“Global warming” is not a global crisis

I just endorsed this realist declaration that came out of the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change. If you read this and agree, you can endorse it too by going to: http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/

Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change

“Global warming” is not a global crisis

We, the scientists and researchers in climate and related fields, economists, policymakers, and business leaders, assembled at Times Square, New York City, participating in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change,

Resolving that scientific questions should be evaluated solely by the scientific method;

Affirming that global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life;

Recognising that the causes and extent of recently-observed climatic change are the subject of intense debates in the climate science community and that oft-repeated assertions of a supposed ‘consensus’ among climate experts are false;

Affirming that attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual citizens to encourage CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future trajectory of global climate change. Such policies will markedly diminish future prosperity and so reduce the ability of societies to adapt to inevitable climate change, thereby increasing, not decreasing human suffering;

Noting that warmer weather is generally less harmful to life on Earth than colder:

Hereby declare:

That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity’s real and serious problems.

That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.

That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.

That adaptation as needed is massively more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation, and that a focus on such mitigation will divert the attention and resources of governments away from addressing the real problems of their peoples.

That human-caused climate change is not a global crisis.

Now, therefore, we recommend –

That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth”.

That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.

Agreed at New York, 4 March 2008.

Our Energy, Our Future

In early June of this year, 2008, Congress is scheduled to vote on the Lieberman-Warner Climate legislation, which is projected to raise electrical power rates to $0.30/kWh – double the current rates for Californians and 5-6 times for Dixie Escalante customers – for the benefit of lowering the projected average global temperature increase by a maximum of 0.07 degrees F over the next 100 years. (Please let me know if you’d like to see the science behind those figures.) If you feel like that’s not a good investment for your hard-earned dollars, especially during this period of financial insecurity, you can make your voice be heard by joining the “Our Energy, Our Future” campaign at: https://www.ourenergy.coop/. For no charge to you and very little time, this website will send e-mails on your behalf to all of your legislators asking them to answer to us, their constituents, and explain why they think this could possibly be construed as a good idea. It’s very important that we give our elected representatives a reason to pause before they make a colossal mistake for which we’ll be paying for generations to come.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Run the numbers

Following is a letter I wrote to a friend in local politics, in response to their concerns on the economics (or lack thereof) of solar home systems:

Solar power costs $10/watt, just for the equipment (panels, controllers, batteries, etc.) I have heard of people spending a lot more than that once they get the equipment installed. Any time I hear someone claim that they’ve installed solar power for less, I know that they’ve left some costs out of their figures. For comparison, natural gas generating stations universally cost $1/watt anywhere in the world (I built three 10MW gas generators in Bangladesh in 2000 for about $0.80/watt.) Large coal-fired power plants have historically cost even less; for example, Deseret’s 400MW power plant that serves Dixie Escalante REA cost about $0.65/watt (for power plant, mine, and railroad.)

The example that I mentioned in our last meeting was for a typical customer of our electric cooperative, of which I’m one. My home is all-electric and I use an average of 1500kWh per month. To replace that amount of energy with solar power, and assuming that the co-op's grid remains available for me to use to offset my time of consumption vs. my time of generation (I use electricity in the dark but would only generate when it’s light,) I would need to install at least 9,000W of solar panels (which would generate about 1225kWh/month.) That amount of solar panels would require 910 square feet of my roof or yard, and would cost me at least $90,000 if I installed them myself. Then, if I could get both the federal and state tax credits of $2,000 each, I would only need to finance $86,000. If I could get a second mortgage on my home at 5% for 30 years, I’d have a monthly payment of $462 for the solar panels. OR, I could just buy that much energy from the co-op for $71.54 and save the extra $400 per month.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns on this or anything else in the power business.

Note: the photo above is a 100W installation on a relatively upscale home in the jungles of Bolivia, from one of my past projects.

What Puts the “Green” in “Green Power?”

Question: What puts the "green" in "green power?"
Answer: The "greenbacks" from your wallet!

