M. Simon,

a) A very common explanation that I have heard for the drop in C-O2 production in the U.S. is that a lot of the manufacturing activity has gone over to China. That makes the U.S. numbers look better for awhile, but since the C-O2 issue is a global one, it doesn't really address the issue of global warming.

b) Further, a 1.3% reduction for one year is tiny. We are going to need drastic reductions in C-O2 production, globally, to make a difference.

c) Market mechanisms can certainly be used. Commonly discussed ones are carbon taxes and cap & trade approaches. The cap & trade methodology was spear-headed in the U.S. to curb the acid-rain problem, and worked pretty well.

d) Whereas all that I have heard from the Bush administration sounds like a carry-over from the Bush administration (version Texas), which was to encourage businesses to reduce pollution without any penalties. Apparently, it didn't work very well.

USCAP is an association of U.S. corporations and environmental groups calling for an economy-wide market-driven approach to climate protection. Members include: Alcan, Alcoa, AIG, BP America, Caterpillar, ConocoPhillips, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, DuPont, General Electric, General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo, PG&E, Shell, Siemens. Their website (http://www.us-cap.org/) describes their point of view and lays out a plan.

d) You keep mentioning Germany as being non-compliant with their Kyoto agreements. All that shows is that German corporations have powerful reasons to fight C-O2 emissions restrictions too; the problem is not confined to the U.S. Why should this be considered a surprise? I'm pretty sure that German cigarette companies, like the U.S. ones, fought bitterly against the warnings printed on cigarette packages, as well. The major difference is the attitude of the governments. The head of the German government, Angela Merkel, is trying to push for more reductions in C-O2 emissions in the European Union. Whereas the U.S. is trying to scuttle C-O2-reduction plans.

The difference in attitude showed up in the earlier issue as well. The notice on U.S. cigarette packs is rather mild, but the German ones say rather starkly, "Smoking can be deadly."

Neal,

Cigarettes are an anti-depressant. You ban them you will have a black market. Then you get a tobacco problem and a crime problem.

Capitalism (constantly doing more with less) and technology are the only ways out.

BTW German industrialists will not invest in more efficient energy production if the profits are being eaten up in taxes. Read my article on the subject or the link provided in the article.

It turns out for a capitalist (free exchange) economy the carbon taxes are counter productive.

M. Simon,

- I have never suggested banning cigarettes. My point was that the German statement on the box was a lot harsher than the equivalent U.S. statement.

- Capitalism works very well with well-defined incentives. The example I gave was the cap & trade used to combat acid rain. Why should that approach work less well for carbon than for sulfates?

- I'm not as familiar with your website as you are. It would be helpful if you would provide a direct link to what you're suggesting I look at.

Neal,

The price of electricity has already doubled in Germany. It is not enough. Their economy is being strangled and CO2 is still rising.

The reason SO2 trading worked is that it only increased electrical costs by a fraction. You are talking multiple intiger increases.

Here is what is happening in some of the smaller (Poland and the Czech Republic etc.) EU countries.

http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2007/05/what-will-happen-when-agw-bubble-bursts.html

China's CO2 output in increasing at 10% a year. That means a doubling in 7 years.

What will you propose for third world countries? Strangling their economies? Surely they will be forever grateful.

Here is the article on Germany,

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2007/05/kyoto-destroying-european-economy.html

*

This article presents me with the last straw. I came here looking for enlightening discussion with people who disagree with me. Instead, all I have found is propaganda:

1. The endless repetition of falsehoods long after those falsehoods have been refuted.

2. The twisting and distortion of truth.

3. The cherry-picking of facts to support claims that are contradicted by the great mass of facts.

4. The frequent denigrative comments about authorities who disagree with the propagandist.

5. The refusal to respond to direct refutations of false or misleading claims.

6. The semantic acrobatics that defy logic and abuse reason.

I have long since abandoned any hope of convincing Mr. Simon of anything -- the very notion of Mr. Simon altering any of his views seems preposterous to me. I did hope that I could at least provide the readership with some service in pointing out the flaws in Mr. Simon's postings. However, Mr. King is doing a magnificent job in this regard and I must express my admiration for both his erudition and his patience. I would suggest, Mr. King, that your talents are wasted here; there are thousands of venues for intelligent discussion on the Web, and this one is one of the less intelligent sites; I would like to see your informative commentary reaching a wider audience. I know that I have learned a great deal from your comments and I'm sure that there are many, many others who could similarly profit from them.

I take my leave now, offering my best wishes to the readership.

M. Simon,

Germany
- Price of electricity: I live in Germany. I haven't noticed anything special, nor have I heard any complaints. Although I won't state you are certainly wrong, my searching on the web so far doesn't show any recent doubling in the cost of electricity.
- Germany has a bit of rigidity, so they are caught in a tough position: they're worried about depending too much on Russia for fuel (for good reason), they have sworn off nuclear power, an important industry of theirs depends on gasoline consumption (the high-performance car industry), and they feel a strong urge to support the EU. But a 3.8 Billion EURO fine is not going to kill a 2.6 Trillion EURO GDP. There will be some shouting internally between Merkel and the industries, and between Merkel and the folks in Brussels, and something will be worked out. Probably the Germans will accept nuclear power eventually.
- The main reason the EU is having to re-do the carbon-dioxide allowances is that they gave too many out to begin with. They have to fix that. I'm not that familiar with EU negotiations, but I remember a problem with the German budget deficit a few years ago: They had moved into the area where fines were to be imposed. After some shouting, they muddled through it by squinting at some points. I imagine the same thing will happen again: the Germans will suck it up, and the EU will drop the fines.
- I don't know where you are getting your estimate of cost-increase due to carbon taxes. The IPCC folks estimate that the worst impacts of C-O2 could be held off with an ongoing cost of less than 1%.
- The biggest issue that I see affecting the German economy is the extreme amount of protection given to workers. It is so difficult to lay off workers that companies are extremely reluctant to hire; so even when the economy improves, there is a tendency to load on more work rather than hire more workers, until things have gotten really unbearable. I think a lot of people are beginning to realize that they have to "loosen up" on worker protections in order to prevent ongoing stagnation. But none of this has to do with C-O2 taxes.

