I don't know if you've ever had occassion to sit at the dinner table with religious fundementalists and discuss science.
I have. (I have, in fact, sat in the laboratory, and discussed science with religious fundementalists, but let's not talk about that.)
One of the more fun conversations like this - dinner table, not laboratory - involved a family member, who I happen to know has never opened a science book seriously in her life - informing all of the members of our family that "everything in the Bible has been verified by science."
This is not by itself even remotely interesting except to inform us on one level about the prestige of science, since in former times science was only considered valid if it conformed to religion whereas, subtly without all that much notice, religions now seek validity from science and not the other way around.
Science has become a cultural talisman worldwide. As it happens, the paper from the primary scientific literature comes from the journal Science...
...which is a very prestigious journal even among scientists, which is not to assert that publication in Science implies a tautology with truth.
It doesn't.
For instance, famously, some scientists who happen to live in my area of the world wrote a very, very, very, very widely discussed paper called Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies and published in Science. This paper generated lots of happy face happy talk about how wonderful solar and wind were and how we could all keep our cars and our lifestyle if we would just increase US efficiency and build huge carbon dumps for our Fischer-Tropsch coal to liquids gasoline.
This paper was published in 2004, the same year that George W. Bush was actually elected to the Presidency, after having been appointed to the office by a Supreme Court in 2000 led (then) by a drug addled guy who helped train Dick Cheney for his job.
From time to time I like to ridicule this paper, not, as you might think, out of a sense of schadenfreud but rather out of a sense of tragedy. Believe me, I wish these glib guys had been right and I - who have always argued that fighting climate change is extremely difficult and not at all easy - had been wrong.
For the record, in 2004 I actually believed that solar and wind were useful means of addressing climate change along with my particular obsession, nuclear energy. I have changed my mind in recent years and have decided that even if solar and wind are superior to dangerous natural gas when they operate - which is something they they actually do surprisingly little - they are so unreliable, and such a drain on economic resources that they are totally unworthy of the expenditure of public resources, including those generated by tax breaks. They are, in fact, very close to useless in any reality based fight against climate change.
If someone wants to purchase a solar PV system, or a wind farm, using their own resources, that's none of my business of course. But I am a Democrat from another age, one for whom the poor matter. In the current emergency - and that is the only word for it, "emergency" - the only wise use of resources is for mature technologies that operate at least a ten exajoule per year power level and a proved to scale at that level and are dense enough and efficient enough, economically and environmentally, to address the needs of all of humanity and not just some guys living behind the gates in Rancho Santa Fe who hire poor illegal immigrants to wax down their new Tesla electric cars.
Let me count the technologies that qualify to realistically fight climate change: 1) Nuclear energy.
OK, I'm done.
I count this way because very clearly whether we've grasped it or not, our economic resources are limited and the choices we make as a species will determine the survival if not for the entire species, then at least for the bulk of it. Thus we don't have time to jerk around with what we want to hear, but rather what we must see.
Experiment trumps theory. Period.
A little more than six years have passed since Pacala and Socolow informed us that the technologies that existed then were sufficient to address climate change, not by stopping the dumping of dangerous fossil fuels in our (at least as we understand thus far) galactically unique atmosphere but by merely ameliorating them.
Thus 12% of the "next 50 years" have now passed and the slope of the linear curve for carbon dioxide levels in Earth's atmosphere is basically unchanged from what it was in the 1960's. If anything, the slope of the curve is increasing, not decreasing.
When Socolow and Pacala's paper was published, in August of 2004, the mean monthly concentrations of carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa Observatiory was 376.07 ppm. In August of 2010 the level was 388.15 an increase in the first six years of the "next 50 years" of roughly 3%.
By contrast, between 1976 - when Jimmy Carter was elected to office on a platform that included solving all of our energy problems - and 1980, when Jimmy Carter was removed from office after demonstrating that said solution involved a lot of kissing the behind of the Iranian despot de jour who controlled the Iranian torture organization SAVAK - that would be "Shah" Reza Pahlevi - atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (in Augusts of both years) rose from 330.64 ppm to 337.45 ppm, an increase of 2%. Note that in 1976 buildings were far less efficient, cars were far less efficient and energy prices were considered outrageous when the price of gasoline rose over $1.00/gallon.
