Magical Thinking and the Republican Party

Everyone engages in a little magical thinking from time to time. I personally have engaged in a ton of it at times. For example, at one point in my life I constructed a very nice fantasy involving the re-emergence of fairies from the middle ages. They were ever so useful. There was the Coffee Fairy who would bring me fresh coffee every morning. There was the Tax Preparation Fairy who would magically calculate my taxes every year with the outcome always ending up in a big refund. There was the Dishes Fairy who ..... well, you get the idea. Unfortunately, like Linus and the Great Pumpkin, my fairy people never actually did appear and so now, years later, I am still forced to deal with the dreary tasks of every day life.

At least I have the comfort of knowing I am not the only one engaging in magical thinking who has been disappointed. During our recent 2010 elections here in California it became increasingly evident that the Republican Party and its now embraced off-shoot, the Tea Party, are even better at engaging in magical thinking than I am. A recent Pew Poll of Republican Party members released in October found that "A 53%-majority of Republicans say there is no solid evidence the earth is warming. Among Tea Party Republicans, fully 70% say there is no evidence."

What is particularly interesting about this poll is that it actually represents a major retrenchment from polls taken just a few years ago (2007) when only 31% of the Republicans said global warming didn't exist. It seems that in this age of hyper-partisan politics even science is in play. Based on recent comments from the Republican leadership it appears many leading Republicans are approaching it from another perspective. According to John Shimkus of Illinois, God not science should be the source we should be relying on. At a a climate hearing last year he said "The earth will end only when God decides it's time to be over. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.". Shimkus may be right but in the meantime I think I will buy a wet suit because first, I have a hunch God wants us to clean up our own messes, and second, the actual scientific data is pointing in the opposite direction.

I don't claim that scientists are infallible, just that when taken as a very large group they tend to be right most of the time. Currently many of them have begun to change some of their thinking about global warming. Unfortunately, it is not in the direction our friends in the Republican Party would like to see things go. It turns out that scientists are finding that global warming may be much worse than they originally thought. In particular, the antarctic is warming at a rate that is truly alarming.

According to a new report from the U.S. Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey the ice shelves in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula appear to be disappearing because of climate change. This summer's loss of ice was much worse than any of the scientists had predicted. "The loss of ice shelves is evidence of the effects of global warming," says USGS scientist and lead author Jane Ferrigno. Since 1998, the ice lost from just one of the five ice shelves in the study totals more than 1,500 square miles, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.

Its not just the antarctic that is at issue. Global temperatures in the first half of the year were the hottest since records began more than a century ago. Scientists from two leading climate research centres have also recently released what they described as the "best evidence yet" of rising long-term temperatures. Their report looked at 11 different indicators, each one based on between three and seven data sets, dating back to between 1850 and the 1970s. Peter Stott, the head of climate modelling at the UK Met Office, said despite variations between individual years, the evidence was unequivocal: "When you follow those decade-to-decade trends then you see clearly and unmistakably signs of a warming world".

OK so given the most current data the scientists have provided it seems the world is getting warmer. What are we going to do about it? It appears the Republican strategy is not only to deny the problem but to try and make it even worse. This year the California Republican party, egged on by some very wealthy Texas oil millionaires, decided to try and repeal or at least postpone the current California environmental laws (AB32)that could have at least minimized the increase in global warming pollutants. Unfortunately for the Republicans, those wild and crazy California voters rejected this proposition (Proposition 23)and decided to continue fighting global warming.

I am sure this was a big setback for the party in Red, but I think I see their problem. The Republican strategy of magical thinking where they simply imagined all of the scientists were wrong and that global warming would magically go away was simply not enticing enough for the average voter. I mean if you are going to create an imaginary world at least create a really good one. Personally I would suggest that it involve strong doses of Pamela Anderson, a repeal of all taxes, and most importantly, the resurgence of the Coffee Fairy!

Dan Daniel
Editor, EnergyBible.com

The Real Problem with Nuclear Energy

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision which struck down the existing laws limiting contributions from corporations is bound to have some immediate impact. Look for lots of campaign commercials from the Nuclear lobby promoting your friendly neighborhood nuclear power plant (along with continuing absurd commercials about the mythical "clean coal"). The doors are now wide open for big corporate energy interests to campaign and we doubt that they will waste any time beating down our virtual doors. However, it is my fervent hope that the public will think twice about buying the pitch for more nuclear plants. Increasing our use of nuclear energy would be very bad policy, though not necessarily for the reason most citizens think.

