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March 6, 2008

Posted by Stay Red on Thursday, March 06, 2008 11:16:05 PM

Part 3 of a three-part series on Nuclear power in America

As America’s need for electricity grows, and public concerns continue to rise over the cost-both environmentally and in real dollars-of using fossil fuels to generate power, people are looking for inexpensive, non-polluting alternatives. One such alternative to fossil fuels is nuclear, which has cheaply and reliably and cleanly and safely produced electricity for nearly 30 years.

But public fear remains a major obstacle to increasing nuclear power generation in the US. Concerns remain over the operating safety of nuclear power plants. Then there is the vexing issue of what to do with all that nuclear waste.

Three Mile Island’s 1979 meltdown rattled people’s faith about the safety of nuclear power. The Chernobyl meltdown seven years later shook public confidence like a magnitude 8 earthquake. Much was made of Chernobyl at the time, and it is still cited and studied as the world’s greatest nuclear disaster. Yet many people are under-informed about the Chernobyl meltdown.

The cause of the meltdown at Chernobyl was:

A. Untrained, inexperienced crew.

B. Flawed reactor design.

C. An experimental test that went awry.

D. All of the above

Which meltdown caused more nuclear fallout in Pennsylvania, Three Mile Island (Pennsyvania) or Chernobyl (Ukraine)?

A. The answer cannot be scientifically determined

B. Three Mile Island meltdown

C. Both about the same

D. Chernobyl meltdown

How many people died as a direct result of the Chernobyl meltdown?

A. 4,000,000

B. 400,000

C. 40,000

D. 4000

The answer to all three Chernobyl questions is "D". The meltdown at Chernobyl occurred when an inexperienced crew-some of whom had been transferred in from jobs at coal-burning power plants-violated safety procedures and performed a fatal experiment on one of the reactors. The Chernobyl plant’s major flaw was the lack of a steel-reinforced, concrete containment structure around the metal vessel housing the reactor. The lack of secondary containment allowed radiation from Chernobyl’s reactor vessel to immediately escape into the atmosphere.

The Chernobyl reactor also used a "carbon moderator" to facilitate the nuclear chain reaction. During the meltdown, the carbon moderator caught fire. It burned for nine days, delaying clean up efforts and prolonging the leakage of radiation into the surrounding area. As radiation continued to escape from Chernobyl, some of it found its way into the upper atmosphere, to be globally distributed by air currents. This helps to explain why ground level monitoring in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania detected higher radiation levels after Chernobyl than had been detected after the meltdown at Three Mile Island.

Opinions vary regarding the number of deaths that directly resulted from the Chernobyl meltdown. Great Britain’s Lancet-the same medical journal that claims the US liberation of Iraq resulted in 655,000 "excessive" Iraqi deaths-published a study alleging that Chernobyl’s meltdown killed every human being on the European Continent and in Asia. More serious and reliable estimates place Chernobyl’s death toll at around 4000 people. Between 50 and 100 of the deaths were plant workers or clean up personnel, most of whom received extremely high radiation exposure and died within a couple of weeks of the meltdown. The remaining deaths were spread over a number of years and were mostly attributed to exposure-related ailments such as cancer.

Based on the available information, all current US nuclear power plants have reinforced concrete containment structures around a separate metal reactor vessel. This would be the required configuration for any new nuclear plant construction. And US plants do not use carbon moderators, they use water.

A disaster like Chernobyl simply could not happen in the United States. American nuclear plants have had a clean safety record for nearly three decades. Even the 1979 incident at Three Mile Island-a "perfect storm" of things gone wrong-did not result in any injuries. If the odds of a nuclear accident are so small, why all the fear?

GQ’s Meltdown has one possible explanation:

What drives this (fear), in many cases, is the conflation of magnitude with probability. That is, when people worry about nuclear power, what they worry about is the scale of an accident, not the likelihood.

So even if the probability of a nuclear meltdown is one in a million, that one occurrence strikes people as potentially devastating. Nobody wants her/his city to be the one smoldering in radioactive ruins.

Though some opposition to nuclear power generation results from worries about the day-to-day safety of America’s nuclear power plants, even more resistance comes from people concerned about what to do with the nuclear fuel after it is no longer useful for generating power. There are two primary options for nuclear waste, which maintains some level of radioactivity for thousands of years: recycle then dispose, or dispose.

