A week or so ago, PBS NOVA decided to run a program (funded by Koch Industries - a top financier of the noted Senate anti-science advocate James Inhofe - as well as by ExxonMobile) attacking California's renewable energy programs. Incidentally, the blog CleanTechnica brought this to my attention - they're worth following.
The whole thing is pretty hard to stomach, but here's a typical extract:
NOVA: Is California taking dangerous risks with its new energy policies?If you don't recall, the Competitive Enterprise Institute claimed that carbon dioxide produced from fossil fuel was "a life-giving gas" - which is kind of like pumping raw sewage into your neighbor's back yard and telling them it's really just a beneficial fertilizer - and that they should be thanking you, not screaming at you.
Marlo Lewis: [Competitive Enterprise Institute] The policies that we're seeing in California make me nervous for California's future. You often hear the advocates of these policies say, "Oh, how can we gamble with the only climate we have?" I would say to them, "How can you gamble with the only economy we have?"
Equally troubling, however, was Energy Secretary Steven Chu's dismissive comments on non-fossil energy sources:
This is troubling because Dr. Chu doesn't distinguish between fossil carbon, which was produced millions of years ago (and is thus devoid of 14-carbon, which is produced in the upper atmosphere from cosmic ray collisions with nitrogen molecules), and biological carbon, which was recently fixed from the atmosphere, and which, when digested or combusted, returns to the atmosphere with no net effect on the overall concentration. Of course, the phrase "magical" is in itself dismissive, is it not?
NOVA: Should we reduce our energy use or turn to alternative sources of energy that don't emit carbon?
Steven Chu: You have to do both. You can't conserve your way out of this problem. Nor can you rely on magical new sources of carbon-free energy to get out of this problem.
In fact, Steven Chu is entirely wrong on this issue, which goes to show that expertise in one area of science, such as nuclear physics, doesn't lead to any particular expertise in a separate area of science, such as solar energy conversion or photosynthetic carbon fixation - Nobel Prizes notwithstanding. Many studies have shown that you can indeed eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix - as well as nuclear fuels - and still have all the energy you need.
However, doing this will be no easier than creating the global fossil fuel infrastructure that the world relies on - and estimates of the cost of that global infrastructure are very rough, but $10 trillion is not a bad benchmark figure. 500 coal-burning megaplants, constructed at a cost of $300 million each, adds up to $150 billion, for example - the cost of the AIG bailout, wasn't it?
A modern solar cell manufacturing facility might run from $100 million to $200 million, say...so, yes, for the cost of the AIG bailout, we could have been well on our way to outfitting every home in the United States with renewable energy technology of various sorts. Instead, it all went to pay off Wall Street debts run up by corrupt bankers - amazing, isn't it?
Here's another stinker from the program:
NOVA: Won't some people lose their jobs?First of all, nobody in California mines coal - and secondly, lost coal jobs will be replaced by renewable energy sector manufacturing jobs (although so far, most solar manufacturing is not done in the United States) and various other infrastructure work.
Vijay Vaitheeswaran: There'll be some job losses, particularly if you're a coal miner, let's say. But then again, if clean-coal technologies take off, there might be a boom in coal, where you get a job doing carbon sequestration.
Secondly, why are they asking an economist with no scientific or engineering background about the plausibility of clean coal and carbon capture? In reality, this is one of the biggest frauds being perpetrated on the American public - and who is behind this PR stunt? Steven Chu's Department of Energy and their private contractor Battelle Memorial Institute - the biggest private "non-profit" research corporation in the United States, and one of the most secretive companies around.
One small problem – it takes more energy to capture and store the emissions from coal than you can generate by burning the fuel. Most of the “demonstration projects” (as well as enhanced oil recovery systems for oil well CO2 injection) only capture about 1% of the emissions from the fossil fuel plant, at an energy cost of greater than 1% of the power output.
Even if you can capture the carbon emissions - at astronomical energy expense - what do you do with them afterwards? A recent paper also (see this Guardian UK report) indicates that subsurface storage is far less plausible than is claimed.
There is zero transparency in this program, because private interests control the patents to the technology - even though the funds come from the taxpayer. The chief DOE contractor on this, as well as the overall manager of the "flagship" DOE-funded zero-emissions coal plant (FutureGen, in Illinois), is also Battelle Memorial Institute, which has promoted the following claims:
FutureGen will demonstrate advanced coal-based technologies to generate electricity for families and businesses, and also produce hydrogen to power fuel cells for transportation and other energy needs. The technology also will integrate the capture of carbon emissions with carbon sequestration, helping to address the issue of climate change as energy demand continues to grow worldwide.What might really be going on here is the construction of a coal-to-gasoline project. The DOE states that once the "demonstration project" is constructed, it will be handed over to the private sector - but the coal-to-gasoline systems look identical to this "zero-emission" system - both rely on coal gasification technology. Furthermore, the coal industry has for years been trying to break into the gasoline markets - but have been blocked by environmental regulations, which Obama and Chu seem determined to overturn as they embark on a new program of coal-to-gasoline plant construction in Virgina, Texas, Illinois and elsewhere.
The 275 megawatt plant will be developed through a public-private partnership led by the seven founding FutureGen Industrial Alliance members that include:
American Electric Power
BHP Billiton
CONSOL Energy Inc.
Foundation Coal Corporation
Kennecott Energy Company, a member of the Rio Tinto group
Peabody Energy
Southern Company
Formation of FutureGen Alliance was coordinated by Battelle, a non-profit research and development institution. The Alliance is working with DOE to secure a final agreement for FutureGen. Once an agreement is reached, the process would proceed to site selection and plant design.