Poland & the Czech Republic

Again, this is more shouting within the EU. Their position is not as central in EU as is Germany's. This will be taken care of politically. I can't get very excited about it.

China and 3rd-World Countries

As I've mentioned before, even high-level ministers in the PRC are publishing articles stating their concern about the threat to China from GW. The PRC, although authoritarian, is not monolithic (nor is any other country) so this doesn't stop them from building coal-burning plants at the present. However, I think their system is ultimately going to make a decision based on the costs for different alternatives; and the best estimates for the costs of NOT acting on GW exceed those for the costs of acting.

The goal for all countries, not only third-world, is to change the fundamental energy-producing technology. It is not to go to a state of "freezing in the dark". Just as many third-world countries have side-stepped the issue of the cost of installing telephone cables throughout their country by moving directly to wireless telephony, I don't see a fundamental problem on the issue of C-O2 for them.

Froblyx,

Thanks for your kind remarks. However:

- One can't hope to convince everyone. My goal is to keep pointing out misconceptions as I see them, rather than to let them go unchallenged. I don't know about this site, but at another site where I've done this, I have occasionally had folks who never post anything send me a message stating their appreciation for my consistent efforts. So, more people are reading than you may be aware of.

- My recommendation/suggestion to you would be: Just lower expectations on your reception. Stick to the high road.

- That said, if you think there are better sites for discussion, let me know. I am currently spending time at a movie-review site, because of the attention brought to the topic by Al Gore's movie. Originally, there were just two folks plugging away at presenting the climatologists'/IPCC's view of GW, but by now there are about 5 or 6.

Jeeze Frob,

I present the real world reaction to CO2 reduction schemes and this pisses you off?

Where my bad science only annoyed you?

Have fun where ever you land next.

Neal say:

The goal for all countries, not only third-world, is to change the fundamental energy-producing technology.

I favor this on grounds other that CO2 reduction. It will happen naturally as the costs of wind and solar PV come down the learning curve. Eventually they will decline below coal and coal will die a natural death. Providing the storage problem can get solved.

All this takes time and profit. Taxes reduce the incentive (profit) to change. It becomes more profitable to squeeze a few more years out of plants that are in existance as the German experience is showing.

And yes German Green's plans to shut down the 1/3 of Germany's electrical production that is nuclear is singularly stupid. Which is the trouble with all these fads. Concerns change and the regulatory systems in place to force change in one direction inhibt it in another.

I believe market oriented systems (as opposed to command and control) are more supple. If you believe in AGW buy your electricity from wind generators.

Neal King: "The goal for all countries, not only third-world, is to change the fundamental energy-producing technology."

I'm glad to hear it. But why do you favor the means of transnational bureaucracy, if what you want is a radical technological advance? Tying up the burning of fossil fuels in elaborate regulations isn't going to force us into switching to other means of generating power. On the scale required to run an industrial economy -- which is also the scale that could conceivably affect the climate -- there are no other means of generating power, except nuclear fission, which is also tied up in elaborate regulations. All that regulating fossil fuels can do is make the regulators rich at the public's expense.

If it's developing new ways of generating power that you want, it'd be far more practical to hand out research grants to people who are working on that directly -- such as the boron fusion project M. Simon is so excited about. Moreover, that's worth doing even if the IPCC is wrong. Throwing sabots into the fossil fuel economy doesn't help the world develop a replacement for it, and you won't deserve any thanks for doing so. Help make what you favor; don't break what you oppose.

Froblyx's complaints are what IPCC-followers accuse GW skeptics of, and also vice versa. Neither side believes the other is honest or rational. Can we find a compromise here?

On the China note... The Red Dragon is awakening with an accelerating economy, a modernizing army and space-warfare capabilities. Aren't you guys getting worried about America losing its status as the most powerful country in the world?

I'm Chinese and I live in a tiny country, so all I have to worry about is the One China Dominion when they annex the entirety of Asia.

M. Simon: "It will happen naturally as the costs of wind and solar PV come down the learning curve. Eventually they will decline below coal and coal will die a natural death."

I doubt that. Wind and solar power require a lot of land per kWH generated, to the point that using either to replace one coal-burning power plant does more damage to the environment than the coal-burner did. And do you have any notion what it takes to make a PV cell?

The feasible choices, within present technology, are fossil fuels and nuclear fission. If the Greens were practically minded, they'd be backing fission, because it's the cleaner method. And, indeed, there are Greens who back fission; but they are not the Greens' public face. It is really quite hard not to think that the core of the Green political movement wants humanity to freeze in the dark, since the alternative is to think they expect somebody to invent a power source which doesn't pollute the Earth and costs nearly nothing, just because we need it so very badly. But there; "never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity."

M. Simon:

I'm going to start with the assumption that C-O2 gives rise to global warming. Let's assume that throughout this discussion, because if it's not true, then there's no point in reducing C-O2 anyway. But then we wouldn't be talking about trying to reduce emissions, would we?

So for the sake of discussion, we accept that C-O2 is causing GW.

The problem is that the "natural" move from fossil fuels to renewables that you are banking on will only reflect the increasing cost of oil/gas/coal as these resources run out. It will not reflect harm stored up in the future.

Analogy: You have decided to replace the plumbing in your house. Based on what you know about the construction and materials of the house, you decide that in about 15 years, it will be a good idea to change it all out, because by that time there will be enough problems that it will be more cost-effective to do a clean job.

However, it turns out that, unbeknownst to you, some of the pipes are prematurely leaking, due to poor installation practices. As a result, at the lowest levels of the house, invisibly, water is leaking and it is corroding your foundation. You cannot observe this, and it will not become apparent for several years. But in fact, your house is already being damaged, and the longer you allow these old pipes to leak, the more damage there will be.

Now, if you were aware of this ongoing damage, you would rationally fold this into your plans. Depending on how much leaking was going on, you might decide it could wait a few years; or you might decide that it needs to be changed right now.