France gets 80 percent of its power from nukes, and has the cheapest electrical rates in Europe. The French also the have cleanest air in Europe, and annually export $4 billion worth of electricity to their European neighbors. France recycles its nuclear waste. From FOXNews article "Recycling Nuclear Fuel: The French Do It; Why Can’t Oui?":

Upon its removal from French reactors, used fuel is packed in containers and safely shipped via train and road to a facility in La Hague. There, the energy producing uranium and plutonium are removed and separated from the other waste and made into new fuel that can be used again. The entire process adds about 6 percent in costs for the French.

Anti-nuclear fear mongering has proved baseless. The French have recycled fuel like this for 30 years without incident: no terrorist attack, no bad guys stealing uranium, no contribution toward nuclear weapons proliferaton, and o accidental explosions.

France meets all of its recycling needs with one facility. Indeed, domestic French reprocessing only takes about half of La Hague’s capacity. The other half is used to recycle other countries’ spent nuclear fuel.

Since beginning operations, France’s La Hague plant has safely processed over 23,000 tones of used fuel—enough to power France for fourteen years. SNIP

The French recycling process is also being adopted by Japan and is being considered by the Chinese. At some point, even the recycled fuel runs out, at which point the French process involves encasing the spent material in glass blocks. The glass blocks then go for "deep geologic disposal" (translation: burial in a really, really deep hole), covered momentarily in this piece.

Current US laws prohibit recycling of nuclear waste, thanks to a 1977 directive signed by then-president Jimmy Carter.

That is unfortunate because the US currently has 112 million pounds of nuclear waste. Recycling would reduce that unusable nuclear waste down to about 12 million pounds. The 100 million pounds of recycled uranium could potentially produce enough electricity to light every home in the United States for the next twelve years.

As a consequence of the ban on nuclear recycling, US nuclear plants currently store nuclear waste onsite, typically in reinforced cooling ponds designed specifically for that purpose. This practice is a big part of the reason that many Americans fear nuclear power. Storing nuclear waste onsite at a nuclear power plant creates the potential that radiation will seep out into the surrounding land, eventually getting into the local water supply.

Concerns about potential groundwater contamination are not unfounded. Nuclear power plants need plenty of cool water to keep the reactors from overheating, so plants are typically located next to large bodies of water. That close proximity to water increases the risk that escaping radiation can contaminate one or more local water sources.

The majority of experts seem to agree that keeping nuclear waste onsite is needlessly risky. And expert consensus is that deep geological disposal is currently the best disposition for spent nuclear fuel. It appears that the only consensus on where to locate the repositories is "in someone else’s backyard".

The French are apparently some of the world’s most informed people when it comes to nuclear power. They are also pragmatic when it comes to nuclear; they understand that there are risks involved, but they trust the people who design and manage the nuclear power systems. And they seem to feel that cheap, clean power is a worthwhile tradeoff for the risks involved.

Yet, enlightened as they are about nuclear power, the French people are not comfortable about the idea of having a large repository for nuclear waste on French soil. Amid much ongoing controversy, the French have yet to settle on their nuclear disposal site.

The US has settled on its disposal site, in tunnels, 1200 feet beneath Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. From Meltdown:

(The mountain) consists of four principal layers, which alternate between a hard and relatively brittle material known as welded tuff and a sponge-like material known as nonwelded tuff. SNIP On the surface, the harder material cloaks the mountain, shedding most rainfall down the sides and into the surrounding plains. The water that does seep into the cracks would have to travel 300 feet through fissures in a layer called Tiva Canyon, saturate a hundred feet of the softer rock, and then continue through fissures in another several hundred feet of hard rock known as Topopah Spring in order to reach the repository. Even then, to be dangerous, that water would first have to penetrate the metal canisters that are molded around the waste, become irradiated, continue down through several hundred more feet of hard rock, and fill yet another layer of spongy rock known as Calico Hills, before finally reaching the water table, where it might, depending on whose data you believe, either surface a century later in the middle of Death Valley, or else not at all. Also, since the spongy layers of Yucca Mountain happen to be rich in minerals known as zeolites, which are known to neutralize radioactivity. SNIP

