Like millions of us, I watched the Democratic acceptance speech of my Party's candidate. It was, by and large, a great speech, a great example of effective communication, and a great summary of why Barack Obama would be SO much better than McSame & Co. But in this speech, there were a pair of things said - they went by in an instance - that were "audience duds" before the 80,000 people watching, and most likely the 38 million or more of us folks in TV land. Well, in those few seconds, the people of our Democratic Party spoke, and I hope our candidates listen. These items fit into the "room for improvement" category - one an Oxymoron, the other, a chimerical dead end. But in some circles (which have highly concentrations of lobbyists and power company executives), they can sound so reasonable.......
Here is the speech reference. The small part of the speech that falls into the "room for improvement" were the references - in the same sentence - to "clean coal" and then nuclear power:
"As president, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power."
The extremely boisterous crowd started getting silent real fast. This was shortly followed by "renewable energies", and the crowd cheered like the winning touchdown just got scored:
" I'll make it easier for the American people to afford these new cars. And I'll invest 150 billion dollars over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy — wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and 5 million new jobs that pay well and can't ever be outsourced."
Then came the understatement of the night:
"America, now is not the time for small plans." Agreed!!!
An oxymoron is defined as "pointedly foolish", and "a combination of contradictory or incongruous words (as in cruel kindness) by Webster's Dictionary. "Clean Coal" is an oxymoron, a sales job. I don't think that Obama and Biden are morons, and it pains me and lots of other environmentally oriented progressives greatly when they put out moronic statements. Here is the bottom line on THAT oxymoron: by the time you extract the CO2 by-product pollutant (yes, fossil fuel derived CO2 is an air pollutant, especially as long as CO2 concentrations in our air keeps going up), the electricity cost will generally be GREATER than if commercial scale wind turbines are used to make that same quantity of electricity. Sure, we could scrub out the CO2 from exhaust gasses, but that is not the "problem". The problem is that it costs more to make electricity from coal when removing ~ 95% of the CO2 pollutant than it does to make it with wind turbines on a subsidy free basis no less (present subsidies - tax credits and rapid depreciation - lower wind turbine costs by about 5 c/kw-hr). So why pay MORE to make electricity with coal, especially when properly dealing with the CO2 pollutant, in ways that make LESS jobs per dollar invested in this scheme than with wind turbines, than to just use wind turbines?
It's one thing to use coal to provide chemicals, and/or heat in mass quantities. But to make electricity in stand alone facilities, with the air pollution highly subsidized (social cost of CO2 pollution is a lot, and in the Stern Review (summary here, a 27 page .pdf) about $85/ton in $US 2005) - that does not read like the definition of smart. Or wise.
Of course, the answer to that question is a mix of politics, influence, vested interests by a mix of people, corporations, even investment banks (so they just have to be right), various regions who might temporarily benefit...etc. So, be diplomatic about it, but not oxymorinic. If a term for such schemes must be used, say "cleaner coal" or "less polluting coal" or "less dirty coal". But clean..that just a propaganda term. And so unneeded. Talk about having to hold yer nose, shut down yer brain in order to campaign for those promoting such an Orwellian term...uggh. After all, the stakes involve drowning New York City, Long Island, Miami and most of Florida, and a lot of Houston, when the Greenland Icesheets crumble and cause ocean levels to rise by 20 feet from CO2 pollution induced warming. And as if Ike was not bad enough.....
As for safe and cost-effective nukes....a chimera is defined as an "unrealizable dream", among other things. Nuke power is one of the riskier ways to make electricity on a commercial scale as currently exists and is only financially possible by defining away the catastrophic risk via the Price-Anderson Act. Just like the magic wand the Fractured Fairy (in case you need a refresher) used to wave on the Rocky and Bullwinkle show....Risk is defined as the probability of an event multiplied by the severity of that event. Let's say the severity of an event like the Fermi 1 partial core meltdown (before Three Mile Island, way down the Memory Hole) taken to the Chernobyl scale of "oops" is $1 trillion, just in dollars, and not in terms of radiation consequences on lifeforms, like humans. Well, what is the probability of that....it is UNKNOWN, and won't be known until it either happens, or never happens (then it is a "less than" value). Those who say they know what the probability is...are lying. But they will no doubt pass off their guess as a real number, worth risking YOUR life and financial health...Nukes have other aspects, like garbage disposal (Yucky Mountain, anyone?), or proliferation...it's one of the easiest ways to mass produce plutonium, which makes such amazing fire-crackers for crack-pot Dictators and wanna-bes...like Bu$h, only worse, if that is possible. And yes, that IS possible. And then there is the police state aspects needed to keep nukes safe from people, both nasty and nice, and people from taking away the subsidies for nukes.....Nukes DO mutate our society by the concentration of socio-economic power, political power, number and types of jobs, by that connection to THE BOMB, and all that is needed to keep that apparatus functional.
Nukes are a great way to squander huge amounts of monies to make highly subsidized electricity. Keep electricity cheap via subsidies, and we can waste it some more, create more demand, and thus install more nukes. What a perfect circle jerk..and it can only be made popular with lots of really slick PR and images made reasonable sounding by the best paid in the image message manipulation business. And all those gigabucks dumped into nukes means less gigabucks put into renewable means of electricity production, and efficiency improvements. That $150 billion quoted....add at least a zero to that number (lots private, some government), multiply it by 2 and now we are talking about the scale of things needed. And the same happens to the number of new jobs created and preserved/expanded.
So, for a wrap, dump the "clean coal" oxymoron, and use something more approximating the truth, such as "cleaner coal" and "less polluting coal combustion". Dump the nuke references...it's not nearly as popular OR as job creating as renewable energy. And maybe promote Rep Inslee's bill, and adopt a system that really works for renewables, like Germany's. After all, the problem is not a lack of presently available technology, just how to make existing commercially available approaches profitable enough. We have several times the wind resource needed to power up our electrical needs, just no incentive to do it as long as outmoded approaches like stand alone, "no co-generation" coal burning and nukes (pretty much no co-gen by definition) get supertankers worth of subsidies. What kind of example does our current set up inspire other countries to do?
Oh well, my 2 cents worth..what's yours? 7 weeks to go till that Day of Reckoning or Day of Rejoicing (real temporary) for our country, and the much of the world.
Nb41