However, as long as you don't know about it, you will stick with your original plan, to leave the plumbing alone for 15 years.

The point of this analogy is that the price signal from fossil fuels simply does not reflect the future and ongoing damage we expect from C-O2. Depending on "normal" technological change is ignoring this damage, because technological change is responsive to incentives: costs and profits.

So the purpose of the carbon tax is indeed to incorporate this damage into the price signal, so that the natural incentives of the cost and profit mechanism reflects the best we know about C-O2. This is a market-oriented system, just as was the cap & trade for the sulfates.

Michael Brazier:

As stated above, the purpose of the carbon tax is to incorporate an incentive to avoid what we don't want: C-O2. We can rely on human ingenuity to find the best solution, given proper incentives. Why do you assume that someone in Washington DC will be able to plan a better solution than folks in Silicon Valley might dream up?

Another analogy: Fighting a war. You do two things when fighting a war: Killing the enemy soldiers and encouraging/supporting your own. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "Only support your own soldiers, don't attack the enemy soldiers, it only makes them upset." It's a war, you have to do both.

And in case it's not clear, the enemy in this case is not people, it's C-O2 production.

Scott,

What compromise can there be? The only solution is that educated people try to engage in reasoned discussion, and try to understand the arguments. In my experience, most of the talking points that one sees on the various GW-denying websites don't have much behind them: they can be refuted in one shot, and the proponent never comes back for a second round. But people have to be willing to think through the logic and the facts to see that.

Scott: "Aren't you guys getting worried about America losing its status as the most powerful country in the world?"

Personally? No. I think China's "accelerating economy" is a bubble driven by massive public debts, and when it's pricked the collapse will take the regime with it. No nation can aspire to replace America's role in the world except by imitating America's regime and policies; which is to say, by accepting American principles and applying them better than America does. (That was how America managed to assume Britian's role after WWII.) There's no sign that the PRC is doing this.

What I worry about is, what else will go down when China's bubble is pricked?

Neal: In the terms of your plumbing analogy, the pipes in our house may or may not be leaking (we don't really know); but we do know that all the pipes now on the market have the same problem as the ones in the house. The problem isn't poor installation, it's inherent in the materials from which all pipes are made. So even if our pipes are leaking now, it makes no sense to replace them now; nothing we can do now will stop the leaks. The best course is simply to save our money until a better pipe material comes on the market (which might well happen in 15 years.)

"Why do you assume that someone in Washington DC will be able to plan a better solution than folks in Silicon Valley might dream up?"

That's what I was asking you. What is a tax on CO2 emissions, if it isn't a plan devised in Washington DC -- or Turtle Bay?

Finally, the point you're missing is, one effect of sabotaging the fossil fuel economy is fewer resources to spend on research projects to find new power sources. You're not attacking the enemy, you're attacking your source of supply.

It's hilarious how Froblyx, when he encounters people who don't fall prostrate genuflecting to the IPCC's holy writ, takes the Rosie O'Donald route.
I typed up a couple comments with the purpose of pointing out to Froblyx that continuing to trackback to the IPCC AR4, when others have pointed out the flaws, is sort of like trying to prove to athiests that God exists by showing then statements from the Pope.
I didn't post those comments because I sort of like hearing from the closed minded bigots on the other side, and I figured that Frob would blow away in that stiff of a breeze.

CO2 isn't a pollutant. I don't like the tone of this post, because it surrenders on this point.
Recently I have heard reports that the southern oceans aren't absorbing atmospheric CO2. Hells bells if they didn't twist this into being bad news, inspite of one of the main "harms" as described by the AR4, being increased CO2 absorbtion increasing ocean ph levels. Ocean acid levels turns out to be another case of "The cherry-picking of facts to support claims that are contradicted by the great mass of facts."

Papertiger,

- Since the point of the original posting is on relative efficacy of approaches towards reducing C-O2, it has to be a premise of the discussion that there is a purpose to removing C-O2.

That doesn't mean that you necessarily believe it; but there's no point in participating in this particular line of discussion if you aren't willing to entertain it, for the purpose of the discussion.

Kind of like, if people are trying to solve a problem with a parameter, and someone suggests, "Now if x = 3, then..." and then a kid were to keep jumping in and saying "But I don't believe x = 3 !" The kid should back off and let people finish their thoughts.

- wrt oceans absorbing C-O2: It is bad news. a) The oceans have been absorbing C-O2. In fact, the 33% increase in C-O2 over the last 100 years would have been a 66% increase except for the oceanic absorption.
b) The problem seems to be that one of the oceans (somewhere in the southern hemisphere) seems to have "stalled out" on its absorption. Something to do with excess windiness, ocean stratification, and re-dissolution of the shells of foraminifera. (I looked at a preprint of the paper, and to be honest, I couldn't understand it. I hope and expect that someone will write up a summary that states succintly what the researchers think is going on, instead of just protecting themselves in tons of methodology description.) So the stalling out is partly due to the C-O2 that has already been absorbed.

The implication is that, if the other oceans begin to stall out as well, C-O2 will be building up twice as fast as before.

The issue with the coral reefs being harmed by the change in pH is still true. The point is that the rapid addition of C-O2 is not a good thing: you can pay in the atmosphere or you can pay in the ocean.

Michael Brazier:

"All pipes are leaking"
I have to disagree with you. The "leaking" in this case is the production of C-O2. Oil/gas/coal combustion produce C-O2. Nuclear/wind/solar production do not. That means we can change the pipes now.

"The best course is to save our money"
Necessity is the mother of invention. If a technology better than, or improved upon, renewables like solar and wind (ultimately a form of solar anyway) is to be developed, there has to be an incentive for it. There are plenty of folks happy to stick with the use of coal, unless discouraged: It's cheap (when you ignore the C-O2 harm) and abundant (good for another 500 years). The development of a new technology is always risky to the developer. Simply waiting is equivalent to hoping that something magical will not only stop those old pipes from leaking, but will also dry up the foundations that are already getting soaked.