The US government has already spent billions of dollars building Yucca and preparing it for operation, even going so far as hiring staff. But then things ground to a halt, primarily stopped due to political pressures. And they may not restart for awhile. Again from Meltdown:

The people of Nevada, by a large majority, believe the repository should be in somebody else’s backyard and have thrown up legal challenges at every stage of the site’s development. With the ascension of Nevada’s Harry Reid to the position of Senate Majority Leader in 2006, the state’s quest to block Yucca Mountain seems more likely than ever to succeed. Although development continues, progress is glacial, and Congress has been, to put it mildly, slow to grant approvals. As recently as January of this year, congressional budget cuts forced the repository to fire nearly all its on-site employees, scaling back to a mostly administrative operation. When (someone) asked Senator Reid what would happen to the repository in the coming years, he minced no words. "It will never happen," he said flatly.

It should not matter that Harry Reid said Yucca will never open. Reid is arguably one of the most ineffectual Senate leaders of the last 100 years. He has no credibility; his words carry no weight.

The risk of storing nuclear waste onsite at nuclear plants outweighs whatever risk there may be in storing waste at Yucca Mountain. America has 104 nuclear power plants, spread across 39 states. It boils down to a decision to put the residents of one state at some slight, theoretical risk, or expose people in 39 states to obvious ongoing hazard.

Eventually Yucca will open, but that may only be the beginning of the fight to store nuclear waste in Nevada. As an RFTLC reader astutely points out, next will come protests over transporting of nuclear wastes over America’s roadways and railways. Expect people blocking roadways and chaining themselves to the tracks to protest nukes traveling through their town-or somebody else’s. The design of the shipping containers and other precautions greatly minimize any risk of radiation leakage from a transportation accident. But, as with a meltdown, nobody wants the accident to happen in his backyard.

The irony of Nevadans fighting the Yucca Mountain project does not escape Meltdown’s author, who notes:

(Nevada, which has America’s dirtiest coal plant,) is unable to generate its own power and currently imports as much as 15 percent of its electricity from California and Arizona. Of course, since they produce 14 percent and 23 percent of their power at nuclear plants, respectively, that means Nevada, which likes to proclaim itself "nuclear-free," actually gets a considerable amount of its power from nuclear plants, too—but at markup prices that profit California and Arizona.

In some ways, the Nevadan attitudes reflect the attitudes of America. The Nevadans embrace the familiar but dirty old king coal, unaware or unconcerned that it is killing people and harming the environment. And maybe folks are more okay with nuclear power generation than they let on; provided the power plant is far enough away that it is no threat to them.

RFTLC believes that America must shift away from using fossil fuels to make electricity; the sooner the better. Renewables such solar and wind power would be this corner’s preference, but those technologies are still unproven and each has its own set of negatives. Nuclear power is availabe now.  It proven; it is cheap and it is clean. And it is safe.

Twenty-four thousand people die each year from coal-related pollution. That is real, not theoretical. Projections of catastrophe due to a meltdown or radiation leakage from nuclear waste are theoretical. But a serious accident has not happened in over thirty years of nuclear power production. There has not ever been a single fatality from US nuclear power generation.

Perhaps Americans can learn something from the French, who understand the threats and the benefits and, having weighed each, choose nuclear power as a clean, inexpensive and, ultimately, safe source of energy…

Stay red…

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March 4, 2008

Posted by Stay Red on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 6:27:50 PM

Twenty-nine years ago, a string of mechanical failures, compounded by human error, led to a reactor meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. No one was hurt and TMI was far and away America’s most serious nuclear accident. And TMI’s performance has since been near-flawless.

Yet nearly three decades later, in the face of rising energy costs-oil pegged $120 per barrel today-and increasing concerns about the environment, the American public remains resistant to nuclear power, a source of cheap, environmentally friendly energy.

Today less than 40 percent of Americans favor nuclear power; roughly one person in ten advocates the outright decommissioning of America’s 104 nuclear power plants.

This public resistance to nuclear power generation has effectively deterred the development of new power plants; the last time the US issued a new permit for a nuclear plant was more than thirty years ago.

