Dangerous Prophecies

 I fully admit to being an energy wonk and this week I have been engaged in an intensely wonkish activity, reading government energy reports from the Energy Information Administration, which is about as wonky a bureaucracy as you could ever hope to find.  The EIA is the division of the federal Department of Energy that is responsible for tracking, reporting and forecasting energy use within the U.S.  I have been perusing the latest EIA forecasts for energy through the year 2040, in other words a 27 year forecast.  The experience has actually gotten me a bit riled up, which is probably surpising, given how truly dull the data is.

What's bothering me is that the EIA forecasts appear so completely out of touch with what is going on in the energy world today, especially renewable energy.  The EIA Annual Energy Outlook for 2013 forecasts a world in which they basic energy mix of the United States remains relatively unchanged for nearly 30 years, a rather depressing future that only oil companies could love!

 

For example, according to the EIA forecast by the year 2040 the United States will be using less coal to generate electricity than it does today(42%) which is a good thing.  However, it projects that way out in 2040 we will still be getting 35% of  our electricity from burning coal.  My initial reaction to this was, "What, you think we are all suicidal?"  I mean think about it, 27 more years of spewing coal into the atmosphere! 27 more years of poisoning the land with strip mining and coal ash.  By that point global warming would be so bad we could go sunbathing in the arctic!  Seriously, how could the EIA presume that in 27 years, with renewables getting cheaper every year, that we would continue to use coal to generate the bulk of our electricity? I wonder what the EPA thinks of this type of forecast!  The EPA has recently cracked down on the types of emissions new coal plants can produce and appears ready to put out equally strict emissions standards for existing coal plants.  Wouldn't it be far more logical to presume that these EPA regulations will significantly reduce the use of coal for generating electricity?

The problem with this recent IEA forecast is not only that it flies in the face of environmental reality, it flies in the face of economic reality.  The cost of using coal to generate electricity is already more than using either natural gas or renewable energy, even more so if you count the cost of the damage that coal does to our environment and health.  Moreover, all the data suggests that coal reserves are progressively getting more expensive to mine, not less. The EPA emissions regulations will probably also drive up costs for those plants that might try to reduce their emissions, rather than shutting down.  Given these increased costs why would we presume that the U.S. will continue to use a more expensive energy source for the next 27!

A Poor Track Record

The EIA doesn't have a particularly good track record when it comes to forecasting.  It completely missed the change in oil demand brought on by the growth of countries like India and China.  It also missed just how expensive oil would become given increasing global demand.  So in that sense I shouldn't be surprised that they seem to be missing the forecasts once again.  What bothers me the most about these reports is the ways in which they seem to dismiss renewable energy without any real justification.

For example, the report uses as a premise that federal tax credits for renewables will expire in 2016 and will never be renewed.  Huh?  On what basis does the EIA make this assumption?  Support for energy tax credits has been growing and attempts to kill them, such as when some members of Congress recently tried to make Wind tax credits part of the sequester, got completely rejected because the Republican congressmen from the plains states know just how fantastic renewables have been for their economy.  Why therefore should we presume that tax credits will expire and never be seen for the next 25 years?

Similarly, the report seems to totally discount the effect that state level Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) could have on renewable energy expansion.  The report says "...they have been relatively quiet in terms of state program expansions."  Again, I gotta say "Huh?"   State level RPS programs have been going gangbusters for the last decade and several states such as California and Colorado have even increased their renewable energy targets given how successful they have proven to be so far. And people are starting to notice that the states with RPS programs are having the greatest overall economic success.  Therefore why would we make energy forecasts assuming that all of the states will suddenly abandon their RPS programs?

Self Fulfilling Prophecies

OK, I realize many of you are probably thinking, so what if EIA got the forecasts wrong.  Prognosticators always get things wrong.  True!  However, it is also true that forecasts and predictions can quickly become self-fulfilling prophecies.  That is true not only in the negative sense but in the positive sense as well.  Predict good things will happen and more often than not they do.  Heck, this is part of the reason why Renewable Portfolio Standards work so well.  We presume a specific target for reducing our fossil fuel dependence, and sure enough the regulations and other efforts needed to make it happen, do happen. 

This is why we need to keep on the EIA about getting these forecasts right.  If they are going to project a dim, never ending fossil-fuel future they should be pushed to justify it, less we all become caught up in a future that we don't want to live in!



 

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Fukushima USA

When I'm not busy being an environmental activist and an unrepentant liberal,I actually attempt to have a life, which I must admit is a whole lot easier to do since I retired out here on the central coast.  Last weekend I was out at one of my favorite wineries, Sculpterra, listening to music from my friend Steve Key, a local music promoter, performer and songwriter who performed a new song which was so completely perfect for what I wanted to write about that I requested and got his permission to include his lyrics in this post.