Why a tax on C-O2 emissions?
Because it worked for sulfates, in combatting the acid-rain problem. It was an approach spear-headed in the U.S.

"Why sabotage the fossil fuel-industry"
The proposal for a carbon tax doesn't sabotage the fossil-fuel industry anymore than the requirement of seat belts, or catalytic converters, sabotaged the car industry. It gives the industry some additional constraints, and let's human ingenuity operate.

In the same way as you, car companies for years swore that requirements for catalytic converters would ruin their industry, and they fought the regulations for decades. It was "doom & gloom". But when the regulations finally went through, the car industry - didn't crash. (The current problems with the U.S. car industry stem from over-supply worldwide and heavy labor costs, especially associated with their healthcare plans.)

Michael Brazier:

- I agree that it's too much to expect fossil fuels to die a "natural" death anytime soon. However, I do expect a drop in the cost of photovoltaic technologies. This is a semiconductor technology, and that area is famous for dropping orders of magnitude of cost in a decade. One issue for PVs is that there hasn't been that much demand. Whenever the demand for a semiconductor product line gets big enough, someone spends the $3 Billion it takes to build a specialized fab for it, and the cost of production drops significantly. That could easily happen with PVs - without any new development in the techhnology. But, of course, I'm expecting new developments as well: This is the semiconductor industry, after all!

- Solar power needs area, but this area doesn't always need to be of exclusive use. What about using city rooftops? All that area, but you don't need to displace anything. And for the coal side: Remember the environmental impact of the mining, as well as the burning. And, because this is the point of the thread, don't forget the environmental impact of the C-O2: That's why we're thinking through these alternatives.

- And I did mention nuclear as a source, didn't I? Yes, I did.

Papertiger,

I agree with you. CO2 is not a polutant.

I'm kinda taking the Devil's Advocate point of view and pointing out that command and control of CO2 output is failing even on its own terms.

Neal says,

The issue with the coral reefs being harmed by the change in pH is still true. The point is that the rapid addition of C-O2 is not a good thing: you can pay in the atmosphere or you can pay in the ocean.

So how did coral survive throug geologic time when CO2 was 2X to 7X higher than today?

Neal says,

This is a semiconductor technology, and that area is famous for dropping orders of magnitude of cost in a decade. One issue for PVs is that there hasn't been that much demand.

Well actually the reason price reductions of PV has stalled is that they use wafers damaged in semiconductor production. Once that supply is maxed out further price reductions are difficult even should some one be willing to spend the $3 bn for a custom plant. The trouble with that idea is that raw material costs even with a custom plant are not sufficiently low.

In the last 20 years, despite rising demand, no one has figured out a way to lower raw material costs for PV cells.

M. Simon,

Coral Reefs and C-O2
My impression is that it may have something to do with the rapidity at which the C-O2 is building up. (Your 7X numbers, if you look at the graphs, come from many many millions of years ago - and took many millions of years to increase/decrease significantly; whereas here we're talking about 33% in 100 years. Rate of change is as important as, and in many ways, more important, than the actual magnitude of the delta itself.) It cannot be a permanent situation, because otherwise there would be no way to have gotten rid of that much C-O2 in the air.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned in my first discussion of this article, I have found that article rather difficult to read. The newspaper reports of it are unsatifactory, and the preprint to the Science article are really heavy on methodological details, but don't give a quick overview about what's going on. This is a bit unusual: Usually somewhere in the article, there is a brief section that says, "This is what we think is actually happening." This article doesn't.

I assume that eventually someone will write up something digestible on this topic; because if it's true, it represents a major problem. Kind of like when you're trying to get a plane off the ground on a runway, and you're not sure you're going to be have enough runway anyway - and then someone points out that it's 30% shorter than you thought it was going to be. Oops.

M. Simon,

Cost of Photovoltaics

You have stated that price reductions in PV have stalled because they use wafers damanged in semiconductor production, and when they run out of these, they will be unable to reduce the price. You suggest that raw material cost will be too high, and that no one has been able to lower cost over the last 20 years despite growing demand.

I have tried to validate your claims,and I fail to find anything to support them:
- The history of PV pricing from 1955 to 2002 have gone from $1200 to $4 per watt. (http://www.powertripenergy.com/pv_hist.htm, http://www.solarbuzz.com/StatsCosts.htm)
- The only reference to a stall in price declines of which I saw a mention was here (http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2005/03/67013), where they refer to a shortage of supply of silicon. (There is no mention of dependence on damaged wafers.) But this sort of thing happens all the time with memory chips: the demand goes up, the price goes up, somebody installs a new plant; the price goes down for awhile, then the demand picks up more, the price goes back up again, and somebody builds a new plant. On and on. The memory market is rather cyclical, but overall the price trends strongly downward. I see absolutely no reason why PVs should be any different. Each new generation in manufacturing will bring a price decrease.
- I have seen no reference to dependence on damaged wafers. If you have any, please provide it.
- Another dimension of price decrease is technological improvement. There are several ideas out there for getting more energy out of each photon, because the simplest PV concept only extracts the same energy out of each one, giving up the rest as heat. New ideas that people are thinking about can improve on that.
- At any rate, the raw-material cost of the silion itself is, at some point, less important than other costs, such as the packaging, installation, etc. Here too, people have ideas: "solar-cell paint" that would dramatically reduce packaging & installation costs.

In general, I find it slightly ironic that you, who consider yourself a technologist, are betting against the likelihood of human ingenuity being able to reduce significantly the cost of PVs.

Neal,

I can't give you a reference off hand. My field of expertise is electronics and it was in one of my trade journals.

As to betting against the lowering of PV costs. I'm not doing that. There have been a number of approaches tried for reducing the cost of silicon for PVs including ribbon extrusion and some other tries. One of the major costs is the sawing of silicon boules to produce wafers. There is a lot of material loss and the sawing itself is expensive.

So far no one has solved this problem. It will get solved, but evidently it is not an easy one.