In 2007, US nuclear facilities generated a record 807 billion kWh of electricity (with record uptime, too), about twenty percent of the nation’s electrical power. That output would not be quick or easy or cheap to replace.

American facilities currently using renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric, wind and solar are all running at or very near capacity. And each of the renewables is currently limited in its ability to add to, let alone replace, the electrical power currently generated by atomic energy.

There are already hydroelectric dams at many of the best spots. What few good spots are left are often unavailable due to environmental or safety concerns. The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, signed into law by President Johnson in 1968, also prohibits building dams on some rivers.

Wind power is unstable and unpredictable, making it tricky to connect to the electrical grid. The electrical grid, in turn, also is limited in its capacity to store surplus power generated by wind. The typical wind farm takes up a sizeable amount of open space and not everyone likes the idea of a couple hundred multi-story (some as tall as 400 feet) structures-required to replace a single conventional power plant-spoiling their view of the landscape. Just ask Teddy Kennedy and his Massachusetts neighbors, whose protests led Congress in 2006 to block the "Cape Wind" project in Nantucket Sound. Cape Wind’s 130 towers would have generated seventy-five percent of the power required for Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

Solar power has produced mixed results; using the sun’s energy to make electricity via steam generation appears economically unviable, but there has been encouraging success with photovoltaic cells.

Where it can be difficult to predict the availability of wind power, solar power is very predictable: If the sun shines, the cells generate power. And solar electrical power is often at its best when people need the most electricity: hot, sunny days when air conditioning use drives up electrical demand.

But solar cells share some disadvantages with wind power; namely they take up plenty of space and not everyone finds them pleasing to the eye. The solar cells required to supply all of the power for an average home would cover one-half of a regulation football field, or about half an acre (No truth to the rumor that it would take solar cells spread over an area the size of Manhattan for Al Bore’s palatial estate; Manhattan is a little too small). And large banks of solar cells are aesthetically objectionable to some onlookers.

Based on current technology, solar electric is still somewhat expensive; upwards of $150,000 for that half acre of solar cells required for the typical home. Then there’s issue of the cells sitting idle when the sun doesn’t shine.

Random factoid: it takes anywhere from 2-5 years for a solar cell to capture the energy originally used to produce it.

Since renewables are not a ready option for replacing nuclear power generation, that leaves the old standby: fossil fuel. There are downsides there, too.

Coal is the most common fuel used in power generation. It is cheap and abundant; some experts say the Earth has a limitless supply of coal. But coal is about the dirtiest fuel currently used to generate electricity in America.

A typical 1000 megawatt power plant will burn more than 100 railcars of coal per week. Burning a ton of coal produces three tons of carbon dioxide, a major source of greenhouse gas. The combustion process also produces sulfur dioxide, a primary component of acid rain.

In 2007, American power plants burned one billion tons of coal and pumped three billion tons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

One may safely debate the effects of acid rain on the environment. And skepticism is abundant-and growing-about the effect of greenhouse gases on the Earth’s climate. But it is a pretty safe bet that few people would advocate a double-digit annual increase in America’s greenhouse gas output. That is what would likely happen if America eliminated nuclear power generation in favor of coal.

From GQ’s "Meltdown" here is some additional perspective on replacing nuclear with coal:

To produce the same amount of electricity, a coal-fired power plant would have to incinerate more than 3 million metric tons of fuel, producing 500 pounds of carbon dioxide per second, as well as 1,200 pounds of ash per minute and 750 pounds of sulfur dioxide every five minutes. SNIP

Picking up on public concerns about pollution from burning coal, three of the largest Wall Street investment banks are imposing environmental standards that will make it tougher to finance construction of coal burning power plants.

Oil burning power plants generated less than 2 percent of America’s power in 2006, the last year of published statistics from the Energy Information Administration. Oil is not quite as big a polluter as coal, but burning it is wasteful when there are so many other, more productive uses for oil. Like the plastic in your computer, for example. Or the tires on your car. Or your detergent. Or that aspirin you feel like taking right now.

Natural gas burning power plants produced about the same percentage of US power as the nuclear plants. And the current trend is upward, increasing over the past ten years from about 14 percent to roughly 20 percent today.