When most people think about nuclear energy the first thoughts that come to mind probably have something to do with Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or other glow-in-the-dark scenarios. Nuclear waste also frequently rears its head as a concern given that nuclear waste is dangerous for thousands of years. However, it may be that the biggest thing we should be worrying about (though it doesn't make for a good movie of the week) is the whooshing sound of dollars leaving our wallet, because when looked at carefully it quickly becomes clear that nuclear power plants are just too darn expensive.

An excellent explanation of this provided yesterday by Elliott Negin, the media director for the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C. in an article that appeared recently on the GreenTechMedia web site. Negrin points out that there have been no new nuclear plants built by utility companies since 1973. The energy companies don't want them because they know how expensive they are. A bit of history is in order. As Negin points out "In the 1960s and 1970s, the industry proposed to build some 200 plants, but as construction costs escalated, only about half were finished. Taxpayers and ratepayers were left footing the bill -- about $300 billion in today's dollars -- for abandoned plants, cost overruns for completed plants, and stranded investments that were higher than the wholesale market price for power. "

The Nuclear lobby has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to approve the building of 26 new nuclear power plants. The cost of these plants would be extraordinary, probably in the range of $7-9 billion dollars apiece. What makes this a bigger concern is that the nuclear power companies are asking for taxpayers to finance these risky investments despite the fact that prior investments led to hundreds of billions of dollars of loss. The Nuclear Energy Institute, which is the lobbying arm for the nuclear industry has petitioned the commission to provide over $100 billion in loan guarantees so they can build the nuclear plants. Folks, this is not chump change. We are talking Iraq war kind of dollars here. Moreover, we are looking at loan guarantees that the nuclear companies could very easily default on. The GAO, the Government Accountability Office estimates that the risk of the nuclear companies defaulting on these loans is at least 50%. I can't imagine any business guaranteeing loans with a 10% risk, much less 50% risk. This is just bad business!

The argument put forward by the nuclear industry is, of course, that the demand for electricity is growing and nuclear plants do not contribute to global warming. Both arguments are true, but what they are not telling us is that there are far better alternatives for getting the renewable energy we need, lots of alternatives.

Let's start with solar energy, for example. As of January 2010 solar has rapidly emerged as an increasingly competitive way of generating commercial electricity. The current cost of a kilowatt-hour of solar energy is hovering around 19 cents per kilowatt hour which is still a bit above nuclear energy costs. However, the cost of photovoltaic panels has dropped by half in 2009 while at the same time the efficiency of the panels went up. Once commercial electric plants begin incorporating these cheaper panels most experts believe PV electricity costs will drop to around 9-11 cents per kilowatt hour which would make them very competitive if not cheaper than electricity from nuclear power plants.

Solar energy can also be generated using solar heat, particularly if the plant is built somewhere in the southwest US where temperatures are high. Solar thermal plants have become far more efficient as the technology becomes refined. There are many solar thermal plants in development that rival nuclear plants in scale. Many of these plants will also address one limitation of solar energy which is its intermittent nature. Recent breakthroughs in the storage of solar thermal energy using molten salt now allow the solar thermal energy to be stored overnight so that the plants can generate energy 24 hours per. This will make them even more viable alternatives to nuclear power plants.

Wind energy is yet another alternative to nuclear power. Large utility scale wind turbines are being manufactured in increasing numbers and as a result are becoming bigger and more cost effective. Over the last 20 years, the cost of electricity from utility-scale wind systems has dropped by more than 80%. In the early 1980s, when the first utility-scale turbines were installed, wind-generated electricity cost as much as 30 cents per kilowatt-hour. Modern wind farms are now producing energy at closer to 4-6cents per kilowatt-hour when you account for the Production Tax Credit. In turn most nuclear power plants are producing energy at somewhere between 11-14 cents per kilowatt-hour when you account for the cost of storing depleted nuclear fuel. Wind farms produce electricity at far less cost and do this without generating any carbon emissions, no radiation risks and without the long-term problem of disposing of nuclear waste. When you look at the whole picture wind energy becomes a no brainer!

Despite these economic hard times are choices for generating cleaner and less expensive energy have never been better. That makes it all the more important that we choose wisely. Give it some thought!