Compare the learning curve of PVs to wind. Wind is on a much faster learning curve which indicates the ease of technological advance. If you look at PVs they will not achieve parity with coal for about 20 or 30 years.

It has been a while and doing a lot of searching to find the references is not something that interests me.

However, if it interests you, have at it. Maybe you will find a solution.

May I add that re: the raw cells. So far efficienciy improvements are costing more than the worth of the added electricity produced or the $ per watt improvement is marginal.

It does lower installed costs so there is some gain.

We are still quite far from the price of coal electricity.

So far the best $ gains are in demand metered situations where PVs lower the peak power required in situations where day time cooling is required: air conditioning.

The other place where PVs make sense (along with wind and backup generators and batteries) is where you want electricity and the cost of bringing the grid to a location is prohibitive.

Neal, may I suggest you read A New Manhattan Project by Stephen den Beste, and the articles linked to from that one? For the topic of that piece is whether it's practical to replace the fossil fuel economy with other power sources. The answer is, only fission can replace coal and oil; every other possible technology doesn't generate power where and when needed. And fission is not used in the USA because it's under an impossible regulatory burden.

The taxes on sulfates -- and on other real pollutants -- worked because genuine alternatives to the polluting processes were technically feasible, and legally available, when the taxes were imposed. Taxing fossil fuel consumption will not work, because the only alternative that's technically feasible has been effectively outlawed, and thus cannot reach the market. Ergo, if you want to cut CO2 emissions, remove the laws that impede fission power. If you want to wreck the world economy, tax CO2 emissions -- but don't expect me to help you.

Michael Brazier:

I've looked at your reference (A New Manhattan Project).

- I agree that a literal "Manhattan Project" approach would not work. That requires a laser-sharp focus on one specific objective and technology.
- I disagree that there are no feasible solutions. Fission is one possibility - and one which I think more environmentally concerned people are thinking may be a better short-term solution than what we have now.
- I also find it strange that you assume that any carbon tax would "wreck the economy". Let's think about that. Would a tax of 0.000000000001% wreck the economy? I can't think it would ever be noticed. Of course, it would also have no effect. Now let's consider raising it to 0.00000000001%. What would that do?

The point is that there is very likely to be a number which will: a) Give people an incentive to lean towards processes which do NOT produce C-O2, b) without causing the GDP to drop to 0. Your absolutist language suggesting that there isn't such a number is sadly reminiscint of the car manufacturers mentioned before, who always would claim that every regulation intended to improve safety or prevent pollution would destroy the car industry. They always managed to delay the regulation; and when the regulation was done, the industry survived. There's a pattern here.

M. Simon:

My expertise is not in solid-state physics, so I'll leave specific innovations in PVs to them. But my expectation is that, as demand kicks in, capitalism will work and solutions will be pursued more rapidly than if they were driven just by intellectual curiosity. And if there are carbon taxes to up the ante, it will happen faster.

Another point: Solar energy does not necessarily mean photovoltaics. Amory Lovins, a well-known energy-use consultant, pointed out many years ago that, of the applications we use electricity, only about 8% really NEED electricity. A lot of electricity is produced at a power plant to transport power to a residence for warming, for example. That's an inefficient method of warming a house, because the conversion from fuel to electrical power typically loses a factor of 3. So Lovins pointed out the opportunities of focusing on end-use application: fitting the energy source to the ultimate application. In many environments, you could use solar energy for residential heating.

Lovins has built a house in the Rockies that maximizes a number of such schemes. The electricity is does use is from PVs. This is discussed at his website at the Rocky Mountain Institute (http://www.rmi.org/)

M. Simon:

By the way, I did drop Indrek a line, and we've exchanged a couple of notes. What I see is that this group of yours has a fascination with Bussard's work, but no real connection with his group. There's no up-to-date information on how far they got, what their active issues are/were, etc. It's like you're revving up a car engine but there's no transmission.

I dropped my 2 cents into your calculation at (http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/2007/05/operating-voltage-for-b11.html)

Neal,

Lovins is a neat guy. However, he does not deal well with all the inertia sunk costs cause and he is also not too swift on the inertia the buying public has.

===

Re: IEC fusion. We are in fact in touch with a former engineer of Bussard's who is still in touch with the Dr. and who just gave a presentation at ISDC because the Dr. asked him. Tom Ligon of course.

The deal is that there is no one central place to go to bring it all together. It is sort of a distributed network.

Go to my side bar at Power and Control and click on the NASA Spaceflight Fusion link.

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=5367&posts=605#M136743

Tom mostly hangs out there. Plus he comments at Fusor.net a lot as well. You have to search around to find his comments. Plus I'm in e-mail contact with him. He is also a member of the Yahoo group (second one to join I believe) but he does not chime in much there.

Neal,

Thanks for giving me a heads up on the IEC Tech blog.

I had forgotten to set up the notification thingy and so was missing the discussion. Both bits have been rectified.

Lovins' strength is in proof of concept. It will take another kind of person to make it a practical system, and to move the institutional blockades.

But the first step is to show that something can, in principle, be done.

He has a good track record for that. I think it was him who first introduced the term "negawatts": the increase in electrical capacity you could get by teaching electricity customers how to reduce their needs for electricity. The name was a little bit over-cute; but a few years later, PG&E and other major electricity suppliers were in fact encouraging more energy-efficient refrigerators on their customers, because it was an easier way to earn profits than to build yet another power plant to provide more power. Negawatts were cheaper than Megawatts.

More on Cap & Trade

Seems like U.S. companies are beginning to think within the framework of cap & trade: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/28/AR2007052801050.html?hpid=topnews
"Companies Gear Up for Greenhouse Gas Limits: Trading of Permits Grows as Congress Considers Caps"

The economic reason negawatts is profitable is that you can handle capital costs out of cash flow better.

Neal,

Congress is doing the same Kabuki dance with this that they did with the war.

It has no chance of passing. Kyoto was shot down 95 to 0 in the Senate when it came up a few years ago because Americans don't want to pitch in to something meaningless (China) and harmful (Taxes On Energy).