Natural gas is the cleanest burning of the fossil fuels. But it is not as abundant as coal. Back in the 1990s, America became a net importer of natural gas. Today Canada supplies about 15 percent of the natural gas consumed in the US. It is not cost effective to ship natural gas due to its bulk, so most natural gas is transported via pipeline. This restricts competition; even if there is a surplus of natural gas in Siberia, there is no economical way to get the gas to America. Restricted supply and rising demand are at least part of the reason that natural gas prices have increased more than 60 percent since 2000.

Like oil, there are plenty of other, better uses for natural gas (heating water, for example) than making electricity. Natural gas is used to manufacture plastic, fabrics and even pharmaceuticals.

On Wednesday (perhaps Thursday if today’s Dim primaries make big news): Why the continued fear about nukes?

Stay red…
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March 3, 2008

Posted by Stay Red on Monday, March 03, 2008 3:26:55 PM

In the pre-dawn hours of March 29, 1979, a simple mechanical anomaly set off a chain of events that radically changed the way America generates its electrical power.

The GQ article Meltdown describes how the incident nearly thirty years ago at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island (TMI) has led to American-and possibly global-fear and loathing about nuclear power.

The meltdown at TMI started when the filters for cleaning incoming water-used to cool the nuclear reactor- simultaneously shutdown. The cooling system attempted to automatically bypass the filters and bring in unfiltered water, but the bypass valve failed to open. With no incoming water to cool down the system, core temperatures began to climb in the reactor.

Rising temperatures and increasing pressure triggered a relief valve to open, venting the system to the outside air. After just ten seconds of operation, the relief valve failed, sticking in the open position and allowing the cooling system water-mostly in the form of steam-to escape. This over-venting only added to the overheating problem by further depleting the water in the system.

Even with all that had gone wrong to that point, there was still a chance to avert a catastrophe. But the two operators on duty-each with decades of experience-both inexplicably froze. When they finally decided what to do, their actions only worsened the crisis.

Inside the plant’s cavernous control room, they stood before a seven-foot-high instrument panel, crammed with hundreds of -dials, gauges, and meters, many of which were erupting with alarm sirens and flashing lights, but none of them had any idea what it meant. As the minutes turned into hours, and the plant’s internal temperature soared above 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, then 1,500 degrees, with water levels plummeting and the prospect of meltdown becoming more likely by the second, the confused operators did nothing to improve the situation. In fact, they made it worse. When one of the plant’s emergency systems began replacing water at a rate of nearly a thousand gallons per minute—which probably would have stemmed the crisis—operators turned the pumps off. Then, for reasons that are difficult to comprehend, they shut down the plant’s circulating pumps, preventing the cool water still inside the building from reaching the superheated core.

It would be another two hours before the morning shift arrived and stopped the leak.

By then, it was too late: The temperature inside the reactor had risen to more than 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat had caused the top half of the radioactive chamber to collapse on itself. The uranium fuel had melted into a lake of radioactive liquid. The zirconium skin around that fuel had evaporated into a broth of volatile gases, including a giant cloud of hydrogen that would soon explode into a fiery ball. And the nation, still asleep in the early-morning hours, was spiraling into the worst nuclear accident in its history, a cataclysm of fear and public mistrust that would consume the airwaves and charge the political dialogue for months; that would bring white-suited emergency-response crews to the site and would summon the president of the United States to visit in a pair of bright yellow protective booties, ordering a full investigation; that would take ten years and a billion dollars to clean up, would destroy the nation’s faith in atomic technology, and would bring the hope and promise of nuclear power—promoted since the 1950s as a clean and plentiful source of energy that would be "too cheap to meter"—to a grinding, glowing, terrified halt. SNIP

Three Mile Island is the poster child for all that has gone wrong with American nuclear power. Yet TMI continues to operate today, reliably generating cheap, non-polluting power.

Over the past ten years, the plant has become famous for its constancy, setting records for continuous operation. The latest, among more than 250 similar reactors worldwide, was 689 days without pause or fail.

