Category: nuclear power
November 25th, 2009
Copenhagen will hear first U.S. pledge to cut emissions
President Obama will speak at the Copenhagen climate talks on December 9. Six U.S. cabinet secretaries and head of the EPA will attend the full conference.
Obama’s presence will be early in the meeting, before the nitty-gritty negotiations talk place. That has alreasdy drawn sniping from other nations. There will be much argument in the U.S. over the potential cost of cutting emissions if that actually becomes more than a talking point and is enacted as law or regulation.
Obama will pledge the U.S. will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 17%, that’s taking the 2005 level and reducing it before 2020. That 17% is the exact number in the energy and climate bill passed by the House last spring, Waxman-Markey. The bills debated in Senate committees actually have a slightly higher level of cuts.
One of the key debate points in the U.S. Congress: will India and China make any cuts or will the U.S. act alone and thus hamper American industry in competing with India and China? At this point China says it will NOT offer up binding emission cuts as most of the damage to the climate has come from developed nations.
In addition many under-developed nations at Copenhagen are going to be looking for payments from wealthier nations. Nominally this would go to developing alternative energy and energy efficiency, within the usual limits of each country’s corruption level which can vary widely.
Overall this will be encouraging to alternative energy firms and their investors. Today the Cleantech Stock index was up. The NASDAQ Clean Edge Index has been climbing for the past two quarters.
This could also put the focus of many environmental groups on China and India. Perhaps boycotts? Both nations are heavily dependent on exports to Europe and the U.S.
Loading ...November 4th, 2009
Remember Kerry-Boxer?
Well, now it may become Kerry-Graham-Lieberman-Boxer. And opponents of nuclear energy may go nuclear over the nuclear option. Not only will the next version of the Senate’s energy and climate change bill include more nuc, it may also include even more offshore oil drilling than is called for by the previous Kerry-Boxer. What’s not known: how many more pages will be added? The now-old bill had less than a thousand pages.
Meanwhile we’re five weeks away from the start of the international climate talks in Copenhagen where the U.S. negotatiors will show up with lots of good intentions and little more. The World Wildlife Fund, focused more on other species with no votes and no money, issued a report asking the nations of the world to re-industrialize. Essentially they’re calling for completely retooling the planet’s energy systems to lower emissions and curtail global warming and the extinctions that it’s expected to trigger. Wall Street wouldn’t like that one bit.
November 3rd, 2009
Washington: lots of talk about global warming
Lots of talk around the American capital today on the topic of global warming. The CO2 emissions from various political factions and lobbyists alone could raise the global temp another degree or two. And that’s not counting the carbon footprint of all the plane travel involved in moving these special folks around.
On a grand scale there’s a summit meeting between President Obama and leaders of the European Union (EU). The EU’s just pledged itself to a 30% cut in greenhouse emissons compared to the 1990 levels. The U.S. has magnanimously suggested a 4% cut as a target, after eight years of refusing any mandates of any kind. The African nations have suggested cancelling global warming talks until there’s some serious commitment from the world’s wealthiest nations, that would include the U.S. which currently camouflages its great wealth as massive debt. Meanwhile there is much interest in what, if anything, the U.S. is really willing to do.
At their summit today President Obama said the US and the EU agreed to re-double their efforts on climate change. This about five weeks from the international conflab on climate change in Copenhagen. The U.N. has given up any hopes of a global agreement coming out of that conference. There is some indication some nations (like the EU again) will pledge money for efforts to help poorer nations reduce greenhouse gas emissons. Again, that effort is led by the EU whose political leaders generally agree global warming’s a real problem. In Britain there’s even a strong environmentalist running for Parliament as a Conservative. That guy’d last about five seconds in the Republican Party here.
The EU is also pointing the finger at China, co-champion in greenhouse gas emissions along with the U.S. Why doesn’t China do more they ask?
SENATE SHOWDOWN
The showdown started with no-shows. Nothing happened in the Senate committee that is considering the Kerry-Boxer energy and climate change bill. The Republican members boycotted the session. Senate tradition requires at least two members of each party be present as well as a quorum before the “mark-up” process. That process precedes any committee voting. Eventually the committee chairwoman, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), can move ahead in violation of tradition but in keeping with the strict rules of the committee. That is considered by Republican analysts as a “nuclear” option which would rule out forever and forever any possible Republican votes in favor of said Kerry-Boxer bill. Currently the bill already has zero Republican support. Sadly for Kerry, Boxer and their supporters, the bill lacks support from some Dems and that could keep it from ever coming to a vote on the Senate floor. Though it is possible a Dem would vote to close debate allowing a floor vote and then go on record by voting against the bill itself. This political drama will continue to play out. Not likely the Senate will have finished its acting, or action, on Kerry-Boxer before the Copenhagen talks next month.
November 2nd, 2009
Kerry-Boxer bill battle set for Tuesday
The Republicans are not going to be present, but a U.S. Senate committee will apparently move ahead to approve a massive energy and air pollution regulation bill. This is the Kerry-Boxer bill. There’s a rule loophole that will allow Commitee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to move ahead with no Repubs present.
Here you can peruse the entire bill, all 959 pages of it.