Notice also that Obama delivered $8 billion in subsidies to the Southern Company, an ardent enemy of renewable energy in the southeastern United States, and a member of the Battelle Energy Alliance that's behind FutureGen. California has implemented a renewable energy portfolio standard, for example - but Southern has a huge lobbying budget committed to defeating such standards in its own operating area.
The bizarre spin that PBS NOVA put on this story doesn't end there - see this quote from their interview with UC Berkeley "media expert" and professor of nuclear engineering, Daniel Kammen:
NOVA: But that is not the only problem. Coal can be burnt to release energy when you need it, but what do you do if the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?Disaster! Hospitals without power, cars smashing into one another as street lights go out, people unable to get their lifesaving medications - yes, they pile it on pretty thick...
DANIEL KAMMEN: Renewables aren’t the easy we’re-just-going-to-do-it solution. There are issues. One of the big issues is that for solar and wind, in particular, they are intermittent. They’re on some of the time, off other times, and it’s not consistent. You cannot always predict it.
NOVA: (almost whining) But grid managers have to predict it. They need power on demand. And when they can’t get it, it raises one alarming specter.
What Professor Daniel Kammen (who surprisingly enough is also the director of Berkeley's "Renewable Energy and Appropriate Energy") doesn't mention is that there are many methods for storing wind and solar energy for use at some later point.... but maybe it's not so surprising, considering Berkeley's close ties with BP - which is bent on selling tar sand syncrude to California energy markets (they also were operating the rig that just blew up and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, leading to a massive oil leak, and they have a similarly atrocious record of spills in Alaska).
Consider my own favorite method of solar energy storage, as just one example. That's the conversion of sunlight to stored chemical energy via the conversion of CO2 and H2O to hydrocarbons, say. This creates an easily trasportable energy commodity that you can use yourself or sell to others - all with no climate effect.
Technically, you would use solar energy to covert atmospheric CO2 to carbon monoxide and then mix that with solar-generated hydrogen from water, and you get methanol - CH3OH. You can also do this starting with coal - and Obama has backed this very same technology in West Virgina, for their coal-to-gasoline plant - which will produce two or three times the amount of CO2 per gallon of gasoline as does traditional crude oil distillation and cracking. Obama's climate program? Who is he trying to fool? You?
Getting back to the solar process, if you have methanol, then futher CO additions create longer-chain hydrocarbons. If you can get this process going at an appreciable rate, you can fill up a oil storage tank with the product - and since all the CO2 came out of the atmosphere, when you burn the fuel you simply return the CO2 to the atmosphere, zero sum gain. Another benefit is that you aren't adding sulfur, mercury, selenium, or arsenic, so the fuel is going to be far cleaner than anything dug out of the ground.
These notions also will play a key role in future space travel - the recent discovery of water on the moon means you could feasibly set up solar panels on the moon, extract that water, generate hydrogen and oxygen, and voila - rocket fuel for exploration of the solar system. Instead, Obama cut the manned space program while also increasing the DOE nuclear weapons budget by 10%! That's the same kind of trick Bush pulled, when he proposed "hydrogen cars" while cutting the National Renewable Energy Lab budget! This is from the ABC Denver news, 2007:
Colorado's Democratic lawmakers criticized Bush's proposed budget, delivered to Congress on Monday, for increasing spending on fossil fuel and nuclear development while cutting the Energy Department's renewable research lab by 3 percent.Some ten years ago I was a PhD student in the chemistry department at UC Santa Cruz, and was looking for funding for this general kind of work - and what I discovered was that there is zero funding from the DOE for non-fossil fuel carbon capture and conversion efforts.
Neither biological methods (algal production of biofuels being the most promising) nor chemical methods (as described above) get any funding from the DOE - in contrast to the billions they give to the coal interests. Shocking? Not when you look at the revolving door between DOE managerial staff and fossil fuel interests, which mimics the revolving door between the military brass and the corporate boards of weapons manufacturers.
There are many other methods for storing and releasing solar & wind energy - this latest one seems pretty innovative:
Giant gravel batteries could make renewable energy more reliable, Guardian UK Mon Apr 26
So, given that state of affairs, it's hard to have any faith in the federal government on energy reform - they seem to be firmly in the grip of fossil fuel interests, which is why many people (myself included) started asking California state politicians and California businesses to take the lead on kick-starting a state-wide renewable energy economy - and this has created a massive backlash, complete with wildly dishonest propaganda spewed out by national media outlets - even PBS NOVA has hopped on this bandwagon, astonishingly enough. This is tragic, since PBS NOVA used to be one of the better science journalism programs on television - and now, they're running ExxonMobil and Koch Industries PR programs as "independent journalism." What a shame.
For the latest on the fossil fuel world, in contrast:
An oil slick covering 400sq miles is threatening a slow-motion catastrophe for the Gulf of Mexico’s delicate marine life, with 42,000 gallons (160,000 litres) a day now gushing from an uncapped well after a rig explosion.The fact of the matter is that we already have the energy technology required to convert California's economy to renewables and eliminate all fossil fuel imports to the state - as well as all offshore drilling. This will actually be a great boon to California's economy, which has largely fallen into debt due to the energy-price rigging brought about by Pete Wilson's deregulation and Enron's shady market manipulation practices. As it is, dependence on external energy sources is slowly bleeding California to death - but large-scale renewable energy projects will put a permanent end to such schemes.
Two days after declaring that there was no leak and that oil on the surface was residue from on board the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform that burst into a fireball on Tuesday, officials revealed that the slick was coming from the seabed and was now 25 times the size it was on Friday. - Times Online UK, Apr 26
I haven't even mentioned the many beneficial health effects of a clean energy economy, either - so clearly, this is smart thing to do, both ecologically and economically.
