Global warming skeptics worry environmentalism?may cripple economies with assorted misguided energy-related boondoggles, Finley writes.?Anti-nuclear environmentalists, Finley adds, have increased electric bills and greenhouse gas emissions, over fears of global warming.
This video, titled "Debating The New Environmentalism" and hosted by Time senior writer Bryan Walsh, is from the SXSW Eco 2012 conference, held last October in Austin, Texas.For one, climate skeptics fear that people who are not qualified to opine on the complex topic of energy production may cripple economies with assorted misguided energy related boondoggles. Is that a realistic concern? What are the odds? I?m going to argue here that the odds are not zero. I offer as anecdotal evidence, the above video?Debating The New Environmentalism?hosted by Bryan Walsh, which I will eventually parse below. Interestingly enough, all three participants are wearing nearly identical shirts. Only Bill McKibben thought to wear his?red power tie.
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On one hand, it seems unlikely that global warming activists will throttle economies in large part because, as McKibben said,??We are losing badly.??He was referring to efforts to reduce carbon emissions.? But consider this, from?Ask McKibben Anything: What About Nuclear Energy:
The advantage of nuclear energy is that it is largely carbon free ?
So why is he against it?
It?s like burning $20 bills to generate electricity.
I?m not against wind if carefully sited to minimize bird and bat deaths, which hasn?t always been the case, but because wind is also ?like burning $20 bills to generate electricity,? this is a case of deception by omission.
The wind tax credit was just extended for another year. First enacted by the Energy Policy Act twenty years ago, it has been extended four, make that five, times. Every honest estimate I?ve seen suggests that this credit costs taxpayers roughly a billion dollars a year, for a total of roughly $20 billion and counting.?
$20 billion is roughly the price tag of three conventional nuclear power plants, capable of producing about a third of present wind capability just from the extra cost of building wind.? 52/19 = 3/x, x = 1.1,? (104 reactors, average of 2 reactors/power plant, 19% of electrical energy from nuclear, 3% from wind, $6.7 billion per nuclear power plant).
If wind is economically viable (cheaper than fossil fuels), why do proponents always insist that the industry will collapse if it loses that credit? And wind can only scale so far before it becomes prohibitively expensive to compensate for its intermittency. We need other low carbon sources of energy to compliment it, and nuclear should be one of them. It may be more expensive than fossil fuels in the short run, but obviously, so is the ?wind-enhanced combined cycle natural gas power plant.?
Nuclear can?t do it all, but neither can wind and solar.
McKibben continues:
It wasn?t really environmentalists who put the kabash on nuclear power. It was Wall Street
Make no mistake about it, McKibben is an anti-nuclear environmentalist. At this point, climate skeptics should be getting nervous because it wasn?t Wall Street that throttled the economies of Japan and Germany by using fear tactics and misinformation to shut down their nuclear. That was the result of years of effort by anti-nuclear environmentalists. Japan is experiencing an unprecedented trade deficit to the tune of $32 billion dollars because their nuclear is on hold, never mind the huge increase in GHG emissions. France, which gets 70% of its electrical power from nuclear,?emits half the CO2 of Germany?and that was before Germany started phasing out its nuclear (instead of coal).
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