M. Simon:

- My point with negawatts: Lovins does not have his head as much in the clouds as some people would like to believe.

- I guess the companies in USCAP must not be as sure as you, because they're getting involved in the cap & trade issue. My guess is that they would rather be in the driver's seat than being run over doing a blockade.

Neal,

Cap and trade is causing turmoil in Europe.

Europe Isolated Over Kyoto.

Do you think our law makers want to get people thinking about them every time they pay their electric bill?

In Illinois rates are set to go up 20% for various political and economic reasons. People are screaming.

In America it pays to cover your bets. Then you profit which ever way the wind blows.

Temperatures have been steay or declining for the last 8 years (with 2004 off the trend line positive).

If it keeps up for a few more years Americans will lose interest.

M. Simon,

- Europe "isolated" over Kyoto: I'm afraid I don't regard Motl as much of an authority on GW; or politics; or much of anything, except strings.

- Frankly, no one will be happier than me if the temperature trend stops rising or actually reverses. But from what I see, it looks extremely compatible with a rise from the 1970s (after they cut back dumping all the sulfates into the air - because of cap & trade). A noisy rise - the climate is, after all, the most complicated system in the world, and it has a lot of it's own internal cycles. But quite definite.

On the subject of AGW politics Lubos doesn't have to be definitive.

He has links to sources.

The question is are those sources reputable?

The second question is are they characterized correctly?

M. Simon,

In my experience, Motl's sources are pretty indiscriminate and his interpretations are pretty off the wall.

- He promoted the journalist the Viscount Monckton's article trying to model GW with a blackbody model that was wrong. Childishly wrong. As a professor of physics, it should have been obvious to him. But since it promoted the story he wanted, he didn't care.

- He promoted the movie, "The Great Global Warming Swindle", even though it had the following serious problems:
i) The director was at the point of being sued by the professor (Wunsch) he had filmed as being his star witness, for having edited what he said so as to give 180-degree opposite opinion on GW than he meant;
(http://fermiparadox.wordpress.com/2007/03/12/swindled-carl-wunsch-responds/)
ii) It was later proven that the director had modified the graphs shown so that they told the story he wanted. The original graphs didn't do it for him. (He said he had done it to "make it neater". Uh huh.)
iii) The broadcaster, Channel 4, disavowed further connection with the film.
(http://www.celsias.com/blog/2007/03/11/the-great-global-warming-swindle/)
All this happened BEFORE Motl promoted the film, as a scientific presentation of what's really happening with GW.

- When Gore's film first came out, not being satisfied with attacking Gore's presentation, he made a cute little image of Gore vomiting out smoke (or something). So tasteful. Of course, we always expect Assistant Professors of Physics at Harvard University to have their little fun, don't we? Whatever happened to professorial (not to mention professional) dignity?

Neal: when I said a tax on CO2 emissions would wreck the economy, I of course meant a tax large enough to cause a noticeable drop in CO2 emissions. The demand for electricity, in the modern world, is not elastic -- we absolutely must generate several terawatts of power, and jacking up the price by taxes and regulations won't reduce that amount. Consider that the price of gasoline has tripled over the past few years, but the rate of gas consumption hasn't dropped significantly.

I can only assume you skipped the article More practical problems, where the specific issues of the known alternative power sources get aired out.

And if we're going to make odious comparisons, remember the alarm over the vanishing ozone layer? Or the fears of "nuclear meltdown" that blocked fission power plants? Environmentalists have been crying "Wolf!" for more than thirty years; going by their past performance "global warming" is just one more false alarm.

I'll repeat: if you want to reduce CO2 emissions, the only practical course is to build fission power plants.

Frob: Assertions that something has been refuted are not a refutation. Nor are assertions or arguments that simply reinforce your existing beliefs.

Now, there may have been some actual refutation (especially of SPECIFIC details), but the line doesn't seem as clear-cut as you'd have me think.

And storming out is not an argument. Bye.

(I remain, contra Neal, unconvinced that anything needs be done at all.

And further, any carbon tax that has a significant effect will definitionally cause economic inefficiency; whether it would really 'destroy' the economy is arguable. But in industries where the profit margin is single percents or less, a significant carbon tax couldn't help but be destructive.

One might, of course, argue that that's regrettable but necessary for the greater good... but one is best off doing that rather than implying that economic destruction won't occur because the GDP won't drop to zero.

[On the same hand, though, it's an equally risible strawman to pretend that 'destroying' the economy means reducing GDP to zero. The phrase has a normal-language meaning that doesn't mean the literal total destruction of economic activity.])

Sigivald,

a) wrt arguments that I have made in this blogspace, if I see a statement that I think is both significant and incorrect, I will challenge it; and if it is defended, I will challenge it further, based on what has been offered in defense. I will refer you to:
- http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2007/05/the_solar_conve.html
- http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2007/05/al_be_doh.html#comments
- http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2007/05/it_is_uncertain.html#comments
- http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2007/05/clouds_in_chamb.html#comments

My attitude is that I will give up the discussion if I am proved wrong; otherwise, I will continue to try to explain how objections fail to hit the mark.

b) This thread is about efficacy of approaches for reducing C-O2 emissions. To have a coherent discussion, you have to assume during this period of discussion that there is a reason for doing it. If you don't assume that, there's really no point in engaging on the topic. This is particularly relevant, because the issue of C-O2 is that the damage comes later, and so it is invisible to us now. It is therefore the ultimiate externalized cost, because future generations are the ones that will experience the negative consequences - but future generations don't vote. Externalization is precisely the reason for the so-called "tragedy of the commons", in which situation all are harmed because it is no one individual's responsibility to take care of a particular issue, and it does benefit some individual to abuse the issue. This "tragedy" is what has to be taken into account also in considering the impact on the economy. You don't think it will be an important effect? It could be as much as 5-degrees (global average temperature) in the next 100 years. 5-degrees is how much warmer we are than the heart of the last glaciation. It wouldn't be much fun to go back to the ice age in 100 years; what makes you think it will be better going the same "temperature distance" in the opposite direction?