The bill currently contains cap and trade and tighter emission standards than the bill passed by the House last spring. I blogged earlier on the political problems this Kerry-Boxer bill faces.
It’s very clear there’s little public agreement in the U.S. about global warming, or what we should do about it. In the eyes of much of the rest of the world this once again makes the U.S. a rogue nation. Tops in greenhouse gases, along with China, but not willing to admit we need to do anything about it.
November 2nd, 2009
Will there be a new energy and air pollution law?
Current wisdom among the Beltway blatherers: it will take six Republican votes to get an energy bill through the Senate. That might be done if the bill becomes a big enough gift to energy corporations and other vested interests. The move to get bi-partisan support might even include an effort to get more nuclear power plants built in the U.S. Nuclear’s been political no-go territory now for three decades. Nuclear in the U.S. gets little support from most American enviornmental groups and is disliked by fossil fuel companies.
So far there’s been no overt Republican support for the Kerry-Boxer bill as it is now. The House last spring passed its own energy and climate change legislation (Waxman-Markey) but the Senate chose to start over.
There’s going to be a move by Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) to get the Senate version of an energy bill marked up and out of her committee this week. One of the provisions of the current Senate bill is cap and trade on greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, the seven Republican members have vowed to boycott any such committee work. And without two Repubs present, the committee cannot act under Senate rules. Will they suspend the rules? Is the Senate bill DOA? Boxer intends to move ahead with the bill tomorrow. Not clear what movement can be taken.
October 28th, 2009
Hearings on climate, cap'n'trade, energy
A Senate Committe is hearing testimony on all sides of the energy, global warming, cap and trade issures. No minds will be changed, but we should see if there’s some way to capture all that hot air, use it to turn a turbine.
It’s the public hearings on the Kerry-Boxer energy and climate bill. C-Span has provided some live coverage of the hearings. They also have archives that you can watch on their website. C-Span does not allow excerpts to appear on youtube.
The White House would like to see this bill passed and they’re working on corporate execs to get behind the cap and trade provision. That means setting standards so lenient that everybody profits except the atmopshere.
Not all Dems favor this current bill with its 900+ pages. And as we blogged here a few weeks back, the elected officials are piqued that the appointed EPA may beat them to the punch in regulating greenhouse gases. Republicans on the committee may simply miss the meetings so there’s no quorum for the necessary procedures to get the bill out of committee. Most of the right-wing groups that lobby Congress hate the very idea of what they call “cap-and-tax.” Much of vocal opposition to any version of the Kerry-Boxer bill comes in the form of “it’ll cripple our economy, kill jobs, etc.” I can recall the exact same arguments were used years ago to try to stop legislation that curtailed emissions that were leading to greater ozone holes and acid rain. Those problems were finally dealt with and, guess what, the economy has been more crippled by business practices than anti-pollution regs. We never seem to learn much from history, do we?
Testifying before the committee were three cabinet secretaries: Transportation, Energy and Interior, the head of the EPA and the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee (FERC). Groups representing businesses and environmental interests, city and state governments will be heard from. Among Wednesday’s witnesses: Dan Reicher, Google’s Dir. of Climate & Energy Initiatives.
Here’s the website of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee. The committee is chaired by liberal Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and the minority leader on the committee is global warming denier Senator James Imhofe (R-OK). It fits. California is a major oil importing state and we know that Oklahoma is an oil exporter. Boxer is co-author of the bill and her state has a lot of greentech start-ups. Imhofe says it will re-work the entire U.S. economy and he wants to know what effects the bill will have. He’s worried the price of Oklahoma crude might drop. One committee member argued that we Yanks invented nuclear power and should build a hundred nuclear plants and electrify half our cars and trucks and not need a tax on carbon, so there!
The three days of hearings wrap up tomorrow. The bills’ official poetic moniker: “S. 1733, Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act.”
You wanna read the bill? Here’s the full PDF. So don’t believe the blather when some say “I never saw the bill before we voted.”
And here are a series of summaries put together by the proponents of the bill.
One provision of the bill that is more stringent than the bill passed last spring by the House: it calls for a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, not just 17%. That gives everybody something to fight over.
October 17th, 2009
The really inconvenient truth: real price of our energy
I’ve blogged before about the need for a new energy calculus. Not just market and whosesale costs to the user of the energy. Economics and business have a notoriously short-sighted, narrow-minded set of considerations. Haven’t we just re-learned that ancient lesson from the hedge funder corruption and the phoney mortgage miasma? Nothing human is self-regulating, whether four year olds or CEOs.
We humans could start calculating the real, total costs of our endeavors to the planet and all of us, living and expected. For energy sources it’s not just fossil fuels. What’s the long-term cost of dealing with nuclear waste? Of making solar panels? The destruction of wildlife and possible weather change wrought by big wind farms. We could stop pretending that nature gives us a free lunch on any source of energy. Even a donkey turning a waterwheel has an environmental cost. The food, the resulting manure, the dust raised by the donkey’s hooves, etc. Can we really pretend that today’s high rates of cancer, infertility, diabetes and asthma–to pick a few–really have nothing to do with the chemicals in our lives, our water, our food?