What all this amounts to, in a typical year, is about 7.2 million megawatt hours of electricity, or enough to satisfy the needs of 800,000 homes. The carbon footprint of a nuclear plant is precisely…nothing. SNIP

Today, TMI is a veritable wildlife sanctuary. But what about back in 1979? Just how much damage was done by the meltdown at TMI?

From a radiological standpoint, the impact is somewhat easier to measure. Radiation is counted in units called millirems. Because the earth is warmed by the largest nuclear reactor of all—the sun—virtually all of us are exposed to a certain baseline of millirems each year, depending on where we live. At higher elevations, like Denver, the sun is closer, and citizens receive about 180 millirems per year; at lower elevations, like Delaware, residents receive only 20 or 30. Building materials can also make a difference: Because of the presence of -elements like radon in many rocks, people who live in brick or stone houses tend to receive 50 or 100 millirems more each year than people who live in wooden houses. Region also has an impact. In areas rich with coal, residents absorb about 100 millirems annually from the ground; in northeastern Washington State, residents get about 1,500 millirems from local minerals; in certain parts of India, as much as 3,000 millirems per year may come from the ground. A cigarette smoker gets about 1,300 millirems per year, mostly from the presence of the radioactive isotope polonium-210, which is found in tobacco (and, recently, in the autopsy reports of Russian spies). Back home in Washington, D.C., Dick Cheney gets about 100 millirems every year from his pacemaker. Every time you go in for a dental X-ray, you get 5. Chest X-ray: 15. PET scan: 650. In fact, just by being alive, you generate a little radiation of your own, and most people absorb about 40 millirems each year from themselves.

At Three Mile Island, according to a 1980 inquiry by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the maximum level of radiation that anybody within a fifty-mile radius could have received from the accident was about 100 millirems—the equivalent of moving to Colorado for a year, or into a brick house for two. According to another study, by the Pennsylvania Departments of Health and Environmental Resources, among 721 locals tested, not a single one showed radiation exposure above normal. A similar study by the state’s Department of Agriculture found no significant trace of radiation in the local fish, water, or dairy products, which tend to register minute impurities. And a study released in 2000 by the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh found that, twenty-one years after the accident, there was still no evidence of "any -measurable impact" on public health. SNIP

No one was injured by the Three Mile Island meltdown. And, according to the GQ article, "nuclear plants have not claimed a single American life". Yet the effects from the TMI meltdown linger on the American psyche.

On Tuesday, the case for nuclear power.

Stay red…
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Happy Valentines Day! February 14, 2008

Posted by Stay Red on Thursday, February 14, 2008 5:21:43 PM

"Vote for the man who promises least; he’ll be the least disappointing." —Bernard Baruch

I guess that means Obama will be least disappointing because he sure isn’t promising much of anything besides hope and change.

Word of thanks to reader Andrew P. for sending along the cartoon.

*************************************

I am sooooo confused! First the experts tell us that biofuels will help reduce global warming (though the effect of greenhouse gases on global warming has yet to be established to the satisfaction of this blogger-read on for more). Now we have experts telling us that biofuel production may result in a net increase of greenhouse gases….

Courtesy New York Times Friday February 8, 2008; excerpted, my bold emphasis.

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these "green" fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded. SNIP

These studies for the first time take a detailed, comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of natural land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development.

The destruction of natural ecosystems — whether rain forest in the tropics or grasslands in South America — not only releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when they are burned and plowed, but also deprives the planet of natural sponges to absorb carbon emissions. Cropland also absorbs far less carbon than the rain forests or even scrubland that it replaces.

Together the two studies offer sweeping conclusions: It does not matter if it is rain forest or scrubland that is cleared, the greenhouse gas contribution is significant. More important, they discovered that, taken globally, the production of almost all biofuels resulted, directly or indirectly, intentionally or not, in new lands being cleared, either for food or fuel. SNIP

(P)lant-based fuels were originally billed as better than fossil fuels because the carbon released when they were burned was balanced by the carbon absorbed when the plants grew. But even that equation proved overly simplistic because the process of turning plants into fuels causes its own emissions — for refining and transport, for example.