The intent & purpose of a carbon tax, therefore, is to forestall the worst that can happen, on the grounds of "a penny of prevention vs. a pound of cure". If the best scientific expectations that we have come true, based on current modes of behavior wrt C-O2, there are quite a few marginal businesses that are going to go away - plus a few more that aren't (currently) so marginal. That's why it's an issue. It's not because some people like winter better than summer.

c) And just as "destroying the economy" doesn't mean setting all economic activity to zero literally, "causing the GDP to drop to 0" doesn't mean that either, literally. In the context of spirited repartee, they are both examples of colorful speech.

Anonymous,

- The price of gas has gone up a lot, but I think many people believe that the price rise is temporary. They are not going to make big changes for temporary increases. If they become convinced that these prices are here to stay, they will make bigger changes. Even as it is, I know a number of people who are buying hybrids now.

- But gasoline is not the long-term issue, because we will run out of oil eventually: 15 years, 30 years, I don't know. The real issue is coal, because we have 500 years or so of coal. I think there is a real need to change what's going on there. I'm not so much against the coal as I am against the C-O2: If someone perfects a coal-gasification process that somehow sequesters C-O2 well, that would be fine with me. Coal useage is not a consumer decision, it is an industrial decision, and as such it will not be determined by convenience but by cost. Nothing responds in zero time, but over timescales of a few years, I think industrial processes will change in response to cost incentives - much faster than lifestyle changes can.

- Alternatives: Fission is a near-term alternative (with known problems, but I don't rule it out). Solar energy: There are well-known issues with solar, but I really don't think the situation is unmanageable: See (http://home.iprimus.com.au/nielsens/solen.html) for a more positive view. The general directions I see are for more of suiting the supply to the end-use; and making use of area that is unused today (like rooftops).

This isn't only a 1st-world issue, by the way. I was in Cambodia recently, and my guide was talking about having to collect firewood to heat up water, while suffering under the heat of a metal roof during the daytime. (It gets really hot in Cambodia.) I pointed out that he could set up some piping and use water to both cool his roof during the daytime and have warm water all the time. We estimated it would cost about $100 in piping, which he could see as an investment. Labor cost would be essentially zero, either because he would do it himself, or because, frankly, labor cost in Cambodia is essentially zero anyway.

- Ozone layer: The ozone layer problem is no longer an issue because the Montreal protocol pretty much stopped production of CFCs. Even now, there is still an ozone hole, but they see signs of it getting smaller. Over the next few decades, when the CFCs have broken down, it will go away. And your point was?

- Fission: Installation of fission plants in the U.S. and in many industrialized nations have stopped. But not in all countries: France has a majority of electricity supplied by nuclear reactors. There are still substantial concerns about how to handle nuclear wastes, most especially the long-lived wastes, which will have to be sequestered away from people or water for 100s of thousands of years. Of course, the more there is of this stuff, the bigger the issue is. As Edward Teller (no environmentalist he) said, "The problem with making something foolproof is that there can always be a fool bigger than your proof." And we need to keep this safe for 100,000 years? But we may just have to deal with it.

Neal, "Anonymous" was me.

We can't possibly sequester CO2 by turning coal into gasoline, because we have to burn the gasoline afterward. I doubt coal gasification will ever be done on an industrial scale (unless the Kyoto Protocol is implemented) because the conditions which would make it economical would also make electric cars or hydrogen fuel cells economical.

What you described to your guide is, as it happens, the one task solar energy is best for: air conditioning. The demand for cool air and the supply of solar energy are nearly in sync; they peak when the sun is brightest and hottest. Unfortunately A/C is not a large item in the world's power budget.

Finally, one good thing about nuclear waste is that activity (= danger) and half-life are inversely related. There isn't any form of nuclear waste which has to be kept safe for hundreds of thousands of years; any substance with a half-life that long is about as dangerous as tropical sunlight. Any stuff that poses a serious health risk also decays to nothing in a century or so -- and we do know how to store wastes safely for that long. Storing nuclear wastes isn't really that hard a problem.

Michael Brazier:

Coal-gasification & carbon sequestering
You're quite right, I sloppily linked these two - too late at night. What I meant was really that if you could do carbon sequestration at a big stationary plant and produce electricity, you could use electrical cars, and not have released C-O2. But I'm also not particularly sanguine about sequestration: I think it's likely to be a big energy tax (making for high inefficiency), and then of course where do you put the stuff, so that it doesn't come popping out at some embarassing (and fatal) moment? People have died when big blobs of C-O2 have emerged from under some lake or other.

Air conditioning
Many things are relatively small potatoes. In fact, even transportation is only about 10-15% of the C-O2 problem, as I recall. What is kind of nice about the Cambodian example is that, not only did it take care of the heat, but it would help get them off their current de-forestation driver: the need to have something to burn for fuel. In the hill areas of Vietnam and in the countryside of Cambodia, people still cook over the fire every day.
Some people have pointed out that if you look at the problem not as one monolithic problem but as 10 little problems (slices) (one being transportation, another being heating, etc.), each of these problems is manageable. If you like, I can see if I can find it somewhere later.

Nuclear wastes
It is true that the higher the level of radioactivity, the shorter the half-life. Therefore, high-level radioactive wastes are ironically less of a problem than intermediate-level wastes. I haven't been able to find a firm number for what is "safe". On the one hand, apparently there is a regulatory requirement of 10,000 years. On the other hand, PU-239 has a half-life of 24,000 years, and is still considered a radioactive waste; in which case, you would want more than a couple of half-lives to feel OK about it. For any of these radioactive species, one also has to consider the chain of decays: if an element turns into another radioactive element, that one also has to decay, and so on.

Here is one statement from the NRC (http://www.nrc.gov/waste/high-level-waste.html), not generally considered fear-mongers wrt nuclear power: "Because of their highly radioactive fission products, high-level waste and spent fuel must be handled and stored with care. Since the only way radioactive waste finally becomes harmless is through decay, which for high-level wastes can take hundreds of thousands of years, the wastes must be stored and finally disposed of in a way that provides adequate protection of the public for a very long time."
So whatever the "right" answer may be, I think your proposal of 100 years is unreasonably short.