The song is called Fukushima USA and you can hear him perform it on his Web site by clicking on this link. In the song Steve is referring to the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California which is located not only right on top of a geological fault line, but just 20 miles from the city of San Luis Obisop, here in the wine country.  Here's a bit of the lyrics:

Local wines by the bottle or taste
Pools filled up with nuclear waste
Nowhere to send it, so it’s here to stay In Fukushima USA
The sunshine and the skies so clear
How could anything bad happen here?
That’s what the Japanese used to say Now it’s Fukushima USA

They had reactors built by GE
All the latest technology
A nineteen foot high seawall
Wasn’t much protection at all

But don’t think about that distant land
Things are safer here than in Japan
Relax and sip a little chardonnay
In Fukushima USA

At a time when the rest of the more or less sane world is running away from nuclear power like it was, well radioactive, the United States appears headed in the opposite direction. Last week the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) voted 4-1 to allow Atlanta-based Southern Company to build two new nuclear power reactors at its existing Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia. This represents the first approval of a new nuclear power plant in the U.S. in over 30 years.

The one silver lining in the vote was that it was the Chairman of the NRC,Gregory Jaczko , who cast the dissenting vote.  Jaczko said "I cannot support issuing this license as if Fukushima never happened. I believe it requires some type of binding commitment that the Fukushima enhancements that are currently projected and currently planned to be made would be made before the operation of the facility." Sounds like common sense to me, too bad the rest of the commission didn't show any.

The timing of this announcement also strikes me as completely out of step.  The Obama administation has just gone through a year of getting beat up about providing loan guarantees to Solyndra, a solar energy company.  And so just when they are being scrutinized about the economics of their energy policy they approve the first nuclear plant in 30 years.  Good gracious, nuclear plants are practically the poster children for cost overruns! They are guaranteed to cost the public exorbitant amounts of money even if there isn't a nuclear accident.  (And by the way nuclear accidents are not exactly cheap. Experts estimate the Fukushima accident will end up costing Japan over $257 billion dollars!).

If you want to see proof of this you need to look no further than this handy little table provided by the independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO). It shows a chart of the cost overruns at nuclear plants to date. The data is not pretty!

Cost Overruns for Nuclear Plants

Year Begun	Number of Plants	Projected Costs(thousands per MW)	Actual Costs (thousands per MW)	Cost Overrun %
1966 to 1967	11	612	1,279	109%
1968 to 1969	26	741	2,180	194%
1970 to 1971	12	829	2,889	248%
1972 to 1973	7	1,220	3,882	218%
1974 to 1975	14	1,263	4,817	281%
1976 to 1977	5	1,630	4,377	169%
Overall Average	13	938	2,959	207%

There is a reason we stopped building nuclear plants and it wasn't the one most people think. It wasn't 3 Mile Island, or nuclear waste disposal, or nuclear accidents, it was the fact that nuclear energy plants proved to be ridiculously expensive. So here we are in the middle of the worst recession since the great depression, at a time when wind and solar energy have never been cheaper, and our government wants to support the development of more nuclear plants?

We have often been very supportive at EB of the progressive energy policies of the Obama administration, but on this one they just got it wrong, very wrong! Nuclear energy is too expensive and we still have no solution on how to handle nuclear waste! Moreover, there should be a complete moratorium on nuclear plants until we fully understand the implications from Fukushima. Now is not the time to build Fukushima USA!

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

Is Religious Environmentalism Taking Hold?

In creating the EnergyBible.com Website one of our goals was to provide the broadest and most complete perspective on the issues of energy use and renewable energy. Towards that end we have included within the site information about moral and spiritual perspectives on the environment because we have found that for many of us issues such as global warming, energy use and environmental stewardship are not simply political issues, they are moral ones. So from time to time on this blog we will be talking about what is going on in the world of faith-based organizations as they, like us, struggle to find the best solutions for out planet moving forward. This week there was a lot happening on that front.

Most of the major religious organizations have been debating envionmental issues for some time. However, as the scientific realities of global warming have begun to sink into our consciousness many organizations are seeing pressure from within to begin to become more actively involved in addressing environmental issues. This was the case with at the Southern Baptist Convention this week . The Southern Baptist Convention is a conglomeration of Southern Baptist churches and they have a yearly meeting, which (just to add to the confusion) is also called the Southern Baptist Convention. This week at their annual conference 44 of their leaders made a significant departure from the Southern Baptist Convention’s official stance on global warming by backing a declaration calling for more action on climate change, saying its previous position on the issue was “too timid.”

