FORBES/WOLFE Weekly Insider:
FEB.6.2009 by Josh Wolfe (email: nanotech@forbes.com )
two of the most compelling arguments I’ve seen for a more rational prioritization. Ignore them at your own rational, intellectual and financial peril! The first is from Peter Huber, the second from Philip Stott.
Before I give Peter the stage, consider this summary argument from Philip Stott:
'Climate change has to be broken down into three questions: 'Is climate changing and in what direction?' 'Are humans influencing climate change, and to what degree?' And: 'Are humans able to manage climate change predictably by adjusting one or two factors out of the thousands involved?' The most fundamental question is: 'Can humans manipulate climate predictably?' Or, more scientifically: 'Will cutting carbon dioxide emissions at the margin produce a linear, predictable change in climate?' The answer is 'No'. In so complex a coupled, non-linear, chaotic system as climate, not doing something at the margins is as unpredictable as doing something. This is the cautious science; the rest is dogma.”
ARGUMENT #1: First from fellow Forbes columnist Peter Huber as broadcast on NPR’s Intelligence Squared—during a debate on whether the cost to abate carbon was worth it:
“Well, while he was running, Barack Obama was heard to say that he would bankrupt our coal industry. Now, I don’t doubt Washington’s ability to bankrupt almost anything in the United States. But, [APPLAUSE] but China is currently adding a hundred gigs of coal electricity a year. That’s one entire United States worth of coal consumption every three years. There is no end in sight and there are other countries, all across the globe, following exactly in its footsteps. So let me say here quickly, where I end up and then try and tell you how I get there.
We rich people of the planet can’t stop the other five billion poor people from burning a couple of trillion tons of carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any real dent in global emissions because the emissions are growing too fast, they involve too much involvement by very poor people who can’t easily change their ways and because those poor people are part of the same global economy as us. And if we are foolish enough, which we could well be, we will let carbon worries send our jobs to their shores and they will grow even faster and carbon emissions will grow faster still. It should go without saying, we don’t control global supply of carbon.
Ten countries ruled by thoroughly nasty people control eighty percent of the world’s oil, a trillion barrels currently worth fifty trillion dollars at current market prices. Now, if I told you that there was that value in gold where it actually is, where the oil actually is, you would scoff at any suggestion that anything we could do, no matter what we spent, could force those people to keep that oil in the ground. It’s all they’ve got. They will drill it. They will pump it. They will find a market and somebody will burn it. Poor countries all around this planet are sitting on a trillion tons of readily accessible coal. It’s all they’ve got for energy beyond the other great carbon reservoir of the planet, which is the rain forests and the soils, which they also, by and large, control. They will squeeze the carbon they can out of cheap coal, cheap forests and cheap soil, because that’s what’s there, unless they can get something even cheaper than that.
And that, as I shall discuss shortly, is going to take some doing. We no longer control demand for carbon, either. The five billion poor people are already the main problem – not us. If you have heard otherwise, you have heard wrong. Collectively, the poor already emit twenty per cent more greenhouse gas than we do. We burn a lot more carbon individually, of course, but they have a lot more children. Their fecundity has beaten out our gluttony and the gap is now widening very fast. [APPLAUSE] China, not the United States, is now the largest emitter of greenhouse gas on the planet and it will soon be joined by others. It’s only a matter of time. And finally, the poor countries have made perfectly clear that they are not interested at all in spending what a low carb diet would cost. They have more pressing problems. So it really does come down to this. First, can we give the world something cheaper than carbon?
The moon shot law of economics says, Why, yes, we can. If we just really put our minds to it, it will happen -- atom bomb, moon landing, energy, you name it. No, not this time. Fossil fuels are very cheap because they concentrate a lot of energy in a small space. You find a mountain of coal and you can just shovel gargantuan amounts of energy into the boxcars. Renewable fuels like sun and wind are much harder. Windmills are now fifty story skyscrapers, yet one windmill generates a piddling two megawatts. A jumbo needs a hundred megawatts to get off the ground. Google is building hundred megawatt servers just to move bits around. Meeting New York City’s total energy demand would require something like thirteen thousand windmills spinning at full speed or more like fifty thousand windmills scattered all over the state because you’ve gotta have enough of them to be sure enough of them are in the windy spots.
What was your Mayor thinking when he suggested that you might just tuck them into Manhattan? I mean, that kind of thinking betrays a very common view that, [APPLAUSE] In fact, it betrays a profound ignorance about how difficult it is to get huge amounts of energy out of these very dilute, thin forms of fuel, like sun and wind. Renewable technologies are not moving down the same plummeting cost curves that we’ve seen in our laptops and our cell phones. When you replace conventional with renewable everything gets bigger, not smaller – much, much bigger – and costs get higher, not lower. China and India won’t trade three cent coal for fifteen cent wind or thirty cent solar.
And if we force those expensive technologies on ourselves, we will certainly end up doing more harm than good. Twenty percent of the planet buys much less carbon, the other eighty percent will be delighted to buy at a lower price. The real jobs will go where the energy is cheap, just as they go where the labor is cheap because manufacturing and heavy industry require so much energy. And in a global economy you can’t possibly compete if you’re paying two or three times as much as your competitors for an essential input. Green jobs means Americans paying other Americans to chase carbon while the rest of the world builds power plants and factories. But the rest of the world is less efficient than us and less careful. A massive transfer of carbon and industry and jobs from us to them will raise carbon emissions. It will not lower them.
