… Having voted against the administration's climate change bill on the record means that at least some of these House Democrats will be able to vote for what emerges from a House-Senate conference later in the year. Therefore, the chances of a climate bill being enacted this year is now much greater than it was 24 hours ago.
That's the ever-perceptive Stan Collender on the politics of the climate change bill.
Climate legislation will result in higher energy costs. This, in turn, will drive all energy-intensive manufacturing to lower cost countries such as China and India. I think the more value-added manufacturing, like scientific instruments and the like, will remain in the U.S. because energy costs are such a small part of the cost of good sold and there are many talented scientists and engineers here. For everyone else, the service industry will be the way to go.
Climate legislation can actually be profitable for me personally. I have more than 10 years Asian business experience. My consulting business can help U.S. companies outsource their manufacturing to Chinese entities. I already have clients in mind for this if such legislation passes. I can also help Chinese manufacturers market in the U.S.
I think this is cool. I can become wealthy and all of the green young people who helped elect Obama and the democrats can work for me as domestic servants and the like. If taxes get too high in the U.S., I can always relocate to Taiwan, China, or some other Asian location where the taxes (and living expenses) are lower.
If the majority of Americans are happy with the evisceration of the U.S. economy, by all means I will help them while profiting myself. When the world hands you lemons, get busy making lemonade.
I heard that kurt9 is going to do pretty well off this legislation.
Way to go kurt9!
What’s so funny about the imminent danger of climate-change?
Nearly everyone is either a believer or a denier. Where are the mere agnostics? Apparently the equilibria run toward infinity and negative infinity: No educated person wants to be caught on the wrong side.
The last public debate this big on a scientific issue was probably on the theory of evolution. There are big differences, however. Mainly the complexity of the math. The layman is much more at the mercy of a scientific community of specialists as to what to believe. The public debate therefore is not a scientific debate. It is a debate about whom to believe.
Considering the complexity of the math of climate change models, the language of the debate is funny. For instance, NASA climate expert James Hanson says: “The science is clear.” Are climate models much like economic models? I would think they would be. But obviously no. Climate models are apparently clear crystal balls.
The word science lives. Is skeptical inquiry dead?
I’d call Hanson an AGW activist who happens to be a NASA bureaucrat. He isn’t a “climate expert”.
I would take environmentalists more seriously if their policy preferences actually showed that they cared about global warming, rather than simply supporting feel-good back-to-nature policies. One clear example of the difference is their opposition to geoengineering; another is their opposition to nuclear energy. Obama dealt a huge blow to the future development of nuclear energy by nixing Yucca Mountain, as shown in the Science in Society blog:
“But President Barack Obama’s first budget a week ago proposes scrapping all spending on Yucca Mountain except for what is needed to answer questions from the NRC on the license application “while the administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal.†
The lack of a permanent storage site for nuclear waste has been a significant impediment to the expansion of nuclear power in the US. Despite the vague talk of other options for waste disposal, this plan means that plants will have to continue to store their waste on-site, and above ground, making the construction of new power plants very difficult…
Yet of the various zero-emissions energy sources, nuclear power has been the most significant success, generating 80% of the electricity used by France. (The only alternative energy that comes close is hydrothermal, which generates a similar proportion of Iceland’s energy. But Iceland has both a smaller population and extraordinarily favorable geography for power generation.) Because of this success, some within the environmental movement have been pushing for increased nuclear power as the best option to combat CO2 emissions.
But, like the majority of the environmental movement, Obama has a record of being less than wholehearted in supporting nuclear power, even as he pushes for subsidizing less quantitatively promising – but politically safer – sources of alternative energy. The safety problem with nuclear power is a real and significant challenge, but by piling up waste at over a hundred discrete sites, this move will likely only exacerbate the problem in the short to medium run. In the long run the risk may decrease, if only because nuclear power generation will stop altogether as old plants are shut down.
The cynic in me must note that the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, is from†¦you guessed it, Nevada.”
I think the important component of this discussion has been noting peak oil. Discussing climate change or peak oil without noting the other is shortsighted. The evidence that oil reserves will become costlier to exploit at an increasing rate means that we will transition from oil, whether climate change suggests we “should”. Climate change is relevant because the alternatives can be clean, renewables or coal. Tyler posted a great manifesto on conservative perspectives on climate change, and I’d suggest rereading it in the archives.
Intelligent environmentalists are probably correct to approach geo-engineering with skepticism; most externality-related degradation stems from Cartesian problem solving, and sequestering an output in an understudied, potentially inadequate way is suspect.