In many ways this action represents a major step forward in the area of religious environmentalism. The Southern Baptist church is a huge organization with over 16 million members and is the largest denomination in the United States after the Roman Catholic Church. Moreover, the Southern Baptist Church has always been extremely conservative when it comes to environmental issues. This may be about to change given that its current president, the Rev. Frank Page, signed the initiative, “A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change.” Two past presidents of the convention, the Rev. Jack Graham and the Rev. James Merritt, also signed. These church leaders stated that “We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues has often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice,”

As recently as 2007 the Southern Baptists passed a resolution which took a very skeptical view of global warming. In contrast, the new declaration says that “Our cautious response to these issues in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed. ”The document also urges ministers to preach more about the environment and for all Baptists to keep an open mind about considering environmental policy. The leaders said that current evidence of global warming is "substantial," and that the threat is too grave to wait for perfect knowledge about whether, or how much, people contribute to the trend.

Because the Southern Baptist Convention is an aggregation of individual churches such announcments are not in any way binding upon the individual churches. This is not the Catholic Church we are talking about. Yet because many of the signatories were both present and past church leaders it is likely that many Baptist preachers and members will give such announcements considerable thought. That strikes us as a good thing. A basic tenet of the Christian faith, and for that matter of most faiths, is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I sincerely believe that most of us would like to live in a clean, pollution free world where no one suffers as a result of our mishandling of the environment. I also sincerely believe that most of us want to survive period! Global warming threatens all of this. We certainly would not want our neighbors doing things that might threaten our environment and therefore our own existance. Consequently we should avoid doing these things ourselves.

Exactly what is the best way to go about our lives such that we don't cause damage to the environment, our neighbors and ourselves is not always easy to see. It will require better understanding of the planet, of the environment and ultimately of our own nature. It was towards this end that the EnergyBible.com Website was created. As we continue to study and research the field of renewable energy and the environment, we hope you will share your own learnings with us so that together we can come up with the most effective solutions. Should you have any knowledge, experience or opionions that you think would be helpful please don't hesitate to write to us. We look forward to hearing from you!

The Marketing of Fear

I was watching the news on NBC last night and one of their stories was about some house fire that was being attributed to "eco-terrorists". The paranoid part of me would like to say this was just another attempt by the current administration to promote bad environmental policies by playing the terrorist card but unfortunately it is not that simple. The fact is that nearly every story NBC presented last night involved some form of fear mongering, or perhaps I should say fear "marketing". The story that followed was about obesity issues (kids not getting enough breakfast which lead to increased obesity) and the one after that was some fear generating story about the recession.

The whole experience got me thinking about what is the difference between the marketing of fear and just reporting on the news, which is after all the job of any news organization. In thinking about it I tried to contrast the mainstream NBC news (CBS and ABC would be no better) and that of the other news program I watch, the PBS News with Jim Lehrer. My conclusion is that it all comes down to time. In the half hour mainstream news each story last between 30 seconds and two minutes because when you take away the commercials the actual news time is only 15 minutes. In a couple of minutes it is only possible to roughly outline problems. There is never enough time to go into the complete details behind a problem much less to discuss possible solutions.

Compare this to the stories on the PBS news. Besides an initial news summary that last usually 3-4 minutes, the rest of the 60 minute broadcast is devoted to covering three or four stories in depth. Because there are few if any commercials each story gets abut 8-10 minutes of coverage. This usually allows enough time to not only present the problem being discussed but time to explore potential solutions that people are currently being explored.

I am always struck by how different the PBS news feels than the conventional news. The conventional news leaves me feeling distraught and worried. I know there is a problem out there but I don't have enough details to analyze it so it sits there like some cloud of doom, amorphous but scary. Since no solutions are ever discussed one gets a sense of hopelessness and despair.

On the other hand on the PBS news I am presented with the same problems but I am given a much better explanation about the details behind the problem. This allows me to engage my intellect and figure out where in the grand scheme of things this particular issue should fit. Are there solutions? Does it really impact me personally? Because I have details and because potential solutions are discussed I come to envision it as yet one more challenge in a life where challenges are to be expected. Not necessarily a good thing but something that I am resigned to dealing with. A far different sensibility than what the mainstream news organizations engender.

Why do I bring this up on my Energy Bible blog? Simple, the environmental media is often as guilty as the mainstream media in playing upon people's fears. Its not that environmental problems are not important or even critical, its that too often the environmental media has been equally guilty of presenting critical topics like global warming or energy with the same lack of detail and analysis that we see on the nightly news shows. As an environmental activist I see it as our duty not to engage in the same type of self-serving fear marketing as the traditional media.

I am convinced that the United States, and the world for that matter, are facing a demanding set of problems caused by decades of poorly managing our production and use of energy. The problems are complex and will not be solved quickly. That being said I have tremendous faith in the ingenuity of human beings and am confident that the problems are something we can address and there are thousands of people around the planet coming up with practical solutions to our energy problems every day. The Energy Bible Web site is dedicated not just to pointing out the problems, but to sharing these solutions. We try hard to provide complete information on each energy topic with enough depth that a person can make good judgements as to how to proceed. To us, this type of detailed and comprehensive coverage of energy issues and solutions is the antidote to fear marketing. We hope you agree!