Way back in the 19th Century we learned the cost of coal included killer smog in London and black lung inside the miners’ chests. Yet we continue to lie to ourselves about energy. We now even see big money trying to market the idea there is “clean coal.” Congress likes that because some major political donors love it. Of course, what is meant is capturing the CO2 and hiding it somewhere or recycling it. Nobody really can believe that mining, moving and burning coal is “clean.” And we need not go into detail on the coal ash residue, do we?
Loading ...We’ve learned much about the actual effects of our resource extraction and use in the past decades. Now we need to stop pretending it’s 1950. When I was a kid in rural Midwest we burned our household trash, including plastics, spray cans and used paint materials. We were spreading heavy metals and nasty organic chemicals like mad. We sprayed our milk cows with DDT, then milked them. I drank a lot of that stuff. No wonder I’m such a pathetic human being today, huh? The point is: we know better now. Buried or burned is not gone, only forgotten. There’s an Oklahoma town suffering from zinc smelting that happened decades ago. A Kansas lead mining town may just be too toxic to live in. A federal buyout there is backed by some of the country’s most conservative U.S. Senators.
Times Beach, Missouri, was killed by dioxin in oil used to control dust. It died in the 1980s.
We still do heedless things today and the “market system” pretends it has no economic meaning. Let’s try growing up. This is our planet and nobody else will clean it up for us.
Here’s just the latest in the endless series of environmental crimes against the planet perpetrated by big energy companies. This one is called “dump it on the poor.” Highly nuclear France seems to be careless with some of their spent nuclear fuel. Surprised? Send it to Russia where nobody imagines there are enforced environmental controls, right?
And it now looks like the American EPA is going to start looking at West Virginia coal mining as more than a source of profit and jobs. The coal companies and their Senate pals will hate that.
October 15th, 2009
Energy prices are about to permanently alter world history
You think you pay too much for gasoline? How about $10 per gallon in Britain?
If you’re an American taxpayer you’re buying fuel for a helluva lot more than a mere $10 per gallon. How about $400 per gallon in Afghanistan. That’s right, $400. Of course, we can’t blame that all on Russia and Saudi. In some parts of that war zone fuel that costs less than $3 per gallon wholesale in the U.S. will have cost $1000 by the time it’s delivered in Afghanistan.
Guess alternative energy is about to become even more political in America. Let’s not speculate about what would happen if hummers were all-electric, recharged easily at solar-powered stations. Or if we’d developed nuclear-powered planes, comparable to our nuclear sub fleet. You think the Pentagon is not intensely interested in quick re-charging, long lasting, light-weight batteries? Or hydrogen fuel cells?
Maybe the U.S. should have spent a little more money on alternative energy research and a little less on something else. Whatever ends up happening in Afghanistan, the $400 per gallon fuel pirce will have been a factor. Almost guarantees that Afghanistan will not become the 51st state or even a “protectorate” on the par with Guam or Puerto Rico.
July 24th, 2009
Is $400 billion a lot of money?
One U.S. Senator says we spend that much every year importing petroleum from our friends in Saudi, Nigeria, Canada, Mexico, Russia and Venezuela. I use the term “friend” advisedly. They are in fact pushers for the American addiction former President George W. Bush called out so pointedly.
So what could we do with $400 billion if we started putting that money somewhere else? 20,000 all-electric cars in a single year at $50,000 each. 40,000 vehicles if we simply gave a $25,000 rebate to each new car buyer who went electric. The current stimulus plan puts about $20 billion into rail transit, 5% of our annual oil bill.
America’s largest urban solar power plant will cost $60-million. Let’s say we build a lot of those for an average of $75 million each. For the $400-billion we could build over 5300 urban solar power plants. If we concentrated them in the southwestern cities like Las Vegas, San Diego and Phoenix where air conditioning is a serious juice drainer, think of the savings. And it could help recharge the electric cars. So maybe we push electric cars and build, say, 2000 urban solar power plants? Hah, dream on.
For 400-billion we could probably even build a nuclear power plant or two if anybody would agree to site them in their state.
None of this pie-in-the-sky greening would help the stock price of Exxon and Chevron, let alone their executive bonuses. That’s one huge drawback. And to beggar the Saudi royal family, for shame!
Could any of us live to see the day when the solar lobby has half the clout of the oil lobby?
July 13th, 2009
Carbon capture? Nuc plants? Not gonna help?
Swedish engineers did some calculating on whether it would work to use two of the more popular approaches to curtailing global warming. They looked at carbon capture (or sequestration) and more nuclear power plants.
Capturing carbon is pointless they say. As for nuclear: it’s a heat disaster, producing three times as much heat emission energy as it does electricity.
The core of the Swedish argument: most of the heat produced by industrialization and hyuman activities is not even inthe atmosphere. It’s trapped in the ground, the oceans, the melting ice caops and glaciers. They maintain the problem is NET HEAT EMISSIONS.
Thus the researchers say use of solar, tidal and wind–which produce little heat emission–is the direction we must use to combat global warming.
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A newsman since 1969, Harry Fuller has worked for CBS, ABC, CNBC Europe, CNET and was founding news director at TechTV. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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