Our elected representatives have already chosen to break the bank on "man-made global warming" and "carbon capture." The big problem is that nearly everyone who understands the fallacies of both issues has a vested interest in the matter. I break it out as follows:

1. The Investor Owned Utilities (IOU's), like Duke Energy Corp, see this as a big cash cow; now they have an excuse to write-off their existing coal-fired power plants that generate power at $0.03/kWh and have a blank check to replace them with natural gas-fired power plants that generate at $0.06/kWh. If you understand that the IOU’s get a fixed 8% return on all sales, then it doesn't take much math to understand why they'd love to double their wholesale power costs. It's good for their profit margins, good for their investors, and no one cares about the customer. And which IOU thought of this scam first? Enron! And when they went broke, guess to which other IOU they sold their renewables business…

2. The product manufacturers, like General Electric, are also experiencing a huge cash windfall; GE just got congress to outlaw incandescent light bulbs, whose next best replacement is CFL bulbs. Now, if they have a fixed profit margin, call it 15%, you can see why they'd love to sell light bulbs for $2.00 each rather than $0.50 each - they just quadrupled their profit margins! And that's just on the consumer side. On the utility side, in that same law congress decreed that transformer efficiencies increase from 98% to 99%. This 1% increase in efficiency will double the cost of every single transformer that every utility in America buys. So, it's all good for their profit margins and investors, and no one cares about the customer.

3. The large research labs, like Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), are also waiting with baited breath for the huge cash infusion from congress. These scientists know full well that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are not causing global warming, and are very careful not to say anything on that subject. What they are saying, however, is that with a little extra funding EPRI could research ways to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions back to 1990 levels. (They're very clever not to make any claims as to whether or not that will affect global warming - they've let Al Gore make that case for them.) And what is their price tag for the research? $2 trillion! That's just 1/6 of our GDP is all.

4. The press has discovered that headlines featuring natural disasters, real or imagined, sell more than headlines stating that the weather is normal, cyclical, and unpredictable. Plus, they have to generate enough copy to fill their airwaves 24/7, and if you watch the news very frequently (I watch CNN, Fox News, and CBS news simultaneously on three TVs every morning for an hour during my workout at the gym) you will quickly note that there is not that much happening around the globe, so they have to stretch, fill, and generate their own news a significant portion of the time. I'm reminded of the L.A. Times' motto: "Bad news is good news, good news is bad news, and old news is history." So, of course you get the press corps clutching at every opportunity to tout "man-made global warming," making them complicit in the scam however ignorantly.

So now you have the “perfect storm” of well-funded lobbyists from the big IOUs, manufacturers, and research labs, as well as the press, all telling congress that Al Gore is right (even though they know he's not) and that our government needs to throw some serious money their way or there will be dire consequences. The only sector that I see trying to tell it like it is, and protect their consumers' best interests, are the rural electric cooperatives. Being non-profit entities we have no vested interest in seeing our rates increase - we have no profit margins to increase and no dividends to pay to share holders. We answer only to our member/consumers and our only interest is to sell electricity with the best reliability possible at the best possible price. Unfortunately, we’re so small that our lobby in Washington is relatively small, so now our only hope to stem the hemorrhaging is to ignite a grass-roots movement among our members. I was talking to our lobby people in DC last week and they told me that they'd done all they could do with the legislators in Washington and now it was up to our members to get involved. Hopefully you'll be a part of that.

Following are three questions that our lobbyists suggest that we all ask our elected officials:

1. Experts say that our nation’s growing electricity needs will soon go well beyond what renewables, conservation, and efficiency can provide; what is your plan to make sure we have the electricity we’ll need in the future?

2. What are you doing to fully fund the research required to make harmful emissions free electric plants an affordable reality?

3. Balancing electricity needs and environmental goals will be difficult. How much is all this going to increase my electric bill and what will you do to keep it affordable?

On the subject of "carbon capture": while this concept is being bandied about in Washington DC as if it were something we could actually do, it's still very much in the theoretical stage, part of that $2T study that EPRI wants to do, so no one yet understands how it would be done or what it might cost us. This is one of those cases of "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it."