How about this story:

Ten days after reactor shut down you are allowed to work in the reactor compartment of a Naval Nuke.

Admitedly you might want to wait longer before sleeping next to the stuff if it was uncontained. However 100 years seems like a fair number.

Neal - what I mean by 'compromise' is to find a somewhere-near-middle ground that people from all sides of the GW/environment debate can be partly pleased with, partly displeased with, but overall accepting of (if grudgingly).

For example, the GW crew want a reduction of CO2. That means less fossil fuel burning for power. American industry won't stand for an increase in costs and neither will the majority of consumers.

So neither side will budge to either Kyoto-style carbon taxes or no action whatsoever. Either extreme end is unacceptable to the diametrically opposed side. Thus nothing gets accomplished, status quo is maintained (to industry's favour).

What if the environmental lobby gave a little ground on the nuclear power issue? And more and stabler wind and solar farms were set up until they are economincally viable to rely on?

With enough non-emitting power sources, industry would have the cost-effective power it needs to run. GW and environment lobbyists will have the CO2 reduction that they demand. Everybody will be slighty less than fully happy, but content.

Or vehicle emissions - keep researching and mass producing hybrids, and when the cost is as low as a convebtional gas/diesel vehicle, everyone will buy one for the fuel savings.

Isn't that better than using the ol' iron fist to slap fines on peak-hour drivers? Who, btw, should be given access to plentiful, non-nonexistant public transport before they are forced to use it.

These improvements in technology and infrastructure will all take time... But if the IPCC's predictions of a 2 degree rise in temperature over 100 years are correct, we have that time. I think it's better than continuing to do nothing but bicker. Whether GW is a real threat or not, we will benefit from such 'compromise' steps. No?

A simplistic view of the factors influecing policy decisions, but that's my idea of things.

Neal - what I mean by 'compromise' is to find a somewhere-near-middle ground that people from all sides of the GW/environment debate can be partly pleased with, partly displeased with, but overall accepting of (if grudgingly).

For example, the GW crew want a reduction of CO2. That means less fossil fuel burning for power. American industry won't stand for an increase in costs and neither will the majority of consumers.

So neither side will budge to either Kyoto-style carbon taxes or no action whatsoever. Either extreme end is unacceptable to the diametrically opposed side. Thus nothing gets accomplished, status quo is maintained (to industry's favour).

What if the environmental lobby gave a little ground on the nuclear power issue? And more and stabler wind and solar farms were set up until they are economincally viable to rely on?

With enough non-emitting power sources, industry would have the cost-effective power it needs to run. GW and environment lobbyists will have the CO2 reduction that they demand. Everybody will be slighty less than fully happy, but content.

Or vehicle emissions - keep researching and mass producing hybrids, and when the cost is as low as a convebtional gas/diesel vehicle, everyone will buy one for the fuel savings.

Isn't that better than using the ol' iron fist to slap fines on peak-hour drivers? Who, btw, should be given access to plentiful, non-nonexistant public transport before they are forced to use it.

These improvements in technology and infrastructure will all take time... But if the IPCC's predictions of a 2 degree rise in temperature over 100 years are correct, we have that time. I think it's better than continuing to do nothing but bicker. Whether GW is a real threat or not, we will benefit from such 'compromise' steps. No?

A simplistic view of the factors influecing policy decisions, but that's my idea of things.

Scott,

I'm with you on that one. Natural technological evolution will take care of the problem over time.

I'm all for boosting wind (tax credits) now because it is within striking distance of coal. Once it gets below coal there will be no stopping it.

Other than wind there is no other alternative electrical generation method I like. I have a plutonium problem.

M. Simon,

I found a table of half-lives of biologically significant radioisotopes present in spent nuclear fuel (http://www.davistownmuseum.org/cbm/RadxIntegratedDatabase.html)

If you look at the range of half-lives, they run from 2.35 days for Neptunium-239 to 2.14 million years for Neptunium-237. But the bothersome ones are in the intermediate range:
- about 30 years for Strontium-90 and Cesium-137
- 88 years for Plutonium-238

No, I don't think 100 years is a good timeframe. And they do a lot of other things in the military that I wouldn't be OK with - like getting shot at.

Neal,

The first day you were limited to about an hour maybe less, maybe more. I do remember my tour of the reactor compartment was in no way hurried nor did we have to suit up. Rad monitoring was done before entry was allowed. And of course we had dosimiters and film badges.

Some of us have no problem getting shot at. As long as it is to no effect.

M. Simon,

But I think you agree that the expectation of what constitutes acceptable exposure to danger is different for the civilians than for the military? If ordinary civilians were being shot at, while going about their daily business, I think you would agree that the situation was out of hand, wouldn't you?

Likewise: When nuclear bombs were still being developed, there were all sorts of exposure of soldiers to explosions just a short distance away (I don't know exactly, maybe a mile). This would not be acceptable now.

From my point of view: If something is dangerously radioactive now, and has a half-life of 88 years, after 100 years it's still dangerously radioactive. And even if the half-life is 30 years, we are only talking about a factor of 8 in reduction. You can do what you like with soldiers: In some sense, it has been decided that their lives are expendable, in the broader interest of the military. Civilian society requires a higher margin of safety.

Neal,

The Navy puts a lot of $$ into training plant operators. They really do not see them as expendable from radiation effects (the Russian Navy is different).

So the military standards for radiation exposure by plant workers is the same standard used by civilians.

M. Simon,

Based on my quote above from the National Regulatory Commission, they can't quite be the same: They're the ones that say "hundreds of thousands of years"
(If my HTML tag doesn't work, it's at:
http://www.nrc.gov/waste/high-level-waste.html.)

And that Strontium-90 that I mentioned, with a half-life of about 30 years? That's the stuff that gravitates into your bone marrow and give rise to bone cancer, doesn't it?

3 half-lives is just not gonna do it for me.