workshop in Paris has produced a series of recommendations to secure an uninterrupted supply of isotopes.
Incidentally, the International Atomic Energy Agency says nuclear science can come to the aid of African and Asian food supplies. Exposing seeds of staple grains to radiation can bring desired changes to plants, making them resistant to drought or certain diseases and enabling them to thrive in saline soil. If countries can’t afford this “radiation breeding” the IAEA says it will do it for them free of charge.
Now the good news
Although we champ at the bit over our leisurely nuclear renaissance, a lot is going on. In the UK British Energy has brought two of its AGRs, out of service for almost 18 months with boiler repairs, back on line – in time for the worst winter weather in 18 years.
Jim Murphy, Secretary of State for Scotland, has twice assaulted Scotland’s anti-nuke stance, saying the ruling Scottish National Party “offers no sophisticated argument” against nuclear power. Spain’s Iberdrola and France’s GDF Suez have entered into partnership to work with Scottish and Southern on the construction of new nuclear power plants in the UK.
In Europe 14 countries have come together to work on the idea of a shared nuclear waste repository. Sweden has scrapped its anti-nuclear policy, putting Germany’s phase-out of nuclear power under pressure. Italy now aims to generate 25 per cent of its electricity with nuclear power and has created a Government department to secure the country’s nuclear power revival. And the French have decided to build a second new reactor at Penly.
America is positively heaving with proposed nuclear power projects and its Nuclear Energy Institute says it is one of the few economic bright spots – expanding rather than contracting.
Boredom
We have had only three communications in response to a Bath member’s reprimand last month for using the Newsletter as a vehicle for scepticism about global warming. Steuart Campbell (Edinburgh) backed the Bath argument that SONE should concentrate on promoting nuclear power and not doubting global warming.
Terri Jackson, of Bangor, Northern Ireland, founder of the Institute of Physics’ Energy group, said there was no scientific evidence that climate change is due mainly to human activity. Neil Craig, of Glasgow, supported open debate even if he sometimes disagreed with the Newsletter. Our conclusion: our members are bored with this.
Stop press
The Independent reported (Feby 23) the conversion of four environmentalists to nuclear power – Stephen Tindale, former director of Greenpeace; Lord Chris Smith, chairman, Environment Agency; Mark Lynas (Royal Society’s book of the year); and Chris Goodall, Green Party prospective candidate. Wonders never cease.
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