Wind Power and Bio Fuels?

I hear all the time from friends and acquaintances who think it's windy enough here in the Southwest/Four Corners states that we should all be powered by windmills. Following is what I wrote to one friend recently:

Sorry, but if you look at DOE's National Renewable Energy Lab's wind resource map (see: http://www.nrel.gov/gis/wind.html) there is very little to no usable wind in the whole Four Corners area in the states of Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, or Colorado. You need a "category 5" wind resource (dark purple on the map) to make wind power, however breezy it seems there where you live (I know I always thought of it as windy.) And then... at best you will only have wind power 15% of the time. Plus... you can only have 10% of your power from wind (the rest must come from coal, natural gas, nuclear, etc.) in order to maintain frequency stability (that's what makes your electric clocks and motors run right.) So, for heaven's sake, don't invest any money in a wind farm.

Also, I'd hate to invest any money in bio-fuels, regardless of that Virgin Airlines flight - burning down the rain forest to grow and burn more food is never good for the planet. See: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/02/24/eco.biofuels/index.html

Fighting the Big "Environmental" Industry

On the political front here in Utah, I spent the past month continually commuting or phone conferencing to/with Salt Lake City for work on three separate but related fronts – a Renewable Portfolio Standard, Net Metering, and Interconnection – all three dealing with “Alternative Energy” sources (but mostly solar.) This has been a particularly busy season since the Utah legislature is currently in session. The problem is that the big “environmental” industry (notably GE and Honeywell) who bought into the existing alternative energy (mostly solar and wind) technology have gotten impatient with their market share (less than 3%) and decided to legislate themselves some more equipment sales. Unfortunately for them, their power prices are about twenty times the going rate here in Utah, which makes them unattractive. Unfortunately for us, Utah’s governor is such a flaming radical (if he weren’t so independently wealthy, thanks to his daddy, I’d say he’d been bought off by the big environmental industry) that he’s willing to betray all of Utah’s rate payers and create our own version of a Soviet-style command economy (like in California) and force us to buy from these snake-oil salesmen (most of whom are lobbying with grant money from the DOE – your and my own tax dollars – talk about being hoisted on your own petard.) But Utah isn’t alone or even the first battle state – these same battles have already been fought and lost in 24 other states, including Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Texas, California, Washington, and Oregon. It’s been nearly a full-time job to try to protect our citizens from this travesty – and for whatever number of battles that we’ve won, I’m not convinced that the war is over; it’s like watching a bad horror movie – every time you think you’ve killed the Boogieman he just gets back up and starts chasing you with a big chainsaw again. It’s good to be involved in the political process a bit, however frustrating. And speaking of frustrating, I’ll save you all my rant about the national political scene – suffice it to say that I’m (literally) having nightmares about the upcoming energy and food shortages as the present and future governments continue to wreck our economy – I’m rapidly becoming an anarchist.

Lake Mead and Lake Powell drying up?

If you've read the recent studies published by the propaganda machine that we call our "free press" in which they talk about droughts in the near future drying up Lake Mead and Lake Powell, don't let these guys get you too worried. If they're correct, it's just dumb luck and not valid science - odds are that they're 100% wrong. I've studied their global climate models and they're not even accurate enough to "predict" the past, which means to use their models to duplicate past climate conditions that were measured, never mind predict the future. They totally missed predicting this past winter (2007-08) which was the coldest on recent record. This huge disconnect with reality comes from the fact that they don't even attempt to model such things as mountains, sea coasts, or even water vapor (which makes up 97% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.) Besides, these models aren't even accurate on a global scale, never mind a micro-climate scale. And I know something about computer models - I've spent the last 20 years making and applying computer models to analyze and predict electrical power systems - that's what has taken me around the world for such clients as the US Government and the United Nations. So, while we should all do our part to conserve the natural resources over which we have stewardship, don't lose any sleep over these predictions or any other climate predictions based on global climate models, at least until the day when they figure out how to model how weather works.