The clearance of grassland releases 93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved by the fuel made annually on that land, said Joseph Fargione, lead author of the second paper, and a scientist at the Nature Conservancy. "So for the next 93 years you’re making climate change worse, just at the time when we need to be bringing down carbon emissions." SNIP

For instance, if vegetable oil prices go up globally, as they have because of increased demand for biofuel crops, more new land is inevitably cleared as farmers in developing countries try to get in on the profits. So crops from old plantations go to Europe for biofuels, while new fields are cleared to feed people at home.

Likewise, Dr. Fargione said that the dedication of so much cropland in the United States to growing corn for bioethanol had caused indirect land use changes far away. Previously, Midwestern farmers had alternated corn with soy in their fields, one year to the next. Now many grow only corn, meaning that soy has to be grown elsewhere.

Increasingly, that elsewhere, Dr. Fargione said, is Brazil, on land that was previously forest or savanna. "Brazilian farmers are planting more of the world’s soybeans — and they’re deforesting the Amazon to do it," he said. SNIP

Said Nicholas Nuttall, spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program "There was an unfortunate effort to dress up biofuels as the silver bullet of climate change," he said. "We fully believe that if biofuels are to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, there urgently needs to be better sustainability criterion." END EXCERPT

If biofuel is the silver bullet, then perhaps carbon caps are the wooden stake designed to kill the vampire that is global warming. That’s okay; we may not need the bullets or the stake; there may not even be a vampire we need to slay…

Courtesy John Hinderaker, posting at Powerline.com on Saturday February 8, 2008. My bold emphasis.

When Scott and I wrote "The Global Warming Hoax" in 1992, a group of Danish scientists had just published a paper that compared solar energy output (as measured by sunspot activity) to global temperatures, and found a striking correlation. No surprise there: just about all energy on earth comes from the Sun. Investors' Business Daily recalls that research and notes that the Sun has been quiet lately:

Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.

Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.

This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.

[Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council] reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere (And how would extremely cold weather in the Northern Hemisphere affect biofuel production?-Kevin). ***

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."

Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."

I suspect that many global warming alarmists are well aware that time is running out for them. If nothing is done and global temperatures decline in coming years--as they inevitably will, the only question is when--the alarmists will have been refuted. On the other hand, if they succeed in pushing through industry-destroying caps on carbon emissions around the world, and especially here in the U.S., they will take credit for the cooling when it comes, claiming it as vindication of their theories.

In that context, the 2008 election shapes up as very important. I don't worry too much about John McCain's acknowledged lack of economic expertise, as his instincts on the economy are generally conservative. But McCain badly needs to educate himself on the debate currently raging over the climate. "Global warming" represents the Left's most ambitious power grab since the fall of Communism, and if a Republican President doesn't stand it its way, who will?

If McCain is looking for a sensible energy policy, he might start with these recommendations from the Science and Environmental Policy Project:

Our policy recommendation is to phase out natural gas (methane) for electric power generation (now about 20% in US and 40% in UK), replace it with coal/nuclear, and use gas as a clean transportation fuel (in the form of Compressed Natural Gas -- CNG) for buses, trucks, and all fleet vehicles. In the US case it would cut oil imports by 30%. Further cuts would come from the use of plug-in and hybrid-electric cars.

There is lots of good work being done in climate science, a discipline that is still in its infancy. There are also plenty of creative proposals for how to address our energy needs. But if the Republican Party mindlessly signs on to the fake-science of anthropogenic global warming, those ideas will never see the light of day. Someone please get the word to John McCain.

Amid growing evidence showing little correlation between CO2 variations and global warming, the Goreacle and his minions have shifted their focus from global warming to "climate change", a lazy, disingenuous catch-all term that describes any weather event that appears even the slightest bit unusual.

Hot enough fer ye? Blame climate change. Cold enough to freeze a witch’s mitt? That’s climate change for ya. Inundated by rain? Gotta be climate change…same thing that explains that drought we had a couple summers back.

Hinderaker is right: No matter which direction global temperatures go over the next few years, Goreacle and his snake oil selling brethren will be there to tell all of us skeptics that they told us so…

Mark Twain passed away early in the 20th century, long before the post World War II boom that supposedly started global warming. Yet the folks in Twain’s time observed periods of heating and cooling sandwiched around periods of unpredictability. Even back then people had a name for climate change: they called it weather.

"Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get." ~ Mark Twain

Stay red…

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