So, unless we are going to ask the Pentagon to take charge – and good luck with that -- we don’t have the power to deliver any lasting reduction in global carbon emissions at all. Whatever we might achieve in the very short term at home, we can’t control the global supply of carbon. We can’t control the five billion poor people who desperately want to burn it and who already control more of the demand than we do. And we can’t control the flight of jobs and industry to where the industry is cheap. Frantically chasing the impossible and falling flat on your face doesn’t make things better. It often makes things worse and it’s never worth the money. [APPLAUSE]
ARGUMENT #2: Philip Stott of University of London
I really wish I could believe that we can manage the costs that would control climate. Very sadly, I have to quote Samuel Johnson, the great British lexicographer. “An obstinate stubbornness, a rationality, stops me believing it.” And with a twinkle in my eye, because we’re in New York and near Wall Street, what I want to show, very dangerously, is that, climate science and these costs are sub-prime science…sub-prime economics, [APPLAUSE] and above all, sub-prime politics. And they will cost us dear, despite what Adam and Oliver and Hunter will be saying. And we’ve got to be very, very careful. And Bjorn used a very important phrase.
Let’s not just follow what’s fashionable. In fact, Johnson again had a wonderful phrase for it. “Let’s not be befuddled, by the clamor of the times.” [APPLAUSE] Let me therefore start, by science, I’m not going to say much on science because, I agree with what Robert said, right at the start in this. It’s actually not very much about the science, it’s always been about economic and political choice. Everything is when it comes down to it, like it or not. But I just want you to have one image, and it’s a very serious scientific image, I want you to think of the world…I want you to think of the world from inner Siberia, to Greenland, then to Singapore, and then come to the Arab states and to Sahara. What, ladies and gentlemen, is the temperature range I have just covered. It is from minus 20 degrees C, to nearly 50 degrees C, a range of 70 degrees C, in which humanity has adapted and learnt to live. [APPLAUSE] We are talking about, ignoring the extremes that Oliver said, a prediction of 2 to 3 degrees C, what a funk! [LAUGHTER, [APPLAUSE] I’m very serious, what a funk! Humanity lives successfully from Greenland to Singapore to Saudi Arabia. 70 degrees C. And what is more, the carbon reductions will not produce an outcome that is predictable. Climate is the most complex, coupled, nonlinear, chaotic system known to man. Of course there are human influences in it, nobody denies that. But what outcome will they get, by fiddling with one variable at the margins. I’m sorry, it’s scientific nonsense. And a very serious nonsense. [APPLAUSE] But it’s the economics above all, because that’s the motion, the costs. I come from the left wing politically. I am fed up with environmentalists putting regressive costs and taxes on the poor. [APPLAUSE] It always costs more in the end, whatever Adam and the other say, and it’s always fundamentally on the poor.
They’ve forgotten the famous Jevons Paradox, Professor Jevons from my own country, University College, London, that actually when you save on energy, you don’t really save, you simply transfer it to new energy costs, and actually probably issue more CO2. So when you save energy you take another holiday, you take another flight, your CO2 increases. And he demonstrated that in the 19th century. Have we forgotten this basic economics.
But above all, it’s this. I’m going to be honest about this, I don’t trust the environmentalist agenda. For 30 to 40 years, what they have fundamentally been wanting to do, is place an infinity in cost-benefit. In other words, so that the rationality of economic choices is undermined by effectively a religious choice, not an economic choice. [APPLAUSE] Under an infinity of course, choice is not made under the procedures that were put down by Peter, and by Bjorn.
But it won’t work. And that leads me, it becomes a closed system of thought, and that always worries me deeply. But it’s the politics then, finally, sub-prime politics. We are full of eco-poseurs and in the United States you have some gems. [LAUGHTER] I don’t think I need to mention them. But what we’ve got to remember is that, this motion is about the cost of artificially in a sense, forcing down the carbon. Energy security, efficiency, are [UNCLEAR] of course they’re absolutely vital. Energy security will become of the major themes…of the Obama administration, and rightly so, but that isn’t artificially forcing down carbon. And exactly as Peter said, only this week, China announced a 30 percent increase by 2015, in its coal production. Actually announced that only this week. And in a sense, we are not being realistic. As I said I would love to be able to think we can control climate, when of course it is indeed going to have to be adaptation, flexibility put to an outcome that we don’t know ‘cause I actually don’t know what climate, they’re wanting to produce for us. And actually I don’t think they know either. [APPLAUSE]
But let me come back to Johnson again, ‘cause Johnson said everything—Bible, Shakespeare and Johnson, you’ve got it. [LAUGHTER] And Johnson said virtually everything. In a very, very brilliant book that he wrote in the 18th century there called Rasselas, he talks of an astronomer who claims that he can control climate. This is what he says. “The sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction. The clouds at my call, have poured their waters.” And what does Johnson say about this astronomer—astronomer? He was mad! And so are we, if we actually believe we can control climate predictably, the costs in every sense will be enormous. Oh, mamma mia. We are the dancing queens. Let’s give this global warming nonsense, its Waterloo tonight. Thank you.”"
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
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The Peter Huber article was one of the best I've read in a long time.
ReplyDeleteRuthless crystalline lucid logic.
Loved it!