Intelligent economists should not tout nuclear power. It is well understood that the costs of insuring nuclear power mandate heavy government involvement, and also that current U-235 supplies would dwindle in a handful of decades at best if the source were utilized in any way that substantially dents carbon emissions. Right now the most “successful” energy source is coal, because the energy profit ratio is 40:1. While I’d agree Obama has overemphasized photovoltaics, he is also an avid supporter of wind energy, which mirrors coal at a 40:1 energy profit ratio.
Basically–nuclear is a poor answer, geo-engineering falls prey to the “you cannot solve a problem with the same sort of thinking that got you into it” dilemma, and wind offers a real solution necessitating only an acceptable investment in infrastructure and confidence in the extenuation of current subsidies. I’d like to know though (and in fairness many of your qualms were well-articulated) where you nay-sayers come up with some of these complaints.
Foobarista:
Why not nuclear? Um, because it would work!
The current climate change legislation is designed to appeal to the following groups:
1. Established industrial capitalists, who will be able to gain an even stronger oligarchy by owning most of an artificially created commodity.
2. Soundbite environmentalists, who want solutions that sound superficially “green” because it makes them feel good. “Nuclear” sounds scary and icky.
3. Neo-Marxist, who see all environmentally-motivated government intervention as a back-door way to implement Socialism.
4. The Chinese Government, who want to continue to shift industrial production from the United States to China, and are able to wield significant pressure with all the debt they own.
Obama wouldn’t want to solve the climate change crisis, any more that Dubya wanted to win the War on Terror. Both politicians are interested in a perpetual crisis that they can exploit to carry out their political agenda. Different demographics respond better to different types of fear-mongering. Just like with the War on Terror, the threat (terrorism) is real, but highly exaggerated and distorted in propaganda, Global Climate Change is real, but highly exaggerated and distorted in propaganda.
Hmm. The “ever-perceptive Stan Collender” ckaims:
Should I take that as meaning that President Obama was never that serious about having pollution credits auctioned off? Silly me, I thought that the White House had lost control of a fair amount of the process, and allowed the bill to be watered down with more corporate welfare than actual emissions reductions.
Why not nuclear? Um, because it would work!
If Obama were to adopt the China or French nuclear power industry approach, would he be called a socialist, or a communist?
France’s power industry was nationalized by a communist cabinet minister under De Gaul as I recall, and then I believe they decided they would become energy independent no matter what and thus they adopted a government command and control structure that employed government technocrats to direct a government workforce to build and run the French energy utility industry. And the technocrats made sure that they responded to the public fears with carefully crafted speech to frame the issue and convince the French people that the government technocrats were trustworthy managers of the national power industry.
And in China, the power industry is government run, and the policies that direct the investment in nuclear, and including the most advanced nuclear reactor designs, not to mention high CAFE standards, wind, solar, etc, all directed by government central planners.
All the US nuclear reactors were approved with positive return in investment assured by government central planners, the PUCs. Once the power industry in the US was no longer overseen by government central planners and it became purely free market, not a single nuclear power plant project has been financed by the free market. For the free market financiers, wind, solar, energy efficiency, cogen, and just about anything is lower in risk than nuclear. And the environmental, NIMBY, zoning, et al issues block wind, solar, PV, coal projects just as much as nuclear projects. Cape Wind has been delayed a decade, but the investors are still willing to invest in its construction, while the nuclear plant projects seem to fade away even with government aid on the projects.
If you point to the success of nuclear as a result of government central planner dictating their construction, then at least call for government central planners to dictate nuclear, rather than calling for the result with out stating the means.
Nuclear fission power is good and some of the new designs (Thorium buring molten salt reactors, pebble bed reactors, IFR, etc.) resolve the issues that bedevil existing plants (nuclear waste, weapons proliferation). I expect nuclear power to be very big in Asia in the coming decades.
However, we will not see any of this in the U.S. The reason is regulatory bureaucracy. All of the approved design specifications were frozen in the 70′s. To get the NRC to approve new designs would take enormous efforts taking years and years. Nuclear will not play a role in the U.S. energy future.
Perhaps someone will put up microwave reflector satellites (these could be done with a single launch, unlike space-based solar power collectors) where we could buy some of that nuclear generated electricity from China and receive it using rectennas in the southwest deserts. This will be how we get most of our electricity in 2030 or so. On the other hand, most of the boomers will be dead and opposition to nuclear power will be much less.
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