Obama’s Climate Challenge. Do Business Leaders Dare To Take It?

Maybe Bernie will take you up on the idea, provided of course the profiteering weasels be forced into it by his administration. Or is that a bridge too far?

Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi published an article in the November 2009 issue of Scientific American titled “A Path to Sustainable Energy.” My first thought was, this must be a spoof. It is very easy to show how to power the US with renewable energy if you ignore the implementation problems and assume ridiculously low costs for producing the energy. So how do you power the US with renewable energy? According to Jacobson all you need is 490,000 tidal turbines, 5,350 geothermal plants, 900 hydroelectric plants, 3,800,000 5-MW wind turbines, 720,000 wave converters, 1,700,000,000 3-kW solar PV systems, 49,000 concentrated solar power plants, and 40,000 300-MW solar PV power plants.
Those numbers should sober even the most enthusiastic supporter of renewable energy.

Cheap oil is one of America’s strengths. Obama wants to take away one of the pillars of success.
Obama understands that a good proportion of voters don’t attend to the reality of oil prices and how this affects economics as well as the truth on global warming.
Given that businesses have to make money or fail whatever colour they are.
I would like to see the “green businesses” forced to fess up about the entire cost of producing their products by unit for comparison, i.e. wind or solar installations, hybrid cars, fully electric cars. I’d like to see them show what goes into an ‘energy saving” light bulb and show it compared to a non green option to show frightened environmentalists what toxic chemicals are used in producing some vital everyday so called greener solutions.

Real cost, fossil fuel use for production and all dodgy chemicals listed on a yellow sticker on every product or package. European style!
It’s only fair.
A farmer explained to me several years ago that the wind farms off the coast of Essex like all wind turbines, don’t turn if it isn’t windy. When they had dignitaries visit they had someone designated to switch on the battery which made the sails move. In a normal world I should have doubted this but It sounds about right. I expect they call this “demo mode” for all those who don’t know what windmills do best.

I just finished “The Confidence Game” by Maria Kuonnikova and it strikes me that this whole thing–subsidizing “green energy” is a giant confidence racket–maybe the biggest in history.

I’m not even talking about whether AGW is happening–for the sake of argument I will stipulate that it is, and that the consensus models are reasonably trustworthy (neither of which I really believe, but I can so stipulate).

Aaccording to the mid-range IPCC modelling, all the recent promises made in Paris, if fully implemented, will only reduce global average temp by about 0.2 degrees C compared to unrestrained trends. Which is the margin of error in the models, and leaves temps well above the 2 degrees that has been advanced (with no persuasive basis) as the safe limit.

So, even if I stipulate to all the questionable “science,” throwing hundreds of billions of dollars around makes no sense. But, that is what the grifters are telling us we should do.

There is not space here, nor is this the place, to recap what the book covers in 320pp, but I will briefly summarize that the con appeals to the mark’s insecurities (am I hurting the planet?), belief systems (industrial civilization is a bad thing, we ALL are hurting the planet), ego (I am too smart to be fooled, I am highly moral and good, and I deserve the best), and need to find spiritual value (if I do this it validates me as a moral, good person).

And, if you believe the “science” there is a far better alternative, teh one identified by Bjorn Lomborg and others: work on how to ameliorate any bad consequences of the warming that we cannot control. Things like flood control, restricting development of vulnerable areas, increased water supply capacity and robustness, developing crops that are more tolerant of extreme weather, and so on–things we could do, and prudence says maybe we should look into even if we are skeptical about AGW–much of it is just smart policy. Far more effective and far cheaper than abandoning fossil fuel and paying $100Bn to third world kleptocracies.

The fact that all the emphasis is on something that doesn’t do any good at all, when clearly better (and cheaper) alternatives are at hand, tells me this is a con.

I highly recommend the book, while we are waiting for Uncertainty to be published.