Energy Symposium
I attended an energy symposium this week here in Madison. As many of you know, I find energy policy a fascinating topic and know that it will be the deciding geo-political issue of my generation. I’ve been trying to educate myself about the subject as best I can, and was naturally rather excited to attend the symposium.
I’ve put together a few highlights from the two-day event and will share them here:
Climate Change: The first lecture was by a climatologist who presented on the state of the earth’s fragile climate. He presented a rather dark but unfortunately accurate assessment of the earth’s fragile climate. Due to a decade- and possibly century-long thermal delay, we have likely already lost the polar ice caps. Even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the earth would continue to get warmer. (And it goes without saying that stopping all greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow is not even remotely possible.) At this point, we’ll be lucky to prevent massive global extinction, famine, millions of human deaths and other unpleasant effects.
Here’s a useful talking point next time you’re trying to deal with a “global warming is just a theory” blowhard: Out of 928 peer-reviewed scientific studies, 928 conclude that global climate change is happening and is due to human activities. (And yet somehow our fearless leaders seem to need more evidence. Maybe 1000 studies will do it?)
Oil: The good news: we’re never going to run out of oil. The bad news: we’re quickly running out of cheap oil. Due to the magic of free market economics, the price of oil rises as demand outstrips supply. The days of $20 oil are long gone. We might go back to $50 oil for a few years, but from this point on the scale is going to keep moving up. $100 oil will soon be a reality, with $200 oil to follow.
The other good news is that as the price of oil increases, various alternatives become economically feasible. Which means that rising oil prices are Good, and trying to artificially lower oil prices through legislation or other means is a terrible, terrible idea. This is a repeated topic on tadfad, but it is a crucial one. Simply put, we need to pay $3 or more at the pump. It’s the only way we’ll ever escape complete foreign oil dependence.
Nuclear: The symposium hosted a gentleman from France to discuss nuclear options and illustrate the remarkable improvements in technology since the 1970s when we built the last U.S. nuclear power plant. I’ve been sitting the fence on nuclear for awhile, but considering all the information we have, it appears that we no longer have much of a choice–we must start building nuclear power plants if we have any hope of lowering our CO2 emissions. Nuclear can scale to replace coal plants and is cost-competitive. Modern designs are much safer than the older generation and can be designed to significantly reduce or eliminate nuclear waste.
The largest problem with nuclear seems to be fear. My response is this: We can continue to pump ever-more CO2 into the atmosphere and all but guarantee catastrophic global climate change, or we can build a few hundred new nuclear power plants and live with the extremely small chance of a catastrophic nuclear accident. We no longer have the luxury of choosing the best option. We’re faced with the hard reality of choosing the lesser of two evils. And from what I’ve learned, nuclear is far less evil than at atmosphere with 750ppm CO2!
. . .
I could go on, but I need to study for my exams. I hope I’ve at least inspired a few of you to read more about energy options and energy policy.
Filed under Uncategorized : Comments (0) : May 10th, 2006 by tadfad