None of the above should be construed as applauding the defeat of Mr. Carter. Obviously the alternative to Mr. Carter was an international disaster, but to say that Ronald Reagan was a disaster is not to prove that, as President at least, that every word that proceeded from Mr. Carter's mouth was oracular, or even that he was a good President, even if he has proved to be a very honorable ex-Preisdent.
If one wishes to understand why the nation of Iran has collectively gone certifiably insane, for instance, one would do well to consider that for twenty six years, the nation was ruled by a "devine right" dictator with a penchant for torture who usurped an elected President with the aid of the American CIA in 1953. The Shah of Iran's divinity derived from violence, foreign violence, and by embracing the Shah, Carter embraced that 1953 violence of which he surely knew or surely should have known.
The reason that the CIA installed this murderous, vile, torturing dictator was because the British and the Americans were concerned that the man who had been elected President of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, would nationalize American and British oil interests and - God forbid - and direct Iran's oil wealth to (gasp) Iranians as opposed to the British and Americans. One may also consider that the same CIA installed torturing dictator was routinely praised and protected, and allowed to escape trial with undeserved political asylum by a President who at the very same time presumed to lecture the world on "human rights."
You may have forgotten all of this, but then again you weren't locked up for 26 years with a violent sadist in control of your life, as was nearly every Iranian who was alive from 1953 to 1979 (which is, of course, not to say that Iranians are not still under the control of violent sadists).
Believe it or not, something like that may be difficult to forget. Not everyone is Nelson Mandela, nor should we expect Nelson Mandelas in this world - Mandela is obviously exceptional which is why he is so honored by all of humanity.
In the context of Iran, any discussion of "human rights" in which Americans participate is purely absurd. Thus Jimmy Carter, who announced a decision not to reprocess U.S. nuclear fuel as providing a "moral example," wasn't doing a bang up job on providing a "moral example" when it came to addressing the American history of installing violent dictators like the Shah.
Dwight Eisenhower - on whose watch Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown, ironically with the grandson of another American President, Kermit Roosevelt, operating as point man - established the American car CULTure's permanence by funding the Interstate Highway system. No President since has ever dared to question the basic assumption that the American car CULTure cannot be replaced. Carter, however, did attempt to put lipstick on the car CULTure pig with a coal-to-liquids scheme, Fischer-Tropsch chemistry, that has worked - and could work again to produce gasoline, albeit at disasterous environmental cost - as well as a program of using biofuels in American cars.
I now am an implacable opponent of Fischer-Tropsch "coal to liquids" (FTCTL) chemistry and regard it as something that all, real environmentalists - as opposed to armchair anti-nuke "environmentalists" - must fight more or less to the death, because frankly, it is death. But I will confess FTCTL seemed like a good idea to me when Jimmy Carter was President, mostly because I essentially had no science education whatsoever at that time and had, as well, very poor critical thinking skills.
An aside: In 2008 I attended a lecture on the subject of the actinide chemistry of ionic liquids by a scientist who was clearly an admirer of Barack Obama, and who began his lecture with a statement about Jimmy Carter's plutonium policy, stating, more or less as a fact succintly that it "was a terrible mistake."
Just so.
I will note, in passing, that many people who are pro-nuke disagree with my views on plutonium - which are more or less identical with the fellow who was speaking on ionic liquids - claiming that thorium is the perfect nuclear fuel and that the uranium/plutonium fuel cycle should be abandoned. I like thorium - a lot - but I am also quite fond of plutonium as a fuel and I consider that both elements are important since I advocate a world with 6,000 - 10,000 reactors that are constructed rapidly.
My view on constructing this number of reactors may be controversial here in the intellectual provinces in the United States - where we are blissfully unaware of reality and are as oblivious as, say, Czar Nicholas II - but this proposal has already been signed off in China, where the China National Nuclear Corporation has announced a 800 billion Yaun - roughly at today's exchange rate the equivalent of $120 billion US dollars - a figure that exceeds China's annual military budget - in new nuclear power. With 24 reactors now under construction, China is actually currently exceeding the required pace to do this.
The current President of the United States - who I continue to admire greatly - has appointed a scientist to be the US Secretary of Energy, not just any scientist but a Nobel Prize winning scientist, to be Secretary of Energy. The Secretary is, I note, a strong supporter of nuclear energy and we have not had such a fine scientific voice in the White House since Glenn Seaborg served with de facto cabinet rank in the Kennedy-Johnson White House.
Like Dr. Seaborg, Dr. Chu, could have rested on his laurels and lived off endless honorariums, but chose, instead, to live a life of service to his country and to the human race.
Science...
Jimmy Carter's biofuels program is one of the few policies of his era that remain in place - it's entrenched via the support it gives the corn industry - but it is worth asking whether, with more than 30 years of experience, "Is it a good policy?"
The paper from the primary scientific literature I will discuss today is found in, um, Science, 29 FEBRUARY 2008 VOL 319, pp 1238-1240.
Here's some excerpts from the paper:
Most life-cycle studies have found that replacing gasoline with ethanol modestly reduces greenhouse gases (GHGs) if made from corn and substantially if made from cellulose or sugarcane (1–7). These studies compare emissions from the separate steps of growing or mining the feedstocks (such as corn or crude oil), refining them into fuel, and burning the fuel in the vehicle. In these stages alone (Table 1), corn and cellulosic ethanol emissions exceed or match those from fossil fuels and therefore produce no greenhouse benefits. But because growing biofuel feedstocks removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, biofuels can in theory reduce GHGs relative to fossil fuels. Studies assign biofuels a credit for this sequestration effect, which we call the feedstock carbon uptake credit. It is typically large enough that overall GHG emissions from biofuels are lower than those from fossil fuels, which do not receive such a credit because they take their carbon from the ground. For most biofuels, growing the feedstock requires land, so the credit represents the carbon benefit of devoting land to biofuels. Unfortunately, by excluding emissions from land-use change, most previous accountings were one-sided because they counted the carbon benefits of using land for biofuels but not the carbon costs, the carbon storage and sequestration sacrificed by diverting land from its existing uses.
Oh. Oh.
I happen to know from general knowledge, and attendance at some talks on the subject, that old growth forests are very different than new growth forests, because of the huge difference in the carbon content of the soil by the way. This is a matter that is widely overlooked. As for cellulose, there are some folks who feel that the use of cellulose to make ethanol (or other biofuels) - which has proved a huge technical failure by the way. Whatever happened to Iogen? Um, last year, they announced that they'd produced in their entire corporate history, 1.4 million liters of cellulosic ethanol. This is, or would be if ethanol had the same heating value of gasoline, the equivalent 8,805 barrels of gasoline, which one may suppose is roughly the amount of gasoline consumed by the Hertz car return area at LAX airport each week.
According to the EIA, the United States imports 6,734,000 barrels of oil per day. Thus in its entire corporate history, Iogen has produced enough ethanol, plus or minus a few percent, to cover US oil imports for one minute and 17 seconds.
Let's have an outburst of optimism, shall we?
Anyway, back to the Science article:
To produce biofuels, farmers can directly plow up more forest or grassland, which releases to the atmosphere much of the carbon previously stored in plants and soils through decomposition or fire. The loss of maturing forests and grasslands also foregoes ongoing carbon sequestration as plants grow each year, and this foregone sequestration is the equivalent of additional emissions. Alternatively, farmers can divert existing crops or croplands into biofuels, which causes similar emissions indirectly. The diversion triggers higher crop prices, and farmers around the world respond by clearing more forest and grassland to replace crops for feed and food.
By the way, if you're wondering about the fate of Sumatran tiger, or for that matter, the orangatan, one might wonder about the clearing of rain forests in Sumatra to make palm oil plantations that are designed to help Germans meet their wonderful "renewable portfolio standards" for biofueled diesel Mercedes whizzing down the autobahn.
(In fairness to people driving renewably standard portfolioed Mercedes down the Autobahn, most palm oil goes into food - where it helps spur sales of Lipitor and other statins - and things like face creams and lubricants.)
Well the paper drones on and on and on. It has been cited by oodles and oodles of papers, including a few written by Socolow of wedgie fame. There's some remarks about that wonderful biofuel nirvana Brazil - about which I have written in this space before in a diary called Those Happy Sugarcane Workers In Brazil: The Car Culture and Urinary Carcinogens. And there's a whole lot of blah, blah, blah...
But the fact is, that 30 years after Jimmy Carter left office, no one can tell if biofuels are worth shit to the environment or anything else. If that doesn't make you think I don't know what will.
But let's not whine too much about rain forests. The wishful thinking car exercise du jour is electric cars. Get those strip mining tools ready.
Don't worry, be happy.